This is a really good blog post, in response to a post I wrote here that said among other things that a WordPress instance is easier to set up on your own server than Mastodon. #
At the start of the piece he said it was like comparing apples and oranges, but by the end, he was starting to see that they kind of do the same thing. I am prepared to explain that. #
First what they have in common is that they deal with posts, and they have more or less the same features. Mastodon for historic reasons, places limits on posts. I'm sure they could relax those limits, so I don't see this as an important difference. #
And then there's all the traffic that comes into a Mastodon instance that doesn't come into a WordPress instance, posts from people you follow, some in response to posts you made. But there is a feed reader built into WordPress. And WordPress supports a very nice API so if you want to build on a different kind of feed management system (as I do) -- no problem, as long as it works on the web, they can connect. Again if we build on the web there are kinds of possibilities that don't exist if you build a monolithic all-in-one system like Mastodon.#
And then you might say that feed readers are slow because they poll, and people want to see messages instantly. And this is where I say there's a very well-debugged feature in WordPress that I helped them build in 2009 that make feed updates instantaneous. Yeah Google tried to FUD it, as they did so much fuckery with feeds, but it it didn't actually accomplish anything. rssCloud is there, and it works, and it's absolutely instantaneous. Every WordPress site supports it as does FeedLand.#
So I figure if we connect the dots, just building on open stuff (ie the web), with WordPress and FeedLand, hooked up to each other, it would more or less do what Mastodon does. It might still be apples and oranges, but on the web, you probably can hook an apple up to an orange and it would probably work the first time. ;-)#
Now there will be things one can do that the other can't, and it probably will go both ways, because this way of doing social networks works somewhat differently, but the cool thing is you can see ActivityPub starting to evolve toward RSS, so I think for the first time in a long time, a very long time, we will see some real motion in Social Media Land. There hasn't been any real competition in this space in a long time, and thus it has stagnated. But with a little competition, the minds should wake up and get to work meeting the challenge.#
One of my mottos: "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." It's still true today as it always has been. We are a species that is motivated to compete. It's deeply ingrained into who we are. #
PS: I love posts that pick up from where I started and move the ball in an interesting direction. This was one of the best things about the blogosphere of the past. It's nice to see that tradition being revived. Thanks to Steven Rosenberg. :-)#
PPS: Someone should edit the Wikipedia page about rssCloud. First they should format the name correctly. Second they say it was superceded by something the W3C did. I asked ChatGPT a straight question, did WebSub supercede rssCloud, and here's the answer. Unequivocally false. Not only that the two protocols are very fundamentally different. #
PPPS: This is one of the reasons I say Wikipedia has a much bigger trust issue than ChatGPT. It frequently transmits fake news or hallucinations like this, due to how it's edited. I expect to see lies on a Wikipedia page, and despite what you read about AIs, they're in my experience much more reliable. It's easy for a Wikipedia page to be hijacked by interested parties, as it was, no doubt, this time. For some reason the AIs seem to factor out the noise, somehow. Or maybe it's just that people haven't figured out how to spam it yet. #
Last update: Thursday November 27, 2025; 11:06 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! :-)