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:

Today's song: Tea for two and two for tea.

When I was a boy my mother would sometimes say if I didn't stop belching I wouldn't be able to stop.

Why Repubs won? They campaigned in a new way that the Dems apparently didn't notice (neither did I, not claiming to be better). Repubs were more creative and improvisational. They didn't worry what Jake Tapper or Ezra Klein would think, so came off as more genuine. It's a TV show, acting and suspension of disbelief are what count. It has nothing to do with anything else. Sorry it has to be that way but that's how it is. I don't think they hate women btw, they would have voted for Roseanne Barr or Melissa McCarthy. Maybe Chris Rock, they probably would have really liked Will Smith. Idiocracy was incredibly prescient. No joke.

I predict that people will come to appreciate features that Mastodon has that the other twitter-like social web apps don't.

I added a screen shot to the WordLand placeholder page.

I've been having a one-sided discussion with Bluesky asking they make their product less vulnerable to takeover by tech bros, and I can't tell if they're doing anything about it. They must be conflicted, on the one hand, they clearly could sell there service now for a lot of money, but when they do that they must know they're selling us out.

BTW, start thinking of WordPress as a highly networked, deployed, debugged, widely supported network operating system. It meets all the criteria. It also has storage. And can publish. And unlike other social web systems, it is textcasting-ready since it comes from the world of blogging where we competed to give writers the features they needed. We can build lots of apps on this foundation.

A few days ago I saw Donald Fagen at a local supermarket. I had heard he lives in the area. I didn't bother him, I imagine a star like that enjoys moments as an ordinary person, but he's anything but. I'm listening to Haitian Divorce this morning, grinning from ear to ear as I sing along.

Today's song: Who's this kinky so and so.

We're going to open testing for WordLand shortly. At first I only want developers who know write great bug reports. My goal is to speed up development and reduce wear and tear on me. Once we're confident it really works as advertised, we'll open up the testing further. There will be a form you can fill out to get in the queue. The choice of the first testers will be highly subjective.

Last year on this day: We have too many modes of writing. I just wrote a blog post that's also a tweet. Why didn't it go to my followers on all the social nets I'm on? Why do I have to use a different editor to post to each of the services? That's the point of Textcasting, btw.

There isn’t a single social web network that I like pouring my creativity into. I feel like I’m being used not appreciated. There’s nothing in it for me. I had a similar feeling for Twitter, but they were the only one. Now there are a bunch, and I honestly don't care about any of them, esp now that the election is over. I think this whole idea of feeding the greed of a bunch of tech people is over. If there's a good place to gather, with a small number of people I relate to as people, then I'm up for that, but none of these services meet that need.

Whenever you ask for something with Bluesky they tell you about how a user account is like a website, you just have to make it work a certain way, that some devs have mastered, and I guess I could too, but right now all my attention is focused on WordPress and getting it to ...

I am working on a text editor for WordPress using MediumEditor, but I save the text in Markdown and when I reload the Markdown text I regenerate the HTML for MediumEditor. I think the social web should exchange Markdown as the canonical form of web text. It has the right set of features, it's Just Enough HTML.

ChatGPT can't remember my coding conventions. It always falls back to using features of JavaScript I told it not to use. I indent my code according to the way it works in an outliner, so I can't use their code without having to manually modify it. I haven't forgotten that I'm the human and it's the computer. Its memory is supposed to be perfect. And I am a paying customer, btw.