I did a podcast interview with Matthias Pfefferle last week. I wanted to introduce my ideas to the Fediverse world. I haven't listened to it yet, but I remember it being a good discussion on basically all the things I am working on and with these days. It's all a continuation of what we were doing when we were so rudely interrupted by the silos, Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky and to a lesser extent Mastodon. I want to reform social media, go back to the beginning and let's ask the question -- what kind of social media does the web want? Start with the basics, and build a stack that performs like Twitter or Bluesky, but never veer from the standards of the web. Every component must be replaceable. Writers must have all the writing power of the web. Evan Prodromou will be glad to hear that I am a huge fan of the role ActivityPub is playing in bringing the power of textcasting to Mastodon. Matthias, my partner in this podcast episode has been working on this since 2008, and now we are reaping the benefit all the way up the stack in WordLand. See, that's what the web is about. Building and including. Without walls that keep competitors out and keep users in. #

Why textcasting? When Twitter came out in 2006 they left out most of the writing features of the web. Their competitors copied the limits. Textcasting says writers don't want the limits. Add these features to your twitter-like social network and we are happy and will sing your praise. That's it. It's no more complicated than that. People ask questions about what it means. This is what it means.#

It happened so slowly that we didn't notice but Twitter wiped out the idea of the web developer. The platforms we were trying to make work together were programmed so they couldn't work together. As well-intentioned we may have been, it wasn't the web we were developing for. I know the term web developer has come to mean more than it means to me. But it's like saying someone is a Mac developer. A web developer creates apps for the web. Not for a specific service. For any service that supports the open formats that everyone else uses. #