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…

The will of the majority

There have been a number of instances of the majority party in different states taking action against minority party representatives (Montana, Tennessee). In these instances, the minority party representatives tried to voice opinions that were at odds with the majority party, and were silenced for it. In other states, minority party representation is hobbled by gerrymandering and voter suppression. Even with majority rule, there should be minority rights:

“Minorities — whether as a result of ethnic background, religious belief, geographic location, income level, or simply as the losers in elections or political debate — enjoy guaranteed basic human rights that no government, and no majority, elected or not, should remove.”

“Among the basic human rights that any democratic government must protect are freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion and belief; due process and equal protection under the law; and freedom to organize, speak out, dissent, and participate fully in the public life of their society.”

Keeping track of a topic

Ken Smith is looking at workflows to help develop a topic over multiple blog posts (at least, that is one part of what he is writing about, I think). I would like to offer some examples. The first is drawn from my zettlekasten experiments last year (link is to my zettlekkasten file). I created a section in my topical outline for the history of podcasting, and was adding posts and articles to it, and arranging them in chronological order. The Politics section was similar, where I was collecting information on the Kari Lake election conflicts in Arizona. Finally, I created a Github repo where I was editing posts by Ken Smith on organizing information for use. I think all of these are possible solutions for what Ken Smith is trying to do.

OPML rendering options

Ken Smith posted this morning asking about ways to render an OPML file as a static page. The Awesome Drummer site lists six different methods to do this, I also have a OPML Includes Github repo showing how to include OPML files within an OPML file, and Dave Winer’s opmlPackage has a demo of an HTML rendering of a OPML file.

So – lots of ways to do this task. Ken’s second question was “is one of them preferable”? My answer is “it depends on your objectives”. If you have an OPML file online, and you want to quickly display it using several of the methods where you can just add the URL in a path to an online tool that will display it, and not have to think about it any more than that, then those type of things can quickly take care of your problem. If you want to have control over the manner the file is displayed, or do not want to depend on another online service/tool to take care of displaying the file, I would suggest using opmlPackage or one of the rendering scripts on the Awesome Drummer list above and hosting it yourself. The “hosting it yourself” option can be a problem for some, but is the best way to make sure your file is displayed the way you want and is available as long as you want.

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!

Watch your quotes when creating JSON files

In using my Glossary Plugin for Micro.blog, John Philpin has noticed that there are two types of double quotes, and that one of them does not produce a valid JSON file or object. There are double quotation marks (like on the keyboard next to the Enter key on my laptop) and double prime marks (think six minutes and 37 seconds 6’37”). If the wrong type of quotes are used, Micro.blog will not render a post using the plugin. A way to check this is to paste your JSON object into a site like JSONLint, which parses the text and can provide feedback on errors (source code for the app available here). Finally more technical info on JSON is available at JSON.org.