It's even worse than it appears..
A new home page for the Scripting News podcast. Nice to get this one off the big todo list. #
I've been following Bluesky since inception, even tried developing for it and found it was nothing new with its 300 character limit, no links, titles, etc. Basically you can build the same apps for Bluesky that we were able to develop for Twitter. I've also been following Leaflet, an attractive writing tool that works on AT Proto, the format that Bluesky is promoting, basically a reinvention of the web but inside a silo, which means -- perhaps confusingly, that Leaflet uses the same basic format that Bluesky uses, but Bluesky can't do anything with Leaflet posts, because of the limits that Leaflet doesn't have. So -- they formed an alliance with two other products that are writing tools for AT Proto, and came up with a format that they will all implement called standard.site (nice name and very attractive site). They probably hope that Bluesky itself will use that format, at least to let people read their documents in the same place they display the more limited Bluesky posts, in user timelines. If that happens it may be a good thing for the web, if services outside of Bluesky can post these documents from outside. But it would be imho more powerful if they created a format based on something like RSS, which is already well-known to developers, and would mean something outside of Bluesky and probably would be taken more seriously by the Bluesky people. There is no advantage that I can discern for creating a new format that only works in Bluesky. #
My first rule of platforms: "People don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors." I thought that rule was pretty new, but it actually appears in a 1996 blog post.#

© copyright 1994-2025 Dave Winer.

Last update: Saturday January 24, 2026; 1:30 PM 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! :-)