The Fediverse is impossible to use even for people who understand what it's trying to do, and most people have no idea. The answer: Stop trying to reinvent Twitter. It wasn't a great idea! And figure out what really works in a decentralized system. It requires some serious brain work.

So proud -- Doc Searls wrote this beautiful blog post with WordLand. If I have my way blogging is going to come all the way back and then zooooom out from there. Still diggin!

Web isn't just a brand, it's also a noun and a verb. "I web you."

I found the TechDirt piece about being a democracy blog disturbing because imho it should have been about democracy at least since 2017, when it was clear that Twitter had just elected a president of the United States. That was a clear strong signal that tech and democracy w...

When I ask a personal question on one of the AI bots, all of a sudden on Facebook I'm getting ads about what I asked about. It could be a coincidence, but it's happened a few times, on more than one system. And I'm a paying customer on all of them.

People who criticize Dems for weak opposition at the SOTU are not hypocrites only if they said before the event what they would do. I was glad not to have to choose. I think in the end they did what made sense to each one individually. The range of response by the Dems was much broader than the Repubs. We should be thankful they haven't capitulated, as so many have, esp in what we used to think of as journalism.

We need a new kind of social network designed to run an effective response to fascism. So far all we have are profit centers for billionaires and wannabe billionaires.

Watch out for people who celebrate your freedom while profiting from your enslavement.

One thing to be grateful for, Trump didn’t invite any of the Jan 6 rioters back to the Capitol for his speech.

The news should always report whether a bit of news is a financial plus or minus for Trump as in does this thing make him richer or poorer. That way you can zero in on the "why" of everything.

I'm thrilled the Knicks are playing tonight. That's what I'll be watching. Let me know if anything happens in DC.

I'm trying to get ChatGPT to not assume I have the same abilities as it has. You can't dump a huge amount of code at me and expect me to quickly see what changed, that's not how human intellect works, but this is something it is extremely good at. Here's what I said to my bot...

Another question about tonight. Where will Elon be? In the seat usually occupied by the VP or the Speaker? Will he make faces at the camera or interrupt Trump?

The single most important thing about what Musk is doing is that it is Musk that is doing it. Not elected, not accountable to anyone, and the only way we know what he's doing is from the aftermath. We play no role in his choices. Completely unacceptable. Let's get that much straight. That's where we start. Plus, he would be our last choice if we were in the market for a crazy despot running our country. He wasn't born or educated here, and thus has very little idea of who we are and thus what the people he's firing do.

Remember when watching the speech tonight, if you are watching, what our Capitol was like on that infamous day. The guy speaking, the guy up there on the podium, he did that. That's who he is. And where is right now, that's where it happened. Takes a lot of nerve to return to the scene of his greatest crime, so far.

Idea for SNL. A special episode of Law and Order where the cops arrest someone for being disrespectful to Trump,. The prosecutors debate among themselves if they have to do this, no one quits, they don't feel good about it but they prosecute, being assured by the District Att...

Pamela Short: The best revenge is none. Heal yourself, forgive, move on and don't become like those who hurt you. There's a pragmatic reason for this. I found, when I was young and didn't know better, that getting revenge didn't just hurt the target, it also left me with a d...

I tried to get ChatGPT to draw an Amazon ad for the cap. This was the best we came up with, and it's not great. I'd like a model who is more everyday American, but this might help move the idea forward a bit.

Video of Mike Myers doing Elon Musk in last night's SNL cold open.

If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and established standards would work just as well. There is a way they could make this work. Come up with a plugin architecture and something like an app store, so developers could define new data types, and then we'd really have something. I would probably do an outliner plugin first, then a Markdown plugin.

What happened in the Oval Office yesterday was as horror-inspiring as the riot in the Capitol on 1/6/2021.

My America is still a democracy and still part of the western world. A pretty great country, far from perfect, but my home. It's rich in all kinds of things, including money. We made a mistake in electing the person we did. Can we admit that and start fixing the mistake now? If not now, when?

AOC asked for ideas of what to do for the SOTU.

I suggested we come up with a new slogan. Like this.

“One America Together”

Make hats, purple — enough for everyone, including the Repubs.

During applause, Dems rise and chant “One America Together.”

What do you think?

The tab key now switches between the main editor and title editor in WordLand. Still a little work to do there.

These days I read Timothy Snyder's essays as soon as they come in.

New month. Last month's source code archived. Onward! 😄

Nice to see Doc Searls using WordLand. He's been an early user of every writing tool I've written for the web going back to the mid-late 90s.

Like many other people I love Severance, esp this season, and esp the most recent episode. And my favorite scene in the last episode took place at a Chinese restaurant. Anyway, I was just listening to the latest episode of the Severance podcast, about this episode, which you should definitely listen to if you like me love the show. They have an interview with Christopher Walken who plays Burt. Amazing stuff. But even more amazing is that I learned in the podcast that the restaurant mentioned earlier is actually a famous Kingston restaurant that just re-opened after a long hiatus, so I've not yet had a chance to eat there, but I want to, Eng's. This, after learning that the diner that's in two scenes, one in each season, is the Phoenicia Diner, one of my favorite local eating places.

Me as a grad student at UW-Madison in 1977 or so, programming on a Unix system, probably working on my first outliner.

Note that the terminal I was using had uppercase and lowercase letters. This was a big innovation!

I was using a PDP-11/45 to write in C.

See the comment thread from 2014 on Facebook.

I lived in a big house with 10 roommates. And as weird as it must seem from the point of view of 2025, I was the only one who used a computer. I would tell them all the time that we'd all use computers someday. They rolled their eyes and smiled. "There goes Dave again." The reason I was so sure was email and writing tools.

I'm also interested in social networks and RSS and have written a lot about that in the context of WordLand, because it generates RSS, it can connect to any app that understands RSS, basically because WordPress does. But don't get confused that WordLand is somehow a twitter-like silo. There are already too many of those. I want something much simpler and I believe more useful and less spammy and abusive -- a social network built around RSS.