FeedCity

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.

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.

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 took. 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. 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.

Sometimes it feels like my job is just to manage thousands or millions of queued background tasks and make sure all the servers are perfectly in balance.

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.

Rainy morning. Walked from the mechanic around the pond to Central Market for coffee. Reminds me of when my kids were little and we’d play over here. 😢

I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! Software companies are happy to make their lives harder (and more expensive: deploying to the big app stores isn’t free!), in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web in the first place!

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So instead of asking “why not React?” we asked: Which of our actual problems would React solve? We went through the list. There were none.

Also, this is good advice when you’re about to make a web component:

Every component starts with the question “does a semantic element already exist for this?”, and remarkably often the answer is yes.

adactio.com/links/22652

Matt asked me a question recently about the end of my People and Blogs run. The question was if I always thought I was going to hand it over at some point, and it’s an interesting question worth expanding on, which is why I told him I was going to write a post about it, rath...

Surveillance doesn't improve crime or make anyone safer. It wastes civic dollars and creates new risks for vulnerable communities. The SFPD's leak demonstrates one reason why.

Good morning. It will 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. Always re-use instead of re-invent is one of my strongest held beliefs. BTW it came up with the name ThreadWalker.

Zohran Mamdani has unveiled a radically collaborative, cross-disciplinary approach to building internal technology capacity. News has a lot to learn from it.

We’re well into the hype cycle and so far the only clearly-measurable changes we’ve seen are that laptops and gaming consoles now cost considerably more.

Truly a transformative technology!

The tenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out: In Episode 10, I chat with Kristoffer and Elliott, the creators of the Internet Phone Book. We talk about, among other things, the history of the Internet Phone Book, the affordances of physical books for a community project, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.

To John Gruber’s point earlier today, I just opened the App Store and literally the entire screen is just ChatGPT and an ad. Hugely valuable. Millions of people see this.

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

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. ;-)

When building a product that does so many things, no one is going to agree on every decision, but I think Micro.blog and our users are aligned on the big things. The mission has never changed: post short posts (and everything else!) to your own blog, which makes the web better, and also opens opportunities for smaller, safer communities.

"After losing their jobs at NOAA, Rebecca Lindsey, her sister and another colleague teamed up to rebuild a pivotal resource the Trump administration took offline."