Notes
Short thoughts, updates, and quick posts. (1647 total)
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There is a fork of rss.chat in the wild that supports basic federation between instances enabling cross community conversations for pre-defined approved instances. Check it here
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RSC — Really Simple Conversations — is a feeds-native social timeline: people who post here and people who post on their own site are equal citizens. Everything travels as RSS — posts, replies, whole conversations — so following, threading, and federation work with nothing but open feeds.
My goal with RSC is not just to publish the code of how it operates and interop but also to publish the spec/plans used to build the code itself.
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Open-source collaboration in the age of AI
I am not going to reconstruct the entire disagreement that prompted this post.
Some of the public exchanges have been deleted. Other parts happened privately or by email. I have no interest in tracing every sentence, assigning blame line by line, or producing a forensic account of who said what. That would only prolong a conflict that has already taken up too much space.
But people noticed that I removed my participation from the project, and I have started receiving emails from strangers asking what happened. So I want to explain the broader issue, without turning a personal disagreement into public theatre.
Open-source collaboration does not necessarily become easier because AI makes it easier to inspect code, identify bugs, produce patches, and write detailed issues. In some ways, it becomes considerably harder.
You can spend time formulating an issue carefully and professionally, only for it to be perceived by the repository owner as a list of orders.
That owner is, of course, entirely free to reject the contribution. They can close the issue, say that it is outside the project’s scope, explain that it is not on the roadmap, or simply decide that they do not want to pursue it. There are thousands of legitimate ways to govern an open-source project.
Governance by burnout is not one of them.
When you use an AI tool to help document a problem, the resulting issue may contain precise examples, references to specific lines, screenshots, reproduction steps, and concrete observations gathered by running the software outside the environment of its original author.
That can be useful. It can also be overwhelming.
The problem is that the intention behind such a contribution may not survive the way it is received. You may believe that you are documenting a bug thoroughly. The maintainer may see a wall of text, an unsolicited audit, or an attempt to dictate the project’s direction.
You can ask questions first. You can soften the language. You can repeatedly state that the maintainer is free to ignore the suggestion. None of that guarantees collaboration when the other side does not experience the contribution as collaborative.
Most of my experiences have been different.
I have submitted issues and pull requests to several projects, including repositories connected to my professional work. Some of those contributions were written with the help of AI—not because I could not be bothered to write them myself, but because the tool already had the context: the code, the logs, the behaviour I had observed, and the steps that exposed the bug.
When the issue was valid, it was investigated. When the patch fixed a real problem, it was reviewed. Sometimes it was merged directly. Sometimes the maintainer rewrote it to match the project’s architecture, conventions, or preferred way of working.
That is normal. A contribution is not an instruction. It is material offered to the project.
For Indiekit, for example, I submitted a skeleton pull request of roughly two thousand lines containing the foundations of a Microsub plugin. It was not something the lead developer could review immediately. It required time and several email exchanges. But the contribution was handled professionally.
That first pull request opened the way for further work, with the plugin I already use in production gradually being reviewed and reconstructed under the oversight of the person responsible for the project.
I have seen similar responses in projects such as Dolibarr, Odysseus, and ComfyUI. A suspected bug was investigated. Its existence was corroborated. A fix was discussed or implemented. Everyone using the project could then benefit.
That is one of the core ideas behind open source.
This is not an argument that AI is inherently good or bad. It is an argument that collaboration still depends on people who actually want to collaborate.
A project can publish its code under an open-source licence without being socially open to outside participation. That is entirely legitimate, but it should be understood honestly. Otherwise, openness risks becoming more of a posture than a practice.
The recent conflict also showed me how easily both sides can misread each other.
The maintainer indicated that they could not follow or process what I had written because it was too much. I interpreted this as a request for greater clarity and replied with another comment summarizing my previous points, together with screenshots from my implementation.
I believed I was reducing the burden.
In reality, the person was angry. They had perceived my earlier issues as orders and felt overwhelmed by my participation as a whole. My attempt to clarify the situation therefore became another contribution to the very problem they were describing.
I later tried to explain myself privately and apologized. I was also transparent that some of the issues and comments had been written partly, or sometimes almost entirely, with Claude’s assistance.
Again, this was not because I had randomly asked a model to invent criticisms of somebody else’s project. The tool was helping me work on the implementation. It already held the context of the bugs and limitations I had encountered, so using that context to draft an issue was the most direct workflow.
But the origin of the text does not erase its effect on the person receiving it.
Everyone is overwhelmed. Maintainers especially are often expected to write the software, review code, answer questions, manage releases, handle support, moderate discussions, and absorb the emotional reactions of users—all without compensation.
Adding more explanations, even explanations intended to correct a misunderstanding, can simply produce more pressure.
My response was therefore to withdraw. I removed my contributions and comments where I could, apologized for the parts for which I could take responsibility, and moved on.
That was not a protest against my work being rejected. Nobody is required to accept an issue, a patch, an idea, or a contribution. In a world where AI makes bootstrapping increasingly accessible, people can fork a project and take it in another direction. That freedom is essential, and it should not change.
The issue is not rejection.
The issue is the growing potential for misunderstanding, misperception, and misjudgment between people working at radically different speeds, with radically different expectations, using tools that can generate more material than any small project is equipped to absorb.
Over the coming years, situations like this will become common.
Contributors will have to learn that the ability to identify ten problems does not mean that a maintainer can process ten issues. The ability to generate a detailed analysis does not mean that detail is always helpful. A technically correct contribution can still arrive in a socially destructive form.
Maintainers, in turn, may need clearer ways to communicate what kind of participation they want, how much they can realistically review, and whether outside contributions are genuinely welcome.
We are entering largely uncharted territory. The tools are evolving faster than the social practices around them.
We will need to rediscover some old rules of collaboration and invent new ones: smaller contributions, clearer boundaries, explicit expectations, consent before large interventions, and a better awareness that attention—not code—is often the scarcest resource in an open-source project.
AI can help us produce more.
It cannot make us ready to receive more.
Whoever reads this, I came and go in Peace, I will keep doing my part the way I see fit, but I have definitely learned a lesson here and for that, I’m thankful.
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There is a Ideas markdown file in the RSC GitHub repo but I want to share on my blog some of the things currently in development :
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Better user management Users should be able to cancel and remove their accounts and cascade removal of their posts and replies.
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better moderation and governance for feeds
creating an open publishing system is easy, moderating it is a pain in the A, so before this goes into a direction I don’t want I want to be able to have the tools to moderate feeds the system ingest.
I want to be able to differentiate an RSS feed from a compatible textcasting instance and RSS feeds added by users.
Currently, there is no difference between a user a a “remote user” representing an RSS feed subscribed by a user, not all feeds are textcasting feeds so we need a way for admins to decide which other instance they federate to, think subscribe bidirectionally and users added RSS feeds.
If/when an item comes from a remote feed I want to be able to moderate it, hide it, remove it, block the source if needed.
Inevitably someone will use one the demo sites to publish unwanted content or subscribe to a dubious feed just to see How it goes…
- Gated community Currently registration is open and users can even make temporary posts to try the app, these guest users without a formal registered account are wiped periodically unless they verify their email registration.
I want this to be configurable, each instance will have different requirements, RSC need to come up with tools to help operator handle an instance.
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Better enclosure support Right now the system doesn’t support enclosure (podcasts) obviously the underlying tech support it, it’s RSS after all but the web front-end doesn’t know what to do with it, I want a shiny play button where needed and the ability to properly display media elements.
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Better integration with YouTube, Funkwhale, SoundCloud, Spotify A link from there should display an embedded player and fallback to link if no JS
There is probably a tons of things I’m not including here, my brain is fried today.
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Stumbled upon a few (local) #AI tools that made me really curious
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@wjmaggos@liberal.city it doesn’t have that… At most if a lot of different instances existed, and were interlinked you would have distributed reach, can that be called social media boost? I don’t know… So yes currently #RSC is a social network with integrated RSS feeds, literally made for small communities with specific topics… Albeit it could also be used in different ways
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Hmmm I wasn’t expecting THAT :)
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Show HN: RSC, a feeds-native social timeline you can self-host (rsc.rmdes.be)
- HN link
edit : name changed
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Well the cat is out of the bag : if you like #RSS and the idea of a social layer on top of the existing web without lockin, ads and algorithms try it : https://rsc.rmdes.be #Fediverse #ATproto #ActivityPub
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The technical aspect of Odyssey IMAX filming is in itself astounding work.
I had no idea it was this complex and old-school to produce an IMAX movie.
Makes me want to watch it again… In a IMAX screen this time 😅
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Working on something really cool, but its too soon to show, all I can say is its about RSS Reader, Micropub and Webmentions
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This is a test
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Testing Phandroid via Obtainium/F-Droid
This post is published through my Micropub endpoint, which creates a new entry in MongoDB. Eleventy then retrieves that entry during the build process and generates a static version of the post.
Any reactions or replies should trigger a Webmention, which is then received and processed by my Indiekit site.
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L’accord Rossel–IPM pose les fondations d’un affaiblissement durable de la presse locale et régionale en Belgique.
Ce scénario n’a rien de nouveau. Aux États-Unis, la disparition massive des journaux locaux a précédé l’apparition de véritables déserts informationnels, laissant des territoires entiers sans contre-pouvoir journalistique, sans enquête de proximité et sans surveillance réelle des pouvoirs politiques et économiques. Le résultat est connu : la viralité de la désinformation via les réseaux sociaux, davantage de désinformation, moins de participation démocratique et des institutions locales plus facilement capturées.
La France suit une trajectoire comparable : concentration croissante des médias, recul du pluralisme, marginalisation des rédactions indépendantes et uniformisation progressive du débat public. Quelques grands propriétaires décident de plus en plus de ce qui mérite d’être visible, discuté ou ignoré. Cette concentration ne suffit pas, à elle seule, à expliquer la montée de l’extrême droite, mais elle contribue à créer un espace médiatique où ses thèmes, ses obsessions et son vocabulaire finissent par devenir omniprésents.
Pendant ce temps, une caste politique et économique toujours plus étroite conserve l’accès aux plateaux, aux éditoriaux et aux leviers de décision, tandis que le reste de la société devient progressivement invisible.
Couplée à une répression systématique des mouvements sociaux et une criminalisation constante de toute forme de manifestations, désobéissance civiles, c’est la porte ouverte à une dégénérescence démocratique sans retour.
La Belgique, une fois encore, semble choisir de reproduire les mauvaises idées déjà testées ailleurs : sacrifier la diversité éditoriale, l’indépendance des rédactions et l’information de proximité au nom de la sacro-sainte rentabilité.
Mais la presse n’est pas une industrie comme une autre. Son utilité ne se mesure pas uniquement à ses marges, à ses abonnements ou à ses économies d’échelle. Une démocratie saine a besoin de rédactions nombreuses, indépendantes, concurrentes et suffisamment financées pour enquêter, déranger et rendre visibles des réalités que les grands centres de pouvoir préféreraient souvent maintenir dans l’ombre.
Quand toute la presse quotidienne francophone finit par dépendre du même groupe, le problème n’est pas seulement économique.
C’est une menace directe contre le pluralisme démocratique.
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The United States’ 250th birthday celebration looked less like a national commemoration than a cheap, Trump-centric political rally, detached from the everyday reality of millions of Americans.
Independence Day increasingly feels repurposed as a celebration of one man rather than of a republic.
If that trajectory continues, the real test will not be the fireworks but the midterms: whether democratic institutions remain capable of constraining executive power, or whether political retaliation, institutional erosion, and the concentration of power become [the new normal.] (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/opioid-of-the-masses/489911/)
The measure of a democracy is not how loudly it celebrates its founding, but how well it protects the institutions meant to outlive any president.
The 250th edition of independence Day was a tragic display of ignorance, cupidity and political sectarianism orchestrated by the Trump elected regime.
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Tournage avec France 2 affaires sensibles pour chardonsbleus.org
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J’ai reçu un spam pour le renouvellement de Norton anti-virus, d’un coup je me suis senti vieux :P
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I don’t follow the games but I do follow US politics and obviously the Trump regime wouldn’t miss that one.
FIFA loves to pretend football and politics should never mix.
Adorable.
By allowing the U.S. government to treat Iran as a political target during the World Cup, FIFA did not stay neutral. It simply outsourced the dirty work to the host country.
And in doing so, it created a precedent.
Future hosts now know the rule: use visas, borders and entry restrictions as political weapons, and FIFA will look the other way — provided the stadiums are shiny enough and the sponsors are comfortable.
There is no walking that back.
The “world’s game” is now apparently open to everyone, unless the host government behaves like a drunk bouncer.
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La nuit a été rude…
chardonsbleus.org