@dave I’ll shoot you an email. And now wondering if I’m over the Finals enough to talk about the Knicks… 🙂

@Dave:

The only way for the others to compete with Twitter is to start innovating. Get rid of the limits. The funny thing is Twitter, the dominant leader, is moving forward and getting rid of character limits, and introducing styles and links. They’re acting like the little guy while the others, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, aren’t doing anything to be more useful. That whole market is stuck in 2006 and the myth that 140 chars somehow was magic. It wasn’t. It killed the web as a writer’s platform. If you want to compete with Twitter, drop your proprietary protocols, hook up to the web standards, and peer with your competitors.

I. Hate. Character. Limits.

@dave Started in Seattle, all the way to New York City.

@dave cool app .. and not wrong.

@scripting.com TrackStar is a great example of this.

I think of these as design problems more than UX issues. Still, they're real and plague the fediverse even now. The list includes: instance selection issues, confusing timelines, difficulty following people, direct messaging issues, search, content discovery, and user discovery (the last three are variations on a single theme). Most of the solutions described in the post come in the form of third party apps: for example, "Services like tags.pub, relay.fedi.buzz, andtagpush.app already provide followable ActivityPub actors for each hashtag." Also, "Activity Intents just landed. Fediscovery is actually available to test." Will these solve the usability problems? I'm inclined to say no. This post is a follow-up to "Tim's Part 1 and Part 2, and Sean's solutions" and you may want to read them first, though it's not necessary.

@dave It’s too bad about HTTP. Feels like the tension is between the document-based web and the web as application platform. Nothing wrong with the document-based web!

@scripting.com I think it’s similar to MD feed. Why don’t we use MD as RSS feed?

@dave I like that. Paying for storage is a clear feature that users understand. I could see Bluesky offering custom domain + storage as an upgrade.

@dave Ha! I’d love to. Would you consider doing some kind of written Q&A just for kicks?

@scripting.com That’s an absolutely wild number. I would love to read a retrospective on your work online and what it means to have a platform for as long as you have, especially with the changes underway in tech now. Kudos, seriously.

@dave Enjoy! It’s funny, we so rarely have not-sunny weather here, it’s sort of a nice change.

@dave Yeah, AI is capable of managing it. I like to keep at least the big picture in my head, and over time that might not be possible.

@dave I’d love to see all podcast players adopt video streaming. There’s an RSS extension for it. Otherwise we’ll keep losing ground to video silos.

@dave I use Codex instead of Claude so maybe it looks weirder to me. As you said, things change.

@dave yup! We don’t like Trump’s way of doing business, but we are now entering his playing field, the only language he might understand.

@dave I got the “isn’t” you meant. Yes, replies are stored separately, they can be edited under the Replies section.

@dave It's weird to read this and find no mention of the fact that LLMs, even before this watermarking, generated text by computing the probabilities of several next words, and then doing a weighted random selection between them. See https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/llm-temperature and https://claudecodeguides.com/claude-temperature-settings-guide/, for example.

@dave I feel differently about Bluesky. Whether they make it as a business or not, I don’t know. But I think it can be a bridge to open platforms for a lot of people.

@dave To start with, it will only create a PDS lazily for new users who aren’t already using Bluesky with Micro.blog. I’m trying to avoid a user ending up with multiple PDSes (the Bluesky-hosted one and the Micro.blog-hosted one). The primary use is Bluesky for now, but other apps could use it.

Thanks @dave for the kind words:

It’s not my place to say what micro.blog is – but the other day I called it: “the swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020’s.” And in that it is unique and imho irreplaceable.

The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal.

@dave The original French series is superb.

@dave I had just finished reading that article when I signed into micro blog and saw your link to it in my feed.

@dave I figured out why this wasn’t working. There’s a limitation in Micro.blog with external RSS feeds (hosted at rss.chat instead of on a Micro.blog-hosted blog) where it accidentally skips Standard.site. I think I can fix this.

@dave I think Standard.site assumes there’s a title field for the blog post. Maybe it should be a setting, though, I’m not sure.

A #chat based on #RSS? Sure, why not: rss.chat

And if so, I think there needs to be a #WordPress plugin to participate: github.com/pfefferle/wo…

/cc @scripting.com

@dave Yes, if you enable Bluesky cross-posting on the Sources page it’ll add standard.site too (for long-form posts with titles).

Taxes are for commoners. 🧐

@dave “I’ve often wondered what it was like to be alive in the summer of 1914, much less in 1938 and 1939. When did people start to realize that the world was on the brink of catastrophe? Speak up too soon or too frequently, and you look ridiculous (…)”

I ask myself this question quite often.

by @dave

"“Now, it wasn’t AI that killed all that. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter were the main culprits, especially once they started treating corporations like users and users like product, sacrificing quality for quantity. AI just danced on our grave.”
: ehandbook.com"

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