Lessons from Blogging and the Evolution of the Open Web

Matthias Pfefferle:
You are listening to the Open Web and Fediverse series, part of the Open Web Conversations channel and Open Channels event productions. And today I have a very special guest. I think I’m following his work since forever, and I would say that most of the things I’m currently working on wouldn’t even exist without him in my world. He invented blogging, podcasting, and rss, and for sure he is the inventor of text casting. Welcome to the podcast. Dave Weiner.

Dave Winer:
Oh, thank you for the very kind introduction. You read my blog and stuff and.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, for sure. This is really not made up. I think I grouped my Internet socialization. Do you say that in English?

Dave Winer:
Okay.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Started with Web 2.0. And you could not stumble upon your name back in the days.

Dave Winer:
So that’s correct. Hopefully people were saying nice things about me.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Oh, always, Always.

Dave Winer:
Really? You know, because my impression was the first time I ever saw a blog roll on somebody else’s blog, okay, this was like a really big moment because, you know, that this was proof that it was working, you know, that, you know, the whole idea was to get everybody else to blog, not just to come read mine, they were. And go to my discussion group and complain about stuff. I mean, that was very easy. But the harder part was to get everybody to go do it themselves. And so I see this blog roll out there and I go, I can’t wait to read what all these people are writing about, you know, and so I click on every damn link, they were cursing me out like, what a jerk he is on, hopefully, go get lost. We. Oh, oh. You know, it’s like. And it happens in every community, you know, it’s every. You see that. It’s like people haven’t figured out yet that the people who get things started are just people. They’re just like everybody else. And the bigger it gets, the more ridiculous it gets because, you know, nobody could keep track of all of what’s going on. And so that’s why I had to ask if people were saying nice things. You managed to find. I always imagined that most people were pretty happy. It was only the. The most vocal that made, you know, the big issue. You know, they had this big problem that they wanted to get taken care of.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, but it’s always the critique you take serious. So that.

Dave Winer:
Yeah, well, because it depends on how you were raised. I was raised by parents that were very critical of me because they thought that would make me a better person. You know, I actually got to ask them, why were you like that all the time? They’re German or I’m half German, so it’s a very German attitude. Yeah. You know, so.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So how is your German, Dave?

Dave Winer:
It’s non existent.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Oh, that’s.

Dave Winer:
I was raised German. My grandparents on one side, they did speak German.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay.

Dave Winer:
So. So for me, hearing somebody speak German is a very warm feeling for me, you know.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay. But you couldn’t understand anything.

Dave Winer:
No, that’s. But maybe I will. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll come move to Germany, you know, that I would think about it, given all that’s going on here right now, you know.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, Germany, the land of the open web. But that’s not, that’s not, it’s not true.

Dave Winer:
But. Yeah, right. But, but it. A lot of the people I know from Germany are on the. Really get the open web. You know, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what is the web lately. This has been something that I think we really ought to nail down, you know.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. And I, and I thought about that a lot. And that is a really tricky question. And I would say.

Dave Winer:
Yeah, well, I, I don’t think it is all that tricky. But the thing is to know that an awful lot of people throw it around without even trying to be on the web.

Matthias Pfefferle:
But I still would say it, it depends on when you first get in contact with, let’s say, the web. So when you started using something on the Internet.

Dave Winer:
Yeah.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So I think for millennials, or how you call the actual generation, generation Alpha, at least how we define the web or how you end up.

Dave Winer:
Well, let me try an idea.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay.

Dave Winer:
Just right off the bat. All right, so you mentioned Web 2.0. Right. And in Web 2.0, everybody gets to write. That’s the key thing about. It’s not a one way thing, it’s a two way thing. So there’s writing involved. I would say that if you offer users a way to write, but you don’t provide for linking, then you are not on the web. If you do, you may be on the web. We could discuss that. But if you don’t allow it, you’re not. That’s. See, that should be one of the rules of the web is that if people get to write, they get to link. I feel pretty strongly about that.

Matthias Pfefferle:
And if you say link, you mean that others can link your content and not that you can share?

Dave Winer:
Oh, I just mean that you can type in ahref equals URL, you know, with, you know. Right. I mean, just at that very basic level. You can do that. Yes. It would be very nice if everything I write has a permalink so people can point to it too. That’s. That seems. Would seem to be the other half. Right. I mean, it’s not that complicated. If you haven’t done that, then I don’t think you’ve really thought too much of the web. And I’d love to know the reason why they don’t do it too. Explain that to me. I mean, you know, is it too much trouble or you just don’t want to say goodbye to the people?

Matthias Pfefferle:
You know, they fear to have their content outside of their.

Dave Winer:
They lose you as a reader. Yeah, right. Why should we let you send somebody somewhere else? We want you to stay right here.

Matthias Pfefferle:
You know, And I think I just recently watched a YouTube video where someone talked about the new kind of movements in YouTube videos. At least in Germany. It’s mostly that big YouTube stars do no longer create their own content, but watch other content and comment that. So they kind of film themselves watching videos and comment these videos. And there’s no shared monetization if they do that. So they earn money with the content of other people. And I would say this is very similar from the problem we have with the web. So let’s say Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is. Maybe not Instagram, but Twitter and Facebook is. Is mostly they need content they could share on their platform, but it’s only this way. It’s sharing on their platform, but you can’t share a Twitter link very easily. So it’s kind of the same problem.

Dave Winer:
And, well, you see this pattern all over the place. It’s like, I’ll give you a great example of it. I wanted to use substack because it does email lists. And I wanted an email list for my blog, you know, and so I thought, well, well, they must accept an RSS feed, right? So I don’t actually have to type the stuff into their text box. But they don’t, and none of them do. Actually, I did find one that does button down. I’m going to try it. But I like button down, by the way. It looks good, but I don’t need it anymore since I wrote my own. That’s the other thing. But on the other hand, it’s a really tough problem how to get HTML content through the mail readers, you know, they all are very weird about how they process stuff. And if you want to get something just even moderately nice, it’s like crazy. I just think we have to focus on the web that works really well and try to draw the things that aren’t in it into it, you know, by creating something that’s exciting but has those rules that says, I mean, start with WordPress. And you see, we’re ostensibly here to talk about activity pub. And. And I hope WordPress, because, I mean, that’s. I’m kind of immersed in WordPress these days, you know, and I hope I don’t sound like I’m going to do a little. Little promotion of WordPress, but the great thing about WordPress is it doesn’t cut any corners on the web. It’s not like any of the other platforms. It accepts the web as it is. It doesn’t try to change it, you know. Yeah, and. And that, in 2025, is a fundamental basic. There’s nothing else like it. You know, you can’t build on anything. Anything else you want to try to build, you have to build on the metal of the web itself. You can’t get any elevation because there’s. But there it is. And I find it very comfortable to say, look, anything we put out of this, I want them to feel on blue sky. I want the users on blue sky to feel like they’re missing all the good stuff, because blue sky doesn’t do. You know, I think you mentioned text casting, right? Yeah, yeah. If. You know what? I wouldn’t be doing any of this stuff if everybody else would just support text casting. I could just retire.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Maybe you can say some words about text casting. I’m not sure if everyone is familiar with it.

Dave Winer:
Okay, well, I just kind of did say it. I mean, basically the idea is that I’m tired of all the limits of the social networks. In 2006, when Twitter came along, they said they had all these limits. It was supposedly running on the web, but it had a character limit. 140 characters, no titles, no styles, no links, no enclosures. You can’t edit your posts. I think that’s pretty much it. I kind of have it to memory, you know, and it was a fantastic product. It was an eye opener. Right. You could see all these people, you know, and they were people, many of them, people that I knew from, you know, business, but I knew nothing about them as people. I would see them once or twice a year maybe at a conference or something, but I knew absolutely Nothing. And all of a sudden, I can see what their lives are like, you know, and I get an idea and also, of course, have more to talk about with them next time I see them. Right. And working with them is better when you have a sense of who they are. So Twitter was a breakthrough, there’s no question about it. But over time, its limits really became a problem. Because as a writer, you know, an analogy would be, let’s say I made guitars. I was in the business of making guitar guitars. And so I said, well, that’s great, but I’m only going to put two strings on the guitars. And you can make music with that. That’s fine. And it saves you from making music that’s too complicated for people to listen to. And I think people would laugh at that idea that. I mean, it’s just absolutely. But that is exactly what we’re dealing with. And now that we have a new generation of, you know, Twitter, like Systems, Blue Sky, Threads, Mastodon, to a large extent, to see them just pick up the limits as if there was something sacred about it and just copy them, it’s like, really demoralizing for me as a writer. You know, I. As a writer, it’s like they’re giving me the two strings and they’re saying, you know, enjoy. It’s like it really cuts the choices out for you. And so what you guys are doing right now, you know, on sort of. There are all kinds of ways of looking at activity. In some ways, I’m very critical of it. You know, that it just makes things far too complicated. And I understand the process that led to that. I have been part of a process that was like that when we went from xml, RPC to Soak, and I was, you know, one of the authors, and they wanted. My name is on the SOAP spec. But I went to the first couple of meetings, I realized I’m not going any more of these meetings because it’s like they’re. It’s all political. It’s 100%. It was 100% politics. There were all these big company reps there. When I talked, nobody listened because I didn’t have the business card. They only respected other big companies and. Yeah, and the people they send to those conferences, those meetings are people that. That’s what they do for a living. They go to those meetings. And I couldn’t afford to do that. I had no interest in it. But I see the same thing happening. You know, it would have been a lot easier to say each of the functions you need to just like make it happen. You don’t have to bring in all these different components, but. So I’m critical of it that way. But I love what you guys have done because what it has done is it’s brought Mastodon into text casting land.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah.

Dave Winer:
And I wrote a piece the other day called the Bloggers of Mastodon. It never occurred to me. But yes, we should create that as a concept because that is how people’s minds are going to get bent here. They’re going to see that there’s blogging happening on Mastodon and that’s just like people get so used to things being the way they are and always have been that just stretching it to show that there’s really not a whole lot of difference between a blogging platform and a WordPress. And that’s what you’re proving. Right?

Matthias Pfefferle:
You made so many points. Where should I start?

Dave Winer:
Sorry.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So maybe first about the blogging using Macedon. I don’t think it’s necessarily needed to be able to blog on Macedon because with Activity Pub, it doesn’t matter where you or what software you use. It should be compatible with every other platform. And I would say it’s more important to get other platforms to care about different object types. So I’m totally fine with Mastodon focusing on microblogging only, but I would love to see that they take care about long form content and kind of display it a bit differently. Or maybe use the excerpt and have some kind of overlay that shows the full article or stuff like that.

Dave Winer:
Can I just inject something there?

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, that.

Dave Winer:
How about competition? How about one platform does it one way, another platform does it another way, and you pick the one that you like. The whole idea of tying the actual content to a specific platform, which you said there. That’s the mistake of saying that I posted this on Twitter or I posted this on Bluesky. No, I just want to post it.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah.

Dave Winer:
And I totally agree. I think, like, we need a sort of a standard for text the same way we have a standard for audio. In audio it’s called MP3. Right. And we had a great standard for text before all this happened. It’s called HTML. HTML provides for all the features we need in text. It works. Or markdown. Markdown might be even better because it takes out all the dangerous stuff from HTML and we want that too. So I’m with you 100% on that. It’s like it doesn’t matter. Your limits are just not. They’re not on topic. It’s like getting it. You Know what I’m saying? It’s like, why are you doing that?

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. And even if the limit, if, and even if some platforms have limits for their own platform, they should take care of the content of other platforms and that they don’t have any limits, then that.

Dave Winer:
Then they won’t have any limits.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah.

Dave Winer:
You know, that kind of thing doesn’t last very long because the users start asking questions, why can’t I type over here? I mean, they’re going to want you to type on their platform, I would assume. Right. But the users have no interest in that limit, you know, none whatsoever.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, maybe. But I had very controversial discussions about bringing WordPress to the Fediverse to Activity Pub, because there are some people that do not expect a blog being part of that. And that common thread that normally happens on microblogging could also live in a comment section of a blog.

Dave Winer:
I don’t believe in comment sections on blogs, though. I think we could live without that, actually.

Matthias Pfefferle:
I had a hard time to try to map modern social web techniques to the classic post comment pattern of WordPress. That was kind of the biggest thing.

Dave Winer:
You probably don’t get enough people understanding how difficult those kinds of problems are. Right?

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, maybe.

Dave Winer:
Maybe that’s where your hair went, huh? Sorry.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, totally.

Dave Winer:
I don’t very much either. You know, I like to wear a hat. You know, it keeps my head warm. You know, I, I think that people. And I’m going to do this, you’ll. You’ll see this on my blog, not before too long. Is that you’ll be able to read my blog in a context where in inside of Wordland. Okay. Wordland is my WordPress editor, text editor. But it’s a lot, it’s going to be a lot more than that. And so if you read something on my blog that you want, have something you want to say about it, you’ll be able to do that. But the post is going to go on your blog, not mine. And the thing you’re responding to, the author of the thing you’re responding to, I will get a link to that and I can read it and then I can decide whether or not it belongs on my blog. And then I just think that I’ve actually done stuff like that and it doesn’t flame out, it doesn’t require moderation, it doesn’t have the flaws of commenting systems, the things that make them such a pain in the ass. I think there, we also have to try, we also have to experiment. And there also needs to be competition. And therefore it needs to be open to independent developers, that if you get an idea, you should just be able to implement it. You know, right now, if I want to exist in this space, I have to re. Implement so much of the stuff that’s in blue sky to just get in there and have a way to do something about the way this stuff works. And that is the thing. We definitely are. We’re crippled by that, you know, because it takes so much money and so much time, so much effort just to get into a place where people will actually listen to your ideas, because they don’t listen to their friends, they just listen to their competitors. They have to be out of that position where they can control large communities of people and any possible movement in the community. That’s why we’re so stuck. That’s why there’s been so much stagnation. The thing about it is that the people you were talking about before the post. Millennials, Right, Yeah. They’ve never even seen a competitive software market. They have no idea what that’s like.

Matthias Pfefferle:
That’s very monopolistic.

Dave Winer:
I have. I grew up in the tech industry in the 80s, and believe me, it was very, very competitive. You had lots of choices. And the way that works is with format compatibility. It means that you can use any number of different editors to edit a JPEG file and that you need in text, too. And then once you’re there, everybody’s providing that kind of interface. It’s a lot easier to develop products and choice. And if that’s the last thing I do, that is what I want to do. I just want to break out of this mess. I know, I know. It’s like Don Quixote, right?

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. But I understand your critique on ActivityPub, but for me, it’s mostly. It fits best my needs. I would say it’s very similar to rss, because for me, you’re the big fighter for RSS still.

Dave Winer:
Hey, you know what? I’m getting away from that. I really don’t like it. I got completely trounced again last week.

Matthias Pfefferle:
I read your blog post. I read your blog post about that.

Dave Winer:
I’m done with that. You know, the hell. I’m sorry for saying that, but the hell with it. You guys take care of it for a while. It’s as much a benefit to you as it is to me.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So my point is that I see kind of the activity pub as the next evolution of rss, because for me, the activity stream is nothing more than RSS with some more metadata, so it’s an enriched version of RSS with a publishing subscribe mechanism. It’s kind of like RSS cloud in bidirectional.

Dave Winer:
Because the difference between there were developers that are comfortable with Activity Club, the number of developers that are Comfortable with RSS 2.0, it’s night and day, you know, and if you could present an interface that worked with RSS 2.0, you would get a jolt of development that you won’t believe. It’s like you don’t choose, you know, it’s like in the United States we’re having this great debate about whether politicians get to choose their constituents or the constituents should choose the politicians, you know, and it’s unfortunately gotten to the point where the politicians are doing the choosing. Same difference. But it’s so frustrating. I can’t get past Activity Pub as a developer. I just don’t have the time or the energy or the patience. And the docs are terrible and it’s impossible to understand. And yet you could have me completely in there doing development work on mastodon itself if somehow you could deliver to me on terms that I understand.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So I totally agree on the comparison to rss. So they are worlds between these two standards. But still, if I compare Activity Pub to, let’s say, ATProto, then I have the same feeling with the comparison to Activity Pub and rss.

Dave Winer:
Do you think Activity Pub simpler? Is that right?

Matthias Pfefferle:
Way simpler. So when I started implementing activity pub for WordPress, it was not that I read the spec, but I kind of tried to reverse engineer what Macedon is doing. So it was not implementing the spec, but how Mastodon is decentralized federating stuff, and it worked.

Dave Winer:
That’s the right way to grab it. Of course, a great example came, right?

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. I could look into their code. It was kind of trial and error and I got something working and that is nearly impossible with ATProto. It is not possible to implement something by simply trying out how they do things.

Dave Winer:
No argument here at Prototype is a disaster. It’s an absolute disaster. It’s the most arrogant thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like it’s just repeating things that already work only by making them more complicated. And they also break it too. I implemented some stuff in. At ATProto. I made a, you know, I have a link blog thing. I want to get links in there and stuff. It was ridiculously complicated. And then I. Then two months later, it doesn’t work because they change the way it works. And that really let me know when it’s done and when, you know, when there’s No, I just think that there’s no. I think. I don’t know what it proves. It doesn’t matter what it proves. It’s just not workable, you know? But why not do both? Why not? I mean, I’m not suggesting that. Well, you know what, I want inbound and outbound RSS and everything too, so that if I am writing on a blog, that should be enough for me to peer with any one of these systems because they. You remember we were talking earlier about sub stack not accepting RSS input. That’s inbound rss. That is giving the user the choice of where they. Where they edit. And you know what? The paradigm, the thing that we’re looking to do, I think this is almost intuitive, is I want to get all my writing on my blog. Right. And I’m never going to get to do that, obviously. But the more places it goes, the less I have to break out of that model. And so why not give that to the bloggers? I mean, I’m not saying you should stop. I don’t want you to stop doing what you’re doing. I think you know why I think what you’re doing is so important. I’ll tell you. It’s because the more successful you are with it, the more pressure there is on Blue sky to do the same thing.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, hopefully.

Dave Winer:
No, there’s. The more I said, the more successful. You know, there’s no hopefully to it. At some level of success, they will have to do it, you know, and that’s why we have to tell the users of Blue sky that this thing exists. They have to. Well, also, they’ll use it as a mastodon and you may find it, you know, a little bit disharmonious to talk about bloggers amassed it on. But if it’s jarring, that makes it even better because it gets people’s attention. They’re not thinking about it. You know, bloggers will really. I don’t know if we ever get any bloggers. There’s a memory of it. It was good the first time. We need a new blogging community.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. And that’s the only reason I started working on Activity Pub. So this was by far not my first try. I tried with several different stuff.

Dave Winer:
You did. How long have you been working on this?

Matthias Pfefferle:
So I think I got into all of this with creative Chris Messina’s first project called Diesel. Distributed Social Networks, I would say. Or they already worked on WordPress. Back in the days, it was the data portability.org movement thingy around 2008. And that drew me into or that brought me into the kind of independent WordPress bubble. And then the next project I invested quite a lot was from Tantec Chalik, the indie web movement. And I implemented quite some of their ideas with WebMention. And then finally I worked on Activity Pub.

Dave Winer:
What year does this story start?

Matthias Pfefferle:
I think it was around 20078 when I started hacking on that.

Dave Winer:
Oh wow. That for bad.

Matthias Pfefferle:
And before it was mostly reading and blogging about the patterns. And then I would say around 2008 I started really productively working on that and always with. I want to keep blogging important and relevant in mind. So it was always not having a federated system because federation is a hip thing. It was always that I wanted to avoid the big social networks like Facebook.

Dave Winer:
And still, well, let’s just create a big social network out of the blogosphere. Yeah, let’s make all the things that we have inside work outside, just with. I mean my formula is RSS and WordPress. That’s it. That’s where the documents live is in WordPress and how we communicate timeline contents is with RSS. And we live within the limits of that. So we create the kind of network you can create with that kind of functionality. It won’t be everything that the other networks are, but one thing for sure is it will be a hundred percent distributed and really easy to develop for. And that’s. Those are the goals right there. And keep it, just keep it super simple all the time, you know, don’t deviate from that. Anytime something can be done more easily and simply with factoring, we just will do it.

Matthias Pfefferle:
You know, the problem is a bit too big maybe.

Dave Winer:
So I hate with sentences that begin like that.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So what I wanted to. What? In the end, I wanted to recommend you to the first episode of the podcast series I’m hosting. I talked with Alex Cook, who worked on a plugin called Friends, and it’s simply he does not care how to follow others. So the idea of the plugin is that you will be able to follow other blogs and he does not care which protocol or technique the other one is trying to use. He supports RSS and a lot of other stuff.

Dave Winer:
When I say RSS, I mean RSS, RSS 1.0.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Everything.

Dave Winer:
Yeah, and yeah, well, not everything, but everything within reason and we’ll add things as necessary.

Matthias Pfefferle:
But, but, but the problem for him was always that if you have that as a plugin, it only works, at least bidirectional, if every blogger is using that plugin, because otherwise RSS is Only a one way show.

Dave Winer:
And no, I don’t have that problem. Yeah, I don’t understand why he has that problem.

Matthias Pfefferle:
You can’t compare.

Dave Winer:
I’m not doing it with a WordPress plugin, you understand?

Matthias Pfefferle:
But the problem is I’m not limited by that. Yeah, but the problem is we are talking about end users. So we have to have something that users can simply use.

Dave Winer:
And.

Matthias Pfefferle:
And if they want to use the bidirectional rss Inside of WordPress, they have to install something because it does not work out of the box, because they.

Dave Winer:
Have what they have exposed.

Matthias Pfefferle:
They have to use the same friends plugin because pushing RSS is not working.

Dave Winer:
Not in my world. They can use any RSS they want. It doesn’t even have to be on WordPress anywhere.

Matthias Pfefferle:
But to make use of it bidirectional, you have to know how it works. You have to install something. You have to use at least an RSS reader or something like that. And then you have the problem that RSS is still one way. There’s no RSS reader that supports commenting inside of the RSS reader.

Dave Winer:
But I told you I’m not doing commenting.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, but you are very special and you know what you are doing. You are not the normal end user.

Dave Winer:
Thank you very much. But what’s the problem? Why is when you started out, you said, but there’s a problem. And in the end it turned out that the problem is that I might not know what I’m doing. But come on, man.

Matthias Pfefferle:
No, the problem is not for you. But the problem is for my mother, for my sister, for my wife.

Dave Winer:
No, it isn’t. No, my system. No, I mean, look, I’m not talking about your mother or your sister. And also, I don’t. Yeah, I’m not talking about that. I. You don’t bootstrap something like this that way. The first users of something like this are motivated people who, you know, whatever, a little bit of, you know. But I don’t think that. Look, I have a lot of experience doing end user software and I don’t see the obstacle here. Right. Is like the baseline ability they have to have. Okay. In order for it to work, they have to have a WordPress site that they can write to. Okay. And it has to be accessible through the WP com API. That’s the one I use. I don’t know if you guys call it that. I call it that because that’s the name of the package, the node package that I use to get into it. I understand there’s another API too. We can maybe work on that later, but I think that’s a very large group of people right there. Anybody that has A site on WordPress.com for example, qualifies. There are what? People that use the Jetpack plugin on other systems. They’re totally on board with this thing, too. So on the writing side, I don’t see an obstacle for, let’s call it casual user.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay, I agree on that.

Dave Winer:
So, in terms of the RSS feed, I already know where one of their RSS feeds is. Right. Because I know the site that they posted to, and I know that’s an RSS feedback, so I automatically subscribe them to their own feed. Okay. I also subscribe them to every feed that they’ve posted to. So. And I happen to have a feed engine sitting behind the scenes that’s fully debugged and ready to go called Feedland. And believe me, they don’t have to install Feedland. We’re running that service, and we’re happy to support them. Then the question is, how do they subscribe to feeds? That turns out not to be complicated either. It’s. We just follow exactly what they do. In Twitter, when you’re looking at a feed, there’s a big button on it says subscribe, and you do. That’s what you do. You click on subscribe, and that’s it. They didn’t have to run a feed reader. They didn’t have to understand what a feed is any more than they would in Twitter.

Matthias Pfefferle:
But that is very centralized, and you can only follow sites that are.

Dave Winer:
Where’s the. It’s not centralized. Well, how’s it centralized?

Matthias Pfefferle:
If you want to have a system where you simply search for something and hit subscribe, the system has to know the URL you are searching for.

Dave Winer:
No, I didn’t say anything about search. When did I say anything about search?

Matthias Pfefferle:
You said it’s the same as on Twitter. The. Yeah.

Dave Winer:
When they see a feed that they want to subscribe to, they just click the button. I didn’t say how they found it.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, but there are going to be.

Dave Winer:
Lots of ways to find it.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, but that is the very different thing I would say with people that grew up with centralized social networks. And maybe that’s the circle to the beginning of how do we describe the web? I think most of the younger generations are not aware of what a link is, what a URL is. They simply use one social network, and if they search for other users, they have that little search box and they search for the username. They do not understand that in a decentralized world that they may have to copy and paste URLs to find a new.

Dave Winer:
No, they won’t. No, they absolutely will not. And right now, let me just be straight with you. I’d be really happy If I had 25 users. Okay? I don’t actually, at this moment, couldn’t handle 25 users. But let’s say in October and November, If I have 25 really interested users who find the idea, it, it won’t matter. I mean, it might still be a little bit difficult for neophyte to come in and do, but all I need is 25 people to get this ball rolling. It’s a bootstrap. When you’re thinking about bootstraps, you don’t think about the complete neophyte or the massive number of people that wouldn’t understand it. That’s not an issue. The issue is, can you get anybody to use it so you can start building the bootstrap so that you can start having a community there that people find interesting? It doesn’t have to be a lot of people, it just has to be people. And that’s how you build these things. You don’t, I don’t know. I can’t tell you to not do things. You don’t have to do this. I’m doing it. Okay. I mean, you just hopefully at the time when this thing starts getting interesting, I hope you’ll take a look at it and think about, well, maybe I want to give that a try.

Matthias Pfefferle:
You know, in the end, I’m very emotional about the technical part I’m depending on, because for me, when I started with all of that, I was very much into this is the best protocol. But for me these days, it’s more about with what protocol I can get the most users subscribed to my content. And the even more important thing, start a conversation about that, because that is really the biggest problem with blogging, that the comment section is dead. No one visits your blog and fills out a comment form anymore.

Dave Winer:
And.

Matthias Pfefferle:
And even if someone is doing that, if you reply to that, he never gets a reminder that there’s a reply to their comment.

Dave Winer:
So let’s fix that.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, but for me, that was the biggest opportunity with Activity Pub, because it was not that I would have to create the critical mass to make that usable. There was already the Mastodon network, and I simply could connect my little block into that big social network that was already working.

Dave Winer:
You’ve already succeeded. I want you to know that you’ve succeeded. Okay. In my case, you Have I found that a post that I put up. I don’t remember which one it was, but it got so much more interest. I basically done the same thing on my own blog. There is a novelty to what you’re doing, you know, and, and you’re going to reach, I’m going to make sure you reach critical mass on what you’re doing. You just need a few more people like me out there that will keep hitting the drum on this. I’m not stopping posting this method, you know, because. Why? First of all, I believe in it under just. I told you before, just. Even if it weren’t fun, okay, it would still be on my list of things to promote because it promotes the text casting idea and it pulls that idea through so just on that basis alone. But it actually is fun. And I think the most fun thing about it is when people, and I’ve seen this happen by the way, when people all of a sudden get the idea that those limits on Mastodon are not necessarily always in their way.

Dave Winer:
Have one, one user. She’s the most brilliant person right now. She’s the number one in our community. She’s amazing. The things that she asks for features are things that are on my list that I’m working on. So you gotta love that, right? I mean, and so she saw my thing, the Bloggers of Mastodon thing. I’ll send you a link. And she said, I thought there was a character limit here. What happened, Dave? Of course that’s not for me to answer. I don’t know what happened. I have no idea how he did it and I don’t care. Why should I give a damn? I mean, all I love is that’s out of my way now, you know. So if you look at it that way, I mean, to entice people to use something like this. All you have to do in this case is so easy because all you have to do is get rid of the headache. There’s this huge headache that happens every time I go over a character limit. I get turned into the most ridiculous person in the world. I have to hack up my own writing to make it fit into some space. Because some ask, excuse me, but some not friendly person decided that there should be a limit here. Yep. They let me put movies on those things. You know, I get 300 characters. Right. But they’ll let me put a movie that’s eight megabytes on it. Right. So it’s not about the memory, is it? Yeah, it’s utterly mindless. I know I keep saying that, but thing is, is that you relieve that pain, you provide a mechanism for the do that. And I. Look, all you have to do to get into your system is be able to post to WordPress. And there are a lot of options for that, believe me. Right. Because The API on WordPress is pretty excellent. The API for WordPress turns out to be an API for Activity Pub, doesn’t it? You ever think about that?

Matthias Pfefferle:
I thought about that after our first discussion about that. So back in, oh, it was some months ago, we talked a bit about your project, Wordland. Maybe you can say some words about that later on.

Dave Winer:
Yeah, I showed that. Right. I mean, that was the point. You guys opened my eyes too though. You see that? And by the way, that’s how you know you’re on the whim. That’s how development was always supposed to work on the web before you got these big companies in there that like thought you were like a Mother Teresa. I’ve been called Mother Teresa. You know who Mother Teresa is, right? Okay, yeah. Well, who are you? Mother Teresa? Don’t you want to make money?

Matthias Pfefferle:
But it was really interesting because I think you mentioned something, that the WordPress API is very stable and it’s very reliable and it’s. That does not. It’s complete and it doesn’t really change. It’s backwards compatible. And I thought about. Yeah, okay, because maybe the WordPress API is the de facto standard to publish long form content on the Fediverse. Because for now there is no real standard.

Dave Winer:
You’re there, you’ve got it. That’s what you’re doing.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. Currently the de facto standard of posting micro content to the Fediverse is the Activity Pub. Not the Activity Pub API, but the Mastodon API. So every decentralized social network tries to reverse engineer the Mastodon API to be compatible with their Mastodon apps and stuff like that. And even we tried to implement that for WordPress, but after our discussion, I really thought about, yeah, maybe we do not have to do that. Maybe we kind of have the de facto standard for long form content, or not even long form content, but for any kind of content on the Fediverse. Because WordPress is not limited to long form.

Dave Winer:
You could, I swear to God, you guys have so much bigger product than you even realized.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Maybe.

Dave Winer:
And I’m talking about WordPress, which is a pretty damn big product, right? There’s a whole other thing. It’s the storage is. You know, we talked about MP3s before and how we need a standard for text too. That’s just like that. And when we come up with it, if we ever do, okay, I promise you WordPress will support it. It doesn’t have to do anything to support it. It already supports it and it scales. And it’s like you said, it’s all, it’s stable and they don’t lock you in. This is another thing I wrote about in the think different about WordPress piece that I wrote. That’s the one I would refer people to from this one. I think that’s the one I would.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Ask them to read right before becoming the most famous guy in the WordPress world. I heard you have a keynote.

Dave Winer:
No, that’s Matt.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, but the second, the second.

Dave Winer:
There’s nobody other than Matt, the second.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Most famous person, you have a keynote on the WordCamp in Canada.

Dave Winer:
I know. I’m excited about that. I really am. Come. You should come.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. Canada is not that it’s not around.

Dave Winer:
The corner, sadly, but I think it’s the United States. See, in my opinion, it’s not cool for us to have tech conferences in.

Matthias Pfefferle:
The U.S. that is true, but because.

Dave Winer:
You’Re going to run into problems at the border, you never know, you might end up in jail for a few weeks. You might get, you know, I mean, seriously could happen. It’s getting worse. So I just don’t think that it’s fair to do that to people. And I think that we. That’s why one of the reasons I wanted to go there, it’s also. I thought maybe I could stand out a little bit better. I also needed the extra time, too. I mean, there’s still more work to do, but there’s a whole other kind of developer that WordPress has never attracted. And I tell you how I know this, because I’m one of them. It I only found out about this API because I stumbled across it in Feedland. We needed to add WordPress login. And I’m coming from Node JS and I’m looking around what kind of APIs exist for this. And I find the WP COM interface, there’s good sample code, I get it running. And then I noticed there’s all these other things that it does. And I started looking at all the features of that API and I was like, I was looking like a kid looking into Fort Knox. I go, oh my God, look at them. Because, you know, I’ll tell you what I thought. Nobody told me in 2017 that WordPress had built this API. I never heard about it. It didn’t get any PR, it wasn’t talked about, I wasn’t invited to a conference or a private meeting to get briefed on it. There was absolutely no communication whatsoever. And I never would have found it unless I had tripped across it in this project that I was doing. I thought that in order to do anything with WordPress you had to do PHP and I don’t do PHP. I mean, you know, you can’t do everything and that just doesn’t have to be one of the languages that I do. But here it is. You showed up in the language that I’m actively developing in and there it was. And the other thing is I have now got code that simplifies that API even further. So I can make it even easier for people. If they just want to write a browser based application that works with WordPress, they don’t have to do anything other than create an account on WordPress.com their developer account, and they’re off and running. So, you know, there’s all these developers out there, that many, I don’t know how many, but there’s a lot of developers in the world, you know, and there’s a tremendous opportunity for building applications just with WordPress as the basis, just with its capabilities. The basis that’s going to open up here, I mean, it can open up, but what has to happen is it’s. I’m glad you say that. I’m so famous, but I need to get to beat the drum so that people hear this over and over, is that if you have a friend who you think might be, you know, find it interesting to write software that runs on top of WordPress and also access accesses Activity Pub through your code, you’re set. Let me show you how to do it. And what you did really seriously did make Activity Pub an awful lot simpler. I didn’t write a single line of activity. Publish code.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. In the end, you simply have to create a post somehow using the internal editor, using the, the API, whatever, it doesn’t matter.

Dave Winer:
See, that’s how you do it. That’s how you do it. That’s how good development based on Interrupt works. You create a new channel for information to flow through and that capability comes in any which way. And you put it into something that already has a lot of interfaces on it, where you’re fairly confident that they’re not going to break this too. I’m talking about Automatic or However you describe WordPress, the development community. It’s not going to break it because it doesn’t break things. It’s that simple. It’s a really powerful place to be. Seriously powerful. It doesn’t have to involve everybody. It just has to get people’s minds working in a different way when they think about WordPress. And don’t kid yourself, that’s hard to do. Once people get locked into an idea about something about what it is very hard to dislodge that. But I’m betting that there are enough creative people around there that are looking for something fun to do that gives them opportunity, hopefully, that it might work. You know, there are a lot of companies that have their platform vendors that screw their developers all the time. I don’t think this is one of those. I don’t know. I may be very naive about that. There’s a lot of anxiety in the WordPress community. I get that. You know, but I always remind you that they didn’t lock you in.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah.

Dave Winer:
So, you know, it’s like in a lot of communities, that’s the bitch. That’s the thing everybody’s upset about in the end.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Copy your code from one host to another, one point the domain to the new host and everything works like before.

Dave Winer:
Yeah, that’s good. I love it. It was like the biggest gift squared. The other thing about it was, is that the API was so much like the API we developed for our first blogging system, which was Manila in the late 90s. So much like that. And I was like, how did that happen? And then I realized, well, it’s a blogging platform. How many different ways could there be to do an API? Not that many. There it was, it was sitting right there and I felt like, you know the story of Rip Van Winkle? Do you know that story? Guy falls asleep for a hundred years and wakes up or 20 years or something, and he wakes up and he discovers the world has changed in so Many different ways. But then it, again, it didn’t change at all. And that’s exactly what I’m having here. It’s sort of like, oh, I mean, these guys have just continued this story. But, you know, some of the things that we did back then haven’t been done here yet. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from too. That’s what Wordland is really radio user land adjusted for, you know, 25 years later. In other words, more modern user interface than it had. But that was a hit product and it. Because it combined the two things. It combined writing and reading, and it was all about rss, you know, then. So believe me, I know this works. It’s not like I’m guessing I’ve been to this place.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So maybe you say some words about what Wordland exactly is.

Dave Winer:
Well, Wordland. Okay, you’re absolutely right. I should say what Wordland is. Wordland is a writer’s tool for WordPress. So the idea is that WordPress is a very powerful, broad product. Its user interface covers all kinds of functionality, and mixed in with all that functionality are the writing tools, but they’re spread all over the place. And so when you’re sitting down to write, what a writer wants is something this. I mean, this is my experience, at least. What a writer wants is a tool that’s for writing. And that’s all I want to do. I want to write, I want to make some changes, I want to refer to a previous document, I want to add a category to something, I want to choose what site this thing is going to. I want to hit the publish button and out it goes and I’m on to the next thing. I also want to have really great bookmarks so that when I need to go back to one of my documents and make a change to it, it’s just choose it from a menu, make the change, hit the publish button, and I’m off. I also want to edit this page. So I’m looking at something that I have ability to edit and I click the button and I’m sitting in the editor, I get to make the change. So it’s all about focusing all of the writing functions in one place and then really working on the user interface. And this is just one very important place. So I poured a lot of time into getting everything to function so that you don’t even notice it. But it’s doing all this great stuff that’s like half of the product and that has been available, is available right now at Wordland Social and You can go sign up and give it a try and see if you like it. Right. But you have to think of that as sort of the parallel of the editor that in Mastodon and Bluesky and Twitter and Threads and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they all have editors in it. This is our editor doesn’t have the limits. It can do titles, it does styling, it does links, you can edit posts. All that doesn’t have any of the limits yet. It doesn’t take up very much more space than those editors do. And it’s just as convenient to get at it as it would be in Twitter. So then there’s the other side, which is the timeline. And the timeline for that I have working right now, and this is very early days, is that it has all of my posts from any of the WordPress sites that I’m authorized to write to. I know what sites the user has access to because there’s API for that. And so any of those sites, if you’ve posted to it, it’ll appear in the timeline. Also any. I want any of the other sites that I post to have RSS feeds. When I say RSS again, I mean all the different kinds of feeds. If it has an RSS feed, then I’m going to put it in my timeline too. So that if I write something on my other on my long term blog, my script scripting.com, which is the blog I’ve been doing for like 30 years, that’s impressive. So that’s not going away, that’s going to stay right. But I want my posts from that blog to show up in my timeline too. I have a podcast feed and I want those in there as well. In other words, I want this timeline to contain all the stuff that I write. I’ve given up on the idea that it can all be in my blog, in one blog. And I’m saying, fine, we’re just going to live with that. And now we have to give you access to all those things. And, and so right now that’s what I’m using. And it works. Now I’m still working on the user interface on there are icons in the left margin, there’s a status box on the right margin. And those things are still being defined and still being worked on. And there’s the things that go little icons that go inside the windows. Some of those things might change. Yeah, it’s still sort of in that level, but. And all I’m hoping For October, whatever, 17th, is it work well enough so that anybody can Use it.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Cool.

Dave Winer:
That functionality I just described, it’s not trying to go all in on all of the functionality of a Twitter or whatever, but it is ready for it. Because in order to get the feed from scripting news to be in there, I had to have subscription implemented because there’s no other way that stuff’s getting it. So behind it all, it’s hooked into feedland.com, yeah. And feedblan.com, we have a protocol in there that runs via WebSockets. And if you hook into that, if an app hooks into that websocket interface, it then gets all of the updates that go through that server.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay.

Dave Winer:
In other words, if a feed has a new item, you get notified. There’s the new item, plus you get all the information about the feed.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Cool.

Dave Winer:
And if it’s something you care about, great. If it doesn’t, you just ignore it. You also get updates so that when an item updates, you know, they change the text or whatever. You get that one too. And so Wordland is sitting there and this is an open protocol. This is documented. I’m going to do. I have already done really good sample code, but I’m going to keep working on it because this is a very. You could think of this. I’m not really joking here, but you could think of it. I am kind of joking though, when I say you can think of sorting as really, really simple syndication. You know, when, when really simple syndication isn’t enough. This is the really, really version because there’s no overhead do whatsoever. I mean, it’s. It’s maybe 100 lines of code to add this and it’s all just. And it’s all in a package. You never have to look inside it. Just say, just send me like, just send me the notifications and then I’ll look at them as they come through. And so then somehow we have to communicate through the user interface of feed of, excuse me, wordland. Somebody lands. We have to communicate through that user interface that these are the user’s other blogs or other feeds. And you know what? Some smart users are going to realize that it doesn’t have to be one of their blogs. It could be anything they want. It could be, you know, could be the New York Times if they want, or it could be, you know, whoever could be any feed they want. There will be no limits there. It’s. If Feedland’s already perfectly capable of subscribing to thousands and thousands of feeds, it’s very well scaled. We also have a version that’s running on feedland.com on the VIP service. And you know, in theory at least, that thing’s supposed to scale at the same rate that WordPress scales. And for a while we can afford to subsidize that, you know, and then say, fine, we’re not going to worry about money to begin with. But over time, what I hope happens is that people find that Wordland’s editor isn’t what they want. They want a different editor because you know what? There’s no one kind of editor that would please everybody. I just tried to find one kind of thing that I thought would work well for most people, over many people. And. And then that second editor is just going to club right in there. It’s not going to have to do any of the things that we did in creating this. Because I’ll tell you, I mean, I’m. One of the things I’m proud of is that I do really nice APIs. And I think that I’ve done that here is that, you know, I’ve factored out so much of it that, you know, and I’m going to keep doing that too. Make it absolutely as simple as possible to get.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So wordland itself has its own API. Okay.

Dave Winer:
Yeah.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Oh, that’s interesting. So you could use the Wordland API to speak to WordPress.

Dave Winer:
Okay, well, I would love to show it to you someday. I mean, it’s right here. It’s open source, my friend. You didn’t get that. I mean, the WebSockets thing, that’s an API that really is API. Right. But there’s a whole other API which is called WP Identity and it just has. It’s a stupid name. But that was the first. You remember I said that the first thing I did with the wp.com API was Identity. So that’s really initially all it was supposed to be for, you know, but it just grew and grew and grew and grew, got all this functionality and there was a way of doing APIs for browser based applications that Facebook used to do and I think they kind of still do it, but they had to completely eviscerate their API in 2016 because they got all that, you know, Citizens United. No, I don’t. It was Cambridge Analytics. Right?

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah.

Dave Winer:
And they had, I mean, you know, they had the great AP greatest API in the world. You could go look anything up, you know, and they cut that off. But the way they did the API was so brilliant that, you know, normally in these things to. To access the remote server, you have to do all this work. And you wonder why is it that everybody has to do all this work? Why don’t they just put all this in one place? That’s what they did. And it took me two days to hook my app up to Facebook and it took me a full month to get into Twitter. It took the equivalent of a full month, you know, to hook into WordPress. But now I’ve got this API that runs on top of that. That should happen in a couple of days. And I’m going to do a hello World app for you.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Perfect.

Dave Winer:
Just a simple editor. And you’re going to see there’s absolutely nothing in it. It’s just really simple. The whole point is like what I really want to do is I really want to get. We have all these developer communities that are so locked in. I have friends that do Mac software and they’re not happy because they just changed the entire user interface of the Mac and they’re all having to do all this work and everything like that. And they’re in every one of these sort of captive markets, really doesn’t understand or particularly care for their developers, you know. And the best platform around is one that doesn’t even like, you know, barely notices that they’re there. You know, the extent that you notice that they’re there, you try to help them and you try to co market. You know, one of the great things about the approaches trying to draw small independent development projects into your sphere is that you, you get to look at all of them and if you decide you want to market one of them, you do a deal with them, they’re right there and they’re, believe me, they’re very happy to work with you. You know, it’s like. And you see all this stuff starting to happen around BlueSky with, at Proto and I’ve talked to some of them. There’s one leaflet, I don’t know if you’ve seen that. It’s, it’s an editor, it is a work of art. I always had so much envy when I saw it. It’s so beautiful. And I contacted him, they were very happy to talk with me and we, you know, exchanged ideas and everything and said, why don’t you port this stuff to WordPress? You’ll be much happier with what you get there. And they’re very, they love it, you know, because bluesky’s paying a little bit of attention to them. They’re not willing though to, you know, if, if, by the way, they made that possible. I mean, leaflet can’t run on Bluesky that’s the thing. Because Bluesky, you know, this is a More. This is a writing tool. And so you can create these posts. As we both know, they don’t fit on Blue Sky. And Blue sky so far hasn’t been willing to budge on this, you know, so they’re just like sitting there, you know, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for Blue sky to figure out that they actually want developers. I think that. And I’ll split, you know, whatever, let’s do it. I just want. I want developers. I want a place where developers can work without being afraid that the platform vendor is going to screw them more. That’s really. That’s what I always hope for. And I don’t want to. I mean, I’ll run it at a certain level, being sort of like the product guy, because that’s all I ever want to be. I don’t want to run a company. I’ve done that. I don’t like it if I do, that means I can’t be a product guy. I’m so old at this point that I want to spend what time I can invest.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. You know, making trouble and making things you love.

Dave Winer:
So there you ask where Word Land is. And that was probably the most comprehensive explanation that I’ve ever given.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So you plan to implement other networks or other platforms in the end, or is this only fully a WordPress thing?

Dave Winer:
Well, yes. Yes. And maybe not. I mean, you know, it all depends on how it goes, you know. Right.

Matthias Pfefferle:
I mean, because scripting your main blog is. I would say it’s based on some kind of outliner.

Dave Winer:
Yeah.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So it’s something completely different. And these two products do not work together at the moment.

Dave Winer:
No. Oh. Actually, once I get out from under all the, you know, there’s a lot of work to do. And Wordland, one of the first things I want to do is hook. I use it. Um, there’s a product called Drummer at Drummer Lamp. It’s an outliner. I use a version of that that’s. That’s in Electron. So it’s a desktop version of it. It’s called Electric Drummer. And that’s what I. I thought it was cool. A cute little pun on electron. Say it’s electric.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. Makes total sense.

Dave Winer:
Yeah. I love naming things. That’s. I mean, that other thing, I just. I love doing that. But, yeah, no, I mean, as soon as I get out from under the Wordland stuff, the next thing I’m going to do is hook up Electric Dr. Drummer to the same API and there’s absolutely no Reason that it can’t work. It used to work, actually, when I was using what you guys call the XML RPC API that I call the Meta Weblog API, which I’m surprised to find that it still works.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah.

Dave Winer:
But, but I can do so much more through the new API. And so that’s what I’m going to do. I. I will love that day. That will be. Because then I can cross post from Scripting News. I don’t know if I’ll do that. I mean, this cross posting thing gets insidious after a while. Right. I mean, you know, and that’s why you want it all to be accessible in one stream. And so then you don’t have to worry about the cross posting. You don’t have to cross post. And the way I’m going to introduce this. Let me. Now that I’ve explained the whole picture is what I’m going to do is. And I told you about what I have in terms of these are all the feeds that go into my blogging work. I’m going to take that and make it public so anybody can use it. All right. And they can all. And It’ll also be Wordland, so they can log in to their WordPress site and they can write right there in there while they’re reading my stuff. And that is going to do the commenting thing right off the bat. And pretty close to being ready with that. I don’t know, maybe a couple of weeks. I really hope before the October Word camp meeting. I hope to have that out and running and it won’t sound very complicated because I’ll just say, hey, this is another way to read my blog.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah.

Dave Winer:
And for the really bright people. And that’s who I want to work with. Right. This is going to make some light bulbs go.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So we need to have a new podcast by the beginning of the next year and that you can show up what you built so far. But because I’m really curious and because that is another nice thing about not cross posting stuff, but really have a remote subscription like with RSS that you do not have. Technically you have a cached copy of the content, but it’s not about posting the content to someone else’s platform. It’s someone subscribes to your content and reads your content somewhere else. Not a limited version of that with only one image instead of 10 and only an excerpt of why the limits.

Dave Winer:
Wherever you see the limits you got. Why. Why do we need these limits? You know, the thing is that so many of them, I think that they Never had that discussion. And they’re. They don’t even have a reason for doing it. They just say, oh, that’s the way we’ve always done it. You know, I think it’s amazing that you’ve been working on this that long. You’ve been in this the whole time that we’ve had social media. Basically what a struggle it was. You know, it’s like I didn’t give up on that whole thing until 2017. That’s when I gave up. That’s when I wrote a piece called I want my old blog back. And then that’s exactly what I did.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, I. I totally feel the pain.

Dave Winer:
We all do.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So I’m not.

Dave Winer:
Oh, well, we’ll just cry. You know what they call it Posse, right? Yeah. It sounds like a nice idea. I’ve been beating my head against the law on that one and, you know, glad you found a great acronym for it, but it ain’t never going to happen.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. So maybe for the ones that do not know what Posse is, it’s the idea of the indie web. Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. It’s kind of a new acronym for cross posting.

Dave Winer:
I would say it depends on a web that doesn’t exist, that we don’t have, but we could create it. And it has to be done with seduction. It has to be done by dangling little carrots out and saying, don’t you think that would be fun? Why don’t we give that a try? And then if it isn’t, then we try something else and we keep trying stuff. I think there’s a pony in there. I think there’s a milkshake. I’m using American idioms, though I’m not sure you know what I mean by.

Matthias Pfefferle:
That, but I totally don’t understand what you mean. Sorry, but I would say most of the listeners of this podcast are from the English speaking world.

Dave Winer:
I will write a blog post.

Matthias Pfefferle:
I hope they understand I use the term.

Dave Winer:
I think there’s a pony in there. And I will explain what it means because it’s a good thing.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay.

Dave Winer:
All right.

Matthias Pfefferle:
So you mentioned one thing, that the current version of Wordland is a bit relying or depending on the WordPress.com flavor of the WordPress API. And you plan to maybe have the generic WordPress API support time.

Dave Winer:
I wouldn’t be the ideal person to.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Do that, but yeah, that’s why I’m mentioning it, because maybe there are some listeners to this podcast who want to do that conversion that do want to contribute and help with that’s what I’m looking forward to.

Dave Winer:
Point where not everything has to go through me. And actually it should be really easy to do it because the API I told you about, the Facebook API, because that’s all that has to be ported. That’s the only thing. Now you know that there are going to be some APIs that won’t be there, right? I can’t ask for all your sites on the other API, because that concept doesn’t exist.

Matthias Pfefferle:
That for sure.

Dave Winer:
Although I would at some point like to discuss a more broad API that would make it possible for that to work. I don’t see it as an impossibility, I just see it as work that they can’t have a site ID and have it be a number in. Or maybe they can. That’s up to the people. I don’t know how that works on the back end, you know, but maybe we can have a protocol where a site ID is acceptable and a DNS, a domain name is acceptable as id and either one will work. And then it can support sites other than WordPress, which I think would be phenomenal. Let growth happen there too. I mean, so you create something that’s incredibly simple or runs in some weird place that nobody ever imagined, and if it just supports enough of the API to plug into the community of developers. And the nice thing about it is that, I mean, not everything I’m doing is open source. But FYI, I want to be clear up front, not at least at the beginning. Big pieces of it are. I mean, all of Feedland is open source and that’s a GPL license. So I chose a license to be compatible with WordPress’s license. So it’ll just sort of plug into that same model. Yeah, the WP identity is MIT licensed. Because I don’t want. I don’t want to manage it. I just, you know what? If you want to be compatible, okay. If you don’t want to be compatible, I wish you would think again, because I think we’re all better off if you are. But I wanted, I wanted that to be out there because I wanted it to be easy for people to run their own servers. I didn’t want to be appearing to lock in anybody in any way. I have no interest in that. I’m not thinking about things like that. In fact, I’m very much against that. And then there’s the browser interface API, and I have a little bit more work to do on that before I want to lock that down, but it’s certainly reviewable at this point. I will Be happy to send you a link to that and have a look at.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, perfect.

Dave Winer:
I’ll send you a link to all that stuff. And this is important document. I want to point people to this. I think we have. Yeah, I think this is great. Well, come to Canon Web. Come on, it’ll be fun.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. I think it’s one or two. Two days after my birthday.

Dave Winer:
So it’s Happy birthday.

Matthias Pfefferle:
And there are quite some events in October and November. I’m in Berlin, I think the first weekend of October because there’s a Fediverse meeting there and it’s one of the few in Germany. So I thought I have to at least catch that one.

Dave Winer:
But anybody that’s listening to this who’s in Canada, totally cool.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. I think there’s still tickets available. So if you want to meet Dave, then go to Canada. The other famous activity pub feed, Worse guy who’s there is Evan Prodromo, one of the editors of the activity Pub Spec.

Dave Winer:
Yeah. And we’re good. So I’ve been talking with him. I mean, I, you know, maybe we’ll do something, he and I together, you.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Know, a workshop that would work.

Dave Winer:
I’ve known him for a very long time, you know, and I did help him promote Identica. I was very excited about Identical.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah, that, that.

Dave Winer:
Yeah, I mean, it was like, thank you. Somebody thinks this stuff should be decentralized, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. We’re going to have a lot of fun here. So that’s also important too. Right?

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. I am so glad that you joined the podcast. Same viewer and yeah, it was a pleasure and a great honor to have one of my.

Dave Winer:
I just want to be your friend. I just like to be your friend.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Okay.

Dave Winer:
Why don’t you, like, get used to describing me as your friends?

Matthias Pfefferle:
Yeah. Then it was a great pleasure to have one of my friends there.

Dave Winer:
All right, man, thank you. Have a nice day.

Matthias Pfefferle:
Bye.

Dave Winer:
Bye.