I read something on Brent's blog the other day that changed my thinking. He said #
WWND. What Would Navalny Do? Think about it.#
The Dems are terrible at politics. They should be running ads on TV saying that no workers in the fields means food prices soaring as we'll have to import food because all the American crops are dead because there was no one to harvest them. It's true. Why didn't anyone see this coming? Well we did see it coming, but the Dems were too dumb to do anything about it. They're supposed to be the "woke" party, isn't it funny that they're so un-woke about something like keeping Americans fed!#- I asked ChatGPT to provide bullet points for yesterday's podcast. I thought this time it did a really good job. It did misunderstand some things I said, I just deleted those, below.#
- Blogging lost to Twitter because Twitter had one-click subscribe.#
- Subscribing in feed readers required too many steps: copying URLs, menus, pasting, confirming.#
- This friction discouraged adoption compared to Twitter's simplicity.#
- Feed reader developers (2002-2006) competed instead of cooperating, creating cluttered subscription buttons.#
- Twitter succeeded because it eliminated that friction.#
- FeedLand solves this with one-click subscribe and checkboxes next to feeds.#
- Users can see others' subscriptions, similar to Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Facebook.#
- Private feeds are possible but niche; public following is standard and expected.#
- Emphasis on factoring UI: reduce steps, as with "Edit This Page" in 1999.#
- Rebooting the blogosphere requires cooperation and a universal "follow" button.#
- FeedLand's checkboxes make subscribing or filtering feeds simple.#
- Introduces "Radio WordLand" release with advanced checkbox features.#
- FeedLand timelines can be filtered live using checkboxes tied to feeds.#
- Example feeds: Daves WordPress blog, Great Art feed from Bluesky, linkblog, Scripting News, podcast, WordCamp Canada 2025 feed.#
- WordCamp Canada keynote in Ottawa, Oct 16-17, 2025.#
- WordLand integrates categories for organizing feeds.#
- Commitment to "Edit This Page" feature: too valuable to abandon.#
- Broader goal: restore writer-friendly features Twitter removed (links, styling, no character limits).#
- Criticism of Bluesky/Twitter/Threads for perpetuating character limits and stripped-down writing.#
- Aim: build software that forces platforms to support the web by user demand.#
- Automatic/WordPress bringing ActivityPub to blogs is "heroic" bridging web and Mastodon.#
- WordPress posts in Mastodon retain titles, styling, links, and images -- better than Twitter/Bluesky.#
- Believes competition will pressure other networks to drop artificial limits.#
- Concludes with confidence: momentum is building, new features will roll out soon.#