March 2025

There were 11 posts published in March 2025 (this is page 1 of 2).

What should a social network have?

I am cross-posting this from my WordLand blog.

The mention of a social network built around RSS has come up again. I added my off-the-cuff thoughts on this topic in this post, but I also wanted to review Dave Winer’s description on the rssCloud website:

There are three sides to the cloud:#

  • The authoring tool. I edit and update a feed. It contains a element that says how a subscriber should request to notification of updates.#
  • The cloud. It is notified of an update, and then in turn notifies all subscribers.#
  • The subscriber. A feed reader, aggregator, whatever — that subscribes to feeds that may or may not be part of a cloud. #

I think that these three elements are the minimum features for a social network to exist. By breaking this down into three parts, it is easier to see that multiple applications cane be created or assembled to create a social network. It does not have to be an “all-in-one” application (like Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc.). Users can use whatever tool they want to create their content, and they can use whatever tool they want to consume the content. Finally, both of those tools can interact with a “cloud server” which performs notification. 

So why has this idea/concept not gained traction? I think there are several reasons. Many authoring tools create feeds, but do not support notification. Many subscriber apps read feeds, but on more of a “polling” basis, and not because the app has been notified that a feed has updated. To me, these are places where innovation could start.

I have been waiting for “someone else” to do this work, but “no one” has stepped in to start, so I am going to try adding some “notification” features to some other blogging tools. I would be remiss if I did not point out that there is a RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress blogs, and WordPress.com supports rssCloud. In my experience, though, my self-hosted WordPress blog has not experienced “real-time” performance due to caching of the RSS feed by my host, Bluehost. I have tried many ways to turn this off, with no success.  Anyway, there is nothing “stopping” me from innovating here, so here goes!

My Oscars thoughts

Watched the Oscars last night on ABC, I would say that big films got small awards, and small independent films took the big awards – interesting! “Wicked” has gotten quite a lot of notice (especially on NBC) since its release, I would say they “already received their reward”.

Watched the Oscars last night on ABC, I would say that big films got small awards, and small independent films took the big awards – interesting! “Wicked” has gotten quite a lot of notice (especially on NBC) since its release, I would say they “already received their reward”.

Continuing conversation about conversation on social media

Ken Smith recently wrote a post about conversations on social media, and I wish to contribute to this conversation. I think it is possible to have meaningful conversations on social media, although I have not participated in very many. The ones that worked were pretty much one-on-one conversations (so not hundreds of people replying to a post). To me, there can be abuse and trolls, and these can make conversation difficult if not impossible. However, to me sometimes people online act like they would like to have conversation, but block replies that they do not agree with, and to me this discourages true conversation. Perhaps the best online conversation opportunities are within a small group or circle of friends, as often happens in real life. Just sharing some thoughts here….

A linkblogging update

I have continued to use Hugo to maintain two link blogs (linkblog.andysylvester.com, a random collection of links, and liveblog47.andysylvester.com a collection of news live blog links on the second Trump presidency), and I thought it was a good time to share an update. I am using the Anubis2 theme that I saw on Jack Baty’s site. I am using Visual Studio Code to create the Markdown files. My approach for the linkblog site is to present a link and the title of the piece or short excerpt. I have not been entirely successful (sometimes I am just pasting the links in a file at the end of the day), but by using Hugo, I can go back at a later time and edit the files easily to fill in information and re-render the site. By switching folders within Visual Studio Code, the editor opens the most recently edited file, which is easy to save as a new file.

In the Liveblog47 site, I wanted to have a record of Trump news, but not have to spend a lot of time tracking down posts to link to. CNN has a pretty regular live blog page daily, so as long as I can check CNN during the day, I can save that link, and paste it in a new file. The URL naming is sometimes inconsistent, so checking each day is pretty much a requirement. I had a site during the 2024 election (Kamala Campaign Timeline) which ended up taking a lot of time, and I did not want to invest that much time in Trump news.

Overall, I am pleased with the link blogs so far. I feel better having the links in a site online, rather than a big link dump file on my hard drive. At least they are live…

Announcing WordLand Bloggers River of News

I am a firm believer in the “river of news” way of reading RSS feeds. Dave Winer has created several “river of news” RSS aggregators (the latest is River5, available on Github). As part of this effort, Dave also created some tools for display of a river of news in a single-page application, using the output from River5. I have created one of these river applications (WordLand Bloggers River of News) to keep up with the WordLand user blogs. If you want to have your WordLand blog added to the river, email me at sylvester.andy@gmail.com. Let’s keep blogging!