This was an email I sent to one of the people I'm working with at Automattic, and realized I was actually writing a blog post. #
I was watching on the FediForum session yesterday, and heard all this stuff about Bluesky and Mastodon, but these are products that are poorly prepared for the "open social web" -- and imho they won't get there. But WordPress is already there. #
I think some of the products are good, btw -- I hadn't seen Surf, it's basically a feed aggregator that can get input from Bluesky and Mastodon. I don't think they're using their RSS support though. Not adequate. But WordPress RSS is fine. I made an improvement to the Scripting News RSS to add an <image> element that works like the one on a WordPress site. Now my posts can show up in the timeline via RSS. #
That's the key to what we're doing. Reading and writing, with the UI of a twitter-like product, all built on RSS, with the content also appearing on the network WordPress has defined. I see this as huge. #
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! :-)