This morning I'm going change the way rss.chat saves and serves its feeds. It's too hard when setting up a new instance to create and configure a location on S3 to store them, so we're going to put them in the SQL database we keep and serve from there. The URLs of the feeds will change. I figure it's early enough in the process to do this. Also we have a demo server up so you can try out the software now. But it is just 1/2 of the functionality of the social network -- the writing half. Some people have asked if they can use WordPress for this. Yes, but -- it would need to have specific support added to their RSS feeds to make it work. That's outlined on the source namespace site. We're starting over in a way -- X is on the right path here, getting rid of the character limit (mostly) and supporting links, styling, the ability to edit posts. It's still too awkward but they're going in the right direction. Imho the twitter-like systems cut too much from the web in their idea of what text is. I wrote a spec for this in 2022 called textcasting.org. This is what we call in tech a "bootstrap." First you take a step in the direction you want to go, and you open it up to other developers. If they don't add the thing we need (a community of social network readers) we'll do it, and keep going until someone gets the idea to steal the idea from us. Then we will do something surprising -- assuming they are respectful (ie no personal attacks) -- we'll promote their work, and when a second and third comes along we'll promote them too. Because we're on the web not only don't we mind competition, we need competition to make the bootstrap work. Note the web itself was a bootstrap when TBL introduced it. It was a simple version of what it would be come. But the time was right, and the demo was good, and soon we had Mozilla, then Netscape an MSIE and Firefox and Chrome and on and on. It took a few years before RSS came along and feed readers, and after that -- Twitter, and that's when the bootstrap party was over. We've lived in that world long enough, is the thesis of rss.chat -- time to return what we've learned to the web, and get on with the bootstrap we suspended in 2006. So when you try out demo.rss.chat -- you will see 1/2 of the social network we're defining, the writing half. And we will provide example code that shows you how to get started with a great reader app. And since we're in the age of AI, you will be able to create one if you have an idea, even if you aren't an experienced programmer. The only part of this that is real today is rss.chat. But we're going to keep going. ;-) As they say -- Still diggin!