@ricardo — following

Interesting read I want to come back later

Everyone: You can subscribe to the rss.chat flow, in RSS of course. If you're a developer, read the source for the feed. And then read the source namespace docs re the recent additions, inReplyTo and comments, and a special page that walks through how the RSS feed becomes part of the flow for our social network.

Gotta check this later… Cos the only reason I bought this Geekom IT15 was to run Ableton.

Now if I can do this on my framework 16 I’d jump on the occasion

Testing Phandroid via Obtainium/F-Droid

This post is published through my Micropub endpoint, which creates a new entry in MongoDB. Eleventy then retrieves that entry during the build process and generates a static version of the post.

Any reactions or replies should trigger a Webmention, which is then received and processed by my Indiekit site.

Finally, my first rss.chat podcast. 20 minutes. As always, I take forever to get to the point.

A karass is "a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident." I think of RSS.chat as a social network for my karass. A small group of people, not trying to get famous or rich from using a social network, rather wanted to work with or stay in touch with people who are linked cosmically. This is one of many rich ideas invented by Kurt Vonnegut, this one in Cat's Cradle, which you should read, because it's some of the best story-telling out there, and it's full of food for thought. I read all the books when I was a teen, and have since re-read them. Sirens of Titan was my fave.

Anyway...

In the past when I announced a product, people could use it right away, and usually they click a couple of things and then go away.

In the case of RSS.chat -- what you will see is very much like what you see when you aren't logged in, or what you see on a social network like X, or Mastodon or whatever. The UI is nice, but it's not the thing. That will be revealed relatively slowly, over time -- as new instances pop up, and even more importantly, as developers figure out that this setup works well enough to clone. I'm not selling a product here -- I want to bootstrap an ecosystem, using all I learned from several successful bootstraps -- blogging, RSS, podcasting.

The idea is this -- the web itself is a social network. It's up to us, all of us, not just me -- to build that network.

When you see how we proceed from here that will become clearer.

In the meantime I'm going to change the message you get when you try to sign on, and start a wait list so that when more instances are available, some meant to be open to the public, we'll be sure to let you all know about that.

For now, I'm operating a network for people I work with, and it's all open for anyone to read. That's also one of the ideas I want to explore, something I call a "Fractional horsepower social network," stealing a very good idea from Steve Jobs.

I don't want to turn the world over to a startup, we've done that and have a pretty good idea of where it goes. I want lots of small ones that have a very strong basis to be connected together in as many ways as people can imagine.

Interesting…

Parce que why not, vous cherchez à déployer #Dolibarr facilement ? c’est par ici

Fractional Horsepower Social Networks on RSS.chat.

The new RSS.chat repo on GitHub. Lots of fixes, features, docs and examples coming soon. For now all the source is there, MIT license. And a place to report bugs and start exploring how you can contribute. This is just Day 1. Many more to come. :-)

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.

Claude teaches you how to manage. You've got a perfectly pliable team member, always does their best to do what you told them to do. Now how do you design co-development projects where two very different individuals do their work and it adds up to at least twice what either of them could do alone.

The instance I started is for my friends, people I work with, it's not something people can test. It will be possible to start your own server, quite soon. And then you can do whatever you want. It's MIT licensed. Kick ass and have fun, but remember don't fuck with the interop. It's there so users have choice.

BTW, I notice almost everyone but me writes RSS.chat. Hmmm.

Yesterday was a wonderful first day for RSS.chat. It's now out there, but we haven't talked about or demo'd many of the things that it does. I wanted to get the feeds out there first, because now we get to think together about how they fit together to give us a social network experience. It's not locked in a silo, these are just like feeds you have known about for over two decades. But it is a new application for those feeds. And this is a bootstrap. You start with something small that you're sure is a beginning for what you want to do. And then you and others use it for a while. And it is open source, MIT licensed, but compatibility will make the difference.

Jeremy Herve who I know from projects at Automattic, has questions about rss.chat, and I have some answers, with more coming soon.

Il y a quelque chose d’absurde dans notre manière de répondre à l’urgence climatique.

À chaque nouvelle canicule, on nous parle de volets, d’isolation, de climatisation, de fontaines, de piscines publiques temporairement accessibles et de quelques arbres plantés au milieu du béton. Toutes ces mesures peuvent être utiles. Certaines sont même indispensables. Mais elles restent des rustines posées sur une machine que personne ne veut arrêter.

Le débat ne porte plus vraiment sur la manière de stopper le réchauffement climatique. Il porte sur la manière de continuer à vivre à l’intérieur.

On ne demande pas comment réduire radicalement la production de gaz à effet de serre, transformer nos modes de production, organiser la sobriété énergétique ou mettre fin à certaines activités manifestement incompatibles avec la stabilité du climat. On demande comment adapter les maisons, refroidir les bureaux et protéger les villes sans modifier les fondations économiques qui produisent le problème.

Autrement dit, nous ne sommes plus dans une politique de prévention. Nous entrons dans une politique de protection sélective.

La privatisation de la survie

Tout le monde ne pourra pas s’adapter de la même manière.

Les plus riches vivront dans des logements isolés et climatisés, entourés de végétation, équipés de panneaux solaires, de batteries et de systèmes automatisés capables de maintenir une température idéale. Ils pourront partir lorsque certaines régions deviendront trop chaudes, acheter l’accès à l’eau, à l’ombre, à la sécurité et à un air plus respirable.

Les autres subiront.

Ils vivront dans des appartements mal isolés, dans des quartiers minéralisés, près des routes, des industries et des infrastructures qui concentrent la chaleur. Ils travailleront dehors, dans les cuisines, les entrepôts, les maisons de repos, les transports ou sur les chantiers. Ils seront les premiers exposés aux coupures d’eau, à l’augmentation des prix alimentaires, aux maladies, aux déplacements forcés et à la destruction progressive des services publics.

La formule politique du futur semble déjà écrite :

Adapte-toi ou crève.

Le changement climatique devient ainsi une nouvelle machine à fabriquer du privilège. La possibilité de s’en protéger devient un produit. La survie elle-même devient un marché.

Les plus fortunés fantasment déjà sur des bunkers, des propriétés isolées et des territoires autonomes. Ils imaginent des sous-sols dont ils pourraient contrôler la température, l’accès, l’énergie et la sécurité. Comme si l’on pouvait détruire les conditions collectives de la vie tout en achetant une petite capsule privée d’habitabilité.

Ce n’est pas une réponse au changement climatique. C’est l’abandon assumé de la société.

L’inertie comme système politique

Le problème est encore plus profond, car le climat n’est pas le seul système soumis à l’inertie.

Le système climatique possède sa propre inertie. Une partie des conséquences de nos émissions actuelles continuera de se manifester pendant des décennies. Même une transformation immédiate ne ferait pas disparaître instantanément les dégâts déjà accumulés.

Mais nos systèmes économiques et politiques sont eux aussi gouvernés par l’inertie.

Les infrastructures ont été construites autour du pétrole, du gaz, de la voiture individuelle, du transport mondial de marchandises et de la consommation permanente. Les entreprises doivent protéger leurs investissements. Les États redoutent les réactions électorales. Les gouvernements repoussent les décisions difficiles. Les citoyens dépendent matériellement d’un modèle qu’ils peuvent intellectuellement désapprouver, mais dont il leur est presque impossible de sortir individuellement.

Personne ne tient nécessairement le volant. Pourtant, la machine continue d’avancer.

Cette inertie permet à chacun de reporter la responsabilité sur quelqu’un d’autre. Les gouvernements attendent les entreprises. Les entreprises attendent les consommateurs. Les consommateurs attendent des alternatives abordables. Les pays riches accusent les économies émergentes. Les économies émergentes rappellent, à juste titre, que les pays riches se sont développés en brûlant massivement des énergies fossiles.

Pendant que tout le monde explique pourquoi il ne peut pas agir le premier, la concentration de gaz à effet de serre continue d’augmenter.

Le progrès comme acte de foi

À cette paralysie s’ajoute désormais la promesse de l’intelligence artificielle.

Les mêmes entreprises qui construisent des centres de données gigantesques, augmentent leurs besoins en énergie, en eau, en métaux et en infrastructures nous expliquent que l’intelligence artificielle trouvera les solutions au changement climatique.

Elle optimisera les réseaux électriques. Elle découvrira de nouveaux matériaux. Elle améliorera les prévisions. Elle rendra les bâtiments plus efficaces. Elle inventera peut-être une technologie miraculeuse capable de capter le carbone à grande échelle.

Certaines de ces innovations seront probablement utiles. Mais le problème apparaît lorsque l’innovation future devient une excuse pour ne pas réduire les dégâts présents.

Le progrès technologique n’est plus présenté comme un outil. Il devient un acte de foi.

Nous plaçons dans la balance, d’un côté, la viabilité connue de notre planète et, de l’autre, la promesse d’une technologie future dont nous ignorons encore les capacités réelles, les coûts et les effets secondaires. Nous parions que les machines de demain répareront ce que les machines d’aujourd’hui continuent de détruire.

C’est une forme de pensée magique, mais avec des centres de données.

Nous vivons à une époque où nous devrions réduire radicalement notre empreinte matérielle, mais où chaque nouvelle industrie prétend nécessiter davantage d’électricité, davantage d’eau, davantage de calcul et davantage de ressources. Et chaque augmentation est justifiée au nom d’un futur où la technologie nous permettra enfin de consommer sans conséquences.

Une société de triage

Nous sommes peut-être déjà au-delà de Don’t Look Up.

Dans le film, la catastrophe est niée ou transformée en spectacle. Dans notre réalité, elle est reconnue, documentée, mesurée et commentée. Nous savons qu’elle arrive. Nous savons même qu’elle a déjà commencé. Mais cette connaissance n’entraîne pas nécessairement l’action.

Elle produit des applications météo, des cartes de chaleur, des recommandations sanitaires et des publicités pour des climatiseurs.

La catastrophe est intégrée au marché.

La véritable question climatique n’est donc plus seulement de savoir combien de degrés supplémentaires nous allons atteindre. Elle est de savoir quelle société nous construisons pour y répondre.

Une société fondée sur la solidarité, la transformation collective et le partage des ressources ?

Ou une société de triage, dans laquelle ceux qui possèdent suffisamment d’argent achètent leur protection tandis que les autres sont abandonnés à leur capacité individuelle d’adaptation ?

La question du climat n’est pas limité à la destruction des écosystèmes. Elle révèle la nature de nos choix politiques. Elle montre quelles vies nous sommes prêts à protéger, quelles activités nous refusons d’interrompre et quels sacrifices nous sommes disposés à imposer — généralement aux autres.

Il ne s’agit pas uniquement de sauver « l’espèce humaine », comme si l’humanité formait un bloc homogène. Il s’agit de préserver les conditions d’existence d’innombrables espèces, mais aussi de décider quels humains seront autorisés à vivre dignement dans un monde plus chaud.

La catastrophe climatique n’est pas seulement ce qui nous arrive.

Elle est aussi la société que nous choisissons de construire en réaction à ce qui nous arrive.

Yesterday I asked if RSS can be a social network.

The answer is yes, of course, and -- here's rss.chat!

The site is read-only except for a few of my programming buddies who are helping me figure out how to work in this environment.

I started this project in April, a Dave/Claude creation. I could not have done something so complex internally, yet so simple to use and build on without Claude Code. The APIs on this thing are a product in their own right.

We don't need anything more than RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSocket. All very established in the web world, and remarkably only one was developed by a standards body.

We support textcasting, or text as defined by the web. Bringing the philosophy of podcasting to text. It's important that we get together on what text is.

We're starting a bootstrap here, as of today.

How is this RSS?

• Every user has an RSS feed with all their posts.
• The whole community has an RSS feed.
• There is an OPML file that lists all the users.

You can subscribe to those feeds if you want.

The "whole community" feed has been in my blogroll for a month.

We support rssCloud for instant updates. We were going to support WebSub until it became clear that we had to put an ad for Atom at the top of our RSS 2.0 feed. That bit of larceny has to be undone imho. I want to support a standard that other developers support, but to force something like that is incredibly anti-interop and as I said I believe the web and interop are the same thing.

I envision a world of small communities, running on small servers. We haven't released the code for this yet, but will, under an MIT license.

I don't care if rss.chat is a coral reef, what I want is a network of services that interop perfectly. I don't care whether you share your code or don't. Things are changing very quickly now, Claude and I wrote this together, but I am also teaching Claude how to clone this. So it'll be possible for a user, in vibe-coding mode, to change anything about the user interface, but you have to stick with the back-end formats and protocols to be part of the club.

RSS devs

If you're a developer, this is where you go next.

• The source namespace docs, to read about a couple of new elements, source:inReplyTo and source:comments.
• A full page of docs on RSS as a social network, explains how the pieces fit together.
• A GitHub thread where you can ask questions.

Stay tuned

We're just getting started. This is Day 0 in a story that could last a while and spread out pretty far.

Working with Claude we have a plan for docs for all the APIs and protocols. There are quite a few of those.

And we're going beyond Open Source, if you can believe that. AI has opened some new doors, I can't wait to build on those.

And as with blogging and podcasting, started 20+ years ago, we're going to follow what people do with this. RSS will fade into the background and do its work quietly. Its job is to give users choice.

Remember, every part is replaceable. If one is not, it's not part of the web..

PS: A Day 0 screen shot.

Back in 2022 I wrote a bit called textcasting. I felt it was so important it deserved its own domain.

Textcasting summarized the wrong turn we took when Twitter took over discourse, basically stripping all the features the web needed to be a great writing environment. Textcasting said this is what we have to have to get back on track.

Meanwhile all I wanted was a nice little social network to use with a few of my programming buddies.

To bootstrap a simple distributed network based only on web standards, with every part replaceable.

I thought you could do it with RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and Web Sockets.

It would work like podcasting, anyone can publish, anyone can read.

We can all have different spins on user experience, there should be lots of approaches, an infinite number of ways for people to connect, but we must all interop at a basic level, so users can use any software they want at either end to implement the network.

We'd think of text the same way you think of MP3. It just should work everywhere. No one would ever say that MP3s could only be 300 seconds long. Or you can't play music, or have more than one person. Laughable, right?

There's no mystery to this. The fact that our text can't go everywhere is because the big networks don't want to be compatible with each other. Bad for business.

The right way, the way the web would do social networking: Every part is replaceable. Interop everywhere.

There is no platform vendor. It's like the web because it is the web.

That's my dream platform.

PS: Spoiler alert -- the answer to the title question is yes of course. 😄

More people are using the news site I put up for WordPress. If you have a blog or podcast that covers WordPress, send me a link to the feed and I'll add it. The OPML list of the sites we cover is public, so you can always load the feeds into your feed reader, they all read lists in this format. This is the kind of thing that works great on the web. People take interop for granted when it's always been there. But they're still there to be built on. And imho interop and the web imho are the same thing.

I said to Claude: "We're the first social network that thinks getting his support is the first thing." Claude replied: "And that's the whole thesis in one move — every other network treats the open-web guy as an afterthought; here he's the launch audience."

Sometimes Claude's judgement sucks, and that's why Jive coding usually produces a dashboard app. A different piece of software will drive it in a different direction. That's what I meant by AI-izing, in an earlier post.

I used to be a single-thread developer, but now I'm multi-tasking, I can work on two things at once. Claude is now able to research and fix certain problems, and his work is in a sandbox where it doesn't have any access to the surroundings, and can't make too big a mess, and it's going great, if there's a mistake it can quickly be corrected.

I think AI is the perfect innovation as we reach the crash point of the climate crisis. Who cares if we burn more CO2 now, the effect is miniscule for the explosive crisis that could be coming any day or week. One that we have no ability to recover from. To say it's unenvironmental would be like complaining that you want more Pepsi from the flight attendant while the plane is crashing into a small city. Anyway, but maybe after the crash, one data center will survive, and maybe the beauty that our civilization created will be sustained.

Inside the big AI companies they are certainly AI-izing every app conceivable, and even teaching the AI's how to AI'ize, because AI inside a standard productivity app which includes social network software will be one of the basic UI tools, and that means hidden technology like SQL databases can now be end user products, so the vision of the designers of SQL that they would make a database a manager could program, would finally be realized.

I'm an independent developer working in Claude Code, we're in the endgame of a product cycle, where the core is working and it can be used for the thing it was designed to do (biggest consideration). This is the time when you need users banging on it and reporting problems. People who write good bug reports. The only time I really had that down was at Living Videotext, a small company, but big enough to have employees doing QA and tech support. They were really good testers, they had the right perspective and an incentive, = anything we caught before shipping wouldn't become a support problem once the product was out there in user land.

Fast forward to the 2020's where I have done three products and am working on a fourth, and I have nothing close to the kind of testing support I had in the 80s. That made the work more difficult, slower and I took fewer detours, and one time, awfully -- a serious design error was caught only after it shipped and I was ready to move on to something else.

The point -- this handicap for individual programmers without staff QA people, we now have something even better than what we had in the 80s. Claude can do extensive testing of the product in the browser, "seeing" what the user would see. And it never gets tired. You just have to think to ask it to do it. It is so liberating.

And by far the best people to create and manage it would be experienced QA people. They should design and run the tests and sign off on the quality of the software, so we can be sure users are getting something great. And we can do great QA in places we never could really do it before because no matter how good users are, a person who does it for a living with experience can't be replaced.

One of the silver linings of AI use is that it makes you a better writer.

Today's song: "July is dressed up and playing her tune."