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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2025-04-18T16:05:27Z

- 2025-04-18T16:05:27Z
Today's song: Pump It Up.

- 2025-04-18T15:57:59Z
I'm working on a baseline theme for WordLand-authored sites. I want to show people how to get a good result with WordLand, even if they have plenty of experience with WordPress, but especially if they don't. I want people to look at a user's site and think "Hey I want one of those!" Not too fancy, just get out of the way and let the writer's writing stand out and look great. This is a replay of the work we did on Manila and then Radio. I hope we're able to start a designer community as vibrant and productive as the one we had a few years ago.

- 2025-04-18T14:55:37Z
Everyone has to communicate in plain language, directly to the people. The courts, universities, every institution that the president is defaming. Go direct, go around the media. Start communicating in the language we communicate in these days. Use the tools. The campaign never stops. Then we'll know what we have to do to protect the rule of law. And the Dems are starting to do that, some of them, thankfully. Best example so far -- AOC and Bernie. Elizabeth Warren. Chris Murphy, Cory Booker, Chris Van Hollen. And lately some Repubs too. It's the same old thing the web does -- Sources Go Direct.

- 2025-04-17T16:49:21Z
I like that Powell is telling Trump he won't go. I wish Obama had had the guts to say that to McConnell when he wouldn't hold hearings on Garland. "Well if you won't take a vote, we'll take that as consent," says the President. "And you can quote me on that." In a televised event Obama himself would walk Garland over to his office at the Supreme Court and administer the oath and let him take his seat. I don't know about you but I would have felt great about America then. We're finished being such pussycats.

- 2025-04-17T12:24:14Z
Watching debates on CNN it’s amazing how many arguments would be settled by saying “It’s nice you feel that way, but that’s not what the Constitution says.”

- 2025-04-17T14:43:59Z
This piece echoes what I’ve been saying. Twitter was a fine start, in 2006, but today it’s clear a lot of its rules and limits were mistakes. 19 years later it’s ridiculous that Bluesky and Mastodon repeat those mistakes. I love the term he uses, the "shape" of Twitter. Each decision we make in developing our means of discourse shapes the discourse. And with the character limit and the inability to edit, and the incentives are all wrong (I can tap into your follower flow without your permision just by posting a reply) it makes almost all twitter-like discourse spam or abusive. I'm planning a different structure for discourse in the world shaped by WordLand. A reply will only be visible to the person who you're replying to. If they want others to see it, they can make it public. It's their choice. So you probably should be respectful if you're looking for a flow boost. You can turn off all discourse if you want, giving the ability to finish a thought. We've learned so much about this in the 19 years since Twitter started. It's time to break out of the limits. BTW, that's what my textcasting doc was all about.

- 2025-04-16T21:10:04Z
WordLand is starting to flow really nicely, and I'm doing more writing there. I have to do this if it's going to be as good a product as it possibly can. The Timeline seems really solid btw, thinking about next steps. Lots of fun products coming soon!

- 2025-04-16T20:13:09Z
Join a Parade Today. When people talk about What You Can Do on podcasts or on TV, they say lame things that don't work that well. One thing for sure is that when Bernie and Alexandria do a rally in your area, you can go and enjoy the energy. This is a good thing because it gives the TV cameras something to focus on. But here's what I think the best thing to do is. Don't start something, join something. Because two is way more powerful than one, and three is way more powerful than two. When people work together on something good, more people doing it is usually even better.

- 2025-04-16T13:10:03Z
I want to develop a WordPress theme by iterating as you would when developing an app. I outlined the flow on the wordLandSupport repo.

- 2025-04-15T12:58:00Z
WordLand 0.5.4. New feature, the Timeline. "I can imagine there will be a Timeline for news about WordLand, or a Timeline that contains Scripting News posts. A Timeline for all the people you work with, the people you play chess with. Basically it will be possible to have Timelines that correspond to anything that can be represented in RSS. It's possible to imagine a product where the Timeline is the main display and the editor is the one that pops up."

- 2025-04-15T14:22:00Z
Quick demo of the Timeline in v0.5.4.

- 2025-04-15T19:34:42Z
Looking for help from people who know how to create WordPress themes. The goal is to create a default theme that works well for WordLand-authored sites. It was suggested I try the Retrospect theme, and it does look quite nice when I switched over the daveverse site to use it. Is it possible to fork a WordPress theme? If so, here's a list of changes I'd like in a new theme.

- 2025-04-15T12:07:56Z
A few days ago I wrote: ChatGPT is to Google what Google was to library card catalogs. The great thing about Google when it was first out was that unlike previous search products, they searched everything, including our blogs, and that opened up knowledge to us that had been previously, for all of our history as a species, not accessible. And LLMs are similarly revolutionary. I'm doing much better, deeper work, with great results for my users, than I could have accomplished with the network defined by Google.

- 2025-04-14T13:29:39Z
A long time ago, based on my experience at Berkman in the 00s, I proposed the idea of a Developing Better Developers function at a university, as a pilot, to create a teaching hospital atmosphere around creating new communication systems out the web and (key point) not compromising the openness of the web. It would be as sacred as academic freedom is in the university, or the First Amendment of the Constitution. It seemed to me that a university is the perfect place to create something like this. If we had such a setup, anywhere, at this time -- we would be working in earnest on an open alternative to twitter, one that is truly billionaire-proof right now, as opposed to "would be nice to have sometime in the future."

- 2025-04-14T20:13:59Z
Harvard could use this moment to bring some really new ideas back into the university.

What is Inbound RSS? - 2025-04-14T12:19:46Z

I wrote a complex piece here earlier, but it's much simpler than it made it sound, so I decided to start again.

Feed readers view RSS as inbound, and blogging tools regard it as outbound. Same feed, different contexts. Like trains going in and out of a station. Inbound and outbound.

But some software views RSS in both directions. The best example is Twitter and its successors such as Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. These products are for both for reading and writing. It makes sense to have outbound feeds, like a blogging tool, and it makes just as much sense as a consumer of feeds, like a feed reader, so we can easily publish stuff from other environments and people can subscribe to them exactly as if they used their editor to write it. No reason anyone needs to know. This is absolutely the simplest and most web-like way to do federation. And you don't need any new formats or protocols. It's all RSS on both sides. We totally know how to do RSS. It's ready to go.

What got me thinking about this a few years ago was Substack. I wanted to publish a nightly email newsletter from what I had posted that day on my blog, but I didn't have the patience to copy and paste and then reformat the text, by hand, when I already have that automated. They wanted to turn me into a computer. I tried that with Medium for a couple of years and it was awful. No thanks. What I needed them to have support Inbound RSS.

That's it. You now know all there is to know about Inbound RSS. 😀

- 2025-04-13T14:21:31Z
Developers: This is the WordPress API. Compare it to AT Proto and ActivityPub. It's got a lot of advantages. It does the basics of social media. It scales, is mature, stable, and well-managed. A stronger, stable, more broad and better foundation imho to build on than the others.

- 2025-04-13T16:14:27Z
I keep beating the drum about Bluesky. Their story says they know they need to be replaceable. But until they deliver on replaceability, it's a 5-alarm fire because of what happened with Twitter. It should not have been possible to acquire Twitter's user base. In hindsight we know it could have been avoided. And it can be avoided by Bluesky, but my guess is the last thing they want is to be replaced. If they really meant it, we could make it happen in a few weeks, and then we could build some really incredible systems, starting in late May, early June. I really believe that. Next journalist that interviews them should ask about this. Thanks for listening.

- 2025-04-12T15:14:44Z
I've been working on an all-new feature for WordLand. Expect something in the next few days, Murphy-willing.

- 2025-04-12T14:43:56Z
If we had a better communication system we would not be so vulnerable. We might even be able to defend ourselves. So it's doubly ridiculous that journalism is leading us to Bluesky, when it is just more of the same with a better story. They're asking us to go deeper into the myth that the most toxic tech ever invented is actually good for us. The thing that feels good is the belief that it is good. In that we are just as deluded as the people who think Trump is a genius who understands business and thus will do a great job of running the world economy, a power no previous president had dared to exercise, not even sure they knew they had such power. The educational institutions that are being attacked by Trump now, should have played a role in creating effective communication systems, as should journalism. I got up on stage at a NYT event a few years back and begged them to compete with Twitter. One or two people in the audience of a few hundred were inspired by the idea, but the follow-up was nil. People are comfortable with the belief that the baby squirrels have our interests at heart. Look at the latest On the Media podcast. They're all selling us out, again, and again, and again. It's a loop they'll never get out of. I have friends scattered around the world in places of power. When are we going to work together to create the communication system we need. We're never going to get there by waiting for tech and journalism to get together on this.

- 2025-04-12T14:52:22Z
BTW, it's totally possible for me to say and know that Bluesky is leading us off the same cliff as Twitter did, and at the same time applaud their deepening support for RSS. I don't think they, or anyone else, realizes how much more this move gives us a chance of building a protected network of communication. Their vision could be achieved much more quickly by giving up their boil the ocean approach and start taking some simple, very doable steps that would empower outside developers to build a rich ecosystem around their product. The only downside would be that now they really would be replaceable. Anyway, they're partly there. Right now they support outbound RSS, and are improving it. That's the strategically easy half to do. The one that would really open them up is inbound RSS, the protocol that all the other twitter-like systems refuse to support. Want to blow the doors off now instead of some vague time in the future? Support outbound and inbound RSS. Let the trains come into the station and leave the station on a well established protocol. It could be done in a few weeks, really. Maybe the very intelligent and curious people who read this blog would like to take the time to understand what this means and the doors it would open? It's a way to change the subject from "good idea but hopeless" to "hey we can have freedom now."

- 2025-04-12T14:58:18Z
To really nail it down, supporting inbound and outbound RSS would justify them saying they are part of the "social web." Today's Bluesky has no business claiming to be part of the web, the system they're hyping is fully centralized.

We were just cogs in the machine - 2025-04-12T17:00:24Z

I went to a special high school in NYC, it was a public school you had to take a test to get into. One day our social studies teacher got some gumption, maybe he had a few drinks, or smoked some weed, but he had courage most teachers never had. He told us who we were.

Most of us were going to MIT or some other university that sent workers into the establishment to become cogs in the big wheel that kept the world running. He was right. Although my own path wasn’t that direct, I did get there. I rose to the top in Silicon Valley, then a big famous university. Everything Mr Goldman told us that day was true. But what he probably also saw was that he too was a cog, a tool, a piece of the machine.

I asked ChatGPT to draw a realistic picture of that day in that 1970 classroom.

- 2025-04-11T21:49:02Z
The difference between the 2008 crash and now is that we had a functioning government in 2008.

- 2025-04-11T12:45:34Z
When young people come out of university in a technical subject, they think they know more than people already doing the jobs. They quickly learn that in school they were doing "student projects" which are not the real thing. Ooops, maybe we didn't know as much as we thought.

- 2025-04-11T13:43:00Z
Why we all have to be working together on creating a modern easily distributed communication system that's truly decentralized. The key is to only implement features that have super-simple implementations, so it will be easy to product new versions quickly in all environments. Which means starting with formats and protocols that are already widely supported.

- 2025-04-11T13:16:21Z
This morning ChatGPT told me it knows more about me, and will learn better. Promises promises. I would like to begin with teaching it my coding conventions. Will make it much easier for me to work with it. Their idea of how JavaScript works is disorganized bordering on chaos. I find that human developers always find a reason not to listen to other people, and that has huge problems (like no interop), but machines should do better. It seems to have infinite patience. What I need is to share a bit of space with the bot, so I can keep it up to date on my worknotes. I'm pretty good at it these days. Why not let that be input into the system so I can say -- give me all the notes I have on my Bingeworthy project. Why should I have to copy/paste. This is a big problem in the web, products that pretend to be islands, when they're really all floating on the same sea, the internet. We were supposed to be able to network not only our attention, but also our work.

- 2025-04-11T21:47:35Z
Did you know there's a chain of beating hearts going from your heart all the way back to the first animal on earth with a heart.

- 2025-04-10T14:18:05Z
Two issues in Bluesky outbound RSS feeds.

- 2025-04-10T13:15:39Z
As long as the Chinese company BYD is making such interesting and inexpensive EVs, and Tesla is a shithole company, if I were in charge, I'd give BYD a negative tariff to encourage them to flood the US market with nice cheap EVs so we can get rid of the shitstain Tesla once and for all. I'd give them an even better price if they agreed to recycle Teslas as trade-ins so we don't have to feel ecologically irresponsible. And yes, dear MAGAs, I am woke. You all can go back to sleep now. Zzzz.

- 2025-04-10T13:26:22Z
If I were a sassy Democratic Party leader I'd cop to being woke. "Why yes I am woke. Aren't you?" The Repubs have never explained why it's bad to be awake. Dems have to learn how to engage to win. Another one -- "read, fire, aim" is how Trump leads, just look at the tariffs, and it's been a huge disaster for hard-working American wage-earners of all generations. The "all generations" part opens an interesting conversation, how it isn't just old people or young people, it's also people who are working today whose earnings are being stolen, and those of us who have been working for 50 years who were paying into a fund so we could benefit when we retire. That money is coming out of your paycheck with no intention of ever paying it back. That's the Republican-run America. Not so great.

The Cootie Zone - 2025-04-09T12:37:49Z

All Trump is doing is making the US the cootie zone.

We won't make anything here and we won't buy anything.

We'll have nice 2025 computers, phones, cars, medicine, lumber, energy, but all the shit we import will break and be used up and we won't be able to replace it.

The rest of the world will wonder why they cared so much about the US, as the world gets along just fine without us.

And that $1 trillion military budget, forget it -- not only did they fire everyone at the IRS, but no one is making any money so there aren't actually any taxes to pay, and there sure as hell aren't any tariffs because no one can afford to buy anything produced anywhere, in the US or the rest of the world.

We become a very sad, poor, sick, uneducated country, but -- Trump will be on Mount Rushmore and his face will be on the $20 bill, which no one sees because no one has $20.

And thus, dear friends, America has become Great Again!

- 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.

#rss