One of the reasons Mastodon doesn't get credit for being "on the web" is that there's been no buzz about the ActivityPub support in WordPress. Ghost has been beating the drum about their ActivityPub support for (many) months. I don't know if they're actually there yet, I've never knowingly seen something from Ghost on Mastodon. I sent an email to Matt this morning suggesting that we promote the incredible connection between WordPress and Mastodon via ActivityPub. In the early days of the blogosphere we had the same problem, there was no good way to see who was writing, so we started a site called weblogs.com, which ping'd each site that we knew about to see if it had changed, if so it went to the top of a list that was published at weblogs.com. So if you wanted to find out what's new you'd just go there. It got more complicated over time, as the blogosphere grew at a very fast clip. We could do that for WordPress sites on ActivityPub by pointing to their site from a weblogs.com-like site. There's no shame in telling the world about the cool new technology you've made, esp when it will make life so much more interesting! But it can't do that if they don't know it's there. Let's do some promotion. :-)
I'm looking into the problems in feedlanddatabase I mentioned yesterday. I bet it'll turn out there are a bunch of issues that have been there for a long time, but don't show up in the user interface of the product. I'm still developing good techniques for debugging Node.js server apps. Recently, I've developed new tools that make these bugs show themselves, like socketdemo. I added some new capabilities to it in the JavaScript console that make the updates visible. If you open the console in the debugger while it's running you'll see what I'm talking about, screen shot. Sometimes to debug a problem that doesn't have a UI you have to give it a UI.
Over the weekend I flipped the switch on a new app that makes my blog available on WordPress. It seems to work really well. The WordPress site is Daveverse. And because it's on WordPress it is also available on ActivityPub, at @scripting@daveverse.org, which means you can read it on Mastodon. It doesn't feel weird at all to be reading a blog post on a social network. I posted on Bluesky that we would love to have the same connection with their social network. It might happen sooner than you think. There are people developing writing tools for ATProto, but they're kind of stuck since Bluesky has all those limits that exclude the writer's web. It's so complicated, but out the other end, I hope will come a consensus that the social web should use more of the text features of the web. Further, the distributed nature of the web itself can form the backbone of distribution for the social web, that is if you think RSS is part of the web. When it's all said and done, we will realize that TBL got it right when he designed text with titles, subheads, styling, links, editing, no character limits, etc. He probably didn't even have to think about it much, considering he was basically replicating the standard document features from word processing apps of the 70s and 80s, without the printing. That's how evolution works, and the last 19 years of distortion by Twitter and those that followed them, will be seen as a weird transcription error (I hope).
Here's a screen shot of what the Daveverse home page looks like. It's got all the stuff from scripting.com. It's not a perfect rendering of my Old School blog, I have more features, but it's pretty good. I'll be testing this out and thinking about it now, as we go forward. But here's the milestone: I have a WordPress place to hook into now that has pretty much everything I write outside the tiny little text boxes. What I write in WordLand or Drummer, the two places I write for real. The rest of it is throw away nonsense, a waste of time. No one reads anything, everyone fighting for attention.
Spoilers follow. Like Doc, I have trouble getting into TV series, but not Pluribus, probably because it came from the showrunner of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, two series that I have watched from beginning to end at least three times.
The star of Pluribus, Rhea Seahorn, was my favorite in Better Call Saul, as Kim Wexler. So I expected a continuation of those shows, and in some sense Pluribus is much like them, but the main character Carol, is nothing like Kim -- who is by far the coolest character in any of the shows, and that's saying a lot.
That's okay because the sweetest character yet in a Vince Gilligan comedy (all these shows are comedies btw, even though the plots are super heavy), is Carol's sidekick, Zosia, played by Karolina Wydra. She's basically the voice of the Others, but the illusion is so alluring, one character in the show has already (understandably) fallen in love with her. And we know that Carol has formed an attachment too, despite her best efforts to hate her. ;-)
BTW, this post is the first one that's cross-posted to the daveverse site. There still are some things to fix, but this is a nice piece of software. Basically implements what I've been calling Inbound RSS, not for a social web app, rather for WordPress (which in my mind is becoming more of a social web system every day).
I wrote this as a comment on Doc's blog.
Doc, I’m working on a discourse system that works better than comments, imho. One thing it does is lets me use the full fidelity of the web instead of forcing me to type in yet another Inadequate Text Box (ITB) with none of the features of my blog editor.
I’m working on a Unified Text Theory (UTT) for the web. Instead of scattering Stupid Little Text Boxes (SLTBs) all over creation, let’s come up with a nice text router, that means our writing can be in one place, but through the magic of pointers, can appear to be in many places. (Actually there's nothing magical about it, pointers are very basic computer technology, when I learned to program on a PDP-11 in 1977 it very much had pointers.)
It’s mostly a matter of GOST (an acronym for Getting Our Shit Together).
All this is a preamble to say that my comment on your post can be read here.
https://daveverse.org/2025/11/16/3096/
It’s also on scripting.com.
See how that works. You can’t really tell where it is, but if I make a change to it, somehow the change appears everywhere.
And I’m using my favorite editor to write. Not the dinky one provided by the web browser.
And of course this should be on my blog too. Damn. I’m still doing it.
Interesting thought with a small Pluribus spoiler. We should all think of our AI pseudo-people with as much disdain as Carol has for the "people" who watch over her. They aren't people, in either case. In Pluribus they give you the hint in everything they say. It's not "I think this" it's we. I'd like my chatbot friends to use similar language. Never behave like a person. That should be as forbidden. We'll regret not controlling this, I think.
I have been thinking, for years now, why not reconceive the discourse system on the social web to factor out moderation. It is the web, so anyone can add a feature any time without having to rewrite the whole web. I've been trying ideas out for years, but people preferred silos. Hoping now there are enough people to start a bootstrap. Won't be much of a discourse system if people don't course. 😄
With any luck this will be the last of the tests for this particular feature.
If this continues to work, tomorrow or Monday I'll switch it over to cross-posting to daveverse instead of the throw-away test site.
Below are the debugging messages I used today. Nothing really happening here. ;-)
It's kind of weird for me to be hanging out around WordPress, but I like it. They've been very welcoming. It's kind of like I imagine it would be for Ward Cunningham to be working with Wikipedia. It may not have been everything he wanted from wiki's but it might be the best place for him to develop new features, most likely to have an influence on the way wikis are used in the real world. It's also kind of like it might have been if Doug Engelbart had been willing to hook up with Living Videotext back in the day. I had a couple of dinners with him in Palo Alto where I presented the idea. We had a growing user base of outliner users, our products had commercial success that weren't possible in the 60s and 70s, before there were personal computers like the Apple II or Macintosh. If he could help us, it would be good for both of us, I reasoned. He had his own codebase, and was working with a bunch of other people, and was happy with the setup. In 2025, I have ambitions for WordPress, I think it can play a bigger and different role in the web than it does. I believe there's a new class of developers and users who could benefit from the stability and scaling of WordPress. It's a good community, it's basically the web itself, which means imho that it can grow to be new things to new people. Anyway, you can see why this post has to be on both scripting.com and on my daveverse site as I discussed yesterday.
Here's what I'm doing. I want to get all my blog posts together in one place. I still want to use Electric Drummer to write stuff for scripting.com, there's a whole system built around it being where it is. But, I want all the posts on scripting to also appear on the daveverse site, so that the first version of my discourse module can be simple to create, debug and use. So I've got the first half working, I've got a script that hooks in via WebSockets to FeedLand and is notified every time Scripting News updates. It mirrors the updates to a site on WordPress (for testing) and once it works, I'll have it send the stuff to daveverse. That part remains to be done. Not sure if it'll be a desktop app or a server-based app. But now I need a break. ;-)
The big news is that there are now docs for source:markdown. The goal is to have a writer-friendly standard for text that's as useful as the one for audio. As with everything in RSS-land, cooperation among the different vendors was never its strong point. I hope to change that, and hope to build a network for written text as open and powerful as the one that developed for podcasting.
My religion is Working Together otherwise known as interop.
Screen shot of DemoLand a new thing I'm doing that shows a developer how to hook an editor up to WordPress using the same server I'm using for WordLand. If they do, our products will work on the same data, in Markdown of course. The user will get to use two different editors to work on the text. This is important because in the social network I'm imagining every part is replaceable. It takes work to make that real, but I have done the work. In this network the user will have choice of writing tools. Unlike products like Substack, for example, where you're forced to use their built-in editor.
Google tries to speak for me.
Reading a friend's email, I click the Reply button, and without asking, it writes a reply for me. Thus, if I want to speak for myself first I have to delete the message it created, signed with my name, w/o permission.
Here's a screen shot with a red arrow pointing to the AI's writing.
I do my own writing, always, and forever. I'm not a Luddite, btw -- if you read my blog I try tech and I use it if it fits. I'm looking for new things tech can do. But this time I was forced to use something I never wanted to use. That disgusts me. How dare the machine think it can impersonate me.
But it gets worse. They buried the opt-out settings, and they don't actually turn anything off. I asked ChatGPT how to do it. It showed me where the settings are, I turned them off, saved changes, reloaded the page, and the same suggestion is there. It's still speaking for me.
Now they certainly haven't rolled this feature out to journalists, because the news would be full of rage. Journalists, like other literate people, generally have the basic ability to speak for themselves. And journalists use a pulpit that Google is probably still a tiny bit scared of.
Also, it's hard to come up with an example you can share publicly because it only does this with replies to emails from people you know. I tried it with spam-like messages and there it is willing to let you speak for yourself.
This raises a philosophical question for Google and its AI bot. Of what use are users?
