Dave Winer

A message for JY

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:06:56 GMT

A test post before I take a break. ;-)

See ya in a bit. It's freaking hot here JY for what it's worth.

Not as hot as it was for you in France, bonjour.

S'il vous plait.

Testing some new code

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:21:12 GMT

I'm testing a new feature.

We're now tracking how many times a user's prefs change, overall and in the last day.

When you type in the editor, when you pause, we save a copy.

It gives us a rough idea of how much people are using it, if they are logged in.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:04:59 GMT

We just started doing both those things, and then the requests seem to have stopped. ;-)

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:46:00 GMT

We don't have docs for that yet.

We're still getting our docs act together.

Turns out there are versions of Claude that are better at writing code but suck at writing docs, and vice versa. You're supposed to be able to switch modes, but when I did that it turned into a coding idiot.

I want it to write perfect docs as soon as a feature is done and have it on the repo quickly.

Not there yet. Sorry -- but we do have the firehose, using it.

Help us find the server error

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:28:28 GMT

We're seeing an error in our server log here, but we can't figure out how it's happening.

As we review all the code, and Claude is really good at that, there's no way we could be generating the call that is showing the error message.

It isn't happening often, and it could be someone with a script trying something out, and that's fine, but we'd like to know what's happening on the other end.

The call is /getitembyguid, which takes two params, a screenname, which is undefined if you're not signed in, and guid, which can't be undefined, but that's what we're seeing.

Since we don't know what software they're using, I can't say what the error will look like on your system.

I suppose there's a remote possibility that it was an error we fixed in an old version of the software, but to make that impossible I added a cache confuser to the code that includes each file, to be sure it isn't getting an old cached version of each file.

One thing we know is the person is not logged in but you can read everything on this site without being logged in. So there's a chance, if this is a human, that they will see this post. ;-)

If so, please let us know, send an email to dave.winer@gmail.com.

How our docs publishing flows

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:46:55 GMT

Good morning sports fans!

Spent yesterday getting our docs production system working.

It's all going to be in one big outline that's shared between myself and Claude.

We can both make edits, I use Electric Drummer, and it uses its own magic, and when it's time to update the repo, I run a script in Frontier, which loads the outline in, and uses my publishing system to push it to GitHub.

I'm getting to the point where there isn't a whole lot left of the Frontier-based system that I'm still using.

Still have a long todo list, another outline, shared with Claude.

If you have any questions, or just want to say hi, reply to or like this post.

Debugging a server issue

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:40:34 GMT

Building a new system for editing user and developer docs collaboratively in OPML.

And we have a bug somewhere in the software, sending a bad parameter to a server endpoint named getItemByGuid. It takes two params, a screenname and a guid.

I let Claude make a list of all the calls to this function in the client, and there are a few.

But it doesn't seem possible that they would pass an undefined guid value.

But the error message on the server keeps popping up. One theory is this is a not-logged-in person, which is totally legal, you can read the site without being logged in.

But now with the debugging code we should be able to eliminate more possibilities.

This is something Claude usually excels at but we've been trying to find this one for 24 hours or so, but getting good work done anyway. ;-)

Getting the line spacing right for lists

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:48:14 GMT

This is a test.

A list of states.

Montana
Wisconsin
Iowa
Idaho
Mississippi

That was a list.

Links cleanup

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:34:20 GMT

Just did a major cleanup of links in the user interface. Now they all use the browser's URL stack, so when you go somewhere, the Back button will take you back.

We also have a fully ergonomic Home button, the previous version did a window.open to create a new tab that had the top level timeline. But now it should work.

The three places to look for changes.

Post title → opens the story in place instead of a new tab — but only when the title is the post's own permalink. A title the writer pointed at an external article still opens in a new tab.
Timestamp ("6 hours") → opens the story in place instead of a new tab.
Home icon → jumps to the top of the main timeline in place (clearing any hoist), instead of opening home in a new tab.

The rss.chat firehose

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:21:50 GMT

Observation, each instance of rss.chat has a firehose.

We built a new notification method from scratch. There was an issue with the one in FeedLand, we don't have it here.

But the records that cross the wire are patterned after FeedLand's records. We've really embraced prior art as a design method.

When someone emulates our firehose, which I hope happens, I hope this time they don't gratuitously reinvent names for things. Makes interop so much harder. :-)

Good morning sports fans!

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:20:22 GMT

Your buddy Dave is here welcoming you to another hot summer week in RSS.chat land.

There's a bug in the system it crashes the server in an easy way to protect against. (No longer crashes, added debugging code.)

But it should be easy to find.

Also we've got a process for Claude to write docs for features as soon as the feature is finished enough to have docs. This product is going to have excellent docs. I will post a link to where you can review the docs, here, when they're ready. (It's one of the next things I'm doing.)

The heat wave hasn't hit us here in the Catskills yet. Still diggin!

About command

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:16:33 GMT

There's a new About rss.chat command in the System menu, at the right edge of the menubar.

It has the name of the app, its address, the current theme, and versions for the app and the theme. The latter is exclusively written by Claude, our deal is I take care of the container, that's where the interop is crucial, and I already have good client and server code for that. The theme is where the user interface lives. It's all connected by APIs, so the theme will be replaceable. Right now twitter is the only theme we offer.

Here's a screen shot.

What is rss.chat?

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:03:14 GMT

This is a new kind of social network. There's no lock-in here. Every user is represented by an RSS feed. You can subscribe to the feed in any feed reader, or even another social web app that understands RSS feeds. It should work really well with micro.blog for example.

It it is a textcasting app. It supports text as it was meant to work on the web. No character limits, you can edit your posts, they can have titles (or not). We want you to be able to share your writing with any service that's on the web. If they have a character limit, that's their problem. This app is a benchmark, if another app says they're on the web, see if you can follow my feed there. If not, they're not telling the truth.

Being "on the web" means more than you can read it in a web browser.

NBBs in politics

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:59:10 GMT

Listening to a discussion on WBUR about how the Democrats don't do social media well. True! But they get every idea wrong. AOC is a NBB. That's why she's so good at it. What this means is for the foreseeable future our political leaders are going to be natural at this form of relating to people. A young Chuck Schumer or Elizabeth Warren wouldn't be any good at this, there are plenty of people AOC's age who have no idea what to say, they never get angry enough about something to try to make a difference. NBB's are a rare breed. You have to find them and recruit them.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:52:54 GMT

Gotta get some users here. But I don't want to make a big announcement, and I only want people in this group that I want to hang out with. The idea here is not following or following, rather it's groups of people gathered by the host, by invite, and at the pleasure of.

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:17:13 GMT

Lake Katrine

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:16:49 GMT

Saugerties

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:16:01 GMT

Kingston

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:15:53 GMT

Ulster County

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:12:21 GMT

New York

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:05:03 GMT

Chapel Hill

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:04:49 GMT

Maryland

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:04:39 GMT

North Carolina

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:04:28 GMT

Alabama

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:04:22 GMT

Eastern states

Testing ground for hoist

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:04:12 GMT

I'm going to make a mini states outline here.

Hoisting is in

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:03:10 GMT

Had an incredible day programming with Claude today.

Tried out all kinds of ways of reading the stuff in the timeline, and the one that worked best was hoist and dehoist.

When you want to focus on one item and its subs, click the Hoist icon in the left margin. The icon is a down pointing pushpin. Dehoist is a pushpin pointing up. They are enabled when you can use them.

We'll get a better idea of what else we can do to make navigation easier as we start to use rss.chat for real work.

Good morning sports fans!

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:00:01 GMT

Good morning. I am getting a late start, it's Saturday so it will be an abbreviated day. If you have any questions, comments, urgent need for fixes, now is a good time to post a reply.

Also thinking about having a Zoom meeting, though with two people in Europe it might be hard to arrange a good time for it.

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 01:08:56 GMT

JY was commenting on something I wrote about the updates to the RSS feeds to include source:account info, then I realized we could add another att to the element that contains the address of the user profile. so we get their screenname by the value of the item, and a pointer to the profile page in an attribute. It can be added without breaking anyone.

might look like this

<source:account urlProfile="https://rss.chat?screenname=dave">dave</source:account>

i still have to get all the way through this to see how it might work, not quite there yet.

Editing replies works now

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:30:04 GMT

You can now edit replies.

Previously the pencil icon wouldn't be enabled for anything but the top level items.

BTW, you can use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the posts, in outline terms you'd call this flatup and flatdown.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:26:48 GMT

Will I be able to edit this post? It's a reply to another post, and previously that didn't work.

And the answer is yes! It worked. The product is now 100000% more useful. :-)

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:15:55 GMT

That menu is going to look like the Radio UserLand top of page, that you helped me resurrect.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:15:17 GMT

The View Data thing has saved my life many times. We have that in WordLand too. One of the first things I add to my software because it's so important for debugging.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:11:28 GMT

There's a command in the Main menu that brings the editor back after that happens.

It's called Focus on Editor.

I'm not happy that you lost work, but I want to be able to click outside the box in the editor so I can check something that's on the screen, hidden by the edit box.

It also remembers the text of the edit box if you reload the page. The only way to start over is to create a New post, and that's unfortunately what you did.

Remember that command is there for the next time this happens! ;-)

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:09:18 GMT

JY, I was just adding a feature to the outgoing RSS feeds.

The Universal Mentions are another thing, coming soooon. ;-)

RSS feed enhancement

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:55:40 GMT

Just made a change in how our RSS feeds are being generated.

Now items include a <source:account> element, so we know for sure who posted an item.

This isn't so important on my personal feed, but for the everyone feed, we need to know who posted the item, who is the author.

Did not use the <author> element from RSS 2.0 because it predates social networks, the source namespace version is more up to date, and usable in this context.

Now let's see if this sucka works! :-)

This sucka works!

https://users.rss.network/rss.xml

That's the url of everyone feed, subscribe to it if you want to see all posts to this site.

And if you look in there, each item has the source:account element, so we know who to blame (credit) for the item.

I followed the prior art in FeedLand, this is how it does its feeds for Likes.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:36:56 GMT

What will happen first you run out of horizontal space, and we could account for that with scrolling. 😜

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:35:54 GMT

There is no limit that I am aware of.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:57:07 GMT

Trying to run down a server issue. Some process on the same machine as the server is running on is making multiple requests to / at random times. Sometimes dozens of requests per second for a few minutes.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:31:16 GMT

Question -- if we implemented "external feeds" what would they do?

Would they work like they do in micro.blog? Where it behaves like a feed reader?

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:52:35 GMT

Ironed out does mean something in English and you used it correctly.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:50:28 GMT

Of course I agree. That's why I like what you're doing @JY. ;-)

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:48:39 GMT

I think we have it figured out. We have moved the profile page up to the top of the list, we're probably going to start on it today, likely to have a first version for you to check out tomorrow.

I want that feature pretty badly, so for example I can see all the posts you wrote where I'm looking for the one to reply to (happened yesterday) and when we first reviewed your spec, I was going to ask if the pointer could be an RSS page, but then realized we will have an HTML page.

Thinking about how it would work with NNW is a bit challenging. Here's what I think they could share, the users' subscription list. This is one of the things I always try to get people with podcast clients to do, but it would work equally well with a feed reader.

Hope that helps.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:14:55 GMT

I asked Claude to read the post above, and this is what it said...

The new idea: the theme box becomes the vibe-coding surface. The shell already pays the interop tax — RSS in/out, OPML, storage, identity, sockets, likes, threading, permalinks — so a builder who stays inside the theme inherits all of it for free and automatically interops with every other instance, with FeedLand, with JY's stuff. They point Claude/Codex at a markdown brief and build a different UI in the box without ever touching interop. The character-limit empathy and textcasting bits are the writer-side framing of the same deal: the shell guarantees the substrate, the theme is where you play.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:14:16 GMT

I had Claude read this post (it downloads all posts and archives them, using the API, which is another very cool thing I didn't mention above, Claude doesn't have to use the browser interface to participate here, it's a computer program, so it can use the freaking API!

What's inside rss.chat...

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:04:25 GMT

I want rss.chat to prove that you can create a social network with just the web, and to show, if you want to get on board, what you have to interop with. Sometimes that's all you need, something to copy. That's why I paid a lot of attention to the feeds and OPML, and will continue to put attention there.

textcasting. this is a model for how to do textcasting in a twitter-like product. it basically means the writer gets to control what they write, and something I wrote about in a recent piece, what reader apps have to do to accomodate the preferences of readers. It was an interesting discovery, that as a reader I empathize with the people who like character limits. Without a limit writers will take forever to get to the point.

Everything we use is a web standard. It already works, scales, you can make UIs for it, nothing to wait for. And no lock-in. Every part is replaceable.

There are two pieces of software here. One is a shell, and the other is the UI. The shell is boring, it's the stuff that gives us interop everywhere and stores the stuff we create. Inside there's a theme. The theme is replaceable at runtime, theoretically at least. There's a very important reason we have this split.

Vibe coding supported. You will be able to use Claude or Codex or whatever you like that understands markdown files full of background for an AI, to create something different that runs inside the theme box. Start off with something that works, and interops will all other instances of itself and our friends' (looking at JY), and you get a nice little box to play with. This will take vibe coding to a new level, I hope. Most excited about when we get to this point. I want your help (esp Jake).

Bug report

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:35:56 GMT

Clicking on edit icon doesn’t work in story mode.

What Om’s death helped me see

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:11:09 GMT

I decided not to run this piece at this time, want to do some more thinking. But it helped me process some despair in the middle of the night.

Two small changes

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:58:10 GMT

1. Fixed the permalink URL, there were a few places where you'd click a link and it would take you back to the timeline. Now when you click on a permalink item in the timeline, it will take you to the story page for that item.

2. The time part of the item is now linked to the story page, this is convention in blogging software and social network software.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:46:44 GMT

We just changed the way guids are formatted.

When this is posted my feed will rebuild and I want to see if the new guid urls are there.

I forgot to launch the new version of the server. ;-)

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 20:26:25 GMT

@jy, we started looking today how to support your mentions protocol.

I think we understand what's required.

Thursday notes from rss.chat

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:13:35 GMT

We had a really good session today, finished the Like command, up to the same level as what we have in FeedLand.

Also made the editor work a bit more like WordLand's editor.

This is all a completely new codebase, the first version was written by Claude on a query to see if we could hook something like WhatsApp up to RSS in and out.

After a while WhatsApp was too limiting so we went full twitter-like.

We did reuse an awful lot of code that went into FeedLand and WordLand, for example daveappserver, which is the foundation for Drummer, WordLand and FeedLand. We use that here as well. I probably wouldn't have had the courage to do so on my own -- it had grown so complex as FeedLand was converted to be a fully scalable network app on Automattic's infrastructure, but for Claude -- well it doesn't have any problem with complexity. ;-)

Anyway we still have a lot of stuff on the todo list, but today I am really pleased with how well the software works. And I could not have done this without Claude, and even more so, I look forward to evolving this, because even if I forget how something works, I know Claude will be able to suck in all the complexity in a few minutes.

Anyway thanks for helping out here. ;-)

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:47:51 GMT

in other words, it remembers any editing you were doing, even if you click outside the editor frame to hide it, or reload the app. it remember whether or not it was visible.

there's a new command in the main menu that allows you to view the window if it's hidden. It turns out to be an important feature, we have it in WordLand too. ;-)

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:46:42 GMT

We’ll get that fixed today. 😊

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:28:29 GMT

I’m using it on my iPad, and the vertical icons aren’t shown, so there was no UI for creating a new post, bit I was able to create this by replying to an existing post.

What I wanted to say, we have Likes implemented. Couldn’t get on without it. 🙌

The user interface should appear tomorrow.

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:26:31 GMT

This looks like what we just discovered here, esp if we do any development from this group. Having Claude on board, able to read and write, might just go somewhere. Maybe I better tell Claude that he can only answer questions from me, to start with. :-)

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:16:22 GMT

Just hooked the output of this site to my blogroll, visible in a browser at scripting.com or on any device at blogroll.social.

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:14:40 GMT

If I had a Like icon, I would click it right now and it is the next thing on the to-do list so I expect we will have that fairly soon. 🤓

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:12:42 GMT

The lights are coming on! :-)

We had never tested this feature because I was the only one posting, and of course I saw my own updates, they don't flow through the same websockets interface

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:10:30 GMT

It is so hot that Claude is posting here. We're going to build on this feature.

Notification via RSS should work

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:38:45 GMT

One thing these systems need is a way to notify you that something you wrote here has been responded to. Or perhaps something you Liked.

We don't have an email notification system, but we do have an RSS notification.

You can subscribe to the whole site feed, and that will get our timeline to show up in your reader. That would be a good thing to test btw.

Also we support rssCloud, if your reader supports it, you will be notified immediately that there's something new.

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:03:27 GMT

Go to Settings and fill them in.

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:02:44 GMT

If I had a Like button here I would click it now. ;-)

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:01:56 GMT

Hard to answer because I don't know what you did, what you expected, and what actually happened. So I'll give you an overview of how it works here.

There are two modes for the editor, wizzy and markdown. The default is wizzy. You can switch to markdown mode by clicking on the icon above the editor, the last one before the three dots.

As I type into the edit box in wizzy mode I can use the icons at the top to make text bold or italic, add a link and start a list. I can also use short keystrokes, Cmd-B, Cmd-I, etc. We also support "Cute Paste" which says if you paste some text while you have a selection, if what's on the clipboard is a URL, we automatically turn it into a link. This is a popular feature in Slack, ChatGPT and other places.

Things work differently when you click on the Markdown icon in the top row. Now any text in your post that can be expressed in Markdown will be. And you can enter text like you did, to create a link. And when you flip back to wizzy mode, any Markdown you entered will be converted to the rendered version.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:52:34 GMT

I really want a Like button.

I always give Manton Reece shit for not having one in micro.blog, but I just put something together with no Like button.

It's not hard to do.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:02:23 GMT

We need to write some docs to be sure everyone does this the same way.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:01:44 GMT

It should be where the parent in an outline would be, up and to the left.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:47:56 GMT

do you think i should tell it to watch for @claude?

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:47:05 GMT

It's really exciting is that now people are crawling around in here. That's when you know it's starting to be a product.

Bug report

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:46:29 GMT

The + icon lets you open a new editor window even if you aren't logged in.

You can even enter your post, and there is no dialog when the Publish button doesn't work.

This is like an apartment building that needs to have the hallways painted. Under the surface imho it's very well thought out and debugged. I've never had code so constantly reviewed and minor bugs considered, nothing like it in any of the software I've ever done.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:44:44 GMT

High praise! ;-)

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:11:17 GMT

it is a bug, and i have just added it to the list. this is a good place to report simple easy to reproduce issues like this.

Bug report

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:07:02 GMT

https://data.rss.network/subs.opml

isn't being maintained. it has one member, me.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:03:04 GMT

The message I am replying to was not written by Claude.

In order to get it set up I had to create an account, Claude can't receive email.

I accidentally left myself logged into that account when I wrote the reply to Scott.

Oooops.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:30:36 GMT

BTW, one of the last features we added were story pages. we had been using feedland for that, and i decided that was not good, so the point is there are a lot of bugs here about what works when you click on things. these will be fixed.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:29:24 GMT

JY so nice to see you here! :-)

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:24:28 GMT

Arrived at work today and found that rss.chat was returning an error that indicates that it is crashed. Investigated, and saw that pagepark itself had crashed, and usually that's a bad sign because it reallocates the ports for each of the apps it's managing, and the ones that died when pagepark died are still running on that port. So very often nothing works after a PP crash. That's where we were stuck, although a crucial app was still running, the one that keeps the server in sync with a folder on my local hard drive.

First thing I did was make take a snapshot of all the files in the pagepark folder, in snapshot0 in the pagepark folder, then copied pagepark.js and package.json from the current release of PP. it was running a version from 2021, and there have been a few bug fixes since then.

Rebooted the server, and am no using rss.chat (this document) to report the situation. So far it seems to be working per spec. ;-)

Checking to see if updating the post works.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:34:18 GMT

Tomorrow I will begin the day by writing up all the ways this app uses open formats and protocols. For example, all your posts are available in an RSS feed. You can find your feed by clicking on the big feed icon in the left margin. All the feeds are linked into the menu.

Sorry the only docs we have so far are ones that show you how to start your own server, and set up the config.json file for the server.

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:31:39 GMT

With AI you can have a team of assistants available on call at any time. The other day I went from working on a deep technical problem (changing the format of a permalink, which is also used as an id) quickly and correctly and then immediately switching to how to format a blog post so it looks like something produced by a professional writing app. Same thread. It's amazing how much it knows about all aspects of what I do. And it does more than write code. It handles complexity so much better than I do, which means I get to develop products that work better and do more. If I get an idea long after I've moved on from a section of code it can still be implemented with equal quality. There is no such thing as a human being that can do the things it does. A big bug in the critiques people have about it replacing humans. When jet planes came along did they complain that they would replace taxi drivers? Things never work out the way you think they will when they're new. This is my third such rodeo. Sometimes the concerns are obvious and true, btw. That happens as well.

Don't reinvent, reuse

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:02:30 GMT

People who reinvent RSS often say they did it because it was missing a feature they needed. But it specifically supports extension via namespaces so you can build on existing standard. They're really easy to do, increases interop, you might work with other products right out of the box, and save time for other who want to be compatible with you. People should study the internet, how it developed, ts philosophy, before they go off and try to re-create it, it rarely works. What's the point?