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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2025-03-12T14:15:54Z

- 2025-03-12T14:15:54Z
Today's song: Starting Over.

Bluesky is not billionaire-proof - 2025-03-11T11:38:38Z

First I want to say that Bluesky is nice software, good design, attractive, they have a goal and stick to it, and it stays up, no fail whales that were so vexing of early days Twitter.

That said, I have two criticisms:

• They are implementing the same limits that Twitter designed into their product, no styling, no links, you can't edit, no titles, enclosures, and a limit of 300 chars per post. Simple stuff that, if they broke through the Twitter design, would make it a decent platform for writers. I don't see any reason to duplicate the mistakes that Twitter made, in 2006, in the design of their product.
• They repeatedly claim to be billionaire-proof but as far as I can tell, and I have built software on their APIs, they are not. Yet they tell users they are safe, and what choice do the users have but to believe them, esp when tech journalism repeats the claims without challenging them. As a result, people believe that if Bluesky were to be acquired by a billionaire, something they might not even be able to stop, they will be able to quickly migrate to something that's the same as Bluesky and keep all their connections, people they follow and people following them.

All of this would be nice, if it were true but imho it is not true. I'm going to go through the recent statement from their CEO in the remainder of this piece. I invite them to rebut it, esp Mike Masnick of Techdirt, who has journalistic integrity, is widely respected, and is on the Bluesky board of directors. Honestly I can't understand why Masnick puts his integrity on the line here, I've tried to discuss it with him, and I guess he doesn't take me seriously enough to give a serious response. I would also like to know what his deal is with them, does he profit personally if Bluesky is acquired. That needs to be disclosed, imho. I would do it if I were in his shoes.

If you read my blog, I hope you know that I wouldn't challenge something like this unless I was pretty sure there is an issue. I don't imagine for a second that people would abandon Bluesky if they knew they were locked in and would have no path out if it was bought by a billionaire. I know we can't get out and I still use Bluesky, because that's where the people I want to network with are. They won. So they don't have to deceive. They can stop making this claim. Yet they continue to do it, in pretty much exactly the same terms as they have been doing it all along.

Here's the statement that appeared in TechCrunch yesterday.

• “If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky, or took it over, or if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn’t like, then they could fork off and go on to another application,” Graber explained at SXSW. “There’s already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network, or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that there’s always the ability to move to a new alternative.”
• The quote is from Jay Graber, the CEO of the company.

Let's go through it, point by point

• "they could fork it off and go on to another application" -- in this sentence "they" applies to developers, because you have to be a developer to fork an application. Assuming Bluesky is available in source code, with an appropriate open source license, and they have released enough code so that a developer could quickly launch an exact Bluesky clone, maybe this part is true. I can't evaluate it without going through the exercise of forking their code, but I do know this -- no one has. Why not? I would think that with 27 million users, by now someone would have tried it. Maybe this post will uncover such an instance, or motivate one. I would be happy to try it out to see how it works. But it has to be completely independent of Bluesky. It would have to work, without loss of functionality, if Bluesky's network disappeared.
• "there’s already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network" -- this is true. But they don't do very much nor do they have many users. They are basically experiments that show that you could build something else with the format they have defined. This isn't unusual. You can make a lot of different kinds of websites with HTML, for example, but very few of them have millions of users. Same thing with apps built on the Bluesky protocol that use data types that Bluesky itself doesn't understand. I don't think this adds anything to the claim of billionaire-safety. Also if these apps are in the same network, that doesn't give us any independence from Bluesky. So I think this is a no-op, it adds nothing but confusion to the claim.
• "[our] openness guarantees that there’s always the ability to move to a new alternative" -- this is not true, and it's the crux of the concern. There is no such guarantee. If there were, we would be able to move to an alternative now. Where is it? It's not there and imho it can't be there.

There are other problems. Mastodon, via its API, actually does what Bluesky claims to do. There are lots of instances of Mastodon servers and they interop with each other. It's an incredible proof of concept. But its federation ability adds enough complexity that most people prefer Bluesky, which doesn't have those complications. There are always tradeoffs in technology. You can have flexibility but it comes at a price. Bluesky would have you believe you can have the flexibility of Mastodon without paying the price.

There may be a way to do what they promise, but it would mean removing features, which isn't a bad idea, but they have decided they have to do everything Twitter does and there is the conundrum. Twitter was designed around centralization, and because of that Twitter is not billionaire-proof as has been demonstrated, and neither is Bluesky.

Every time I read this quote from their CEO it gets my bile up, and I say things on Bluesky that I regret later. Instead I decided to take the time this morning to carefully explain the problem and now when they make the claim, I can point to this piece. And maybe I'm wrong, and they can show me an instance I can switch to and not lose access to my network of friends on Bluesky and not depend on the existence of Bluesky itself. That would actually make me happy (I think) and give me a completely new understanding of computer science.

- 2025-03-10T13:39:46Z
BTW it's worth calling attention to a bit I linked to yesterday. Cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon is not on the roadmap for WordLand. They are too limited in the features they support for writers. This is a big point, not a casual thing. I am trying to create a network that's like stereo to mono. We're not going to try to scale down writing in WordLand so it fits into the tight little featureless well-silo'd boxes in order to peer with those systems. Instead, I want to force them to give writers a decent surface to write on. Somehow we lost our minds and decided deliberately to limit communication to grunts and snorts, and it should not be a surprise that when our civilization migrated to them, it became unable to understand complex ideas. I guarantee you Carl Sagan, if he were alive, would have seen this. Or maybe not? I don't know. But it's a bizarre situation that I've decided to try to fix.

- 2025-03-10T13:45:20Z
A hard lesson to learn -- people don't listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors.

- 2025-03-10T13:17:17Z
A new kind of WordPress post for me. A big picture with a punchy caption and a teasing title.

- 2025-03-10T13:08:05Z
The word is starting to spread about WordLand. And the product is holding up pretty well. There are some issues in Safari with the toolbar that pops up over selection. I see people pasting in URLs that makes me think it's not working for them. Don Park started using it. I did my first project with Don in the late 80s. The project was very successful. His respect means a lot to me. The positioning -- it makes WordPress as easy to write for as Twitter, is great to hear as users write about it. That was one of the major design goals. What people are missing, and it's right in front of their eyes, they can use writing features that somehow never made it to the twitter-like systems, the ones listed on the textcasting memorandum (or manifesto, whichever you prefer). I'm glad people are seeing this as an enhancement to WordPress, not an attempt to create a new community. I want all WordPress writers to use this product. Every one of them. I want people to feel that it's an essential part of WordPress, for writers. The writer's web. Remember that, you'll be hearing a lot about that. And I want to be sure we fix all the bugs, and add all the features they believe are missing, as long as the features pertain to writing. Everything else is well-covered by the main product. There's also an API that comes with WordLand, I'll be talking more about that later. Makes it easier to write WordPress apps in JavaScript that run in the browser.

- 2025-03-09T15:23:12Z
I did a restoration of discuss.userland.com, the discussion group for scripting.com between 1998 and 2001. I think now finally it works. If you find anything interesting in the archive, send me a link. A lot of the early blogs started from discussions there, heated at times. But a lot of good stuff came from it.

- 2025-03-09T15:36:07Z
The very last message in the DG is, now, 25 years later, basically the design of the network I'm building -- with WordLand as the frontend and WordPress as the backend. The issue is the same. When people post only to get attention, forget about anything useful getting done there. It's strictly a broadcast system. So the investment Masto and Bluesky make in discourse is imho wasted complexity. What we want is linking, not replies. If they were the web, they would be designed very differently. Anyway, in 2000, I asked people to put their ideas on their own sites, send me a link, and maybe I'll post it on my site. That right there is the plan for the new network. Facilitating that, it's as easy as posting on a twitter-like system (the early users confirm that!), but the post goes into your space ie your blog, and a link goes to the person you're responding to, and it's up to them whether or not they want to amplify it, using their own criteria, in their space, to their subscribers. It's why twitter failed to be a keg of revolutionary ideas, instead one of warring factions in a prison. Not able to leave, but not able to do anything either.

- 2025-03-09T14:41:19Z
A question came up about the RSS feeds that WordLand maintains, so I wrote it up on the support site. Net-net: Unless you're developing a component of the textcasting vision, you should probably use the WordPress-maintained feed for your site.

- 2025-03-09T18:42:04Z
I love how people declare that Trump doesn't represent us. But the truth is as long as our representatives don't impeach and remove him, he absolutely does represent us. There aren't two definitions of represent.

Fucking Republicans and Medicare - 2025-03-09T14:10:52Z

I am hereby changing the name of "Republicans" to "Fucking Republicans" because that's what they do and what we're going to do to them. Today's issue is Medicare, which hits home to me, a person who planned for health care and depends on Medicare.

I need my Medicare. It's my health insurance. Health insurance always been a problem for me, with pre-existing conditions, and at one point a lapsed corporate plan.

I finally got on solid ground or so I thought when I turned 65 a few years ago. Now I find out that the Repubs are going to cancel or reduce my insurance, and I don't imagine that a person my age, with my pre-existing conditions (we all have them once at this age) I could get insurance.

So please tell me Republicans, how this is meant to work? I am not stupid and I know Medicare is not out of money. Am I going to be paying out of pocket for my health care? Are there any doctors or hospitals who even do this any longer?

Repubs, if my Medicare goes down, you are going down too.

PS: The inspiration for this fucking idea.

Krugman's paywall - 2025-03-09T14:02:03Z

I'm not a paid subscriber to anything on Substack. But I do read a few of their newsletters when they come out, including Paul Krugman's. Almost always must-read stuff.

But he also writes on the "other side of the paywall." When he announced it, he said he doesn't need the money, so I wondered why he does it. I kept reading anyway.

But he does something incredibly annoying and as clueless imho as the things he calls out in his writing — I only find out an article is on the other side of the paywall after I've read the first few paragraphs. I am a fan and I would send the money directly if he asked for it, but not via Substack.

Here's an example of such a post.

So because I don't pay I have to lose that time every time you do this? Have some respect for us who read you. I'm as old as he is, and I like to use my time well. So please either get rid of the stinking paywall, or warn us up front.

And also consider getting off Substack. It's not a good look.

- 2025-03-08T14:57:43Z
David Weinberger on WordLand. "It's a web page that clears out all of WordPress's cruft and gives you an interface that's so simple that it's actually enjoyable."

- 2025-03-08T15:14:55Z
Praise from David, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, is the best. He picked up WordLand overnight, and he loves it, for the right reasons. WordLand is an editor for "small pieces," maybe the first. Most of the really easy editors have been stuck in silos and thus are dead-ends. I'm sure the people who designed them wished they weren't locked up, but they had to work for billionaires-to-be, I don't. I called the locked-up editors tiny little text boxes. I created an editor that starts out slightly larger than the TLTBs, and grows as your idea grows. So David opened up WordLand and started typing. And it turned into a normal sized blog post. It flowed right into it. And unlike the TLTB's in twitter-like worlds, those bits live on the open web, and can use all the features of the web, and are fed out to software networks via RSS, which is a lot simpler than other protocols. It can grow faster because there already is a huge installed base of software and knowledge for RSS. Imho developers should build on existing standards, not try to replace them. They might be more alive than you think (or more accurately, wish).

- 2025-03-08T14:47:27Z
I updated the screen shot on the WordLand docs page. It was really out of date. WordLand is the best editor for people to write in WordPress. I've been developing it over the last couple of years. I wanted to get a really nice editor into this slot. I felt WordPress deserved one. It's designed to feel like the editor in twitter-like services, but without the limits. I've been writing about this on my blog, while I was doing that, I was developing WordLand in the background. We have ignored the needs of writers for too long. It's time to remove the limits. People believed the formula Twitter arrived at was the right one. It is far too limited for writers. WordLand is the answer, in software.

- 2025-03-07T21:10:34Z
The United States is Russia's 51st state, sad to say. Let's get it back for the people of the United States. We don't like Putin. Sorry.

- 2025-03-07T16:16:35Z
Before our media was gradually taken over by Russia, they did it to Ukraine, but they managed to dig their way out, had a democratic election, resulting in their current government. So it's not impossible to dig your way out. But you have to stop insisting that Hitler be allowed to speak.

- 2025-03-07T16:07:16Z
The Fediverse is impossible to use even for people who understand what it's trying to do, and most people have no idea. The answer: Stop trying to reinvent Twitter. It wasn't a great idea! And figure out what really works in a decentralized system. It requires some serious brain work.

- 2025-03-07T17:32:01Z
I've been getting my exercise outdoors mostly, but then when the weather got bad for a bit, too bad to walk outdoors, I took up the Peloton again. I was really out of shape for that. So I started riding every third day or so. And then without any warning I just passed my 600th ride. Not too bad! :-)

- 2025-03-06T16:15:48Z
Web isn't just a brand, it's also a noun and a verb. "I web you."

- 2025-03-07T01:29:06Z
Doc Searls wrote this beautiful blog post with WordLand. If I have my way blogging is going to come all the way back and then zooooom out from there. Still diggin!

Tech and democracy - 2025-03-06T14:24:46Z

I found the TechDirt piece by Mike Masnick about being a democracy blog disturbing because imho it should have been about democracy at least since 2017, when it was clear that Twitter had just elected a president of the United States. That was a clear strong signal that tech and democracy were tightly connected.

At the time I tried to raise the alarm, in tech and in finance, that a Republican could buy Twitter for $12B, and that was a cheap price considering the value of the presidency in a tech entrepreneur's hands.

My experience in Silicon Valley goes back to the late 70s, so I have a pretty good understanding of the personality of tech entrepreneurs.

My blog, Scripting News, has been about democracy since inception, in 1994, though it has primarily been about technology. I got the same complaints that I should stick to tech, but I didn't see a line of separation. The stakes were large then, but now they're much larger and as Masnick notes, impossible to ignore.

In the mid-90s there was not much of a debate whether the First Amendment applied to the web, the consensus was that it did not! The NYT didn't defend the 1st A on the web, and Congress passed a law saying the 1st A didn't apply and a Democratic president, Clinton, signed the law. That was a pretty clear signal. (We were saved by a Federal appeals court, otherwise who knows what we'd be doing now.)

In tech, every generation thinks they're seeing a problem for the first time. This is almost never true. It's like anything else, we're iterative, going over the same issues again and again, and we have a chance to wake up at any point and learn from our mistakes and not repeat the previous cycle, but it seems we never do.

Most important is that we work together and share what we learned. But first you have to be aware that there is history. You know the famous line about people who "cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

We have great historians working here, and TechDirt is more famous than Scripting News is now. It would be a shame if the historians overlooked the historic connection between tech and democracy because they weren't aware it was documented much earlier than 2025. And btw -- don't miss that Google et al would like to deprecate the archive of the early web. No one is paying attention to that problem, and it's another way history is lost. The wisdom of the Google people forcing this on the rest of us is very much like the DOGE bros in DC today.

- 2025-03-05T15:19:13Z
We need a new kind of social network designed to run an effective response to fascism. So far all we have are profit centers for billionaires and would-be billionaires.

- 2025-03-05T22:14:51Z
When I ask a personal question on one of the AI bots, all of a sudden on Facebook I'm getting ads about what I asked about. It could be a coincidence, but it's happened a few times, on more than one system. And I'm a paying customer on all of them.

- 2025-03-05T15:19:36Z
People who criticize Dems for weak opposition at the SOTU are not hypocrites only if they said before the event what they would do. I was glad not to have to choose. I think in the end they did what made sense to each one individually. The range of response by the Dems was much broader than the Repubs. We should be thankful they haven't capitulated, as so many have, esp in what we used to think of as journalism.

- 2025-03-05T14:31:02Z
One thing to be grateful for, Trump didn’t invite any of the Jan 6 rioters back to the Capitol for his speech.

- 2025-03-05T14:31:49Z
Watch out for people who celebrate your freedom while profiting from your enslavement.

- 2025-03-04T16:02:42Z
I'm trying to get ChatGPT to not assume I have the same abilities as it has. You can't dump a huge amount of code at me and expect me to quickly see what changed, that's not how human intellect works, but this is something computers are extremely good at. I told my bot that it would work a lot better if they just told me what to change. I said this: "I have a lot of experience being a human being and working with other humans, and all your clients as far as I know are human." In other words, be concise and direct. This is what it said in response. "That’s a sharp observation, and I appreciate the insight. I'll keep focusing on clarity, directness, and being actually helpful rather than just dumping information. If I ever seem to be leading you down a non-optimal path, feel free to call it out!" Note how concise the response was. More advice for the bot. Help your human understand. I think maybe eventually we may be their pets. Try scratching behind the ears. On the other hand, to my human friends, do not depend on the strategies they choose. They will never on their own question the path they took. It may not be the optimal one, but they'll keep going down it. It's up to you to say nah this isn't the way I want to go, and they will always respect that. It's not like HAL in 2001. I've sometimes wasted whole programming session going in the wrong direction assuming my bot was good at this. None of them are, as far as I can tell.

- 2025-03-04T14:05:59Z
The single most important thing about what Musk is doing is that it is Musk that is doing it. Not elected, not accountable to anyone, and the only way we know what he's doing is from the aftermath. We play no role in his choices. Plus, he would be our last choice if we were in the market for a crazy despot to ruin our country. He wasn't born or educated here, and thus has very little idea of who we are and thus what the people he's firing do.

- 2025-03-04T13:51:57Z
Remember when watching the speech tonight, if you are watching, what our Capitol was like on that infamous day. The guy speaking, the guy up there on the podium, he did that. That's who he is. And where is right now, that's where it happened. Takes a lot of nerve to return to the scene of his greatest crime, so far.

- 2025-03-04T14:12:55Z
Another question about tonight. Where will Elon be? In the seat usually occupied by the VP or the Speaker? Will he make faces at the camera or interrupt Trump?

- 2025-03-04T21:30:55Z
The news should always report whether a bit of news is a financial plus or minus for Trump as in does this thing make him richer or poorer. That way you can zero in on the "why" of everything.

- 2025-03-04T21:14:42Z
I'm thrilled the Knicks are playing tonight. That's what I'll be watching. Let me know if anything happens in DC.

- 2025-03-03T16:24:41Z
Idea for SNL. A special episode of Law and Order where the cops arrest someone for being disrespectful to Trump,. The prosecutors debate among themselves if they have to do this, no one quits, they don't feel good about it but they prosecute, being assured by the District Attorney it's the right thing to do. When there are objections judge rules in favor of the government most of the time, but wants to show balance so once or twice rules in favor of the defense, but it doesn't matter, when the judge gives instructions to the jury he says basically the only option is to convict, or so it seems that's what he's saying and dutifully, the jury convicts. There are sentencing standards, provided by the DOJ so the judge sentences the accused to life at hard labor. Back in the studio at 30 Rock the audience isn’t sure if they should laugh, slowly realizing it’s not meant to be funny, the skit fades out to a commercial break.

- 2025-03-02T14:24:20Z
If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and established standards would work just as well. There is a way they could make this work. Come up with a plugin architecture and something like an app store, so developers could define new data types, and then we'd really have something. I would probably do an outliner plugin first, then a Markdown plugin.

The best revenge is none - 2025-03-02T19:44:16Z

Pamela Short: The best revenge is none. Heal yourself, forgive, move on and don't become like those who hurt you.

There's a pragmatic reason for this. I found, when I was young and didn't know better, that getting revenge didn't just hurt the target, it also left me with a deep pain. When I did something to another person I was also doing it to myself. I found that the dark cloud of my harmful behavior would stay with me for a long time, maybe never going away. I would find it hard to forgive myself for what I did. So it's better to not try to get revenge, and let the pain of being hurt dissipate on its own.

I have a story to go with that. In the beginning of RSS, I had a partner and customer ask me at lunch if there were any circumstances when I would take the server we ran for them off the air. I said that's a weird question, but of course not. The very next day, his team announced they were taking over RSS, completely changing it, and the first I heard of it was in the public announcement. Later that same day, my brain boiling over in anger at being treated so poorly, I did eventually land on the idea of just taking his server offline. And then I laughed that he knew I'd get to that, and wanted to plant a little marker there for whatever reason, I don't know. But no I didn't take his server off the air. He may be a bastard, but he did pay for the service so his server stays up. And two years later, his project a failure, I came out with RSS 2.0 and that was the end of that. It wasn't revenge, it was just picking up the ball in the playground and restarting the game that they had caused to stop. We went on and RSS did a lot of good work.

Mike Myers as Elon Musk - 2025-03-02T15:32:27Z

Video of Mike Myers doing Elon Musk in last night's SNL cold open.

- 2025-03-01T18:25:54Z
The tab key now switches between the main editor and title editor in WordLand. Still a little work to do there.

- 2025-03-01T18:23:51Z
These days I read Timothy Snyder's essays as soon as they come in.

- 2025-03-02T01:30:31Z
My America is still a democracy and still part of the western world. A pretty great country, far from perfect, but my home. It's rich in all kinds of things, including money. We made a mistake in electing the person we did. Can we admit that and start fixing the mistake now? If not now, when?

- 2025-03-02T01:41:45Z
What happened in the Oval Office yesterday was as horror-inspiring as the riot in the Capitol on 1/6/2021.

- 2025-03-01T18:21:22Z
New month. Last month's source code archived. Onward! 😄

One America Together - 2025-03-01T18:56:54Z

AOC asked for ideas of what to do for the SOTU.

I suggested we come up with a new slogan. Like this.

• One America Together.

Make hats, purple — enough for everyone, including the Repubs.

During applause, Dems rise and chant “One America Together.”

What do you think?

#rss