/reader

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. #

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. #

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. #

I want to develop a WordPress theme by iterating as you would when developing an app. I outlined the flow on the wordLandSupport repo.#

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Quick demo of the Timeline in v0.5.4.#

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. #

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. #

Harvard could use this moment to bring some really new ideas back into the university.#

What is Inbound RSS?#

• 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. 😀 #

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.#

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. #

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."#

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#

• 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.#

• Mr Goldman lays the hard truth on us.#

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.#

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. #

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.#

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.#