FeedCity

[Wes Davis at The Verge] Interesting announcement from the European Commission: "The European Union says Twitter alternative Bluesky violates the EU Digital Services Act rules around information disclosure, reports Reuters. But since Bluesky isn’t yet big en...

I just wrote a for-real post on my WordLand site.

In January 2017, I scooped everyone, by years, on the idea that a billionaire could buy Twitter and thus purchase the presidency. That value wasn't priced into the stock price of TWTR. No one listened. Here's the next installment. The US government acquires Twitter. Elon Musk is of course named Secretary of Twitter. The "constitution" reconceived for online twitter-like systems, says every other online system has to go through twitter.com to reach users. It will act as their gateway to the net. There will be resistance, but by that time there will be no actually independent twitter-like systems, they will all be owned by venture capital funds, or individual billionaires, and of course they will conform because they are also owned to a large degree by Musk. We will have been cartelized, which is one step beyond enshitified.

It's important that Bluesky increase its character limit to 500 because they are not alone. Today there are so many twitter-like systems that are useful, people want to cross-post. If I'm writing something I plan to cross-post, and I pass the 300-char limit, but I'm not finished, what to do. These days generally I view 500 as the actual limit, which means when my cross-poster tries to publish to Bluesky it fails. We should be trying to coalesce on an idea of what a text document is in the mid-late 20s. I've put my proposal out.

The usual block-inducing mindless bullshit is most definitely showing up on Bluesky. I wonder if people understand the economic box that's pushing them into. It's so important that if it's going to be the next Twitter, we as a world, invest in lifeboats to get off the ship quickly and easily if Hulk Hogan ends up being the czar of Bluesky. Weirder things are possible my friends.

Despite server hiccups overnight, I’m feeling refreshed and ready to tackle a couple new problems. It has been a great several days away. Heading home, will have a much-requested Mastodon integration improvement in the queue for later this week. 🏖️

According to Blogtree, 259 blogs considered Scripting News their parent blog, ie they were inspired to start blogging by this blog.

I was feeling pretty good about making improvements and deploying them while on vacation… Until I woke up and realized I had broken a few things. Very sorry, Micro.blog… Bad testing on my part. Should be fixed now.

Sunday session

Some people asked about us not using Basecamp. We had considered dropping it for a while. A post-election DHH post also frustrated me, although I usually try to separate that from whether it’s a good, unique product, which it is. Right now the cost just doesn’t make sense for our tiny team.

One of the best things about ChatGPT is that you can ask it to put together exactly the report you want, that the news orgs aren't writing, or you can't find, or get to through paywalla. In this query, I learned about how Republicans deal with intersex people and bathrooms, they apparently don't. Not surprising, to tell the truth.

Last year I described how I syndicate my posts to different social networks. Back then my approach to syndicating to Bluesky was to piggy-back off my micro.blog account (which is really just the RSS feed of my notes): Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. On...

Rule #2. You have permission. If you want someone else to do something, and they haven't done it, or you don't want to wait, you have permission to do it yourself. You can invoke this rule when someone says "who do they think they are." You had permission, according to rule #2.

If there was going to be a User's Charter for Bluesky, item one would be: You can give me the benefit of the doubt. Let's not argue, esp not about details. We assume the other person is smart. That's one way we get stuff done.

If such a network existed, we would be nominating our own Cabinet members, the shadow Cabinet. Let the journalists compare the qualifications of our candidates vs the incumbent party's. Create news. That's what the Dems absolutely suck at. They very quietly pass legislation that the other party (which votes against) takes credit for. One party is on the air, the other is not. We need to change that. We make news. And we listen to each other, not just the stuffed shirts who run the party now.

Imagine if the Democratic Party ran a Bluesky clone where being able to post means you're a dues-paying member of the party. We can vote on referendums, support or not support Democratic initiatives. Site would never shut down, and would support campaigns when they're running. It would cost money to belong to the site. This would keep trolling under control, and would fund projects the community would sponsor, and also pay for operating the service. No advertising, no billionaires sponsoring. They can be members like everyone else.

[Mike Masnick at MSNBC] As Mike Masnick points out here, the hypocrisy from Elon Musk about collusion between tech and government is staggering: "Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election mi...

[Christine Lemmer-Webber] Christine Lemmer-Webber has written a superb post that sets out to ask how decentralized Bluesky is but goes far deeper into the different models at play in decentralized social networking. It's required reading for anyone who cares...

Cozumel. 🏖️

Given that the conversation has rightly turned to billionaire-proofness of Bluesky, if they allow devs to build on Bluesky with RSS in and out, that's enough to alleviate the concern about it being billionaire-proof.

They already support outbound RSS. Now just let us get into the system with just RSS. Yes, I know it's a "third party opportunity" but something like this, to have the required value, has to be a fully supported and maintained feature of the platform.

Let's do this right, and we can spread this into Masto-Land and Threads-Land and then we can thank Elon Musk for helping us not just bridge these systems, but make them all part of the same freaking system.

We can do this.