Scripting News argues RSS and related standards can underpin interoperable social networks

All I wanted for Christmas

Back in 2022 I wrote a bit called textcasting. I felt it was so important it deserved its own domain. Textcasting summarized the wrong turn we took when Twitter took over discourse, basically stripping all the features the web needed to be a great writing environment. Textcasting said this is what we have to have to get back on track. Meanwhile all I wanted was a nice little social network to use with a few of my programming buddies. To bootstrap a simple distributed network based only on web standards, with every part replaceable. I thought you could do it with RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and Web Sockets. It would work like podcasting, anyone can publish, anyone can read. We can all have different spins on user experience, there should be lots of approaches, an infinite number of ways for people to connect, but we must all interop at a basic level, so users can use any software they want at either end to implement the network. We'd think of text the same way you think of MP3. It just should work everywhere. No one would ever say that MP3s could only be 300 seconds long. Or you can't play music, or have more than one person. Laughable, right? There's no mystery to this. The fact that our text can't go everywhere is because the big networks don't want to be compatible with each other. Bad for business. The right way, the way the web would do social networking: Every part is replaceable. Interop everywhere. There is no platform vendor. It's like the web because it is the web. That's my dream platform.

7 hours ago

Can RSS be a social network?

Back in 2022 I wrote a bit called textcasting. I felt it was so important it deserved its own domain. Textcasting summarized the wrong turn we took when Twitter took over discourse, basically stripping all the features the web needed to be a great writing environment. Textcasting said this is what we have to have to get back on track. Meanwhile all I wanted was a nice little social network to use with a few of my programming buddies. To bootstrap a simple distributed network based only on web standards, with every part replaceable. I thought you could do it with RSS 2.0, OPML, Markdown, SQL and Web Sockets. It would work like podcasting, anyone can publish, anyone can read. We can all have different spins on user experience, there should be lots of approaches, an infinite number of ways for people to connect, but we must all interop at a basic level, so users can use any software they want at either end to implement the network. We'd think of text the same way you think of MP3. It just should work everywhere. No one would ever say that MP3s could only be 300 seconds long. Or you can't play music, or have more than one person. Laughable, right? There's no mystery to this. The fact that our text can't go everywhere is because the big networks don't want to be compatible with each other. Bad for business. The right way, the way the web would do social networking: Every part is replaceable. Interop everywhere. There is no platform vendor. It's like the web because it is the web. That's my dream platform. PS: Spoiler alert -- the answer to the title question is yes of course. 😄

7 hours ago