Notices by Dave Winer (scripting@daveverse.org)

I want to develop a scripting interface for Mastodon from Frontier. I need a test account for us to use. I have applied at two public Mastodon hosts and answered the question honestly, I want to use it to test a new scripting system, probably doesn’t sound too warm and fuzzy.

Fatpages. I’m working on a code release that’s on the path to Frontier. It reads and writes fatpage files, a format we invented for releasing new and updated parts for Frontier in 1997. So this is very old but perfectly useful technology that’s being built in a new release of Frontier, the first in 1.5 decades, depending on how you count years and forks.

Reminder, my posts are also available on Mastodon, made possible by WordPress, where I mirror my posts from Scripting News, and they mirror them to Mastodon. A lot of what’s in the post makes it through. But this is where we need to do some work, connecting a blog like mine, to WordPress and Mastodon, with no loss of fidelity, that’s the ideal. Same thing with the people creating writing tools for AT Proto, they should meet up with us via RSS 2.0, so they don’t have to depend on the access the company gives them to users. This is just a repeat of what happened with Twitter and its API. And Apple with their OS, Microsoft, etc, etc. The only way it works is if we use the web’s definition of text, and use the standards of the web, like Markdown and RSS 2.0.

It’s our job to make the web a more attractive environment than AT Proto. We can deliver all the benefits they tout, without the huge transition involved in converting to their world. It would be like porting from Mac to Windows in the 90s, something we did at UserLand, and net-net probably wasn’t worth it, althought at the time the Mac was in deep shit (before Jobs came back) and they had basically crushed our efforts on the Mac platform. I liked the feeling of us getting out of there. Now if only we had ported to Linux over Windows, then we’d be sitting in the freaking catbird seat. And btw, if AT Proto wants to make a smooth on ramp (and off ramp) for apps that use the well established standards of the web, that’s even better. We all do better if there’s just one platform to develop for, that way we can focus on making users happy instead of whatever is accomplished by being different in unnecessary ways.

A karass is “a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.”

I think of rss.chat as a social network for my karass. A small group of people, not trying to get famous or rich from using a social network, rather wanted to work with or stay in touch with people who are linked cosmically. This is one of many rich ideas invented by Kurt Vonnegut, this one in Cat’s Cradle, which you should read, because it’s some of the best story-telling out there, and it’s full of food for thought. I read all the books when I was a teen, and have since re-read them. Sirens of Titan was my fave.

Anyway…

In the past when I announced a product, people could use it right away, and usually they click a couple of things and then go away.

In the case of rss.chat — what you will see is very much like what you see when you aren’t logged in, or what you see on a social network like Twitter, or Mastodon or whatever. The UI is nice, but it’s not the thing. That will be revealed relatively slowly, over time — as new instances pop up, and even more importantly, as developers figure out that this setup works well enough to clone. I’m not selling a product here — I want to bootstrap an ecosystem, using all I learned from several successful bootstraps — blogging, RSS, podcasting.

The idea is this — the web itself is a social network. It’s up to us, all of us, not just me — to build that network.

When you see how we proceed from here that will become more clear.

In the meantime I’m going to change the message you get when you try to sign up, and start a wait list so that when more instances are available, some meant to be open to the public, we’ll be sure to let you all know about that.

For now, I’m operating a network for people I work with, and it’s all open for anyone to read. That’s also one of the ideas I want to explore, something I call a “Fractional horsepower social network,” stealing a very good idea from Steve Jobs.

I don’t want to turn the world over to a startup, we’ve done that and have a pretty good idea of where it goes. I want lots of small ones that have a very strong basis to be connected together in as many ways as people can imagine.

In the case of rss.chat — what you will see is very much like what you see when you aren’t logged in, or what you see on a social network like X, or Mastodon or whatever. The UI is nice, but it’s not the thing.

That will be revealed relatively slowly, over time — as new instances pop up, and even more importantly, as developers figure out that this setup works well enough to clone. I’m not selling a product here — I want to bootstrap an ecosystem, using all I learned from several successful bootstraps — blogging, RSS, podcasting.

The idea is this — the web itself is a social network. It’s up to us, all of us, not just me — to build that network.

When you see how we proceed from here that will become clearer.

In the meantime I’m going to change the message you get when you try to sign on, and start a wait list so that when more instances are available, some meant to be open to the public, we’ll be sure to let you all know about that.

For now, I’m operating a network for people I work with, and it’s all open for anyone to read. That’s also one of the ideas I want to explore, something I call a “Fractional horsepower social network,” stealing a very good idea from Steve Jobs.

I don’t want to turn the world over to a startup, we’ve done that and have a pretty good idea of where it goes. I want lots of small ones that have a very strong basis to be connected together in as many ways as people can imagine.

PS: The idea of a karass

Yesterday was a wonderful first day for rss.chat. It’s now out there, but we haven’t talked about or demo’d many of the things that it does. I wanted to get the feeds out there first, because now we get to think together about how they fit together to give us a social network experience. It’s not locked in a silo, these are just like feeds you have known about for over two decades. But it is a new application for those feeds. And this is a bootstrap. You start with something small that you’re sure is a beginning for what you want to do. And then you and others use it for a while. And it is open source, MIT licensed, but compatibility will make the difference.

The other day Matt joked about how old I am, in public, and I am pretty old. But Matt, I was paying attention then as I am now, and connecting the dots. No one else working today, I’d venture, knows what it’s like to create and run a modem-based dial-up Twitter-like system on an Apple II with a 10MB Corvus hard drive. Yet it worked, and people loved it. If you weren’t alive in 1981, you wouldn’t know anything about this. I remember well talking with Doug Engelbart when I was running UserLand. If you don’t know who he is, look him up. He blazed a trail we were turning into a highway, and we’re all using his inventions all the time. Every chance I got to sit down with him I did. I wanted him to work with us, to critique everything we were doing. He had a lot of knowledge that disappeared when he passed on a few years later. That’s the sad thing, at my advanced age, I am trying to avoid. And btw, as surprise, Claude really understand this stuff. I’ve never seen anything like it with a human, and I’ve worked with some great humans.

Leaflet is a nice editor designed to work with Bluesky. But they’ve been branching out. They now support email and RSS output. They’re going in the right direction, toward the internet with the email, and toward the web with the RSS support. As nice as Bluesky is, it’s a small part of the web, and it isn’t as open as it might appear to be, imho.

I didn’t write about the Knicks prior to last night’s game because I had no idea what to write.

The Knicks in the Finals is something I had a hard time understanding, even thinking about. To me the Knicks are soulful losers. They’re like once-future hall-of-famer Carmelo Anthony surrounded by people who shouldn’t even be in the NBA, but otherwise are lovely individuals. When they asked Melo what his goal was he said it was to win a championship, but the reporters never followed up with the obvious question — “Really?” They did make the playoffs, three times, in the Age of Melo, and they made it to the second round one of those three years, but that was it as far as Melo’s championship aspirations. He should’ve been on one of LeBron’s teams, like JR Smith and Iman Shumpert, both Knicks alumni in the Melo period, who were fine players and did win with LeBron at Cleveland.

Going into the game last night I thought maybe the pundits were right, that the real NBA Finals was the previous round between the San Antonios and the Oklahoma Cities. But last night that was debunked. At what point did I realize this? It wasn’t until the game was over, ABC announcer Mike Breen said at the exact moment the game was over “..their 12-game win streak” which revealed that I had little faith the streak would be preserved. I thought 11 was pretty great, but 12? Until that exact moment — unthinkable.

In the first part of the game when San Antonio looked like they might rout the poor unprepared Knicks, I thought okay, but couldn’t we just concede so we don’t have to watch? In that moment I appreciated what the Clevelands must have been feeling as they shrunk to nothing faced with the Knicks onslaught? How about if we all go home now at some point they must all have been thinking.

I’m a Mets fan first, and I bring the Mets philosophy to every sport, including the NBA and software. I’m here for the game. Sure I love it when we win, but if the Knicks went down in the final test, I’d still be a happy camper. Look they made it to the freaking Finals! Some Mets fans say the team slogan is You Gotta Believe. I say Wait Till Next Year! Same for the Knicks. Same for every software product I make that no one bothers to try out.

This Knicks team is classic. Every one of their players would be a star on any other team, including the bench players. Some of them whose contracts expire at the end of the series will certainly go to other teams. But what a thrill to have this group all on the same team and that team is my lovely Knicks.

Last night’s game was a lesson, you should always be open to the possibility of winning because sometimes you do.

Every social web need avatars. If you’re looking for them in an RSS 2.0 feed, I suggest looking at the channel-level image element. For good prior art see how they do it in WordPress.

One of the items in Rules for Standards-makers is don't design the format before you make the app. Instead, make an app, and when you're ready, make the file format public so people can interop (ie compete) so as not to lock users to in your software. If you do that you can say you are "of the web." If we all do that always, voila! — no more silos. Another rule is that you must use an existing format if it exists, because then you will interop with the other people who support that format. Gratuitous incompatibility is a sign of a silo-seeker and not conducive to standards. So, look first, if there are no usable formats, make your app and make your format public.

Poll: Do you have a blog?

February 4 is the midpoint of winter. So we're almost half-way there.

Sometimes you think of things 22 years too late, like this time. I wish I had thought of meeting with the Harvard Crimson people in 2003 and made the same offer to them that I had made to NYT the year before, ie we should offer blogs to everyone on staff, and anyone they quote, or basically anyone they want to be writing on the web, which was still a new thing — and we'd host them alongside the ones we were hosting at the law school. Had we done that there would be a scholarly and intellectual equivalent to Facebook which was also booting up on the same campus at the same time as blogging and podcasting. Love and intellect, that's a good combination for young super-achievers.

One more thing, people are posting Trump's vicious eulogy for Reiner and his wife. Why are they helping him piss on the fresh memory of the life of these people who gave us so much. Stop and think before you express your outrage at Trump, and realize you're giving him exactly what he wants, as you tarnish the memory of good-hearted and generous people. Just don't do it.

RSS 2.0, the antidote to enshitification.

I like it when people send me thoughtful responsive notes about things I've written. I think it's possible to set up a social network so that most of what you get follows that pattern. It has to do with incentives.

A quick idea.

You can now pretty much write a blog on Mastodon.

I am doing such a thing here now. 

This site is emanating from a WordPress site, on a server I run myself.

But I've also installed the plugin that cross-posts to Masto via ActivityPub. I have no idea how it works, but I don't have to. My writing magically appears on both the web and Mastodon at the same time. 

And the features it has on Masto are good enough to call it blogging.

I have the ability to do simple styling. I can link from a word to another page, the most basic feature of blogging and the web. We dreamed about how we'd use this in the early days of the web, and now it's rare that we type into a place where you can. But blogs still love links! And somehow they get through the usual filters and the links show up in Mastodon via ActivityPub. Woohoo! 

Of course we want more! But this is a decent place to start.

So let's think about it and if you have a Blog of Mastodon, send me a link, I want to read it. 

PS: If you can read this on Threads please let me know! 🙂

PPS: And the cool thing about the Blogs of Mastodon is you can't do it on Bluesky, yet. But we hope they will support this too.

I've been taking Ozempic for the last couple of years with dramatic effects.

But now for the last year my weight is stable at a reasonably healthy level for the first time in a long time. Getting prepared for the big decade, I just turned 70 this year. It's a daunting moment. I remember when my grandfather was 70. It seemed like an impossibly age. I was 15.

Anyway I haven't said anything about it on my main blog. Not sure how people would react.

But this blog, daveverse, is finding another audience. I haven't made sense of it, people are liking it somewhere, but we don't have a Like button on the site. I'm thinking they must be doing it on Mastodon, but where? This is something we have to work on for Mastodon. There need to be places, and I always assumed they were there but now I think they aren't. This is not a good thing to be confused about.

Anyway back to Ozempic. I realize now how it works. After two years, I don't get an emotional rush out of eating. It isn't about satisfying a need for love any more. It's just eating. And I swear I taste so much more of the food now than I ever did. Eating for nutrition and eating for sensation.

My old grandfather used to call this the Art of Living. Maybe this attitude toward food isn't only coming from the drug, maybe time does that too.

My message btw to people who feel 70 is impossibly old, you won't feel that way so much when you are 70 because you keep learning and seeing things you didn't see before. It's part of the trip. I almost died a few times earlier in life, glad I didn't so I get to do this.

If I were running Bluesky I’d have a quiet project to make a lite Bluesky server that peers with the mother ship, highly factored, in a Node package, open source of course. Get this snake oil phase behind them, where they’re claiming to be decentralized, but aren’t.