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There are 119 posts filed in Feeds (this is page 2 of 12).

Does Dave Winer really want a RSS-based social web?

I am sorry to have to continue this thread, but there are more developments to assess. In a followup, Dave Winer shares he does not get much in the way of views of his content on Twitter. He then tells Ben Werdmuller (and the rest of us) that “we have to create our own social web”.

Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it! If someone wants to have a social web based on RSS, they are going to have to create it themselves, instead of trying to “boil the ocean” and get every other social network software platform to add features to use RSS as the transport mechanism for social network applications. Then, they are going to have to convince other people to use it instead of existing social network software.

From the Mastodon About page, Eugen Rochko created Mastodon in 2016 because he was “dissatisfied with the state and direction of Twitter”. That was 9 years ago! Mastodon as an application has taken a long time to reach the position it holds today. rssCloud has been supported in Dave Winer’s blogging tools since 2001, and rssCloud support was added to WordPress in 2009 (see reference here), but there has been almost no uptake of rssCloud as a basis for blogging or social network tools. Perhaps part of the reason why is how Dave Winer responds to negative feedback on his tools in a negative way (examples: Feedland and Drummer).

I have described what a social network should have, and that definition covers all current social networking applications. Dave Winer gave his own description of a RSS-based Twitter app in January 2025, and it matches up pretty well with the app I developed, My Status Tool (demo version, repo for code). I also created a portal site for RSS-based apps for social networking (The Feed Network), so there is a place for people to get started (but I do not see it as my mission to try to evangelize this area). Dave has talked about what his new vision would be using WordLand (September 2025), but this “new vision” is nowhere to be seen. Show us the beef!

Do users want a “Really Simple” social web?

I have refrained from commenting on updates from Dave Winer regarding Inbound RSS, two-way RSS, social web based on RSS…fill in the blank RSS…, since he did not do a “reveal” on any of the features he said he was going to demo at WordCamp Canada 2025. However, this weekend, he posted another mini-manifesto on RSS-based social web stuff, which deserves a review.

He references three posts by notable writers who have written posts on RSS in the past year. Of the posts, only one hints at more “social web” possibilities for RSS. The overwhelming majority of the content of the posts concerns the classic reasons for using RSS (control the content you read, control the way you read it, filter out shit). So – my first objection to this manifesto is that these prominent users are not sending out calls to action demanding “inbound RSS” or “using RSS as a social network”. The second objection I have is the demand that other people’s software should start supporting two-way RSS (Davespeak for “inbound RSS” and “outbound RSS”). This is nothing new from Dave Winer, but none of these three references say anything at all about this.

I have addressed this second objection before, stating “What is in it for the “other people’s software developers to add inbound and outbound RSS support”? My answer is – nothing – no users are demanding this – no users are clamoring for a RSS-based “social network” that can communicate as a peer with other social network software.

Now, can there be a RSS-based social network that does not peer directly with other social network software (Twitter/Mastodon/BlueSky)? Yes! I created a site to collect the tools that support this – The Feed Network. Many of the tools I list were created by Dave Winer – see a pattern here?

In my opinion, the only way that inbound RSS support will be added to other tools will be by developers other than the main developers. Dave Winer actually did this for WordPress (although I have not looked it, so I cannot confirm if it works or not). I think someone besides Mastodon developers will have to do that development, not sure about Bluesky…but, to re-iterate at the risk of being repetitious, the only person in the world that is making a stink about inbound RSS is…..Dave Winer. Not much user demand there, methinks.

Thoughts on the “Winer WordPress Tease”

Dave Winer has been promoting his editor for WordPress sites, called WordLand, leading up to his keynote speech at WordCamp Canada in October 2025, as well as hinting about other WordPress-related projects. Recently, he asked readers to “Think Different About WordPress“, where he talks about how WordPress supports editing features that Mastodon and Bluesky do not support (linking, no character limits, and other features). WordPress also has “excellent support” for RSS and rssCloud, and has a “deep and powerful API“.

Dave Winer goes on to say that he is providing three things to bootstrap a development community around WordPress: (1) Apps (I assume this refers to WordLand), (2) a storage service (I assume this refers to his wpIdentity NPM package, which he uses for identity for his FeedLand feed reader, and also to provide storage for user writing (although it appears to use the MySQL database associated with a WordPress install)), and (3) content (to me, this is RSS from other sites, implying some feed reader app or link to a feed reader app (like FeedLand)).

Now, how does a development community arise from this? Well, I guess that if people want to use an API to interact with WordPress (create posts, manipulate data in the WordPress database), they can do that, and maybe wpIdentity makes it easier to create Node.js apps that can interact with WordPress (like WordLand). As Dave Winer has mentioned before, though, the WordPress API has been around for a long time, but does not seem to have gotten much use. I am not sure if providing an easier “front end” to an API will increase use of that API. The WordLand app up to this point has been “the example app”, but has been provided as a service (no source code), so it is more of a “working example” for developers, not an app that some one can build on. Finally, Dave Winer has been hinting about an “RSS timeline viewer“, which is perhaps where FeedLand comes in. Again, without the full picture, it is hard to see how these three things are going to spark a growth in WordPress application development.

Finally, Dave Winer posted a podcast on “the last chance for the open web“, in which he talks about WordLand as “really easy way to write for the open web that does not otherwise exist today”, among other topics. I do not see this as the “last chance” for anything. I have written before on the economics of software development and on innovation in RSS and podcasting. The open web is still there, still providing a platform for innovative work. Nobody stopped me from creating MyStatusTool as a Twitter replacement based on rssCloud, and nobody stopped me from collecting rssCloud-based tools at The Feed Network. I know that Dave Winer would like his writing tools to be able to push their content to all social media platforms. Maybe that is the “promised land” that WordPress might provide via the ActivityPub plugin and an AT Protocol plugin (not yet developed). We will have to wait and see…

Again, Dave Winer says that he is “building around WordPress to create a social network based on RSS”. To date, his teases indicate he is building only a “feed reader” experience. To me, social networks imply being able to communicate with others. Where’s the beef? Show it to us!

Taking another look at social networks and RSS

Today, Dave Winer wrote “What if you made a social network out of RSS?”. He then basically described a feed reader interface, and used examples from Bluesky and Twitter. However, I think that an important point of what people think of as “social networks” was overlooked or omitted. If you look at the Bluesky/Twitter examples, you can see that someone posts, and then replies are shown. I do not think that the “timeline viewer” that Dave Winer is “teasing” in recent posts is going to show or allow replies. The development of WordLand and its Baseline theme does not support comments or replies.

During the development of MyStatusTool, my collaborator Colin Walker proposed a namespace to allow replies via RSS. Perhaps this could be a stepping stone to supporting replies, and therefore conversations, via RSS. Just having a feed reader isn’t having a conversation, and isn’t particularly social. For other tools in this space, see my site The Feed Network.

Shouldn’t RSS feeds have link URLs?

An interesting note – I wanted to link to the entry at links.daveverse.org for a particular link. I went to the site, did not see an easy way, so I went to the RSS feed linked at the bottom of the site. To my surprise, the feed listed items pointing to the links.daveverse.org item, but that item did not have the URL related to that item. I finally found them at https://dave.linkblog.org/. However, this seems to be at odds with Dave Winer’s own description of what a linkblog feed should be – what’s up with that?

Use case: linkblogging from your phone

I use my RSS reading app to graze stories from the feeds I am following. After scrolling through the list, I have a set of browser tabs open to read. After reading, usually I have several tabs (or perhaps a lot of tabs) for which I would like to save the links. Many times in the past, I have copied them to a “link dump” file. However, another approach is to use a linkblogging tool to capture the links.

My tool of choice in this situation is MyStatusTool (my live version is here). Here is a screenshot from my phone browser:

The area above the “post your update” button is the text area to enter a post. MyStatusTool uses the medium-editor toolbar to make it easy to add a link. The most difficult thing is to select the link text and get the medium-editor toolbar to appear (usually I double-tap the text). It is also best to only link to a single word (again, selecting several words as the link text can be difficult). The tool also creates a view of user posts, so you can review just your posts and not all of the content from subscribed feeds.

If anyone is interested in installing MyStatusTool, let me know! More information is available at The Feed Network.

More on linkblogging

Frank McPherson wrote this week on the subject of linkblogging, looking at how RSS can be used to share. I liked his perspective on how linkblogs can be useful in a web browser, while just having a RSS-feed linkblog requires a feed reader. Both of these types of sharing are supported on the Web – diversity in action!

Some thoughts on linkblogging

As I have written in the past week, I have a number of linkblogs and linkblog sites:

I have used different tools for these sites, but I consider all of them to be linkblogs of one kind or another. Many people have linkblogs. However, this week, Dave Winer says that he “had to do a definitive linkblog“. Really? Like there is such a thing. Is there a “definitive blog”? Dave has commented on how people should not start a group “whose name says you own the future of something that is open” (podcasting), or what constitutes the open social web. Please – let’s have a little humility here. Linkblogs are everywhere and have lots of variety, just like regular blogs. No need to add the adjective “definitive” here…