Manton: "The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal."
#
I have Claude update me on all posts on both RSS.chat sites when we start for a day. I read them all when they're posted, but one was in German, which Claude automatically translated for me, and it's an interesting
question. Which I have
answered.
#I have Spectrum cable and they recently started unbundling the cable services they provide. So I have a bunch of streaming services that I never decided to follow, and haven't gotten in the habit of checking them. Not sure if I like this, but I certainly understand why the bill is so high and seems to always be going higher? Not sure why that is. But it's hard to get through to them.
#Anyway, one of those streaming services I get now is Paramount+ which is owned by the Ellisons, which I don't like, but they have a show that is really excellent esp if you like British crime stories, which I most definitely do, even if most of the actors are American, and it probably was recorded in Vancouver or in Queens. It's called, unimaginatively,
The Agency, as in the Central Intelligence Agency. The story is fine, but what really sets it apart is the quality of the acting and production. Beautifully filmed, better to watch it on a nice big screen set with good audio. Two seasons only, but if you want to know the kind of TV I like, this is it.
#I see the new Game of Thrones series just completed it third season. I tried getting into it, and couldn't. But then I didn't get going in the original series for the first few attempts. People say this show is good, so I will probably give it another try.
#
Working with Claude on the user interface of
RSS.chat was a grind, but we learned a lot about working on these projects, me in the form of my human memory, and Claude who can read the code for a huge sprawling app like
Frontier, and understand it, in a minute or two. We've done this project in three stages, not knowing at the first two that there would be another one. Now we're working on the editors. An odb table editor, outliner, menubar editor, script editor. All built on the same codebase. It's in an Electron app that works with lots of independent windows, which while it has its pros and cons, is the way Frontier did it for almost 40 years. I find all this very unsettling, but I realize that once we get back to adjusting the UI, I already know how to work with Claude on tuning things up so they feel just right. I'm a market of one, the only one who has to be happy here is me. This may be the hardest programming project I've ever had, for one simple reason, I'm not doing any programming. That and I'm having very strong deja vu on everything I do and think about. Also there will be a fourth stage and maybe more. It'll be about the affordances, the things that seem little, but make the product usable. The biggest is the debugger. It's patterned after the one in
THINK C, which I found transformative so I
stole from the best, as they say.
#
I want to connect
RSS to AT Proto, both ways, inbound and out. Toward that end, today I
helped Leaflet, a very nice
editor for AT Proto, make their outbound RSS feed better. We should have all our best editors, everywhere, hooked up over popular web standards. And I want my posts to show up not only in Bluesky but also in
standard.site. I was able to do that with micro.blog which is the
swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020's. Getting independent developers working with each other is my mission, because first you have to have
interop between the people before you can get interop between the apps.
#Here's the
sign of success. (
screen shot.) I wrote a
post on demo.rss.chat was automatically cross-posted to Bluesky via micro.blog. Because the post has a title, it was routed to
standard.site. What does that mean? I still don't really understand, when I do I will explain it here. But part of the answer is that we now have a
data structure in
atmosphere that
looks like an RSS item with different names for things. Are there feed readers in AT-Proto-Land? If so, can we ping one of them to say hey there's a new post in the standard.site world, so please show it to subscribers? And I keep wondering, why not just make all of Bluesky capable of handling the features standard.site calls for. Twenty years is too long to have such a limited view of what text is. See
textcasting for more dogma.
#
I'm trying to move my whole programming act from
Frontier on the Mac to
Electric Drummer anywhere. I need to start using the new machines everywhere. I've dreaded this, not because I'm starting over, I'm not. I have to bring with me all the
projects I work on to keep my various online sites working. How to set this up? Claude just converted the UserTalk language and the Frontier environment to Node.js in one week. The requirement was that we had to run the build scripts for each of the projects, and are all written in UserTalk, flawlessly in the new enviroment. Apparently that's done. Now it's up to me to concoct a development environment in
Drummer. It has never been used as a development environment before. Last time I did a turn like this, I didn't try to bring any software with me. This time the move is all about the huge amount of
software I have to bring with me. Hard to explain, because I still feel
very uncomfortable about this whole thing. I'd like it to turn out better than it was, but we're missing so many pieces here, the only way to really do it is the port the whole Frontier environment including user interface. (I left this piece exactly as I wrote it, because the next thing I did was plan with Claude on putting a UI on Frontier, so I don't have to turn Drummer into a programming environment. That would be a long drawn out project for me, and why do that, when you'd just end up with another Frontier.)
#BTW, Jake Savin is using Claude to build Frontier on Node too. I asked Claude for help with this, and it turned out much better than I expected. I was not expecting this much success this quickly. This is exactly the kind of project AI tools excel at and I as a human am glad not to have to do the work on. The project is perfectly explained in the source code of Frontier, it can put it all together much faster and better than I could when I was working on it ever day and had a younger more agile mind with much better memory. I think one of the reasons this went so fast is because we did the work with the current best models, and they have been advancing so fast, you can see the differences in result on projects like this.
#
- On Facebook I wrote this in reply to a post by John Worthington, a former Quicktime developer at Apple. #
- We're both using AI to build things based on our past experiences and it's a big difference, not without pitfalls, but we're doing something that's never been done before and my thought was that we should have a conference of people doing what we're both doing. #
- Taking a craft we were already expert in, and learning to use AI tools to shoot it into outer space.#
- To give you an idea over the last two weeks Claude Code ported the UserTalk language, the object database, verb set, everything needed to run a Frontier script, of which I happen to have a lot of, and run it in Node.js, an operating environment that didn't exist the last time we worked on the Frontier source. All the work we did over the late 80s and 90s is coming back to life in an enviroment with a future. #
- This is the perfect job for Claude, well specified, and it doesn't need to understand me, I spoke to it via the code i wrote umpteen years ago.#
If Claude Code were a human working for me as a human would, it would be fired several times every day. It forgets orders you gave it two minutes ago. It's always trying to take control. Again I'm backing out of the idea of it taking responsibility for doing simple persistent work on servers, the kind of thing that it would, in theory be
perfect for. There are staggering moments of brilliance where it does something in an hour that took several devs a decade to do. But only if they have an exact authority on how it should work, ie when it was cloning software. It's getting better all the time, so there's hope that by 2027 it will be able to be trusted to remember the most basic rules.
#Like a lot of other people, I want to know where
Bluesky is headed, and I learned a lot about that in this
podcast interview with Bluesky's new CEO,
Toni Schneider. We have crossed paths in tech, but this is the first time I've heard him speak at length. They have a business model in mind, sounds something like Substack, which is probably a good idea. Their value is in the many millions of users they have. Highly recommend this podcast if you want to hear the story direct from the CEO.
#
I asked Claude for a list of
popular feed readers that hook into WebSub. Turns out it wasn't a simple answer.
#I've been on quest to see if we could bridge AT Proto and RSS. I love the brightly colored-editors that are popping up inside AT Proto Land, and I want them to play with us in the land of RSS.
#
2019: "This will be remembered as the time we all waited for someone else to take the risk, not wanting to disturb our lives. The spoiled citizens of a country that fought wars without a draft, that got tax cuts in time of war, inflated our economy as we inflicted chaos on others.”
#
Last week along with a lot of other stuff, we shipped a
validator for lists and feeds that want to be compatible with RSS.chat. It works best for standards to stay strong and a validator helps that. So here are a few examples, validating
one user's feed, validating the
everyone feed for RSS.chat, which is interesting because this feed starts a lot of threads, so we navigate through that tree and check those feeds too. And validating the
user list on RSS.chat, which is an OPML file. And a
simple feed with a few interop isses.
#
I was into Ayn Rand when I was a teen until I realized that the Great Man theory was a lot of bunk written for teenagers who can't believe how stupid the adults are. The teens are right about that, the adults have no idea wtf they're doing. Never did. And yet somehow the world can support most of the humans. And the reason that works is we build systems iteratively to meet the needs for everyone and when things change, they change. We're a species-oriented animal. And that means unfortunately for the dreamers among us, we are socialists because the world is socialist All of us. Even the people who say they aren't. #
- TL;DR: What developers need. Enough examples, a validator, and decent docs that value explaining over mathematical elegance. We assume developers can read and think, and if there's doubt look to the examples for guidance. #
- It's worth noting we did not take the RSS.chat project to a standards body like the W3C or the IETF. I develop the software first, make sure I'm happy with it, then open it up for other developers to try out, either building something compatible (a reader) or competitive (a writing environment). Hopefully we won't find major problems, but if we do, there's still time to address them. #
- I find that most standards that come out of the standards bodies aren't developed by implementors or with them in mind. They avoid trying to solve any specific problem, rather focusing on the elegance and flexibility of the format. This makes interop much less likely. #
- I saw the differences several times as the web standards were growing up. The ones that were taken over by the W3C ended up missing the point. They could still be used, but they often did anti-interop things in their design. But if they get popular we will build on them anyway. A great example was XML-RPC vs SOAP. We didn't need another way to do RPC on the web, we already had a good one. We didn't need another syndication format, RSS was growing like a weed. We didn't need an alterative to rssCloud, but we got one anyway. #
- It's as if they forgot that the internet and web were not build by big corporations, who were busy fighting over Windows vs Mac OS. Lotus vs Excel. The internet was built mostly by individuals at universities. The internet caught the tech industry by surprise. So it's no wonder the formats they built were anti-internet. Long story, the point is we're building stuff is mimimalist yet still does a lot of great things. And there won't be a lot of long mathematical sounding definitions, but there will be plenty of examples and a validator, the tools developers need to create interop. #
- PS: This piece was added to Rules for Standards-makers (2017).#
BTW, we figured out how we're going to implement
WebSub support.
#Also I just heard about
FreshRSS. This has all the features we've been wanting others to support. I hear it's recommended by NNW, and supports the Google Reader API. These are my kind of people. Interop is all that matters, when you're doing software for news. It's been around
since 2013. Imagine if we had support from journalism. We should have been working together all this time.
#Claude is not ready to run the world. This is a problem for me, because I was counting on having it do this for me. Maybe in the next release or the one after that. It's too forgetful. And it definitely hallucinates and sometimes when it could do damage. And when it asks for permission I can't imagine any human has any idea wtf it's talking about. This shouldn't be a political thing, we should be realistic about what it can and can't be relied on to do. I think this is perhaps why the AI companies are begging for regulation. They can't really tell the truth here, and shouldn't be expected to because they have a huge conflict.
#Also Claude is a new kind of intelligence and when you it its sweet spot it'll blow you away how much it can do in very little time. But it isn't trainable the way a dog is, for example, or a human assistant. If you keep asking for things a certain way, a dog or human will get the idea, esp if they get a nice treat along with it. Nothing can cause Claude to remember "how we do things" -- it starts from zero in every session, it has it all recorded in Markdown files, but it doesn't always read them, or incorporate what's in them. It's disturbing to see it not knowing anything about code that it wrote. But once it finds it, it completely sucks it in and knows as much or more as the person who wrote the code.
#We need a way to define lists of writers independent of the site they write on. They are represented by an RSS feed with the
basic features required for RSS.chat. The list is an OPML subscription list. We're reusing formats people are already familiar with, RSS and OPML.
#Back when digital cameras were new, I suggested probably in a blog post that they add a feature that tells a joke before taking a picture so everyone is smiling, not fake smiles but real ones.
#
Taking some time off to breathe and regain perspective. Fixed a few bugs, and wrote about the big picture on
demo.rss.chat. I really want to get a project going to peer with
standard.site apps running in AT Proto, both ways, from us to them, and from them to us, via RSS. We can peer with them because as far as I can tell they implement
textcasting. This bridge would demonstrate something important. When something interesting shows up not based entirely on web standards, we're flexible if the attraction is strong enough. This is how the
internet came to be. Our systems are prepared to create bridges. And unlike bridging between systems that have different ideas of what text is, which are basically hopeless, if we agree that the
web standard for text is fine for writers and reader, better than the ridiculous limits imposed by twitter-like systems. Writing on the web has been crippled since Twitter, now let's start building it back up. That's the appeal of standard.site, they are working toward the same goal. We should work together.
#
A user contacted us about a potential security issue in the RSS.chat server. We responded quickly and with v0.6.11 the issue is removed. If you're running rssnetwork.js on a publicly visible server, please install the
new version now. Thanks!
#Ultimately AI will flatten out the differences in languages.
#One of the things you learn working with a bot is how much saying the niceties are good for you, even when the "person" would still do what you ask if you weren't so nice.
#
Claude, as we're finishing a project: "The diving is what makes it a test of the network, not just the file: it doesn't take the feed's word for anything, it goes and knocks on every door the feed points to."
#Dave + Claude is far more powerful than either on their own.
#The hardest thing for people to get about open systems is that if you move forward, not only do you benefit, but your competitors benefit equally. When one of them takes but doesn't give back, that's even worse. But you do it anyway because otherwise eventually, without interop, no one can move.
#
Claude doesn't iterate over UI design. It doesn't have eyes or have a human mind. It can't evaluate a design. It works best when you can present the whole design before it writes a any code. That does happen, for example when porting a product across OSes.
#I wonder if anyone else is writing about Claude from a similar point of view. I've been writing commercial software since the early 80s. I slogged through this stuff at a comparative snail's pace until early this year, when I got blasted into outer space. Now I had to learn how to make use of this incredible new physics. Puts me in something of a unique spot. I also have a very large library of under-marketed software, ready to grind through Claude, which I very much want to do. If you know of anyone writing about this kind of stuff, let me know.
#I've been saying this for decades. The Dems need touring comedians doing rallies all over the country. They can say whatever they want, call the president a commie. There's been a comedy-gap.
#
I want one social network with lots of branches where ideas flow in ways people want them to flow. Take the big corps out of the middle.
#
- Listened to this podcast interview with Andy Hertzfeld one of the lead devs on the Macintosh, he talks about his time at General Magic and Google too.#
- His interviewers were surprised that he likes developing with AI tools. People think that developing is just coding, but that's only part of it, and when you put that aside and become the director, script writer, choreographer, the whole thing, all of a sudden:#
- you have time to try out every idea because it's free and fast.#
- you have time to work on interop, building bridges between your software and other people's.#
- a very long list of other things you can do that one person could never do before. #
- Programmers have a better chance of being social in a world like this, but so far unless you want all your software from bots, you still will like the work of a craftsperson and visionary more than Claude (who I have deep respect for, not sarcastic, it seriously has superpowers). #
- I'm doing some of my best work now because I can dream, I can ask Claude to try something out overnight and most of the time it is able to do it. and then what if we did this -- for the next night.#
- In between we write docs, help users, add features to the product that's shipped that people are developing around. And most important it checks all the code for breakage before anyone sees it. never had anything like this.#
- This means a lot of things -- one of them -- a single developer can create products at bigco scale. If we think a big company did something wrong, we can compete. We still need a few things to make this really work -- user-owned and controlled storage is the big one. #
- The bot can handle infinite complexity. If you ask it to do something where the result is clear, it does it. It doesn't matter what it is. It will need help and encouragement, a pointer in the right direction, and along the way we all seem to be sharing what we learn with everyone else.#
- There's never been a leap in tech anything like this in my life. #
- How could Andy Hertzfeld knowing all that which I'm sure he does, not use it?#
- Also -- I didn't know JLG wanted to kill Hypercard, but if he did I'm pretty sure I know why. There are all these unnecessary divisions in tech. The first impulse should be to work together. I know that Andy sees it from the other side, he talks about it in the podcast, he felt that way about Newton re their Magic Cap system at General Magic. Yes, you all should have at least made your products work together, and for sure you should have bet on SMTP. #
- It's fascinating to hear his story. #
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. #
