Dave Winer

The stuff you're reading here comes from my WordPress blog at daveverse.org. Mastodon preserves links and styling, and doesn't seem to have a size limit. I can edit my posts and you get the updates. So Mastodon kind of informally has become a blogging system, which I totally applaud. It checks a lot of the boxes from my "textcasting" manifesto. Slowly the world is starting to make sense.

Blog: https://daveverse.org/
Profile: https://daveverse.org/author/scripting/
Homepage: http://scripting.com/

Last Notes

2026-03-28 12:59:46 UTC

##
Bluesky’s future for devs
There's a conference in Vancouver [this weekend](https://atmosphereconf.org/ ) for people who are developing apps for Bluesky. They have a protocol they are proud of called AT Proto. A sexy name, but imho it doesn't do anything that Twitter's API did 20 years ago. So why do people hope it'll make a difference for independent developers? I think they're believing because they want to believe in something, a magic potion that will make it easy for the web to overcome the power of the silos like Twitter, Facebook, Threads and Bluesky too.
I feel most sympathy for the developers who are using AT Proto to make writing tools that use the web as their prototype for what a good text editor would do. But they overlook the problem that Bluesky itself has most of the limits on writing that Twitter has, although Twitter is working slowly to get rid of the limits, presumably because when Elon Musk saw them he thought the limits were bullshit, as I do too and always have. It was a tragedy for the web, the day Twitter decided the web wasn't a good model for writers of "tweets" — they had to get rid of style, links, editing, enclosures and add a character limit so people couldn't use it for a longform writing platform.
The division created a problem that users have always wanted someone to solve — they don't want to have to copy/paste everything they write into five different editors because none of the silos can connect, much like the [Apple TV series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) ) of the same name. Each silo is a world unto itself. And somehow, Bluesky which preserves the silo tradition, also claims to be a lover and supporter of the [open web](http://scripting.com/2026/02/16.html#a201945 ), truly outstanding VC hype.
Here's what Bluesky could do to turn me into a fan. Get rid of the limits. Then the people who have created writing tools for AT Proto will have a market to serve. We will of course convert [WordLand](https://wordland.social/ ) to serve that newly enabled user base. Maybe that's what the writing tools devs are anticipating — the day when Bluesky decides that character limits have outlived their usefulness. And that links, the core innovation of the web, deserves to be loved, not hidden as if it's too much power for their users. When we can add an enclosure to help be sure that podcasting survives the latest BigSilo onslaught (it has survived all that came before, I have no reason to believe this time will be any different). They do also need to support inbound and outbound RSS so we can easily hook everything together. I will praise them individually and collectively. I would love to be wrong! I will sing a song in their name.
[Rule #4 of Rules for Standards-Makers](https://this.how/standards/#1497798790000 ): "People choose to interop because it helps them find new users. If you have no users to offer, there won't be much interest in interop."
That's where Bluesky is stuck. If they want to keep their devs and to attract new ones, they have to give them access to *all* their users. All of them. And the only way to do that is to get rid of the limits, to make it the one twitter-like platform that can handle everyone else's tweets, and every writing tool ever written for the web before Twitter came along — ie Tumblr and WordPress, and everything anyone can think of that conforms to the standards that power the web — HTTP and HTML. I've suggested we settle on Markdown as the core writing functionality of these platforms.
The problem is that Bluesky doesn't have much of a business model if all their users can walk out the door every night. Not much monetizable value in that, but it would be good for the web, and for civilization.

2026-01-30 15:40:13 UTC

##
Notes for FediForum meetup
The FediForum [home page](https://fediforum.org/2026-03-growing-open-social-web/ ) says "the Open Social Web still has only a tiny fraction of the users of the closed social media platforms, and growing that number significantly has turned out harder than expected." This is the premise of their next conference, on [March 2](https://events.humanitix.com/fediforum-un-workshop-growing-the-open-social-web-2026-03/tickets ), a little over a month from now.
Why don't people switch to Mastodon?<li>It's hard to use.</li><li>Twitter beat RSS because it was so damned hard to subscribe to a feed in RSS, and with Twitter it was a single click. Mastodon has the same problem. You might want to think of coming up with a Mastodon Lite that trades off some of the decentralization for ease of use. Not sure how that would work. But I promise you — you all are having the same problems we had with RSS. People wouldn't work together, Twitter blew right through that.</li><li>If you want to get an idea why adoption is slow for Mastodon, take a typical task, responding to a post, and write down the actual steps you have to go through. It'll be a long list, and every one of those steps is a reason someone will give up and go back to Bluesky or Twitter.</li>
Does it matter if people use Bluesky?<li>What are you actually accomplishing by using Bluesky?</li><li>It's not decentralized. Bluesky could shut down any developer or all developers any time they want.</li><li>It's not replaceable. Pretty sure it never will be.</li><li>People get confused because they have an API. Twitter has had an API since inception. It broke when Musk took over, but it works again. Bluesky breaks developers too, and if they want to be part of the "open web" why didn't they just use the existing standards of the web.</li><li>Bluesky at some point decided to clone Twitter, which is fine — it's actually a better twitter than Twitter is. But once they did that, it becaume impossible for it to be federated, because Twitter has features that can't be federated, that depend on it being centralized. Again the realities of software kick in, you can't do what's impossible.</li>
Start over<li>The only way imho to achieve your goal is to start over.</li><li>Start with a simple to install server and make it peer-to-peer at the server level from the beginning.</li><li>No features go in that don't work in that mode. Now see what you can make that's social.</li>
Who owns Bluesky?<li>You have to start thinking about who is behind these companies.</li><li>Mastodon I believe is what it appears to be. I don't think you have to worry about anyone breaking developers there.</li><li>But Bluesky appears to be a pretty normal tech startup, except we know much less about its backers than we usually do.</li><li>They disclosed a $15 million investment two years ago. Have they raised more money? No idea. Do we know who their original backers are? We know who the founders of the Blockchain Capital fund are, but that's all that's publicly known, as far as I can tell.</li>
Open social web<li>You should leave out the "open" part — because it's implied by "web."</li><li>And imho neither of the products is connected to the web.</li><li>There's more to being on the web than being able to use the product in a web browser.</li>
Why do I keep saying this stuff?<li>Because I think a social web wouldn't just be nice to have, I think we need it, last year, not next year. (Actually we needed it twenty years ago.)</li><li>You guys have been wandering.</li><li>And the biggest flaw in your culture is that you don't listen.</li><li>If you want to bootstrap something of significance, you should always be looking for clues of things that will work.</li><li>Just coming out with something that's a labor of love basically what you have now does not help you find the magic spot where it grows virally on its own.</li><li>I speak from decades of experience trying to do products that do what you say you want, sometimes with success. Sometimes with huge success. I know what it's like to find the sweet spot at the right time.</li><li>But I say things you don't want to hear. Like this — you have not found the answer from a product standpoint.</li><li>When we look back at this I want to be sure people know I tried.</li><li>And ultimately I think we will succeed and I think some of you folk could help. 🙂</li>
A pair of good rules<li>Things that can be decentralized should be.</li><li>Things that should be centralized should be.</li>

2025-09-14 23:48:38 UTC

##
The Bloggers of MastodonA quick idea.
You can now pretty much write a blog on Mastodon.
I am doing such a thing here now.
This site is emanating from a [WordPress site](https://daveverse.org/2025/09/14/the-bloggers-of-mastodon/ ), on a server I run myself.
But I've also installed the plugin that cross-posts to Masto via ActivityPub. I have no idea how it works, but I don't have to. My writing magically appears on both the web and [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@npub1n4s…sdak/115205341809959164 ) at the same time.
And the features it has on Masto are good enough to call it blogging.
I have the ability to do *simple* **styling**. I can [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink ) from a [word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/73rd_Primetime_Emmy_Awards ) to another page, the most basic feature of blogging and the web. We dreamed about how we'd use this in the early days of the web, and now it's rare that we type into a place where you can. But blogs still love links! And somehow they get through the usual filters and the links show up in Mastodon via ActivityPub. *Woohoo!*
Of course we want more! But this is a decent place to start.
So let's think about it and if you have a Blog of Mastodon, send me a link, I want to read it.
PS: If you can read this on Threads please let me know! 🙂
PPS: And the cool thing about the Blogs of Mastodon is you can't do it on Bluesky, yet. But we hope they will support this too.

2025-09-13 09:15:49 UTC

##
Reading the news at 4amThere’s a large shift in perspective that hasn’t yet happened in the US. We’re still all in it for ourselves.
It shakes me when I get complimented for “altruism.”
Or fighting the good fight.
They don’t have the time.
The truth: you have to help other people if you want to survive.
We are incredibly codependent. Our fates are determined by what all of us do. It’s always been this way actually. Somehow we got pretty far without having to face this. The myth is we all live on the prairie fighting for survival and not able to depend on anyone else. Yet in reality we can’t survive without lots of people coming through for us.
I want to believe, but in the middle of the night I want to give up more. It’ll probably be better when the sun cones up.
Which is reality? I think more and more that believing in other Americans is crazy.

2025-08-30 22:25:36 UTC

##
If I ran Bluesky..If I were running Bluesky I’d have a quiet project to make a lite Bluesky server that peers with the mother ship, highly factored, in a Node package, open source of course. Get this snake oil phase behind them, where they’re claiming to be decentralized, but aren’t.

2025-07-09 13:57:35 UTC

##
Example of a WordPress post in MastodonThis is a [post](https://daveverse.org/2025/07/09/example-of-a-wordpress-post-in-mastodon/ ) I wrote in [WordPress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress ).
You can also [read it](https://mastodon.social/@npub1n4s…sdak/114823624237979477 ) in Mastodon, via [ActivityPub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub ), and a bridge that [Automattic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic ) created to adapt WordPress posts to the language of ActivityPub.
Here are some of the features that are supported:<li>This post has a title (it's optional).</li><li>Simple styling: bold, italic, numbered lists (see below), bulleted lists, subheads. </li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink">Hyperlinks</a>, the defining feature of the web, omitted from all twitter-like products, e.g. Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Twitter.</li><li>The posts are editable, if I make a change to the WordPress post, that change is quickly reflected in the ActivityPub version. </li><li>This post is much longer than the typical Mastodon post, illustrating the lack of a character limit.</li>
A numbered list, all the continents of the world, in alphabetic order:<li>Africa</li><li>Antarctica</li><li>Asia</li><li>Australia</li><li>Europe</li><li>North America</li><li>South America</li>###
DiscussionWhat's remarkable about this feature list is that it's basically the features of the web and the features of RSS, which are also the features of WordPress. These are also the basic features I call for twitter-like services to support in the [textcasting](https://textcasting.org/ ) spec (2022).
By opening this door to developers, easily and quickly, via RSS, we implement the "open" part of it. Until that happens, it's effectively out of reach to developers. If to get into this club you have to support ActivityPub, that's too high a barrier of entry, as we have seen. ActivityPub should be supported well, once, and then accessible via the simplicity of RSS.
PS: This document has 347 words and 2475 characters.
PPS: This was an example for the post I wrote [on Scripting News](http://scripting.com/2025/07/09/133129.html?title=whyRssToActivityPub ) this morning. It explains why we need the same thing WordPress does for ActivityPub to work for RSS too, so developers can build apps that hook up to Mastodon. We have yet to see Masto become an easy platform for web developers, which is why it's wrong to say it's part of the web. When that happens the doors will open for all kinds of creativity.

2025-07-05 17:11:19 UTC

##
WordPress in ActivityPubYesterday I was chatting with [Tim Bray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray ) on Mastodon about coming up with a design and implementation for incoming feeds for ActivityPub. I promised to show how WordPress does it.
So this is an [example](http://scripting.com/2024/10/11/132736.html ) of a WordPress post, but I'm providing a link to this post as it is viewed on Mastodon via the AP interface that the Automattic people have done.
It's a heroic effort imho. And it shows that Mastodon doesn't have a character limit, and it can do *simple* **styling** and [links](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink ). Posts can have titles, and can be edited.
These are important features that are not new to writing on computers but are new to social media. Tim and I are old enough when writing tools routinely provided these features for web writing. Speaking for myself I want them back.###
Happy to rambleNow I'm rambling on purpose to show how long-winded one can be using this connection. Someone will point out that I could have said what I have to say here in 140 characters. It's so true! But I feel free to go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on but at some point you have to say enough is enough and just stop for crying out loud.