Today, Dave Winer talks about “working together”, and how he wants to work with other people. The bug in this statement is that Dave Winer deletes things from sites he provides for others to try out his tools, talks about “spam” posts (which is his word for someone trying to make use of his “flow” to promote their “personal projects”) and how he will “moderate” them, and other abusive behaviors. That turns off users and developers. I have personal experience with this, and reports from other users/developers.
Next, he talks about he wants to work together, but what he gets instead are people (collaborators? partners? who?) who want to be him (what does that mean? does it mean they want to be in charge of the project/control the project?). He talks about how people wanted to take over RSS and OPML. I will give him the benefit of the doubt of his lived experience, but my lived experience of working together with people (mostly working in teams in corporate software development) is that a goal is established, roles and responsibilities are laid out, scope and schedule are defined, and the team gets to work until the goal is met. My observation of the way Dave Winer works is that he controls the project, he does all the development and only changes code in an outliner (although Claude is now a silent partner), will not accept PRs, and gets upset when he ends up being the “only person” answering questions in Github issue repos.
Finally, here is a quote from the “Working Together” post he references in the post above:
Working together means this: If someone else has a good-enough way to do something, rather than reinvent what they do, incorporate what they do into what you do.
So – all of the other chat programs in the world were not “good enough”, so they need to be reimplemented using “RSS 2.0 feeds and websockets” (quote from rss.chat repo README file)
From monitoring the rss.chat and demo.rss.chat sites, I see some of Dave’s former co-workers/collaborators are building some things to work with rss.chat. Hope that works out for them!