I've always had a hunch that dead people have special powers over the living. I think my father showed me that in the days after he died, there was a miracle he would have appreciated, and part of me doesn't believe it was a coincidence. #
One thing's for sure if your social network came from a big tech company or VC-backed startup, you’ll be locked in. It’s a fundamental law like Murphy or Moore.#
A series of tweets dashed off in the middle of the night on my iPad.#
I like the precedent Mastodon sets. A server product installed by users. A slow rise as opposed to an overnight success. A dominant competitor falls apart just enough to let a new entrant rise.#
I also love the precedent RSS has set. Enduring a long PR campaign against it by tech giants, VCs and pundits, it persisted, having no employees or burn rate it just needs users to keep it going until both twitter and Google Reader are gone.#
Bet the naysayers didn’t see RSS surviving through all that, but they don’t study history. Basic formats like RSS once entrenched never go away. Somewhere under NYC the pipes laid in Peter Stuyvesant's time are still carrying water to NYers.#
Somewhere deep inside every Chromebook there beats the heart of an IBM ROM BIOS clone still handling all the events from the keyboard. And RSS is there now to provide Mastodon a solid path to informing people who don’t even use the product.#
We pick up from where we left off when Twitter and Google Reader plopped their fat asses down on the feediverse. Hopefully we don’t let that happen again but I have my doubts as users flock to VC products just as dominant as those who are now vanquished.#
We can now write postmortems on twitter. We know where all the promise, dreaming, vision, puffy news pieces led — it always was a powerful weapon waiting to be used that way, we don’t know it’s limits, but we’re going to find out.#
Did you ever read Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. We're at a SoT type moment with Twitter. It was such an amazing thing, but we can now speculate on its purpose with some confidence.#
Everything Twitter did, everything you and I did on Twitter was for the simple purpose of giving a new kind of weapon to a boy-man with a vast fortune. His name is not Winston Niles Rumfoord, rather it's Elon Musk, which is kind of a Vonnegut name, if you think about it.#
Or maybe it's so the boy-man could turn it over to the next meaningful person, someone in his karass possibly or perhaps a stranded space traveler from Tralfamadore.#
Last update: Wednesday December 21, 2022; 12:14 PM EST.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)