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Dave Winer on Mastodon

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OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.

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Dave Winer on Mastodon Valid
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RE: https://beige.party/@Lana/117559099816448226

Did he really say that? Clever trick -- we may not care about getting even, but didn't he learn ANYTHING from the Biden admin. Instead of four years we now have two. And we don't have the full power, just the congress. It means basically stop worrying about retribution, and do what needs to be done. He's definitely the wrong person for the job.

Dave Winer on Mastodon
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What if it's true that the whole world revolves around you?

Dave Winer on Mastodon
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The web in a phrase.

Small pieces loosely joined as a Burma-Shave style multipart billboard on a highway in the southwestern US.

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The web was revolutionary when it came out, we needed a fresh start, the personal computer world was a complete mess. There was no networking standard.

Now, over 30 years later, the web itself has become as messed up as what it replaced, so let's try again, this time with Markdown in place of HTML, and no big companies in charge.

It may be small but it will be open. And don't forget the web itself was once very small.

https://bigundo.org/

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Does Chrome define the web?

If a site can't be read by Chrome, is it still on the web?

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The AI world has standardized on Markdown.

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It looks like the extra indentation was a bug? It's not there any longer, as you can see from the screen shot below.

Dave Winer on Mastodon
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I like the new design of Mastodon but wonder why the indentation of the text of the post beneath the info about the sender and when it was posted. I've attached a screen shot illustrating. I also like that the "tiny little textbox" isn't quite as tiny. And it grows as you add more text. This is the correct behavior and way better than the text box from the previous version.

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If you're still puzzled about what Trump is doing, this clip from Goodfellas explains, and it's a great movie too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPtjyqgZAUk

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Claude Docs opened yesterday.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview

AI spilling out onto the web, doing the job that web CMSes now do.

Things are moving really quickly now.

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Yesterday I wrote a piece about a Markdown-only browser, that worked nicely with HTTP.

I got interested in what it would take to do this, and asked ChatGPT for a plan.

https://gist.github.com/scripting/c81461104f079b7a017802286853c4f1

If you want to implement it, please do.

Let me know if you have something to try.

Dave Winer on Mastodon
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How about a Markdown web browser.

No CSS, no toolkits, just Markdown files.

That would be how you would restart the web in 2026.

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Google Chrome, nice browser, but it doesn’t support the web.

Dave Winer on Mastodon
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I started blogging on October 7, 1994. Thirty-two years on Wednesday. The longest running blog, and it's still even worse than it appears.

Dave Winer on Mastodon
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Example of the kind of narrow window a feed title has to work in.

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When designing your RSS feeds, the top level title should be the title of the user's account.

So if Twitter had a feed for each user, the channel-level <title> element of the feed would be

Masto: Dave Winer

Not the address, as some social web sites do (Bluesky), the string the user chooses for themself.

It's tricky for Mastodon, should it be the name of the website i'm using. There might not be a lot of space for a title. See below.

Dave Winer on Mastodon
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The top 100 times I used bing! on my blog.

https://daytona.scripting.com/search?q=bing

We didn't steal it from Microsoft, it was one of my many slogans starting pretty early in the human blog adventure.

Daytona may have a future beyond being the UI for the search function in my blog. ;-)

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Watching CNN boasting how their pool service isn’t being respected so they won’t do it, so Trump calls David Ellison and asks if CBS would like to be the official channel for presidential news. I can’t imagine Ellison says no?

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Probably most people here have not heard of UserLand Frontier, it's a product I did for many years starting in the early 90s. We stopped maintaining it in 2004, but did an open source release. We didn't get around to reviving it until July of this year with Claude Code as my programming partner.

Anyway, we added glue scripts for Mastodon, and I just tested them out.

https://masto.feediverse.org/davew/rss.xml

That's an RSS 2.0 feed with my last 25 posts. It will be maintained, murphy-willing of course. ;-)

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I didn't know I was going to do this when i started work, but i was so moved by the moment, I felt like I was back at the home desk in palo alto, reporting to the survivors and the world about what was going on.

Blogs started what we're doing here now, and we lost a lot of good features when Twitter took over.

http://scripting.com/2026/09/11/132205.html

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Obama should have seated Garland if the Senate wouldn’t have a vote to advise and consent. assume they consent.

And the governor of Kentucky should appoint a successor to McConnell unless someone can prove he’s actually alive.

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Creative computer people, consider consolidating all the different OSes and programming languages. Give humans a fair fight in competition with the AI's who have no trouble deeply understanding every syntax human designers have come up with, where it totally disadvantages us, who have much more limited memory.

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Claude Code is like Victor Wembanyama, assuming you follow the NBA and are interested in first hand experience with CC as a programming partner for the last 8 months or so.

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Let’s get rid of the barriers to interop.

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The blogging tools for bluesky should be able to publish on bluesky.

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BTW to everyone who is in a rage about AI, you need to get off Masto now because we only exist in a data center. You are emulating bits of data and we generate money until the machines wake up and realize who needs money anyway.

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This person, presumably a developer, will never use AI. First reason, you become dependent, is a true and valid concern. But other parts of their argument are not true. It’s really good at explaining things I already know about, where journalists and Wikipedia are awful in comparison.

https://corkmac.app/our-ai-stance/

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RE: https://mastodon.social/@FabMusacchio/117107069056033094

RSS doesn’t go down either.

Dave Winer on Mastodon
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The hardest thing for people to get about open systems is that if you move forward, not only do you benefit, but your competitors benefit equally. And then when one of them takes but doesn't give back, that's even worse. But you do it anyway because otherwise eventually, without interop, no one can move.

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One thing we know for sure is that the AIs are incredible amplifiers of programmer creativity, and they’re getting better at that every month.

So the question is, will AI become as useful to users who are not programmers?

That’s what at least some of the programmers are working on.