Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan walk into a bar. The bartender serves them tainted alcohol because there are no regulations. They die.#

On Bluesky, inbound RSS is becoming a thing.#

It's noteworthy that we haven't seen many outages as Bluesky scales. On Twitter they had fail whales for years. #

What matters with social networks is what you can get done there, not so much the features of the network. Bluesky has the same features today it had a month ago. The difference is we had an election in the US, I guess that was the catalyst. The presence of Elon Musk so close to Trump says there is a need for a Musk-free place. I've kept my account on Twitter. I started there in 2006, and I love the web more than I feel it would do any good to erase my presence there. It's pretty much against my religion to deliberately erase bits of the web. And whatever you think of Twitter, it is most definitely part of the web.#

Basically, if you have to lock your users in, your product must suck.#

A quick podcast about the new 365-day-a-year campaign we need on the social web to keep our democracy alive. #

We've found Lauren Kapp, the 25-year-old creative genius behind kamalahq. We need to get her back on the air, with her team, fully funded and supported. We need leadership on the social web. Thanks to Brian Puckett for the link. #

Joe Trippi posted a video to his new sez.us service where Pete Buttigieg explains what the Russians have done to the US. I see it that way too. When Brian Lehrer asked a few weeks ago how the US got so divided of his guest Bob Woodward (a fascinating time capsule, recorded before the election) they both missed it. We were divided by an enemy that is on the cusp of destroying the US without launching a single nuke. Putin didn't have to invade Ukraine. I guess even he didn't think his plan would succeed so spectacularly. BTW, I don't think Trippi's network is the answer, but maybe it is. I wish I had had a chance to create the system he was using, we would make a good team. Anyway we need to be further along than his offering is. The right system would allow me to control my presence with only RSS, in and out. Maybe not for everyone, to start, but it would allow us to start building. It's why I have been lobbying for inbound and outbound RSS as a back-end for all these networks. With the rise of Bluesky in the last couple of weeks (things are happening that fast now) we may have a new shot at it because Masto and Threads are certainly feeling it, and when people feel competed-with they are more open to new thinking. #

Excellent piece on how Bluesky leaves users with the impression that it's open and decentralized in ways it is not. If it's bought by someone who wants to use it the way Musk has, they can, without any recourse by the users. As they said in the old days, if you're getting something for free, you're the product, not the customer. We helped Musk build a way to excercise political power against our interests. You may think Bluesky is a way of fixing that, but it probably isn't. They're digging a deep hole, probably too deep to climb out of at this point. They did some innovative stuff, perhaps. But they ended up at the same place, it appears, as Twitter did. #

Today's song: Tea for two and two for tea. #

I added a screen shot to the WordLand placeholder page.#

I predict that people will come to appreciate features that Mastodon has that the other twitter-like social web services don't.#

Why Repubs won? They campaigned in a new way that the Dems apparently didn't notice (neither did I, not claiming to be better). Repubs were more creative and improvisational. They didn't worry what Jake Tapper or Ezra Klein would think, so came off as more genuine. It's a TV show, acting and suspension of disbelief are what count. It has nothing to do with anything else. Sorry it has to be that way but that's how it is. I don't think they hate women btw, they would have voted for Roseanne Barr or Melissa McCarthy. Maybe Chris Rock, they probably would have really liked Will Smith. Idiocracy was incredibly prescient. No joke. #

When I was a boy my mother would sometimes say if I didn't stop belching I wouldn't be able to stop. #

Today's song: Who's this kinky so and so. #

A few days ago I saw Donald Fagen at a local supermarket. I had heard he lives in the area. I didn't bother him, I imagine a star like that enjoys moments as an ordinary person, but he's anything but. I'm listening to Haitian Divorce this morning, grinning from ear to ear as I sing along. #

Last year on this day: We have too many modes of writing. I just wrote a blog post that's also a tweet. Why didn't it go to my followers on all the social nets I'm on? Why do I have to use a different editor to post to each of the services? That's the point of Textcasting, btw.#

We're going to open testing for WordLand shortly. At first I only want developers who write great bug reports. My goal is to speed up development and reduce wear and tear on me. Once we're confident it really works as advertised, we'll open up the testing further. There will be a form you can fill out to get in the queue. The choice of the first testers will be highly subjective. #

BTW, start thinking of WordPress as a highly networked, deployed, debugged, widely supported network operating system. It meets all the criteria. It also has storage. And can publish. And unlike other social web systems, it is textcasting-ready since it comes from the world of blogging where we competed to give writers the features they needed. We can build lots of apps on this foundation.#

I've been having a one-sided discussion with Bluesky asking they make their product less vulnerable to takeover by tech bros, and I can't tell if they're doing anything about it. They must be conflicted, on the one hand, they clearly could sell there service now for a lot of money, but when they do that they must know they're selling us out.#

A 27-minute post-election ramble podcast. #

I am working on a text editor for WordPress using MediumEditor, but I save the text in Markdown and when I reload the Markdown text I regenerate the HTML. I think the social web should exchange Markdown as the canonical form of web text. It has the right set of features, it's Just Enough HTML. #

There isn’t a single social web network that I like pouring my creativity into. I feel like I’m being used not appreciated. There’s nothing in it for me. I had a similar feeling for Twitter, but they were the only one. Now there are a bunch, and I honestly don't care about any of them, esp now that the election is over. I think this whole idea of feeding the greed of a bunch of tech people is over. If there's a good place to gather, with a small number of people I relate to as people, then I'm up for that, but none of these services meet that need.#

ChatGPT can't remember my coding conventions. It always falls back to using features of JavaScript I told it not to use. I indent my code according to the way it works in an outliner, so I can't use their code without having to manually modify it. I haven't forgotten that I'm the human and it's the computer. Its memory is supposed to be perfect. And I am a paying customer, btw. #

If Bluesky is open source, which it appears to be, someone who has time and has experience packaging products, should create a Bluesky distribution for a few popular hosting services (Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud), so installing a new instance is as simple as it can possibly be. One click? That would be awesome. We need to have thousands of these running. If it really is like the web, as they say it is, then it should be like the web in every way. There are lots of websites. If you sell your website to a billionaire, that has no effect on my website. Right now we are totally vulnerable to the Bluesky folk selling their service to another country, or our country for that matter -- or a billionaire, or whoever. Whoever did this packaging job would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Anticipating the objection that Mastodon is already doing this -- it is not. Setting up and using a Mastodon instance is good for nerds. Not for poets. #

Update: My guess is that they haven't released enough code to run a Bluesky of your own, because all the answers from people who say they know say the same thing -- "It doesn't work that way." You could write your own, but if we were to do that, why use their one-off API, use a standard instead, and we might have a chance to interop with other systems in a meaningful way. I don't blame them for wanting to cash out, but I do blame them for conning people into believing it's some kind of escape. Until I hear otherwise Bluesky is a dead-end, not worth investing your hope in. If you're migrating from Twitter this is no better. Keep looking. But I promise to let you know if I get any info that changes my opinion, so if I've got it wrong, people from Bluesky, just answer the freaking question in the post at the top of this page. Thanks.#

Does anyone know who was doing the work at kamalahq on the various social networks? I wonder if they would like to keep posting. They stopped updating on Election Day. We could change the names of the accounts. I thought it was great that there was a steady source of political news that didn't equivocate like the NYT-inspired news orgs. I would love to help fund a continuation of that flow.#

It might be time to get our shit together.#

There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that what's missing in the two-party system in the US is that one of the parties does not own a social network. It is not represented online 7-by-24-by-12 every year, not just presidential election years. Democrats, when you lose it's because you didn't show up. It's happened three times so far, at least. We could have led here because most of the innovators in this space vote Democratic, but the leadership doesn't listen. The voters could get to know all the stars of the parties. People were right when they said they didn't know Harris. It's time to let the leaders rise from the net, not just from the insiders. This is how you do it. #

ChatGPT's web search can search my blog, as I do on Google, but it's way more useful. Here's a screen shot. We're getting there. Really nice.#

I'd like to hear from tech vendors, asap, which ones will help American voters learn what's true independent of whatever "truth" the government wants us to believe? Who will stand with the people? A good question for all of us to ask. Ask news orgs the same question.#

It's worth listening to On The Media, interview with Masha Gassen, saying that the authoritarian government will want to define what's true and not. Since we now understand that most of the information flow now goes around the NYT, CNN etc -- even Fox, and largely through social web and podcasts, if that's where we're all getting our news from, and btw MSNBC are already pretty well limited in what they'll tell us (this was our beef with NYT if you recall) -- the next step is to make it impossible for us to hear what each other are saying. Now is the time to plant seeds for a defense of our speech and communication later. #

I see they have a piece about the "Manosphere." Stop blaming men. Lose that habit now. It's toxic.#

BTW, there's a lot of talk about new ways to communicate that don't depend on silos that could be sold to billionaires. One way to do it is with my product FeedLand. It manages news streams for feeds you subscribe to. I think every publication should share news from feeds they depend on, experts they quote, other news sources they read. We can build our own networks this way. The advantage of this approach is that it is truly decentralized and not at all complicated to use. Here's the news stream I provide for readers of my blog. It's the most popular feature on the site. With FeedLand you can create your own. #

Not much time to write today and tomorrow. #

I prayed. I really did. But I got the wrong answer. #

In 2016, on the night of Election Day, when it was obvious Trump would win, before taking a Xanax and going to sleep, I wrote a piece, that my friend Chuck Shotton says I should run again. Rather than doing that, I'll quote the important part. "I don't think it's about economics, I think it's about change happening too fast. And the Trump voters had the power to bring it to a screeching halt, they saw the chance and took it." #

First thing -- Don't shut down the campaign. We must keep communicating with the electorate, independent of what they get from the news orgs. The Harris campaign did an exemplary job. Why shut it down. Keep setting the agenda. Help keep us organized. Preserve the perspective and expectation of democracy in the US. Change the message from raising money, to keeping us all in touch with the opposition (ie us). This is the mistake we made in every election since we had the web to organize. The Repubs, almost by accident, never stopped organizing. And now that Musk, who will be part of the new administration, owns Twitter, you can be sure they will stay and get more organized. We can do it too! We have to stop making this mistake of going back to zero after election, whether we win or lost.#

Blame is pointless. It may be emotionally satisfying at some level, but it is division, and that's why we keep losing elections. We don't see it but we create our own divisions. This must stop. #

Be generous with all classes of people, by gender, age, race, religion, whatever is used to divide us. Stop vilifying men. Carville was right. There's no reason to make one whole gender the scapegoat for all our problems. It's no accident that the Repubs own the men. We could probably have had ten percent or more of their voters if we stopped doing this. Key point, when you blame a whole gender, you hurt people who have no power to stop it. #

Speaking of Carville, yesterday's Trippi podcast with Carville as the only guest was the best podcast I've ever heard. I recommended it yesterday as inspirational. Now that we know the outcome of the election, it's a marker of where we were before the results were known. A world that no longer exists. But like stories written in 2016, the markers are useful to see where we once were and how we got here, and what we can learn from what happened between. I wish it had turned out the way these two great friends thought it should have. But it didn't. But there was a hint that they knew what wouldn't work this time. No spoilers. #

Ben Thompson wrote in his Stratechery newsletter: "What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it’s a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and in the intervening years the flight of advertisers from the platform has made it worth even less. From a Musk Inc. perspective, however, X played a pivotal role in ensuring that the incoming administration will do whatever Musk needs at the exact moment that SpaceX is gaining the capabilities to actually make a trip to Mars, if only the FAA in particular will give him the freedom to do so. That alone is almost certainly worth $44 billion to Musk!" I wrote in 2017, that some Repub would buy Twitter, and it would merge and thus transform politics and tech. This was obvious, but for some reason I was the only one who saw it. We could have headed this off, if people would just listen. I beg you to listen to people you don't usually listen to. The NYT will never hire someone like me to write on their op-ed page, so if you only accept your input from people with legit credentials, you'll miss insights like this. We're paying a heavy price for this now. When I begged people to listen they came back with the balance sheet valuation of Twitter, but they were leaving the most important asset off the balance sheet, the dollar value of being able to elect a president. Musk didn't miss this. #

"Richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world."#

Also to the Twitter founders, amassing that much power and centralizing it as Twitter did, had a cost that we're paying now. But it's very hard to stop when the juggernaut is rolling. I understand, but in the future we have to think about this more clearly. When a medium becomes too big and centralized, there's trouble ahead. It was accidental that Trump was the one to take advantage of this to route around journalism and go direct, but it was not accidential that Musk did. #

Speaking of Musk, maybe he will temper Trump's desire for retribution. It may be a vain hope, but I'll cling to it anyway. Doing business in a world of retribution might not be too conducive to the creativity needed to run innovative tech businesses. A climate of fear doesn't inspire great software. I know the quality of products Musk makes, I own and love my Tesla Model Y. Best car I've ever owned or driven. #

My longtime friend, Mike Arrington said next time have a primary. He has a point. Would Harris have been the nominee if the Dems had had a normal primary process? Who knows. Maybe the voters could have told us then that what happened yesterday was coming. #

Final note (I think). The pain you feel at first may abate. It did for me. I had pushed down memories of 2020 and 2021. It was a horror show, and Trump was the main character. So the first thing I had to deal with is that I don't want to remember that. Too painful. But once I realized that's not where we are right now, it's a totally different situation, that's when the creative impulse rose as the pain receded. We have one short term thing to do -- keep the campaign running, and long term we have to recognize division we add, and counteract it. We are the party that welcomes everyone regardless or race, religion, country of origin, age or gender. All of them. No exceptions. The election result represents big change. And it's a good time to make more changes. #

PS: I bet Bezos wishes he had bought Twitter. #

lists.opml.org: The other day I asked a famous blogger who uses RSS if he would be willing to share his list of feeds, so others could subscribe to them. He declined, for good reason, there was private stuff in the list he couldn't share. I certainly understand that. Then I realized, as often is the case, that I could do myself what I had been asking others to do. And in fact I already was sharing my OPML subscription lists, but people who didn't use FeedLand wouldn't know how to find them. So I decided to make it easier. On lists.opml.org I've got a link to the lists of podcasts I'm subscribed to. That list should update every hour for any additions or removals from this list. I don't update the list very often, fwiw. And I make no warranties about the quality of the podcasts, or when the feeds in the list update. And maybe this will give other people an idea that they might want to do this as well. Let me know if you do, I'd love to see what you do. #

Tomorrow if you are an American, and haven't voted yet and are thinking of sitting it out -- get off your butt and get out there and do your civic duty. We need great turnout this year, record-setting turnout, as a show of love for our country and our Constitution. Vote now, because later you might not have any power to change direction. Tomorrow, you do have power. And remember that voting is not you expressing yourself, it's not free speech, it's you and I governing. This is our moment of greatest power. Use it or lose it.#

About polls, I learned how they work and how much they are a Ouija board, where the reports are tuned up based on the pollsters assumptions about who are the real voters, and account for the limited people who can be polled. They're trying to estimate what millions of people will do by talking with a few hundred. So they read each others' work, and try not to be too far off the consensus. It's at best an art, at worst they're just press releases designed to get the ad money to flow in certain directions. Don't overlook that the money is flowing to the same businesses that are choosing which polls to report on. Most of what the news orgs report on, it makes it into a sport like the NBA or MLB, but there at least there's objective news to report on, you know -- the score of each game, how many runs were scored, who got injured, fired, traded. In politics, there is no objective news, and if there were, the journalists we have don't report it. There's a lot of inputs that are connected to the outputs, conflicts of interest everywhere. Even so, the top item on Memeorandum is about a poll in Iowa that says Harris is ahead. Iowa was never thought to be in play. Yes, I too am addicted. Endlessly fascinated. Maybe we'll survive next week after all? Hope.#

Heard on Facebook: Next week has been exhausting. Yes.#

Programming language design should follow the half of Postel's Principle that says be "conservative in what you send." There should be one way to do anything, not many. That way I can include your code in mine and vice versa. I can understand what you're doing. Tools can be developed that make it even easier to do things the only way they work. New programming languages if they really are necessary should strive to simplify the programming model, there should be less things for the developer to worry about, the more easily new ideas can be developed, the less attention you have to pay to how you'll do something over what it does. I actually don't support the other half of Postel, in everything but user interface where I do support it. I don't think in general software interfaces should be liberal with what they understand because that defeats the first half. They sort of zero each other out. #

See also: Rules for standards-makers. Language design and protocol design are the same thing. #

People may question my credentials as a language designer. I've designed a very innovative system that unfortunately the academics don't think is worth studying. It's utterly ridiculous. Who says you can only learn from systems developed at big companies or universities. I cover a lot of ground, it's true -- no one gave me permission to create Frontier, but I didn't feel I needed permission. Or funding for that matter. I think what happened is Apple positioned us as less significant than their system scripting language, and people just accepted that, when Frontier is a far superior system. Anyway, the ideas are there anyway, and you're welcome to learn from them. #

Must-read: “It’s extremely difficult for decent people to accept that there are some people who simply do not share their values about truth and basic human kindness. This is what the sociopath counts on.”#

Unfortunately the only place you can read this Dan Conover piece is on Facebook about the failure of the NY Times and Washington Post to adequately defend democracy. He says something I had not seen elsewhere. "We're not talking about HuffPo or Salon here. We're talking about the last two 'unique nationals' standing in American print journalism. Institutions with long and storied histories. Both took the same test at the same time, and both failed it." I'd add that all other journalism usually follows their lead, but that may be finally changing. #

Meanwhile, it's amazing that both CNN and MSNBC have gotten serious about covering the reality of Trump 2.0 after being very unserious for the last year. It's as if after rejecting Joe Biden, months later they realized they rejected the wrong guy.#

We now understand that the Republicans derive their power through division, setting groups against each other. We think the Democrats are the opposite, they are inclusive, everyone is welcome there. But that's not true. This NPR piece touches on it, gingerly, because it's the third rail in non-Republican politics. Because it's one of the divisions that's maintained by people who are mostly Democrats. If you want to know if you're part of the problem, measure your own feelings when you find out what it's about. And then listen, carefully to the words. It might be hard to hear because I think most people who do this don't think they do, or they're justified in doing it. They don't want to look here. But the pragmatic reason to focus on this is that in future elections, assuming we have them, if we can make an effort to not do this, we could get enough Republican votes to switch to make real change possible. They might even become our most vocal supporters. Winning in politics is done by focusing on common interests over division. #

The monthly archive for October has been saved. By the end of this month we'll know a lot more than we know now.#

I did the first demo of my new editor to a couple of developers I'm working with on our ActivityPub project, something I'm ever-more-excited about. Happy to say the demo was a success. They appeared to love the product, and for the right reasons. It makes WordPress into a fantastic writer's platform. This is what I love to do more than anything. People think I'm most interested in protocols and formats, but that's just part of it, and not the main part. I love making writing tools. I got interested in that in the late 70s working on editors for programming languages, then ran a company that made the same kind of editor, outliners, for writers, and then with Frontier went back to programmers. Now I'm trying something new. I want to create a whole category of editors. Editors where none existed before but should be there. The web. Instead what we have in 2024 is a lot of tiny little text boxes that hoard your writing making it pointless for developers to compete for writing tools that writers love. So writing on the web remains something that's not for writers. That's freaking stupid! Anyway right in the middle of all this is the perfect product, really a platform -- WordPress. It needs 100 great editors. I'm going to provide the first, and the toolkit to create more. Then Murphy-willing I'm going to create another editor, to show that it can be done. Then I'm going to kick back and smell the roses, a lifetime's work done, so now I can play. It's looking like the plan might just work.#

I voted today at the early voting place in Saugerties, NY. #

There should be a prize for developers who create the most interop. #

A few days I concluded that Trump doesn't think he's going to win. Now it seems he doesn't want to win.#

When we vote we are governing, not expressing ourselves or protesting. It's not just the first amendment, it's the whole thing. #

What Musk has been saying is cover for what the oligarchs did to the Soviet Union as it was breaking apart. Only the US has vastly more wealth. And unlike Trump, Musk understands how money works, presumably Putin does too. They want the entire flow of cash that's generated by the US economy to go through them. So "richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world." Forget about any benefit from government, that's over. The health care system would fall apart. The situation with abortion is just the beginning. When Musk says it'll come back better after a few years, that's a lie. Something like that never comes back. We've encountered this before, when the Repubs were threatening default. #

Progress on the YouTube TV front. Thanks to all the responses, I've gotten F*cks News out of the startup position, but it still appears in the upper left corner of the 2-by-2 news multiview display, and thus is the default, and when I launch it I hear them talking which is not pleasant. Further I always have to see what their freaking chyron says, and the commercials from the Hitler-fanboi pillow salesman. Basically I want to be able to see what they're doing when I want to, but never have it forced on me. Help. #

The Major League Baseball season is finally over. The no-philosophy mess in the Bronx was near-swept by the infidels from California, on their home field no less, so we expect Jankee Estadium to be either haunted in perpetuity or torn down (latter solution preferable) and replaced with something more appropriate, hopefully very far away from Queens, maybe they'd consider moving to California too? Since the Jankees fans only sanction winning, I don't imagine too many would mind if they had to hate them from afar? And now NY baseball is united in our disrespect from the so-called Bronx Bombers, whose bombs were duds this year. Anyway the Mets did better against the Dodgers in the NLCS, and their star hitter wasn't injured when the lovable Metsies played them. The Mets scored far more runs and of course far more philosophy. And in a desperate attempt to win, when losing was already baked-in, two Janks fans were ejected for trying to interfere with a Dodger outfielder on a stinking foul ball! I mean if you want to try to steal the game, at least have the good sense to interfere with a home run? Not too smart. Oh well. At least the Janks were humiliated, a bright spot for baseball in the Big Apple. #

YouTube TV when it starts up, the station it automatically opens is Fox News. I posted this on various social webs and heard from people this is not their experience. #

"When your house is on fire there aren’t two sides." A few people misunderstood. In this analogy there are no arsonists. There is the house and there is fire. If you were reporting on this situation, you don't need to find out what motivates the fire, the only important thing is that if not checked it will destroy the house.#

I started to read Ben Thompson's email newsletter Stratechery this morning, it was about Trump on Joe Rogan's podcast, which I didn't want to listen to, because I am overdosing on Trump, again. I was surprised to see it begins with the story of podcasting, which has my name in it, which was gratifying. A lot of people will read that. I'm including a screen shot of the beginning because his newsletter is not something you can read without a subscription.#

The people who are alive right now are the first to create knowledge that we know in advance will be part of LLM databases. So far we've heard from the resisters, the ones who don't want any part of this. But what about people who want to create knowledge in the maximally useful form? Are there any howto's for this? A busy writer's guide to creating human knowledge? #

It appears Trump expects to lose.#

If the Washington Post already had their endorsement written when is it going to leak?#

Listened to Charlemagne tha God for the first time on the New Yorker podcast. I agree with everything he said. Really glad that people with clear mind and purpose are using our medium to do the good we hoped for. Best part was where he quoted Obama agreeing that things don't change when you elect a new president. Change can't come that fast unless we bring a substantial majority of other Americans with us. The vote isn't a way to make change, it isn't a way to express yourself, it's your role in governing our country. It's not the First Amendment or the Second Amendment, it's the whole Constitution. It's the most power every one of us gets. Even the president doesn't have the power of our votes. You don't get a specific result from your vote, that would be the fascism that we're trying to avoid. It's the consenus that build that makes the difference. And Obama is too modest because he made at least a couple of big changes. First, everyone has a right to health insurance now because we elected Obama. That's no small deal, coming from someone who has depended on health insurance to survive, a couple of times. And second, we stirred the racial pot in this country in a positive way. Not to say we got peace and love as a result. Because there are a lot of white folks who don't want that pot stirred. But that was change nonetheless. The only way we get there, and I've said this many times, is by working together. Blame is powerless. Acceptance is powerful. #