FeedCity

We're programmed to believe big companies make things the right way and individual people can't be trusted. We're going to have to break out of that rut, to stop trusting them so much. It's like the 2008 banking crisis, but this time they've taken over the government, not just the economy. The tech industry, believe it or not, started with assumption that it was the other way around. That people were the brilliance, and companies started wars to make money (we were the generation that stopped the Vietnam war, btw). I got into computers because I thought I could earn a living that way, but quickly discovered how inherently subversive they are. They weren't just for the nerds with the plastic pocket protectors, they were also for hippies. Some of us are still here and we want to create with you.

Molly White has an excellent OPML subscription list. I want to make something with this, maybe a Bluesky feed reader? I want to show people they can combine skills to make new media. We don't have to wait for big companies to do it for us. We can work together. That's how we rise to the challenges we share. We can flip this bad situation around, turning problems into opportunity. Big changes happen now. We can steer in the direction we want to go.

Another ad. Donald Trump on Mt Rushmore. Donald Trump on the $20 bill. The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial renamed Trump. Kennedy airport in NYC renamed Trump International. In the future the US will have only one founding father: Donald J. Trump.

If our political system worked we’d have wonderful heart-grabbing ads on TV about all the people who have meaningful jobs thanks to DEI. It wouldn’t be hard to make the Repubs look like Scrooges. Get people riled up. Another ad, about the people Trump pardoned and what they’re doing now. Wait till one of them commits a major crime and run Willie Horton style ads. Make it understood who these people actually are. Trump has to own each and every one of them. This really isn’t hard. But the Dems think campaigns end. They don’t end.

I thought this excerpt from Krugman's piece about his move back to blogging was right on. "For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts." There's a need for a system that combines the full-featured writing of blogging and the timelines of twitter-like systems.

Podcast: The Repubs are trying to kill you.

Could what happened to Twitter, happen there? To determine, ask yourself if you could continue to use it if it was acquired by a billionaire for their own personal political use? What would you switch to? Would you have to give up your history and followers? And developers, ...

This is a post for longtime Scripting News readers. As you know, I've been doing feed readers for a long time. They've been mostly organized around the river of news concept, which also happens to be the way twitter-like systems work. My rivers are built around RSS and forma...

I wonder if people understand what a sanctuary city is. In a sanctuary city the local government accepts the fact that there are people living in the city who are not there legally. They want these people to be able to call the police without fear of being turned into the...

Isn't it funny how the two political forces we thought we completely defeated in the 90s are coming back for their revenge.

Hegseth's job is to stay out of the way while the Heritage Foundation separates the military into those who take loyalty seriously and those who are retiring.

For that job being an alcoholic is a plus. 😀

They're interviewing for who wants to be his replacement.

His job is to keep the seat warm.

Our best hope is that the factions within MAGA fight each other. We're assuming they have a way to keep everyone in line, but the more power they capture, the harder that's going to be.

It's been over 24 hours, and my viral post from yesterday is still getting lots of RTs and likes. An observation -- it's made my Bluesky account virtually unusable. Anything else I publish there is swamped by the viral post. I'm also working on a new version of the software that turns Bluesky into a feed reader. It will be able to manage multiple rivers, where the first version could only do one. The next reader will be all the posts from me on all the various services I post to that have outbound RSS feeds. After that, I have ideas for special feeds for specific publications. I want to help our friends in the blogging and news world, using the best communication tools available. I find now that people are much more open to ideas. This is good. But we should never be complacent. Learn from the competition. They were getting ready for this moment, we weren't.

I kept this screenshot assuming someday we might be asked to forget. Back when the NYT tried sometimes to report the news as it actually happened.

Objectively, January 6, 2021 was even more of a "day which will live in infamy" than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It was more insidious because while Hawaii was an American territory, January 6 was an attack on the actual center of our government. Had the mob prevailed, the US would have been defeated, right there and then.

The Capitol police were our last line of defense, they received no help from military.

The Supreme Court should count their blessings too, because their building is just behind the Capitol.

BTW, Bluesky, for me, is already a greater flow generator than Twitter ever was. My post about never forgetting Trump's coup attempt has already been RT'd 2.8K times, about three hours after it was posted. In all my years of using the social web I've never gotten that much attention. I have 11.7K followers, far fewer than I have on Twitter.

Basically we have to bring politics to the people.

The W3C should've gotten behind RSS long before they endorsed ActivityPub. They're controlled by big companies who are truly scared of interop, explains why most of their proposed standards go nowhere. BTW, I figure if Matt can openly discuss what's undermining WordPress as an open standard (which it is) no reason I can't tell the truth why the social web is not a web. It's all a big corporate con. Everywhere you look, ripping us off and selling us out.

To answer Mark Cuban's question of what could we do now to make things better. I forgot that I have two ready-made answers. First, get the Democrats or whatever its successor is called, on the air 365 days a year, every year, not just in election years, and have it do many t...

It's a no-blogging Wednesday, will return tomorrow.

Another idea. One of Tesla's competitors could offer a trade-in, where they commit to recycling all the parts of your Tesla, so you are actually taking a Tesla off the road. And for a few extra dollars they can send you a scrapbook of your old Tesla being lovingly taken apart suitable for RT'ing.

Wouldn't it be smart for Kia or Rivian or some other EV competitor of Tesla's to name their car Bluesky and have it only come in blue?

The most depressing moment of Trump 1.0, for me, was leaving the local supermarket, after seeing the kind of empty shelves you see in third world countries with broken or non-existent economic systems. This was when it sunk in how far the United States had fallen. But someh...

I spent a few days designing and implementing the protocol that allows WordLand to be the writing tool for Bingeworthy, thus giving it a real writing and publishing function, instead of the usual ridiculous tiny little textbox. Today I'm going to make it work for writing and...

Please -- to the people in charge at Bluesky, add a setting that allows me to restrict who can reply to posts.

Choices:

1. Anyone can reply.
2. People who follow me can reply.
3. People I follow can reply.
4. No one can reply.

For all posts, not on a post-by-post basis.

Defaults to #3.

In the last days of Trump's first term, I had a nice little web app that told you how much time remained in his term. It was a one-line change to make it work again, which, sigh, is necessary now.

BTW, actually the term social web is probably too big a compromise. The "web" part is the only part that's imho useful. The sad part is that "social" means "we removed most of the features of the web." Why? Some vague sense that people would write too much if given the space. Or link too much. Or edit too much. Or be too emphatic. It's worse than Disneyfied -- at least at Disneyland you get actors, and color and rides, and bland food with tons of sugar and fat. But there is some fun and nutrition. In the social web, it's just memes and slogans. Not even much room for a metaphor. There's so much more to say about being human.

I just wrote a review for Industry in Bingeworthy, but it doesn't have a text editor. It farms the job off to WordLand, which shoots the text back to Bingeworthy when the user publishes. So the text is on both BW and WP. And through WordPress it has a presence on the web. This is the goal, writing exists on its own, but can be shared in all the contexts it makes sense in, but it lives primarily in your blog, your home base. That's why WordPress is so important in the scheme of things. It's a consensus, this is where a lot of people are blogging in 2025. And there's a lot of unexplored interop. This may not make total sense at this time, but soon, I hope to be able to point back at this post, and say it was the first time something important worked.

There's a great scene in No Country For Old Men, where a character is facing imminent death, but he's arguing with the character who will kill him, who asks if all your great ideas led to this (his death) how good were the ideas (paraphrasing).

Along those lines.. If Twitter was such a great idea but it led to the death of democracy (for now at least) maybe it wasn't such a great idea. Maybe when we try to reboot we should try something realllly different.

As they say -- Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Sad news: Longtime friend Pam McQuesten passed away on January 1 after a brief illness. I knew Pam in Silicon Valley, as we were starting up Living Videotext in 1983. Our office was on Elwell Court in Palo Alto, just off 101, near the golf course and airport. Pam was managi...