I wrote a blog post on Twitter this morning, sort of a version 0.4 of the talk I want to do at WCUS in August in Phoenix.

I want to offer cross-posting to twitter in an upcoming product, but I think the user should pay for the service, not me, a one-person independent developer.

I doubt if they'll do it, but this is general advice to companies that provide online services that they want to get paid for. If you depend on developers, you're shutting out sole proprietors who don't want to get caught up in the VC world, or don't have a chance to.

In the early days of the web and in the PC/Mac platforms before that, a creative software writer could get going without having to fund their users' storage needs. PCs came with storage built into the hardware. And in the early web days everyone was something of a geek and could be relied on to find a place on their own, to store their writing (not a perfect system by any means).

It's been 31+ years since I started my blog and still I can't offer writing software easily, with one exception, with WordPress. This is something I'm not sure photomatt et al are focused on. It's why WordPress has so much potential to grow the web.

The thing many people don't realize is that WordPress unlike pretty much everything else does not lock users in. It's part of their ethos. They run their service as part of the web, not an exploiter of the web.

When Matt talks about being an open source company (true) he's leaving out something equally important, that it's part of the web, unlike most if not all of the other choices.

When I speak at WCUS in August, I'd like to invite Matt to come up on stage and take a bow. Because there's a reason why such a great community has grown around his product, but we haven't been focusing on it and encouraging independent developers to see WP as part of the web that welcomes them, and does not lock the users or developers in.

PS: This will appear on my blog later today. I've started using twitter again to write early drafts of blog posts, and I especially like that they've eliminated character limits for paying customers. Nothing wrong with charging for services that people *want* to pay for.

PPS: I'm posting here again because it's more alive than Bluesky, by a lot, and Bluesky is just as much of a ripoff as X, except they haven't sold out to a billionaire yet. They should work with the web instead of trying to replace it, then I'll feel more at home there.

I'm using EMX more than Bluesky, consciously -- realizing it was a mistake to move my social web act over there. There's no discourse to keep me there so I'm giving it less of my bandwidth.

I tried an experiment today, Paul Graham, a big tech influencer on EMX said all the Tesla haters were seemed to be gone, so I chimed in that I am one, and have just returned. I wanted to see what would happen. Yeah I got trolled. Won't be doing that again.

hate == love + betrayed. You can't hate something you don't also love. If you go back before last year's election, I was borderline about Musk, happy to loved the car without thinking of him every damn time I drove it. Maybe I should start writing about it again. I promise it will be a very different story.

Also EMX is what I'm calling Elon Musk's X. I think calling it Twitter now is not right. But I don't see X as the name of a service or product. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but most good names have 2-4 syllables with 3 generally thought to be ideal. Look around you, see how things are named. That imho is why we like Claude better than ChatGPT.

I didn't write about the Knicks prior to last night's game because I had no idea what to write.

The Knicks in the Finals is something I had a hard time understanding, even thinking about. To me the Knicks are soulful losers. They're like once-future hall-of-famer Carmelo Anthony surrounded by people who shouldn't even be in the NBA, but otherwise are lovely individuals. When they asked Melo what his goal was he said it was to win a championship, but the reporters never followed up with the obvious question -- "Really?" They did make the playoffs, three times, in the Age of Melo, and they made it to the second round one of those three seasons, but that was it as far as Melo's championship aspirations went. He should've been on one of LeBron's teams, like JR Smith and Iman Shumpert, both Knicks alumni in the Melo period, who were fine players and did win with LeBron at Cleveland.

Going into the game last night I thought maybe the pundits were right, that the real NBA Finals was the previous round between the San Antonios and the Oklahoma Cities. But last night that was debunked. At what point did I realize this? It wasn't until the game was over, ABC announcer Mike Breen said at the exact moment the game was over "..their 12-game win streak" which revealed that I had little faith the streak would be preserved. I thought 11 was pretty great, but 12? Until that exact moment -- unthinkable.

In the first part of the game when San Antonio looked like they might rout the poor unprepared Knicks, I thought okay, but couldn't we just concede so we don't have to watch? In that moment I appreciated what the Clevelands must have been feeling as they shrunk to nothing faced with the Knicks onslaught? How about if we all go home now at some point they must all have been thinking.

I'm a Mets fan first, and I bring the Mets philosophy to every sport, including the NBA and software. I'm here for the game. Sure I love it when we win, but if the Knicks went down in the final test, I'd still be a happy camper. Look they made it to the freaking Finals! Some Mets fans say the team slogan is You Gotta Believe. I say Wait Till Next Year! Same for the Knicks. Same for every software product I make that no one bothers to try out.

This Knicks team is classic. Every one of their players would be a star on any other team, including the bench players. Some of them whose contracts expire at the end of the series will certainly go to other teams. But what a thrill to have this group all on the same team and that team is my lovely Knicks.

Last night's game was a lesson, you should always be open to the possibility of winning because sometimes you do.

PS: My friend Dave Carlick sent me a text overnight: "I watch the Knicks rooting for you. How tribal is that?" I had a longish reply. "I wrote a piece this morning after reading this comment, and of course I am rooting for the Knicks in some sense, but a win here is about more than winning -- it's a transformation. I've heard other people say this and the Knicks are us -- in a city that has disagreements about everything the only thing everyone is on board with are the Knicks. We're really comfortable with the Knicks as losers, and this has already become an unequivocal change. It's a whole new situation. Unless something really weird happens now, the Knicks will be great next year too, and the year after. So it's like witnessing a moon landing Dave. Underneath that of course I'm rooting for success, the same way we rooted for it for the initial moon landing in 1969."

Is Bluesky on the web? Yes, to an extent. I can post the url of an item I wrote on Bluesky, using an HTML link. That is how the web works. First you're on my blog, or reading it somewhere else where my blog is projected, via RSS. Then you click an anchor element, and you're instantly transported to Bluesky, to the specific place where my post is stored. In less than a second you're reading the thing I referenced. That's the web, right there.

But it doesn't work the other way. They love it when you send people to their site, but not so much if you want to send them away. Sending people away is a sensitive concept to Bluesky's investors. Why would you do that? This is not a new point where the web and silos disagree. The web says "let them go" and the silos ask "do we look like idiots?"

But they will support the web in both directions if they are forced to by competition or user expectations (pretty much the same thing). That's why podcasting remains unsiloized after over 20 years. If people expect choice, they won't use clients that don't make it easy to switch.