Open letter to Dave Winer’s call to develop feed-based social media apps

On December 3, Dave Winer published a “call to develop” for a feed-based social media app (he mentioned Mastodon in his post, but could be any social media app out there in my opinion). Sounds great to me! I have a feed-based app using rssCloud for notification called MyStatusTool (link to Github repo and my install). It is implemented using Node.js, Express, and Embedded Javascript for templating. It inspired Colin Walker to develop a PHP implementation of the tool (Github repo, his install). We were able to use our tools to interop with each other (have a real-time conversation), and to follow other feeds using rssCloud for notification. I have tested my implementation with the rssCloud user feeds from FeedLand and WordPress.com in addition to Colin Walker’s MyStatusTool implementation, and verified the real-time performance (new posts showed up almost immediately).

Now, is MyStatusTool a fully-developed thing? Nope! It’s a bootstrap. It does use a number of Node packages developed by Dave Winer for feed generation and feed reading, and uses Andrew Shell’s rssCloud server for notification, so I think it falls into the “working together” category that Dave Winer wrote about in 2015: “When you have a choice, instead of re-inventing someone else’s work, use it.”

I am ready to work for interop with whatever Dave develops. I don’t have any illusion that MyStatusTool is the epiphany of feed-based social media tools, but I developed it to see if one could be developed, and it spawned another implementation, so I think that is pretty cool. Let’s get busy and see what happens!

Was able to get the text of a previous post into the MyStatusTool editor window, but had tags appear in the post. Did some experimenting, then I could not decode the HTML entities – frustrating!

Dave Winer is musing about a lightweight social network. As Colin Walker and I have mentioned, I think that MyStatusTool would be a great fit (rssCloud for notification, can be used for small groups)! Dave has blocked me in most forums – can someone tell him about it?

Saw via my RSS feeds that Colin Walker had signed up for Bluesky. I reached out to follow him, and he was online at the same time! We had a mini-conversation, it felt good!

Made a change to MyStatusTool to read the user posts in the Admin interface instead of the full set of user and subscribe posts. Next will be to use the edit button to copy the individual post text to the editor window….