I wrote a pretty good set of paragraphs on Twitter/X this morning.
Yesterday I announced RSS.chat.
Some people spell it RSS.chat. I haven't decided which way is right yet.
The announcement covers a slice of the project, but it fans out to be the beginning of a bootstrap.
I want to entice other projects to fully endorse the text model of the web. Today most social "web" services support a pitiful subset of the web, and leave out the most crucial element, the link. If a writer can't link, how can you call it the web? Seriously.
I want to force them out of their silos and get the web working for the people and esp independent developers.
I've been preaching this for years, and I am reminded what I learned a long time ago -- people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors.
It was developed by Claude Code and myself, starting in April. We make an incredibly good team though sometimes Claude is tedious, but I put up with it because the results make me laugh out loud frequently because I never imagined working at such velocity.
I'm not doing this to make money, though of course I don't *mind* making money. I just want to return the web to its former glory, where every part is replaceable, and if you can think of something you can probably do it.
I want to use lots of different software to work on my social network presence. I want this post to appear on Masto, Bluesky, Twitter, Threads, Facebook even, and have them all work perfectly together.
In the meantime, we're now ready to create our own global network of free speech, uncontrolled by the big silos. At some point if it works, we will have moved beyond them, or they will see the sense in joining the party.
Small pieces loosely joined and every part replaceable.
As its name implies, it's built entirely on fully open web standards, RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSockets. It turns out you can make a very nice distributed social network without having to wait. It was always there, we just had to decide to do it.
How it evolves? That's up to everyone who can code, and that's a lot of people now thanks to the AI tools.