Two methods for creating standards: bootstrap and boil the ocean. #
John Johnston got inboundRss working, so now he can automatically post to his WordPress blog from demo.rss.chat. These are the kinds of things that “just work” when standards are used to connect to the outside world. WordPress, as I’ve been saying so long, has all the right hooks to be the place where text and publishing meet on the web. They’ve been reluctant to step into that role, but I think it’ll be realllly good for Matt’s company and the community. A lot of fresh developers can come in via the web. That’s how I personally approach WordPress. A place to send text so it can be widely read. A growing foundation for a community to build on, and would imho help the web enormously. #
Yesterday was a wonderful first day for RSS.chat. It’s now out there, but we haven’t talked about or demo’d many of the things that it does. I wanted to get the feeds out there first, because now we get to think together about how they fit together to give us a social network experience. It’s not locked in a silo, these are just like feeds you have known about for over two decades. But it is a new application for those feeds. And this is a bootstrap. You start with something small that you’re sure is a beginning for what you want to do. And then you and others use it for a while. And it is open source, MIT licensed, but compatibility will make the difference. #
Claude codes. It may seem as if developers have taken over this blog, because we have real business to do. So much new stuff to show. Today’s RSS.chat goodie is an example app called ThreadWalker that crawls the network of replies under a single post, to all levels, printing them on screen in neat hierarchic form. It was written and documented by Claude. I reviewed the code, and looks good, and honestly doesn’t look like anything I would write (not bad, just different). It could be used as a starter system that says when someone replied to something you wrote, or something deeper in the tree. All this is done by reading RSS feeds. This is where we begin to explore what’s possible when you use a famous and familiar format like RSS 2.0 as the basis for a social network. #
Someone on Masto who I blocked used a nasty word to descript RSS.chat. Let me be really clear here, this is an act of authorship by me. Claude is helping, a lot — I doubt if I could have done this without its help, certainly not in the amount of time it has taken so far. And Claude could not have done it without me driving. It’s basically good at a few things, but this is new territory, even I am feeling my way through this project. In many parts we have lots of prior art, but in how the whole thing hangs together, this is new territory. Having Claude is like having a car would be to someone who couldn’t drive. All of a sudden you can go places. It takes a while to learn how to use that power, and so far the learning has not come close to leveling off. You couldn’t find someone better in the world to do this project, and I’m working on this every day. #
I wrote a pretty good set of paragraphs on Twitter/X this morning.
Yesterday I announced RSS.chat.
Some people spell it RSS.chat. I haven’t decided which way is right yet.
The announcement covers a slice of the project, but it fans out to be the beginning of a bootstrap.
I want to entice other projects to fully endorse the text model of the web. Today most social “web” services support a pitiful subset of the web, and leave out the most crucial element, the link. If a writer can’t link, how can you call it the web? Seriously.
I want to force them out of their silos and get the web working for the people and esp independent developers.
I’ve been preaching this for years, and I am reminded what I learned a long time ago — people don’t listen to their friends, they listen to their competitors.
It was developed by Claude Code and myself, starting in April. We make an incredibly good team though sometimes Claude is tedious, but I put up with it because the results make me laugh out loud frequently because I never imagined working at such velocity.
I’m not doing this to make money, though of course I don’t *mind* making money. I just want to return the web to its former glory, where every part is replaceable, and if you can think of something you can probably do it.
I want to use lots of different software to work on my social network presence. I want this post to appear on Masto, Bluesky, Twitter, Threads, Facebook even, and have them all work perfectly together.
In the meantime, we’re now ready to create our own global network of free speech, uncontrolled by the big silos. At some point if it works, we will have moved beyond them, or they will see the sense in joining the party.
Small pieces loosely joined and every part replaceable.
As its name implies, it’s built entirely on fully open web standards, RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and WebSockets. It turns out you can make a very nice distributed social network without having to wait. It was always there, we just had to decide to do it.
How it evolves? That’s up to everyone who can code, and that’s a lot of people now thanks to the AI tools.
A karass is “a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.” I think of RSS.chat as a social network for my karass. A small group of people, not trying to get famous or rich from using a social network, rather wanted to work with or stay in touch with people who are linked cosmically. This is one of many rich ideas invented by Kurt Vonnegut, this one in Cat’s Cradle, which you should read, because it’s some of the best story-telling out there, and it’s full of food for thought. I read all the books when I was a teen, and have since re-read them. Sirens of Titan was my fave.
Anyway…
In the past when I announced a product, people could use it right away, and usually they click a couple of things and then go away.
In the case of RSS.chat — what you will see is very much like what you see when you aren’t logged in, or what you see on a social network like X, or Mastodon or whatever. The UI is nice, but it’s not the thing. That will be revealed relatively slowly, over time — as new instances pop up, and even more importantly, as developers figure out that this setup works well enough to clone. I’m not selling a product here — I want to bootstrap an ecosystem, using all I learned from several successful bootstraps — blogging, RSS, podcasting.
The idea is this — the web itself is a social network. It’s up to us, all of us, not just me — to build that network.
When you see how we proceed from here that will become clearer.
In the meantime I’m going to change the message you get when you try to sign on, and start a wait list so that when more instances are available, some meant to be open to the public, we’ll be sure to let you all know about that.
For now, I’m operating a network for people I work with, and it’s all open for anyone to read. That’s also one of the ideas I want to explore, something I call a “Fractional horsepower social network,” stealing a very good idea from Steve Jobs.
I don’t want to turn the world over to a startup, we’ve done that and have a pretty good idea of where it goes. I want lots of small ones that have a very strong basis to be connected together in as many ways as people can imagine.