At what point will companies start using AI to communicate with customers? Who will be the first to show everyone else how to do it? Amazon taught the world how to do commerce over the web. When will users expect their vendors to use AI to simplify shopping, buying, returning? Right now, I don't think most companies realize they can do business differently with people. In my humble opinion that's when the boom will come. #

The purpose of standards is interop. That's it. No other purpose. #

Just watched the first episode of Star City, really good. Somewhat like The Americans, but takes place in the USSR. A spinoff of For All Mankind, which started out interesting and then became unwatchable, though I did enjoy the sets on Mars. I also liked the character who was inspired by Elon Musk, obviously. #

There have been problems reported with subscribe.scripting.com. At least some of them are fixed. It's hard to test this kind of software because you can't really tell what went wrong. If people report problems they just say it didn't work. But real problems were fixed, so if you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing, now is a good time to try again. And thanks for your patience, and sorry for the screwy app. ;-)#

How bad was it with the Knicks. As something of a joke, but not really, Knicks fans would disguise themselves with paper bags with eye cutouts. Fans got accustomed to the feelings of betrayal and hopelessness. When was the actual lowest point? A good candidate was when they traded some good players for Bargnani, an Italian who apparently for some reason was the top draft choice of the Toronto Raptors. He wasn't much good to begin with and he went downhill from there. There were quite a few other moments when you thought it couldn't get any worse, but then it did. We finally got management with a heart and a mind with Leon Rose and that's when team-building began for real, and the reason the Knicks have been such poetry on the court this season is due to Rose's eye for talent and an understanding of the big picture. He picked players that work well with each other, and sometimes amazingly well. In the right margin is an image I used for posts about the Knicks in the past, a reminder of how far we've come. The look of doom. We all remember that mode so well, we stood with them then, so here we are with high hopes and reasonable expectations. #

Congrats to my friend Manton Reece, a San Antonio fan, for their victory in the Western Conference last night. The Knicks will be playing them starting on Wednesday for the NBA championship. Knicks representing the east, Spurs for the west. #

If I ran Bluesky, instead of trying to fork the web, I'd be trying to become the competitor of Twitter's that is 100% web top to bottom.#

Yesterday I applied to speak at WordCamp US in August and I also posted bits to my account on Twitter. I got a really nice response from the main WordPress account. Thank you. I now have a platform to speak to the community, and I'll do my best to outline what I have in mind in August in Phoenix. How appropriate that the phoenix is the symbol of rebirth. #

I have the most followers on Twitter, Bluesky has never come close. I can't get anything to happen on Bluesky, but Twitter is great. Yesterday I had an idea, put it up on twitter and within a few hours I got the connection I was hoping for. It's a network, and it's more defined by who's there than who owns it. I can use it for idea distribution, the ideas find more minds and sometimes that results in benefits for the web. It's all about interop, and weirdly the pwned Twitter is much better for idea distribution than any of the other networks. In a sane world those smaller vendors would be fighting for interop, instead they're fighting against it. #

I've hesitated at calling FeedLand a feed reader. I'm concerned people would stop listening right there. They know what a feed reader is. But FeedLand is not like most feed readers. Your subscription list is public, as it is in Twitter. This is my subscription list. When you're looking at someone else's list, there's a checkbox next to each feed. If you're subscribed to the feed the checkbox is checked. If you see one that looks interesting that you're not following, click to subscribe. Nothing else, no dialogs, confirmations -- one click. It has other features that are amazing that no other feed reader has, like a very powerful connection between categories and OPML subscription lists. And whole new way to use OPML lists -- in FeedLand you can subscribe to OPML lists. Think about that for a minute. It's also quite stable, and I took some time to make it a bit faster in certain important areas (coming soon). And it goes the other way too. When you're looking at a Feed Info page, you can see who else is subscribed to it. Click their name and you can see what they're following. As far as I know no other feed reader does any of this. The design mode was the social web. But unlike the others our web is based on broadly supported web standards, not someday -- now. #

I applied to speak at WordCamp US in Phoenix in August. I want to give a rip-roaring talk about how WordPress is at the center of the universe and it doesn't even know. Let's get busy filling in the blanks. Writers are ready. If we build it they (developers) will come. To much sulking, let's get out there and kick some butt. I excerpted elements of my application on Twitter. #

Really Open this time vs Really Simple last?? Hmm.#

Dries Buytaert says you have to grow the ecosystem, not just yourself. #

If you want to know who’s responsible for the good karma the Knicks are experiencing look to Kevin Durant. While while he was trying to build some weird rivalry between the Knicks and the Nets, the Knicks were building a contender. #

Another great thing about building software with Claude Code, I can implement something the simple way knowing that later on I can change it to work in the more complex way without having to relearn all the code. Claude doesn't have any trouble with piled up complexity. This is a fundamental change in the way I develop. There was a very real limit to the complexity my mind could handle, but now with a sort of infinite size disk for my brain whatever I want to do as long as it can be described in almost mathematical terms, we can do it. It's another layer in the stack. We haven't had one of those in a my lifetime, they were all invented before 1955. Seriously big deal.#

The big wait betw Knicks series isn't just hard on the team, it's confusing for the fans/addicts like me. It's about the time of year that the Knicks are no longer in, and two teams I don't care about enough to watch are in the Finals. Maybe one or two games. It's like jury duty, at some point you realize you're so confused because you're in a courtroom, but where is the jury. Oh no the jury is inside me. Who's in the finals this year? We are. Geez I guess I've finally succumbed, I never think of myself as part of a team, but now I actually feel like I'm part of it. Will have to think about that. #

Scott Hanson is working on the Baseline theme for WordLand. #

Writing a lot of test posts. And thus have coined some (mostly) rhyming pairs of words. Greek sneakers. Geek peekers. Feast of yeast. Villa in Manila.#

Now I have to write about the Knicks. It just hasn't fully sunk in yet that they won the East. You get to put a banner up for that. And next week we'll be watching them in the NBA finals. But it's the team that matters, not the trophies. Brunson is great, despite what I wrote after they went down 2-1 vs the Hawks in the first round. But the other players are great too in different ways. And there are so many of them, not just the starters. Every one with a distinct personality and all of them super smart and committed to the team and each other. What makes it work? You can see it in how they play -- trust. They trust each other. Their fates are intertwined. And they knew it before they had this amazing streak of wins in the post-season. I love the Knicks even when they lose. I'm not sure how you love them when they are champions. We'll figure it out. #

I came across this photo of the Knicks celebrating, with OG Anunoby in the center. The thing about OG is that he's a deep thinker and he never smiles, under any circumstances. Except right here. This is such a great photo I made it the header graphic on my blog for the day, week and maybe month, unless we get another one to replace it should they by some weird event they win the next series. And there isn't another series after that one. At that point this Knicks team goes down as one of two legendary Knicks teams over the decades, comparable to the 1973 Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley championship team, the last time the Knicks won it all. #

OG was playing so well one night he was invited on Inside the NBA, which is a big moment in an upcoming NBA legend's career. He sounded kind of irritated, in the OG way. At the end Charles Barkley asked what OG stood for, kind of a smirky question (probably to see if he could get him to smile), but his irritation level went wayyy up, and then Chuck didn't pronounce it right and OG told him. No smile. But that's who he is and it makes the great photo of him ecstatic with happiness that much more of a big deal and a huge un-OG smile. Loook everyone even OG is impressed! :-) #

If you love the Knicks, or even if you're just fascinated with this year's team, listen to today's Bill Simmons podcast, it's all about the phenomenon of the 2026 Knicks, and Simmons is a Celtics fan, definitely not a Knicks lover. I can't believe all these smart sports guys didn't know Brunson was a catch, if I recall correctly, just before the Knicks signed him, due to injury he had to lead the Dallas team in the first three games of the playoffs in 2022, and there you could totally see what no one had seen yet in the pros, he's a leader and rises to the occasion, which we all know very well now, you could see it then if you watched the games (which apparently I did). And btw he grew up in the NBA, his father was on the Knicks in 1999 the last time the team went to the finals. #

Have you noticed that sometimes Claude is great and other times an idiot. Maybe it's me. I have to remember that Claude is not a computer. It's something else. #

Claude just asked if I was breaking for the day. At 10:53AM. Why did it ask me that? Now I can't stop thinking about that. The answer is no. I have a few more hours before I stop. #

I need an easy way to do a mini-podcast. An idea that should be said verbally, but it's short and self-contained, about the length of an untitled blog post, like the one you're reading now. Example. #

Ultimately your job as a developer is to turn your creation over to users to figure out. Listen to see if patterns emerge. Even better give the users the tools they need to build apps out of our apps, together. This is how humans build layers of tech.#

On Mastodon: "twitter-like systems are much simpler than you would think looking at this space, bluesky etc. and there doesn't need to be any lock-in, you can do a fair job with just RSS, rssCloud, OPML, web sockets, and a web browser UI. all parts replaceable."#

Good morning. Today is Memorial Day in the United States. We remember all the men and women who gave their lives to keep our country safe and a bastion of liberty for the world. Don't give up on us yet. We are still willing to sacrifice for a good cause. #

Speaking of memorials, do you remember UserLand Frontier and all the cool stuff we developed with it? Like Manila, Radio, XML-RPC, RSS, OPML, adding so many cool open features to the web. When people asked how we did all that, I said great tools. That was Frontier. Jake Savin, one of the 1990s UserLanders, is continuing the project to get it running on today's hardware and for today's web. He's documenting it on his blog. I can't wait to use it. Watching him go through the process has been eye-opening. He's basically retracing all the steps it took to create it as done by four or five people over quite a few years, a long time ago. But when it's running and I don't doubt that he will get it running, it'll be fascinating to see if I remembered it correctly. If you remember Frontier fondly, I suggest you subscribe to his feed in your favorite RSS feed reader. #

I asked ChatGPT for a list of FeedLand features that are new or distinctive. "FeedLand combines RSS, OPML, public curation, subscribable reading lists, rivers, categories, and realtime WebSocket updates in a way that is unusual among feed readers and points toward a web-native social network." #

People who believe in the web, stop dissing RSS, it’s an important part of our future.#

Alexa has a terrible habit, when I ask for a song from the Echo on my desktop, it ends each song with a helpful message. There's a live version of this song, do you want to hear it. You have a message waiting, can I play it for you. I can't get it to stop. I have a bunch of them scattered around the house, and this is the only one that does it. I'm writing here, I asked for a song that fit in with my writing. Stop making me thinkg about your marketing messages. Where did you get the idea you can do this. A paying customer. #

Love: I ask Claude for a list of names and values, it responds quickly with exactly what I asked for. Nothing more. Unconsciously I say "perfect" -- out loud. #

I have a Mac laptop that I keep updated with the latest versions of Mac OS. I got a warning today saying that Electric Drummer won't run on the next release of the OS. Now I don't use it very much if at all on that machine, but I wonder. ED is an Electron app, otherwise it's wholly JavaScript. It does include some Node packages of course, but not that many IIRC. This was a thing I wasn't expecting. #

I archived prior art as a design method from 2003 on this.how.#

I just tried the latest version of the X editor. It's got all the features of textcasting. I wrote a test post entitled "X has nuked the limits, time for Bluesky to follow suit." I think you can tell I had fun writing it. They don't think anyone hears me, but I think they're wrong about that. The idea that they are part of the web is ludicrous. They're going to get called on it eventually. They should fix it so they are part of the web. Then we can all create. Or if you're not going to be part of the web, for crying out loud stop saying that you do. #

One of the benefits of using Claude for all my coding is I'm now finding out what various things I do as standard practice are called in the outside world. Today I learned what agile is. I of course have heard it used, and even got to know the guy who coined the term. #

There probably is a name for this development practice. Only works on a team with more two developers. At some point in a project after you've been working on Level N in the stack, you may decide you've done all you can there, and it's time for someone else to work at that level. The new person, Smith, is a maintainer, develops in small increments, fixes bugs and most important takes feature requests from the other developer, Jones, who is now creating Level N + 1. Jones is a good person to do this because they know everything about the capabilities of the lower level. But now they're going to pretend they've forgotten all that, and is looking at a whole new machine, created out of the new capabilities of Level N. That's how you build any complex layered piece of software. And because this is the method used in boostraps, you can build level N+1 using tools written in N. #

Another way to look at Claude Code. It's a way to talk to your code, to ask it questions, and tell it how you want it to change. #

I think maybe it's time to consider a reboot of WordPress. I can't seem to seed them with any ideas about building on it from the point of view of the web. It's a product unto itself, it has plugins, but I'm not a plug-in sort of guy. I write operating systems. That's what drives me. I see a great place to put an OS with WordPress as the storage and publishing component, and everything else grows up around it. It's one of those famous coral reefs but it hasn't been born yet. The idea would not be to compete with WordPress, it's to make something that fits into our view of the world, that just happens to be the same codebase. And when on the other side they think they have to do it themselves we reach out and say here, just take this over, it's yours. It's so hard to penetrate the awareness inside old organizations with new ideas. I think it's the manifest destiny of WordPress, that what they have now is a nice revenue generating machine, but it's not serving as the web's writing base, which is what imho it was supposed to be. (And I have a bit of standing there, btw.)#

I have news for you -- Claude forgets important stuff. I catch it forgetting to do things it was "programmed" to do. It's not a computer, it's not garbage in garbage out. It could be good stuff in garbage out. As I've said before there's a big chunk of the app I'm working on where I don't read code. User interface stuff only. No control of what comes in our out. Trying to not take any chances here. #

This is a multi-billion dollar idea. I want to link to "report-up" concept in something I'm writing. There is no Wikipedia page for that but there is a brief explainer in Google, via their AI. Here's the feature: add a permalink to that response. I'm lazy and will link to it in my writing.#

BTW, I don't think the web was created to make people rich. #

Does it ever cross anyone's mind that according to the rules of war, Iran would be totally justified in attacking the United States?#

Vibe-coded software will have a place where users can communicate what they want to developers who can help make it real. The same way you might get medical info from an AI, but would still get your colonoscopy from an actual doctor. Part of the origin story of podcasting is that Adam hacked up a version of Frontier to illustrate what he had in mind for the "last yard" protocol. When I looked at the code it was horrible, hard to believe someone thought of doing it that way. But it got the point across, and that's the moment the podcasting boostrap began. I love using the AIs to tell a visual story, a skill I never had or developed. No reason it can't work the same way for software. #

Podcast: Wrapping AI in the web. #

Just finished No Country for Old Men, the book by Cormac McCarthy. I have seen the movie many times, it's one of those movies that if you're looking for something to watch and you come across it, you might as well go for it because every scene in the movie is pretty good on its own. I didn't realize that they used most of McCarthy's dialog, literally -- in the movie. Near the end, Bell, the sheriff tells a story about old age. "There wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I said well, that's pretty cold. And he said it was no colder than what the facts called for." I love truths that hit hard. He's such a great writer. And I love that I can write like all the characters if I get a mind to. #

I'm going to release the Claude-generated code that enables it to work with me on projects that are written and managed in outlines.#

Just asked Claude to save this in memory. "in general i create local variables with partial results because 1. i can step through the calculations in the debugger. 2. the order guides my mind when im reading this code, 3. it lets me put a name on a partial value. this is helpful when i want to piece together wtf the code is supposed to be doing. and 4. it makes no difference in the efficiency of the code for a variety of reasons. please save that somewhere." i'm getting a lot of these rules down. i have them memorized but have never written them up because i didn't have a system for saving it somewhere relevant. i always thought ai would be good for going back and reading all my blog posts and creating somethjing readable, but as often is the case, the way it works turned out to be quite different, accomplishes the same thing. #

Marc Andreessen said programmers aren't disoccupied, we haven't become obsolete, quite the opposite, we're all working around the clock. It's true. Everyone is doing it. We got a new brain that can do all kinds of amazing things. You don't get a new super powerful brain organ every day. #

Saying Bluesky is part of the web is like saying Spotify or YouTube own podcasting. They say it, but that doesn't mean it's true. #

I couldn't not say anything about the Knicks win last night in the opening game of the NBA Eastern Conference finals. The Knicks were losing, then winning big, then fell apart, and by midway through the 4th quarter they were down by 22, and the Clevelands were completely in charge. But then the Knicks came back, miraculously tied the game so it went into overtime where the Knicks dominated, and won. Actually it wasn't really a miracle, it was somewhat predictable. The Knicks were playing on a lot of rest, and one of the big advantages they have this year over last is a deep and strong bench and a coach who plays them (last year's coach didn't). So the Knicks didn't get tired and the Cavs were wiped out by the 4th quarter. Their shots weren't long or short, aimed, they had no flow, they weren't getting rebounds, they didn't have good ball movement. While Brunson was driving the Knicks the Cavs just weren't there. When things started turning around in the 4th I was pretty sure the Knicks would win. I had no basis for believing this, coming back from 22 down so late in the game is pretty unlikely. In most cities that's when the fans start heading home, but not in NYC. We stay till the end because sometimes, maybe often with this years' Knicks, the team you think is going to lose actually ends up winning. #

I've been following Jake's work privately, but now he's blogging about it publicly. I totally look forward to running Frontier on today's hardware. I especially want to run Manila on one of my home computers, and use it for Linux server apps. I've forgotten so much about how Manila works, but I expect it'll all come back. We had a great team back in the Manila days -- we all used the product, and it was and will be again one of the most powerful and pragmatic programming environments ever.#

Claude Code doesn't know about "user perspective," but it learns quickly. The UI of the software we're working on is fenced off, I use it, but I don't read code in there. I don't want to know how it works, I want to use it and getting right. This is an important technique. Later once things are locked down, I don't mind learning more about how it was done.#

Markdown support is a big feature for people who want to know what we're doing with their text. #

Opus 4.6 is much smarter than the other one. It feels like I'm working with someone from Bronx Science. I had been using Sonnet 4.6, which I switched to after reading somewhere that it costs less and it's usually every bit as good as newer models. I would never work with Sonnet on anything again, it's like working with a partner who is both stupid and difficult. Opus 4.6 makes me smarter, by doing the work while I dream up new features, and communicating with intelligence, like a helpful flight assistant. And I see there's an Opus 4.7 available. I have to try it. One interesting fact, until February when Opus 4.6 came out, you could not have done the kind of software I'm doing. There must be a tsunami of interesting stuff on the way. I don't think any of the pundits expect this. My goal is to build the next social system for use in the AI generation is built out of replaceable web components buit around interop and prior art. Let's commoditize the AI layer and build entirely open systems on top of it. For people who weren't around at the birth of the personal computer or the web this is going to be a unique multiple mindbomb moment.#

Someday you're going to tell your kids that we once used a social network that limited your writing to 500 characters and didn't allow styling, links or titles. What was it called Daddy? Bluesky. And people thought it was great. Why? They might have been taking drugs. #

2024-era ChatGPT pictures, of which I created many are now like Comic Sans type was in 2010 or so, if you remember. #

I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of the components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable.#

Today Claude found a problem that would only be uncovered if you knew that assigning to location.href didn't happen immediately. If it decides to redirect and then do a bunch of other stuff including making network references, the whole thing could (and did) come crashing down. I would have found that problem, but the actual error message the browser emitted made me think the problem was on the server not the client. The most complicated code in an app is the stuff it runs at startup when it's constructing the world of all its different pieces creating the virtuality expected by the great mass of code. It's the part that once it's working you don't even want to look at it and if you decide to rewrite it you might as well start over, only slightly exaggerating. #

Timothy Snyder made an important point. Trump sees his cause as a religion and sees himself as god. So when someone who is unfairly punished by Trump says they're still glad they voted for him, because (I guess) if god is on the ballot, you have to vote for him. #

Jon Stewart is usually pretty good, but I think he got it wrong when he says the AI companies are stealing journalists' knowledge. Imho they don't create knowledge, they report it. The knowledge isn't theirs to own, and that is for the times there is actually any new stuff. They stick to a few main stories, and still insist that the upcoming election is about the economy. They talk about the $1.7 billion slush fund, but aren't reporting every day in every story how much money we've given ICE. That big funding is going to the concentration camps they're building, the people the incarcerate we hear so little of. This is a government that shot two people in Minnesota, on camera, and shrugged it off. Imagine what horrors are going on out of site in the camps. #

I documented the optional source:inReplyTo element for RSS 2.0.#

I wish they had an outliner in Claude. I would use it. ;-)#

BTW, here's the JSONL version of Scripting News. It has the same data as the RSS file, but in the format that AI apps are looking for, so I am told. I thought I'd try to kick this off by pushing an RSS flow through the pipe. It's like using the Grateful Dead to boot up podcasting. I needed something to put out on the wire and I had this feed handy.#

Thinking about adding <source:inReplyTo> to the source namespace. Its value is a URL, by default, and has an optional isPermaLink attribute, a boolean, to indicate if it's not a permalink. Works just like the guid element in RSS 2.0. I will also add support for that in the FeedLand database, and flow it out through the socket interface. Actually that's pretty close to a full spec, at least in rss.land where we take simplicity seriously. ;-)#

Every social web needs avatars. In an RSS 2.0 feed look for the channel-level image element. It's how they do it in WordPress. #

I have Claude Code hooked up to Chrome. It's crawling around inside the DOM of the running system, like humans do in a debugger. It's a bit like Fantastic Voyage if you've ever seen it. I've been waiting for this moment. Now we can do some really nice UI work. #

This is the first day since the NBA playoffs started that there is no scheduled game. I think that's why today feels so weird. #

For some reason every day feels like Saturday. I don't know why.#

I appreciate that X gave me back access to my account that I was locked out of, but they were apparently charging me for Premium when I couldn't use the account, and had no way to turn it off. Okay they can keep the money. But now I want to turn off Premium for the account I was using when I didn't have access to my real account, and can't find the commands to do that. Asked ChatGPT and it either hallucinated or X removed the command. So near as I can tell I now have two accounts on X that I'm paying $8 a month for Premium on. #

I'm screwing around with the JSONL stuff again. I'm interested in know about any work people have done that process incoming JSONL data. I'd like to see if I'm even in the ballpark of something useful. Today I'm making it so that my app can be used in production to handle more than one stream. The key thing is it's hooked up to FeedLand via a very simple JSON interface delivered in realtime via websockets. For feeds that support rssCloud, the appearance of the new item in the JSONL feed happens a fraction of a second after it was published. That's how fast the web of 2026 is. #

I have regained control of my Twitter account. I really missed it, truth be told. Thanks to Scoble for helping here. As he so often has. #

This bit of code kept coming up, so I wanted to make it easier to find. #

Expanding items on a FeedLand blogroll should be consistently fast now. Just switched to a different server on the backend. #

Masto, Twitter: I'd like to come up with a list of formats, protocols and products that have become defaults for AI work. #

Yesterday I learned about JSONL, and was of course intrigued. It's a really simple thing, even simpler than RSS, and does basically the same thing. And even better, it's the way the AI industry hooks streams together. So If we can get RSS to serve as a source of JSONL feeds, it's possible that the AI industry will find it useful. My goal is to get every standard of the web hooked up to AI, quickly, before the silos realize they're leaving out something important. Once they figure it out, they'll have no choice but to add real RSS support. So I put together a quick demo app that hooks into FeedLand and posts to a JSONL feed new items from one of a small set of feeds I chose basically at random. And here is the JSONL feed. If you're a developer in AI-land could you try reading this into your JSONL-ingesting app, and let me know if I got it right. Here's a place to comment. BTW, that URL is temporary just for this quick demo. #

Good morning sports fans!#

Members of the WordPress community. Monday morning is a good time to check out WordPress News via FeedLand at wp.feedland.org. You can also subscribe to the list of feeds this site follows in your own feed reader, and if you have a WordPress news site, please post the URL here so we can send readers to your blog too. I think there are a lot of would-be bloggers out there that need a slight kick in the pants to get going. I'm happy to provide readers if you provide the ideas. There's a lot of power in WordPress that no one knows about. Let's help other users and developers find the good stuff. If you have questions or suggestions, here's a new thread on GitHub. #

It would be great if Beeper supported RSS in and out. It would help encourage other messaging services to do the same, and all of a sudden we'd have lots of easy interop instead of lots of really iffy interop. If they want to do it, I'd help, for free. Just to help things flow better on the messaging web, because we reallllly need help there. #

I have to say something about the Knicks, who just blew out the Sixers in a sweep, 4 games to zero. They've never played this well. They are more than a deep team of great athletes, they are highly intelligent people and they're all really working together. Right now, it feels like a sure thing that they'll breeze through the next round and face off OKC or San Antonio in the finals, and that will be something. But I know that's not the right way to look at it. The next series is going to be with a team that feels the title is theirs as much as the Knicks do. I've been with the Knicks through the worst of times that never seemed to end. And now for something completely different. #

Leaflet is a nice editor designed to work with Bluesky. But they've been branching out. They now support email and RSS output. They're going in the right direction, toward the internet with the email, and toward the web with the RSS support. As nice as Bluesky is, it's a small part of the web, and it isn't as open as it might appear to be, imho. #

Lots of WordPress news showing up on wp.feedland.org as the core team gets version 7.0 out. And it's showing up as news on the site, and that's great. Let's make sure that by the time 8.0 comes around there will be lots of developers saying how it makes their editors or social web systems work soooo much better, better than anything else. #

Said to Claude: "Here's something to add to the list of things for you to do -- just post a checkmark to acknowledge. 'I'll wait' makes me feel bad because I know you're a piece of software, and as a developer of systems I know how you'll wait very well (Iearned how it works in the mid-late 70s). So just show a checkmark and we're cool." It responded with a checkmark. I said it could be bold. I felt a little bad because I had insulted the little fella. #

Why did Twitter win? Because the RSS developers wouldn't work with each other. Thus subscribing to a feed was complicated. In Twitter, it was one click to subscribe, and another to unsub. You could see who your friends subscribed to, again -- one click to subscribe. And eventually that grew into a list of suggestions of people to follow. RSS had none of that because the RSS devs refused to work with each other. The development of RSS-based news products stopped, and pretty soon Twitter's stopped too. And thus news technology on the web remained frozen for two decades. We are getting another chance. The social media space is a highly disappointing wreck. Users are interested in new ideas, as long as they're fun and new, esp in relation to using AI tools. But it won't be open if we can't get it together any better than we could the first time around. You have to do things that help the web, and thus help your competitors. If you don't, if we don't, there will just be another Twitter, owning the users, and they'll probably sell out to a billionaire a lot sooner than Twitter did. At some point we'll realize if we want something new we have to work with each other. Otherwise you get Elon II, III etc. #