Micro.Blog

There are 319 posts filed in Micro.Blog (this is page 7 of 32).

Political violence, political speech, and political hate

I am totally against political violence. I agree with Frank McPherson that I am sad about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. People should not be shooting people because they disagree with their speech or behavior. I agree with Andrew Shell that Charlie Kirk had the right to free speech (1st Amendment). The “Golden Rule” would be a good starting place here. If you would not like being shot to death, don’t do it to others.

People should also think about their speech and whether it meets the Golden Rule or not. I was not aware of who Charlie Kirk was before this South Park episode. (which has now been pulled from repeat broadcast on Comedy Central). I was not aware that Kirk has spoken out that felt it was “worth it” to have some gun deaths in the US to preserve the Second Amendment (right to bear arms), or aware of the extent of his racist and bigoted behavior. How does this behavior square with the Golden Rule?

Finally, an atmosphere of political hate pervades our federal government. From Stephen Miller to Tom Homan to Donald Trump, demonizing of people and groups occurs on a non-stop basis. Is this in line with the Golden Rule? I think not.

Embracing creativity

Dave Winer wrote recently about “embracing the creativity of others“. It sounds good, but I don’t think he is taking his own advice. Dave regularly posts about how ActivityPub and AT Protocol are too difficult, and the developers supporting those protocols should support RSS, or should implement inbound/outbound RSS. Sure, that works for RSS developers, but what’s in it for ActivityPub or AT Protocol (or for Mastodon or Bluesky or Threads or….)? Where is the win for them? It seems like Dave Winer is looking for someone to say that his work with WordPress (the WordLand editor) is great. Well, it is a nice editor, but so what if people are not rushing to take advantage of it? Keep working at it, and PLEASE show us all that stuff about FeedLand and WordLand integration, instead of just talking about it!

Mavis and Marvin Smiley/A Prairie Home Companion

On the former radio show A Prairie Home Companion, there were a number of recurring “commercials” which were always great fun to listen to. One of my favorites was the commercials for Do-Tell Records, featuring “Mavis and Marvin Smiley and the Manhattan Valley Boys” (in real life, it was Robin and Linda Williams and their bluegrass band).

One of my favorites was “Broadway Bluegrass”, which I remember in its original performance, but have not been able to find online until this week. Here is is in all its glory!

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.

A question about rssCloud on WordPress.com

I have been trying to troubleshoot a problem with subscribing to RSS feeds from WordPress.com sites on my rssCloud blog tool MyStatusTool. I decided to use a rssCloud test app from Andrew Shell, and was able to set it up and run it successfully. I did a week-long test to see if I could detect posts from seven WP.Com sites, and it worked (see log file here). This weekend, I realized that the app did not re-subscribe to any of the feeds, but still remained active, receiving notifications from the subscribed blogs for over a week. This seems to be in conflict with the rssCloud walkthrough page, which states that a feed must be re-subscribed every 24 hr. Does anyone know anything about this?

I recently went on a trip where I was going to fly over the body of water south of Texas. The pilot correctly identified the body of water as “the Gulf of Mexico”. Nice!

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?