I'm starting to work on my new discourse system. I've been waiting to do this for a while, until all the pieces I needed were there, and they have been for a couple of months. I'll tell you about it as it starts to come into view.

The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don't have to "go" to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.

A comment is not in any way guaranteed space on the other person's blog. Thus the spam incentive that all other comment systems have is not here. I think that's a huge part of the problem, and it's neatly solved.

And the people I imagine who will be appearing in my space are the kind of people that used to get quoted on my mail pages, in the ancient pre-silo web. Doc Searls is #1 on this list, he was a perfect contributor to the mail pages. He understood the idea before he even heard it. That was how quickly he grok'd this stuff. Same way my mother understood blogging, no one had to explain it to her, she already knew. I think NakedJen will be a fantastic contributor in this mode, and we won't need Facebook to tie us together.

See, I already know the people I want to come to the party and the place I want to party. I just have to get the electricity working, the usual things you need, plumbing, heat, etc.

In the future if you have a comment on this now relatively long post, you'll click on an icon, write your comment, publish it, with almost no overhead. You won't have to "go" anywhere to do that. It'll be right there where you're reading, just like a twitter-like system. But unlike Twitter commenting, our not-so-tiny full-featured text box will let you write, for crying out loud, instead of dealing with a programmer's idea of how you should write. I want all my writing features on my blog, and dammit, when I write a comment too. Why should the comment editor be any different from the regular editor, and why can't all my comments, everywhere, be readable on my blog. See how we're making a web here? It's not hard, you just have to keep factoring. Never stop.

How many different ways do I have to write? One. Just one. But I should have choice, because not everyone loves the same kind of editor. The web is about choice, pretty much everywhere. It doesn't matter what software people use because it's all done with open formats and protocols, every part replaceable. Small pieces loosely joined. In other words we'll be using the web.

I've been using the term of the web, starting in a piece I wrote last Monday. Now it's time to explain more about what it means because I used the term in the context of Pocket Casts in an earlier post.

For a piece of software, being of the web means that it is built to share data with other apps, ones that receive data as input, as a feed reader consumes feeds, or generate output for other apps, e.g. software used to publish feeds. Or competitive apps, that do roughly the same thing another app does, and want to be able to receive the user's data, or better, share the users' data so they can use both apps (we shouldn't settle for less than this, imho).

Of the web means you're signed on to letting users move data wherever it makes sense to them to.

These days people use the term "web" to mean basically something you can view in a web browser. But that does not mean it is of the web. If Bluesky for example were of the web, it would mean you could add a feature to it without rewriting the whole thing.

This fantastic web is what the silos destroyed, starting with Twitter in 2006. They made the software simpler to use because all the feed reader developers were trying to wall off this part of the web for themselves. Going to WordCamp was invigorating for me, because the people I met there were very much of the web as far as I could tell. And they were young enough to not have been part of the initial web, they've never had the experience of plug and play between apps. I want desperately to develop a small web playground for us to explore all the possibilities.

There's a reason the web is called the web. Visualize what it's capable of doing as a web. It's not just a word, it's concept, a very important one.

PS: I looked around the web for illustrations of a spider's web but they're all too orderly too symetric. The point of a web in real life, the kind that spiders make, is they are chaotic and ad hoc. Like the web we make on the internet.

This week I had lunch with a developer who had been at WordCamp last month. He apologized for not being at my session, but I waved it off. I didn't go to many sessions myself, too many great discussions in the hallway, out on the patio or in the coffee room.

I remembered this was the rationale for how and why we did BloggerCon in the mid-2000s, to bring the hallway conversations into the meeting rooms.

We did this by using a university, its classrooms, and we put someone in front of the room called a discussion leader.

A good DL should know the topic they're leading and be able to start it off with a provocative intro, 5 or so minutes, and then a microphone, held by a student, is moves to a person with their hand up, and they can speak. Not a question. They have something to say. They are the expert of the moment.

The leader can cut them off and move the mike to the next person. (Works even better if there are two roving mikes.) When this works, it really holds everyone's attention.

This idea came from literally hundreds of hours in boring sessions with a panel of experts and people lined up waiting to speak, in the form of a question of course, and getting nervous and composing a speech in their head, and when its their turn they ramble on and on, so of course the good stuff happens in the hallway.

It is harder to do this kind of conference where the "content" takes care of itself. But the BloggerCon type, when it works is far more dynamic.

BTW, the best discussion leaders are teachers and reporters.

Loving a series I just heard about, This Is Going To Hurt.

I discovered it the usual tedious way, scrolling through newly available shows on one of the streaming services with my iPad handy and when I see one that looks interesting, I look it up on Metacritic. If the rating is below 60, I don't look any further, but this show was rated 91, which is a very high rating. It's a British medical drama, the characters and story are fantastic, you can see that right from the beginning. They do show a lot of surgery details, I wish they didn't, I just can't watch that stuff. But I hold the iPad up to block the screen when it gets hard to watch, and I judge from the dialog when the gore is over.

Another thing I can't stomach are pictures of dog food, esp people eating dog food. If you have a similar phobia, episode 4 of Pluribus, which is as usual great, is hard to watch, but the segment where a character eats dog food is self contained.

There also a commercial for dog food that opens with a chunk of the most disgusting dog food, from a company that makes dog food that looks like human food. They're challenging you with a question, would you eat this shit? Well no! -- and I don't want to look at it either dammit. It's why I don't like the term dogfooding, ie people using their own products. As much as I love dogs, the people who use my software are not dogs, and my software is not dog food.

Also I want to add that I have a vague memory of actually eating dog food when I was a small child with a bunch of equally young friends because we were curious about what it was like. My memory is that it isn't bad. But the memory for me, now as an adult, is nauseating. I like eating human food, even though I'm sure in other contexts it's equally disgusting.

But do watch This Is Going To Hurt. Sorry it's only seven episodes, I would have loved it to continue for another few seasons. I have one more episode left to watch, though it totally could have ended after six episodes.

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.

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. ;-)

• This is one of those days I am pretty sure I have nothing to write but as I get going I'll remember stuff. Maybe. As you've probably surmised I'm still working on tests. These are called regression tests. Yesterday I got the whole thing running, but knew I still had to move things around, and turn some features off that weren't needed. So every time I do one of those things that could shake things up, I have to try it again to make sure I didn't break it. This is the page I have to look at for the result. The cool thing is that the wordpress site is starting to feel like scripting.com, the software runs that quickly. But there are a lot of bits of software running all over the place that have to work in order for it to feel that solid.
• How did the regression test go? Wellll, I did break a bunch of stuff. But I put the pieces back in place. And with any luck this post will show up on the other end. It did.