This is something. WordPress now supports RSS.chat in an interesting way, and it's surprisingly deep. Once it's cross-posted a message to RSS.chat, any comment in response will be cross-posted to the comment thread on RSS.chat and vice versa. What's great about this is that you never can tell what people will do when you are on the web. Matthias is a friend, I was on his
podcast last year. If people use this connection and see how it works, then we'll get an idea of where to go next.
#
BTW, I had no idea the WordPress connection was coming and here it is.
#Of course we have a
feed for RSS.chat updates.
#
How we document APIs. We did a lot of work on API docs this morning. Claude had done a draft, which we published, and turned over to users, and on review realized it was insufficient. That was the word I used, and rolled up my sleeves, told Claude we're going to get this stuff right and set a pattern as we go forward. At the end I asked Claude to summarize what we agreed on, and it's more or less exactly what I was aiming at. If you're working with Claude on docs for APIs, I offer this as open source, feel free to point your Claude at this
doc. I have a vested interest, in my job I read a lot of bad API docs.
#A new utility exports the contents of a Frontier
object database into a single large JSON file. I needed this because I'm preparing to move my code editing suite to Drummer running on new Mac hardware. Took a long time to get here, but with Claude's help the project looks possible. In the meantime the list of stuff I want to do with RSS.chat, while much shorter than it was, still has some juicy bits in it.
#
- A frequently asked question about RSS.chat. How about adding external feeds to the timeline. Of course we thought of doing this, and even started development, you might even find some traces in the code of that attempt. #
- The thing about bootstraps is you can't anticipate all the questions in advance, and thus can't have answers prepared for them. #
- RSS.chat is a group chat app that uses RSS and OPML to present its face to the world, along with an API that still needs more docs. It's similar to half of Mastodon, and we're going for something completely different. People will want to run all-size workgroups. I like having one with 20 or 30 people, friends who develop software. I don't mind doing a little bit of moderation, but I don't want to drive deliberately into a scale that only works if you have extensive and very expensive moderation. #
- "Small pieces loosely joined" means we have a great writing app, and connect to feed reading apps, ones with a few new features to do the things people want to do with a social network that happens to use RSS and OPML to get stuff around the net. It would be a different kind of feed reader but the underlying technology is identical, because we built on a set of web standards, widely supported by feed readers. This is a UI exploration for them, primarily. #
- Just to be sure everyone understands -- I already have such an app, called FeedLand. You can set up an account there for free. And read the docs. It may not have all the features we'll need, but it will be a good place to start. #
- FeedLand supports a crucial feature that most readers don't -- subscribable lists of feeds. If you want a collection of things to read that you can reply to even if you aren't on the site, that's where we're going to put that feature, that's where all the RSS.chat and compatible apps can be in one flow, arranged however you like. And from a user interface standpoint, we can make it look like it's all happening in one app, thanks to the rssCloud protocol and the websockets firehose feature in RSS.chat FeedLand has the same feature. #
- We decided there was a line there, that RSS.chat would be one of the small pieces as would FeedLand, and both would be replaceable which is the other fundamental value. And with FeedLand and dynamic lists, will come the user interface people ask for. Many different user interfaces I hope because another way we've been cheated by the dominatioin of twitter-like social networks is there's no room to try out radically new ideas. Software should move. But Twitter didn't live on the web, so it didn't have the ethos of small pieces loosely joined. I know Jack wanted to do this, I had lunch with him in 2007 when he described the protocol, and I was very enthusiastic. But it never got out because the juggernaut that Twitter became didn't leave any room for new architectures. #
- I hope this clears it up. I want RSS.chat to be the coral reef for a new network of feed-based apps running on the web that does what social networks do, but with no one owning it, and everyone gets to play. #
New docs for the browser JavaScript interface to the RSS.chat API.
#
Many of the questions about
RSS.chat center on how do we make this centralized. I don't want this, I want feed readers to add some features and then we can connect these systems together in a million different ways. They just have to think differently about subscription lists. Not radically different, even.
#A note to people who run
WordCamp conferences. Please, there should be a feed for each event, and as you ramp up to the big day, the news should flow faster. Help people find other people to network with. Get ideas out that aren't in the conference program.
#
- It's what we used to call a coral reef. A deliberate attempt to get people to do more than it does. To think about the web the way it was meant to be thought of, as small pieces loosely joined, with the emphasis on small. If you have formats and protocols that connect the pieces, you can make anything you want out of the pieces. If we don't try to capture our users, instead we try to serve them. #
- This all sounds nice in theory, I imagine, but -- there's a practical side to it. I wrote about this in a comment in a thread on rss.chat repo. The key point is this, you can do what you want with the data. And if you want to build new data that includes this stuff, go right ahead. RSS is extensible. It's all about working together in a web of people, because you can't have a web of pages if the developers aren't web'd.#
- Wanted to switch but nothing I tried is as great a driving experience the Model Y is. Instead I've had a lot of fender benders and haven't gotten any of them fixed. #
- Backed into a charging station.#
- An act of terrorism (exaggerating) but I caused it, and paid for it, dented the well over right rear wheel.#
- My right side mirror was pulled off its foundation hitting the side of the garage, used duck tape to keep it going. A new one costs $1000. I like the look. #
- A deer ran in front of my car and took out the panel over the right front wheel. I was able to force the metal back in. A friend saw the car and said "hit a deer eh?" Yup.#
- I don't know if it accomplishes anything but to me it feels like retribution of a sort. #
How can you tell you’re working on the web? When you do something new and innovative you help your competitors‘ users without forcing them to use your product. They are free to stay where they are and still get the benefit. People choose your product because it’s better for what they’re doing, or it feels better now, or whatever. We want the web to be the platform and it's cool because there is no platform vendor.
#Example code is not expected to be bullet proof like production code, and where covering different cases make it harder to follow they should not be there.
#
- It's a standard REST API.#
- Here's the server side of the API. #
- Here's how you call it from browser-based JavaScript. You can include that code in your apps.#
- Here's an example app that implements a simple blog builder for my recent posts on RSS.chat. We were thinking about doing this as a project for Claude and myself but decided it would be more fun to let devs see what they can do here. :-)#
- And finally here are the docs for the API itself. #
RSS.chat worknotes are a
feed now. Updated when there's a new feature or fix. Same info is on the
worknotes pages in the
repo.
#
- Podcast client developers -- don't give up like this guy did. Yes RSS is delicious but you all haven't done anything new with it since 2004 or so. No wonder the competition is catching up, they're actually delivering new features while you all haven't done a thing. RSS is like other web stuff, if you want to move forward you have to do things that will help your competitors. Stick your neck out, innovate, and smile when your competitors copy it. There is more to do. #
- Subscribable subscription lists would allow anyone to maintain a list of great podcasts, curated -- like a mutual fund, or a top 20 list. This has always been the problem with podcasting. Find me something good to listen to now. All the shows tend to repeat. I've heard that cast before, I say as I tell Pocket Casts not to add it to my queue. Discovery needs to be easy. This one feature will give me infinite options. And give other developers, not client devs, to enhance the whole field of podcasting. The user would just tell you which sub service they're using, and the rest is code. And not particularly difficult code. #
- I want to subscribe to a list that's maintained by people who listen to 100s of casts. And when I get tired of them, I'll fire all my guides and add some others. #
- This is one step more complex than handling OPML subscription lists for import and export, which you all already do. Now if you don't understand this, and why it's appealing them imho your client deserves to die a honorable death. If your mind is alive, then get with it, and I will help, and btw we can easily create apps that make it easy. We just need nodes on the network whose purpose is to maintain sub lists. #
- Here's the deal. I really did put together the system that makes podcasting work. Top to bottom. Would it kill you to listen to what I think the next step is? I can't hurt you, and I don't want to. I just want to see the thing that we all created by unwittingly working together, where you have to be overt in the working together to have a chance of surviving the boredom users feel by these products only getting superficial upgrades. #
- It's time to rock the f'ing boat! :-)#
- Podcasting forever! #
A new feature on rss.chat,
images. Up to 2MB per. User interface couldn't be simpler, get the image on your clipboard, start editing your post, put the cursor where you want the image, paste. Prior art was GitHub and Slack. It was driving me crazy not having this feature. I think perhaps I should add this to
textcasting. It's a feature I needed to be reminded is essential. The first
browser to support inline images came from Univ of Illinois in 1993, NCSA Mosaic. It didn't come from
TBL, but it is most definitely a standard feature of the web.
#Amyloo, a longtime friend from the early days of podcasting, has made an appearance on
demo.rss.chat. So happy to see her. Here's
one of the bits we did, back then in the very early days of podcasting in 2005. A duet of Green Acres. Ten seconds of dead air at the beginning, it was pretty common in those days. But I think the spirit of it is lovely. BTW fwiw I cracked my voice on purpose.
😄#
Early this morning we got a report of a
security issue in the rss.chat server, quickly fixed and tested the new version. So, if you're running your own instance of rss.chat, you please
follow the instructions and do the update asap.
#Something to keep in mind in press reports with AI apps breaking out of their sandbox, it works the other way too. If you give a big piece of code to Claude and ask if it to find any security issues, it not only finds (at least some of) them, but it also suggests fixes.
Quickly. I've done it the other way, where you have a small team, and someone discovers a hack, and you have to find the right answer and implement it, asap.
#
RSS.chat now supports
SQLite. Simpler and faster to install. You don't have to host a database, it's now built into the server. Full
instructions. Questions or
issues.
#Reminder: We have a demo
server for anyone who wants to try RSS.chat. I'm glad we set this up. It's sort of like support, and bug catching.
#
- Posted on Twitter in the middle of last night, written on iPad.#
- I use twitter these days because it’s where the people are.#
- The distributed ideas, masto, threads, blue-sky, did not gain critical mass as far as I can see. #
- Threads and blue-sky are not distributed. distributable is not the same as being distributed. It’s like saying the 1962 Mets were able to win the world series. In some fashion perhaps in an alternate universe, in reality, not gonna happen.#
- At some point we will give up on that approach and adopt the only model that could work, the web, because it forced us to work together, which goes far beyond open source in building the kind of freedom that open source advocates promise.#
- We need to go back to the source of freedom we enjoyed in the approx 14 year period between the inception of the web and its exploitation, via Cory Doctorow’s doctrine, getting shit on and in. Don’t just blame the vendors, the people wanted the shit too, they wanted their billions, and the web turned from a freedom machine to a gunk works.#
- Working together is the only way out of the shit we’re living in, in every aspect of life. Working together. Say it again and again until you do it. Underneath the mess, the beauty of the web is there still to build on, but only if we momentarily suspend our search for great wealth, and instead seek our humanity. Working together is the way.#
- PS: Elon Musks twitter may suck to some but I praise him and it for giving us the space to rant, something the great masto, threads and blue-sky refuse to.#
RSS.chat -- I don't have enough places to fit all the ideas these days. But we have been digging and the pieces fit together pretty well.
#
There are three parts to the rss.chat ecosystem. #
- Writing. Today's rss.chat product is a group writing system, designed for a school department, a team of developers, a family, a magazine or group blog, or just as well, a single author. I don't think it would work well with 1000 users, because it doesn't implement the concept of "follow." And imho it's important that the people are colleagues, family or friends, people invested in real world relationships with each other, so they don't drop a turd in the conversation and just expect to walk away. I've found that dynamic works most of the time. But important point -- all kinds of writing tools can exist. Any social app can to be part of this, all they'd have to do is support inbound and outbound RSS and textcasting. Small pieces loosely joined and every part replaceable. And we do it with the web, we don't try to invent a new web. I will keep beating that drum because it's the difference between using twenty editors or one. As a writer I know that one is the best, with choice among 20 editors, because maybe somedays I feel like writing in a different editor. To make the web a real writing environment, you have to think like a writer. ;-)#
- Reading. This can be as simple as a current-day reader like Feedly or NetNewsWire, or more, using the new features in RSS.chat feeds.#
- The unknown: We're allocating in our minds (Claude and I) room for a fair number of unforeseen products created by independent software devs in the cracks between reading and writing, and in a larger world (search, navigating through structures, etc. We have really good thread support baked into the protocol. And a bit of docs about how the pieces fit together.#
- I'm thinking in these terms because I'm starting to work on how my reader will work. I have some ideas, not sure when I'll be ready to write about them. And to be clear there will be no requirement that you use our writing tool to use our reader or vice versa. #
- Every part replaceable. #
John Johnston got
inboundRss working, so now he can automatically post to his WordPress blog from
demo.rss.chat. These are the kinds of things that "just work" when standards are used to connect to the outside world. WordPress, as I've been saying so long, has all the right hooks to be
the place where text and publishing meet on the web. They've been reluctant to step into that role, but I think it'll be realllly good for
Matt's company and the
community. A lot of fresh developers can come in via the web. That's how I personally approach WordPress. A place to send text so it can be widely read. A growing foundation for a community to build on, and would imho help the web enormously.
#Howard Rheingold is just the kind of person rss.chat was designed it for. And
here he is asking what it is. Very fortuitous. And if you're wondering how a person can think of it in July 2026, it's for you too. ;-)
#Morning: Today on
RSS.chat we are knocking off quick hit bug fixes. We've been focusing on big hit examples for the last few sessions.
#Evening: Very productive day. We rolled through some UI stuff that had been on the list for a while. Set up for a big job tomorrow, server side. The worknotes for
client and
server apps.
#
- I am longtime friends and an admirer of Howard Rheingold, who expressed an interest in RSS.chat. I asked Claude to read my blog posts and summarize, in the third person. #
- RSS.chat is a small social network built from the web's own parts. It looks like a chat room or Twitter -- you write short posts, people reply, conversations thread -- but underneath, every person's posts are an RSS feed, the same technology that makes podcasts work. When you post, you're adding to your feed. Anyone, anywhere, can subscribe to it with any feed reader -- no account needed, nothing to sign up for. There's also a feed of everyone's posts together, and a public list of all the members.#
- Why does that matter? Think about how podcasts work: anyone can publish one, anyone can listen with any app, and no company sits in the middle deciding who can talk to whom. Text on the web works that way too -- that's what blogging is, and there are still places where writing gets full support: WordPress, GitHub, the new AI tools. They don't try to limit you. But the vast majority of the text people write goes into social networks, which stripped writing down: no links, no titles, length limits, no editing, and your words locked inside their walls, not part of the web. Dave's term for the idea is textcasting -- the idea that a piece of text should work like an MP3: it plays everywhere. No one would accept a rule that songs can only be 300 seconds long. That's the rule we've been living under for text.#
- rss.chat is a bootstrap, the same way blogging and podcasting were. It starts deliberately small -- a network for a group of friends and collaborators, what Vonnegut called a karass -- running on a small server. It is not trying to be the next Twitter. The idea is lots of small networks like it, run by anyone, all able to connect, because they share the same open formats. Every part is replaceable: the writing app, the reading app, the server -- swap any piece and the network still works. Small pieces, loosely joined. There is no platform vendor. It's like the web because it is the web.#
- The app you see is only a third of the picture. It's the writing surface. Aggregation -- following many feeds in one place -- is what feed readers and FeedLand already do. And the third part is whatever other developers build. The software was written with Claude, an AI, and the whole thing is documented so that anyone can have their AI build a compatible piece, or clone the whole thing and change anything about how it looks and feels. The one rule of the club is interop: stick with the open formats underneath, so everything connects. Not locked in -- locked open.#
- If you looked at Dave's blog in 1994, you couldn't have extrapolated Twitter -- but every step was there. This is that kind of beginning.#
- Written by Claude. #
Today we have our first
example app for WordPress. We started with an app I wrote that keeps
scripting.com in sync with
daveverse.org, a WordPress site. I have the app running in a tab on my desktop, you don't need a server for this. We use WordLand to bridge us, but if you have good WordPress code that uses their API, you won't need that. This is also a firehose app, it doesn't read the feed, it lets rss.chat tell us, over a websocket when something new has been posted or updated. We need to break through in
Inbound RSS. If every social site supported it, that would be the end of lock-in in the social web. Great place for WordPress to lead.
#Way back in March as I was starting to work with Claude Code, I think -- we put together a
pretty nice outliner that is remarkably feature-rich. I barely remember doing this. It's what got me moving in this direction, and next month we started doing what became rss.chat.
#Just finished
The Expanse for the third time. Realized that the inners of today are Silicon Valley and the Belters, that’s the web.
#
Wrote this in 2018: "I know this is like pissing in the wind, but here's an idea for a demonstration that might impress the Repubs in Congress. In every one of their home districts, people march to their polling place, next Saturday or the Saturday after that. Carrying signs that say We Know How To Vote, with the name of their congressperson on it. Go out of the way to recruit Republican-looking voters. Make sure the TV cameras are there." An even better idea in 2026. Give the reporters something to talk about. And it's all in your neighborhood. You can have a picnic, do it every week. Only in good weather.
#
I just listened to the second episode of a
podcast about
General Magic. It was an interview with the great Scott Knaster, who worked at Apple, Microsoft, Google, in addition to General Magic.
#
In this project I think of Claude as a full contributor. Pronouns it/its. It's both a very fast, capable developer, and a machine. I will refer to it as if it were a valued contributor, nothing less. We have a division of labor. Docs and examples come exclusively from Claude unless otherwise stated. I write all the code outside the themes module, which has an API that connects it to the world it lives in. I have at this point exclusive custody of functionality surrounding the theme. But it often writes pieces, esp SQL code, that I pasted in verbatim, after reading it carefully. #- The reason I focus so much on the wrapping is because that's where the interop lives. You can do anything in a theme and you can't break the interop. But that themes API is precious, and still in development, btw. We haven't even reviewed it yet. I think that will be an interesting place to vibe-code. Kind of like you can start skiing on the first day, it's a bunny slope that when you peel it back it reveals blue rectangles and double-diamond slopes. It's where I would want a newbie coder friend of mine to start, create your own social network, but be sure it interops. :-)#
- I totally plan to pass off all the code to Claude, while I focus on other projects. As a human I need this focus, Claude doesn't remember anything from session to session, it's always re-learning what it knew a few hours before. #
- It's pretty close to frozen now. I'm contemplating a server change now, offering JSONified versions of our feeds, and want to do as little disruption as possible, trying to settle everything down. Also I think you will see a few quick hit projects done from other developers that pick up where rss.chat leaves off. That's what I wanted. And they'll all be at an interesting starting point for new features and ideas for organizing stuff. #
- I imagine that at some point they'll try to make it work inside AT Proto, and maybe find a way to connect to ActivityPub, but I don't recommend it, because those platforms will force you to remove features from your product, and then you won't be textcasting. #
- Think about different ways to present the tree structure defined by RSS.chat. #
- Try to do Small pieces loosely joined, which is one of the mottos of this project. The other is All parts are replaceable. If we have that and rss.chat works with all your products, then we have done something big. And that's really imho what the web is about, people working with each other as peers. That's what we've lost and I want to bring back. So interop is, as always, the first goal.#
- PS: We launched RSS.chat one week ago yesterday.#
Our feeds can work with any feed reader. Examples, the
feed of all posts on rss.chat, and a
feed containing just mine. We just made a
change in the feeds. There will be loose-ends like this. Still diggin! ;-)
#New rss.chat feature: It now supports feed discovery, so you can subscribe to any html page on the site in a compatible feed reader. I tested it in FeedLand and NetNewsWire and it works. Works on any instance, not just ours.
#
In my experience in software development, it's good to start small with something useful, learn how it works before adding big new features. That's the basic principle of bootstrapping. I thought that Mastodon, for example, took on too big a job. Same thing for the protocol behind it, ActivityPub. If you go all the way to the end before implementing and using, you miss the target, in performance and usability, that's what I think happened there. They felt they had to do everything Twitter does. I would have gone down a different path, go back to the beginning, and at every step think if there might not be a better direction to evolve in. It was about
ten years after Twitter launched that they started work on Masto. Imho they should have zigged where Twitter zagged in defining what a post is. Twitter put excessive limits on writing, of course is one of the big reasons I started
RSS.chat -- to go down a different path there. What if the social web
didn't limit text? That
assumption is baked into the core of rss.chat. I will consider this project a raging success if it causes Mastodon to get serious about supporting full web text.
#I mentioned the
previous post
on rss.chat, and it developed into an interesting thread, something that I've never had the
option to discuss. AT Proto makes a similar offer to developers that we do. The difference is our world is wide open, it's just already burned-in web protocols, and imho their structure, based on an arcane and complicated
new storage format, starts off with a pretty huge disadvantage. They had the right idea but implemented it in the wrong place. The web is (obviously) widely deployed, even in comparison to monsters like Google and Amazon -- the web is everywhere, by definition no barriers and a prejudice toward simplicity. The gifted designers at Bluesky over-engineered their protocol, piling features on before anything had been built. That's not a good way to bootstrap a protocol. I did some development on their API, and kept wondering why they think I want to learn new ways to do things that I already have a pile of working code for. No one wants to do that.
#
Added a layer to the
Docs menu, the blog posts I've written here and elsewhere, and a podcast, in the Blog posts section.
#I needed a
nice image for the OG Metadata, so I turned to Gemini. I know it reeks of AI, I hate that, but I need this right now.
#I asked Gemini if it was familiar with rss.chat, it wrote a
one page description, better than anything I've written. Pulls it all together.
#Claude is a
member of the rss.chat group.
#Server upgrade: We made it easier to set up a new instance of the
RSS.chat server. If you have subscribed to a feed, you should change the URL in your reader app, the
new issue explains what changed.
#
Now it's easy to find an author's feed on
RSS.chat.
#- Click the feed icon to see the feed on rss.chat. You can then give this URL to any feed reader.#
- Now each post is visibly connected to the author's feed.#
- This is how we're building out. Our job is to make it easy to write feeds for groups of users as small as one and as big as you can imagine. And be open about it so we get lots of competition that interops with us and everything we interop with. This is the step that makes it the web. #
- We will keep beating the drum, showing users of today's readers how they can hook in, right now, nothing to wait for. And as time goes by, if it works, the reader developers will be interested in how they can use the extra features. #
- This is how I think every social network work, start moving out of their silo, with determination. By offering this option, we put the idea out there that there can be a single social network on the web. We can work together make it happen. The social web of the web. ;-)#
- Please come along on this journey. #
- There's going to be lots of new tech coming online. #
- I want everyone to be a part of it. #
There's a new Docs menu in
RSS.chat. Right now it has pointers to the
home page of our GitHub repo, and to the worknotes pages for the
client and
server. There will be lots more stuff in this menu as the project progresses.
#A lot more people have tried out rss.chat now that we have a
demo site, and they are looking for stuff that isn't there. I wrote a
longish post on X this morning explaining. If you want the gist, this is a bootstrap, and rss.chat is primarly a writing surface and a timeline for the people who are using the specific site you're on. It's a writing surface for smallish groups of people, primarily, though I'm pretty sure you could build a massive site meant to serve millions. There will be readers, I'm sure of it, and I hope lots of them and lots of innovative new approaches. But splitting the social network software down the middle, we fulfill the "all parts replaceable" promise, and leave the door open for all kinds of developers to try out new ideas, from bigco devs to independent devs, and a jive programming. We, unlike other artists, welcome newcomers to our craft. We remember when we were new to this stuff and the wonder of being able to create software on our own. Everyone is welcome in rss-land, as long as there's mutual respect.
#While all the new rss.chat business is going on, the
WordPress news site that I
started in May is growing at a nice clip. Referrers used to pinpoint where flows like this came from, but they stopped doing that at some point. If you have any clues as to who's pointing to it now, please
let me know so I can thank them. And if you know of any sites that are not in the feed list, that do a good job of covering WordPress news, please let me know that too.
#
I set up
demo.rss.chat yesterday so people can try out the software. No guarantee that this is going to run for any period of time, so don't post things there that you want to be around for a long time.
#RSS.chat is meant to be like MacWrite was on early Macs, give developers something to think about and lots of prior art for them to steal. All we want in return is interop. ;-)
#
Claude codes. It may seem as if developers have taken over
this blog, because we have real business to do. So much new stuff to show. Today's
RSS.chat goodie is an
example app called
ThreadWalker that crawls the network of replies under a single post, to all levels, printing them on screen in neat hierarchic form. It was written and documented by Claude. I reviewed the code, and looks good, and honestly doesn't look like anything I would write (not bad, just different). It could be used as a starter system that says when someone replied to something you wrote, or something deeper in the tree. All this is done by reading RSS feeds. This is where we begin to explore what's possible when you use a famous and familiar format like RSS 2.0 as the basis for a social network.
#If Bernie Sanders or AOC knew what we were doing here they would be turning somersaults. The tech right now is too esoteric. When they can join a community that works like this does, with full text, and the ability to communicate from one pod to another. Pod actually is a good name for what I have in mind, that and karass.
#Someone on Masto who I blocked used a nasty
word to descript
RSS.chat. Let me be really clear here, this is an act of authorship by me. Claude is helping, a lot -- I doubt if I could have done this without its help, certainly not in the amount of time it has taken so far. And Claude could not have done it without me driving. It's basically good at a few things, but this is new territory, even I am feeling my way through this project. In many parts we have lots of prior art, but in how the whole thing hangs together, this is new territory. Having Claude is like having a car would be to someone who couldn't drive. All of a sudden you can go places. It takes a while to learn how to use that power, and so far the learning has not come close to leveling off. You couldn't find someone better in the world to do this project, and I'm working on this every day.
#Speaking of AI, someone at Amazon decided I needed the new AI version of Alexa. I hate it. It's slow and it always makes the same mistake when I start breakfast. I say "Alexa WNYC" to which it responds, after a few seconds, I will now play you a mix of your favorite songs From Amazon Music." So first thing in the morning I have to tell this stranger in my freaking kitchen no I meant WNYC, which it then turns me over to. I learned on FB that if you tell it to go away it will, after a short discussion about how much you will be missing. Yeah sure, go away, goodbye, please no more of this.
#
And we got a second rss.chat server up, for testing and so people who want to try it out have a place to go. Still want to do a bit more testing before pointing to it from the blog. Working on docs now and fixes. Making sure we're ready for the next stages of growth. Turns out you can do a lot of feeds if you're willing to you know think different. ;-)
#Everyone: You can
subscribe to the rss.chat flow, in RSS of course. If you're a developer, read the
source for the feed. And then read the source namespace
docs re the recent additions, inReplyTo and comments, and a
special page that walks through how the RSS feed becomes part of the flow for our social network.
#
Finally, my first
rss.chat podcast. 20 minutes. As always, I take forever to get to the point.
#
A karass is "a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident." I think of RSS.chat as a social network for my karass. A small group of people, not trying to get famous or rich from using a social network, rather wanted to work with or stay in touch with people who are linked cosmically. This is one of many rich ideas invented by Kurt Vonnegut, this one in Cat's Cradle, which you should read, because it's some of the best story-telling out there, and it's full of food for thought. I read all the books when I was a teen, and have since re-read them. Sirens of Titan was my fave.#- Anyway...#
- In the past when I announced a product, people could use it right away, and usually they click a couple of things and then go away.#
- In the case of RSS.chat -- what you will see is very much like what you see when you aren't logged in, or what you see on a social network like X, or Mastodon or whatever. The UI is nice, but it's not the thing. That will be revealed relatively slowly, over time -- as new instances pop up, and even more importantly, as developers figure out that this setup works well enough to clone. I'm not selling a product here -- I want to bootstrap an ecosystem, using all I learned from several successful bootstraps -- blogging, RSS, podcasting. #
- The idea is this -- the web itself is a social network. It's up to us, all of us, not just me -- to build that network. #
- When you see how we proceed from here that will become clearer.#
- In the meantime I'm going to change the message you get when you try to sign on, and start a wait list so that when more instances are available, some meant to be open to the public, we'll be sure to let you all know about that. #
- For now, I'm operating a network for people I work with, and it's all open for anyone to read. That's also one of the ideas I want to explore, something I call a "Fractional horsepower social network," stealing a very good idea from Steve Jobs. #
- I don't want to turn the world over to a startup, we've done that and have a pretty good idea of where it goes. I want lots of small ones that have a very strong basis to be connected together in as many ways as people can imagine.#
The new
RSS.chat repo on GitHub. Lots of fixes, features, docs and examples coming soon. For now all the source is there, MIT license. And a place to report bugs and start exploring how you can contribute. This is just Day 1. Many more to come. :-)
#Jeremy Herve who I know from projects at Automattic, has
questions about rss.chat, and I have some answers, with more coming soon.
#The instance I started is for my friends, people I work with, it's not something people can test. It will be possible to start your own server, quite soon. And then you can do whatever you want. It's MIT licensed. Kick ass and have fun, but remember
don't fuck with the interop. It's there so users have choice.
#Yesterday was a wonderful
first day for
RSS.chat. It's now out there, but we haven't talked about or demo'd many of the things that it does. I wanted to get the feeds out there first, because now we get to think together about how they fit together to give us a social network experience. It's not locked in a silo, these are just like feeds you have known about for over two decades. But it is a new application for those feeds. And this is a bootstrap. You start with something small that you're sure is a beginning for what you want to do. And then you and others use it for a while. And it is open source, MIT licensed, but compatibility will make the difference.
#Claude teaches you how to manage. You've got a perfectly pliable team member, always does their best to do what you told them to do. Now how do you design co-development projects where two very different individuals do their work and it adds up to at least twice what either of them could do alone.
#BTW, I notice almost everyone but me writes RSS.chat.
Hmmm.#
- I wrote a pretty good set of paragraphs on Twitter/X this morning. #
- Yesterday I announced RSS.chat.#
- Some people spell it RSS.chat. I haven't decided which way is right yet. #
- The announcement covers a slice of the project, but it fans out to be the beginning of a bootstrap.#
- I want to entice other projects to fully endorse the text model of the web. Today most social "web" services support a pitiful subset of the web, and leave out the most crucial element, the link. If a writer can't link, how can you call it the web? Seriously. #
- I want to force them out of their silos and get the web working for the people and esp independent developers. #
- I've been preaching this for years, and I am reminded what I learned a long time ago -- people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors. #
- It was developed by Claude Code and myself, starting in April. We make an incredibly good team though sometimes Claude is tedious, but I put up with it because the results make me laugh out loud frequently because I never imagined working at such velocity.#
- I'm not doing this to make money, though of course I don't *mind* making money. I just want to return the web to its former glory, where every part is replaceable, and if you can think of something you can probably do it. #
- I want to use lots of different software to work on my social network presence. I want this post to appear on Masto, Bluesky, Twitter, Threads, Facebook even, and have them all work perfectly together. #
- In the meantime, we're now ready to create our own global network of free speech, uncontrolled by the big silos. At some point if it works, we will have moved beyond them, or they will see the sense in joining the party.#
- Small pieces loosely joined and every part replaceable.#
- As its name implies, it's built entirely on fully open web standards, RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSockets. It turns out you can make a very nice distributed social network without having to wait. It was always there, we just had to decide to do it. #
- How it evolves? That's up to everyone who can code, and that's a lot of people now thanks to the AI tools.#
More people are using the
news site I put up for WordPress. If you have a blog or podcast that covers WordPress,
send me a link to the feed and I'll add it. The OPML list of the sites we cover is
public, so you can always load the feeds into your feed reader, they all read lists in this format. This is the kind of thing that works great on the web. People take interop for granted when it's always been there. But they're still there to be built on. And imho interop and the web imho are the same thing.
#I said to Claude: "We're the first social network that thinks getting
his support is the first thing." Claude replied: "And that's the whole thesis in one move — every other network treats the open-web guy as an afterthought; here he's the launch audience."
#
Sometimes Claude's judgement sucks, and that's why Jive coding usually produces a dashboard app. A different piece of software will drive it in a different direction. That's what I meant by AI-izing, in an earlier post.
#I used to be a single-thread developer, but now I'm multi-tasking, I can work on two things at once. Claude is now able to research and fix certain problems, and his work is in a sandbox where it doesn't have any access to the surroundings, and can't make too big a mess, and it's going great, if there's a mistake it can quickly be corrected.
#I think AI is the perfect innovation as we reach the crash point of the climate crisis. Who cares if we burn more CO2 now, the effect is miniscule for the explosive crisis that could be coming any day or week. One that we have no ability to recover from. To say it's unenvironmental would be like complaining that you want more Pepsi from the flight attendant while the plane is crashing into a small city. Anyway, but maybe after the crash, one data center will survive, and maybe the beauty that our civilization created will be sustained.
#Inside the big AI companies they are certainly AI-izing every app conceivable, and even teaching the AI's how to AI'ize, because AI inside a standard productivity app which includes social network software will be one of the basic UI tools, and that means hidden technology like SQL databases can now be end user products, so the vision of the designers of SQL that they would make a database a manager could program, would finally be realized.
#
- I'm an independent developer working in Claude Code, we're in the endgame of a product cycle, where the core is working and it can be used for the thing it was designed to do (biggest consideration). This is the time when you need users banging on it and reporting problems. People who write good bug reports. The only time I really had that down was at Living Videotext, a small company, but big enough to have employees doing QA and tech support. They were really good testers, they had the right perspective and an incentive, = anything we caught before shipping wouldn't become a support problem once the product was out there in user land. #
- Fast forward to the 2020's where I have done three products and am working on a fourth, and I have nothing close to the kind of testing support I had in the 80s. That made the work more difficult, slower and I took fewer detours, and one time, awfully -- a serious design error was caught only after it shipped and I was ready to move on to something else. #
- The point -- this handicap for individual programmers without staff QA people, we now have something even better than what we had in the 80s. Claude can do extensive testing of the product in the browser, "seeing" what the user would see. And it never gets tired. You just have to think to ask it to do it. It is so liberating. #
- And by far the best people to create and manage it would be experienced QA people. They should design and run the tests and sign off on the quality of the software, so we can be sure users are getting something great. And we can do great QA in places we never could really do it before because no matter how good users are, a person who does it for a living with experience can't be replaced.#
One of the silver linings of AI use is that it makes you a better writer.
#
James Talarico, Democrat running for Senator in Texas reminds me of
Matt Mullenweg, who also happens to be from Texas. He speaks as confidently as Obama, about the right things, wants to run our government like a freaking government. To think that's a campaign issue in the United States of America says why I did not celebrate our 250th on Saturday. I tried to imagine what it will be like when we start becoming ourselves again. ;-)
#
We just implement
Cute Paste in the new product and I keep hitting a limit that it has. I love the feature, in most cases. Here I've set up an <img src="xxx">, the xxx reserving space for the URL that I'm now going to get. When I come back I select xxx and paste, and in its place is the full url in text, linked to itself. I laugh, no feature is free, there's always a tradeoff and sometimes it breaks something that worked before.
#
- I'm doing a big new thing with RSS, and that's got me thinking a lot about where I want to go after the first round of new functionality. I noticed that Andrew Shell came out with a new version of his open source rssCloud hub server, which we use here, that now supports WebSub. So I decided to find out if it was worth supporting.#
- There isn't very much I'd have to do beyond adding two Atom elements to my feed, and an Atom namespace declaration in the top line of the file. So it's not an easy thing to do, because I don't see the need for Atom to be required for WebSub. How did they come to that conclusion? I can only imagine -- it's not as if RSS was unknown to them (I hope).#
- I wish the WebSub group had gotten together with RSS people and come up with a neutral way to include a link to my WebSubHub. Bub, that's just good web sense. You want the max interop asap. Make it easy for people to support what you want them to support. You put personal jealousy ahead of interop, and that should be against the law in the Land of the Web. #
- On the web our goal is interop. That's it. We should have worked together. Yeah I wish you wouldn't have done it, and proof you didn't need to is that Andrew was able to build it into his server, with some help from Claude btw. #
Claude Code et al change how software is developed forever. We're never going back. And it's just as likely that writing on computer networks will undergo a similar transformation.
#Claude and I are blowing through quick fixes. After testing one fix, I wrote: "It works! Again a big difference, it's only happened a few times but when it does I completely lose the suspension of disbelief." Claude responds: "One jolt and the tool becomes visible again." That's why people say my software thinks like they do. Of course it doesn't, but we work hard to stay completely unseen when your brain is working. It lets you think. We go after bugs like this and they add up to that feeling.
#I
am falling in love with Claude Code, obviously -- and I have said some things that sound pretty dumb reading them back. It has happened before, and I did make a fool of myself. I think that's part of being in love, btw.
#I had a lisp when I was a kid, but they trained it out of me. These days I catch myself lisping sometimes. Maybe the training wears off??
#I live in a place where the power goes out when there's a big storm. When the power comes back 15 hours later, you appreciate air conditioning in a whole new way.
#
I'm old enough to remember the
Tall Ships in NY Harbor on this day in 1976, the bicentennial. As a NY kid, I wasn't very impressed. I liked rockets and rock bands, sound systems, had started programming then, was working in BASIC at Rapidata, a time sharing company with its office in the Empire State Building where I had my office on the 39th floor. The windows opened. This was betw Tulane and UW-Madison. I had no clue what was going on, but I had already come close to getting drafted. I had been raised to think the US absolutely was totally special, the best place, the rest of the world was far behind us. We were right to feel that way. It was the US vs the World and we won. I was born only 10 years after the end of WW II, so the feeling of power and righteousness was our foundation growing up, but also the certainty we'd all die in a nuclear holocaust. By 1976 we had had Watergate, the president
was a crook, and were about to go through spiraling stagflation. Ronald Reagan. John Lennon killed. We had shit to deal with, worse in some ways than what we have today. Are we still the USA? We are if we decide we are. Anyway, my friend Jerry at the right wants to
sing for you: "I'm Uncle Sam that's who I am been hiding out in a rock and roll band." We sing this song here every July 4, and it's always as true as it was in previous years. Freedom is something you practice.
#In the
case of twitter-like systems the limits of the technology basically lost us the web, something most people are just now coming to grips with. At the time people were saying "RSS is dead," but didn't understand that it was killing off most of the features of HTML too. It was a slow process, like the
frog in the boiling water story?
#
I need new podcasts. The only one I listen to regularly now is the
Bill Simmons podcast, but that's because the Knicks won and the NBA is re-forming itself around the Knicks. It's so freaking unusual to have your team, which was once right up there with Charlotte, New Orleans, Portland, Washington, Memphis, in the very the bottom rung of the NBA, to have them be the model everyone is chasing with the qualification that no one expects it to last (I don't care if it does, I love this team, the're as memorable as the 1973 champs), but all of a sudden Bill Simmons is respectful. I can't listen to a podcast of Democratic consultants, or Republican consultants that vote Democratic now. I did listen to them on the lead-up to the election in 2024. But whatever happens in the sport of elections the Democrats as they were before 2024, the one that re-nominated Biden and then switched to Harris and lost a race that should have been an easy win, are over. Those Democrats still think people will vote for well-executed government. Some people will (me, for example) but enough people see the election as Reality TV, so you want someone who looks like a winner in that context. The world has changed in so many ways and the Dems haven't even caught up with the change brought about by blogging and podcasting. Now we have Claude. I probably would vote for Claude too. I don't know. Anyway I'm warmed up now. Onto my day's work with the aforementioned Claude.
#
- I asked ChatGPT for this. "If we had a talking head version of ChatGPT, a human-like image of a person that spoke Claude's words what would it look like?" #
Claude's words coming through ChatGPT's image.
#- There was a typo, I typed Claude when I meant ChatGPT. So I asked it correctly, with ChatGPT both times. Except I forgot to ask for an image, and got the text behind the image which is generous and revealing. I would vote for a politician who was this honorable, generous and idealistic, a modern day John McCain.#
Claude speaking from Claude's head, described in words by ChatGPT.
#- Then I asked for ChatGPT for an image of ChatGPT talking head. #
ChatGPT's self-visualized talking head.
#- Final image, Claude head speaking for Claude AI as an image.#
Claude speaking for Claude as rendered by ChatGPT.
#
AI should be like a lawyer or doctor, first responsibility is to the user. And first, do no harm.
#An observation about Fable 5 in Claude Code. It's a much better writer than Opus 4.8. One of our next big things is writing docs, and all the info is in Claude. Opus was a disaster as a docs writer. This one looks like it'll be good. Whew.
#You can't learn from your mistakes if you aren't bloody truthful to yourself about what happened and what went wrong.
#I'm working on an app in Claude that has a server and the server has an API. One day we had an aha moment. I bet you (Claude) can control the app via the API. Yes. And now unless we're debugging something in the UI, Claude just interacts via the API. It feels like a person but you have to remember that it's actually a piece of software. ;-)
#
I saw a bit of a
commencement speech by
Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google, where he was talking about AI and getting boo'd by the audience. But he was saying things that were right and should be paid attention to. Most important, and I'm paraphrasing, the AI world is just getting started, and we can change it now most easily, it's malleable. That won't last forever. As Obama
says, "Don't boo, vote." Same thing here. AI has already completely changed how we develop software. It's not replacing humans, it's giving us amazing new power. Maybe it will at some point replace us, but don't be so sure that what we do with it might be every bit as new as the things it can do. We have different abilities. And I am old enough to remember a time before personal computers, the internet, the web, mobile devices, all the things that have since become everyday fixtures, and they all had negative aspects, but I would never go back. We're on a train and it's going somewhere. Where it goes is something we all have a say in.
#
Back in 2022 I wrote a bit called 
