in Drummer

My impressions of the current state of Drummer

I read some comments by Dave Winer on March 15th about users/development of Drummer and how he got little feedback on a feature and how he might go back to just writing software for himself. I also just finished listening to a podcast from March 16th where Dave Winer talks about the need for Drummer users to test new features, or “we can’t move”. As an early tester and user of Drummer, I would like to offer my perspective on these items.

I was one of the early testers of Dave Winer’s Drummer application. I was pretty active in the first month or two, but then I had a negative experience – getting deleted from the Drummer support repo for posting a link to a river of news of Drummer users using Drummer to create blogs. I understood the reason for the deletion (I wasn’t reporting any problem), but I felt the attitude was wrong. As I watched other Drummer users giving opinions on the product, instead of reporting problems, their comments would get deleted, usually after some negative back and forth with Dave Winer. I can understand having rules about participation in support forums, but this consistent pattern gave me the impression that Dave Winer did not want any other feedback except for problem reports on Drummer. To me, this behavior does not give the impression that someone is interested in other people’s opinions. Also, I think if someone is going to criticize others in public, be prepared to stand behind your comments. For people who followed the Drummer support repo, all of this back-and-forth was plain to see via the Github emails.

I spent some time working on developing outline renderer scripts, but got a dig (I think) for using the word “Drummer” in the title of my Github repo. That didn’t feel good. I had started work on integrating a presentation library with Drummer, but decided after that to hold off on investing more. I guess some people can include Drummer in their repo name, but not others.

The first major feature of Drummer to get traction was the Old School blogging tool. Many people gave it a try (including me (original blog and relocated blog when I had a overwrite problem) and there were lots of comments and problem reports. At first, these were welcomed, but within a short period of time, negativity returned. In addition, people posting about the tool or possible changes were deleted or got negative responses. I worked with another Drummer user to create a separate repo (awesome-drummer) to collect information on Drummer, and to provide a place where non-problem-report conversations could occur. Dave Winer created a separate repo called “RFC” – Request For Comments – where people could contribute ideas that could be developed further. There were some user posts there, but most initial posts were by Dave Winer, so it did not appear to have much uptake in terms of suggestions from users. Full disclosure – the awesome-drummer site did not take off either, but at least no one’s comments were deleted for being off-topic…

When Dave Winer rolled out the Daytona search engine, some reasonable initial comments were met with replies like “…people who won’t even read the fucking manual.”, but those “docs” were somewhat hidden in the first days of the release of Daytona. How does this behavior help build a community?

I have worked in software development for 37 years, primarily in small teams in the aerospace industry. If I or other team leads treated team members in the way other Drummer users have been treated in the Drummer development project, I believe they would go find some other project to work on. 

Frank McPherson sums it up well: “Developer yells at users, wonders why then users don’t participate in the development process.”

So how much activity is Drummer getting now? The small flood of users who tried use Old School for blogging have stopped. There are an average of five people who still post to their Old School blogs on a regular basis (from reading the Old School Drummers river of news). New items on the support repo have slowed. This could mean that Drummer is working great. To me, it says that many of the early Drummer users have moved on.

I am glad that Dave Winer made a choice to share Drummer with the world. I am using Drummer to write this blog post. I have a copy of Electric Drummer for Windows, for which I am happy. What I don’t have is a compelling reason to use Drummer. I don’t need another writing tool (strictly speaking), writing in outlines is fun but getting that text into something other than a blog post using the Drummer tool being hosted on someone else’s site is not straightforward (did I mention that the blog is hosted on someone else’s site?). I don’t have a lot of content that could be searched using Daytona, so that is not enticing. Markdown is not part of my workflow, so the work on that feature is not something I am interested in.

There are ways to add functionality through scripting, which is great. Several users did develop some independent features (WordPress integration, Gatsby integration, HTTPS proxy mapping, my outline renderer script), but these did not get much participation from other users. Still, their contributions are still present and available for use.

I get the comment that Dave Winer wants feedback on features. The work I did was a collaboration with two other Drummer users. However, the tone of the podcast comments and the blog post comes off to me as more “demanding” than “asking” or “requesting”. In the end, my impression of Drummer is that this is Dave Winer’s application, a logical outgrowth of his previous work on Frontier and the OPML Editor. It is his application to shape and grow. Other people may not share his vision or interest, but that should not be a roadblock for development, unless Dave lets it be a roadblock. Look at how other development tools have evolved/grown over the past 20 years – a tool scratches someone’s itch, gets some users, gets traction, interest grows, people start to talk about the tool itself, people start making contributions to the tool or environment. Perhaps it will take more time. Perhaps it will take a change in attitude. I don’t know, but I think there are at least two sides to this story.

(Cross-posted from my Drummer blog).

    Mentions

  • 💬 Andy
  • 💬 I read your post with interest and shared my experience in a comment. By coincidence I had, just before I read your post, wrote a post on your podacast on oldschool.scripting.com/ahinama
  • 💬 Bridgy Response
  • 💬 Bridgy Response
  • 💬 Bridgy Response
  • 💬 brid.gy

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Comment

  1. Agree 100 percent. The tone of recent comments by Dave was off-putting. I love where he’s going with his development, but the hostility toward users (probably NOT intended…) make me uncomfortable.

    I respect his choice to develop software for himself. I wish he could find a way to buffer himself from his users.

  2. Thanks Andy for sharing your story. I was also a victim for Dave´s way to handle his supporters. When I had problems to transfer from Little Outliner 2 to Drummer I had difficulty to understand how to change the background image by reading the documentation, so I asked on the Git Hub repo and got a nasty reply by Dave: “You should read the docs before asking for help”. When I then tried to explain I wrote:
    Thanks Dave for the link! Problem solved, and I think how I solved it may
    > be of interest for other POETS (non-coding users).
    > In the File menu I choose Open *OPML Headers* where I find a table with
    > *Titel* , *Date created*, and some other attributes. Here I clicked the +
    > under the table and got an empty field in which I entered *urlHeaderImage*
    > in the left field. Then I opened Scripting News in Windows/Chrome and
    > right-click and choose *View page source* and searched for
    > “urlHeaderImage”: “http://scripting.com/images/2022/02/26/ukraineFlag.png”.
    > After copying this link to the right field of the table I choose *Save*
    > and then I choose *Build my blog* in the Tools menu. Voila! There my
    > Ukrainian flag appeared as background for my blog SKALMAN.
    But I don´t think he even read it because the my issue was closed and I seem to have been block to use the GitHub after that.

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Webmentions

  • This is an attempt to capture some work/events I have been involved with over the last few weeks regarding the rssCloud protocol. I hope this will provide some insights into software development and technical communication, and will be of use to others using the rssCloud protocol. I hope it will also demonstrate that it can be difficult to identify/isolate problems between multiple apps/web services/web sites, and that all involved in the discussion should adopt a mindset of “follow the data” and be open to input from others.

    rssCloud is a notification protocol that uses a “cloud” element in a RSS feed. This element contains information on a cloud server that is supporting this feed. A feed reader app can read the RSS feed and register with the server listed in the cloud element to be notified when the feed updates. The producer of the RSS feed can then “ping” the server to let it know that updates are available, and the server can inform apps that registered that feed that updates are available. The cloud element was included in version 2.0 of the RSS specification.

    The protocol has been supported in the blogging tools that Dave Winer developed since 2001 (Radio Userland (feed reader/blogging) and Manila (blogging)). Since that time, several other tools added support for adding the cloud element to RSS feeds (Django, Perl XML-RSS, and syndic-rss2). In 2009, Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress.com blogs would support rssCloud, and that a plugin would be available for WordPress.org blogs. A unique feature of the WordPress implementation is that the WordPress blog itself is the cloud server. A result of this was that a user did not have to find a rssCloud server for their feed to reference – their own site could handle feed registrations and notifications to feed reader apps. This created a supply of literally millions of weblogs that could support quick notifications to their readers if their reading app supported the use of rssCloud. However, for the most part, only feed readers and apps developed by Dave Winer supported the protocol (River2 (OPML Editor app), River4 and River5 (Node.js apps), Radio3 (Node.js) and now FeedLand (Node.js)).

    Some users noted issues with rssCloud support back in 2009 as WordPress.com rolled out its rssCloud support. One of the posts from this period highlighted the problems with registering an application with the rssCloud server associated with the WordPress.com blog. I began looking at rssCloud in 2015 and 2016 with limited success, and tried to develop a separate plugin, but had issues. I have been aware for several years that there were problems with River5 working with WordPress.com blogs and WordPress.org blogs in terms of rssCloud support, but I did not have the Node.js knowledge to adequately figure out the issue.

    After the rollout of FeedLand (Dave Winer’s latest feed application), a user, Colin Walker, started asking questions about rssCloud so that he could support it in his custom blog/reader application, and Dave Winer said he wanted people to ask questions about rssCloud, so I thought this was the right time to bring up the WordPress.com problem and document it to the best of my ability. I also tried to not say that it was a FeedLand problem, but to me the end result was that FeedLand was not doing what WordPress.com wanted to support rssCloud. Since Joseph Scott indicated that the WordPress.com implementation would not be changing, it was FeedLand that had to change (and other rssCloud apps that might want to say that they work with WordPress.com blogs). I didn’t get much, if any, credit for bringing this up, but I did identify the problem and tried to provide the level of info that Dave Winer seems to want/need before looking into a problem. During the investigation, Andrew Shell determined that the WordPress cloud server would only respond to requests from ports 80, 443, and 8080. This fact alone would be a valid explanation of why River5 (which ran on a default port of 1337) would not be able to register with a WordPress site or get notifications. However, this was not documented in any of the WordPress posts listed above regarding rollout of RSS Cloud support.

    Dave Winer then published a reference app for testing rssCloud implementations (https://github.com/scripting/reallysimple/tree/main/demos/clouddemo). I tried to comment on the reallySimple repo, but I saw this:

    Screen capture from Github repo issue

    …so I posted my report on my own blog.

    I checked, and saw that Github does have moderation features which allow repo owners to block people. I assume this is what has happened. I am also going to assume that this is from my comment on the earlier Github thread where I called out Dave’s negative request for help with rssCloud issues. Being his repo, he can do what he wants. However, to me that does not give the impression that Dave is open to feedback, even though he asked for feedback at the top of the issue (I guess it was just my feedback he did not want). I later checked and saw that I saw the same response on other repos within github.com/scripting, so I assume I am blocked from all of those repos.

    This is not the first time I have identified problems in how Dave Winer approaches comments about him or his products. I know he has “guidelines” to handle feedback, and that is his right. At this time in my life (I turned 60 earlier this year, I know Dave is 67-68), I tend more to “call it like I see it” in as factual a manner as I can. If that is what Dave Winer thinks of as “trolls, spammers, and abusers“, I can’t do anything about that. However, I don’t think I fit into any of those categories.

    With the help of Andrew Shell, Dave Winer was able to update FeedLand so that it supports display of WordPress.com and WordPress.org blog posts in near-real-time. I am seeing some RSS feed caching issues with WordPress, which I am continuing to document on a Github gist thread. Joseph Scott of Automattic has been very helpful with ideas. I was able to demonstrate that the new version of the rssCloud plugin (0.5.0) supported registration and notification with FeedLand, but subsequent tests with test scripts are showing the RSS feed caching problem I saw last week.

    I have a rssCloud project in mind that I would like to develop, but I want all WordPress users to be able to take advantage of rssCloud. Hopefully, this will become a reality soon.

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