On Bluesky, inbound RSS is becoming a thing....

It's noteworthy that we haven't seen many outages as Bluesky scales. On Twitter they had fail whales for years....

What matters with social networks is what you can get done there, not so much the features of the network. Bluesky has the same features today it had a month ago. The difference is we had an election in the US, I guess that was the catalyst. The presence of Elon Musk so close to Trump says there is a need for a Musk-free place. I've kept my account on Twitter. I started there in 2006, and I love the web more than I feel it would do any good to erase my presence there. It's pretty much against my religion to deliberately erase bits of the web. And whatever you think of Twitter, it is most definitely part of the web....

Basically, if you have to lock your users in, your product must suck....

A quick podcast about the new 365-day-a-year campaign we need on the social web to keep our democracy alive....

We've found Lauren Kapp, the 25-year-old creative genius behind kamalahq. We need to get her back on the air, with her team, fully funded and supported. We need leadership on the social web. Thanks to Brian Puckett for the link....

I posted a feature request on Bluesky that has gotten a lot of flow.

Why I haven't created an account on sez.us yet.

Joe Trippi posted a video to his new sez.us service where Pete Buttigieg explains what the Russians have done to the US. I see it that way too. When Brian Lehrer asked a few weeks ago how the US got so divided of his guest Bob Woodward (a fascinating time capsule, recorded before the election) they both missed it. We were divided by an enemy that is on the cusp of destroying the US without launching a single nuke. Putin didn't have to invade Ukraine. I guess even he didn't think his plan would succeed so spectacularly. BTW, I don't think Trippi's network is the answer, but maybe it is. I wish I had had a chance to create the system he was using, we would make a good team. Anyway we need to be further along than his offering is. The right system would allow me to control my presence with only RSS, in and out. Maybe not for everyone, to start, but it would allow us to start building. It's why I have been lobbying for inbound and outbound RSS as a back-end for all these networks. With the rise of Bluesky in the last couple of weeks (things are happening that fast now) we may have a new shot at it because Masto and Threads are certainly feeling it, and when people feel competed-with they are more open to new thinking....

Excellent piece on how Bluesky leaves users with the impression that it's open and decentralized in ways it is not. If it's bought by someone who wants to use it the way Musk has, they can, without any recourse by the users. As they said in the old days, if you're getting something for free, you're the product, not the customer. We helped Musk build a way to excercise political power against our interests. You may think Bluesky is a way of fixing that, but it probably isn't. They're digging a deep hole, probably too deep to climb out of at this point. They did some innovative stuff, perhaps. But they ended up at the same place, it appears, as Twitter did....

Today's song: Tea for two and two for tea....

I added a screen shot to the WordLand placeholder page....

I predict that people will come to appreciate features that Mastodon has that the other twitter-like social web services don't....

Why Repubs won? They campaigned in a new way that the Dems apparently didn't notice (neither did I, not claiming to be better). Repubs were more creative and improvisational. They didn't worry what Jake Tapper or Ezra Klein would think, so came off as more genuine. It's a TV show, acting and suspension of disbelief are what count. It has nothing to do with anything else. Sorry it has to be that way but that's how it is. I don't think they hate women btw, they would have voted for Roseanne Barr or Melissa McCarthy. Maybe Chris Rock, they probably would have really liked Will Smith. Idiocracy was incredibly prescient. No joke....

When I was a boy my mother would sometimes say if I didn't stop belching I wouldn't be able to stop....

Today's song: Who's this kinky so and so....

A few days ago I saw Donald Fagen at a local supermarket. I had heard he lives in the area. I didn't bother him, I imagine a star like that enjoys moments as an ordinary person, but he's anything but. I'm listening to Haitian Divorce this morning, grinning from ear to ear as I sing along....

Last year on this day: We have too many modes of writing. I just wrote a blog post that's also a tweet. Why didn't it go to my followers on all the social nets I'm on? Why do I have to use a different editor to post to each of the services? That's the point of Textcasting, btw....

We're going to open testing for WordLand shortly. At first I only want developers who write great bug reports. My goal is to speed up development and reduce wear and tear on me. Once we're confident it really works as advertised, we'll open up the testing further. There will be a form you can fill out to get in the queue. The choice of the first testers will be highly subjective....

BTW, start thinking of WordPress as a highly networked, deployed, debugged, widely supported network operating system. It meets all the criteria. It also has storage. And can publish. And unlike other social web systems, it is textcasting-ready since it comes from the world of blogging where we competed to give writers the features they needed. We can build lots of apps on this foundation....

I've been having a one-sided discussion with Bluesky asking they make their product less vulnerable to takeover by tech bros, and I can't tell if they're doing anything about it. They must be conflicted, on the one hand, they clearly could sell there service now for a lot of money, but when they do that they must know they're selling us out....

A 27-minute post-election ramble podcast....

I am working on a text editor for WordPress using MediumEditor, but I save the text in Markdown and when I reload the Markdown text I regenerate the HTML. I think the social web should exchange Markdown as the canonical form of web text. It has the right set of features, it's Just Enough HTML....

There isn’t a single social web network that I like pouring my creativity into. I feel like I’m being used not appreciated. There’s nothing in it for me. I had a similar feeling for Twitter, but they were the only one. Now there are a bunch, and I honestly don't care about any of them, esp now that the election is over. I think this whole idea of feeding the greed of a bunch of tech people is over. If there's a good place to gather, with a small number of people I relate to as people, then I'm up for that, but none of these services meet that need....

ChatGPT can't remember my coding conventions. It always falls back to using features of JavaScript I told it not to use. I indent my code according to the way it works in an outliner, so I can't use their code without having to manually modify it. I haven't forgotten that I'm the human and it's the computer. Its memory is supposed to be perfect. And I am a paying customer, btw....

Whenever you ask for something with Bluesky they tell you about how a user account is like a website, you just have to make it work a certain way, that some devs have mastered, and I guess I could too, but right now all my attention is focused on WordPress and getting it to work well with ActivityPub so my editor can get directly into the Mastodon network and possibly with Threads too.

It's good to have a record of the things you posted and when you posted it. On August 12 of this year, I tweeted this: "When the NYT makes Trump sound like a reasonable candidate that a sane person might vote for, remember this day." I included a screen shot of the front page of the NYT on Jan 7, 2021. One in three Trump voters still watch mainstream news, which follows the lead of the NYT, and if they had been straight with us, perhaps enough people who like Trump's style would have realized the danger, and voted in a conservative way, ie to conserve the Constitution. Because of how they covered it, we now get to re-run the 2016 experiment all over again.

If Bluesky is open source, which it appears to be, someone who has time and has experience packaging products, should create a Bluesky distribution for a few popular hosting services (Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud), so installing a new instance is as simple as it can possibly be. One click? That would be awesome. We need to have thousands of these running. If it really is like the web, as they say it is, then it should be like the web in every way. There are lots of websites. If you sell your website to a billionaire, that has no effect on my website. Right now we are totally vulnerable to the Bluesky folk selling their service to another country, or our country for that matter -- or a billionaire, or whoever. Whoever did this packaging job would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Anticipating the objection that Mastodon is already doing this -- it is not. Setting up and using a Mastodon instance is good for nerds. Not for poets....

Update: My guess is that they haven't released enough code to run a Bluesky of your own, because all the answers from people who say they know say the same thing -- "It doesn't work that way." You could write your own, but if we were to do that, why use their one-off API, use a standard instead, and we might have a chance to interop with other systems in a meaningful way. I don't blame them for wanting to cash out, but I do blame them for conning people into believing it's some kind of escape. Until I hear otherwise Bluesky is a dead-end, not worth investing your hope in. If you're migrating from Twitter this is no better. Keep looking. But I promise to let you know if I get any info that changes my opinion, so if I've got it wrong, people from Bluesky, just answer the freaking question in the post at the top of this page. Thanks....

Does anyone know who was doing the work at kamalahq on the various social networks? I wonder if they would like to keep posting. They stopped updating on Election Day. We could change the names of the accounts. I thought it was great that there was a steady source of political news that didn't equivocate like the NYT-inspired news orgs. I would love to help fund a continuation of that flow....

It might be time to get our shit together....

There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that what's missing in the two-party system in the US is that one of the parties does not own a social network. It is not represented online 7-by-24-by-12 every year, not just presidential election years. Democrats, when you lose it's because you didn't show up. It's happened three times so far, at least. We could have led here because most of the innovators in this space vote Democratic, but the leadership doesn't listen. The voters could get to know all the stars of the parties. People were right when they said they didn't know Harris. It's time to let the leaders rise from the net, not just from the insiders. This is how you do it....

ChatGPT's web search can search my blog, as I do on Google, but it's way more useful. Here's a screen shot. We're getting there. Really nice....

I'd like to hear from tech vendors, asap, which ones will help American voters learn what's true independent of whatever "truth" the government wants us to believe? Who will stand with the people? A good question for all of us to ask. Ask news orgs the same question....

It's worth listening to On The Media, interview with Masha Gassen, saying that the authoritarian government will want to define what's true and not. Since we now understand that most of the information flow now goes around the NYT, CNN etc -- even Fox, and largely through social web and podcasts, if that's where we're all getting our news from, and btw MSNBC are already pretty well limited in what they'll tell us (this was our beef with NYT if you recall) -- the next step is to make it impossible for us to hear what each other are saying. Now is the time to plant seeds for a defense of our speech and communication later....

I see they have a piece about the "Manosphere." Stop blaming men. Lose that habit now. It's toxic....

I asked ChatGPT: "Based on what you know about me, draw a picture of what you think my current life looks like."

Dave's life as imagined by ChatGPT.

...

BTW, there's a lot of talk about new ways to communicate that don't depend on silos that could be sold to billionaires. One way to do it is with my product FeedLand. It manages news streams for feeds you subscribe to. I think every publication should share news from feeds they depend on, experts they quote, other news sources they read. We can build our own networks this way. The advantage of this approach is that it is truly decentralized and not at all complicated to use. Here's the news stream I provide for readers of my blog. It's the most popular feature on the site. With FeedLand you can create your own....

I've actually written a lot, but haven't wanted to publish most of it. So many reasons why the Dems lost. Maybe I should just list them.

Not much time to write today and tomorrow....

I prayed. I really did. But I got the wrong answer....

In 2016, on the night of Election Day, when it was obvious Trump would win, before taking a Xanax and going to sleep, I wrote a piece, that my friend Chuck Shotton says I should run again. Rather than doing that, I'll quote the important part. "I don't think it's about economics, I think it's about change happening too fast. And the Trump voters had the power to bring it to a screeching halt, they saw the chance and took it."...

First thing -- Don't shut down the campaign. We must keep communicating with the electorate, independent of what they get from the news orgs. The Harris campaign did an exemplary job. Why shut it down. Keep setting the agenda. Help keep us organized. Preserve the perspective and expectation of democracy in the US. Change the message from raising money, to keeping us all in touch with the opposition (ie us). This is the mistake we made in every election since we had the web to organize. The Repubs, almost by accident, never stopped organizing. And now that Musk, who will be part of the new administration, owns Twitter, you can be sure they will stay and get more organized. We can do it too! We have to stop making this mistake of going back to zero after election, whether we win or lost....

Blame is pointless. It may be emotionally satisfying at some level, but it is division, and that's why we keep losing elections. We don't see it but we create our own divisions. This must stop....

Be generous with all classes of people, by gender, age, race, religion, whatever is used to divide us. Stop vilifying men. Carville was right. There's no reason to make one whole gender the scapegoat for all our problems. It's no accident that the Repubs own the men. We could probably have had ten percent or more of their voters if we stopped doing this. Key point, when you blame a whole gender, you hurt people who have no power to stop it....

Speaking of Carville, yesterday's Trippi podcast with Carville as the only guest was the best podcast I've ever heard. I recommended it yesterday as inspirational. Now that we know the outcome of the election, it's a marker of where we were before the results were known. A world that no longer exists. But like stories written in 2016, the markers are useful to see where we once were and how we got here, and what we can learn from what happened between. I wish it had turned out the way these two great friends thought it should have. But it didn't. But there was a hint that they knew what wouldn't work this time. No spoilers....

Ben Thompson wrote in his Stratechery newsletter: "What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it’s a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and in the intervening years the flight of advertisers from the platform has made it worth even less. From a Musk Inc. perspective, however, X played a pivotal role in ensuring that the incoming administration will do whatever Musk needs at the exact moment that SpaceX is gaining the capabilities to actually make a trip to Mars, if only the FAA in particular will give him the freedom to do so. That alone is almost certainly worth $44 billion to Musk!" I wrote in 2017, that some Repub would buy Twitter, and it would merge and thus transform politics and tech. This was obvious, but for some reason I was the only one who saw it. We could have headed this off, if people would just listen. I beg you to listen to people you don't usually listen to. The NYT will never hire someone like me to write on their op-ed page, so if you only accept your input from people with legit credentials, you'll miss insights like this. We're paying a heavy price for this now. When I begged people to listen they came back with the balance sheet valuation of Twitter, but they were leaving the most important asset off the balance sheet, the dollar value of being able to elect a president. Musk didn't miss this....

"Richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world."...

Also to the Twitter founders, amassing that much power and centralizing it as Twitter did, had a cost that we're paying now. But it's very hard to stop when the juggernaut is rolling. I understand, but in the future we have to think about this more clearly. When a medium becomes too big and centralized, there's trouble ahead. It was accidental that Trump was the one to take advantage of this to route around journalism and go direct, but it was not accidential that Musk did....

Speaking of Musk, maybe he will temper Trump's desire for retribution. It may be a vain hope, but I'll cling to it anyway. Doing business in a world of retribution might not be too conducive to the creativity needed to run innovative tech businesses. A climate of fear doesn't inspire great software. I know the quality of products Musk makes, I own and love my Tesla Model Y. Best car I've ever owned or driven....