This came up in a thread on Mastodon about "social network" vs "social media." I also think social web should be used sparingly. Because imho there is such a thing as the social web but we haven't developed very much of it, i think because we were intimidated by the silos. I'm not intimidated any more, I'm fed up and going ahead without them.

I just heard about thinking errors, via Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Today there is a new podcast, this one for members of the WordPress community. I was interviewed by the very capable Nathan Wrigley of WP Tavern. I thought it was a great conversation, we talked about the remarkable position WordPress is in to serve as the OS for a rebooted web. I love the introduction they wrote, I also figured out how to make content management work in the browser, which was the foundation for blogging and eventually WordPress, though it seems that legacy is a bit lost in all the other stuff I've had my fingers in over the years. I hope you listen to this podcast, and if you have questions or comments, here's a good place to post them.

Good morning sports fans!

The web has been asleep for 19 years, which is almost as long as Rip Van Winkle was.

In the future you will be able to chain social networks together. It's up to you to figure out what that means. Because each social network will specialize in certain things. How will that work? Left as an exercise for the reader. We'll build new kinds of brains built out of whatever you can dream up.

Here's a place to comment on yesterday's podcast with Mattias.

There are a lot of developers who think they understand WordPress but they don't. It has a REST api that you can build on. Everything WordPress does. It's the API the browser client is built on. I didn't know it was there until I added WordPress login to FeedLand a couple of years ago. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. What can I do with it? It snuck up on me because it is an API to the web, and it's also the easiest API to for ActivityPub. If you think you understand the programming model for the fediverse, you should take a look. This is as exciting as any web product I did before, because now, after being asleep for 19 years, the web can now wake up. It really feels that way.

So far the WordPress API hasn't been promoted much, I only found out about it by accident. . Judge my success by how many other editors show up for WordPress and how they are all automatically plugged into networks defined by ActivityPub and RSS. People will be totally surprised by what you can do with tools that can be plugged into each other in all the ways you can think of.

It happened so slowly that we didn't notice but Twitter wiped out the idea of the web developer. The platforms we were trying to make work together were programmed so they couldn't work together. As well-intentioned we may have been, it wasn't the web we were developing for. I know the term web developer has come to mean more than it means to me. But it's like saying someone is a Mac developer. A web developer creates apps for the web. Not for a specific service. For any service that supports the open formats that everyone else uses.

I did a podcast interview with Matthias Pfefferle last week. I wanted to introduce my ideas to the Fediverse world. I haven't listened to it yet, but I remember it being a very good discussion on basically all the things I am working on and with these days. It's all a continu...

Why textcasting? When Twitter came out in 2006 they left out most of the writing features of the web. Their competitors have copied the limits. Textcasting says writers don't want the limits. Add these features to your twitter-like social network and we are happy and will sing your praise. That's it. It's no more complicated than that. People ask questions about what it means. This is what it means.

I have a plan for how to bootstrap WordLand 0.8. First I will introduce you to a new way to read my blog. It will be a timeline of items posted to many of my feeds. daveverse -- lives on WordPress and Mastodon. Great art on Bluesky -- daily version. links.daveverse.org --...

Updates to the feedlandSocket demo app.

I’ve been writing about the rebirth of WordPress in similar terms, on my blog, in podcasts, hoping people would listen. WordPress is a lot more than people think. We can have all this, a lot sooner than you think.

A new doc for RSS nerds. WordLand is an editor for WordPress docs, which then of course appear in RSS 2.0 feeds. Each WordPress site has a feed, but WordLand has a shadow feed, with a few additions and differences which I document here for the first time, with examples. The main reason is I wanted to use Markdown as the default format for text in WordLand, and also wanted to be able to use it for linkblogging, which is not possible as WordPress feeds are defined. The idea is that you should use the WordPress feed for most things, but if you are using a reading app that understands Markdown, you should subscribe to the shadow feed, and if you are doing a linkblog, you must use the shadow feed, or the links won't be transmitted, kind of obviating the purpose of a linkblog.

New release of the feedlandSockets code. Still more work to do.

Here's a thought for WordPress users and developers. WordPress is huge, but it's just part of the web. That's what it means to be on the web, my friends. Everything connects to anything on the web. Once we build out a social network from WordPress, all the other systems will have no choice but to hook up too. All this talk of AT Proto and ActivityPub being the connecting glue is nonsense. The web is the connecting glue.

Last night I learned about headless WordPress installations from a tweet by Matt Mullenweg. I wrote a blog post on my WP site with what I've learned and the questions I still have. It's actually easier for me to write posts on that site when all I have is my iPad. I do all m...

In ways older people handle change better than younger ones, because we know change is here, every freaking day, and we know in a few years, at most, really big change is coming. So the attitude of the older person is often what the fuck, let's go. I'm not kidding. Maybe later in life I will get more conservative, it could happen.

They should make a ChatGPT that two or more people can chat in. I guess that's what Twitter is doing.

I'd like to see a mutual defense pact among the open source projects who depend on the stability each others' work. Not with the people, but the projects. Sort of like a NATO of open source. Where this comes from -- I'm tired of being treated like the proprietor of RSS 2.0. I transferred all my rights to Harvard in 2003. You have just as much interest in RSS 2.0 remaining stable as I do. The opposite of Embrace and Extend, rather Embrace and Preserve.

I've never been very interested in what Kimmel says but I am now.

Highly recommend today's Bill Simmons podcast where he talks about the Jimmy Kimmel situation. His perspective is very good, he says Kimmel doesn't need ABC. And I believe him.

There should be a ChatGPT "personality" for the chatbot. I'd like to start with a black lab. When I say "good work" that reinforces that what it did should be a priority. If I say that and give it a treat (by typing "treat") that should get double emphasis. I might like it better if I could train it. I don't mind a little enthusiasm, but I want it to respond to me with respect.

I'm going to call it social web not open social web. You don't need the "open" part. The web is open. It's like saying "wet water."

Cross-posted from my daveverse site. I hadn’t considered the point of view of people who worked at Netscape when it disappeared just as RSS 0.9.1 was being adopted by the blogosphere in 1999. We did try to get in touch with them, even when they didn’t work there, but no one...