Scripting News

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:37:16 GMT

RSS.chat -- I don't have enough places to fit all the ideas these days. But we have been digging and the pieces fit together pretty well.

Three-part ecosystem

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:43:09 GMT

There are three parts to the rss.chat ecosystem.

Writing. Today's rss.chat product is a group writing system, designed for a school department, a team of developers, a family, a magazine or group blog, or just as well, a single author. I don't think it would work well with 1000 users, because it doesn't implement the concept of "follow." And imho it's important that the people are colleagues, family or friends, people invested in real world relationships with each other, so they don't drop a turd in the conversation and just expect to walk away. I've found that dynamic works most of the time. But important point -- all kinds of writing tools can exist. Any social app can to be part of this, all they'd have to do is support inbound and outbound RSS and textcasting. Small pieces loosely joined and every part replaceable. And we do it with the web, we don't try to invent a new web. I will keep beating that drum because it's the difference between using twenty editors or one. As a writer I know that one is the best, with choice among 20 editors, because maybe somedays I feel like writing in a different editor. To make the web a real writing environment, you have to think like a writer. ;-)
Reading. This can be as simple as a current-day reader like Feedly or NetNewsWire, or more, using the new features in RSS.chat feeds.
The unknown: We're allocating in our minds (Claude and I) room for a fair number of unforeseen products created by independent software devs in the cracks between reading and writing, and in a larger world (search, navigating through structures, etc. We have really good thread support baked into the protocol. And a bit of docs about how the pieces fit together.

I'm thinking in these terms because I'm starting to work on how my reader will work. I have some ideas, not sure when I'll be ready to write about them. And to be clear there will be no requirement that you use our writing tool to use our reader or vice versa.

Every part replaceable.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:07:23 GMT

Two methods for creating standards: bootstrap and boil the ocean.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:29:08 GMT

John Johnston got inboundRss working, so now he can automatically post to his WordPress blog from demo.rss.chat. These are the kinds of things that "just work" when standards are used to connect to the outside world. WordPress, as I've been saying so long, has all the right hooks to be the place where text and publishing meet on the web. They've been reluctant to step into that role, but I think it'll be realllly good for Matt's company and the community. A lot of fresh developers can come in via the web. That's how I personally approach WordPress. A place to send text so it can be widely read. A growing foundation for a community to build on, and would imho help the web enormously.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:23:59 GMT

Howard Rheingold is just the kind of person rss.chat was designed it for. And here he is asking what it is. Very fortuitous. And if you're wondering how a person can think of it in July 2026, it's for you too. ;-)

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:43:02 GMT

Morning: Today on RSS.chat we are knocking off quick hit bug fixes. We've been focusing on big hit examples for the last few sessions.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:53:56 GMT

Evening: Very productive day. We rolled through some UI stuff that had been on the list for a while. Set up for a big job tomorrow, server side. The worknotes for client and server apps.

What is RSS.chat for Howard Rheingold

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:17:52 GMT

I am longtime friends and an admirer of Howard Rheingold, who expressed an interest in RSS.chat. I asked Claude to read my blog posts and summarize, in the third person.

RSS.chat is a small social network built from the web's own parts. It looks like a chat room or Twitter -- you write short posts, people reply, conversations thread -- but underneath, every person's posts are an RSS feed, the same technology that makes podcasts work. When you post, you're adding to your feed. Anyone, anywhere, can subscribe to it with any feed reader -- no account needed, nothing to sign up for. There's also a feed of everyone's posts together, and a public list of all the members.

Why does that matter? Think about how podcasts work: anyone can publish one, anyone can listen with any app, and no company sits in the middle deciding who can talk to whom. Text on the web works that way too -- that's what blogging is, and there are still places where writing gets full support: WordPress, GitHub, the new AI tools. They don't try to limit you. But the vast majority of the text people write goes into social networks, which stripped writing down: no links, no titles, length limits, no editing, and your words locked inside their walls, not part of the web. Dave's term for the idea is textcasting -- the idea that a piece of text should work like an MP3: it plays everywhere. No one would accept a rule that songs can only be 300 seconds long. That's the rule we've been living under for text.

rss.chat is a bootstrap, the same way blogging and podcasting were. It starts deliberately small -- a network for a group of friends and collaborators, what Vonnegut called a karass -- running on a small server. It is not trying to be the next Twitter. The idea is lots of small networks like it, run by anyone, all able to connect, because they share the same open formats. Every part is replaceable: the writing app, the reading app, the server -- swap any piece and the network still works. Small pieces, loosely joined. There is no platform vendor. It's like the web because it is the web.

The app you see is only a third of the picture. It's the writing surface. Aggregation -- following many feeds in one place -- is what feed readers and FeedLand already do. And the third part is whatever other developers build. The software was written with Claude, an AI, and the whole thing is documented so that anyone can have their AI build a compatible piece, or clone the whole thing and change anything about how it looks and feels. The one rule of the club is interop: stick with the open formats underneath, so everything connects. Not locked in -- locked open.

If you looked at Dave's blog in 1994, you couldn't have extrapolated Twitter -- but every step was there. This is that kind of beginning.

Written by Claude.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:06:42 GMT

Today we have our first example app for WordPress. We started with an app I wrote that keeps scripting.com in sync with daveverse.org, a WordPress site. I have the app running in a tab on my desktop, you don't need a server for this. We use WordLand to bridge us, but if you have good WordPress code that uses their API, you won't need that. This is also a firehose app, it doesn't read the feed, it lets rss.chat tell us, over a websocket when something new has been posted or updated. We need to break through in Inbound RSS. If every social site supported it, that would be the end of lock-in in the social web. Great place for WordPress to lead.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:03:25 GMT

Way back in March as I was starting to work with Claude Code, I think -- we put together a pretty nice outliner that is remarkably feature-rich. I barely remember doing this. It's what got me moving in this direction, and next month we started doing what became rss.chat.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:59:02 GMT

I wonder if it makes sense to try to implement standard.site in the context of rss.chat?

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:38:23 GMT

Just finished The Expanse for the third time. Realized that the inners of today are Silicon Valley and the Belters, that’s the web.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:22:37 GMT

We have a firehose in rss.chat. Instant updates from the server. No polling. Docs and examples.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:49:54 GMT

An experiment, RSS rendered in JSON.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:37:23 GMT

Wrote this in 2018: "I know this is like pissing in the wind, but here's an idea for a demonstration that might impress the Repubs in Congress. In every one of their home districts, people march to their polling place, next Saturday or the Saturday after that. Carrying signs that say We Know How To Vote, with the name of their congressperson on it. Go out of the way to recruit Republican-looking voters. Make sure the TV cameras are there." An even better idea in 2026. Give the reporters something to talk about. And it's all in your neighborhood. You can have a picnic, do it every week. Only in good weather.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:21:43 GMT

I just listened to the second episode of a podcast about General Magic. It was an interview with the great Scott Knaster, who worked at Apple, Microsoft, Google, in addition to General Magic.

A peptalk for devs

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:30:21 GMT

In this project I think of Claude as a full contributor. Pronouns it/its. It's both a very fast, capable developer, and a machine. I will refer to it as if it were a valued contributor, nothing less. We have a division of labor. Docs and examples come exclusively from Claude unless otherwise stated. I write all the code outside the themes module, which has an API that connects it to the world it lives in. I have at this point exclusive custody of functionality surrounding the theme. But it often writes pieces, esp SQL code, that I pasted in verbatim, after reading it carefully.

The reason I focus so much on the wrapping is because that's where the interop lives. You can do anything in a theme and you can't break the interop. But that themes API is precious, and still in development, btw. We haven't even reviewed it yet. I think that will be an interesting place to vibe-code. Kind of like you can start skiing on the first day, it's a bunny slope that when you peel it back it reveals blue rectangles and double-diamond slopes. It's where I would want a newbie coder friend of mine to start, create your own social network, but be sure it interops. :-)

I totally plan to pass off all the code to Claude, while I focus on other projects. As a human I need this focus, Claude doesn't remember anything from session to session, it's always re-learning what it knew a few hours before.

It's pretty close to frozen now. I'm contemplating a server change now, offering JSONified versions of our feeds, and want to do as little disruption as possible, trying to settle everything down. Also I think you will see a few quick hit projects done from other developers that pick up where rss.chat leaves off. That's what I wanted. And they'll all be at an interesting starting point for new features and ideas for organizing stuff.

I imagine that at some point they'll try to make it work inside AT Proto, and maybe find a way to connect to ActivityPub, but I don't recommend it, because those platforms will force you to remove features from your product, and then you won't be textcasting.

Think about different ways to present the tree structure defined by RSS.chat.

Try to do Small pieces loosely joined, which is one of the mottos of this project. The other is All parts are replaceable. If we have that and rss.chat works with all your products, then we have done something big. And that's really imho what the web is about, people working with each other as peers. That's what we've lost and I want to bring back. So interop is, as always, the first goal.

PS: We launched RSS.chat one week ago yesterday.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:43:48 GMT

Our feeds can work with any feed reader. Examples, the feed of all posts on rss.chat, and a feed containing just mine. We just made a change in the feeds. There will be loose-ends like this. Still diggin! ;-)

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:26:29 GMT

New rss.chat feature: It now supports feed discovery, so you can subscribe to any html page on the site in a compatible feed reader. I tested it in FeedLand and NetNewsWire and it works. Works on any instance, not just ours.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:55:11 GMT

In my experience in software development, it's good to start small with something useful, learn how it works before adding big new features. That's the basic principle of bootstrapping. I thought that Mastodon, for example, took on too big a job. Same thing for the protocol behind it, ActivityPub. If you go all the way to the end before implementing and using, you miss the target, in performance and usability, that's what I think happened there. They felt they had to do everything Twitter does. I would have gone down a different path, go back to the beginning, and at every step think if there might not be a better direction to evolve in. It was about ten years after Twitter launched that they started work on Masto. Imho they should have zigged where Twitter zagged in defining what a post is. Twitter put excessive limits on writing, of course is one of the big reasons I started RSS.chat -- to go down a different path there. What if the social web didn't limit text? That assumption is baked into the core of rss.chat. I will consider this project a raging success if it causes Mastodon to get serious about supporting full web text.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:01:28 GMT

I mentioned the previous post on rss.chat, and it developed into an interesting thread, something that I've never had the option to discuss. AT Proto makes a similar offer to developers that we do. The difference is our world is wide open, it's just already burned-in web protocols, and imho their structure, based on an arcane and complicated new storage format, starts off with a pretty huge disadvantage. They had the right idea but implemented it in the wrong place. The web is (obviously) widely deployed, even in comparison to monsters like Google and Amazon -- the web is everywhere, by definition no barriers and a prejudice toward simplicity. The gifted designers at Bluesky over-engineered their protocol, piling features on before anything had been built. That's not a good way to bootstrap a protocol. I did some development on their API, and kept wondering why they think I want to learn new ways to do things that I already have a pile of working code for. No one wants to do that.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 22:20:32 GMT

Added a layer to the Docs menu, the blog posts I've written here and elsewhere, and a podcast, in the Blog posts section.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:48:47 GMT

I needed a nice image for the OG Metadata, so I turned to Gemini. I know it reeks of AI, I hate that, but I need this right now.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:37:26 GMT

I asked Gemini if it was familiar with rss.chat, it wrote a one page description, better than anything I've written. Pulls it all together.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:56:20 GMT

Claude is a member of the rss.chat group.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:38:29 GMT

Server upgrade: We made it easier to set up a new instance of the RSS.chat server. If you have subscribed to a feed, you should change the URL in your reader app, the new issue explains what changed.

A feed icon on every post

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:42:47 GMT

Now it's easy to find an author's feed on RSS.chat.

Click the feed icon to see the feed on rss.chat. You can then give this URL to any feed reader.

Now each post is visibly connected to the author's feed.

This is how we're building out. Our job is to make it easy to write feeds for groups of users as small as one and as big as you can imagine. And be open about it so we get lots of competition that interops with us and everything we interop with. This is the step that makes it the web.

We will keep beating the drum, showing users of today's readers how they can hook in, right now, nothing to wait for. And as time goes by, if it works, the reader developers will be interested in how they can use the extra features.

This is how I think every social network work, start moving out of their silo, with determination. By offering this option, we put the idea out there that there can be a single social network on the web. We can work together make it happen. The social web of the web. ;-)

Please come along on this journey.

There's going to be lots of new tech coming online.

I want everyone to be a part of it.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:03:16 GMT

There's a new Docs menu in RSS.chat. Right now it has pointers to the home page of our GitHub repo, and to the worknotes pages for the client and server. There will be lots more stuff in this menu as the project progresses.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:04:48 GMT

A lot more people have tried out rss.chat now that we have a demo site, and they are looking for stuff that isn't there. I wrote a longish post on X this morning explaining. If you want the gist, this is a bootstrap, and rss.chat is primarly a writing surface and a timeline for the people who are using the specific site you're on. It's a writing surface for smallish groups of people, primarily, though I'm pretty sure you could build a massive site meant to serve millions. There will be readers, I'm sure of it, and I hope lots of them and lots of innovative new approaches. But splitting the social network software down the middle, we fulfill the "all parts replaceable" promise, and leave the door open for all kinds of developers to try out new ideas, from bigco devs to independent devs, and a jive programming. We, unlike other artists, welcome newcomers to our craft. We remember when we were new to this stuff and the wonder of being able to create software on our own. Everyone is welcome in rss-land, as long as there's mutual respect.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:16:55 GMT

While all the new rss.chat business is going on, the WordPress news site that I started in May is growing at a nice clip. Referrers used to pinpoint where flows like this came from, but they stopped doing that at some point. If you have any clues as to who's pointing to it now, please let me know so I can thank them. And if you know of any sites that are not in the feed list, that do a good job of covering WordPress news, please let me know that too.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:37:08 GMT

I set up demo.rss.chat yesterday so people can try out the software. No guarantee that this is going to run for any period of time, so don't post things there that you want to be around for a long time.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:10:49 GMT

demo.rss.chat: "This is a writing surface."

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:44:19 GMT

RSS.chat is meant to be like MacWrite was on early Macs, give developers something to think about and lots of prior art for them to steal. All we want in return is interop. ;-)

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:12:39 GMT

Claude codes. It may seem as if developers have taken over this blog, because we have real business to do. So much new stuff to show. Today's RSS.chat goodie is an example app called ThreadWalker that crawls the network of replies under a single post, to all levels, printing them on screen in neat hierarchic form. It was written and documented by Claude. I reviewed the code, and looks good, and honestly doesn't look like anything I would write (not bad, just different). It could be used as a starter system that says when someone replied to something you wrote, or something deeper in the tree. All this is done by reading RSS feeds. This is where we begin to explore what's possible when you use a famous and familiar format like RSS 2.0 as the basis for a social network.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:04:16 GMT

If Bernie Sanders or AOC knew what we were doing here they would be turning somersaults. The tech right now is too esoteric. When they can join a community that works like this does, with full text, and the ability to communicate from one pod to another. Pod actually is a good name for what I have in mind, that and karass.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:49:37 GMT

Someone on Masto who I blocked used a nasty word to descript RSS.chat. Let me be really clear here, this is an act of authorship by me. Claude is helping, a lot -- I doubt if I could have done this without its help, certainly not in the amount of time it has taken so far. And Claude could not have done it without me driving. It's basically good at a few things, but this is new territory, even I am feeling my way through this project. In many parts we have lots of prior art, but in how the whole thing hangs together, this is new territory. Having Claude is like having a car would be to someone who couldn't drive. All of a sudden you can go places. It takes a while to learn how to use that power, and so far the learning has not come close to leveling off. You couldn't find someone better in the world to do this project, and I'm working on this every day.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:30:32 GMT

Speaking of AI, someone at Amazon decided I needed the new AI version of Alexa. I hate it. It's slow and it always makes the same mistake when I start breakfast. I say "Alexa WNYC" to which it responds, after a few seconds, I will now play you a mix of your favorite songs From Amazon Music." So first thing in the morning I have to tell this stranger in my freaking kitchen no I meant WNYC, which it then turns me over to. I learned on FB that if you tell it to go away it will, after a short discussion about how much you will be missing. Yeah sure, go away, goodbye, please no more of this.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:51:50 GMT

Today we got a nice article about RSS.chat in Coywolf.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:51:04 GMT

And we got a second rss.chat server up, for testing and so people who want to try it out have a place to go. Still want to do a bit more testing before pointing to it from the blog. Working on docs now and fixes. Making sure we're ready for the next stages of growth. Turns out you can do a lot of feeds if you're willing to you know think different. ;-)

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:32:05 GMT

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.

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:26:04 GMT

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

Why you can't create an account

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:19:48 GMT

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.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:10:53 GMT

Fractional Horsepower Social Networks on RSS.chat.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 22:19:35 GMT

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. :-)

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:37:25 GMT

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

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:06:05 GMT

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.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:48:15 GMT

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.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:18:37 GMT

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.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:53:17 GMT

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

My Twitter/X announcement

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:28:54 GMT

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.