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….

Success! I have installed Colin Walker’s MST-PHP tool at https://mst.andysylvester.com/, and it is working! Check it out!

Watch out – Colin Walker and I are developing tools that could be the first apps to meet Dave Winer’s Textcasting proposal! Both are available on Github…nothing stopping anyone from trying them out!

Having a conversation using rssCloud

This weekend, Colin Walker and I were able to have a conversation using our respective microblogging tools (MyStatusTool and MST-PHP). It was a cool and fun experience. I felt like we were taking the first steps to explore how to use these tools.

I sent email to a number of friends when I announced MyStatusTool, and one of them replied that he did not know what problem this was trying to solve. I thought about it and today realized what is it – a bootstrap to develop something new. Dave Winer has been referring to bootstraps throughout his blogging career (this essay is an excellent summary, and it is over 20 years old). The concept of MyStatusTool is a specific type of bootstrap:

My Status Tool is an application that provides the basic posting and reading functionality within Twitter, but using RSS and rssCloud as the enabling technologies.
from https://github.com/andysylvester/myStatusToolDemo

So, really, this is a bootstrap of a new type of Twitter. Dave Winer had a post about this in 2010:

Anyway, to answer the question posed by this piece — you bootstrap the federated 140-character loosely coupled network the same way you bootstrap anything. Let’s start with something very very simple, like two tin cans separated with a string. Something that is useful, perhaps minimally so, and can be federated. Then we use it. Then we think. Then we improve it. Start with working code. Start tomorrow, not next month.
from http://scripting.com/stories/2010/08/10/howToBootstrapFederated140.html

I will have more to say about this in the coming days – let me know if you want to be a part of this bootstrap!

Colin Walker has hit on a good point today – it is fun and energizing to work on a project with someone else, or to riff on another project. I am hoping to get some time in on MyStatusTool today!

Colin Walker and I have both developed tools for making short posts and following RSS feeds.

Colin’s tool: https://colinwalker.blog/php-mst/

Colin’s announcement: https://colinwalker.blog/blog/?date=2023-02-08

My tool: http://fedwiki.andysylvester.com:443/

My announcement: https://andysylvester.com/2023/02/06/demo-of-mystatustool-twitter-using-rss-and-rsscloud/

Check them out!

Update on MyStatusTool development

Recently I published a roadmap of the major features for a “Twitter using rssCloud” tool that I am calling MyStatusTool. As of this weekend, I have the major pieces in place (have a text box to enter a short post, to create a RSS feed based on the posts, for each post to have a page, to ping a rssCloud server when a post is live, to have the posts be displayed in reverse-chronological order, and to display posts from other tools that create RSS feeds supporting rssCloud). I spent some time looking at integrating Passport.js to provide multi-user capability, but it turned out to be more than just a day’s worth of work. As a result, I am going to push my current version to Github this weekend after writing some docs. More news to come!