Dave Winer

Example of a WordPress post in Mastodon

This is a post I wrote in WordPress.

You can also @scripting@daveverse.org@mastodon.social in Mastodon, via ActivityPub, and a bridge that Automattic created to adapt WordPress posts to the language of ActivityPub.

Here are some of the features that are supported:

• This post has a title (it's optional).

• Simple styling: bold, italic, numbered lists (see below), bulleted lists, subheads. 

• Hyperlinks, the defining feature of the web, omitted from all twitter-like products, e.g. Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Twitter.

• The posts are editable, if I make a change to the WordPress post, that change is quickly reflected in the ActivityPub version. 

• This post is much longer than the typical Mastodon post, illustrating the lack of a character limit.

A numbered list, all the continents of the world, in alphabetic order:

1. Africa
2. Antarctica
3. Asia
4. Australia
5. Europe
6. North America
7. South America

Discussion

What's remarkable about this feature list is that it's basically the features of the web and the features of RSS, which are also the features of WordPress. These are also the basic features I call for twitter-like services to support in the textcasting spec (2022). 

By opening this door to developers, easily and quickly, via RSS, we implement the "open" part of it. Until that happens, it's effectively out of reach to developers. If to get into this club you have to support ActivityPub, that's too high a barrier of entry, as we have seen. ActivityPub should be supported well, once, and then accessible via the simplicity of RSS. 

PS: This document has 347 words and 2475 characters.

PPS: This was an example for the post I wrote on Scripting News this morning. It explains why we need the same thing WordPress does for ActivityPub to work for RSS too, so developers can build apps that hook up to Mastodon. We have yet to see Masto become an easy platform for web developers, which is why it's wrong to say it's part of the web. When that happens the doors will open for all kinds of creativity.

Joni Mitchell wrote a sad and lovely Christmas song.

Bluesky: "The reason we have enough money for a war is that we get to print money because we have the reserve currency that the whole world uses. So we could afford to buy you a house or pay for your healthcare or forgive your student loan debt but we don’t because I don’t know."

AIs can reason

I'm doing another new Claude project, just started it last night after the Knicks game. This one is right-size. The others were too complex for us to communicate about. On this one I'm letting it write all the code, so we don't have to get bogged down telling it how to write code that's consistent with mine. This project, if it ships, can be maintained entirely using Claude, or presumably any AI app.

Can the AIs think? Maybe we'll never know, but it definitely can reason. I can judge that the same I would if I were teaching a class in computer programming. Even though it has bad days, which I think was due to overload, Claude is generally very good at reasoning. The code it produces works, and upgrades happen very quickly. And it narrates its work (a relatively new feature) something I can't even get myself to do consistently.

I don't trust the predictions that software developers will be obsolete. The culture of Silicon Valley encourages this kind of chest thumping. On the other hand, the predictions for PCs and the web, the big things of my career in tech, were similarly bombastic, but they were wrong. The web was huge, just not in the ways people thought it would be.

And before that PCs weren't as limited as people thought in the early days of that corner-turn. They ended up completely replacing the mainframes. The big data centers of 2026 are not filled with IBM 360s. And PCs led to the web. That may turn out to be the biggest contribution they made in the evolution of tech. But if you had said that at a tech conference in 1986 they wouldn't have understood.

The web as your plan B

I hate to see AT Proto use up creativity of web developers that imho haven't realized that they're pouring their ideas and work into someone else's platform, and that in the end they will control every bit of content that flows through their network. They might let you in, but I doubt they would do that until they had a feature that competes with your add-in.

Sure you can build another network using their identity system, and that was exactly the deal Twitter offered us. I went for it — who wants to develop a new identity system, when good old Twitter was letting us use theirs. I really think they meant well, sort of fits in with Jack Dorsey's way of looking at things.

It was a good deal for a lot of years, but then one day Elon Musk bought the company, and soon all bets were off. We had little warning before we had to move our act and all our users to another identity system. Lost a lot of traction right there.

My advice — think this through, now. And if you can't see a way that you share in the success of the company behind Bluesky, which we know very little about, then I urge you to at least have the web as a backup. Use a standard format to broadcast your writer's work to places outside the AT Proto-verse, so we can pick up your signal, and you'll still be on the air if they yank your chain. This alone might get the Bluesky folk to listen to you more carefully. My experience, no matter how much you want, you can't wish away the economics of this stuff.

As I get deeper into the Claude-O-Verse, I get that it doesn’t remember anything about the code. The code actually serves as its memory of the project. There are comments in the code of course, put there by Claude. Managing my own memory when I’ve got so many different bits of software is the bain of my existence, esp as I get older and older. But I’ll turn it all over to Claude as fast as I can, to relieve me of the responsibility to remember all that stuff. Its brain works much better at this kind of stuff. I can conceive of things worth doing. And I know how to build the features, but I don’t have the skill of immediately understanding some code by reading it not top down but all the lines at the same freaking time. If this isn’t us learning how to work with an aliens species, it’s a pretty good imitation.

I’ve been teaching Claude why we favor Markdown. “We add support for Markdown editing wherever we can, because people like Markdown and they should. It makes things simple and guarantees a certain level of flexibility for their writing far beyond the standards of twitter-like systems with tiny little text boxes. If you don’t really support Markdown people figure it out right away. But the character limits and stuff like that seem more technical to users. Markdown support says clearly — you’re really on the web.”

I was just marveling with Claude about how well all the pieces are fitting together: two databases, connected by an RSS 2.0 feed and a websocket pipe all had to agree how to communicate the same object. Worked the first time. Small pieces loosely joined.

WordPress and web text in the future

I wrote a blog post on Twitter this morning, sort of a version 0.4 of the talk I want to do at WCUS in August in Phoenix.

I want to offer cross-posting to twitter in an upcoming product, but I think the user should pay the service, not me, a one-person independent developer.

I doubt if they’ll do it, but this is general advice to companies that provide online services that they want to get paid for. If you depend on developers, you’re shutting out sole proprietors who don’t want to get caught up in the VC world, or don’t have a chance.

In the early days of the web and in the PC/Mac platforms before that, a creative software writer could get going without having to fund their users’ storage needs. PCs came with storage built into the hardware. And in the early web days everyone was something of a geek and could be relied on to find a place on their own, to store their writing (not a perfect system by any means).

It’s been 31+ years since I started my blog and still I can’t offer writing software easily, with one exception, with WordPress. This is something I’m not sure

@photomatt et al are focused on. It’s why WordPress has so much potential to grow the web.

The thing many people don’t realize is that WordPress unlike pretty much everything else does not lock users in. It’s part of their ethos. They run their service as part of the web, not an exploiter of the web.

When Matt talks about being an open source company (true) he’s leaving out something equally important, that it’s part of the web, unlike most if not all of the other choices.

When I speak at WCUS in August, I’d like to invite Matt to come up on stage and take a bow. Because there’s a reason why such a great community has grown around his product, but we haven’t been focusing on it and encouraging independent developers to see WP as part of the web that welcomes them, and does not lock the users or developers in.

PS: This will appear on my blog later today. I’ve started using twitter again to write early drafts of blog posts, and I especially like that they’ve eliminated character limits for paying customers. Nothing wrong with charging for services that people *want* to pay for.

PPS: I’m posting here again because it’s more alive than Bluesky, by a lot, and Bluesky is just as much of a ripoff as X, except they haven’t sold out to a billionaire yet. They should work with the web instead of trying to replace it, then I’ll feel more at home there.

All the news reports about AI tools repeat the same hallucination story they’ve been running for years. That’s another huge bug in the news process. They only report on a small number of angles that might have been news a few years ago, and have no insights on what else is going on. They did this with the web too. They always pick an item that their narcissistic view of the world finds tasty. It’s a huge bug in the system, and why “news” isn’t valuable for news, it’s mainly useful for a relaxing reassurance that nothing has changed, the world is fucked up in exactly the same way it was fucked last week, month, year, etc. It’s a form of bedtime story.

Star City is very good. It’s good enough that you have to watch each episode at least twice to get the idea of what’s really going on. I stopped watching the show it is a sequel for, For All Mankind, because it got incredibly juvenile and sitcom-like. But Star City is serious, at least in the first three episodes.

Walt Frazier: “The regular season is where you make your name, but the postseason is where you make your fame.”

The Knicks won again last night. They’re now up 2-0, both games on the road. This has blown my sense of reality. This Knicks team bears no resemblance to what I think of as the Knicks. Hard to concentrate. Will Trump try to put his name of Madison Square Garden.

Google could do a mixture of AI and search. I want to search my blog for a place where I discuss the idea of hate is betrayed love even if I don’t use the actual words. I bet they’re working on it.

Elon Musk’s X

I’m using “EMX” more than Bluesky, consciously — realizing it was a mistake to move my social web act over there. There’s no discourse to keep me there, I’m giving it less of my bandwidth. I tried an experiment today, Paul Graham, a big tech influencer on EMX said all the Tesla haters were seemed to be gone, and I chimed in that I am one, and have just returned. I wanted to see what would happen. Yeah I got trolled. Won’t be doing that again. Hate btw is betrayed love. You can’t hate something you don’t also love. If you go back before last year’s election, I was borderline about Musk, happy to enjoy the car without thinking of him every damn time I drove it. Maybe I should start writing about it again. I promise it will be a very different story. Also EMX is what I’m calling Elon Musk’s X. I think calling it Twitter now is not right. But I don’t see X as the name of a service or product. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but most good names have 2-4 syllables with 3 being ideal. Look around you. That imho is why we like Claude better than ChatGPT.

It’s really cool we get another NBA Finals game tonight. I’m rehearsing what it feels like to be a fan of the Eastern Conference Champion NY Knicks. It still hasn’t even slightly sunk in yet.

Having fun rolling stuff out on Elon Musk’s X.

The Knicks

I didn’t write about the Knicks prior to last night’s game because I had no idea what to write. The Knicks in the Finals is something I had a hard time understanding. To me the Knicks are soulful losers. They’re like once-future hall-of-famer Carmelo Anthony surrounded by people who shouldn’t even be in the NBA, but otherwise are lovely individuals. When they asked Melo what his goal was he said it was to win a championship, but the reporters never followed up with the obvious question — “Really?” They did make the playoffs, three times, in the Age of Melo, and they made it to the second round one of those three years.

Going into the game last night I thought maybe the pundits were right, that the real NBA Finals was the previous round between the San Antonios and the Oklahoma Cities. But last night that was debunked. At what point did I realize this? After the game was over, ABC announcer Mike Breen said in the exact moment the game was over “..their 12-game win streak” which revealed that I had little faith the streak would be preserved. I thought 11 was pretty great, but 12? Until that moment — unthinkable.

In the first part of the game when San Antonio looked like they might rout the poor unprepared Knicks, I thought okay, but couldn’t we just concede so we don’t have to watch? In that moment I appreciated what the Clevelands must have been feeling as they shrunk to nothing faced with the Knicks juggernaut? How about if we all go home now at some point they must all have been thinking.

I’m a Mets fan first, and I bring the Mets philosophy to every sport, including the NBA and software. I’m here for the game. Sure I love it when we win, but if the Knicks went down in the final test, I’d still be a happy camper. Look they made it to the freaking Finals! Some Mets fans say the team slogan is You Gotta Believe. I say Wait Till Next Year! Same for the Knicks. Same for every software product I make that no one even tries out.

This Knicks team is classic. Every one of their players would be a star on any other team, including the bench players. Some of them who are on one-year contracts will certainly go to other teams next year. But what a thrill to have this group all on the same team and that team is my lovely Knicks.

Last night’s game was a lesson, you should always be open to the possibility of winning because sometimes you do.