Scripting News: Monday, March 2, 2026
Very happy to welcome my old friend, John Palfrey, back to the web. His first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. I added his feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s, now heads up the MacArthur Foundations. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-)#
- I like the way they organized today's Fediforum conference. (They call it an unconference. I use the term to mean something very different, and we used it first at BloggerCon.)#
- They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.#
- Inbetween, they had a set of virtual tables where six people could join and have a conversation.#
- It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference. #
- Some of my takeaways from the meetup.#
- Getting more people to use Bluesky and AT Proto was the topic. I don't know how to do that, and I don't think there's anything developers can do to make it happen. I think both products are what they will continue to be. #
- What's needed is to get all the various systems to interop. There must be a definition of what a text message is. Since we're trying to make the social web, I recommend looking to the web for the definition of what a text object is. I would go with a subset of the web. I outlined the features in the textcasting doc I wrote a few years ago. I am using Markdown in my software, and it seems like a lot of other people feel this is a good subset to use.#
- Bluesky will never be a distributed system because it has features that depend on being centralized. That's okay, perfection isn't needed. #
- Even better would be to have all systems support both inbound and outbound RSS, then they can do whatever they want internally, and users can participate using any blog and any feed reader. And independent developers can go crazy trying out all kinds of variants. That's how it works in WordLand 2 coming real soon now. 😄#
- More people will use a system when it's fun and/or interesting and they can't wait to see what else happened there. Like watching Alysa Liu videos now. People don't think about what they want, they just want it. That's what Twitter was like when it started. Unfortunately you can't start it again, if you want people to want it, you have do something new. #
- I talk too much. That's the downside of having an interesting conference. At a boring one where people give PowerPoint type talks, I can listen, form my opinions, write a blog post that no one reads and get back to work on my projects. #
- One day I'd love to go to one of these meetings and find people I can work with. You can be sure I'll let you know when that happens. Last conference I went to where that happened was at WordCamp Canada last October, but that wasn't about the social web, it was about WordPress. #
- I got to talk with Mike Masnick. I don't understand why he has a board seat at Bluesky and promotes it as a decentralized system. He's a highly credible reporter at TechDirt, but you can't be part of a company you cover and report on it with credibility. And it is not now and imho never will be a distributed system. I talked with him about this, at one of the virtual groups-of-six tables, but he didn't respond. I don't like it when Bluesky misleads users and they buy it, but as bad as that is, it is predictable. A credible journalist doing it, I can't comprehend that. I am open to being convinced, but I'm kind of an expert on this stuff, so it's really going to blow my mind if I'm wrong. #
Linkblog items for the day
The FBI Staffers Kash Patel Ousted Because They Worked on Mar-a-Lago Probe Had Iran Expertise. yahoo.com
AWS says drone strikes damaged 3 facilities in UAE and Bahrain. cnbc.com
I don't understand why mastodon needs a special share button? If I can post something with a link included then post it, haven't I just shared it? blog.joinmastodon.org
The Colorado River's Native Predator. flylordsmag.com
Users are ditching ChatGPT for Claude. Here's how to make the switch. techcrunch.com
Could conflict with Iran raise security risks in the U.S.? wbur.org
The Public Opposes But Mostly Doesn't See the Point of This War. talkingpointsmemo.com
A Mad King Who Enjoys Watching Things Go Boom. talkingpointsmemo.com
Current Launches River-Style RSS Reader App. findarticles.com
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