I am sorry to have to continue this thread, but there are more developments to assess. In a followup, Dave Winer shares he does not get much in the way of views of his content on Twitter. He then tells Ben Werdmuller (and the rest of us) that “we have to create our own social web”.
Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it! If someone wants to have a social web based on RSS, they are going to have to create it themselves, instead of trying to “boil the ocean” and get every other social network software platform to add features to use RSS as the transport mechanism for…
I am sorry to have to continue this thread, but there are more developments to assess. In a followup, Dave Winer shares he does not get much in the way of views of his content on Twitter. He then tells Ben Werdmuller (and the rest of us) that “we have to create our own social web”.
Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it! If someone wants to have a social web based on RSS, they are going to have to create it themselves, instead of trying to “boil the ocean” and get every other social network software platform to add features to use RSS as the transport mechanism for social network applications. Then, they are going to have to convince other people to use it instead of existing social network software.
From the Mastodon About page, Eugen Rochko created Mastodon in 2016 because he was “dissatisfied with the state and direction of Twitter”. That was 9 years ago! Mastodon as an application has taken a long time to reach the position it holds today. rssCloud has been supported in Dave Winer’s blogging tools since 2001, and rssCloud support was added to WordPress in 2009 (see reference here), but there has been almost no uptake of rssCloud as a basis for blogging or social network tools. Perhaps part of the reason why is how Dave Winer responds to negative feedback on his tools in a negative way (examples: Feedland and Drummer).
I have described what a social network should have, and that definition covers all current social networking applications. Dave Winer gave his own description of a RSS-based Twitter app in January 2025, and it matches up pretty well with the app I developed, My Status Tool (demo version, repo for code). I also created a portal site for RSS-based apps for social networking (The Feed Network), so there is a place for people to get started (but I do not see it as my mission to try to evangelize this area). Dave has talked about what his new vision would be using WordLand (September 2025), but this “new vision” is nowhere to be seen. Show us the beef!