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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…

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?

More discussion on “Inbound RSS” and “Outbound” RSS

Dave Winer writes today about the Open Social Web, and puts forward a solution on “linking the collection of social twitter-like sites into a real honest to goodness open social web”:

  • Add inbound RSS feeds. The social site allows a user to specify an RSS feed that represents their posts. When a new one shows up, it appears in the timelines of people who are following the user. They can add items to that feed however they like. It can come from anywhere. That’s 1/2 of “open.”#
  • Add outbound RSS feeds. This gives you the other half. When a new item shows up in a users feed, however it got there, it appears in their outbound feed, which can be tied into the input feed of one or more other sites. #
  • Support links in users’ posts. You really can’t claim to be part of the web if you don’t implement this core feature of the web. #

Is this something of a shift from what Dave has written in the past? Let’s take a look back…

In April 2025, Dave wrote:

Feed readers view RSS as inbound, and blogging tools regard it as outbound. Same feed, different contexts. Like trains going in and out of a station. Inbound and outbound. 

I responded with my take shortly after that:

As far as I know, the only service/tool that takes a RSS feed as an input and allows users to publish based on the content of that RSS feed is the Micro.blog service. 

So far, looks the same to me. Perhaps the way to probe further is to create some use cases. Say a person is using OpenSocialTool, they can subscribe to feeds from other people (not necessarily on OpenSocialTool), and they can create posts with OpenSocialTool, and those posts are included in a feed to which other users can subscribe. This is a good description of MyStatusTool (see demo version here).

Now, let us say that BlueMastoThread lets users specify feeds from others that they want to follow (inbound RSS) and displays the content of those feeds in BlueMastoThread, and the user can create an outbound feed of this aggregated content (outbound RSS). In addition, the user can create posts in BlueMastoThread and have those posts appear in their outbound feed, or maybe a separate outbound feed, I don’t know (outbound RSS). I think this use case describes the situation that Dave Winer talks about in his post today (inbound RSS can be an input into outbound RSS), which is a little different from most, if not all, blogging/social tools today. I do not think that there is any tool available today that implements this use case, but maybe there is, and I just don’t know about it.

Blogging from the train from Portland to Seattle, wifi is slow, but making do….

My apologies to Micro.blog users following my feed – I had a comment spam problem arise and could not log in – I have fixed it…