WordLand is the easy editor that writers using WordPress always deserved. I updated the
docs this morning to include very basic getting started stuff, and it now includes a link to a form where you can apply to be a tester. At this time it's limited to people who know how to write a bug report, how to find and read the JavaScript console in a web browser, and take a screen shot that shows clearly what went wrong. This the hardest part of getting a product fit for general use, and I'm too old to try to wrangle workable bug reports from well-intentioned users who basically aren't scientists. This time I'm determined to do this the right way without excess wear and tear on me.
😄#
One way to help
RSS-based podcasts is to promote individual episodes from the past. Sometimes shows are done, but the archive contains good stuff. Not everything is based on current events. Music, art, history for example. Also bring the feed out from hiding. At least the nerdy people should understand how this stuff works. One of the big crimes was when the browser makers tried to hide the feeds. I like to be able to lift the hood even if I don't understand what I'm looking at.
#
I'm using the term "RSS-based podcasts" in place of "podcasts" to make sure whoever reads it knows to ask the question of other "podcasts," are you RSS-based? The best answer is to encourage YouTube et al to just connect their "podcasts" to RSS and everyone's happy. Like "organic cheeseburgers." :-)
#
For the record, Bluesky has completely taken over from Threads. Threads is basically at zero, needs something to shake it up. Obviously this could be different for everyone. And engagement on Twitter is pretty close to zero. I still check there periodically because despite what people say a lot of people I follow still post there. And I do too, since cross-posting costs me nothing. And it has been pointed out that deleting your Twitter account comes with a fairly huge risk. And if you do it, I wouldn't announce it, because anyone apparently can claim your account once it is completely deactivated. And that could create some problems for you. Probably better to hold the account indefinitely.
#
Welcome to the last month of
Scripting News in the year 2024. Each year goes by faster and faster. And as we move forward in time, there's less room in front of us on the runway of life, and more behind us. At some point in the next decade my plane will probably take off. I feel a sense of urgency about getting it done. Still a fair amount on my todo list, but I'm making progress. As someone once said many times: Still diggin!
#
And welcome to the time of year you can't remember what the day of the week is. For what it's worth today is Sunday. Feels like Monday?
#
And here, for the record, is the
archive for November. A relatively lite month, only 87K worth of text. The
norm is about 120K.
#
I wasn't clear enough
yesterday. We're losing the word "podcast" very quickly. It's coming to mean video interviews on YouTube mostly. Our only hope is upgrading the open platform in a way that stimulates the imagination of creators, and there's no time to waste. If you make a podcast client, it's time to start collaborating with competitors and people who create RSS-based podcasts to take advantage of the open platforms, otherwise having a podcast will mean getting approved by Google, Apple, Spotify, Amazon etc. And they, as we know, are nuzzling up to the new government, who will want to impose severe limits. This isn't a casual
request, it's
urgent.#
I want to add an important feature to podcasting that can only work with
RSS, it can’t work with Spotify, Google, Audible etc. The idea is subscribing to subscription lists, which the influencers are likely to really love because they can create networks of podcasts. And when they want to edit the list, if this is done right, the users will automatically be updated. The RSS-based podcast industry just hasn’t been moving and if we don’t add features, improve the tech with new features for creators and users, then we deserve what we get. More on the technology to come in subsequent blog posts. But this is the core idea, just to get started.
#
Think about primarying Democratic candidates not from the right or left, but from courage, intellect, and power in communication. People who say what they think and know if the press excoriates you, you can survive it, and the users will love you for it.
#
Happy
Thanksgiving to all who celebrate the holiday. What am I thankful for? Peloton for one. And living in the most beautiful part of the United States, except for all the other most beautiful parts. I know we're going to find our way out of this mess. My hope is we all start listening to each other more than we need to be heard. One way for sure to hear yourself is to listen to others. One of those paradoxes, true nonetheless. I'm very grateful for ChatGPT that has made me a much more proficient programmer. Amazing what an always-ready expert-in-everything programming partner is. It has a terrible memory for things I tell it to remember, but it remembers all the things it got from reading the web. I thank the friends who make the effort to stay in my life. And most important I thank you, dear blog reader. We got through 30 years of this crazy michegas. I think there may be a couple more innovations to come before we hang em up for good.
#
- Analogously, Trump is Kennedy and Biden/Harris is Nixon.#
- And the social web is, in 2024, what TV was in 1960.#
- Trump has mastered the new medium. To a large extent, he created the new medium, and the resulting network formed around him.#
- So when Carville says he wants to figure out how to communicate the way Trump did, he can't because our way doesn't work in his universe. We have to create our own. #
- Analogously Nixon might have said about TV in 1959 -- how can we get into that? If you have to ask you can't get there. You have to fit like a hand in a glove, like Kennedy or Trump.#
- The next Democratic candidate to win the presidency will have to be a media creator. They must create a medium that's perfectly adapted to the communication interests of the 50 percent of the electorate that voted for Harris and the other 20 percent who would if they just knew who she was. #
- Look at the picture of Kennedy and Nixon. Did we elect Kennedy over Nixon because he had better policy? No. We elected him because he has better hair. Because on TV what counts is your hair. A friend who was a TV news person told me that. #
Kennedy and Nixon on the debate stage in 1960.
#
- So if you want to win, create an internet farm system. A network with everyone who wants to run for office nationwide on the Democratic ticket. And let's see how they work in the new medium. We get to know them like we knew Archie Bunker. And let's get some people we get to know who also tend to tell the truth (though they can screw up and we'll forgive them, remember the gotchas are over).#
Every
generation or two you hear about a few tech
wiener boys who think after getting founders stock at a Silicon Valley company and getting his picture in
Business Week or
TechCrunch that he should run Africa or make up some country and for a minute tries doing it and no one pays much attention and a generation or two later it happens again, and the conclusion is that being a tech wiener boy doesn’t really prepare you to do anything but make a bunch of money once, be bored, and really nothing else. First time I witnessed this phenomenon was with a few product marketing
wünderbrats at Apple in the early 80s, smart people (not kidding) but not nearly as smart as they thought they were. A big part was the serendipity of being in a
Hobee’s or
Buck's when Steve Jobs or a
Kleiner partner was having
breakfast after a
big IPO.
#
Carville gets close to the answer. The Dems shut down their online operation on Election Day, go off the air for 3.5 years, then reboot. The Repubs never sign off. Trump is Archie Bunker. People vote for him, even if they don't agree, over the stranger they don't know. Voters kept saying this, but somehow this didn't register. Never nominate a candidate again who isn't well known to and tolerated by the electorate. Forget about
gotchas. The old Dems revolve around fear-of-gotcha. No longer a problem. A flaw proves you're genuine, authentic. Dems need a complete overhaul top to bottom. Their next leader should have a top podcast, because that's how you will govern from now on. Expect to be surprised how Trump does this starting Jan 20.
#
Let's spend a few months marketing the Democratic Party.
#
In
January 2017, I scooped everyone, by years, on the idea that a
billionaire could buy Twitter and thus purchase the presidency. That value wasn't priced into
TWTR stock. No one listened. Here's the next installment. The US government acquires Twitter. Elon Musk is of course named Secretary of Twitter. The "constitution" reconceived for online twitter-like systems, says every other online system has to go through twitter.com to reach users. It will act as their gateway to the net. There will be resistance, but by that time there will be no actually independent twitter-like systems, they will all be owned by venture capital funds, or individual billionaires, and of course they will conform because they are also owned to a large degree by Musk. We will have been
cartelized, which is one step beyond
enshitified.
#
It's important that
Bluesky increase its character limit to 500 because they are not alone. Today there are so many twitter-like systems that are useful, people want to cross-post. If I'm writing something I plan to cross-post, and I pass the 300-char limit, but I'm not finished, what to do. These days generally I view 500 as the actual limit, which means when my cross-poster tries to publish to Bluesky it fails. We should be trying to coalesce on an idea of what a text document is in the mid-late 20s. I've put my
proposal out.
#
The usual mindless block-inducing bullshit from twitter and every other online venue is showing up on Bluesky. I wonder if people understand the economic box that's pushing them into. It's so important that if it's going to be the next Twitter, we as a world, invest in lifeboats to get off the ship quickly and easily if
Hulk Hogan ends up being the czar of Bluesky. Weirder things are possible my friends.
#
According to
Blogtree, 259 blogs considered Scripting News their parent blog, ie they were inspired to start blogging by this blog.
#
Imagine if the Democratic Party ran a Bluesky clone where being able to post means you're a dues-paying member of the party. We can vote on referendums, support or not support Democratic initiatives. Site would never shut down, and would support campaigns when they're running. It would cost money to belong to the site. This would keep trolling under control, and would fund projects the community would sponsor, and also pay for operating the service. No advertising, no billionaires sponsoring. They can be members like everyone else.
#
If such a network existed, we would be nominating our own Cabinet members, the shadow Cabinet. Let the journalists compare the qualifications of our candidates vs the incumbent party's. Create news. That's what the Dems absolutely suck at. They very quietly pass legislation that the other party (which votes against) takes credit for. One party is on the air, the other is not. We need to change that. We make news. And we listen to each other, not just the stuffed shirts who run the party now.
#
If there was going to be a
User's Charter for Bluesky, item one would be: You can give me the benefit of the doubt. Let's not argue, esp not about details. We assume the other person is smart. That's one way we get stuff done.
#
Rule #2. You have permission. If you want someone else to do something, and they haven't done it, or you don't want to wait, you have permission to do it yourself. You can invoke this rule when someone says "who do they think they are." You had permission, according to rule #2.
#
One of the best things about ChatGPT is that you can ask it to put together exactly the report you want, that the news orgs aren't writing, or you can't find, or get to through paywalls. In
this query, I learned about how Republicans deal with intersex people and bathrooms, they apparently don't. Not surprising, to tell the truth.
#
- 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 only incompatible with previously existing APIs, but also are difficult for developers who learned earlier APIs to adopt because now they have all kinds of replicated code for different systems. It adds another level of complexity to the developer's code. #
- What each platform vendor wants is not only captive users, but also locked-in developers. Why do you think they all have new languages? Come on is Swift really better than Go or React or whatever. Groups of Mac developers constantly spinning their wheels to keep up with Apple breaking releases. Groups of JavaScript developers. And there are many kinds of JS devs. When does it end. Ones who build on OpenAI and others that develop on the APIs of other vendors (I'm not even trying to go on that ride, too late in my career.) There's so much confusion, that leads to exhaustion. #
- Now we're feeling it especially hard when there are such ill-conceived duplicate APIs that all could have been done with RSS 2.0 and OPML. Every one of them. Cory Doctorow, who came up with the term enshitification, also wrote a passionate piece about RSS. I want to say to my friend Cory, if a system isn't built on RSS at this point, they are certainly trying to lock users and developers in. I don't care if it's ActivityPub or ATProto or Facebook or Meta or X or Twitter (sorry I can't keep up with their names). #
- I want to build on a system that's pure inbound and outbound RSS. Give me lists in OPML and the please just let me ignore the rest of your lockin strategy. They talk a good line about wanting interop, federation and standards, but their actions speak otherwise. #
- At a conference the CEO of twitter-splitter Bluesky said her product is billionaire-proof, but it doesn't seem too likely to me that it is. And maybe they're quoting her incorrectly. A billionaire could take it over and the users would have no recourse, the whole thing would blow up even more quickly than Twitter is (and I'm not convinced it has blown up, there still seems to be a lot going on there, I think perhaps people are exaggerating how polluted it is or maybe I'm being shielded by an algorithm). It would be nice to use a system that is truly billionaire-proof. How about building a network on top of something else that is 100 percent RSS. #
- And btw, RSS is probably the closest to billionaire-proof. I don't get royalties on it, lots of people have tried to make big bucks from it, but so far its only allegiance is to people who want to publish and receive news. If a billionaire could buy it, they probably would have by now. 😄#
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. That's because the Dems go off the air on Election Day and don't show up again for three years. Meanwhile the other party is on the air 24 hours a day, every day of every year. #
- Next time we nominate a candidate, the voters will already know them and like them. No more of the "we don't know her well enough." That's what mattered. They want a sense that they know who you are. The same way kids of my generation knew who Archie Bunker was, and Maude, and Mary Tyler Moore. That's where trust comes from. We may not have liked Archie Bunker's politics, but we knew who he was. #
- We should be marketing the hell out of this shit all the time so when we choose a candidate the people will already know and like them. #
- I listened to a pathetic Daily Blast podcast yesterday where Greg Sargent and his guest kept saying "we gotta figure this out." #
- The answer is staring you in the face. Dems are only on the air for a few months every four years. Of course the other side spins you like crazy. #
- You all are clinging to the "gotcha" model of journalism. There are no more gotchas. We've known that since Access Hollywood. The leaders of the new Democratic Party will be comfortable in their own skin. They tell you what they think. Fetterman, AOC, Tammy Baldwin. There will be many of them. #
- Get on the air and relax and say what you really think. And when the Repubs lie, say it like that -- they're lying. When you say nothing people think you agree with them. #
- Let's get the Dems back on the air before the inauguration. I'll kick in $100 to get it started, and I'll tell everyone I know to fund it too. There's no time to waste.#
Woz and Jobs.
#
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.
#
Basically, if you have to lock your users in, your product must suck.
#
A
quick podcast about the new 365-day-a-year campaign we need 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.
#
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 before the election) they both missed it. We were divided by an enemy that is on the cusp of destroying the US without launching a single nuke. Putin didn't have to invade Ukraine. I guess even he didn't think his plan would succeed so spectacularly. BTW, I don't think Trippi's network is the answer, but maybe it is. I wish I had had a chance to create the system he was using, we would make a good team. Anyway we need to be further along than his offering is. The right system would allow me to control my presence with only
RSS, in and out. Maybe not for everyone, to start, but it would allow us to start building. It's why I have been lobbying for inbound and outbound RSS as a back-end for all these networks. With the rise of Bluesky in the last couple of weeks (things are happening that fast now) we may have a new shot at it because Masto and Threads are certainly feeling it, and when people feel competed-with they are more open to new thinking.
#
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 predict that people will come to appreciate features that Mastodon has that the other twitter-like social web services don't.
#
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.
#
When I was a boy my mother would sometimes say if I didn't stop belching I wouldn't be able to stop.
#
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.
#
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.
#
We're going to open testing for
WordLand shortly. At first I only want developers who 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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
A 27-minute post-election ramble
podcast.
#
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. 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.
#
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.
#
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.
#
- 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 work well with ActivityPub so my editor can get directly into the Mastodon network and possibly with Threads too. #
- But what about Bluesky which is growing like a weed now??#
- It might be easy for the right person.#
- Come up with an interface that makes it so that a WordPress blog is just a user on the Bluesky network.#
- They have a nice API, I've just spent a year implementing on top of it. I imagine for someone who knows both WordPress and Bluesky this might be a weekend project? #
- Do it, and blow our minds! There's a lot of content out there in WordPress and a lot of people publish on it. #
- And the best part of it is that it totally drives adoption of textcasting which is my not so hidden agenda. 😄#
- And for the people who are starting to think it's only an ActivityPub thing, think again. #
- If you do this you might not win the Nobel Peace Prize but you will be Nerd of the Year in my book! #
- It's good to have a record of the things you posted and when you posted it. On August 12 of this year, I tweeted this: "When the NYT makes Trump sound like a reasonable candidate that a sane person might vote for, remember this day." I included a screen shot of the front page of the NYT on Jan 7, 2021. One in three Trump voters still watch mainstream news, which follows the lead of the NYT, and if they had been straight with us, perhaps enough people who like Trump's style would have realized the danger, and voted in a conservative way, ie to conserve the Constitution. Because of how they covered it, we now get to re-run the 2016 experiment all over again. #
- But, as Heather Cox Richardson points out in Jon Stewart's weekly podcast (a must-listen) -- we have more experience too, and perhaps will know better how to deal with Trump and know that his bark is often worse than his bite. I have to say as the new reality sinks in, I'm not as scared as I was on Election Night last week or even Election Night in 2016. A lot of people will sell out this time who didn't before. But the problems of climate change have gotten worse in the intervening years, and people feel it in their bones, pocketbooks and fears. You think inflation was bad? This will be far worse and it's happening now, and nothing we can do at a human scale will make it go away. #
- We're dealing with a very unusual drought in the eastern US now. Fires are breaking out where we never used to have them. Yeah this shit is real, and even people who don't believe in science are feeling it. #
- As someone once said, you should never waste a good crisis. A lot of other people feel compelled to move. Unfortunately some are moving to the wrong place, as they always do. Making change isn't easy, but is possible, if you understand how people move. As they try to figure out what the Dem's failed at, that's it. #
- Skate to where the puck will be, not where it was, as another famous philosopher once said. And people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors (which I said, sadly, but then put that fact to use to get various standards to fly by without debate). There is a method to human madness, in other words, imho.#
If Bluesky is open source, which it
appears to be, someone who has time and has experience packaging products, should create a Bluesky distribution for a few popular hosting services (Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud), so installing a new instance is as simple as it can possibly be. One click? That would be awesome. We need to have
thousands of these running. If it really is like the web, as they say it is, then it should be like the web in every way. There are lots of websites. If you sell your website to a billionaire, that has no effect on my website. Right now we are totally vulnerable to the Bluesky folk selling their service to another country, or
our country for that matter -- or a billionaire, or whoever. Whoever did this packaging job would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Anticipating the objection that Mastodon is already doing this -- it is not. Setting up and using a Mastodon instance is good for nerds. Not for poets.
#
Update: My guess is that they haven't released enough code to run a Bluesky of your own, because all the answers from people who say they know say the same thing -- "It doesn't work that way." You
could write your own, but if we were to do that, why use their one-off API, use a standard instead, and we might have a chance to interop with other systems in a meaningful way. I don't blame them for wanting to cash out, but I do blame them for conning people into believing it's some kind of escape. Until I hear otherwise Bluesky is a dead-end, not worth investing your hope in. If you're migrating from Twitter this is no better. Keep looking. But I promise to let you know if I get any info that changes my opinion, so if I've got it wrong, people from Bluesky, just answer the freaking question in the post at the top of this page. Thanks.
#
Does anyone know who was doing the work at
kamalahq on the various social networks? I wonder if they would like to keep posting. They stopped updating on Election Day. We could change the names of the accounts. I thought it was great that there was a steady source of political news that didn't equivocate like the NYT-inspired news orgs. I would love to help fund a continuation of that flow.
#
It might be time to get our shit together.
#
There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that what's missing in the two-party system in the US is that one of the parties does not own a social network. It is not represented online 7-by-24-by-12 every year, not just presidential election years. Democrats, when you lose it's because you didn't show up. It's happened three times so far, at least. We could have led here because most of the innovators in this space vote Democratic, but the leadership doesn't listen. The voters could get to know all the stars of the parties. People were right when they said they didn't know Harris. It's time to let the leaders rise from the net, not just from the insiders. This is how you do it.
#
ChatGPT's web search can search my blog, as I do on Google, but it's way more useful. Here's a
screen shot. We're getting there. Really nice.
#
I'd like to hear from tech vendors, asap, which ones will help American voters learn what's true independent of whatever "truth" the government wants us to believe? Who will stand with the people? A good question for all of us to ask. Ask news orgs the same question.
#
It's worth listening to
On The Media, interview with
Masha Gassen, saying that the authoritarian government will want to define what's true and not. Since we now understand that most of the information flow now goes around the NYT, CNN etc -- even Fox, and largely through social web and podcasts, if that's where we're all getting our news from, and btw MSNBC are already pretty well limited in what they'll tell us (this was our beef with NYT if you recall) -- the next step is to make it impossible for us to hear what each other are saying. Now is the time to plant seeds for a defense of our speech and communication later.
#
I see they have a piece about the "Manosphere."
Stop blaming men. Lose that habit now. It's toxic.
#
- I asked ChatGPT: "Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like."#
Dave's life as imagined by ChatGPT.
#
BTW, there's a lot of talk about new ways to communicate that don't depend on silos that could be sold to billionaires. One way to do it is with my product
FeedLand. It manages news streams for feeds you subscribe to. I think every publication should share news from feeds they depend on, experts they quote, other news sources they read. We can build our own networks this way. The advantage of this approach is that it is truly decentralized and not at all complicated to use. Here's the
news stream I provide for readers of my blog. It's the most popular feature on the site. With FeedLand you can
create your own.
#
- I've actually written a lot, but haven't wanted to publish most of it. So many reasons why the Dems lost. Maybe I should just list them.#
- Biden shouldn't have run again. There would have been a primary. Given the result of the election this week, we should have found out what support each candidate had with voters. We didn't get to choose the candidate. That said Harris ran a fantastic campaign. #
- Biden should not have shut down his campaign website. Rather than using it to raise money to feed to the media industry, they should have organized and listened, to develop new channels of communication with voters that were not dependent on journalism. Every time the Dems run a campaign, win or lose, they shut down their connection to the electorate. The voters' only role in the party was when they needed our money and our vote. We were not part of governing. Huge mistake. And I'm not just saying that now, I've said that about every Democratic campaign since Obama. This is probably the biggest single mistake the Dems keep making.#
- We needed a prosecutor at the top of Justice. I don't know what Garland actually did, but I'm sure it will all be swept out by whoever is Trump's AG. #
- Men's votes need to be sought and welcomed, specifically. So much has been done to alienate male voters, which is why so many voted for Trump. We could have had a bunch of them this year, if we had only spoken to them with respect. #
- I don't know if we can reboot the Democrats as an opposition party given all these problems. Whatever comes next is going to perform very differently from the party that lost this election. If we try to do it again the same old way, it will fail even worse. I think everyone knows this by now. #
Not much time to write today and tomorrow.
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