We should be declaring independence from both political parties. We have to get together with other citizens whose lives are going to be torn apart by what's happening, and the Dems are not at this time representing us. This is our government that is being overthrown.

WordLand is where we start to boot up a simple social net using only RSS as the protocol connecting users. Rather than wait for ActivityPub and AT Proto to get their acts together. I think we can do it with feeds and start off with immediate interop without the complexity of federation. I call it the feediverse. It's not a joke, although it may incite a smile and a giggle. And that's ok.

WordLand opened for everyone to use yesterday. There was a deal-stopping bug reported last night, fixed provisionally immediately, then for real this morning. Prevented new users from getting started. Really embarassing. If you have trouble, please report. There's a link for Support in the main menu in the app.

Jay Rosen started a list of journalism sources on Bluesky. John Spurlock wrote an app that generates an OPML subscription list using Bluesky's API. It will enable us to recreate a world that Jay put together, outside of Bluesky. From AT Proto to OPML and RSS.

We aren't prepared for what's coming.

WordLand is now open for anyone to sign up. Here we go! :-)

A note to designers of Bluesky as a platform.

I've been playing with adding metadata to posts in a thread.

As you can see the metadata, in the screen shot below, overwhelms the content in the post.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a set of templates to choose from, post types? Let designers be part of the platform.

Journalism is as usual writing news they could have written last year and should have if they weren't dreaming that somehow we'd escape End of Democracy 2.0 (spoiler: we didn't). Who is Elon Musk? Until I read his Wikipedia profile last week, I only had a vague idea. I want...

Something you hear from Democratic politicians and MSNBC hosts. "We know why Musk is cutting so much, it's to fund a huge tax cut for billionaires." They don't actually know that and I doubt it's true. Show me another example where Musk did anything to benefit anyone but himself? Why should he share the loot he's grabbing with other rich folk? What did they do to help? Nah I think it's all for him, with a taste going to the Trump and Putin families. He's going to use his new power to buy something else. The question is what? What else could he want? I imagine he wants all the money in the world not just the most.

Can you imagine how livid developers of other AI platforms are that Musk gets exclusive access to all the private information stored in US government databases.

Imagine Bezos calling Trump.

"Hey I thought we were friends. I can send you another billion. 2 billion? 100 billion?"

"Call Elon, if he says it's OK I'll sign the order."

Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, OpenAI, etc etc.

I'm starting to use the rewrite of my thread publisher on Bluesky. Here's an example. And here's the version of the thread without being broken up into 300-character chunks (you can get it by clicking in the metadata box below the text of the post). I don't like it. The software is as good as it can be, given the extreme limits of the twitter-like environment. I went all the way with this, but I'm not sure I'm going to release it. But I'm going to keep using it, and maybe I'll think of something that makes it fun or worthwhile, or maybe I'll just chalk it up to another learning experience.

Once again Maddow is must-watch destination TV this year. Keep on going. One thing to watch out for, Bluesky will disappoint you. Don't blame them when it happens, because they can't be as good as you all think they are. They are a startup in a tough market. Sooner or later Musk is going to aim at them (maybe he already is) and they will have to seek refuge somewhere, and all big tech companies are bastards, not bros. There isn't one of them you can trust with your democracy. So keep that in mind, and when yous see open billionaire-proof social networks rise up, give them a little of that Rachel love.

Favorite part of the SNL50 show. Eddie Murphy impersonating Tracy Morgan, while standing next to him on Black Jeopardy. It's really hard to see the resemblance between today's Eddie and young Eddie, but there it was, the comic brilliance. Then they ask the real Tracy if they are related and he said he doesn't see it.

Yes it's me I'm the pride of Cucamonga.

In the Catskills, we've been getting so much snow this winter and super cold weather and huge winds. And Trump & Musk. A quadruple threat.

One more thing. I like watching Maddow nowadays. She seems unstuck. And she's talking straight to the Repubs, and not with resignation, with the idea that maybe finally enough is enough, and they might work with us to save what we can of this great country. Also like that Bernie Sanders is on the road campaigning in swing districts that are held by Repubs, to see if he can squeeze out a few defectors from the ranks of House Republicans. Very important, because the Repub margin there is only 3. Just have to flip 2. America has to start moving now, or it's going to take a long long time to come back from this. The sooner we all get that, and that we are part of it, the better things will turn out, imho.

I don't like social networks as they're currently configured. The idea that it's some kind of conversation -- no it really doesn't resemble a conversation. I would like to try a social network that didn't have the concept of replying to a post. Give each other a little more ...

Some days nothing shows up on the blog. Still diggin! 😄

I started out doing a week to strip blue.threadcenter down to its bones, for a fresh start, but then I started getting ideas, and decided to go for it. I have the time, and Bluesky is having moment after moment and these days I'm using it to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, though I do check Twitter, Threads and Mastodon a few times a day, but usually there's nothing for me in those places. Anyway I'll be pointing to this post from some of my experiments, so maybe nothing more interesting than this will appear here.

I just thought of a good example of a question you could bring to ChatGPT. Here's the prompt. I'm thinking of driving from NYC to Jacksonville, FL. I want to do it in four days with stopovers in three places that have good places to ride a bike and a Citibike-style bike ren...

One of the not-good things about Mastodon is that you can't moderate comments under your own posts.

If someone says something abusive, it's there for everyone to see, forever.

I've come to value the feature in Facebook that gives the author full discretion over what comments remain, to head off bad vibes.

I think of a post I write as my house, and I want people who visit to feel respected.

A turd in the middle of the living room is not respectful.

A simple idea, a quid pro quo.

If we want Democrats to support the Constitution, we have to demonstrate that we will support them.

We are the government of the US, Congress represents us.

We have been too passive.

But then, they have to include us in governing.

No more shutting off the connection after the election.

Seems like a fair deal.

This is how the US government used to describe slaves.

If I were in charge of marketing for the Democrats: 1. I'd restart the online channel that Kamala Harris had that was shut down on Election Day. 2. I'd get out the message over and over about how things are going too fast, we need to slow it down, so we can consider what's h...

We're diving head first into a world run by AI bots, before we've even begun to understand how to use them. Musk couldn't be more diabolical if he were cast as a comic book anti-hero. Trump is like the straight man police commissioner. I grew up reading those kinds of comic books. We all did I guess. Probably Elon Musk too. He needs a biographer, asap. Someone please get to work on this.

BTW, no one thought much about the threading structure we use on Bluesky. As far as I can tell it was copied from Twitter. It's not a very good structure. It encourages spam and abuse. You gotta wonder if the threading structure had evolved, or if there were more competition, different approaches to see what would happen, we might have avoided our meltdown with a better design.

Great quote from a favorite show. "He put the dick in contradiction." This is a show that doesn't often indulge in that kind of humor. I imagine they must've had a great time with it in the writer's room. Or was it ad-lib'd? And wtf does it mean?

The idea of a coup in the US is one we all presumably have a hard time thinking about. I sure do. It has never happened before. But it has happened now, and the group that is governing is doing it illegally, and is dismantling the country as quickly as they can, assuming someone will at some point try to stop them? Is that correct? What comes next?

The way to get even is to win. A lot of people don't get that, and it's almost always their downfall.

I’m not giving money to Democrats. I will give to campaigns that run hard-hitting ads telling the full truth about what Musk is doing now. I want to see the actual ads before I chip in, and will do so enthusiastically, but they can’t be anemic.