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.

A lot has changed since the last time we took a serious look at blogging. A few items, as examples.

1. When RSS came along Markdown didn't exist. The two technologies belong together, imho.
2. Websockets have replaced long polling.
3. Servers got cheap! (and easy to deploy).
4. SQL is fast and the tools are much better.
5. The user interfaces of all the Web 2.0+ products didn't exist last time we created new blogging communities. We can borrow ideas from twitter-like systems, even huge products like Facebook and Spotify have innovations that come long after the initial wave of blogging.

But one thing stays the same -- all the components are replaceable. Absolutely zero lock-in. We use simple standard APIs where they exist, and create new minimal formats and protocols where they don't.

Blogging has a simple philosophy that remains constant.

Adding and deleting categories are part of WordLand 0.50, released earlier today. These are the same categories you can edit in the WordPress user interface. But I learned that you need to be able to add categories when you're writing. You want this functionality to be close-by.

Two columns in the Categories dialog. More efficient use of space.

Context menu with two new commands.

Change notes are here.

Adding and deleting categories coming to WordLand, probably later today. These are the same categories you can edit in the WordPress user interface. But I learned that you need to be able to add categories when you're writing. You want this functionality to be close-by.

Looking for help with wpcom API in Node.js app.

I'd love to get a list of old school bloggers who are still at it. How would you go about that? I decided to give it to Gemini, limiting it at first to 100 bloggers. Here's the prompt I wrote. For a while I was wondering what "deep research" was for, but as it's starting the work, I'm thinking of resources that would fit in -- like blogtree.com -- a fascinating site, gives a clear picture how blogs emerge out of the community of an earlier blog. Anyway it's working on it while I write this post. 😄

An application ChatGPT is great it. You're staring at some code, it's really straightforward, you've done this a thousand times, but it doesn't work. Stare at it some more. Try re-entering it. Change the names of things. Still doesn't work. Copy and paste the problem code into ChatGPT and in an instant it tells you without you even having to ask that your comment isn't properly terminated, so the runtime was never seeing the code, and nothing I did made the slightest difference. The information was there. I had been staring at it, but humans see what we expect to see. Machines don't have that problem, at least not in this way (thinking of hallucinations).

Another BTW, I'm still thinking about how I want to transition from the public and open-to-anyone FeedLand servers. So if you're still using .org or .com, they're still on the air doing the same thing they've been doing all along.

BTW, these days the images are served via HTTPS so they don't show up in broken links in RSS readers, including my own FeedLand which is served over HTTPS.

I asked ChatGPT when Google started making HTTPS a requirement. Then I asked when was HTTPS first deployed, and was surprised it was in 1994 in Netscape Navigator. But apparently it was really buggy and wasn't codified until much later. Then I asked when HTTPS became the norm? 2017. So there's a lot of web out there that isn't being maintained by anyone, it just works, that predates HTTPS being widely adopted, if you believe the timelines ChatGPT produced.