Dave Winer

@scripting.com

15033 Followers 433 Following

OG blogger, podcaster, outliners, CMSes, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.

One of the things that sucks about the tech industry is that the assumption is that creative work is done by employees. Imagine if music or movies worked like that. And the employees will resist the company working with individual outsiders, the equiv of musicians in this area. If you know anything about my career imagine what a barrier this has been. Their first inclination when they see an individual or small company doing what they think they should do is -- this -- CRUSH. It's hard to escape this. Upton Sinclair said once -- “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” If you go to your boss and say Dave says we should improve what we do with RSS, and not invest in AT Proto compatibility or wait until there's some functionality on their side of the API. You're helping the competition to add more vapor to their vaporware. How is that consistent with your strategy, and btw what *is* your strategy. This has actually happened. And before it many years ago Microsoft unilaterally changed the logo for RSS. They had the courtesy to give me a heads up, and I told them it wasn't theirs to change and a lot of thought had gone into the one we had, and the one they want to use looks like every other internet logo. They let me finish my sentence and went on with other parts of the presentation. Lots of other examples. It's very rare when they don't try to erase your work at Big Companies (or BigCo's). The problem is this -- the web needs individual developers to survive and grow. The fact that we've been suppressed by the the BigCo's has meant we haven't built out the web the way we could have if we understood that tech is more than a business model for VCs. Other creative areas managed to get past this, why didn't tech? And can we change that? I want to. If one of the Big Companies decided they want a real ecosystem for an internet-level standard, and hopefully have a product with lots of users that …
Jeremy Lin and Carmelo Anthony got together yesterday and had a private conversation. A lot of people, including myself, were drawn back into the NBA because of Jeremy Lin. I was living in the city at the time, you could feel it everywhere, esp downtown Manhattan and Flushing. It was wonderful in so many ways. A hero could emerge from anywhere, he might not look like an NBA player, but there he is doing stuff he shouldn't be able to do. Undrafted, went to Harvard. When he's in motion he's a thing of beauty. It worked because Melo was out with an injury, as soon as he came back the , the ball was always in Melo's hands. So Melo dribbles and shoots, that was the extent of their offense, and there was no room for Linsanity and that was the end of that. It's what made us laugh when Melo said later his goal was a championship. If that's what he wanted, Lin was a gift from heaven. Lin was pushed out, and had a non-spectacular career from that point. There was magic there. It wasn't just Lin, it was the world -- we were ready for a Cinderella story in any context -- but in our culture they're always manufactured, this one was real. This crushed the hearts of Knicks fans, and people who believe in heroes popping up from nowhere. We don't talk about it. But we were cheated there, too. We had a right to see where that would go. And narcissists don't win NBA titles, that's what we learned. It's good that someone thought to get these guys together. Maybe Melo has grown, and sees that he didn't play for the team there, or fate. We all deserved to find out what was next.
I posted this on Twitter on this day in 2014. To give you an idea of how timid tech is, an industry self-proclaimed at being great innovators, this is how we do it on Bluesky except the limit isn't 140 or 280, it's 300. And you still can't use simple styles, links or give a post a title. And this is while they claim to be on the web. Hell no, they're not.
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 asked chatgpt if the term "glass palace" had been used to talk about pre-PC computer data centers. this is a screen shot of the response.
A conversation with two nerds about what's possible in 2028 with RSS 2.0 as the backbone for network communications.
Quick note on Bluesky's disclosures. Yesterday they disclosed $100 million investment in April last year. It's good that they cleared it up, but bad that they were hiding it for so long. Everything about what they do is based on trust. New management probably is the reason this happened now. They should also clean up the promises they've made about Bluesky as a platform. I've done the homework, having developed a few apps using their API, some are still running. If I were their new CEO, I would announce that in addition to supporting AT Proto, they will also hook up Bluesky to the web. The web is already decentralized. Lots of developers know how to build web stuff. We can all breathe the same air.
I've been following Bluesky since inception, even tried developing for it and found it was nothing new with its 300 character limit, no links, titles, etc. Basically you can build the same apps for Bluesky that we were able to develop for Twitter. I've also been following <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/leaflet.pub/post/3md4qsqncqs24">Leaflet</a>, an attractive writing tool that works on AT Proto, the format that Bluesky is promoting, basically a reinvention of the web but inside a silo, which means -- perhaps confusingly, that Leaflet uses the same basic format that Bluesky uses, but Bluesky can't do anything with Leaflet posts, because of the limits that Leaflet doesn't have. So -- they formed an alliance with two other products that are writing tools for AT Proto, and came up with a format that they will all implement called <a href="https://standard.site/">standard.site</a> (nice name and very attractive site). They probably hope that Bluesky itself will use that format, at least to let people read their documents in the same place they display the more limited Bluesky posts, in user timelines. If that happens it may be a good thing for the web, if services outside of Bluesky can post these documents from outside. But it would be imho more powerful if they created a format based on something like RSS, which is already well-known to developers, and would mean something outside of Bluesky and probably would be taken more seriously by the Bluesky people. There is no advantage that I can discern for creating a new format that only works in Bluesky.