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Podcast: We elected Archie Bunker. 17 minutes.

Carville gets close to the answer. The Dems shut down their online operation on Election Day, go off the air for 3.5 years, then reboot. The Repubs never sign off. Trump is Archie Bunker. People vote for him, even if they don't agree, over the stranger they don't know. Voters kept saying this, but somehow this didn't register. Never nominate a candidate again who isn't very well known to and tolerated by the electorate. Forget about gotchas. The old Dems revolve around fear of being got. It's no longer a problem, a flaw proves you're genuine, authentic. Dems need a complete overhaul top to bottom. Their next leader should have a top podcast, because that's how you will govern from now on. Expect to be surprised how Trump does this starting Jan 20.

I just wrote a for-real post on my WordLand site.

In January 2017, I scooped everyone, by years, on the idea that a billionaire could buy Twitter and thus purchase the presidency. That value wasn't priced into the stock price of TWTR. No one listened. Here's the next installment. The US government acquires Twitter. Elon Musk is of course named Secretary of Twitter. The "constitution" reconceived for online twitter-like systems, says every other online system has to go through twitter.com to reach users. It will act as their gateway to the net. There will be resistance, but by that time there will be no actually independent twitter-like systems, they will all be owned by venture capital funds, or individual billionaires, and of course they will conform because they are also owned to a large degree by Musk. We will have been cartelized, which is one step beyond enshitified.

It's important that Bluesky increase its character limit to 500 because they are not alone. Today there are so many twitter-like systems that are useful, people want to cross-post. If I'm writing something I plan to cross-post, and I pass the 300-char limit, but I'm not finished, what to do. These days generally I view 500 as the actual limit, which means when my cross-poster tries to publish to Bluesky it fails. We should be trying to coalesce on an idea of what a text document is in the mid-late 20s. I've put my proposal out.

The usual block-inducing mindless bullshit is most definitely showing up on Bluesky. I wonder if people understand the economic box that's pushing them into. It's so important that if it's going to be the next Twitter, we as a world, invest in lifeboats to get off the ship quickly and easily if Hulk Hogan ends up being the czar of Bluesky. Weirder things are possible my friends.

According to Blogtree, 259 blogs considered Scripting News their parent blog, ie they were inspired to start blogging by this blog.

One of the best things about ChatGPT is that you can ask it to put together exactly the report you want, that the news orgs aren't writing, or you can't find, or get to through paywalla. In this query, I learned about how Republicans deal with intersex people and bathrooms, they apparently don't. Not surprising, to tell the truth.

Rule #2. You have permission. If you want someone else to do something, and they haven't done it, or you don't want to wait, you have permission to do it yourself. You can invoke this rule when someone says "who do they think they are." You had permission, according to rule #2.

If there was going to be a User's Charter for Bluesky, item one would be: You can give me the benefit of the doubt. Let's not argue, esp not about details. We assume the other person is smart. That's one way we get stuff done.

If such a network existed, we would be nominating our own Cabinet members, the shadow Cabinet. Let the journalists compare the qualifications of our candidates vs the incumbent party's. Create news. That's what the Dems absolutely suck at. They very quietly pass legislation that the other party (which votes against) takes credit for. One party is on the air, the other is not. We need to change that. We make news. And we listen to each other, not just the stuffed shirts who run the party now.

Imagine if the Democratic Party ran a Bluesky clone where being able to post means you're a dues-paying member of the party. We can vote on referendums, support or not support Democratic initiatives. Site would never shut down, and would support campaigns when they're running. It would cost money to belong to the site. This would keep trolling under control, and would fund projects the community would sponsor, and also pay for operating the service. No advertising, no billionaires sponsoring. They can be members like everyone else.

Given that the conversation has rightly turned to billionaire-proofness of Bluesky, if they allow devs to build on Bluesky with RSS in and out, that's enough to alleviate the concern about it being billionaire-proof.

They already support outbound RSS. Now just let us get into the system with just RSS. Yes, I know it's a "third party opportunity" but something like this, to have the required value, has to be a fully supported and maintained feature of the platform.

Let's do this right, and we can spread this into Masto-Land and Threads-Land and then we can thank Elon Musk for helping us not just bridge these systems, but make them all part of the same freaking system.

We can do this.

I just realized that there's another kind of enshitification that we're experiencing now because the twitter-verse has split into so many forks. Bluesky is hot now, but this isn't over yet. Developers are deliberately locking their users in by creating new APIs that are not ...

I just realized that there's another kind of enshitification that we're experiencing now because the twitter-verse has split into so many forks. Bluesky is hot now, but this isn't over yet. Developers are deliberately locking their users in by creating new APIs that are not ...

I started a feature list on the About WordLand page.

Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan walk into a bar. The bartender serves them tainted alcohol because there are no regulations. They die.

When people said they didn't know Kamala well, they weren't kidding. She didn't start broadcasting until three months before the election. That's not even one season of Abbott Elementary or Wheel of Fortune. Of course they didn't know her. We should be marketing the hell out...

Basically, if you have to lock your users in, your product must suck.

It's noteworthy that we haven't seen many outages as Bluesky scales. On Twitter they had fail whales for years.

What matters with social networks is what you can get done there, not so much the features of the network. Bluesky has the same features today it had a month ago. The difference is we had an election in the US, I guess that was the catalyst. The presence of Elon Musk so close to Trump says there is a need for a Musk-free place. I've kept my account on Twitter. I started there in 2006, and I love the web more than I feel it would do any good to erase my presence there. It's pretty much against my religion to deliberately erase bits of the web. And whatever you think of Twitter, it is most definitely part of the web.

On Bluesky, inbound RSS is becoming a thing.

A quick podcast about our new 365-day-a-year campaign on the social web to keep our democracy alive.

We've found Lauren Kapp, the 25-year-old creative genius behind kamalahq. We need to get her back on the air, with her team, fully funded and supported. We need leadership on the social web. Thanks to Brian Puckett for the link.

I posted a feature request on Bluesky that has gotten a lot of flow. Bluesky devs.. How about a compromise. Support inbound RSS. Let me enter the URL of an RSS feed in settings. I'll ping a fixed location when the feed updates. Would allow the same flow to go to other sy...

Why I haven't created an account on sez.us yet.

• They ask for my first and last name before I sign up. Ask for that info later, after I've created an account. I gave it a fake name to get to the next screen.
• Then they ask for my phone number. That's when I hit the back button. I already get too much spam on my phone, and the filters aren't good there. I am happy to provide an email address as my identifier as I do on all other systems. Later, if I become a regular user, I don't mind providing the phone number as part of 2-factor identity, but not up front.
• Also I don't like white on black letters. It's hard for me to read. All the competitive systems use black on white background. Offer it as an option if it's important to you, but please default to black on white.

Joe Trippi posted a video to his new sez.us service where Pete Buttigieg explains what the Russians have done to the US. I see it that way too. When Brian Lehrer asked a few weeks ago how the US got so divided of his guest Bob Woodward (a fascinating time capsule, recorded b...

Excellent piece on how Bluesky leaves users with the impression that it's open and decentralized in ways it is not. If it's bought by someone who wants to use it the way Musk has, they can, without any recourse by the users. As they said in the old days, if you're getting something for free, you're the product, not the customer. We helped Musk build a way to excercise political power against our interests. You may think Bluesky is a way of fixing that, but it probably isn't. They're digging a deep hole, probably too deep to climb out of at this point. They did some innovative stuff, perhaps. But they ended up at the same place, it appears, as Twitter did.

I like to put something here every day whether I have something to say or not because I'm not sure how my software would handle a post-less. Someday we may find out, but not today. "smile: