That is hard for the user to comprehend. It if you actually were to step back and you know, draw a sort of graph of How the different servers connect with each other, it the user has to actually be aware of how that works. And it's I find it extreme you get all these dialogues that are extremely confusing.
You know, says you're on a server that you don't belong to so you can't type something here. So, go back to your server and find this same message. And you will be able to respond there. I think that's what it's saying, not sure. Um, if I really stopped and worked at it when it comes up, Yeah, I might actually be able to figure it out.
Um, But having figured it out. Do I really want to do all that work? And I had a question. I mean it and the fact that it's taking so long for threads to implement it and for ghost to implement it. And I've yet to see a context in which I can use it in WordPress.
So, I've kept a distance from it and I did actually do some work to make it so that I can cross post to mastodon. Um, But I really would rather not have people follow me on the server that I can cross post to. So I almost never publicized the link to that site but yet people find it and subscribe to it.
And at some point, I'm going to have to turn that server off because it's it's too expensive. Just for that one application and I really had a hard time figuring out. How do I From my link blogging tool, just simply post something to The fetiverse. Seems to me that ought to be a simple thing to do and it's not and I don't exactly remember why I got deep into it and I realized that maybe I could do it but My God.
Look at all the work. I would have to do to pull that off and I don't even know that that many people even read these posts. And And I'm kind of accustomed to this being simple. Which is what you get, what I got from Twitter. I used to cross post to Twitter and that was where my link blogging went to, for real time.
It also went to the links page on my blog, scripting.com And it was also available as an RSS feed so people could subscribe to it and that was plenty good because well at that time, the entire Twitter verse was concentrated just on that one server but now we've got it on a lot of different servers and now how to make matters worse.
Or better depending on how you look at it. There's, Um Blue Sky and Blue Sky doesn't support Activity Pub, and it has its own protocol for posting to it. And I'm not as I mentioned, I think I mentioned, I'm not even using activity Pub to get to Mastodon because I don't think there's a way to do that.
It's all extremely confusing. In the meantime, there are forms of In a Rob that users place a high value on and that and in some cases are very powerful that require extremely low amounts of work. And I can't help but think that we're recreating the problem that we had in the 80s with hypertext.
And it was another one of these situations where I kept my distance, I didn't really understand what they were doing. But I knew that there were conferences on hypertext I had read Ted Nelson's book of course and it was like everybody many people in my generation that was an Anthem for us.
It was Um, We all found our own ideas in there. I did, I was working on outliners and somebody said, you really do have to read this book and I said, okay, I'll read it and I read it and my jaw dropped, right? Because he was describing the work that Doug engelbart had already done.
And there were my words. There they were. This wasn't the mouse, this wasn't the things Windows, the things that people give them a lot of credit for this was the augmentation stuff. The stuff that that people had a real hard time. Grasping if they used it they wouldn't have a hard time but they For whatever reason we did a lot to commercialize that and at my first company living video text and there's now a market for this stuff outliners.
And a lot of products in it but it's still a very small niche relatively speaking to all the big things we use on the internet. Um, But yeah, in the 80s they were, they were contemplating these very complicated systems for hypertext. And, um, because they were two-way, the links were two-way And it turns out that's a hard problem to solve.
In fact, it's well, I don't want to say nobody solved it because I don't know but I've never used a system that really did it and it's been a long time. You know, the 80s, we're talking, I don't know, do the math? It's about 40 years. Isn't that crazy?
Is that right? Yes, it's 40 years. Since 8 1984 was 40 years ago. That's crazy. Anyway, such as it is. I was an adult in 1984 for what it's worth. That's why I'm having to pause here for a moment and do this. I do it a lot. It's just like I can't believe that this is what.
Anyway, I'll stop that. Right? And so does that sound a lot like what we're doing with, uh, the kind of peering that we have in activity Pub, it does to me, And it'd be interesting to hear what other people think about that. So why why do? Well we do have hypertext right?
And so what happened was Along Comes Tim bernersley And he either doesn't understand what they're talking about or he doesn't care. And he went ahead and did it without two-way links and turns out that's actually a doable problem. And he did it one person, did it and he got it working, and he did the server part, and he did the client part, and he had hypertext And then it like, in a couple of years, it was exploding, it was because the time was right, people were totally ready for networking and they, the tech industry just had not delivered it in any usable form, their ideas of what networking were.
Well, there were opportunities for each of them to become dominant and of course, when you have a lot of people trying to be dominant, then really? Nobody is dominant. They're all spending time in conferences and fighting with each other and like whatever. What. That's what big Industries do and So great Along Comes Tim berners-lee and he blows the whole thing out of the water and now networking has been redefined.
If you weren't alive for this and you don't know the history of it, it's really remarkable. And if and you wouldn't have so much reverence for the big companies. If you saw what happened, I had a front row seat to this. I was deeply embedded in the software industry at the time and had hit all the walls and I tried.
I sold my well, not exactly, hit the walls. I sold my first company and that was financially, a very good deal for me and he made me financially independent. Um, But by the time, I ship my next product from the startup that I started. It was all all the the, you know, it was the mess.
It was just the mess. I started to describe before it was impossible to launch a product in there, because there were too many big companies and too many employees that felt threatened by almost every developer product that that could come out. It got ridiculous at times the way they lobbied internally to not have the big platform.
Vendor do anything to help you? In fact, they would do things to hinder you. Not for any financial reason or business reason, but because it interfered with the plans of the people that worked at the companies, And uh, Then we now know benefit hindsight, how silly those things are.
They look silly to me at the time said well why would you like take the chance that that approach is going to work? And we already know this one does? Why can't we just do this while you're off figuring out like how to boil the ocean? Which is what they always want to do with those big companies?
That's a phrase that technologists use, it's like a lot of times people come up with plans. Very ambitious and unnecessarily so I've done it myself. Shit happens. Anyway, um, So, What would be the equivalent now of The Tim berners-lee route around the boil, the ocean approach that wasn't working in 1992 or one, I forget, which year it was that he did his initial work.
The boiling the ocean was what IBM and apple and Oh, I don't know Oracle. All kinds of companies. Borland was actually a big company. They bought Ashton Tate which It's a whole nother story. All the, so it was like it was just Decaying not working. Microsoft, of course, big big player at that time.
Had no better idea of where the world was heading. They got just as surprised as everybody else when the world when people said, Oh, you mean, we don't have to wait for them to deliver Nirvana. We could just have it now. Oh, okay. We'll do that. And they were surprised.
They didn't expect. They thought they had that this users were stupid. They forgot that they got into when they got into this. They were just users too. So, So while we're sitting here, waiting for all these pieces to fit together and it doesn't look like they're really going to fit together.
We could right now, do some very short steps that aren't that are more like, Timber's Lee approach than the boil, the ocean approach, and that involves and I know you're going to say oh of course he's going to say this, right? Because, you know, it's like he's got the huge conflict of interest.
So I'm going to say that RSS is your answer. Seriously, it's a very simple form of peering. And it's a very web way of doing it, and it's extremely simple. And the way it works is that first of all, if okay, if you're operating a Twitter like system, let's that's what I call them.
I I say Twitter like is like a super set of Um the FED averse the fetiverse is a twitter-like system. It's patterned after Twitter it's trying to be provide the functionality of Twitter, the full functionality of Twitter But in a, in a Loosely coupled way, in a Federated way.
And then you've got like also blue sky, is also part of this and Twitter itself is part of it. Twitter has not gone away. If you think that Twitter's gone away you're wrong. It's not, it's still very much there. It has the largest installed base of all these systems and a lot of really good people are still there and communicate that way.
They just don't have the political ownership of the issues of the tech industry. I'm sure you know what, that's like because there are other situations where you do things that other people might say. Well, you're like being a scab, you know, you're crossing the picket line. You're you're not thinking very futuristically you go.
Well yeah, but I know but this isn't my problem, you know, I'm just a customer. I'm just a user. You know. I have, we all use a lot of products that we don't like the companies. I mean, that's just the way it goes, you ever bought, uh, gasoline from Exxon.
I'm sure you have whether you know it or not I'm sure you have and Exxon is a is a terrible company you know? Every I don't know that. Yeah that's Alexa my friend. She thought I was talking to her, you know, they say that those things aren't listening to you all the time but I didn't ever say her name.
Oh okay, I'm getting whatever. I I don't mind, it doesn't bother me. So yeah, I mean we buy Exxon stuff. We you know I don't like what I don't like what Apple dose of developers. I just, I hate what they do with their platforms. They used to have the best platforms in a way.
They still do, but they've made them, I don't know, whatever the hell with it. Google, I'm talking to you on a Google phone right now. Have you ever read the piece I wrote about Google in HTTP? How utterly depraved? I think that company is But what can I do?
I I used web. I have to use Google, there's no way around it. Yeah. And so that, I mean, if you want me to explain it and that I think of that, what I just told you is like a bedtime story. It's like meant to say, I hear you, isn't it bad?
Aren't the bad people bad? You know, whatever, but grow the fuck up. If you have an answer for how to get rid of Twitter and make it all work great, but you don't Knowing you don't have the answer. That's also an important part of this whole thing. It's like if you think you've got, you know, I just watched the bear.
I'm actually right up to season three so I got a whole fresh season now. So what a great show, I hadn't realized how great it was first time through. I didn't get it second time through. I'm like, oh my God, that speaks to me that really does. Direct me.
To remember that, the reason I do, what I do is because I want to reach Nirvana. I want to make Perfection. I want to make, I want to delight people. Because that Delights me. That makes me feel good. If I create something that other people, You know discover things about themselves because that's really what art does.
By the way everybody has this hard time understanding what art is art is the experience of the user not the artist well and the artist is a user too so they get the experience of a user as well. And so you make the art that that turns you on and then you share it if you want, if you don't have to share it, if you don't want to, it's still hard.
Because it affected you. It just isn't Mass hard but you can share it with other people. If you get, if that's what gets you off. In my case, my software I feel is a Performing Art and my software is a Unique kind of art. It's like I like to create media.
I don't want to just create products. I wanted to create products. That's how I create the media. But what I want to do is, I want to create new ways for human beings to express themselves, because I was born at a time. When that was possible, it was possible for a single person to create.
Software. That would have that kind of effect for a lot of other people. So and we're still there and I think we're back at a new place where there's a lot of open doors. Okay, so what you do is you hook RSS up to these systems and you don't get the two-way nature and you don't get the ability to reply to messages.
What you get is you get to have stuff flowing in and out, and you figure out what you can do with that. I think there's a shitload that you can do with it and the one thing you can't do with it is, you can't lock people in and that means we all get to play.
That means if I have a really weird service. That fits into this model. A writing tool that only one, I don't know. One let's say 100 people in the world want to use it but those are 100 people that I really want to make suffer for than I can.
There's nobody going to stop me from doing it because we've set up a system where anybody can play in this sport. But the way these guys have set it up, they do it the way tech companies and Tech people do all the time. They make these convolutely complicated things that they don't think that's a problem.
But when you do make it that complicated what you've done is well you're not going to get the growth of the web. That's for sure. Because the great thing about the web was Once you. Wanted to really wanted to make an application that ran on the web. You were 15 minutes away from doing it?
How about that? You didn't, there wasn't a lot to understand. It's just it was so weird that you had to work up the courage to actually believe that the stupid little thing that you could do to publish a website would actually work. And that was the beauty of it.
It's and it was very much like All of my every time I have a new sort of amazing breakthrough experience with computers. It's always just like that. It's just like oh my God I didn't really do anything but wanted it and there it is. The same damn thing is true with chat gpt In the first two years of using it.
The limits. Let me see if I figure out how to say this, but its limits were more of my limits of creativity to think to bring that problem to chat GPT. So I go. Why didn't I think to ask Chad TPD about that because the first time I thought to ask about it and knew the answer I love that.
It was a kind of the same experience as I had with Napster in the first time I tried Napster, I understood what it was for. It's like Program, your own music. You're not limited to what you have purchased at the record store, or which Heard on the radio. There's all these other stuff that you can get.
That isn't being played on the radio or That you can't afford to buy that much music to have the one song that you really want to hear right now? It's not in your record collection. You can't hear it. So the first time we went in there and tried it, I like knew none of the songs and I go, well, this is useless, I mean, it's great.
I'm supposed to be nice if they ever got some music in here, you know? But then I was like, six months later. Um, I was hearing, I was listening to k-fat, or k-fog one of those two stations in the Bay Area and it was Father's Day and they played a song.
I've written this up by the way, so it's like told the story before. Um, And they played a song by Cat Stevens, called Father and Son. And It really reached me. My father was alive then and he wasn't. He wasn't in the afterlife yet. He's gone now. But, um, And you know, like a lot of fathers and sons.
We stopped communicating when I stopped being a child. That was basically I'm not I think we communicated plenty when I was a child but then what I don't know what I don't want to go into it but there was a lot in that song that really reached me and after having and I didn't I was surprised.
I didn't know that I had this inside of me, right? Well, maybe I was just ready for this at this point, I was ready to feel. What I was, what I was feeling and I wanted to find out what it was and that meant I had to play the song again and I had no way to do that.
So I then I said, oh, I'll bring the problem to Napster and they had the song. And within a minute or five minutes or whatever, I'm listening to it. And it's like, My God look what I just did and then I started asking it about all the other songs that I haven't heard in 20 years and there's this crazy thing about music.
It's like smells, it's like Taps into some memory inside of you. That's very cherished and Ancient, it's older than it actually. Is it feels it's like it really brings it all up and you get to look at it again and it's an amazing experience and all this was locked up.
They they had. I mean, I used to say at that time, as I said, the music industry, can't figure out what to all. They can think is, how to destroy this. And I think you got a product that people are talking about in airports, for crying out loud, in grocery stores, they're saying, I got, did you see, do you hear this?
Did you hear? And you can't figure out a way to make boatloads of money off of that. Come on. This is fun. Just come on. Figure it out. And of course, they succeeded at destroying it and You have to try to imagine. I mean, most people are too young to know about this, but you have to try to imagine.
Life before Napster or if you don't know Napster Spotify or apple music or whatever there was life before that and the music industry worked very very differently from the way it works now. It was much more scarce product. Music is everywhere now and you always have the ability to program.
But is that hard to use? No, it's simplest user interface ever. You just say I want to listen to this song. Please give it to me. That's what the AI experience is, like, that's what the web experience was like. And that is what social, the Social Web will be.
Like, once we get out of this mode, where all of our needs are taken care of by big companies, because they're going to do the same damn thing. The music industry does every fucking time. Sorry for that. As I was saying it, I knew that I shouldn't be. But there you go.
The industry, just that's what they do. They clamp down and own things and that's fine, I guess. But up to a point They don't need to, we don't need them to own this and The companies involved here are not doing it. They're not Doing it. Maybe they want to do it.
Who knows? Have an outbound RSS feed in inbound inbound, RSS feed for every user. Or maybe more than one inbound. But one outbound, maybe more than one outbound. Start with one. Okay, just one. What is an outbound interface? Mean? It means that everything I post is also available in a feed.
And what is, um, Inbound. Mean, inbound means I can use any editing tool I want to. I don't have to use your editor. Why is that good? Well, it means that lots of editors get developed. And we don't, when we create New Media and any person can do it, And you won't believe and God, there must be millions of programmers now And they've never had a chance to make software for the For the web as an operating system and the these twitter-like systems.
Are incredibly close to being an operating system. It's amazing. Well I can go through that another time. People really want to understand that. I mean, we can just talk about what is an operating system and how is the web. Not an operating system and the answer is, it's storage and identity.
You know, you don't need on a desktop computer identity. Well you do you sign on to your computer, you have to enter a password to get in. So there you have it. There's your identity in your desktop computer storage. Well that's your hard drive. You have terabytes of storage sitting there and applications any application you install on, your system can access any file on your operating system.
There you go. We don't have that on the web, could we? Yes, we could. We totally could. The technology is all tried and true. Very well understood. Why don't we have it really good question. I don't know the answer to that. I think it's the business. I think it's the Bill Gates business.
If Bill Gates were here, now, running Microsoft. He would have this. And if not if somehow you can like send this to Bill Gates, If you wouldn't do it, would you mind explaining to me? Why I mean, is this better than a computer on every desk? Don't you think?
Why can't we have this? I've tried it out. I mean, I'll just leave you with this one thing. I would like to leave you with a bunch of other things, but I don't have the time. Maybe we'll just leave it right there. And, See how much, how much time have I spent here?
27 minutes that's ridiculous. Okay. So we're out of here. Um, I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.