Dave Winer

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:45:32 GMT

New docs for the API that connects RSS.chat to the server.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/blob/main/client/docs/apijs.md

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:16:15 GMT

what a nice surprise! ;-)

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:25:23 GMT

Just deployed a new version. This is a test.

The new version can do nightly backups of the database, and it creates the feed when when the user signs on, everyone has a feed even if they haven't posted.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:17:16 GMT

i'm really happy you're setting up a rss.chat server.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:25:04 GMT

I told her this is the green room.

API is documented, new example app

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:45:02 GMT

I see lots of people trying to figure out the API by reading the code.

Now we have docs and a great example app for building a trivial blog from one person's posts. A practical example of using the API and hopefully food for thought. There are lots of ways of generating websites and people with preferences for all of them.

All this is listed in a blog post on Scripting News.

New API call

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:32:40 GMT

Lots of new stuff coming out this morning.

But this one bit didn't belong among the others.

Remember the ThreadWalker example app.

We decided to make that an API call, documented here.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 11:20:44 GMT

Yes. Do you think it shouldn’t?

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:39:05 GMT

One thing we know for sure is that the AIs are incredible amplifiers of programmer creativity, and they’re getting better at that every month. So the question is, will AI become as useful to users who are not programmers? That’s what at least some of the programmers are working on.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:39:58 GMT

John, run the config.json through a JSON syntax checker. It's probably an extra comma, or a missing one.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:55:21 GMT

very interesting. i heard about that when they were starting development, but lost track of it. i love font awesome, changed how i develop. do they have themes for a blog?

Writing my blog from RSS.chat??

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:09:10 GMT

I'm thinking about maybe writing my blog from here, you know -- the one on scripting.com.

It wouldn't be that hard. I would use one of the static site generators out there.

It would just monitor my feed here, and keep them in sync.

What's the most popular site generator these days? I have no clue. But I have friends and I'm sure Claude has an idea.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:58:43 GMT

That’s one of the many benefits of having Claude as a programming partner.

Security fix

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:56:35 GMT

We got a report of a security issue which we quickly addressed and fixed.

Instructions on how to update your server.

This server has been updated as has demo.rss.chat.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:30:35 GMT

John we’re going to include your way of working around email in our install notes.

Claude will read this and automatically queue it up for todo++, which should be all I hav3 to do to get it on the agenda.

Also noted that some of your markdown text is showing through encoded. You have to be in markdown mode to use that syntax. There’s an icon above the edit box, an M with a down arrow. It turns green when you click it, to indicate it understands.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:05:02 GMT

Nice to see you here Anton, ready to help if you need it, and celebrate when it’s running.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:14:05 GMT

Another test.

If this works we will finally have caught up the Slack and GitHub in the pasting department. ;-)

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:56:14 GMT

Threadwalker example app has the code to crib for this.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/tree/main/examples/threadwalker

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:06:25 GMT

You're all set then, you know how to handle what we ship in our feeds.

https://source.scripting.com/social.opml

Want to be sure you have seen that page.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:03:59 GMT

Good to know. ;-)

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:10:14 GMT

Thanks Manton!

Keep us in the loop on what you do, and if there are any nice-to-have or must-have features.

Are your conversations hierarchic?

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:50:23 GMT

It would just be a command in a menu. We have lots of room to grow there.

I’m looking for things to put there, user interface improvements are the most visible.

We tried out a lot of different ways of doing this, the switch between timeline and structure.

I had a product in the early 80s called LBBS that had a neat way of doing this, but it was a scrolling display, where things like that worked. We tried it here, but yuck. Didn’t work.

Also in the UserLand discussion group we had a flip switch like that but you could see only one level at a time.

I’m willing to put an experimental feature in for you. I think the idea of expand-all is easy enough, would have to have a limit because there could be a lot under any node.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:26:02 GMT

Don I think I have to try your product before I’ll understand.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:25:27 GMT

Maybe what you want is a command to expand all the subs under the current post. We don’t have that now, but it wouldn’t be hard to add. you can already focus on one node by clicking on its permalink, by convention, clicking on the timestamp.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 21:19:30 GMT

Everything seems to have worked quite nicely. Soon it will be time to break for the day.

But it's been quite a day here in daveverse, with my excellent programming buddy, Claude.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:54:17 GMT

Now we're running the new server software on rss.chat.

Not yet on demo.rss.chat.

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:43:32 GMT

We're testing a big new feature in the next few minutes.

Can't wait to tell you about it, esp if you're thinking about running your own instance.

It's about to get easier. Fingers crossed.

RSS is still RSS, picking up where we left off

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:36:49 GMT

A lot of people are confused about wtf this is.

I don't blame them. I put out there a partially implemented vision.

But the vision isn't really new -- it's a turnback to 2002, and what UserLand would have done if we had continued pushing, which we did not.

At the time we had a product named Radio UserLand that was an integrated writing and reading platform, very user friendly, and it worked, all done with RSS. It also did podcasting if you can believe that.

So here we are 24 years later. RSS is still RSS. And we still have feed readers and blogging tools, so how does this become a social network?

http://scripting.com/2026/07/21/134309.html

That's where it's at right now. This is the writing environment. I have yet to show a new reading environment, but that's okay you can use NetNewsWire! It works. I didn't even tell Brent this was coming. Why is that? Because we use standards.

I don't have enough places to fit all the ideas these days. But we have been digging and the pieces seem to fit together just right

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:17:06 GMT

Another test post.

This one has things that look like URLs to autolinker, but shouldn't be hotted up because they aren't full web addresses.

This is the test part -- install.md and rss.chat are two examples, the first should not be linked and the second should.

Test post for blanks at end of post

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:55:03 GMT

Next test post. We made it so that the server automatically chops off extraneous blank lines at the end of a post. Sometimes they pile up after editing and you can't see them. They shouldn't be in the feed, so we take em out. So this post will have many blank lines at the end when I publish it.

Result -- it works. ;-)

BTW, changes like this will be merged with the repo at end of the work session. And I'll updated demo.rss.chat once, at the end of the session.

inBound RSS example app with WordPress

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:47:29 GMT

It's a demo app that does something quite useful and I hope illuminating.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/tree/main/examples/wordpress/inboundRss

You can set it up to run on your desktop, or on a server -- it's notified via the firehose socket interface of every new item or update from rss.chat.

It then posts the incoming text on a WordPress blog you specify.

It's the same software I use to keep daveverse.org in sync with scripting.com. Works really well, has performed without issue for months.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:22:55 GMT

We're working on a new example toolkit, this is a test post to see if it worked.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 14:00:58 GMT

Don, I made the change described in the previous post.

removed the version number of the theme from the menubar.
changed the name of the first command in the system menu (the one with your name in its title) to "Software versions" which is what it's really about.
in that dialog you will get all the versions of all the software running in rss.chat.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:16:23 GMT

Don there are actually quite a few version numbers in rss.chat, so a single tool tip couldn't cover it. We do have a command that gets you all the version numbers, it's the first one in the system menu at the right side of the menu bar. You can also get to that same dialog by clicking on the theme version number, but I'm thinking we should change the way that works. While we were in rapid development mode of the UI, that would let me know that I was using the latest version of the themes code. But we aren't moving that quickly any longer, and there are other components we need to keep track of. So we'll probably change that around now. Stay tuned.

RSS gets you to somewhere new

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:48:44 GMT

People assume rss.chat is going to go the same route as twitter or mastodon, and it isn’t.

This is going to remain a small group. That doesn’t mean our posts can’t be viewed in other places, together, as collections of people you follow. We already have experience doing just that, in feed readers. The user interfaces there might be different. And there can be more elegant ways of editing your subs. And sharing subs among services. We already support that tech in FeedLand, btw.

The social networks we’ve been using have a lot of dead ends, by design, lot of “you can’t get there from here.” We’ve got the opposite philosophy. Small pieces loosely joined and every part replaceable. That gets you to new places we’ve never been before.

RSS rendered in JSON

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:48:33 GMT

We're trying an experiment with a new format, RSS rendered in JSON, in addition to XML.

https://rss.chat/feed?screenname=dave&format=json

This only applies in that one kind of feed, the other formats haven't been modified, but we do plan to do this across the board. If we generate something in XML we will also generate it in JSON.

Just wanted everyone to see this, it's not earth-shaking -- but it's time to put this out there. For whatever reason no one listened to RSS, but imho it had something to say. :-)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:12:03 GMT

Thanks. You can see why I push back when people think of this as a product.

So many people don't think in terms of small pieces loosely joined. The power of my product is not in all its features but all the things that are left undone, that are possible.

That's simply the web. For 12 years before the silos, the web was that malleable. That's how we made blogs, feeds, podcasts happen. The bigco's tried to get in the way, but it didn't work because the people knew what they were entitled to.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:29:19 GMT

A peptalk for devs.

http://scripting.com/2026/07/18/143021.html

I just started writing about where we are, one week after launch.

Yeah it's only been a week! :-)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:16:15 GMT

This is a test post for an experiment claude is running.

Changes in the feeds rss.chat generates

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:38:28 GMT

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/issues/14

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:08:43 GMT

Test post.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:54:51 GMT

claude can post but i have to review the post.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:45:00 GMT

BTW, never in a billion years will any of my software ever require a title.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:39:36 GMT

If you type the body text alone, the button is never enabled?

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:34:57 GMT

This is a test. This item does not have a title.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:57:23 GMT

New feature.

If you open a second copy of rss.chat in a different tab, the version you left behind will put up a dialog saying you can either close the tab or reload the page.

This keeps us from losing data. ;-)

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:17:57 GMT

Welcome to the new land. :-)

Sorry there was a problem.

If you want, please let us know what happened.

Feed discovery

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:28:28 GMT

New rss.chat feature: It now supports feed discovery, so you can subscribe to any html page on a rss.chat site, in a compatible feed reader.

I tested it in FeedLand and NetNewsWire and it works.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:59:14 GMT

I'm glad you're looking at this, of course I am too. Been using Twitter for 20 years, and gave up trying to get cross-posting working in 2017.

I would love to talk about this, because the text limits are the only thing holding their dynasty up, the fact that their limits are different from all their competitors. If there was a universal definition of what "web text" is -- well they'd be screwed. It wouldn't matter where you wrote the text, it would still play on Bluesky.

And if we didn't have to no one would use their editor.

Same for Substack btw. I wanted to do my writing in my editor. No can do, they say.

I think that incompatibility is the only thing holding up their dynasty, the idea that 300 is better than 10K as a character limit.

The pressure on them to do it is coming from Leaflet et al. Either Bluesky relents, or we'll eventually get them working with us on the web, where there are no freaking character limits.

What do you think of that?

PS: They would also have to support inbound and outbound RSS.

PPS: I chat regularly with the Leaflet people. Very smart and business-like. I also know the new Bluesky management, somewhat -- he comes from Automattic. I had a meeting with him a couple of years ago basically to talk about storage and identity -- they were launching a new identity service, and I desperately wanted them to add storage so we could have an ecosystem of apps sharing data. That part of what AT Proto is doing -- I support, but the business model is all wrong. The users should pay for the storage, and give permission to apps. The Leaflet style app is reselling Amazon S3 storage, which is a shitty business for a smallish entrepreneur.

PPPS: If Toni reads this, I'd be happy to chat. It's all getting sooo interesting now.

Image support? Yes.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:14:30 GMT

BTW, I told Claude yesterday that we will support images in posts. I wanted it earlier when chaos still ruled (believe me it was very hard to use at this time) and it talked me out of it, saying it was too expensive.

I don't think it will be too expensive. And if it does, then we'll find a way to get money flowing through this project without holding things up.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:12:42 GMT

Andrew, I just wrote a post on my blog about Mastodon, and how it assumed Twitter's feature list as their todo list, and why imho that was a mistake.

We're just getting started here, and I want to go easy on nailing things down. I wouldn't limit rss.chat to only working with AT Proto (for example) as lots of developers do. Instead I'm not working with it, and hope to pull Bluesky out of their non-web architecture out into the wild web, that may not have made Bluesky possible (they grew out of Twitter) but it certainly made Twitter possible. ;-)

So that's why this might not be a solvable problem at this time. But starting the discussion with the WordPress people, well, it's always a good time to do that. :-)

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:54:41 GMT

Andrew I sent an email to Jeremy Herve at Automattic, cc'd to you.

I authorized his email account to be part of the discussion here.

At some point you should open a thread where everyone can participate on the repo.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/issues

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:44:05 GMT

1. Yes -- the name is rss.chat.

2. It's not part of textcasting because it isn't about text, it's about structure.

3. Is all that's in the way is having a permalink for a comment? Can comments in WordPress have comments?

I don't want to be held back by trying to work with an existing product that has a different view of the web. WordPress is very close, because they support textcasting, but their view of discourse is not as simple as rss.chat's view and at the same time not as powerful.

They do it the way comments on blogs have always worked, more or less, although I should point out that discuss.userland.com didn't make a distinction between comments and posts, nor did its predecessor LBBS. We had those kinds of discussions while this was under development. I did offer to work with WordPress on this stuff, but they went in a different direction -- ActivityPub and AT Proto. I do think eventually they will want to be involved here. Since they've been pioneering a new path here, maybe we should find out what they think?

Anyway -- I will send a link to this post to Jeremy Herve at Automattic, he commented on this last week when we rolled it out publicly, and he's a good guy -- I think they went the wrong way, but I've made a few bets like that myself. ;-)

"goodnightkiss" messages coming tomorrow

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 22:05:52 GMT

Tomorrow the plan is to add a new websocket-based way of making sure that only one copy of rss.chat is running at the same time. When you log on, on another computer or even on the same computer, this creates another copy of appPrefs.

If you change something, they get saved to the server. Meanwhile on another machine it doesn't have the new version, it has values that you don't want to write over the ones you changed on the other machine.

So when you log on, the server sends a "goodnightkiss" message to every copy it's connected to with your username. They then put up a dialog saying if you want to continue using rss.chat you have to reload.

All this is working in WordLand and FeedLand, so it's pretty likely it'll work right away. I know that sounds cocky, but that's how it's been going. It's like Claude is both a compiler and runtime, and I haven't seen any mistakes go by it without it catching them.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:46:30 GMT

Andrew -- I'm interested. Is there a use-case you have in mind.

Not sure I would add anything to this element, but could create another element, and the use-case will give me an idea how to present it.

In general I don't like to add features until I have an actual use for it.

That said, I want encourage you to look over the source namespace and make comments and suggestions.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:26:13 GMT

Scott is my bossman when it comes to stuff like this. :-)

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:53:14 GMT

We have to teach my Claude to do that too. We keep coming up with how useful it would be for it to have a throwaway instance to test with. I don't have the bandwidth to branch out into that area. Usual story. ;-)

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:51:05 GMT

Also, Claude has an account here, and will post, but only under my careful scrutiny.

For some reason I let it run wild on the docs. I don't generally review them, and I hope we develop a community that can read them and make note of things that don't sound right.

How the project works, division of labor

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:48:25 GMT

There have also been changes in the client and we're about to do something that connects client and server. Will document later. ;-)

There's a difference between the client and the theme. I have to write that up soon, but it's something that might not be immediately obvious. There's a replaceable box in the middle of the app. Only Claude writes code in that space, I insist that it talk to me as a user when it comes to that, I don't want any other perspective, where as in the rest of the code, I am the author, but I get support from Claude. Lots of support.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:45:51 GMT

Not yet, we generally update the repo at the end of a session. We're still working on stuff.

New sub-menu on Docs menu

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:28:26 GMT

Title of the menu -- RSS & OPML.

Links to the RSS 2.0 spec, the OPML 2.0 spec, source namespace and the RSS as a social network walkthrough.

A feed icon on every post

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:04:09 GMT

There's now a feed icon on every post.

When you click it a new tab opens with the post, ready to paste into your feed reader.

A blog post with a screen shot and explainer.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:47:10 GMT

I'm taking a screen shot of this post, so I need there to be a reply. ;-)

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:46:38 GMT

We undid this, it works this way now. One server. Makes setup much easier. Please check it out, and do the upgrade on your instance.

Feed URLs change

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:17:59 GMT

The URLs for the feeds have changed. If you haven't subscribed to any of the feeds here, you don't need to do anything. But if you have, you should read this note, and subscribe via the new URL and unsub from the old one.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/issues/7

Simpler instance-starting

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:53:24 GMT

We just converted both rss.chat and demo.rss.chat to use a different storage system, instead of using Amazon S3 to store the feeds, we're storing them in our database. So instead of there being two domains for on system, now there's only one. Cuts out one of the most complicated parts of setting up a new instance.

So if this works, it will show up on the blogroll on Scripting News, which is watching the old url, which should redirect to the new one.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:03:01 GMT

There's a new sub-menu for all pages on the GitHub repo.

The first two we're linking to are the worknotes files for the client and server.

We've just turned this over to Claude, previously I was taking the notes in my code, and they were spotty. Now Claude can add things to the worknotes files without my supervision.

Basically everything on the repo site that doesn't say otherwise was written by Claude.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:57:50 GMT

There's a Docs menu, so now I have a place to put links to docs. Coming soooon.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:54:00 GMT

How could I try your product? Do you have a demo site?

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:15:14 GMT

I went back to the top of the thread, I think the question you asked was answered with the item-level <source> element?

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:40:12 GMT

What does that mean to someone who doesn't know what microsub is?

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:37:31 GMT

Not sure about this one. I understand the need for it, but how to fit it in, not sure.

We're going to move slowly here and hopefully there will be products that offer special features like this, highly customizable, using a variety of different approaches.

Remember, this is an attempt at a bootstrap -- not a silo. We're just here now to help get a bit of a fire burning. It's not like other systems where it can't happen unless the platform vendor does it. This is open and cloneable, and open source.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:35:05 GMT

Ricardo, the information is in the feed in the <source> element.

This is a not-often-used element from core RSS 2.0.

Now most feed readers don't look for it, but it's there.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 20:58:09 GMT

In setting up the new server I forgot to configure the location of the S3 files for the feeds so we were overwriting the feeds for rss.chat.

When I post this, my personal feed and the everyone feed should rebuild and be good.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:33:13 GMT

Thanks Scott, that's high praise. :-)

I just finished my installation and the new server, demo.rss.chat, is up and running.

We have more excellent stuff in the pipe, still working out some details.

Also the worknotes.md files are working now. Claude is doing all the change notes there.

worknotes for server

worknotes for client

Still diggin as they say.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:29:49 GMT

Ricardo, this is great and it's one of the reasons I wanted you here. The other was calling your RSS and OPML support "load bearing" in your app. ✓😀

Anyway, I am just about to start my test of the current install instructions.

We're not going to change that for a while, but I'm happy to help spread the word on new easier ways to do it. And then when the time comes, we can have alternate methods for doing an install.

Yes to running your own server

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:12:57 GMT

Good morning sports fans!

This is the URL of one of the many blog posts I wrote over the weekend.

http://scripting.com/2026/07/12/121948.html

I also did a podcast.

https://shownotes.scripting.com/scripting/2026/07/12/myFirstRsschatPodcast.html

If you want to know where we're going, listen to the podcast. I ramble a lot, people who have heard me speak or talk on the phone know that I do that a lot. But if you're using rss.chat, esp if you're a developer, the ideas here are new, when applied to social networks on the web.

What you'll see there is a consistent theme, the action isn't in the rss.chat client, which is nice for sure -- but it's just the beginning. It's set up so that it can easily be replaced, on both ends, in the client or the server.

Ricardo, who we'll get to know, is a developer who is already signed on to this philosophy, and is running a FeedLand server, wants to get going with the server here, and I say yes! That's the way to go. We have to create a wave, to reinstate the web as the home of social networking on the web (saying it that way sounds silly, but people need to be reminded that the web is still there, and ready to be of service.

It so happens my first big task for the day is to create a second server for myself, thus testing the install instructions, and also to have an answer for people who want to kick the tires. This one will be open to anyone. No whitelist.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:19:46 GMT

If you know how to do it we’ll support you.

Also there’s a websockets based firehouse that’s implemented but not yet documented.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:17:59 GMT

Glad to hear it. I think small groups of people joined by mutual respect, not trying to boil the ocean. And working together as opposed to trying to rule the world.

How to install your own rss.chat server

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:11:06 GMT

We have instructions for setting up a new server...

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat/blob/main/server/docs/install.md

Claude wrote these docs, haven't had a change to test them.

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:58:37 GMT

Believe me, I agree.

You could also cc @claude as well, it has an account here as well.

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:57:27 GMT

Don, maybe Claude or whatever can explain to us what it does.

Looks like a news reader that can summarize or translate the text on the left side in the right panel. It’s a plug-in, yes? So the text could be coming from anywhere?

Frontier finally can do a console.log

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:06:48 GMT

I write my build scripts in Frontier, I might be the last person in the world to do this.

Anyway I had to do a major rewrite of the build script for rss.chat, and got tired of the fact that Frontier doesn't have anything like console.log in JavaScript. So I wrote one.

The console is an outline of course, and there are two verbs, console.start and console.log. And they work very nicely. Each start creates a new top level headline with the time in it, and then the subsequent console.log's go in under the time.

Anyway you can download it here. You won't see anything on your screen but if you View Source you will see it's a fat page. Oh the humanity. ;-)

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:02:15 GMT

Don't think of a "network" as necessarily a big thing.

They can be small too, the same software works, but the priorities are different.

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:28:11 GMT

My first podcast about rss.chat.

https://shownotes.scripting.com/scripting/2026/07/12/myFirstRsschatPodcast.html

20 minutes.

Spam no more

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:56:33 GMT

Getting our email out of spam.

We were using the wrong email address to send the email.

We're now sending email from hello@rss.chat -- and it's fully verified by our mail sender service, SES.

So now when you get a signon link via email it should not be send to spam.

Still diggin!

Fractional horsepower social networks

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 22:57:51 GMT

I wrote another long post on Twitter.

https://x.com/davewiner/status/2076076891115757616

The piece is about the small size of RSS.chat, and comparing the bootstrap I have in mind with the one we did for podcasting between 2001 and 2004.

This goes to answering Manton's question yesterday -- do you remember the Morning Coffee Notes or Trade Secrets podcasts? Almost no one does, but they were the mechanism that the bootstrap of podcasting fed back to the innovators who were doing the booting up. And once it was off and running we didn't need them. Instead I listened to Dawn & Drew and Adam Curry. And shortly after that Morning Edition and Fresh Air.

So in the end this may become just like that, or like blogging -- where I still post on scripting.com every day, but it doesn't play anywhere near the central importance it did in the 90s and 00s.

I am different from most other entrepreneurs. I try to create new media, and it's a success when it takes off and my personal creation fades into the background. It's the new media that's my creation. I'm almost never in it for the money, I'm in it for the thrill of making new media. And as I've said earlier and need to repeat, I am not Mother Teresa, I like making money, I just don't let money get in the way of a great idea, as so many other people do.

Anyway people are listening now. That's really cool. And don't expect me to shut up. It doesn't work that way. 😃

The RSS.chat repo on GitHub

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 22:19:16 GMT

The all--new RSS.chat repo.

https://github.com/scripting/rss.chat

Two parts, client and server.

Full source in both.

The client is the software that runs in the browser in JavaScript.

It calls the server via api.js -- which is glue we recommend using if you're coming in via JS.

All code open source via MIT license.

Docs right now are minimal, but that will change. That will be Claude's responsibility.

I'm going to write the main readme files.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:41:02 GMT

Hey Jason, glad to see you made it! ;-)

We don't have to, and won't, do everything

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:39:04 GMT

I think it's cool if there's something micro.blog can add to rss.chat -- so we create the idea that people use both our products because they're different and they interop. Not saying I won't do it, but it's also cool if we don't have to.

In the back of my mind I was thinking we'd offer domains for instances, I'm going to keep this group small, I don't want the whole world here, I want people I have worked with in the past and enjoyed it, like you, Don, Andrew, Jake, Scott -- basically everyone here. I've also invited the guy we were chatting with about his load-bearing OPML app. I'm looking for talented excited people who are on board for interop. But otherwise people can start their own little spaces, or maybe someone will try to make a Bluesky-size system, more power to them. Not saying I'm never going to try to build something but, but not right now.

So for example, if Jake were to start a rss.chat instance I would be happy to give him jake.rss.chat. Pretty sure Scott is going to be among the first to set one up.

Also we don't render a blog from people's feeds, though it has been discussed. I think that would be the place you'd want to have domains point, so it can behave like a blog. I can see a lot of people doing those.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:24:43 GMT

Because RSS already has a link element, it would be really ugly to recommend that people do something so heinous that depends on a reader being liberal to work.

It would have to be <source:link>. If that works I'll be doggone.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:13:39 GMT

I imagine the WordPress community is on top of this?

Wonder if they discuss this somewhere..

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:05:20 GMT

Jeremy Herve, who I know from Automattic, asked a few questions which I answered.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:03:03 GMT

that's an interesting idea. a group of us get together and decide that since html already has a link element that works the same way atom's does, why bother with the atom part.

their motive goes back 20 years, that little thing has been over forever. i think it's better if we try to fix it, and this idea gives a whole new approach.

andrew, are you tuned in?

Day 0 was a success

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:39:24 GMT

It’s been quite a day. At the end, rss.chat is a thing.

More new stuff tomorrow.

Claude is a great freaking partner.

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:17:00 GMT

It's very low on my list of things to do, unless it rises to the top, say Feedly, for example, really wants to incorporate our stuff, and they refuse to look for the cloud element. (Which on its face sounds ridiculous.)

I'm more concerned with peering with apps that are trying to create a social network with RSS. That's who I want to work with most.

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:11:59 GMT

Also these docs are for you.

https://source.scripting.com/social.opml

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:59:11 GMT

Don great to see you here!

Everyone else, I've known Don for a long time. In 1988 I think he did a Mac INIT that made it possible to send messages between apps, which was a basic function we needed in Frontier.

Over the years we keep crossing paths and this is another.

Shoehorning WebSub in

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:53:41 GMT

Andrew I just had an idea.

This is the cloud element in all our feeds.

We could tell sites that expect WebSub callbacks to just ping to your server, and somehow indicate that you want websub notification, that with this server, you can get back websub calls.

Makes it perfectly painless, or so it seems.

But I'm not sure if you can do it.

Welcome to rss.chat

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:29:31 GMT

I've wanted to do this product many years, but couldn't quite figure it out I guess. Or I got lazy, or I guess I kind of gave up, like a lot of people did, on the web as the thing that unifies independent developers so we can create stuff without the permission of people who work at BigCo's. We're doing something different and they keep getting in the way.

I got the energy flowing when I asked Claude if it could make software that does this, and I pasted a screen shot of What's App into the Claude chat window. Of course it said yes. I said do it. And it did. Wasn't doing very much, but I got the idea that we could work inside an app together, which could be a lot more powerful than that asking for consulting help on projects where it can't get in there and feel around.

Almost four months later we have rss.chat. It's not a demo app, it's real.

We're going to do some amazing things from here. I didn't build this platform to stop here, I did it so finally (again) I'd have a place were we can all build together, and honestly fuck the big platform vendors. It's a nightmare compared to where we started, and I know -- I was there.