I'd love to get a list of old school bloggers who are still at it. How would you go about that? I decided to give it to Gemini, limiting it at first to 100 bloggers. Here's the
prompt I wrote. For a while I was wondering what "deep research" was for, but as it's starting the work, I'm thinking of resources that would fit in -- like blogtree.com -- a fascinating site, gives a clear picture how blogs emerge out of the community of an earlier blog. Anyway it's working on it while I write this post.
š #
An application ChatGPT is great it. You're staring at some code, it's really straightforward, you've done this a thousand times, but it doesn't work. Stare at it some more. Try re-entering it. Change the names of things. Still doesn't work. Copy and paste the problem code into ChatGPT and in an instant it tells you without you even having to ask that your comment isn't properly terminated, so the runtime was never seeing the code, and nothing I did made the slightest difference. The information was there. I had been staring at it, but humans see what we expect to see. Machines don't have that problem, at least not in this way (thinking of hallucinations).
#

Why is scripting.com not https? I hope you can see that I have no trouble deploying https sites here. I use
Caddy on my Linux servers, and I don't see why anyone uses anything else. It's really easy and requires none of the work people complain about. Anyway the reason scripting.com is http and not https is that the site dates back to 1994, before there was such a thing as https. Google didn't start their push to get the web to convert to https until 2014, 20 years after I started blogging. Have a look at
any of
my archived blog posts and
docs, the're pretty much all there. This is something I'm proud of. I wanted to create a record from the start, it was very deliberate. I was already an experienced developer when the web started up, so I had an idea what I was doing. I also use images on my site, in the right margin of posts, and lately as "inline" images, in their own boxes with a caption. It's a way for me to play with the ideas, and adds color to pages that are almost all text. So if I were to move the site from S3 to one of my hosted servers, which would be a fairly major undertaking on its own and add a lot of overhead because Amazon takes care of a lot of the bullshit you have to deal with, there would be a small matter of what about the images? They would all break if scripting.com was hosted on https and they were served from http. Now you might say -- Dave all you have to do is move all those images to a place with https support and remap the domains, and take care of all the michegas that's going to pop up. Or suffer with broken images. I decided to instead tell Google to stop trying to own something that belongs to no one and everyone. If they want a more secure web, create it, and make a browser for it, and respect the original web alone. Hopefully this clears it up.
#
I asked
ChatGPT when Google started making HTTPS a requirement. Then I asked when was HTTPS first deployed, and was surprised it was in 1994 in Netscape Navigator. But apparently it was really buggy and wasn't codified until much later. Then I asked when HTTPS became the norm? 2017. So there's a lot of web out there that isn't being maintained by anyone, it just works, that predates HTTPS being widely adopted, if you believe the timelines ChatGPT produced.
#
BTW, these days the images are served via HTTPS so they don't show up in broken links in RSS readers, including my own
FeedLand which is served over HTTPS.
#
Another BTW, I'm still thinking about how I want to transition from the public and open-to-anyone FeedLand servers. So if you're still using .org or .com, they're still on the air doing the same thing they've been doing all along.
#

My suggestion re
Schumer et al. It's over -- remember the lessons, let's look forward, tonight's vote is already history. Let the Dems in the Senate take care of themselves. It's we, the people, who created this country, and we the people are the only ones who can make it work again.
#
I heard an idea that really resonated in a Brian Lehrer
interview with
Anand Giridharadas, who says among many other things, that we should aim our ire at the
leaders of the MAGA movement, and stop bringing our angst to the people who voted for them. Every time I see a condescending TikTok story about them, I think about how that takes us further from getting where we must go. We have to reconcile, we share a country, and our interests are totally aligned. We need each other, that will become completely obvious, and the sooner it does the better.
#
Question for WordLand users. When you published your first post, were you surprised that the window didn't clear? Did you understand that you can make changes and update the public post? I was just talking with a friend who didn't expect it to behave the way it did.
#
I was looking over my
blog archive for August 2006, which was when I started using Twitter, and came across this
video of Jason Calacanis, at a Wikipedia conference in Cambridge. This is what videos were like back then. I probably took it with a fairly expensive Nikon camera.
#
Saw an
interview with Mark Cuban where they asked why would Elon Musk do something that would cause Tesla stock to tank. He's got the power to play with the biggest financial thing that has ever existed, and quite possibly that ever will exist. In comparison Tesla is just one car company, with a lot of competition, a market-leading product for sure, but the competition is catching up. They're constantly lowering prices to keep the volume up, so eventually the stock will have to come down anyway. He certainly knows stuff about the company that no one else can see, maybe their new product pipeline is empty? He also has had to deal with short-sellers who have the incentive to drive the price down, and he can't bet alongside them (how would that look, a CEO betting against his own company). No matter what, there is nothing bigger than the USA, and he's got it, and plans to keep it. But he's human, and thus has frailties, and he loses as often as he wins and knows it. Unfortunately for us we're all in his boat now, unless somehow we can wrench it back.
#

Please, today -- write a blog post that explains why you believe in
The Writer's Web. That's the best way to express our ideas on the web is with all the
tools that writers have invented. And while we may enjoy using social media like Bluesky or Mastodon, we understand that they are not for writing and are not the web. Please
send me a link to your post and I will read what you've written with thanks for believing in writers and the web! You can use any blogging software you like. My email address is dave.winer@gmail.com. And thank you. (And btw, your post can be about whatever you like, by just writing a blog post you're expressing your support for the writing on the web!)
#
- I keep hearing pundits and incumbent Democrats missing the point, that the people are the ones whose opinion matters about the Republicans dismantling our democracy in the United States. #
- I want to celebrate those leaders who totally get that the power is with the people, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. They are an inspiration! I live in New York and while AOC doesn't represent me in Congress (Pat Ryan is my rep), in a political and spiritual way she most definitely represents me. She should be the next president, as far as I'm concerned. She has all the leadership abilities we could ever want. #
- My contribution for today is the slogan that's the title of this piece. It's derived from James Carville's slogan when Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, updated for 2025. #
- "It's the people, dummy!" was always the right slogan. It's we, the people, who created this country, and we the people are the only ones who can make it work again.#

Highly recommend this week's
New Yorker Radio Hour interview with
Stephen Kotkin of Stanford. He's an expert on Russian history, biographer of Stalin, he talks about what Trump is doing, and as I listened I realized we have not filled in how crazy or challenged the leaders of the other huge powers are. Trump apparently is not an outlier. Putin can't keep the war going in Europe indefinitely, their banking system is running on fumes and the people are tired of war (unlike in the US they feel their wars). There's tremendous corruption in the Chinese military, so Xi isn't rushing to try to take over Taiwan. It's easier and safer to just keep threatening. In the US we're shocked by what we've become, so quickly, we're failing to see the context. Kotkin also offers a perspective on the new media, relative to when TV and radio were new, and all the chaos the US has survived. He said something I believe is true, it'll be hard to turn America into a totalitarian state because every freaking American today was raised in a country where we had all the
amendments. It'll be hard to get us to STFU. They have a plan in TrumpLand, but that doesn't mean it will work.
#
BTW it's worth
calling attention to a bit I linked to yesterday.
Cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon is not on the roadmap for WordLand. They are too limited in the features they support for writers. This is a big point, not a casual thing. I am trying to create a network that's like stereo to mono. We're not going to try to scale down writing in WordLand so it fits into the tight little featureless well-silo'd boxes in order to peer with those systems. Instead, I want to force them to give writers a decent surface to write on. Somehow we lost our minds and decided deliberately to limit communication to grunts and snorts, and it should not be a surprise that when our civilization migrated to them, it became unable to understand complex ideas. I guarantee you Carl Sagan, if he were alive, would have seen this. Or maybe not? I don't know. But it's a bizarre situation that I've decided to try to fix.
#
A hard lesson to learn -- people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors.
#
A new kind of WordPress post for me. A
big picture with a punchy caption and a teasing title.
#
The word is starting to spread about
WordLand. And the product is holding up pretty well. There are some issues in Safari with the toolbar that pops up over selection. I see people pasting in URLs that makes me think it's not working for them. Don Park started using it. I did my first project with Don in the late 80s. The project was very successful. His respect means a lot to me. The positioning -- it makes WordPress as easy to write for as Twitter, is great to hear as users write about it. That was one of the major design goals. What people are missing, and it's right in front of their eyes, they can use writing features that somehow never made it to the twitter-like systems, the ones listed on the
textcasting memorandum (or manifesto, whichever you prefer). I'm glad people are seeing this as an enhancement to WordPress, not an attempt to create a new community. I want
all WordPress writers to use this product. Every one of them. I want people to feel that it's an essential part of WordPress, for writers. The writer's web. Remember that, you'll be hearing a lot about that. And I want to be sure we fix all the bugs, and add all the features they believe are missing, as long as the features pertain to writing. Everything else is well-covered by the main product. There's also an API that comes with WordLand, I'll be talking more about that later. Makes it easier to write WordPress apps in JavaScript that run in the browser.
#
I did a restoration of
discuss.userland.com, the discussion group for scripting.com between 1998 and 2001. I think now finally it works. If you find anything interesting in the archive, send me a link. A lot of the early blogs started from discussions there, heated at times. But a lot of good stuff came from it.
#
The very last message in the DG is, now, 25 years later, basically the design of the network I'm building -- with WordLand as the frontend and WordPress as the backend. The issue is the same. When people post only to get attention, forget about anything useful getting done there. It's strictly a broadcast system. So the investment Masto and Bluesky make in discourse is imho wasted complexity. What we want is linking, not replies. If they were the web, they would be designed very differently. Anyway, in 2000, I asked people to put their ideas on their own sites, send me a link, and maybe I'll post it on my site. That right there is the plan for the new network. Facilitating that, it's as easy as posting on a twitter-like system (the early users
confirm that!), but the post goes into
your space ie your blog, and a link goes to the person you're responding to, and it's up to them whether or not they want to amplify it, using their own criteria, in their space, to their subscribers. It's why twitter failed to be a keg of revolutionary ideas, instead one of warring factions in a prison. Not able to leave, but not able to do anything either.
#
A question came up about the RSS feeds that WordLand maintains, so I
wrote it up on the support site. Net-net: Unless you're developing a component of the
textcasting vision, you should probably use the WordPress-maintained feed for your site.
#
I love how people declare that Trump doesn't represent us. But the truth is as long as our representatives don't impeach and remove him, he absolutely does represent us. There aren't two definitions of
represent.#
- I am hereby changing the name of "Republicans" to "Fucking Republicans" because that's what they do and what we're going to do to them. Today's issue is Medicare, which hits home to me, a person who planned for health care and depends on Medicare.#
- I need my Medicare. It's my health insurance. Health insurance always been a problem for me, with pre-existing conditions, and at one point a lapsed corporate plan.#
- I finally got on solid ground or so I thought when I turned 65 a few years ago. Now I find out that the Repubs are going to cancel or reduce my insurance, and I don't imagine that a person my age, with my pre-existing conditions (we all have them once at this age) I could get insurance.#
- So please tell me Republicans, how this is meant to work? I am not stupid and I know Medicare is not out of money. Am I going to be paying out of pocket for my health care? Are there any doctors or hospitals who even do this any longer?#
- Repubs, if my Medicare goes down, you are going down too.#
- PS: The inspiration for this fucking idea. #
- I'm not a paid subscriber to anything on Substack. But I do read a few of their newsletters when they come out, including Paul Krugman's. Almost always must-read stuff. #
- But he also writes on the "other side of the paywall." When he announced it, he said he doesn't need the money, so I wondered why he does it. I kept reading anyway.#
- But he does something incredibly annoying and as clueless imho as the things he calls out in his writing ā I only find out an article is on the other side of the paywall after I've read the first few paragraphs. I am a fan and I would send the money directly if he asked for it, but not via Substack.#
- Here's an example of such a post. #
- So because I don't pay I have to lose that time every time you do this? Have some respect for us who read you. I'm as old as he is, and I like to use my time well. So please either get rid of the stinking paywall, or warn us up front.#
- And also consider getting off Substack. It's not a good look.#
David Weinberger on WordLand. "It's a web page that clears out all of WordPress's cruft and gives you an interface that's so simple that it's actually enjoyable."
#

Praise from David, author of
Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of
Cluetrain Manifesto, is the best. He picked up
WordLand overnight, and he loves it, for the right reasons. WordLand is an editor for "small pieces," maybe the first. Most of the really easy editors have been stuck in silos and thus are dead-ends. I'm sure the people who designed them wished they weren't locked up, but they had to work for billionaires-to-be, I don't. I called the locked-up editors
tiny little text boxes. I created an editor that starts out slightly larger than the TLTBs, and grows as your idea grows. So David opened up
WordLand and started typing. And it turned into a
normal sized blog post. It flowed right into it. And unlike the TLTB's in twitter-like worlds, those bits live on the open web, and can use all the features of the web, and are fed out to software networks via
RSS, which is a lot simpler than other protocols. It can grow faster because there already is a huge installed base of software and knowledge for RSS. Imho developers should
build on existing standards, not try to replace them. They might be more
alive than you think (or more accurately, wish).
#
I updated the
screen shot on the WordLand
docs page. It was really out of date.
WordLand is the best editor for people to write in WordPress. I've been developing it over the last couple of years. I wanted to get a really nice editor into this slot. I felt WordPress deserved one. It's designed to feel like the editor in twitter-like services, but without the limits. I've been writing about this
on my blog, while I was doing that, I was developing WordLand in the background. We have ignored the needs of writers for too long. It's time to remove the limits. People believed the formula Twitter arrived at was the right one. It is far too limited for writers. WordLand is the answer, in software.
#
The United States is Russia's 51st state, sad to say. Let's get it back for the people of the United States. We don't like Putin. Sorry.
#
Before our media was gradually taken over by Russia, they did it to Ukraine, but they managed to dig their way out, had a democratic election, resulting in their current government. So it's not impossible to dig your way out. But you have to stop insisting that
Hitler be allowed to speak.
#
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.
#

I've been getting my exercise outdoors mostly, but then when the weather got bad for a bit, too bad to walk outdoors, I took up the Peloton again. I was really out of shape for that. So I started riding every third day or so. And then without any warning I just passed my 600th ride. Not too bad! :-)
#
Web isn't just a brand, it's also a noun and a verb. "I web you."
#
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!
#
- I found the TechDirt piece by Mike Masnick 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 were tightly connected. #
- At the time I tried to raise the alarm, in tech and in finance, that a Republican could buy Twitter for $12B, and that was a cheap price considering the value of the presidency in a tech entrepreneur's hands.#
- My experience in Silicon Valley goes back to the late 70s, so I have a pretty good understanding of the personality of tech entrepreneurs.#
- My blog, Scripting News, has been about democracy since inception, in 1994, though it has primarily been about technology. I got the same complaints that I should stick to tech, but I didn't see a line of separation. The stakes were large then, but now they're much larger and as Masnick notes, impossible to ignore. #
- In the mid-90s there was not much of a debate whether the First Amendment applied to the web, the consensus was that it did not! The NYT didn't defend the 1st A on the web, and Congress passed a law saying the 1st A didn't apply and a Democratic president, Clinton, signed the law. That was a pretty clear signal. (We were saved by a Federal appeals court, otherwise who knows what we'd be doing now.)#
- In tech, every generation thinks they're seeing a problem for the first time. This is almost never true. It's like anything else, we're iterative, going over the same issues again and again, and we have a chance to wake up at any point and learn from our mistakes and not repeat the previous cycle, but it seems we never do.#
- Most important is that we work together and share what we learned. But first you have to be aware that there is history. You know the famous line about people who "cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."#
- We have great historians working here, and TechDirt is more famous than Scripting News is now. It would be a shame if the historians overlooked the historic connection between tech and democracy because they weren't aware it was documented much earlier than 2025. And btw -- don't miss that Google et al would like to deprecate the archive of the early web. No one is paying attention to that problem, and it's another way history is lost. The wisdom of the Google people forcing this on the rest of us is very much like the DOGE bros in DC today. #

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 would-be billionaires.
#
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.
#
One thing to be grateful for, Trump didnāt invite any of the Jan 6 rioters back to the Capitol for his speech.
#
Watch out for people who celebrate your freedom while profiting from your enslavement.
#

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 computers are
extremely good at. I told my bot that it would work a lot better if they just told me what to change. I said this: "I have a lot of experience being a human being and working with other humans, and all your clients as far as I know are human." In other words, be concise and direct. This is what it said in response. "Thatās a sharp observation, and I appreciate the insight. I'll keep focusing on clarity, directness, and being actually helpful rather than just dumping information. If I ever seem to be leading you down a non-optimal path, feel free to call it out!" Note how concise the response was. More advice for the bot. Help your human understand. I think maybe eventually we may be their pets. Try scratching behind the ears. On the other hand, to my human friends, do not depend on the strategies they choose. They will never on their own question the path they took. It may not be the optimal one, but they'll keep going down it. It's up to you to say nah this isn't the way I want to go, and they will always respect that. It's not like
HAL in 2001. I've sometimes wasted whole programming session going in the wrong direction assuming my bot was good at this. None of them are, as far as I can tell.
#
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. Plus, he would be our last choice if we were in the market for a crazy despot to ruin 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.
#
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 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.
#
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 Attorney it's the right thing to do. When there are objections judge rules in favor of the government most of the time, but wants to show balance so once or twice rules in favor of the defense, but it doesn't matter, when the judge gives instructions to the jury he says basically the only option is to convict, or so it seems that's what he's saying and dutifully, the jury convicts. There are sentencing standards, provided by the DOJ so the judge sentences the accused to life at hard labor. Back in the studio at 30 Rock the audience isnāt sure if they should laugh, slowly realizing itās not meant to be funny, the skit fades out to a commercial break.
#

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.
#
- 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 deep pain. When I did something to another person I was also doing it to myself. I found that the dark cloud of my harmful behavior would stay with me for a long time, maybe never going away. I would find it hard to forgive myself for what I did. So it's better to not try to get revenge, and let the pain of being hurt dissipate on its own.#
- I have a story to go with that. In the beginning of RSS, I had a partner and customer ask me at lunch if there were any circumstances when I would take the server we ran for them off the air. I said that's a weird question, but of course not. The very next day, his team announced they were taking over RSS, completely changing it, and the first I heard of it was in the public announcement. Later that same day, my brain boiling over in anger at being treated so poorly, I did eventually land on the idea of just taking his server offline. And then I laughed that he knew I'd get to that, and wanted to plant a little marker there for whatever reason, I don't know. But no I didn't take his server off the air. He may be a bastard, but he did pay for the service so his server stays up. And two years later, his project a failure, I came out with RSS 2.0 and that was the end of that. It wasn't revenge, it was just picking up the ball in the playground and restarting the game that they had caused to stop. We went on and RSS did a lot of good work.#
- Video of Mike Myers doing Elon Musk in last night's SNL cold open. #
The
tab key now switches between the main editor and title editor in
WordLand. Still a little work to do there.
#
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?
#
What
happened in the Oval Office yesterday was as horror-inspiring as the riot in the Capitol on 1/6/2021.
#
- AOC asked for ideas of what to do for the SOTU.#
- I suggested we come up with a new slogan. Like this.#
- Make hats, purple ā enough for everyone, including the Repubs. #
- During applause, Dems rise and chant āOne America Together.ā#
- What do you think?#

Wordle Kitty throwing out the first pitch of the baseball season.
#
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.
#
WordLand is simply an editor for writers who publish to WordPress.
#

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. 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. #

Like many other people I love
Severance, esp this season, and esp the
most recent episode. 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. #

Me at 22 in Madison. My mother, Dr Eve Winer, took this picture.
#

People give
Matt Mullenweg a lot of grief, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadnāt kept it going for 20+ years. I wrote the other day that I feel like a
time traveler, discovering WordPress 20 years after I left UserLand. I care that it's open source, but I care much more that it's open web esp after we've been so thoroughly dominated by feature-limited silos such as Twitter, Facebook and yes -- even Mastodon and Bluesky. Even if there's a theoretical way to do it, practically speaking we have to wait for their developers to implement the features we want. Open source doesn't help there, but open web does. Matt puts the emphasis on the open source part, that's why it wasn't until very recently that I realized that
open web is more important, to me at least.
#
An email arrived from the Social Security Administration entitled Help Us Slam the Scam. Explains how not to get scammed by people who want our checks. Wonder if they realized it applies equally to Elon Musk, richest man in the world, who wants to eat old people's cupcakes because, well I can't explain it.
#
- I asked ChatGPT to draw a picture of a death panel as described by Republican lawmakers as they fought the Affordable Care Act. I was surprised it was willing to do it.#
- According to the bot: "The concept of 'death panels' was a widely debunked political talking point used by opponents of the Affordable Care Act. It falsely suggested that government-run committees would decide whether individualsāespecially the elderly or disabledāwould receive life-saving care. #
- "I can generate an image depicting a grim, dystopian bureaucratic setting where a group of shadowy officials in suits are sitting at a long, dark table, stamping papers while an elderly patient looks on with concern. The room would have a cold, sterile look, with a looming clock symbolizing bureaucratic power over life and death."#

Death panel, as imagined by ChatGPT.
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WordLand user: "Does it make a difference if I can just dash off a short note without all the other bullshit that goes with publishing online." Yes, it should be as easy to take a note in WordPress as it is in Bluesky. I didn't buy that assumption that WordPress has to be heavy machinery for writers. What if I just want to write something quickly and get back to the other thing I was working on. Also the edit box in WordLand starts out the size of a tiny little text box, but grows as you add more words. You are allowed to keep going. No character limit.
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Just saw a report that styling isn't working in WordLand in latest versions of Safari. We're using
MediumEditor to do the editing. Did a quick query in Claude.ai and there do appear to be some compatibility issues with Safari. A request that people actually report these problems in the repo, via the Support link in the main menu, otherwise it's hit or miss. Thanks.
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Since Bluesky gave us the ability to limit responses to people I follow, the amount of spam/abuse has been reduced to a trickle. People can still comment, by quoting my post. But they want to
troll, to gain exposure to my followers. Helping promote
my ideas is not their idea of fun.
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Would have preferred if, when
replacing Joy Reid, MSNBC had hired someone in Detroit or Miami, or St Louis or Dallas. Or a different city each day. Put yourself where the people are. The drumbeat: Enough is enough.
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- Aziz Poonawalla wrote a review of WordLand. I'd like to respond.#
- First, I'd like to say I put a lot of thought into this product, so it is the way it is for good reason.#
- I'm trying to escape from the limits of twitter-like systems. I want a writing world where we get the features of textcasting. So your belief that the product has to support Bluesky and Mastodon cross-posting would be like saying an EV should only run on gasoline. The whole point is to not limit ourselves to the features of Bluesky. #
- On the other hand, I'm not saying limits in software aren't good. A product is as much defined by what it can't do as with what it does. All feed reading software has to strip large amounts of HTML from what it finds in feeds, because RSS doesn't place any limits what you can use. So we strip off all the HTML except (in FeedLand) simple styling and links. And so to fit into FeedLand and as a suggestion to other feed reading software, I've said my limit is Markdown. I think we can all support that. I ran the idea by my former colleague Brent Simmons, who does NetNewsWire, and he was quickly convinced, and plans to support it in his product. This is a way to get new stuff happening in the RSS world. Start with supporting the source:markdown element in your feeds and in your feed reader. #
- You say there's no use-case -- but there is a use-case, just not for you which is fine. #
- The typical user is a writer who publishes to WordPress. As passionate as I am about the limits of twitter-like systems, I am also feel that WordPress has never adequately served the needs of writers, and what a shame that is. WordLand, imho, is exactly what writers need. Get all the other non-writing stuff out of my way. Let me clear a space for iterating over something I publish to the web. Give me a menu with all my documents, so I can quickly make a change. These are the basic principles we implemented successfully in Radio UserLand in 2002. They were available for anyone in the WordPress world to copy, but for some reason they didn't. It's so weird to me, I'm like a time traveler who has come 20 years in the future to find out they lost the purpose of a product like WordPress. It's supposed to be a place writers love to come to do their writing. I think when writers discover WordLand they will see a product designed by someone who is one of them. It's just a beginning, there's lots more to do. I take the long term view, a road to anywhere begins with one step.#
- Back to Bluesky and Mastodon -- because they both support outbound RSS, we will be able to include stuff written there in our collections of published feeds. I fully intend to integrate features from FeedLand in WordLand. That's why the names are so similar. š#
- It's good that you like micro.blog, this isn't in the way of it and it isn't in the way of WordLand. I'm in regular contact with Manton, and if his product grows, I win because he's got the right model. He's still trying to work with the limited platforms and I, again, gave up. That right there defines the two products. #
- Sometimes giving up is the right thing to do. The first time i gave up btw was in 2017, when I stopped trying to cross-post from Scripting News to Medium, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It was liberation. I had come to hate my writing because I couldn't use links, and I couldn't edit or have more than 140 chars. What a miserable existence, and I love writing, and I had to make a choice. I'm doing it again, but now have made the investment in meeting people with the kind of writing tool they expect and want. That was the same thing that worked so well with Radio. #
- My real goal was to not need to do any of this! I would have much preferred if Bluesky had decided to break out of the tiny little box Twitter put them in. Then I could do all my writing there. And I wish WordPress had a team of developers working on making the product the best for writers in addition to programmers and designers, but they didn't. Should I give up there? Maybe. Maybe we were destined to give up on the web as a writer's platform. But I saw so much potential there in 1994 when I started working here exclusively. That potential is still very much there, you just have to believe, and against all odds, I do still believe. One more time, let's give it a try.#
- Anyway, it's okay if you don't use it, but I wanted to disagree with some of your conclusions. :-)#
- PS: I wrote every word on this page, not an AI bot, in case you were wondering. š#
WordLand opened yesterday for everyone to use. There was a deal-stopping bug reported last night,
fixed provisionally, 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. WordLand is designed to be the kind of editor you use in a social app like Bluesky or Mastodon, but with most of the features of
textcasting.
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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.
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We aren't prepared for what's coming.
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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.
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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.
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- 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.#

Playing with metadata in a
post in a thread.
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- 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. And we know how that turned out, about the same as Hillary's Emails. #
- Who is Elon Musk? Until I read his Wikipedia profile last week, I only had a vague idea. I wanted to know if he was actually raised in South Africa, when he left, and what influence it had on him. I'll let you read the article. We should be examining every nook and cranny of who this unelected guy who never was in a debate, or won a primary or an election, or had his background investigated, and remains untouched by any kind of examination. #
- His security detail was just deputized by the US Marshals Service. What next? Maybe they'll just give him control of the military and get on with it. You can see that's coming, maybe in March, or sooner. #
- Do you think he'd have any compunction against using the military against Americans? This isn't his country. So Americans probably mean nothing special to him. Since we played a role in the overthrow of their apartheid, probably the opposite. I wonder who or what he cares about. Has he ever answered a question without deflecting? Is there any reporter who could or would interview him? #
- If journalism were really doing their job seriously, they would report on this because this is what we're thinking. When will jouralism get that they are one of us, not above us? The sooner that light goes on, the better. #
- Here's a good story for one of fierce courageous reporters at the NY Times. Who should be more scared of what's coming? Blacks or Jews?#
- 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 people think they are. They're 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. There isn't one of them you can trust with your democracy. So keep that in mind, and when you see open billionaire-proof social networks rise up, give them a little the Rachel we love.
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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 distance. It still would be a graph, people following other people, but you wouldn't be able to insert something into someone else's flow, which is where all the indecency comes from imho. Or let replies be only visible to the person it's in reply to, so you don't end up getting speeches under your posts. And so that people with a lot of followers don't bother reading anything that's related to what they wrote, and thus no new ideas can enter the flow. We've been doing this, the way we do it, since the inception of Twitter in 2006. For some reason the design of that network is considered sacred. I was a math major who studied combinatorics, specifically graph theory -- and the Twitter way of organizing people and discourse is just one of many ways people could be arranged. Predictably, the weird structure of Twitter is turning into the structure of our society. If we want to change things the fastest way might be to do another look at what Twiiter does and see if we can't intentionally make something that works better for whatever we think we should be doing with it, other than staring at the evil people on the other side and saying how evil they are (or hopeless, or woke or whatever bullshit the influencers have made up). And with that I wish you a good evening and note that tomorrow is another day.
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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.
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