Scripting News: Monday, April 14, 2025
A long time ago, based on my experience at Berkman in the 00s, I proposed the idea of a Developing Better Developers function at a university, as a pilot, to create a teaching hospital atmosphere around creating new communication systems out the web and (key point) not compromising the openness of the web. It would be as sacred as academic freedom is in the university, or the First Amendment of the Constitution. It seemed to me that a university is the perfect place to create something like this. If we had such a setup, anywhere, at this time -- we would be working in earnest on an open alternative to twitter, one that is truly billionaire-proof right now, as opposed to "would be nice to have sometime in the future."#I wrote a complex piece here earlier, but it's much simpler than it made it sound, so I decided to start again.#
Feed readers view RSS as inbound, and blogging tools regard it as outbound. Same feed, different contexts. Like trains going in and out of a station. Inbound and outbound. #
But some software views RSS in both directions. The best example is Twitter and its successors such as Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. These products are for both for reading and writing. It makes sense to have outbound feeds, like a blogging tool, and it makes just as much sense as a consumer of feeds, like a feed reader, so we can easily publish stuff from other environments and people can subscribe to them exactly as if they used their editor to write it. No reason anyone needs to know. This is absolutely the simplest and most web-like way to do federation. And you don't need any new formats or protocols. It's all RSS on both sides. We totally know how to do RSS. It's ready to go. #
What got me thinking about this a few years ago was Substack. I wanted to publish a nightly email newsletter from what I had posted that day on my blog, but I didn't have the patience to copy and paste and then reformat the text, by hand, when I already have that automated. They wanted to turn me into a computer. I tried that with Medium for a couple of years and it was awful. No thanks. What I needed them to have support Inbound RSS. #
Linkblog items for the day.
ChatGPT can now remember and reference all your previous chats. arstechnica.com
Coffee prices are skyrocketing. What does this mean for East Bay cafes? berkeleyside.org
Harvard's response. harvard.edu
Bukele's Offense Against the American People. talkingpointsmemo.com
How Donald Trump Rolled Bill Maher. theframelab.org
Scripting News: What is Inbound RSS? scripting.com
Christian immigrants helped elect Trump, now some are at risk of being deported. npr.org
ChatGPT is to Google what Google was to library card catalogs. wikipedia.org
I was looking forward to hearing why it was somehow wrong to use ChatGPT to formulate a housing plan for New York, I would be surprised if he didn't (it's a useful tool!) but I couldn't because well I'll never find out because the author used some other random tool to put up a paywall. hellgatenyc.com
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