Dave Winer posts in early January 2016

My current bookmarks page of sites that I visit or feeds that I consume includes a link to DW's feed near the top of the list. I access his feed multiple times per day to see what new insights he has posted. I'm mainly interested in his thoughts and projects regarding web publishing.

I agree and disagree with his tech posts. I don't care about the other topics. I don't access his Facebook or Twitter pages, except in extremely rare occasions. I read the RSS feed from his blog.

Here is how I read Dave Winer's writings: feed page.

I use my custom "feed" command that is included within my Junco code that powers this site. The feed command also exists in the Parula code that powers my message board at ToledoTalk.com.

Here's how it works. The feed= is surrounded by two curly braces at each end. The line must begin at the start of a new line in order for it to work.

Scripting News - 2025-04-08T22:04:56Z

- 2025-04-08T16:09:45Z
Today's song: Come on Eileen.

The big vision behind WordLand - 2025-04-08T22:04:56Z

I believe that eventually WordPress will be the hub for writers the way the web itself became the the hub for apps. Initially, the web wasn’t the best place to host apps, the Mac had a much more developed set of meaningful features for app devs, and we already knew the Mac APIs where the web was strange and incomplete.

Yet most of the energy in AppLand quickly shifted to the web because of three advantages it had:

1. Anyone could publish for it, there was no platform vendor.
2. The networking model was open and simple, where the Mac's was hidden behind incomplete and poorly written docs.
3. The Mac's networking only worked on the Mac at a time when Windows was becoming dominant, and the web offered simplicity that neither platform could match.

The web made writing network apps a joy, where the Mac made it a slog. No matter how much time you spent developing, it never resulted in success.

There was no question for me when I saw the web, I had to be there.

Substack and Ghost are like Mac and Windows at the dawn of the web. Their big mistake imho is they weren’t built on WordPress, which can and should imho serve as the base platform for writing on the web. If an ecosystem of writing tools is built on the Wordpress foundation how could silo’d writing tools hope to compete?

If you question the choice of Wordpress, what would you go with in its place? I argue that whatever it is, it would work much like Wordpress, which has a 20+ year head start, is stable, scales, is widely supported, and open source, so if you don't like the company behind it, you can choose not to use their distribution.

With WordLand we are testing the water hopefully proving that it is possible to create a functional writing environment on the WordPress foundation. Why is that such an advantage? Because, like the word processing products of the 80s on various OSes, these apps should be able to share data. One day you may feel like writing something with WordLand and a few days later you might want to try editing the same document using a different editing tool. As long as they both ingest and emit Markdown, they should have no trouble editing each others' documents. This is where the benefit of a common platform becomes insurmountable, because the silos insist you use their editor and only their editor and an open platform with open data formats lets you move between apps that interop. There’s a reason so many word processors thrived in the 80s, because the needs and tastes of writers vary so much, and technically it was possible to move data around in an ad hoc way.

Until WordLand, tools for writers on the Wordpress platform were practically nonexistent. I think that can change now, because the middleware that connects WordLand to Wordpress is both easy to understand, for developers, and open source under the most liberal license. Any app that connects with Wordpress through this API will interop with WordLand so totally that it could replace WordLand.

I would be happy if WordLand played the role of MacWrite in the Mac ecosystem of the 80s. At the outset it was the only writing tool for the Mac, and set the usability pattern for all that followed. As a result the Mac platform, even though initially its appeal was mainly to developers and designers, quickly boomed as a writer's platform. I strongly believe Wordpress has this potential.

I think writers need the same variety and open possibilities as developers, and the existing writer's systems are not offering that choice. I believe this is the start of the writers web, that should, if we do it right, and if my intuition is correct, grow like the web itself at inception. My bet is that an expansive approach will yield far more creativity in a very important area, writing, and should quickly become the place writers want to be.

- 2025-04-08T01:29:28Z
There’s no reason RSS and social media have to be separate worlds. RSS is the easiest and fastest way to connect systems. When I see people endorse RSS over social sites I think we took a wrong turn somewhere because all these systems should be connected on the open web and RSS is the perfect way to do that.

- 2025-04-08T01:30:33Z
Rachel Maddow's show these days often begins with a hard-to-watch over-the-top endorsement of Bluesky. She shouldn't be doing that. It's a private company and someday she may criticize them as strongly as she did Facebook. I'd love to hear her explain exactly what's the difference between Bluesky and Facebook. A lot less than you might think.

- 2025-04-07T14:32:24Z
Hillary Clinton makes a very important point. "Republicans in Congress can put a stop to this at any time." By this, she means the crashing US economy. And even if you believe they'll "never do it" -- it's still the right thing to repeat this over and over -- people should know they could. This should be repeated until enough people get it, this is being done on purpose by the Repubs. This isn't about winning elections, it's about understanding who's doing this to you and how deliberate it is.

- 2025-04-07T13:31:00Z
A question on GitHub: Is OPML the native file format for Drummer? It's better to first use the product or read the docs or search on web or use an AI chatbot before getting humans involved. Anyway, the answer is yes, OPML is the native file format of Drummer. It's the reason we chose OPML as the format for RSS reading lists, so we could edit them in a distant ancestor of Drummer's whose native file format was also OPML. I tend not to change file formats gratuitously -- it's how you can use different tools to edit your own data. That's a big part of the plan with WordLand, because the internal file format for drafts is Markdown, you could put any editor alongside that can edit and save text in Markdown, without a glitch. The idea is to create a new platform, editors for WordPress, and have them all interop with each other perfectly from the start. Because WordLand is the first product in this niche, and Markdown is a very safe choice these days (understood to discourage lock-in), I think it's going to be a perfect basis for interop. Learning from past experience and doing it better each time.

- 2025-04-06T16:59:36Z
A search for WordPress on this blog tells an interesting story.

- 2025-04-06T17:04:08Z
I wonder when ChatGPT or Claude.ai will compete with Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is great but it has always had a weakness in that it can be manipulated to tell a story from a very limited point of view. For example the RSS page has a long section explaining the benefits of Atom. What I like about the AI versions of the basic history of things is that it isn't so easily manipulated. I talked about this with Claude, and asked it to write up a proposal for ClaudeWiki, a Wikipedia workalike, not too expensive to run, make it part of a user's $20 per month subscription. I think it would be useful, if only as a demo how Wikipedia itself might improve its service.

- 2025-04-06T16:38:05Z
If I were designing a social network, I would implement replies differently. When you reply to a post, only the person who wrote the post sees it. If they want they can RT it. The way it works now on all twitter-like systems means most of the replies are basically spam, people using your post as a way to reach people who follow you.

- 2025-04-06T16:35:43Z
BTW, when you post something on Bluesky it's just a tweet. These things don't need different names on each platform.

- 2025-04-06T16:30:58Z
I like people who stand up and speak the truth. This is one of the silver linings of this crisis. There's no real advantage at this point in trying to play it safe, to not be noticed. So I like what Chris Murphy, Senator from Connecticut has been saying.

- 2025-04-06T16:28:36Z
I used to tell friends you can't go wrong buying the S&P 500. The president is rated by now the stock market does, and so over the long haul you can expect steady growth from the S&P 500, and it keeps things really simple. Well, have to say -- that's no longer good advice. Maybe real estate? Outside the United States? I don't know. It depends on what the people of this country do, and if our representatives are listening.

- 2025-04-06T14:36:50Z
MAGA's goal, it turns out, was the Great Depression.

- 2025-04-05T15:34:40Z
I finally looked at my nest egg and was shocked to see the new number. Even worse that the dollars in the account will buy even less as the US dollar loses its value as the flight to safety currency. It's not a big surprise as the US behaves like a drunk Dunning-Kruger deluded schoolyard bully. What is amazing, if you think about it, is that we aren't having an emergency impeachment and trial to get him out of there. That could actually restore a bit of confidence of the outside world, showing that the power in the US is more with the people than it has been for a long time. Maybe our would-be overlords are scared too at what their idea has unleashed. Even if Trump weren't so inept, eventually whoever you choose as the monarch, they're going to behave like this. Inevitable. We could have a revolution right now, fix this, and set the country on the right course. We could do it. I believe we could.

- 2025-04-06T01:54:05Z
And btw it could be worse. 💥

- 2025-04-05T18:08:00Z
I now have a Canadian partner on the radiofreeameri.ca project, a founder of Tucows, who I've known for decades, Ross Rader. We've done work together in the past, it's great to be doing it again.

- 2025-04-05T17:10:20Z
On the path we're on, no doubt Bluesky will come under the same kind of regulation law firms and universities are. And the shame of it is we could be using this time to spread out, distribute.

Diego Rivera style portrait - 2025-04-05T15:14:46Z

I asked ChatGPT to draw a portrait of the current US president in the style of Diego Rivera.

- 2025-04-04T21:51:38Z
How Bluesky hooks up via RSS into a powerful news system.

- 2025-04-04T16:55:19Z
Bluesky is centralized, version 2. I wasn't satisfied with the blog post I wrote in March. I felt it was poorly organized and hard to understand, so I edited it, to get it down to its essential elements, and at the end explain why it's so important to get this right. Basically, by trying to be the universe, Bluesky is cutting off easy connections that can be made with other networks, make the system work better for communication, and at least deliver some of the freedom we all want. They've been very successful, and deserve to profit from that, but recognize it plays a larger role today than just as a business, so let's spread it out so it's harder to shut it down. This is a real concern, not just a nice-to-have thing.

- 2025-04-04T15:57:03Z
ChatGPT colorized the photo of my grandfather on his tribute site.

- 2025-04-04T13:17:28Z
Just tried an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to review ActivityPub re Rules for Standards-makers. I totally concurred with its conclusions. In any case, it illustrates how ChatGPT can be helpful in designing new formats and protocols, making them more supportable and more useful for interop, which according to Rule 1, is the only reason we make standards.

- 2025-04-04T13:47:27Z
One thing led to another, we discussed lots of facets to the RFSM document. At some point it started rewriting what I had, and used two terms that don't belong in standards-making: dogfood and deprecate. Nothing ever is deprecated. That's arrogance on the part of developers. Imagine if someone in charge of NYC decided to deprecate the arrangement of the streets. Also, if your protocol achieved any adoption at all, there are far more developers than there are originators of the format. If I decided, for example, that the "webmaster" element in RSS was deprecated, do you think anyone would care? Of course not, nor should they. It's a powerless thing. I feel you should introduce features carefully because you will have to live with them forever. Also I thought there was a section in RFSM about breakage. That was Rule #1 at UserLand. We didn't always live up to it. About dogfood: I don't eat dog food, I'm a human. 2. It says we think of our users as pets, that's not rational or productive. However I do very strongly believe you have to use what you create, because you won't understand what users say unless you are one yourself.

- 2025-04-03T21:30:53Z
We're doing some research into the origins of my family in Germany, learning a lot.

Journalists still sanewashing - 2025-04-03T21:52:40Z

They're still sanewashing Trump.

Example. Just listened to Brian Lehrer, a news interview and call-in show on WNYC, which I revere, for many reasons. Lehrer is smart, and doesn't dumb things down for his audience. He usually asks the question I'm dying to hear the answer to, which most reporters don't think of or won't ask.

On the March 27 they had a discussion about Trump's assault on Columbia University, which has now been extended to Harvard and Princeton. In all of them, the main issue is antisemitism at these universities.

Never in the discussion did they raise this question --

Do we believe that Trump cares about antisemitism?

And if he did, there are much bigger antisemites who are much more powerful and much closer to Trump (who is an obvious antisemite himself).

I'll mention just one -- Elon Musk, who actually did the Nazi salute, twice, from the podium with the Presidential Seal on it, at the freaking inauguration.

Musk has also backed the German Nazi party (they have a different name but to use that name would be NaziWashing, which I won't do).

The Occam's truth is that he's tying antisemitism to things because it's fun for him, and because later -- they will blame Jews for everything that's wrong in the US, as they always do.

The whole thing of Trump being a champion for Jewish people made me really uneasy, until I read a piece in Timothy Snyder's newsletter, which I recommend to everyone.

Anyway, I trust Brian Lehrer, I don't think he'd shirk a tough question, I just think as a journalist he still isn't thinking realistically about the world as it is now, instead behaving as he did before it got so rotten.

- 2025-04-02T14:05:06Z
Cory Booker asked the right question. "Where does the Constitution live? On paper or in our hearts?" Every living American was raised under the Bill of Rights. That's different from other countries which have long traditions of autocracies. Fascism on a mass scale will have a harder time taking root in this country. Joe Rogan said what Trump is doing is wrong. He knows he has the right to say that. Setting a fine example. It will be hard to suppress that.

- 2025-04-02T14:24:31Z
Gambling and sports don’t mix for me. I want a version of games without the gambling. I don’t know how parents can let their kids watch games with all the gambling ads.

- 2025-04-01T14:23:43Z
The chickens of sanewashing come home to roost.

- 2025-04-01T11:12:48Z
How did the music industry get through hip-hop sampling in the 80s without blowing itself up? I was paying attention to copyright issues in software at the time, we used copy protection, but we knew it didn't work. It was just how things were done.

- 2025-04-01T10:41:29Z
The beautiful art that came with the season finale of Severance could have been drawn by ChatGPT, it's that good, in the way that machine art is good. There's a point of view reflected in its creations, looking into a soul that in no way exists. We're learning about it, but it's a moving target, evolving before our eyes, in huge steps.

- 2025-04-01T10:39:00Z
My server has been coughing up hairballs tonight. It coughed up a link to this piece from two years ago, when Twitter pulled the plug on their API. It knocked everything I had built on the Twitter API off the air. Every thing. Just like that. That's what tonight was like here. It was just some of my apps, suddenly, not working. Whew.

- 2025-04-01T10:16:09Z
WordLand and Scripting News and a bunch of other sites/apps were off the air starting about 1AM Eastern, but mostly things seem to be working now, shortly after 6AM. It was a big scramble, I had to provision a new server on Digital Ocean.

More weird ChatGPT fun - 2025-04-01T10:47:58Z

The prompt: Here's a drawing and a profile picture. I'd like you to insert the person in the profile into the drawing, and adapt it as you see fit, but the face of the person in the profile should be in the same style as the ones around it.

I gave it a snapshot of the art from the season finale of Severance, and my profile picture from Facebook.

I'd like to excerpt from and comment about three DW posts that he made over the past couple days.

• Jan 4, 2016 - Leave nothing but footprints
• Jan 4, 2016 - Why tech insiders must be on Facebook
• Jan 5, 2016 - Re Twitter easing the 140-char limit

Dave claims that he likes the open web, and he often rails against silos, such as Twitter and Facebook. In the summer of 2013, I discovered the #indieweb group via a poster mentioning the https://indiewebcamp.com in a comment to one of DW's posts. Maybe the word "silo" has been used for a long time to describe social media sites, but the term got popularized in my conscience by the Indieweb site.

I added #webmention support to my Junco code because of the Indieweb group. The Indieweb people "use" social media sites differently. They own their own domain names. They post articles and notes to their own blog sites. But rather than manually cross-posting their info their many social media presences, they use software that makes it appear that the Indieweb users are using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. just like everyone else, but that's not the true.

Indieweb users use software to post to other