Checking in with FeedLand users, is there interest in: Mapping a FeedLand category to a Mastodon account. #

Not loving FeedLand because it uses Twitter for identity is like not loving a friend because they had a baby with someone you don't like. Or not loving NetNewsWire, for example, because it runs on Macs and iOS and Apple does crazy shit that fucks everything up. (I use Macs, lots of them, despite what I think of Apple. I also own a bunch of Apple stock yet I am aware of how Apple is not a force for good.) Or you find out some app is running in Google's cloud and Google is destroying the web. I have another one. I use Digital Ocean for hosting and S3 for storage. You might want to check out who owns those services and decide if you still like me. (I use DO because they have great docs and good prices. I use S3 because it was a breakthrough product when it came out and I totally needed what they offered and I loved what they were doing, and now I'm pretty well locked-in.) And I chose Twitter for identity in 2014 because identity is a human-intensive bitch and they were offering to let me use theirs for $0. I solved the problem long ago and baked it into my system. I could bake something else in, and I would, quickly if they broke us. But so far I've been able to spend my time on more productive and fun development work. Maybe I'm giving something up. Yeah, there are a lot of choices in life. You never know what was down the road you didn't take. #

We all have to hold our noses. Users too. To think you haven't been doing that and aren't still, is a delusion.#

Everyone who uses a silo (e.g. Substack) should ask their owners what assurance they can give they won't sell out to Musk or someone like him. Journalists and financial analysts should include in their valuation of tech companies, their political value, translated to dollars.#

This is a brilliant point. Kanye has twice as many followers as there are Jews in the whole freaking world.#

Mastodon is like email and twitter got married and had a baby.#

Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M's support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn't know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been "boosted" (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it's good to have a number to put behind that. #

For my friends Geraldine and Peter, this is a chat system where you ask an AI that really is amazing to write stories for you, or answer questions, or even develop software. Everyone, including me, is smitten by this invention. I asked it to write a story about Donald Trump admitting he is a troll and tells everyone to just ignore him, and it'll be good for everyone including him. #

It would be smart if there were a lefty Elon type to invest a billion or two in a big hub in the fediverse so we can't get "concentrated" on Twitter into an online "camp."#

I need help testing a new important app -- it's the first one that hooks RSS directly up to Mastodon via the Mastodon API. I am reluctant to promote it until it's had been validated. So if you know how to run a Node app, and have a few minutes to help out, please give it a try, and let me know, in this thread, whether it worked. A link to one of the Mastodon messages it created would be helpful too. Thanks! #

Having fun with AI. I asked the OpenAI chatbot to write a story about the demise of bloggers now that OpenAI can do all the writing. It added journalists all on its own. I assume some pundit can use this in an op-ed for the NYT or Washington Post about the dangers of AI. Which I then asked OpenAI to write. 💥#

If you use FeedLand you can follow my Mastodon posts via this feed. Just click the Subscribe button and you're in. Mastodon, unlike Twitter, provides an RSS feed for each user. A huge advance in the state of the art. I hope Twitter takes note and adds this feature. #

Poll: I subscribe to HBO, Netflix, AppleTV, Hulu. Guess which is the only one I ever watch?#

My first Mastodon-empowered app is Radio3. You can now share linkblog posts to Mastodon, Twitter, Slack, RSS and a static HTML page. I use Radio3 to do the Links page on scripting.com. #

This is a huge deal. If I type a web address in a tweet, Twitter figures it out and hots it up in the rendered tweet. All of a sudden a tweet can link out to lots of places. Let's hope next up is Markdown support, optional titles, unlimited length and podcast enclosures and then you better believe WordPress and Tumblr will have to do it, and that will provide impetus for Mastodon. Here we go. Please keep going Twitter.#

2014: "The great thing about the web is/was that I could create any feature I could implement without getting permission from anyone. Before the web, with compuserve or applelink, only employees of those companies could. Here we are again."#

Micropayments is such an awful term. Let's say I buy a Metrocard to ride the NYC subway. Every time I slide the card through a turnstile, what is that called? Is it a micropayment? Or I have an EZ-Pass responder on my car, so I drive through where the toll booths used to be without even slowing down. I don't know how much that costs, but I assure you there's nothing micro about it! One of the reasons business people at pubs must be tired of this discussion is it's their job to get MACRO payments for their employer, not teeny little micros. As I envision it, I would probably spend $100 a month on various pubs, and maybe more and more over time. When fluidity is added to the economics, how can you help but pay more. It's only because of the attitude about this at publishers that we can't have more news (and they get more money). Right now I only pay three pubs -- NYT, WP and Consumer Reports. My money should be spread around a lot better than that. #

I'm definitely starting to see breakage in Twitter. Things that used to work that now are obviously broken.#

Perhaps we should try exterminating Nazis now that they're voluntarily decloaking. They owe us approximately 6 million lives.#

My parents were children in Europe as the Holocaust was brewing. Their parents, my grandparents, got them out in time so that they could meet in Brooklyn, get married and have children, including me of course. My paternal grandfather told me, when I was a little kid, in his heavy Russian accent "Daveeed, when the Nazis come (he was sure they would) you get a gun and go on the roof and you shoot them!" My parents were horrified. I thought he was just a crazy old man. But he was a lot smarter and wiser than we gave him credit for.#

Welcome to December. Here's the OPML archive for November. #

A friend is someone who laughs at your jokes. 😜#

Today I'm testing a new Node.js app that watches a set of feeds (RSS, Atom, RDF) and posts new items to a Mastodon account. This one works with any Mastodon server. Requires some technical competence, but not much. The idea is to get the example code out there, for reading feeds easily and posting to Mastodon, again easily. I want feeds to melt into the fediverse, forming sort of a feediverse, which is maybe just a little bit bigger. I am so on board with decentralizing everything we do. My pitch for user-run servers goes back to the beginning of the web. Now having knocked down one of the biggest silos, all of a sudden lots of blue sky! Let's not give up our freedom this time. Anyway watch for a release later today or tomorrow. #

As you may recall, I had the lens in my right eye replaced on Monday. Simple outpatient deal. The result is amazing. Everything is so sharp and clear, colors so vivid. I had been living in a visually foggy and blasé world, now it’s the other extreme, a total acid trip.#

Over the years I've bought some great screens. An OLED screen in the living room. A retina screen on my desktop Mac. Until today I'd never been able to see enough detail to appreciate how nice they are. #

You know how they used to say if you're not the customer, you're the product. Well today it's if you're not the Nazi you're the Good German or worse. #

A lot of people think I'm too old to ship a product as good as one I shipped N years ago. Those same people think you're rude if you insist that you have done that. I think they get angry, one or two have made fun of me, as if I'm a fool. It's not really very fair or friendly, even though these people may think they're friends. I can think of a dozen people who think I'm rude because I acted like FeedLand is a breakthrough. Or maybe they didn't like the way I said it? Hmm. I wonder how else you could. I've been through this loop over and over. As long ago as 1989 I was thought to be finished as a software dev. I wish it would get easier once. Just once. If I keep beating the drum, I guess when people see I'm not giving up, they might have a look? I'm not giving up, btw. 😄#

I learned how to use the web from reporters in 1994. I volunteered to run the SF newspaper strike website, and they were shooting me articles from all over the country, in HTML, and telling me how they wanted them published. Most important -- preserve the links. It was an incredible time of learning and fun and working together. That's when I'm happy, making software for people who have a vision.#

A publishing tool that only works with their editor is locking you in.#

This morning my vision is weird, slightly flawed, but on the whole much better than it was before the surgery yesterday. #

Dear friends -- I got my right eye fixed today. Was it worth it? Well I had a good all-afternoon nap, so that was pretty good. Now my vision sucks in a new way, but the how-to guide says it'll clear up in a day or two, at most a week. At times the colors are intense, like I imagine an acid trip to be, and some light reflects off objects like a Fourth of July sparkler. I think this is just foreign material being assimilated into human material. Was it worth it? Hmmm. I'll let you know. But I'm pretty sure it was. Your faithful correspondent -- Davey.#

I was looking for links to prior eye surgeries, on the left eye. Not a good story. I started with decent vision, and a left-eye floater freaked me out. An eye surgeon said they could get rid of it, they did, but there was a new dead spot in the middle of my left eye. This surgery, in 2007, has given me crappy vision since then. Finally I had to get the lens in my right eye replaced, that's what was done today. After this, when the dust settles, my vision should be closer to what it was after the first surgery. The lesson: when a doctor says they can fix a condition, find out in advance if the cure is worse. A floater, I learned later, is harmless. Your brain gets used to and and factors it out, you stop seeing the floater after a while. The best thing to do is wait it out. Bigger lesson: if you can avoid surgery, avoid it. #

Reading some stuff I wrote in 2007 and 2010, I was saddened by how much my blog changed for the worse in a few years, because I was trying to fit into Google Reader's idea of what a blog post was, which was not my own view. I wrote posts of all lengths, some with titles, on their own pages, and others just a sentence or two or a paragraph, many on the same page. They used to coexist in one flow, and it was great! All of a sudden there was a fork, on one side you had to use Twitter and the other side you could use blogging software, on one side you were locked in and in the other you had choice. We've been suffering this division since 2006 or so. But we're in a really good place now because we could rejoin the two flows, and let writers decide how much writing each idea deserves, not a random limit imposed years ago without any clear idea of why. Right now please everyone think about what the world would be like if we had blogs and tweets flowing through one pipe. All kinds of new ways of visualizing flows will develop, the boundaries will melt. You can have it all, I promise, as a software developer. As a writer, we'll learn how to play with length without having to edit to fit an engineer's idea of how writing works. It's as if a geek said to a painter you can only create on a 140 pixel canvas. You could make good art that way, but think of all the art you can't make. I promise, you will be inspired by the new kinds of software we make. Most people using computers today have never been around for a blue-sky boom, where all the rules that were holding us back are gone in an instant. We are there right now folks, let's make the most of the moment. #

There are three ways to get content into the Mastodon flow: 1. Activity Streams. 2. The Mastodon API. 3. Feeds. #

I guess getting my eye fixed has helped me see more clearly. 💥#

I'm taking tomorrow and part of Tuesday off. Murphy-willing blogging will resume, along with the release of new software. #

Some Mastodon posts are gorgeous. And they're going to look even better when Masto has Markdown support. The version I'm testing has Markdown now (also a 10000 character limit btw). Think of how long it took for Twitter to not do Markdown in tweets. And we've got users to play with. "Users and developers party together."#

Where we're headed is a world where it doesn't matter where you write, you can use the tools you love, and it doesn't matter where you read, again what you love, in the moment is what you will use. Computers used to be like this. In the 80s you could use any writing tool you wanted and any printer. There was no concept of a writing tool that was bound to a printer. We're very close to that now, closer than we've been in a decade. I am determined that we do not pass up this opportunity. Seize the moment. #

A frequently asked FeedLand question re the order of timelines. #

If I were a person with a uterus I’d be furious about the Dobbs decision and I’d be equally outraged that life goes on as usual knowing that other people with uteri were being enslaved by their state governments as a result.#

news.scripting.com now has 250 items per tab, where previously there was a limit of 100. I wanted more news. #

I couldn't be happier that an open microblogging site is booming after spending a full year developing FeedLand. Timing couldn't be better. I love that there are users who are excited about the software I make.And I truly appreciate Elon Musk for letting them all go.#

Happy Thanksgiving my friends. ☘️#

rssCloud bootcamp thread. If you're thinking about adding rssCloud to your blogging software. #

February 2001: "Internet 3.0 will realize the groupware vision of the late 80s which was really Doug Engelbart's vision of the 60s and 70s. Shared writing spaces with good boundaries. Structures that link to each other but are capable of managing greater complexity than the page-oriented metaphor of the Web." I still want to do this.#

Poll: Should Elon Musk be banned from Twitter?#

I have my linkblogging tool working with Mastodon. Bing!#

What is a document? A plea for interop at the document level. #

An idea for a New Year's resolution. At least once a day agree with someone. Not silently. Say "I agree with you." No qualification, not "I agree with you, but.." It's jarring at first, then liberating. And the responses will surprise you.#

On my Mastodon account: As you may have heard, I'm developing a connection between my base of software that works with Twitter and teaching it how to work with Mastodon as well. The fact that you can see this in my Mastodon account means that it's working at a new level.#

To follow me on Mastodon, paste @davew@mastodon.social into the search box and press Return. #

The blogosphere which was absorbed by twitter for $0 was eventually turned into a Nazi frat party for Elon. That was the end result, that and billions for Ev, Jack, Biz, Union Square and Spark, and we’re back where we were when they took over. 16 years wasted.#

I can't tell you how convenient it is that Mastodon has the same name as my first real internet presence on CompuServe in the early 80s, also Mastodon. I have a whole language already designed to go with that name. Mastodoctor, for example. For a while we were all adding "bunny" to our names, so I became Mastobunny and then Mastobun for short. Most of these names are available, so I'm tempted, but so far I've resisted. I have bought a couple though. Like most domain names I buy, I'll probably never use them. But it's nice they're there. I keep hoping someday to come up with a service that deserves the name ou.rs which I've been renewing for many years. #

I had a great talk with Doc Searls yesterday. They're always expressive and irreverant. We had fun at the expense of New Jersey, Kevin Durant, The Nets and of course the current mess at Twitter. I keep thinking we should do a podcast. If there was anyone in the world I want to do one with it would be Papa Doc. #

FeedLand has a really simple websockets interface that connects the browser-based client with the server. The same interface can be used in server apps, or other clients. Here's a simple demo app in Node.js that shows how it works. Please be kind to our server. This is keeping with the spirit of FeedLand, we want news to flow where ever it makes sense for it to flow. I'm using this to hook up FeedLand to Mastodon, more on that sooon. 💥#

I have very vague but strong memories of the JFK assassination. I was 8, in second grade, my teacher, Miss Ruffino, rushed out of the classroom in tears, no idea why. My mom picked me up to walk me home, we lived a couple of blocks from the school, PS 149 Queens. I understood Kennedy was President, but he was the only president I had known. The idea of someone other than Kennedy being president didn’t make any sense. I asked my mom, what now. Someone named Johnson would be president. It didn’t make any sense to me. Kennedy was president.#

Marge Gunderson: "And it's a beautiful day."#

To FeedLand users. If Twitter turned us off for some reason you’d still be able to read your news while we worked around the outage. But so far there have been no problems that I’m aware of, and rushing to change tested software is a sure way to break things. That said we're making good progress on hooking up to Mastodon. Planning to show off a new way to do news products with FeedLand, and I want to write Mastodon threads in Drummer. Those will be the first steps. ☘️#

Don’t underestimate the importance of Mastodon. It’s like the internet itself, or AWS making it easy to create your own version of Linux, or PCs letting you have your own computer. I experienced all these liberations. Some thought these unthinkable, and controlled silos do serve a purpose as training wheels. But after some time you grow up and it’s time to leave home and create your own world. I believe we are now experiencing such a moment. We don’t need Twitter to provide us a safe space. Life itself isn’t safe. Fear is frozen fun! Only steal from the best. And as they say -- Still diggin!#

Update on our Mastodon work. It's working. 😄#

There's something really interesting about this feed from Mastodon. I look at it and I see that even though I've never met them, somehow their feed ended up looking a lot like the feeds I make now, 20 years later. It's like there was this game of Telephone, and you'd expect by now, after passing through so many hands, esp people who were trying to break the chain, what came out the other end is correct. Thanks due in part to Manton Reece who persuaded the Masto folk that feed items are not required to have titles. Finally we have a massive maker of feeds who I hope will force all feed readers to support this feature that has been in RSS since v0.91. Item titles are optional. It's in the spec. In fact it's so important that I said it twice in two different ways in case anyone was confused. I think this is just a matter of programmers looking for an easy way out and most of them not being writers. 💥#

In late 2021, I wrote this piece which has turned into a manifesto in my mind. "Drummer is more than a piece of software -- it's an interop bomb." The same is true of FeedLand. #

In the age of Mastodon, we're going to rely more on our blogs because we will be able to.#

i have a Tesla. Lovely car. After a year, I still love driving it. but it's funny -- no Nazis or smelly wanna be dictators show up in the passenger seat when I'm driving . I think Elon should get Twitter to run like a Tesla and in the meantime just stfu. I hope he knows what stfu means. #

Video demo: I didn't want long posts to dominate the feed, so I came up with this approach, a down-arrow that reveals the full content, in place, without having to go anywhere else. It's this approach that would make it possible to have indefinite length posts in Masto or Twitter or whatever, without dominating the feed.#

I'm close to having my Hello World for Mastodon in JavaScript app working, but could use help from people who have been down this road.#

One thing I love most about Mastodon is they are genuinely interested in my software. Unlike Twitter which could give a shit. Over there, wow, they think the idea of more toys from Dave with feeds and blogs, that's the best. I feel like Keith Richards singing Happy. 😄#

I'm helping Colin Walker get his rssCloud implementation working. I know other people are doing this now, so if you want to get in the loop this is a good time and place to do so.#

Video demo: I can now sign on to Mastodon the way we sign on to Twitter. This is the very beginning, there's still a lot of work to do. What a slog!#

Help needed with Mastodon OAuth code. Got it!#

I spent this whole week building a connection to Mastodon. We will have FeedLand and Drummer running in the Mastodon ecosystem before too long, Murphy-willing. #

When Twitter is gone where will you go when a big story breaks?#

One thing I won’t miss should Twitter go, is all the phonies with supposedly millions of followers thanks to the Suggested Users List debacle.#

I imagine running Tesla and Spacex are trouble, but Twitter is a very strange beast because every user has a Twitter account (obviously) and they're all connected to each other (again obviously) and no such link exists between Tesla and Spacex users. Further Tesla users spend tens of thousands of dollars to become users, and Tesla could brick their cars any time they want, and we're not connected to each other. Same with SpaceX of course. And even worse than that, most of Twitter's users are either journalists, bloggers, or podcasters. So there's that too. And every one of them is sure Elon Musk is fucking it up. All of this foerseeable, btw. #

To all the old school bloggers, remember how you all used to hate me? This is how it works. It's very rare that in an online space people love the top person, if they are accessible. If they're aloof, hard to find, or speak in haiku, you love them. But if you can talk to them and they might respond, most of what you're going to say to and about them will be negative. I know -- I lived on the other side of that for a number of years. It was fucked up. Absolutely nothing I said would be interpreted as if it were said like a human, like themselves. #

In 2014 I wrote a piece explaining what a River of News aggregator is. The first qualification is not true in FeedLand. We can handle full text, but it doesn't interfere with scrolling because only the first part is automatically displayed. There's a little downarrow in the lower right corner which reveals the full text if you want to see it. #

Health care companies break rules about preventing identity theft as a routine matter. If you tell them you won't give them your date of birth when they call you, they tell you to stop being difficult.#

All the new RSS emanating out of MastodonLand is blowing my mind. We're all part of the same freaking religion. This has been an incredible day, and I expect tomorrow to be even more so. I have a list of things I want them to look at. For example I think Mastodon's outgoing feeds should support rssCloud so we can get instant updates. I would be happy to show them how it works and help them do the adaptation. Basically all they have to do is add some info to their feed, and ping a special server when they update the feed. We take care of the rest. #

I'm stuck with OAuth on Mastodon, but I'm getting somewhere. Here's the story.#

BTW, since RSS is rebounding (yay!) -- I have a Node.js package that makes reading an RSS feed a one line call. It factors out all the variability, and returns a consistent JavaScript object. Reading an RSS feed is as easy as reading a JSON file. I promise. No bullshit. And btw, it also reads Atom and RDF through the same interface. You don't even have to know what format the file is, all that is taken care of. The point is, reading an RSS file was too hard. So I spent the time to make it simple and easy. #

This is the RSS feed for my Mastodon posts. #

<item>s in Mastodon feeds do not have <title>s. It's time for all feed readers to not treat this as an error. Here's a screen shot that illustrates. Also repeating the text where the title goes is not useful or correct, and if your reader does that, it should be fixed. RSS is going places now, and if you don't go with it, people are going to notice. #

Here’s the thing about hardcore programming. You only have so many useful hours for programming every day. After about five or six, you start making mistakes and spend hours trying to get your new code to work, when a fresh start is what’s needed. #

I am @davew@mastodon.social. Follow me. 😄#

Worth isn't a function of money, or what others think of you. It's what you find when you look inside. That's what you're worth.#

Once I discovered I could reverse the color on the Mastodon screen I actually love this mofo. They did a very nice job, even on the docs for the API. I think people who have experience working on software commercially are working on this project. It doesn't suck (surprised). The experience of going through this is unlike any experience I've had in software and I've been doing this a long time. #

A designer of software working now, who hasn’t used Facebook and Twitter, and built on their teachings, is like a current musician having not experienced Coltrane or Beatles. How can you make art thats relevant w/o understanding the art people already know.#

I've written my first four verbs for my Mastodon scripting interface. Voila! I can tell I'm going to be obsessed with this. I actually already am. ;-) #

Thinking out loud. I think there will be an explosion of inbound RSS apps. I want WordPress to do it. Substack. And Mastodon. There should be a new address for a user that's simply an RSS feed. Here's an idea -- let DNS do it the mapping.#

The role Twitter plays from a micro.blog perspective. "Even if you’re not participating, you’re benefitting from the existence of Twitter." #

If Twitter were to fail, it’s hard to know what else would break. I’d rather not find out. When Google Reader was canceled, with lots of notice, it left a hole that hasn’t yet been filled after nine years. And it was much smaller then, than today's Twitter. I'm sure there are some online services that are too big to fail. This is probably something that should be looked into in Congress, because should one of them fail the American taxpayer will be left footing the bill. My sense is that Twitter is one of those services. #

Eric Kidd did a fantastic review of the tech of Mastodon. Now the work can get started in earnest! #

The most kickass Democratic ticket for 2024 is Newsom and Whitmer or vice versa. On the campaign trail only young brilliant Democrats including Demings, Abrams, Warnock, Buttigieg. The older Dems wait to campaign till the end. Win everything. Have the power to really fix stuff. #

Here's the story of RSS in a sentence: RSS took off when we signed the NYT and that's the world we've been in for the last 20 years. #

What I really want from AI is for it to sort all my writing into an index, like the index in the back of a book. i've got 28 years of writing on my site, and there are definitely threads running through it, but i have never been able to visualize those threads. I want the AI to do an editorial job that would be insurmountable for a human. I know I've tried at times to work with editors on that, and they see the scope of it and just give up. Here's the archive btw -- if you have an AI and would like to try it out. #

Anyway, when ActivityPub and RSS merge we will have a fantastic social network along with the news reader of the world, as an open system that the Bigs will never break. We will have the online system we've been waiting for. Now we just have to do everything right. 😄 #

Jack Dorsey is like RBG imho. Both meant well, had big ideas about their own impact, but ultimately waited too long to get out of the way.#

A Twitter thread that begins: "I want Twitter to live. Don't fuck it up Elon Musk."#

BTW, imho -- the open Fediverse is great, but it will need help to survive what's coming. #

And, the best thing for the people, forget about big tech companies, investors, governments, journos -- for the people -- is if Twitter survives and thrives, and the Fediverse grows and is a hotbed of innovation. #

There are a couple of new features in FeedLand, documented here. With the first, the Document icon on each news item (screen shot), you can now link to individual items from a news page on FeedLand, and can of course share that link with others. They will not need to log in. I realized we needed this the other day when I wanted to point to an episode of a podcast, not the podcast feed. We didn't have that ability, now we do. And, a bonus is that we can point to long-form feed items in a comfortable to read format instead of in the middle of all the other items. I found this very useful reading stuff this morning on my iPad. Here's an example of a story from The Atlantic. And an untitled post from today's Scripting News. I have to say, I feel so much more powerful now that I can improve my reading environment so easily. #

BTW, you can subscribe to the Change Notes feed, in FeedLand itself, or any other RSS reader. The power of open standards! 😄 #

Why we need Twitter. Elon Musk nails it. "FTX meltdown/ransack being tracked in real-time on Twitter." Exactly. If we depended on professional journalists for this story they;'d be so confused all that we'd hear is mush. But the insiders are on Twitter, and the story that's coming out at least has some truth behind it. Journalism always tells the same bullshit story. (Which varies a little from time to time, the only consistent thread is how much you, little person, depend on us for all the truth we think you can handle, limited by our pathetic understanding of the facts.) #

ActivityPub and RSS have to come together. It should be possible for a site that produces RSS feeds for each user to peer with a site that uses ActivityPub in the same way. They should have started with RSS, imho, and added whatever they needed via a namespace. I said this in a message earlier today, and was pleasantly suprised by the collegial response. So hopefully you all understand that when I'm saying things like "I need to get my linkblogging tool hooked up to Mastodon," I've taken part of the problem and put it in simple terms. The goal in coming up with open formats and protocols is to maximize interop. Now we have to go back, and if possible, build a bridge between RSS and ActivityPub.#

Mind bombs everywhere! Wow the open web hasn't been this interesting in a very long time. #

In getting FeedLand completely dialed-in, I'm finding out about all the weird stuff developers of RSS packages have done in the name of making life "easier" for developers. Today I couldn't figure out why all of a sudden items in a new kind of feed were getting link elements when there were no item-level link elements in the feeds. Okay so I think this is what I'm dealing with. My workaround which is ugly, is to consider the link element on an item to be a ghost (ie ignore it) if it has the same value as the guid element. It's bullshit. Nothing in the design of RSS allows me to infer this. But that's what happens with egregious hacks. To live with them you have to do more egregious hacks. And that's why, my friends, code never is done. I documented the problem. #

I have a Node.js package called davetwitter. It contains all the code I use to talk to Twitter from all my Node apps. I want to do everything I do with Twitter for Mastodon. I don't have the ability to do this myself, for quite some time -- I'm the only person working on FeedLand and there's still a lot more to do. The package is MIT licensed, so anyone can do this work, and I don't need all the functionality. Looking for someone to take on this project. #

Elon is Trump 2.0, but this time the Trump owns the Twitter.#

We are swimming in fake news. All the big news brands lied about the most basic fact about the country we live in. Why should anyone pay any attention to the garbage that journalism tries to feed us?#

One of the nice features on Facebook, they show you things you wrote on this day in years past. I just read a bunch of them, all humorous and written in a certain style that's not really mine. I love my own writing, I have to say. I imagine most writers do. Put me in a good mood.#

Here's one of the pieces, written on my 50th birthday. #

Podcast about how Twitter is blowing up and the opportunities to put things back together better as we move on. You can hear how tired I am. Having shipped FeedLand, I'm kind of spent, but there's more to do. I'm grateful for that. Let's make the most of it. The podcast is about using FeedLand to write, not just read. About the connection to micro.blog and hopes for connection to Mastodon. And leveraging Markdown in your feeds, how to do it with no breakage. My FeedLand feed is here. #

Any product with a timeline should support inbound RSS. Let my feed be a proxy for me. Don't force me to use your writing tools to be in your network. Let me write where I like to write. Then what happens is we get differentiated writing tools.#

I asked Elon Musk about developers and Twitter today.#