It's even worse than it appears..
Friday, December 30, 2022
It's been a long year. One more day to go. #
One network is better than two#
  • I was there when we moved from mainframes to micros. #
  • The real magic happened when they could both be on the same network. That came about 15 years after micros showed up. The web. Two worlds became one. #
  • Today the text world was similarly bifurcated.#
  • There's a big line separating the web writing world into two parts.#
    • The parts meant for reading via RSS#
    • The parts that can't be read via RSS#
  • But that is changing because the line has been crossed, by Mastodon. #
  • What they did is provide an RSS feed for each user.#
  • There, the line is gone. #
  • What's next?#
Substack, interop and the philosophy of blogging#
  • On Mastodon:#
  • Yes, Substack is blogging, and it's totally valid for a blogging system to be better at publishing one kind of writing.#
  • What's wrong with Substack, and why it will ultimately need to change or be replaced, is that they require writers to use their editor. #
  • That's lock-in. Not interop.#
  • And interop is part of the philosophy of blogging imho.#
  • As a writer, I use the writing tools best suited for me. #
The mistake we made with RSS#
  • We let Google bury it.#
  • But it survived anyway.#
  • Never again.#
  • #

Last update: Saturday December 31, 2022; 10:55 AM 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! :-)