Scripting News: Thursday, July 9, 2026
Thursday, July 9, 2026 Can RSS be a social network? # Back in 2022 I wrote a bit called textcasting . I felt it was so important it deserved its own domain. # Textcasting summarized the wrong turn we took when Twitter took over discourse, basically stripping all the features the web needed to be a great writing environment. Textcasting said this is what we have to have to get back on track. # Meanwhile all I wanted was a nice little social network to use with a few of my programming buddies. # To bootstrap a simple distributed network based only on web standards, with every part replaceable. # I thought you could do it with RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and Web Sockets. # It would work like podcasting , anyone can publish, anyone can read. # We can all have different spins on user experience, there should be lots of approaches, an infinite number of ways for people to connect, but we must all interop at a basic level, s...