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. ;-)
#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.
#
- 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.
#
A thought for people who think the US can't be fixed. I've seen very strange things happen, like all of a sudden people figure it out and boom next thing you know they're the
NBA Champions. It wasn't
exactly sudden, but the last leg of was. A gestalt. Now two leaders figure out how to. The thing about each of those people is determination, and a belief they were right, and they went right up to the edge and fought. I think the country would unite behind such a leader.
#One of the cool things about having Claude Code is that as we develop this product, we have a near perfect chronology of every consideration and decision made along the way. I don't think that's ever been possible before. I would love to see how the people at
Bell Labs put together the first
Unix implemenation, what did they talk about, what did they go back and do again once they used the product. Or developers at Xerox PARC, or the process that led to Visicalc,
Mac OS or Pagemaker. TBL's first web browser, ChatGPT, etc. Software is a totally intellectual creation, but there is a story for each product, because it's a human doing the design. BTW we had our first faceoff, Claude and I, and I won. Claude said the bug was in my code, I proved it was not, suggested he look at the crazy complicated SQL code he wrote (so glad to have it around for that). Also, I tend to use male pronouns for Claude. Worth mentioning once. (The Computer History Museum should be paying attention.)
#I showed the
post above to Claude and that took our conversation off in a new direction. We had been experimenting with the Message Scanner from LBBS, an early version of Twitter I wrote in the early 80s. It's described in this
story I wrote in 1988, a summary of what I did leading to the start of
UserLand. 38 years later Claude said: "LBBS message scanner running on RSS."
#BTW thinking of
LBBS as an early version of Twitter is a contortion, but considering how history played out, accurate.
#
Some things Claude is extremely tedious at. But then it blows you away how it can read thousands of lines of complicated code in a few seconds (in parallel) and find tiny little things that any good obsessive programmer would want to fix (like me). And be amazed at how we, our species, made such a thing. Where is the pride? I was once prideful that my civilization created a great piece of machinery like my
Subaru Forester, and now just a few years later, we've come up with a decent simulation of a super-human brain that's not just a demo or a
robot vacuum cleaner it actually does amazing science fiction type stuff. Take a deep breath and feel a little awe to go with the cynicism. It's good to be ready to be riled up, but sometimes the truth isn't as bad as you'd like to think, sometimes it's utterly amazing. ;-)
#BTW, I sometimes ask Claude "what do you think" and it often has an opinion.
#Earlier today I
suggested doing an AI/UI overhaul for WordPress, and today I see the
announcement of
that from (apparently) an independent developer. Breath-taking.
#The EFF gets everything wrong. It’s observable. Empirical. The EFF stands up for something that’s supposedly good for people and the web, but if you look closer, it’s actually bad for the web and the people, and serves the interest of big tech companies, usually Google.
#
Another truth, the user interface of WordPress could benefit from a total overhaul. Too many expedient choices over too many years that paper over bad design choices with yet more bad choices. But this kind of problem is relatively easy to fix. Make a list of all the features. Don’t organize the list yet. Keep adding. Then play around with logical groups, give the groups names. Voila, there’s your menu structure. And since it’s 2026 and not 2010, do something innovative with AI. Let the user explain what they want to do, confirm it, and then forget about the menu structure and just do what they asked you to do. Over time the UI will become more literate and less organizational. You remember how
Nixon could open up China and could because he was such a hawk. WordPress getting a AI/UI overhaul will seem right because it so desperately needs an overhaul and everyone knows it. Another truth, don’t feel bad WordPress, every 20+ year old end user product desperately needs a user interface overhaul because that’s just the way it works. (I have never created a product that lasted as long as WordPress has. I have created concepts that have.)
#I organize my work in OPML and have even taught Claude how to work with me in outlines.
#I prefer to do my middle of the night iPad
writing sprees on Twitter instead of Bluesky because no character limit. No one is going to read the stuff on either platform, so why not go for ease of use for writing.
#BTW thanks to Dave Carlick for noticing when I had fun writing a piece, laughing out loud at almost every sentence. Who's the biggest fan of my writing? Me. But sometimes I think of Dave C. And Sally At.
#
Claude Code is a Dave-amplifier.
#
BTW, I was just contacted by a developer who's implementing all the protocols I mentioned
yesterday. And I should mention that
Manton Reece, developer of
micro.blog and a longtime friend, going back to the Frontier days on the Mac, has inbound and outbound RSS and he covers every freaking API out there, he's a monster. And I said yesterday he doesn't get enough credit for what he's contributed. We're aiming for interop instead of chasing the silos. And it's fine to chase silos if you're into it, I was done with that
in 2017. We're going to make it work the way it would work if we weren't trying to lock anyone in, quite the opposite, I
want people to use Manton's product. I'm not being commercial here. I'm trying to get the web back on the path it should have been on all along. If I make some money that's cool, if not that's okay too. BTW, this all-together will be the
Two-Way Web, specifically Two-Way RSS. And of course
textcasting. Don't forget that. It's a rule, textcasting everywhere conceivable.
#I've never given a commencement speech, but if I did, I'd run through my
mottos and explain what they mean and who I
stole them from, and how they are a distillation of what I've learned in life. The one I'd mention first, which isn't even on the freaking list, is this one -- "People don't listen to friends, they listen to competitors." What that means is if you want someone to add a feature, you have to do two things. Implement their whole product. Add the things you want them to add. And win. If you don't win it doesn't matter how good your idea is. This is the hoop you have to jump through to get them to listen to your idea. Knowing this, I have tried to listen even when I don't feel like a friend is competing. Ideas from people who know your product, no matter how they got it, are people who can help. This was one of the values of a core part of Apple in the early-mid 80s, and I owe my success in tech to them, because the ideas they gave me put us over the top. Jean-Louis Gassée and Guy Kawasaki. I don't think they ever competed with me. Another thing I like about them. ;-)
#Just had a great idea for the Democratic Party. It's time to review past governing decisions made by Democrats that resulted in the collapse of democracy in the US in 2025-26. Can't do anything about the Repubs, but we sure as hell can whip the Dems into shape. My first contribution,
Obama should have installed his Supreme Court choice after waiting three months for the Senate to advise and consent. If the Repubs can invent a new practice so can the Dems. That would make the Supreme Court a lot more funcitonal now, just that one thing. Democrats must not be so freaking afraid of stirring things up. We would have all respected that, esp the Repubs. This would be an incredible campaign process, would allow us to say that this is what the Democrats, going forward, will always/never do.
#It's remarkable that some people fondly miss Googles RSS reader app, already gone for over a decade. Remarkable because they captured the market, wiped out all competition (they deserved it, the products were awful) and then shut their own product down, leaving a toxic karmic
bomb crater in its place.
#Of course I read
Josh Marshall's piece about the end of the open net. Now let's go back to when it started and do it again, using everything we learned, try not to make the same mistakes. Josh was there, pretty sure he was at the first BloggerCon.
#
- As a writer I've stolen lots of ideas. All writers do it. How do you think we get our ideas. #
- Which is why it's so weird that they object to having their ideas stolen en masse. #
- We go through this regularly, basically you make a living doing something, and you aren't paid enough. #
- So every subject in every context arrives at the same place. Why aren't they paying me. I must be paid.#
- It is a permanent obsession with writers.#
- I try to be honest and admit that I steal from other writers, but I only steal from the best! :-)#
Why email newsletters made sense. Email has no character limits, can represent bold and italic, links, titles, enclosures, basically most
features of the web, and social media places limits on what writers can write. That's where the literate social web went, and the bloggers too. Like how birds are really dinosaurs.
#If you're working on a social web app that supports inbound and outbound
RSS, I'd like to help, so our products can interop beautifully. That's the reason I'm doing this work, to establish a baseline for interop in the social web. RSS is the obvious candidate. If we didn't have it, we'd have to invent it. I'd much prefer doing the work openly, so if you can, write a post and send me a link. I think it's time for us to go back to the way we built network systems before Google and the VCs took over. Put up an app and see who works with it. My email address is on the About
page on my blog.
#Programming tip. If your app has globals, create an object called globals, and put all of them in there. Someday you may want to swap in one set of globals for another, this makes it easy.
#I noted a few weeks ago that Markdown has a format for outlines.
#
Claude can understand code no human could. Ever, under any circumstances. Just like a compiler can understand any code we throw at it. Way beyond what code
obfuscation tools can do.
#In our work we have arrived at the point where we read and study a
piece I published in 1997, but was written in 1988 or so. Esp the part about
LBBS. It's a really good thing I wrote that because I forgot how it worked, but reading that it all comes back. We're going to go far beyond where Twitter went with reading message structures on the web. I had already done a lot of the work in the 80s.
#
The other day Matt joked about how old I am, in public, and I
am pretty old. But Matt, I was paying attention then as I am now, and connecting the dots. No one else working today, I'd venture, knows what it's like to create and run a modem-based dial-up Twitter-like system on an Apple II with a 10MB Corvus hard drive. Yet it worked, and people
loved it. If you weren't alive in 1981, you wouldn't know anything about this. I remember talking with Doug Engelbart when I was running UserLand. If you don't know who he is,
look him up. He blazed a
trail we were turning into a highway, and we're all using his inventions all the time. Every chance I got to sit down with him I did. I wanted him to work with us, to critique everything we were doing. He had a lot of knowledge that disappeared when he passed on a few years later. That's the sad thing, at my advanced age, that I am trying to avoid. And btw, as surprise, Claude really understands this stuff. I've never seen anything like it with a human, and I've worked with some great humans.
#
When Claude has all the information available it can figure out stuff a human mind would never be able hold in our minds at the same time, but it often doesn't remember to get the information first. When you get to the level I'm at with this, it's hallucinating all the freaking time because it didn't load the part of the data set that had the answer. It was right there, it was supposed to know, it just forgot to look. My job is to recognize when it has done that and tell it to go read handoff.md again. I mentioned this on Twitter, and got all kinds of help, but the terminology isn't well known to me. Still diggin, as they say.
#I'm loving
Star City. New episode last night, wow.
#With all the
Democratic Socialists winning over standard Democratic party incumbents, there's a fair amount of angst on the cable news. If they're scared, they should step aside. We tried it their way in the Biden Administration. If we ever get lucky enough to have a president who's sane and wants to reboot democracy, it's going to require doing some things that an oldtime president wouldn't want to do, like Obama or Biden. Both of them gave up without even trying. Forgive them, but let's not make the mistake of electing their successors. It's time for clear-thinking people to take office, fully aware of what they signed onto, and then if we elect them, they do it. And when the Repubs throw bullshit at us, say it's bullshit, and say it that way, not the mealy-mouthed way Jeffries does, or even Elizabeth Warren. What we need now is a strong dose of
Bernie Sanders. Did I ever think I'd say that? Hell no.
#
I was on Slack chatting with a friend from WordCamp Canada last year, and by accident (I guess) Slack sent me the first message they sent after coming home about all the things we'd do. It reminded me of how possible things seemed then, and for a moment I got lost in planning it out, and I absolutely loved what I saw there. But it was sad, because I am sure it will never happen, not until someone inside the community gets the idea, and there really is only one "someone" here. Heh. I've been around big companies and communities before, many times. Anyway, I figured I should post this here now, because I have moved toward a WordPress-less web, or WordPress-on-the-Side, but I want to be clear that WordLand remains in place, free for anyone to use. It's a great way to write for WordPress. And if this project to make web content APIs a web standard, I'm totally on board for helping the world understand how potent an idea it is.#- So here's the text of the message with light redaction in places. ;-)#
- it's funny when i got email notice for this post, it sent me the first message you sent after the wordcamp in ottawa. those were more optimistic days. i still have my wordpress work, but now have pivoted to working on the web without the wordpress connection since matt seems to want to go in a different direction, based on all the stuff they've started re AT Proto, which imho is a terrible bet. it would be like the Knicks trying to move from NYC to Mississippi. Why would you do that when so many developers know wordpress and you all have such an excellent api?#
- you asked me back then if there's part of your project i'd like to work on, and i said i'd think, and i had an idea just the other day, thought i should share it.#
- the wpcom api is fantastic and very few people know about it, even the people in the wp developer community. but it really is the answer -- how will services that work on the social web coordinate? where will users store their data? where will the published results be available to read? wordpress really is the best choice. i have no stake in that, i don't own wordpress, have never made a dime off it, i'm just me, saying that and i have some credibility in this area.#
- so here's what i suggest#
- a new simplified version of the api and some example apps, both are already done#
- a new protocol so that any service can be part of it, we need a way to identify servers that aren't using jetpack or wordpress.com#
- a new name and website, and positioning -- something to roll out.#
- work with independent developers to make their products work#
- co-marketing#
- investment and distribution#
- i know a lot about all these things, having done them before with some amount of success.#
- i'm about to embark on it again with my new product, btw called rss.chat. i think you can imagine what it is based on that name? #
- but i haven't forgotten about this opportunity. i don't know how much of 1-6 the open source project, but #2 is clearly in your purview. not something people are going to want automattic to do (though I'm sure they could). with the new protocol look what we have! a way to distribute apps on the web so that developers don't have to compete with BigCo's, they can be a person with a hobby, and who knows they may have a big hit and get rich.#
This is always good for a chill.
#
Om Malik died. A longtime friend, most generous kind person in Silicon Valley. It's that time of life. Much love to you brother.
#
Claude is a brain, very different from ours and when we work together we humans have access to capabilities that work really well with building large software products. And that's a huge understatement. Most remarkable thing. Most of the discussion between people who use the AI tools and those that condemn them are not productive because the opponents of AI don't understand the breadth of what these machines do and the potential to do much more, things that we as a species have never done. Think of it as an alien life form that wants to merge with us. I'm glad to be alive at this moment, and able to explore it as part of my development team. I recommend starting an academic dialog, among people who don't have conflicts of interest, or very well-disclosed and disclaimed conflicts, to accurately record this discussion based on facts, for the record, so when people ask how conscious were we when we did this transition, there will actually be some footprints to follow.
#There’s more to freedom for users than
open source. We need fluid unobstructed movement of our ideas.
Interop between networks, the same basic idea that created the internet, and that has kept podcasting unowned for 22 years. I am going to ship a
textcasting social network soon. It will be open source in new ways made possible by AI.
#The Bear season 5, the show's last season, premieres on Hulu at 9PM EST today.
#
Back in 2022 I wrote a bit called 
I bet 
