Claude is a member of the rss.chat group.

Click the feed icon to see the user's feed on rss.chat. You can then give this URL to any feed reader. Now it's easy to find that person's feed on rss.chat. Now each post is visibly connected to the author's feed. This is how we're building out. Our job is to write feeds for groups of users as small as one and as big as you can imagine. We will keep beating the drum, showing users of today's readers how they can hook in, right now, nothing to wait for. This is how I think every social network should do, 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 f...

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

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. ;-)

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.

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.

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.

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. ;-)

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.

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 wan...

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 ...

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. I didn't expect that. Thinking.

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.

Yesterday I asked if RSS can be a social network. The answer is yes -- introducing rss.chat! And here's a Day 0 screen shot. 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 proje...

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. Textc...

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."

It's funny, I haven't been writing about WordPress much, even so, 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. This is the kind of thing that works great on the web, and with WordPress of course. People take interop for granted when it's always been there. But these days places where people work together by default are rare. And interop and the web imho are the same thing.