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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2025-07-04T18:11:25Z

- 2025-07-04T13:31:35Z
Today is Independence Day in the US, so how about an Independence Day for the web. One simple way would be to hook RSS up to ActivityPub, turning Mastodon and Threads into a big feed reader. It could easily be done in software, it would just take money to keep it running. Not something I could attempt personally. But I would totally help with the software and design. It would open the door for lots of new apps that could communicate with users through a single simple API. I want to talk with people about this at WordCamp Canada in October.

- 2025-07-04T13:32:26Z
How odd on Independence Day a law goes into effect that funds a secret police for the US. The goal is to flow people from inside the United States into concentration camps, and ostensibly deport them to other countries. It may turn out to be easier and less expensive to just gas them and burn the bodies right here in the USA. I listened to this morning's Daily podcast to hear how they summed up the bill. They focused on taxes and health care as most of the other news orgs have been doing. They were puzzled why the Repubs didn't seem to care if it hurt their electorate, but they didn't state the obvious answer. They don't care. Remember Occam's News. I guess they didn't want to say it out loud so they just telegraphed the question. It worked, message received.

RSS ==> ActivityPub - 2025-07-04T18:11:25Z

I'd love to see a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub. I've asked people at various companies if they'd do this. I'm happy to help with the software but operating the service is something for a trusted company to do.

I think this would go all the way to putting the "open" in open social web, because people who already know how to build RSS feeds would be able to quickly write apps that hook into AP networks. And of course it wouldn't have to be limited to RSS, it could build on Atom and RDF equally well.

It think it's tragic that it's taking Ghost, for example, so long to get their service up fully, and it suggests that smaller devs don't stand a chance. I can't wake up one day and have an idea of something that would work well with Mastodon, for example, and have a prototype running the next day.

If you think this is a good idea, post a link to this post somewhere developers live, and let's see if we can get a cooperative project up and running.

And if you don't like RSS, Atom or RDF, invent an orthogonal format and we can work with that too. I know people have strong feelings about this stuff, not a problem.

PS: I asked Tim Bray to comment, and he responded. Sounds good. We've known each other for decades, going back to the early days of XML.

- 2025-07-03T13:22:34Z
WordLand v0.5.17 -- Two changes with linkblog support.

- 2025-07-03T11:36:00Z
BTW, this is where we're going with WordLand. We can have a nice social web that builds on simple open formats. I will make an instance of this to show it can be done, both sides, reading and writing. They will work wonderfully with each other. You can write a nice reader and/or writer and it will work with this simple network. A technological coral reef. Think of the MacWrite and MacPaint of the open social web. Enough to get the ball rolling.

- 2025-07-03T11:34:29Z
Looking forward to putting linkblogs in WordLand to bed, I don't think too many people other than myself will use the feature, but I wanted to get it right and then move on.

- 2025-07-02T21:13:47Z
WordLand 0.5.16 -- Rounding out the linkblogging features.

- 2025-07-02T15:26:05Z
Software internally is mostly pipes connected to other pipes, each adding a specific quality to whatever passes through it. If you have nice standards for what you send through the pipes, you can do more of what you imagine. This is called orthogonality. Factoring is when you notice a repeating pattern, give it a name, and a set of things you can do to it, those would be names of pipes. I have to ask ChatGPT what it thinks about this, but I am also asking my human friends. BTW I expect this seems so natural because our minds probably work that way too, internally, below our conscious awareness.

- 2025-07-02T00:06:24Z
More feedback on the design of Bluesky's API.

- 2025-07-01T18:40:18Z
Bullshit. Lisa Murkowski goes on a press tour and sounds like she could be the one that breaks away from Trump in the Republican Senate. As with all of them, always, it was an act. She has a role to play, she's The Agonizer. They are amazing in terms of how organized and orchestrated their campaign is.

- 2025-07-01T11:25:31Z
The archived source for June 2025.

My new linkblog feed - 2025-07-01T11:44:29Z

This is the address of my linkblog feed: dave.linkblog.org.

I think it's kind of interesting to have the top page of a site be a feed. I don't hide the XML-ness of it. I never supported the obfuscation, it's confusing, makes people not trust RSS, imho.

I think the feed is pretty stable now, so if you want to subscribe, go ahead. I haven't redirected from the old feed yet, probably should do that soon, since it more or less has stopped updating.

This is all managed in WordLand and therefore is part of the WordPress ecosystem.

I felt it was time to do a definitive linkblog, since as far as I could tell no one has tried to explain what it is: basically, a feed where the <link> element of each <item> points to some other site. That's the basic difference.

Also a linkblog feed should specify the channel-level <image> element, which is used as the avatar for the feed when it appears in a twitter-like timeline.

I think the only other product that is open to feeds being part of the open social web is Surf from Mike McCue's company, Flipboard. I asked ChatGPT to brief me on how it works with feeds, and saw that we're more or less doing the same thing, except I'm not trying to work with the output from Twitter, Bluesky, etc. Even when they have outbound RSS feeds they aren't good enough to be part of the social web defined by feeds.

I only want really good feeds. It's time to stop being so careless about what we transmit to the world. If we want an open web we're all going to have to be good gardeners. It's like a food system where all the food is grown by family farmers and I'm running a restaurant, and only want the good stuff, and we want it to look good too! :-)

PS: Another thing, the feed items must have working guids. All software that runs on feeds should be able to depend on this.

PPS: Linkblogs aren't the only kinds of feeds that will be used in this RSS-based feediverse. Scripting News will work with it. You would be able to read this post in this new medium (not yet delivered, btw).

PPPS: More here and here.

#rss