A new this.how page for RSS.chat. I’ll point to it from blog posts. #
In my experience in software development, it’s good to start small with something useful, learn how it works before adding big new features. That’s the basic principle of bootstrapping. I thought that Mastodon, for example, took on too big a job. Same thing for the protocol behind it, ActivityPub. If you go all the way to the end before implementing and using, you miss the target, in performance and usability, that’s what I think happened there. They felt they had to do everything Twitter does. I would have gone down a different path, go back to the beginning, and at every step think if there might not be a better direction to evolve in. It was about ten years after Twitter launched that they started work on Masto. Imho they should have zigged where Twitter zagged in defining what a post is. Twitter put excessive limits on writing, of course is one of the big reasons I started RSS.chat — to go down a different path there. What if the social web didn’t limit text? That assumption is baked into the core of rss.chat. I will consider this project a raging success if it causes Mastodon to get serious about supporting full web text. #
I am longtime friends and an admirer of Howard Rheingold, who expressed an interest in RSS.chat. I asked Claude to read my blog posts and summarize, in the third person.
RSS.chat is a small social network built from the web’s own parts. It looks like a chat room or Twitter — you write short posts, people reply, conversations thread — but underneath, every person’s posts are an RSS feed, the same technology that makes podcasts work. When you post, you’re adding to your feed. Anyone, anywhere, can subscribe to it with any feed reader — no account needed, nothing to sign up for. There’s also a feed of everyone’s posts together, and a public list of all the members.
Why does that matter? Think about how podcasts work: anyone can publish one, anyone can listen with any app, and no company sits in the middle deciding who can talk to whom. Text on the web works that way too — that’s what blogging is, and there are still places where writing gets full support: WordPress, GitHub, the new AI tools. They don’t try to limit you. But the vast majority of the text people write goes into social networks, which stripped writing down: no links, no titles, length limits, no editing, and your words locked inside their walls, not part of the web. Dave’s term for the idea is textcasting — the idea that a piece of text should work like an MP3: it plays everywhere. No one would accept a rule that songs can only be 300 seconds long. That’s the rule we’ve been living under for text.
rss.chat is a bootstrap, the same way blogging and podcasting were. It starts deliberately small — a network for a group of friends and collaborators, what Vonnegut called a karass — running on a small server. It is not trying to be the next Twitter. The idea is lots of small networks like it, run by anyone, all able to connect, because they share the same open formats. Every part is replaceable: the writing app, the reading app, the server — swap any piece and the network still works. Small pieces, loosely joined. There is no platform vendor. It’s like the web because it is the web.
The app you see is only a third of the picture. It’s the writing surface. Aggregation — following many feeds in one place — is what feed readers and FeedLand already do. And the third part is whatever other developers build. The software was written with Claude, an AI, and the whole thing is documented so that anyone can have their AI build a compatible piece, or clone the whole thing and change anything about how it looks and feels. The one rule of the club is interop: stick with the open formats underneath, so everything connects. Not locked in — locked open.
If you looked at Dave’s blog in 1994, you couldn’t have extrapolated Twitter — but every step was there. This is that kind of beginning.
Written by Claude.
Yesterday’s Scripting News was one of the most news-full days in a long time, maybe going back to the rollout of RSS 2.0 in Sept 2002. If you look at what’s there, a post about re-opening the Frontier object database format would be considered the top item on any other day, but it’s the last of the untitled posts for the day.
At the top of the page, a surprise that Matthias Pfefferle at Automattic had built a substantial (and unforeseen!) bridge between WordPress and RSS.chat. It builds on the new features. This may turn out to be the moment RSS started being accepted as a social web protocol by the insiders, alongside ActivityPub and AT Proto.
Look at what we’ve done. I stress we. Matthias didn’t need to tell us about what he did until it was done. That my friends is how the web works, that’s what I’ve been trying to show you, and now it has been shown. In a way the clock has gone back to the world before Twitter when events like this happened pretty routinely.
Small pieces loosely joined and all parts replaceable. The web in a sentence. That’s what you’re buying into when you put your work on the web. And it’s a much more honorable way to work, imho.
Anyway, now we’ve got half of the big picture working.
Also yesterday, before I knew what Matthias had been cooking up, I wrote a piece about how I see the network evolving. I predict, if this bootstrap works, we will come back here in a year and say things like “If he only knew.” But that’s how it goes, you tell your story and leave a record of it, and then later you can go back and see what it looked like as it happened, not as you remember it.
I’m proud that I have a record of Sept 2002 for you all to scroll through. That was when we knew that RSS was going everywhere. NYT support got us the full support of the news industry, and they worked fast in part because it is really simple. 🙂
And almost unnoticed, something even I seem to forget — this is also a new launch for RSS. We’re using old reliable RSS 2.0 as specified in 2003, even using one of the elements that had never had been much used. Claude suggested it, I never would have thought of it, a perfect fit. What people may realize but don’t realize the importance of, that RSS is extensible. I’ve accumulated all the extensions I use in my software since the early teens in the source namespace. And that’s where the new stuff went. Guess what folks, RSS got an upgrade. First time in a long time. Perhaps you didn’t think that was possible.
I played with a lot of names while RSS.chat was in development but decided the name had to be RSS.something. It deserves a lot more love than it has gotten from the tech world. I don’t want to hide it, I want it to get a victory parade like the one the Knicks got on Broadway after winning the championship. It’s an incredible gift that all that came together the way it did. People think they understand how it happened, but they only understand the BigCo version of how they buried RSS and were proud of it. Well I’m here to tell you that didn’t happen. It’s still here to pick up the pieces of what’s left of the social web, after the VCs got through with it. We’re picking up where we left off in 2006.
Because of Claude, we are able to work very fast now as long as we know what we’re doing. I’m doing some projects on the side with Claude that are bearing fruit amazingly fast, because we have a very clear idea of what we hope to do. The tools keep getting better, and in this period, the art of creating software has blasted into outer space. It’s as if the best transport we had was a horse and buggy and now all of a sudden we have everything we have today, bikes, cars, planes, rocket ships. The challenge is how high do you dare to set your ambition. It seems, based on experience, it doesn’t matter how high it is as long as you know where you want to go.
Journalism only sees the threat. This change is on the level of curing cancer. We may have thought it might be possible someday to do what we’re doing now, so amazing that as you watch Claude make it happen you get goosebumps and can’t help but laugh out loud.
I thought my career was winding down, but now it feels like it’s just getting started.
Reminded of a great quote in Godfather III, Michael Corleone says: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
Here we go!