FeedCity

I've been putting Markdown support in my feeds -- everywhere -- on both sides, yielding serendipity like this. This is how "it just works" comes about. With a good design and a lot of love.

I don't have a huge problem with platform companies that lock users in. That's a business model, and at this point if users aren't aware of the costs well that's their problem. There have been plenty of opportunities to learn. But when a company markets their proprietary system as somehow fighting lockin, well that's about as much chutzpah as anyone should put up with.

A funny thing. A few months back someone told me that I had been gone from the podcast world for too long for anyone to listen to me. I thought how weird, I didn't go anywhere at all, I stayed exactly where I was, all the time. Virtually every day. If people cared to know wh...

I find that writing about something publicly helps me focus on the idea in a way I can't get by only talking about it privately. That's because I am a Natural Born Blogger. I was born that way.

I am using Bluesky the way I used to use Twitter, to talk openly about product development ideas before they are fully hatched.

It's been exactly one month since WordLand opened to the public.

Thanks to Ben Werdmuller and Om Malik for their nice writeups of WordLand on their blogs. They're right. It is a small piece that can be hooked into lots of places, as is WordPress a big place that can host lots of apps many of which haven't been written yet. Products that l...

Mini-spoilers follow. I'm a Severance lover, it's definitely one of the best shows ever, and I feel even more so after the season 2 finale which I watched last night on AppleTV+. I think there are two types of Severance users. One whose focus is on the evil and the other whose focus is on the love. If you think nothing happened in the finale then you're the first type, if you are the second type, this episode was incredible rich. And we learned what the goats were about and that's not nothing.

Here's something that could be very useful. A link to ChatGPT with instructions on how to help a user overcome problems using WordLand. Try clicking the link and see what happens, esp if you're a regular WordLand user. I discovered the feature first by asking if the bot knew what WordLand was, and it said it did, and got it mostly right. I've been using ChatGPT to develop the product, so it's possible it has retained some of the info. And the docs are on the web. This is one of those times when you really want the AI bot to ingest everything they can find. What I'm worried most about are hallucinations. But with a product like WordLand, which could show up problems in the browser or a WordPress theme, a lot of the help requests we get are not problems with WordLand.

Notes

• Terminology: I don't thnk we should use the term social web until there actually is such a thing, so I invented a new term for these twitter-like services.
• Since Ghost is now supporting ActivityPub, I felt we needed to include Substack because the two products compete directly.
• I consider AT Proto a proprietary protocol for now, as proprietary as Mastodon's API.
• I included WordPress because it supports ActivityPub.
• If you want to comment or ask questions I posted this table on Mastodon and Bluesky.

Senator Chris Murphy: "How on earth are we going to ask the American people to take risks for us when there's a 5-alarm constitutional fire and we need them to be out on the streets, with hundreds of thousands of people if we're not willing to show courage and take risks ourselves."

Podcast: We still need universities. 21 minutes.

If you aren’t sure how to ask for help with software, try first asking ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to help figure out what’s going wrong. It has infinite time to help, and won’t mind if the problem turned out to be a random browser plug-in that was misbehaving.

It often suggests trying things you might not have thought of.

I use it myself esp as often is the case there’s no one who can or is willing to work for me for free. I’m already playing it $20 per month, and for that I get as much time as it takes.

Really good for organizing your approach to a problem.

A thread I wrote on Bluesky about how the RSS world, an earlier instance of the writer's web, was overtaken by Twitter and why, which boils down to this -- the reading platforms wouldn't work with each other. So Twitter made subscription one click. And RSS made sites include ...

I like Jeff Nichols' piece, but I don't agree that the writer's web is blogging. I think it's bigger. Blogging is part of the writer's web. Today's writing network is much more powerful, the software tools are stronger, and new UI standards have evolved. Things like Digital Ocean, Markdown, Font-Awesome and Node.js didn't exist last time we took a serious look at writing on the web. The web with all its features is still here. WordPress has created a strong foundation to build on, at least as good as the social media platforms, but better because it's of the web, with no limits. We've got the beginning of a new platform, one where developers compete to create great writing and reading environments, and we don't need federation because the web takes care of that.

The basic thing about tech is that it's filled with people who take things that don't belong to them. There's no policing. The richest people are the ones who are best at grabbing control of other people's creations. That's the common theme. Now they're in DC, going for all of it. The whole thing. But they're like the dog that catches the car. They don't have the slightest idea what to do with what they're taking. How could they? It's incomprehensibly vast.

A piece that Paul Krugman should write. How what Musk is doing to the US is worse than the 2009 near-collapse of the world economy. People who think he's going to bring down just the US, should recall how close we all came to falling into the abyss. But this time there will be no one to save us.

Obama once said to the bankers who just crashed the economy, much like Trump/Musk are trying to do now -- that his administration is the "only thing between you and the pitchforks.” These are the same people. They’re back from 2009 and this time they want everything. They don't care what's left, they're like machines. All they know how to do is to consume things. Squeeze one penny of value from every dollar. This clip from Goodfellas explains.

The data behind a WordLand blog post I wrote a few days ago. I'm publishing these so people get an idea of the structures we're working with. It's basically a WordPress post with added metadata. They have these kinds of structures in RSS, Atom, ActivityPub and AT Proto. Event...

Techdirt has a well-deserved rep for exposing the false claims tech companies make. I’d love to see a Techdirt analysis of Bluesky’s claim that they’re billionaire-proof and they don’t lock users in. For background check out this TechCrunch piece from SXSW.

Of course I'm getting ready to ditch my Tesla Model Y, and thinking about what my options are. I saw someone comment on the Rivian truck, and I've seen them around but didn't imagine they'd have the same muscle car profile as the Tesla, but apparently they do. That's the thing I'd miss the most about the Model Y. Its power and handling. It's a big car, but it drives in many ways like the Miata I drove in the 90s.

This is like that moment, five years ago, when we realized that Covid was going to kill a lot of us but it hadn't happened yet. A lot of people weren't yet aware. My friend John Palfrey, who is a legal scholar, has been writing about this moment on LinkedIn and Facebook. Thi...

The Dems highest priority should be to get the Kamala Harris campaign back on social media, 24 by 7, with the truth and snark, irreverance, disrespectful of the Repubs, as a matter of principle. They were great. Perfect. We need a voice for the Democrats on the social networks.

Would someone please send this to AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Bernie Sanders, Mark Cuban, James Carville, anyone else you can think of.

The Dems only problem is there is no voice, no pulse, no heartbeat. Even without this, they almost won the last election.

Everything you like about government came from the Democrats.

This post is for idiots like you who click on links to The Bulwark.

This is the data we currently keep for every draft you edit in WordLand.

Palfrey's alarm yesterday was about the Americans who were whisked off to El Salvador. Who they are and what they're accused of is unknown, as if there's any substance to the accusation. No indictment, trial, verdict, appeals, etc. El Salvador wants to be the US dumping ground for undesirables. This is where we have, as Timothy Snyder says, regime change. I thought the elmination of Social Security would have been the moment the light went on for most Americans, but this should be it. Citizens like you and me being disappeared. It's a pretty quick way to get most of the people to behave according to the rules of the government, or off you go.

Poking around on old servers I found this cute little app that jsonifies an RSS feed. Not sure why I did it.

I put out a call for Old School Bloggers, and got back a bunch of notes on Mastodon. Gettin' the band back together! :-)

Pradeep is using WordLand for some of his WordPress blog posts, and has given them a special category. Very smart, good use of categories.