It's even worse than it appears..
Monday February 16, 2026; 3:09 PM EST
Ideas for the fediverse#
  • Bullet items for the Fediforum conference in March.#
    • Subscribing must be easy.#
    • Some things will work better if they're slightly centralized, esp subscribing. #
    • Use DNS for naming people. #
    • Support RSS in and out, and test it once you add the feature, so many easy things to fix remain broken (like titles of the feeds, look terrible in a list of feed titles). RSS is how you earn the "web" in your name. "Web" means something, it's just an intention, there are rules. #
    • You don't need "open" if you have "web." The web is by definition open. Water is wet. Raises question re what the not-open web is. (Silo.)#
    • Support the basic features of text in the web. If you shut off the writing features of the web, as Twitter did, you're not really part of the web. Especially linking.#
    • Listen to users, listen to other developers.#
    • Automattic is doing heroic work connecting WordPress to ActivityPub. This means that WordPress APIs are now ActivityPub APIs. Not a small thing. #
    • Look at text coming out of WordPress into Mastodon, the HTML used definitely could be improved. Seems pretty simple things to fix, the simple things matter. Example: WordPress version. Mastodon version of the same post. Let's make this beautiful! #
    • Keep trying fundamentally new architectures. #
    • Learn from past mistakes. #
    • Interop is paramount.#
    • Don't re-invent. #
  • BTW, this can be read on my blog, on Mastodon, in WordPress and of course my feeds (and thus can be read in any app that supports inbound RSS).#

© copyright 1994-2026 Dave Winer.

Last update: Monday February 16, 2026; 4:00 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! :-)