I saw Ken’s Smith’s recent post on group activities, and I agree that larger social media may not be the place for such groups to work together. I also think another recent post of Ken’s (Choose to affiliate) also echoes this thought. To me, MyStatusTool could be the tool of communication for a small work group or organization, with the added plus of owning your content/work. Since it uses rssCloud as the notification service for new posts, real-time conversations can occur there.

Dave Winer linked this morning to a 2008 post on a “decentralized Twitter”. I believe that MyStatusTool meets that definition. I also discussed this more in a February 2023 post where I link to some other Dave Winer posts on bootstrapping. MyStatusTool is definitely in the bootstrap phase, and available to anyone who wants to try it (see this post for an example)!

New version of MyStatusTool now available

Overview of MyStatusTool

MyStatusTool is a proof of concept for a microblogging tool relying on local files for data storage and rssCloud for notification. I was motivated to do this to show how rssCloud could be used to support a Twitter-like experience. With the chaos underway at Twitter, multiple microblogging services have been getting more attention (Mastodon, Micro.blog, etc.). It seemed like a good time to try something different.

Why use MyStatusTool?

There are many tools/services that people can use to publish their thoughts on the Internet. The features that MyStatusTool brings to the table are:

Web application
Can post from a web page (PC, tablet, mobile)
Can instantly notify people that your feed has updated (if they are using an rssCloud-enabled reader tool/service)
Can instantly get updates from other rssCloud-enabled feeds (like MyStatusTool feeds, WordPress.com feeds, and WordPress.org sites using the RSS Cloud plugin)
Hosted by the user – no dependence on a silo service (think Twitter/Facebook, even Mastodon) – you own your content
Individual pages with URLs for all MyStatusTool posts

In the above description, note how Twitter-like this list of features is. People like using Twitter, so I wanted to leverage the best parts of the user experience.

There has been some recent discussion about being able to have small group conversations on the web. A group of users could use MyStatusTool to support those conversations, with each of the users subscribing to the other users with whom they want to have a conversation. It can be as small or as large as you like – no limits!

How can I get started?

Check out the Github repo and give it a try if you have a Linux server online! I have an instance running here, so you can see how it looks. There is also an alternative implementation written in PHP (MST-PHP, created by Colin Walker) which can run on most web hosting services.

If you do try it, let me know how it goes for you – I am interested in improving the user experience wherever I can….

I have migrated the feed reading part of MyStatusTool to use the formatting from Colin Walker’s MST-PHP implementation – looks great! Next up will be to add posting capability…

Making progress on MyStatusTool updates, but…

This afternoon, I started migrating the feed reading parts of MyStatusTool to my new version with authentication. I was able to get the feed subscription to work, but when the app received a POST from the rssCloud server indicating that a feed had been updated, I saw a POST /feedupdated 403 message. I did some searching on POST routes when using Passport.js, I got the impression that the service doing the posting has to be authenticated. I do not know how to make this work – Lazyweb, help!

Made some progress on incorporating the MST-PHP post styling within the sample app for user authentication! This is a static feed, but helped me to understand the formatting and how to access JSON data within an Express application.

Update on MyStatusTool development

The MyStatusTool project was on hold for a period of weeks while I was developing a glossary plugin for Micro.blog (and specifically for John Philpin). That appears to be working at least for John and me, so I am resuming work on this project. In conversations with Colin Walker (developer of MST-PHP), I am planning to move to update my user interface to match Colin’s, so our tools will be more common to users. I made a start on this by getting the simple version of username/password authentication using Passport.js set up (since my initial version did not have this). I have also spent some time familiarizing myself with how MST-PHP styles its user interface. The following is my projected list of tasks:

Display static set of feed items on home page

Display items on login page

Read feeds, add to posts file, update display on home and login page

Create admin page to manage feeds

Add posting feature and create a feed for posts

Add static pages for each post

John Johnston notes a podcast on a WordPress plugin (Friends) for a social network (although back in 2021). Seems to be lots of activity in the social area – why not MyStatusTool and MST-PHP?

I have been working on developing a glossary plugin for Micro.blog, and that has been taking up my time the past few weeks. I plan to get back to MyStatusTool development, as well as some blogging.

Had a great conversation today with Colin Walker on MyStatusTool development! Colin has added “reply” functionality in his tool – I need to catch up! This is all lots of fun – good to be working with someone….