Scripting News: Thursday, March 20, 2025
Senator Chris Murphy: "How on earth are we going to ask the American people to take risks for us when there's a 5-alarm constitutional fire and we need them to be out on the streets, with hundreds of thousands of people, if we're not willing to show courage and take risks ourselves."#
I like Jeff Nichols' piece, but I don't agree that the writer's web is blogging. I think it's bigger. Blogging is part of the writer's web. Today's writing network is much more powerful, the software tools are stronger, and new UI standards have evolved. Things like Digital Ocean, Markdown, Font-Awesome and Node.js didn't exist last time we took a serious look at writing on the web. The web with all its features is still here. WordPress has created a strong foundation to build on, at least as good as the social media platforms, but better because it's of the web, with no limits. We've got the beginning of a new platform, one where developers compete to create great writing and reading environments, and we don't need federation because the web takes care of that. #
A thread I wrote on Bluesky about how the RSS world, an earlier instance of the writer's web, was overtaken by Twitter and why, which boils down to this -- the reading platforms wouldn't work with each other. So Twitter made subscription one click. And RSS made sites include 25 buttons to give people one-click subscription in every popular feed reader. Twitter only needed one button. And it worked every time. Now, 18 years later, the twitter-like systems world, Mastodon, Threads, Substack, Ghost, Bluesky, etc mostly can't get together on a simple way to peer. They keep talking about it and while they do, we're losing everything that's important to us. In the open tech world we have the same problem as the Democratic Party and the same problem RSS had. We refuse to see how the world has changed, and our slow and steady approach leads nowhere fast. We can't all be masters of our own silo'd domain. We need a web for words that's simple and can be learned in an afternoon, but doesn't lose the essential features writers need. I don't know what we need to win, but I do know what we need to get started. #
Notes#
Terminology: I don't thnk we should use the term social web until there actually is such a thing, so I invented a new term for these twitter-like services.#
Since Ghost is now supporting ActivityPub, I felt we needed to include Substack because the two products compete directly. #
I consider AT Proto a proprietary protocol for now, as proprietary as Mastodon's API.#
I included WordPress because it supports ActivityPub. #
If you aren't sure how to ask for help with software, try first asking ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to help figure out what's going wrong. It has infinite time to help, and won't mind if the problem turned out to be a random browser plug-in that was misbehaving.#
It often suggests trying things you might not have thought of.#
I use it myself esp as often is the case there's no one who can or is willing to work for me for free. I'm already playing it $20 per month, and for that I get as much time as it takes.#
Really good for organizing your approach to a problem.#
Linkblog items for the day.
Elon Musk and China: Could Tesla's bottom line influence Trump's foreign policy? vox.com
It's remarkable how some of the rich of Silicon Valley want to do to the world what they did to the web! If you extrapolate, we'll go from a world with great potential, to a lot of grunting and snorting and not much else. scripting.com
Immigration agents arrested a U.S. citizen and created warrants after an arrest, lawyers say in court. suntimes.com
DOT must not give Tesla or other automakers a free pass, advocates say. arstechnica.com
Sacha Chua has a list of old school bloggers in every conceivable format. sachachua.com
Jeff Nichols on The Writer's Web. jeffcnichols.net
Profile of Steve Davis, Elon Musk's Top Lieutenant Who Oversees DOGE. nytimes.com
Good morning sports fans! 😊 youtube.com
Thejesh Is shutting down his Mastodon instance. thejeshgn.com
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