Scripting News: Thursday, May 7, 2026
Why did Twitter win? Because the RSS developers wouldn't work with each other. Thus subscribing to a feed was complicated. In Twitter, it was one click to subscribe, and another to unsub. You could see who your friends subscribed to, again -- one click to subscribe. And eventually that grew into a list of suggestions of people to follow. RSS had none of that because the RSS devs refused to work with each other. The development of RSS-based news products stopped, and pretty soon Twitter's stopped too. And thus news technology on the web remained frozen for two decades. We are getting another chance. The social media space is a highly disappointing wreck. Users are interested in new ideas, as long as they're fun and new, esp in relation to using AI tools. But it won't be open if we can't get it together any better than we could the first time around. You have to do things that help the web, and thus help your competitors. If you don't, if we don't, there will just be another Twitter, owning the users, and they'll probably sell out to a billionaire a lot sooner than Twitter did. At some point we'll realize if we want something new we have to work with each other. Otherwise you get Elon II, III etc. #
- I say to Claude: btw, i would have been surprised if it was broken, that feature went in very quickly and i use it a fair amount. one of the two big pages in feedland is the Feed List page. here's a screen shot. maybe you can figure out what everything does??#
- Claude retorts#
- Disclosure triangle — expands the row to show more about that feed (recent items, description, full URL).#
- Blue checkbox (checked) — subscription state. Checked = you're subscribed. Click to subscribe/unsubscribe.#
- Row number — just positional, 1..14 for this result set.#
- Feed title — clickable, opens the feed's own page (the other "big page" you mentioned).#
- Small tag icon next to the title — opens a categories editor for that subscription, lets you tag the feed into categories.#
- When column — last update time, with adaptive granularity: minutes for very recent ("21 mins", "26 mins"), day-of-week for the past few days ("Fri", "Tue", "Thu"), month+day after that ("Nov 22", "Mar 29"), and presumably full date for old stuff.#
- Ct column — subscriber count for the feed. Every row shows 2 because feedland.social is small. Worth noting: this is the same #
- ct that the SQL we just touched uses for #
- order by ct desc — the column visible in the UI is the sort key.#
- Green circle "i" — info popup, probably feed metadata (URL, description, last build, maybe owner).#
- Claude is very very smart. And I guess I got the right answers. A lot of work went into the design#
- The only thing it didn't guess correctly about is what the other "big page" is. It's not the Feed Info page, it's the news page, a timeline or river. #
- Done for the day, my last words to Claude were -- FeedLand is an important product and we're going to do right by it. #
Linkblog items for the day
You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, etc, Mr Roberts.
nbcnews.com
At some point we'll realize if we want something new we have to work with each other. Otherwise you get Elon II, III etc.
scripting.com
What comes after social media is messy.
arstechnica.com
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