#186 – Dave Winer on Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing

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So on the podcast today we have Dave Winer. Dave’s journey into the heart of Silicon Valley began in the 1980s when he left Wisconsin and moved to California with two products and a dream to achieve fame and fortune in the world of technology. Driven by a deep belief that real communication involves people truly connecting, he set out to make his mark.

Early on, he found himself in a memorable meeting with Steve Jobs. Both were in their early twenties, bursting with ambition and self-assurance. Their encounter was fiery and competitive, yet it marked the start of Dave’s lifelong mission to wire the world together, not just with technology, but by bringing people closer through it.

If you’ve ever subscribed to a blog, listened to a podcast, or shared your thoughts online, chances are you’ve benefited from Dave’s pioneering work. He’s the developer behind influential technologies like RSS, and a longtime advocate for open, user owned, publishing platforms.

He describes himself as someone who wrote the first versions of lots of software, wants to work with everyone, still has big ideas, he likes things to be open from top to bottom and doesn’t care for greedy people.

Today we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the walled gardens of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

But the conversation isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s a call to action for reclaiming the internet’s potential. Dave explains what went wrong with the evolution of the social web, why he thinks blogging tech like RSS just need more love, and how the influx of money and centralisation stifled the creativity and interoperability the web was built for.

You’ll also get to hear about Dave’s latest efforts to reignite those original web ideals. He reveals the thinking behind Wordland, a minimalist and powerful writing tool for WordPress users that puts freedom, portability, and open protocols front and centre.

Dave also lays out his Textcasting manifesto, challenging platforms to truly support writers with features like unlimited length, markdown support, and true ownership of content, without the need for permission or platform lock-in.

Dave truly is a pioneer of the internet, and is certainly not finished yet. He’s putting WordPress at the centre of many of his future endeavors.

If you’re passionate about owning your content, deeply curious about web history, or looking for inspiration on how technology can empower rather than control, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes.

And so without further delay, I bring you Dave Winer.

I am joined on the podcast today by Dave Winer. Hello Dave.

[00:04:26] Dave Winer: Hey, how you doing?

[00:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: I confess, I’m going to get this out the way and I’m going to put it on the record because Dave Winer has been in my brain for about 20 years or more. And I’m going to allow Dave the opportunity to do a bio. He may lean into that and tell us many, many things, or he may not. But I would just like to offer my profound congratulations for many of the things that I literally have as the foundational bits of my working life.

Many of those bits are because of you, and I would like to express my enormous thanks for the way that you’ve done that, the stuff that you’ve built, the method in which you deployed that, and the way that you didn’t tie it up to a subscription model.

And, with that out of the way, I would just like to offer you the opportunity to introduce yourself. So do you mind just little potted bio, two or three minutes tops, something like that.

[00:05:18] Dave Winer: Wow. I didn’t realize I was gonna be doing this. Well, I’m a software developer and a blogger. I started software development when I was a grad student in the 1970s, at the University of Wisconsin. And I immediately knew that this is what I was going to do in my whole career. Up to that point, I didn’t know.

It just fit. Everything about developing software, and communication with software. I used to call it communication with a big C. So you talk about communication with a little C is like wiring everything together. But the big C, its people getting connected. And that was going back to the, I guess the early eighties.

I moved from Wisconsin to California to Silicon Valley, and I had two products. My goal was to go to California and achieve fame and fortune, and it didn’t happen all at once at least. One of my first meetings was with Steve Jobs, and we were both exactly the same age, 23 or something like that, and very arrogant and full of ourselves, and we ended up insulting each other, and I have a lot of regrets about that because I had the two products and he wanted the wrong one. And I told him, man, that’s the wrong one. You should want the other one.

And anyway, so I ended up hooking up with a company that eventually became the biggest software company in the valley and then exploded. And then I started my own company. And that was a pretty long haul. But we got there. We made software for the Apple 2, the IBM PC, the Macintosh.

We had a really big hit in 1986, product called MORE. It was a really good product, but it also hit the market at exactly the right time. And then I sold the company and then I started developing software on my own, because that’s really what I always wanted to do. I was a CEO because I had to be, because nobody else understood the idea, that we were doing there.

And that’s actually been the story of my life, is like when I start something, I tell everybody how great it’s gonna be, and then they look at me like, what are you talking about? I have no idea. Or, that’s not useful. Or AI, this is what they say today. Oh, AI is gonna do that for us. And I go, no, I actually, I don’t think it is.

And so one thing led to another. I started making software on the web. I saw the web as complete liberation. Because the tech industry had gotten so congested with the power of the big companies. This happens periodically by the way. You end up, they get, they lock themselves in, and then they just protect their lock in. And then nothing happens for a while, and then an explosion happens, usually. A new company comes along with a big idea, and the big companies don’t understand it, and all of a sudden. And that was the web.

And there were things before that. The PC was like that to some extent. The Mac was. Rock and roll was like that for sure. The Beatles fit into that pattern of things that fundamentally changed everything. And the web was one of those things too.

And it blew the doors off the tech industry. Whenever a big tech company tried to dominate the web, it just didn’t work. It didn’t work. Until eventually it did work, and now we’re pretty thoroughly dominated. We got dominated by Facebook, by Google. Twitter, very influential company, and a few others, and now it’s Bluesky. They’re out there telling them that everybody, that they’re decentralized and whatever. They say they’re on the web, they’re not on the web.

The web means something. It means that I can add a feature that hooks into your product and I don’t need your permission to do it. That’s what you have to have for the web.

You also have to have links. If you don’t give the person writing in your environment the ability to put hyperlinks in their text, you can’t say you’re the web. Because you’ve deprived the writers of the one most essential thing that they need, the ability to defer to somebody else as the expert on this topic, and build these structures. Twitter, took that out. They just said, we don’t need that. Or put character limits on it. Or they said no titles. Or you can’t edit your post, or you can’t put a podcast, you can’t put an audio on there, on a post. And they add an API and that’s really nice, but it’s still, you don’t get that freedom. There’s nothing like that there.

[00:09:40] Nathan Wrigley: I watched the internet develop in much the same way as I might watch a game of, we call it football, you may call it soccer, in that I’d be in the crowd and all of these characters are moving around on the field and doing important things and it just develops.

The game is afoot and it develops and it’s like evolution. Curiously, you were one of the people on the field kind of making these decisions. And so with the benefit of hindsight, looking back, it sounds like there’s a part of you which, not just a part of you, I feel like it might be a big part, which regrets a lot of the way that it has developed. The beginnings of the internet, there seem to be more, I don’t know, blue sky thinking, let’s put it that way.

[00:10:19] Dave Winer: We actually called it that. We actually called it that, believe it or not, a piece of blue sky. The clouds, sky is overcast and then there’s a little bit of blue sky and we’re all gonna go there. Yeah, it was like that, but what was wrong was my model was wrong. My model for humanity.

Our model, the early web people. We had this very idealistic idea of what humanity was, and how they would take advantage of the opportunity. And that includes the entrepreneurs, because they create structures where people can be very abusive to each other, and they don’t do anything really about that.

And then the people, and we still live with this, in fact, well this comes up sometimes people say, you’re being altruistic. I’ve heard that said, and I reject that. I’m not being altruistic. If anything trying to set an example for what we have to do collectively in order to have freedom.

If you don’t, if you don’t enable your competitors, you don’t deserve users, is my feeling. And in fact, you can see that playing out in the WordPress community right now, right? That is what the big controversy seems to be. I’m gonna step back from it. I’m not part of the WordPress community. It’s not that I’m not really, I’m not. And I’m an observer of all of this, and I see it all playing out in a sort of predictable way.

But as I think you said earlier, we end up in a pretty good place and I put this in one of the pieces I wrote recently about the whole why I am betting so heavy on WordPress, is that whatever you can say about Automattic and Matt and whatever, he didn’t lock you in. You have freedom of movement. All your data can move with you wherever you want. Anybody can add a feature to WordPress if they want. It probably won’t get into the main distribution, but you can build on it.

And I have proven that by building on it. I never hit any dead ends. What I also see there, this is another plus for this platform is, whoever it is that’s building this, and I know there’s some contention about that, it really believes in not breaking developers, and that is super important.

That’s one of the basic, also fundamental principles of the web, is that a website that you built in 1995, you should still be able to read it in 2025. And you can, except Google doesn’t think you should. Google as recently as 2014, that’s when HTTPS came along and became something that people wanted to use. Up until that point, HTTP was perfectly fine. And then one day Google and the EFF decided no more of this. It was very bad development. It set a bad precedent, but that’s a sidebar. That’s not the real thing.

What’s really going on here is, I think there is now an opportunity in the, what we call, I call the Twitter, like world, I won’t call it the social web, because it isn’t the web. That’s not fair, they can’t. They should support the web before they get to call themselves the web. And they’ve just inherited all the limits that Twitter put on there.

They had the opportunity to relax those limits, but they have no incentive to do it. I could sit there, like you said, as an observer. See, that’s what I’ve been too, for the last, whatever, 16 years. 2006, it’s 2025, 19 years, sorry, for the last 19 years. With all due humility. I’m a pretty freaking good developer, and I really work very energetically, and I love making products for users, and I’m stuck. There’s no place for me to go. And I can’t accept that. That’s all I want to say, is I don’t accept that, and I found a way to work around it, that’s what I’m doing. And WordPress is key to it, central to it.

[00:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: We’ll come onto that whole project in a minute, which is really fascinating. But I’m just gonna rewind the clock and go back to the very beginnings of what we might now call the internet.

An academic enterprise, really, it felt like. A bunch of academics. Maybe you’ll go back as far as CERN and have those discussions about just wanting to send academic documentation to one another, and, then the hyperlink came along, and then all of a sudden this world of possibility opened up, and it felt as if there was so much positive potential there.

I remember the beginnings of the internet, the burgeoning of it, people beginning to talk about it, people starting to use it on desktops and things like that. And there was this real sense positivity that it was, like it was, it was this blue sky thing. For the first time in humanity’s history everybody had a way to interconnect.

We don’t need to go into what happened, but at some point, through a whole series of dominoes falling, we get all these walled gardens, and now the internet seems like anything other than blue sky. It feels like there’s just these silos everywhere. You’ve got a Meta silo, and you’ve got an X silo, and you’ve got a TikTok silo, and a YouTube silo.

And I think, with hand on heart, almost everybody would be able to point to at least some downside to that. Sure, you might enjoy consuming YouTube videos, but there may be a flip side to that. You end up doing it at the wrong time of the day. I think anybody could agree that people’s passions get inflamed to the point of getting a bit out of hand on the internet.

This was never what it was supposed to be. And so going back to my question from a minute ago, where I was implying that maybe there’s some sense of regret. If you could go back and move the jigsaw pieces, or move the chess pieces differently, I expect you would. I’d expect you’d be shouting a bit louder about the need for things to be not walled in, and maybe things would be different.

[00:15:58] Dave Winer: I don’t think anybody hears that. I think I shouted it pretty loud. I repeated it over and over. I don’t have any regret about that, I think I did a tremendous amount of that, but the problem is, I can’t call it regret. I think that collectively there was a blogging community prior to WordPress. There was. There were competitive products. And then in 1999, it all clicked with RSS, and that gave us a way, we had ways, by the way, to find the updates on blogs before that.

We had a site called weblogs.com, and it would go looking around the blogosphere, had a list. There weren’t that many blogs, okay. So it would look at all of them, see if they updated, and if they updated it would put it at the top of the list. And so bloggers were just reloading that page all day long. And it worked. You still had to find the new post, but that wasn’t too hard because they were at the top of the page, right.

And then after that, with Netscape, we got RSS going. And that led to a whole other generation of that kind of stuff. We had it, it was going. But what killed it. Killed is too strong a word. What put a limit on it, what said that what you described would happen is that, do you remember the .com boom, right?

All of a sudden it wasn’t just a place for idealists to screw around and try out new ideas and everything. It was a place to come and get rich, and so it attracted all those people who wanted to get rich. That’s all they wanted. They didn’t care about what they had to do to get rich, and that attracted the professional investors, the venture capitalists. They want to get rich, it’s totally okay to do whatever they have to do to get rich. It just simply, it is their business to get rich, and it’s hard to blame them for that. And then, here’s the key point, they wouldn’t work with each other.

[00:17:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:17:50] Dave Winer: They would not work with each other. And I just wrote a piece this morning, on my blog, and it said in retrospect, it was a retrospective thing about RSS, because that’s becoming an issue again, and it said what RSS needed was love. It needed to be loved and nurtured, and fed and taken care of, and the users had to be given features that were collective across all the products. So that if you wanted to subscribe to a feed, you didn’t have to memorize a complicated process, involving pasting URLs or reading the HTML source, or all the crazy stuff that became, until Twitter, what choice was there, right? So people had to do it, but it was tremendous weakness.

And Twitter came in and just completely blew it out. Because in Twitter subscribing was a single click. And we’re gonna hit that again now. If I’m successful in what I do, we’re gonna hit it again, and we’re gonna have to answer that question differently.

[00:18:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was just gonna say, so many of the underpinnings that could have made the internet into a different place never went away, they just got ignored. Maybe that’s the wrong word, but they just got forgotten about. And so we wholeheartedly subscribed to X, formally Twitter. We wholeheartedly jumped in on Facebook, because they offered this amazing level of convenience. And of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how maybe that was a catastrophic failure, but the time.

[00:19:18] Dave Winer: I have no regrets about that either, Twitter was amazing.

[00:19:21] Nathan Wrigley: It was so revolutionary, you could suddenly connect with people that you’d lost touch with many years ago.

[00:19:26] Dave Winer: There you go. You put your finger right on it. It wasn’t that Twitter was so great. It’s that look at all the people. One of the first experiences I had on Twitter that really, really showed me what the difference is, is that there was just this random guy. I would meet him. We had our own community too, by the way. And so we would go to conferences and, I watched the WordCamp conference from afar, right? And I said, oh, I know all those people. Because in our community we had people like that. Only there only about 30 years younger than I was, than we were, but I recognize it.

And, meet somebody at a conference that’s, now I know what he’s doing with his family. I know what his sports are, who his team is, what’s the weather like where they live. And how does he describe it? There’s all these inputs that you simply don’t get from seeing somebody couple of times a year. It’s nice and everything, but this was a different thing altogether.

And I still use Facebook. I don’t use Twitter very much anymore. But, I still have my account. I didn’t delete it. But I use Facebook. I will never stop using Facebook because my friends from childhood are there. Where am I gonna get new friends from childhood? That’s not happening, right. They have their advantages. But they’re a really good example of people that refuse to do anything to help anything other than their mission to make more money. I’ve had these conversations with executives at Facebook, and we’ve had a couple of, fits and starts a couple of them, twice.

They were gonna add RSS support in and out, to Facebook. Kind of like what they’re doing with Threads and ActivityPub, right? Or the Fediverse. Yeah, I’m trying to forget that because I don’t believe in it, to be honest with you, but I do believe in Mastodon. I think that’s what we’re really doing here. And I think they blow a lot of smoke at these things, and they, make them seem like, they shouldn’t make them appear to be more than they are because we need to have both of those things. There’s no reason we can’t have both, but that means you have to be a little bit altruistic to use that word. You may feel like you’re being an altruist, but then look at the times we live in.

In the United States, we are very worried about what’s coming or what’s here right now. And we’re all asking, what can we do? What can we do? One of the things you can do is let down, open up to your inner altruist, start doing things that aren’t just about putting food on the table or getting ahead in your career.

Do things that make connecting with other people a lot easier, and more free. Because those services are now owned by people that go to dinner with the government of the United States. You’ve never seen a more clear picture of what we’re up against. You think that somebody from the White House calls Mark Zuckerberg and says, get Dave Winer off of Facebook. I guarantee you I’m off Facebook in 10 seconds. That’s who we are, depending on their honor, I think that’s a really bad bet. We’re all gonna have that choice.

And at the same time, people who know how to work with WordPress are gonna have an amazing advantage, because I see WordPress as being comparable to the Mastodon server and the Bluesky server, and Bluesky doesn’t give you a server to install yet, but Mastodon does. And, I didn’t install it. I had a friend because I tried and I couldn’t get it to go. That is what it’s gonna take. And WordPress is a lot easier to install, and it’s a lot more mature, and it really works and the APIs aren’t gonna break. So we got a much better foundation to build on.

[00:23:04] Nathan Wrigley: Going back to what you said a moment ago about, it’s not either or. What we’re imagining here, I think is, you keep your Facebook, and you keep your X, and all of those things can go. Fine, carry on using those, but there’s an alternative, which many people may prefer. There’s a whole kind of ethos behind that, and a whole philosophy behind that. But underpinning it all, things like Mastodon, and potentially WordPress, and we’ll get into that, are a bunch of APIs and protocols and things like that, many of which you were very much involved in the creation of things like RSS, and thank you for that.

[00:23:38] Dave Winer: More altruism there, huh?

[00:23:39] Nathan Wrigley: This entire whole podcast thing sits right on top of it. It feels like we’re going back to those things to try and, not compete, but be alongside of these other walled gardens, if you like.

[00:23:51] Dave Winer: Oh, I think we’re competing. I’m not scared of competition. Let’s do it. There will be differences, however. There will be. There’ll be things that you can do in this world that you couldn’t do over there. But the opposite is true as well.

But the thing that we’re gonna do, if we’re successful, is we’re gonna influence those networks. And we’re going to get them to support markdown. That’s very specific. Just let me put markdown in my posts on Bluesky and get rid of the character limits and let me edit. And then we’re, we’re fine.

You have to support inbound RSS as well, not just outbound. I have to be able to stay in my space, and contribute, and write, and have anybody read it wherever they are. That’s it. It’s saying basically, let’s actually live up to the promise of the web. And that’s what the web promised. And if you’re confident in your users will find value in your network, and there’s no reason they won’t. I’m talking about Bluesky and Mastodon, then why wouldn’t you do it?

I think then we’ve outed you. If you don’t want to do it. Okay, they don’t want to do it now because they don’t see it as a way of attracting new users, or keeping the users they have. They don’t see it that way because it’s true. It’s not, and that’s what we have to do. We have to make it that. They have to be hearing it all the time. You have to support markdown, that’s what Textcasting was all about. I think markdown is the mp3 of text. We did podcasting too.

That was a fall out of all this stuff. I want to do radio. I love radio. I always have. And I always thought at some point I’m gonna do audio blogs. That’s what I was doing, getting ready to do that. And there we were, and one thing led to another and did I ever think about using something other than mp3? That would be crazy. It was a gift. They gave me the answer. Of course I’m going to use mp3. Why would I screw around with that? We’re gonna make it just as obvious that the other networks, if they’re gonna pretend to deal with text, they have to support a basic set of features, which are simply defined by the web. That’s it.

And WordPress does all that. WordPress documents are web documents, and that’s super important. That’s everything.

[00:26:15] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like in the last few months you’ve very much planted a flag in the sand and it feels like you’ve committed to following through on the promise that we’re about to get into. And the underpinnings of it, I’m gonna link in the show notes to this, so you want to head to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Dave Winer, and in there will be a whole list of things. Anything that discuss, I’ll basically link to.

But there’s a couple of pieces which Dave has penned. One of them was in 2024, November, 2024, called Textcasting. And the URL for that is textcasting.org, and we’ll go into that in a minute. But then much more recently over on scripting.com, published on 28th of August, 2025, so very recently, was a piece which kind of built a top of that called Think Differently About WordPress.

I’m gonna return to the Textcasting one ’cause this feels like the foundational technological underpinnings of what you are proposing here, this thing which would be a competitor to all of these walled gardens. It sits outside of WordPress.

[00:27:14] Dave Winer: It’s more of a, okay, for me, this is when I was planning this product. I hadn’t even begun to develop it yet. But I wanted to write down in one place, these are all the things we’re gonna do. And that’s it. That’s all it was. I keep going on and on about all the different things that I wanted that I wasn’t getting, as a writer. I am a writer and I feel like Twitter was the original one, said you can’t have all your writing tools. It’s like I’m designing a guitar. And I’m saying, you can have three strings if you want. You can play music on three strings, right?

The ultimate insult is the people who made this decision are not guitar players. They’re not musicians. They don’t have the slightest clue what the f they’re doing, and I’ve been told that even getting a new generation of products isn’t gonna solve this problem, because they are just as clueless about what writers need. And so at least I feel like upfront I ought to tell them exactly what I want from them. And that’s what textcasting.org is.

So when we give it to the people, they can say, they might say, why didn’t you tell us that’s all you want? Yeah, look at textcasting.org, and look at the creation date. I was very clear about what I wanted, but understand that I needed this for myself as the requirements document for the product I was making. I’m a blogger, so when I write a requirements document, I put it in the public, because that’s what bloggers do. It is just the knee jerk. I do write some private documents, I do, it’s true. But my impulse is to write them publicly. So that’s really all that it is. It’s just saying, this is what we’re gonna do.

[00:28:58] Nathan Wrigley: So right at the top, the goal is very simply encapsulated and it goes like this. It’s easy to get in your head and parse. Interop between social media apps based on the features writers needs, specifically the services of the social web, and there’s a link there, support these basic features.

And then you go on to describe the ethics behind the movement is. But then you list out the things that you would like as a writer. It’s surprisingly a short list. There’s only six things, titles, optional. Links, de rigueur, you’ve gotta have links. Simple styling, bold, italics, that’s probably enough. Enclosures making it possible to do other things like, I don’t know, podcasting and things like that. Unlimited length, that’s the big differentiator, isn’t it? Because more or less all the platforms that have gained success have stifled that in some way. And then the, this is important, I think maybe this is the bit that I think is most enjoyable, editable. Go back, modify it because why not? You wrote it, it’s yours. And markdown. That basically is textcasting encapsulated in just a few sentences. I’ve probably missed a lot of the nuance there, but that’s kind of how I see it.

[00:30:04] Dave Winer: No, I don’t think so. Actually. Notice what’s not there? You’ll kick yourself. Comments. I don’t give a damn about comments.

[00:30:12] Nathan Wrigley: Presumably the comments could be handled elsewhere.

[00:30:15] Dave Winer: Absolutely, and I have a new idea for how comments should work. I wrote that up. I did a podcast about that, I think it was yesterday or the day before. I’ve had this design for many years, but I think there’s a way around all the abuse, and all the spamming that goes on these networks. I think it’s time for another look, first of all. I mean, I had a look, okay.

But, second of all, it’s time to open it up so everybody can play in this game so we can try out lots of different ways of doing it. Which by the way is also part of what I’m doing. I’m making a, the thing Wordland. If you go to wordland.social. Go there and try it out.

It’s there. It works with your WordPress sites. And so you might think, okay, it is actually my business to make a new writing tool for WordPress. I made the writing tool I would like to use. The idea is that you focus all your attention on writing, so it has all the functionality that you need to write and nothing else.

Everything else that it does that’s in the WordPress, their command structure. And it was what I felt was in the way for me to be a writer using WordPress. Because what WordPress, I don’t want to call it a mistake, it’s just how it evolved, is that the writing functionality is intermixed with everything else. And it makes it a very intimidating thing to get started with.

And so if you look at the people that are the insiders in the WordPress community, that’s a very small number compared to the number of people who have tried to use WordPress. That’s a huge number because WordPress is it, right?

And the number of people who use it, but they might prefer a better tool because this isn’t really what they think about. The things that are in the WordPress command structure are things that most people never need to go to. It’s too complicated. Look at the feature set of Twitter, for example. And it does a lot more than Twitter does, but most people aren’t interested in that. That’s one.

Number two is, there are modes of working and writing requires severe focus. I don’t want to have to jump. Every time I have to go some random other place in the, that I have to devote my brain power to that, what I’m not doing, I’m not focused on the plan for writing. When I write something, I’m thinking three paragraphs ahead. And I’m trying to remember that because I don’t want to stop writing to take a note. I want to just go down the page and get my first draft out. But if in order to do this I have to go somewhere far away, that requires me to think, now I’ve lost my place.

And it creates a certain stress and programmers, if you say this to a programmer, most programmers go, oh, you’re just being weird. That’s not the way it works. Let me tell you how it works. I am also myself a programmer, so I understand the thought process, but you have to play. You have to have both roles in there. And that’s one of the things that makes me a fairly unique developer, is that I’m both a writer and a developer.

So I play on both sides of that fence. And so if I want a writer to test my code, I don’t do it right after I wrote the code. I come back a couple of days later, now that I’ve got a fresh way of looking at things and then I try to use it, and then I see the problems right off the bat.

[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll link to Wordland. I’ve had a good long look at the pages that you’ve offered up. I confess, I haven’t actually tried it out, but it’s a, it’s a very different take on a fairly minimal editing interface in WordPress. So I’ll make sure to link out to that.

[00:33:37] Dave Winer: It’s fairly minimal, but it does everything on the Textcasting page. It doesn’t have the limits that all the Twitter like products have. It’s all supported, you get to do all of that stuff. And plus you get categories. And I think categories are huge. I really do. And it has a very nice, simple interface for it, but a very powerful one for categories. So, have a look at that.

[00:33:58] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.

[00:33:59] Dave Winer: And bookmarks. It’s very important for a writer. I have, I don’t know how many hundreds of documents that I’ve written over the years. I pretty much need quick access to all of them. Because I never know when I’m gonna have to make a change, and that’s in there too.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:34:12] Dave Winer: Oh wait, I forgot the actual main point. The main point I was gonna make is that I’ve also, all the work I had to do on the server side to set this up, I’m not gonna make anybody have to do. That’s all open source, and I’ll even run the server for you.

Yeah, because what I want is a development community to pop up here. And so if somebody looks at Wordland, says that’s not the way to do it, here’s how you should do it. Say, great, go ahead, do it. And what they’ll find is, just like with WordPress, okay, there’s nothing in your way. You get to do that.

And there’s more from that too, is that the user owns the documents, and all the documents are in markdown format. And so if you want to use a different editor on a document, just to work on it for whatever purpose, go ahead and it’ll still work in the place it came from.

And this is going back to the IBM PC and the Macintosh, where when you had those machines, you owned the documents and you could have any editor you want edit it. And this led to file format standards, because if you come along three years after Microsoft Word comes along in the Macintosh, you better read Word format documents.

Since I get to go first here, if this, if something happens, okay, that I have to say, maybe nothing will happen here, you never know. But because I got to go first, I chose markdown. Because markdown is the mp3 of text. It’s the obvious answer. And tell me why they don’t support markdown. Anything that works with text should support markdown in my opinion.

[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: It’s just a nice, easy to access. The keyboard does everything.

[00:36:03] Dave Winer: There’s more. I’ve written feed readers. All along have been writing feed readers, and we have to sterilize the content because people put all kinds of garbage. And so you basically strip everything out. I’m tired of doing that. What I want to do is give the writers the ability to put some bold face and italics, and put some links in there, and give it, all the things that are on the Textcasting thing.

So I don’t want to strip that out anymore. And so in Feedland and in Wordland, markdown is fully supported everywhere, and in RSS. It’s a key point. If I had that to do over again. I can’t do that one. I’m sorry, I’m going on about this but I really believe in it. I couldn’t do it over again. If I had to do over again in the beginning, I would’ve made markdown the text format in RSS, totally. I couldn’t do it ’cause it didn’t exist. RSS came first but I’ve taken care of it.

Now, Wordland produces its own RSS feed for every document, along with the one that WordPress produces. And the feed we produce has the markdown in it. And it has a couple of other things, and it, we will have more. As we think of more features to add. I’ve now got a place where I can add features. These are in a namespace, it’s totally non-controversial. I’m not modifying RSS, I have something called the source namespace.

And then at some point, again, it’s all prefixed by if it catches on, then I’ll go to the guys that do the feeds inside of WordPress and say, here’s some suggestions for features to your feed. And at that point we’ll be friends, I hope. And they’ll, love me and I’ll love them. It’s not impossible. There are people on the team that are helping us. That’s nice, I really love that.

[00:37:47] Nathan Wrigley: So taking it back a little bit, we’ve got the Textcasting framework that we described a little bit, a few moments ago. That kind of feels like the underpinnings to this other piece that I mentioned. And again, links in the show notes. Think Different About WordPress. Now, I confess, I’ve been following you for many years. really, in my head, collided you with WordPress.

[00:38:08] Dave Winer: I wasn’t, you interpreted

[00:38:10] Nathan Wrigley: And then suddenly you pop up with this piece about Wordland for start, which is a, an editor, which binds to WordPress. And then this whole piece about think differently about WordPress. Now this is really curious because, well you tell me what you’re proposing. I could try, try to interpret it.

[00:38:26] Dave Winer: I tried put the key idea upfront, okay. When I say Think Different About WordPress, I can tell you exactly what that is, what you’re supposed to think. I used the grammatically incorrect version that Apple uses.

[00:38:42] Nathan Wrigley: Think different.

[00:38:43] Dave Winer: Yeah, it was cute. I thought, what the heck, let’s do it. That’s the point, really. And it is just think of WordPress as the equivalent of the Bluesky service and the Mastodon service. And the reason you can do that is because it’s really comparable. They’re all text databases, that’s what they are. They have some different structures. That’s okay, we can add structures too. But it’s how good are they at doing that, and how mature is their code, this is very technical stuff, right? But what does the API look like, and how stable is the API? These are all the concerns that limit what people can develop on the platform. And if you do the check boxes, I probably should do that, but WordPress wins on every one of them.

[00:39:31] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a lot of life behind it and a lot of commitment to backwards compatibility.

[00:39:35] Dave Winer: It’s very simple actually. The reason it is that way is that whoever made the calls, they had a philosophy for the whole 22 years of the web will tell us what to do, and they did it. What else?

I know, I felt Rip Van Winkle, you know what I’m saying? It’s like, I was not paying attention to WordPress because I had all the wrong ideas. Now, they didn’t market to me. They never told me in 2017 they had a new API never. It. They didn’t tell me that they had a Node.js package for that API. They never told me. I was working in Node.js at that point. So I could have tried it out right away. They never told me. And all of a sudden, like I’m looking around, I need to add WordPress login to Feedland, because that’s running, we have a, at feedland.com people should try that too. Okay, because that’s a big part.

It’s the feed backend for the system that we’re talking about. And Feedland runs on the Automattic VIP server. So that thing scales. Okay. I learned how to write, I didn’t know how to write scalable software before I hooked up with them, in I guess it was like three years ago or something.

And the first thing we did is, and they were very generous about this in teaching me, and I kept finding things I had to change to make it so that you could support millions of users, right? It’s not mysterious once you learn how to do it, but there’s an art to it.

The bigger project is imagine Twitter with an editor that could support. Twitter has what I call a tiny little text box, okay? You get to type something in there and they’ve extended their limit, if you pay them money, 10,000 characters, that’s a pretty good character limit. I say in Textcasting, unlimited. 10,000 is unlimited, okay. For all practical purposes, if you’re writing more than 10,000 characters, there shouldn’t be a limit, but, okay.

So you got a text editor. Twitter has a text editor. We have a text editor. Our text editor does the web the way I want it to do the web. And it has timelines where you see messages in reverse chronological order. So imagine if that was RSS, instead of their server. That timeline. You could make a timeline in RSS look just like it came from Twitter. There’s no problem with that, and that’s what I’ve done. When you subscribe to feeds, what you get.

So anything that supports RSS plugs into this system, and guess what? RSS is totally replaceable. Everything that I do, you can come up with another one and it works just as well, because RSS is an open format. Yeah, it’s got a protocol with it too. There’s a RSS cloud, which I mentioned in that piece, which does the real time component of it. It worked great.

WordPress supports it in every one of the instances they do it, and so it may be more limited than the one, but I don’t know the one that’s in Bluesky or Mastodon. It may have features that are hard to do, but like I said, then it will do features. It’ll have things that they can’t do either.

One thing it’ll do is it’ll be very, very, very, very, simple. That’s the point.

[00:42:48] Nathan Wrigley: What I’m thinking here is, I think that the typical listener listening to this will be thinking, how does this differ from, let’s say, going to Twitter, but it’s got a different interface and it’s got a different character limit.

[00:42:59] Dave Winer: Not that different. whole idea is that it won’t be that different. I’m not actually running your server. Go, you could pick and choose. You don’t like my timeline, fine. Go get Joe’s timeline or Mary’s timeline or, Google might have a timeline or OpenAI might have one or. Do you need a license to create an RSS reader? No, that’s the point. The point is you get innovation, you get the doors blown off. You don’t have a silo. There’s no silo anywhere in sight.

If you want the users, you have to give them features, performance or price. They don’t have to stay with you if they don’t want to. There’s no import or export. It’s just there. It’s the feeds you subscribe to. That’s really, there’s not a whole lot of technology there.

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I mean, it’s a fairly nice, simple, basic proposition. It sounds from what you were saying in the Think Different About WordPress, it sounds like, well I said you planted your flag in the sand a little bit before. It sounds like you are committing yourself to do.

[00:44:03] Dave Winer: I’ve already done the work. I’ll be demoing this at WordCamp Canada in October, hopefully that will all be webcast so everybody can watch it. And it’ll be archived and it probably will crash, because that’s the way these things work, right? And, but I will stay with it.

I will get the bugs out. It’s gonna be a process. It’s not gonna be done, on October, whatever, 17th I think it is. It’s not gonna be done. All I ask is have a look then, and then when there’s a new version, please come have a look then too, and I’ll come back on your podcast if you want. We can talk about it as it develops. Remember the things that we’re puzzling, and don’t mistake for a minute that I’m not confused too. I am.

I’m gonna tell you a little self-aggrandizing anecdote. Once in, I think it was high school or something, teachers said, somebody like to come up and solve this problem, it was a math class, solve this problem on the whiteboard?

I said, okay, I’ll go. And I go up there and I’m doing it, and I got the answer, and the teacher said, you didn’t know the answer when you raised your hand, did you? No. I, it’s like, I’m an old guy now, that was when I was young. What the hell have I got to lose? Nothing. Nothing. I’m giving you software, an approach to software that I believe in. And, I’m testing the idea of the assumption.

I was always told that RSS can’t do what Twitter does, and because I had not mastered server side scaled software, and remember until a couple of years ago, I had never done that. So I said, I have no way of testing that. They say you can’t do it. They know. I have my doubts about what they said, but I have no way of doing anything about it. And then I got the skill, and then I think now that it’s not true, I think that you absolutely can do it, and that they had a reason for telling me that, is that they didn’t want me to do it. Okay, that’s an invitation, a great invitation if I’ve ever seen one, right.

I mean go for it. Let’s go for it, but let’s all go for it together. You see, that’s the point. It’s no fun if I’m just sitting here going, oh, please, I beg you, would you please try my software so I can be a billionaire too?

[00:46:19] Nathan Wrigley: I was just gonna say, if you’re going into WordCamp Canada, and you’re demoing it all there, but at the moment, I’m guessing you’re doing all of the work, or you have done all of the work, by yourself. Are you hoping to create a community around this?

[00:46:31] Dave Winer: Yeah. I want a developer community, but in order to have a developer community, there better be some users, ’cause the developers don’t come until there are users. So this is something, if a user says, what can I do to help? I’m just a user. The answer is you could do a lot to help. You can use the damn thing. Your product, your content, the stuff that you write will be a magnet for other people. They’ll see the reality of it and they’ll say, oh wow, I guess you can use stuff like this.

[00:47:03] Nathan Wrigley: So the next question I have then is how does what you wish to do, how does that stand in relation to some of the currently existing things out there? So for example, the Fediverse, I know maybe that term’s not something you like to use, but let’s say Mastodon for want of a better word or ActivityPub, let’s go with that.

ActivityPub has a plugin which is under the custodianship of Automattic, so we’re obviously trying to bind our WordPress websites with the Fedi verse and being able to communicate in that way.

[00:47:31] Dave Winer: No, that’s good. That’s very good.

[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: How does yours stand in contrast to that? How, will yours differ from that familiar thing?

[00:47:39] Dave Winer: What that does is it’s wonderful. First, let me tell you why it’s wonderful, and then I’ll tell you, I don’t even know how to begin telling you what the difference is. But, it’s wonderful because it accomplishes at least part of the goal of bringing the Textcasting vision into Mastodon. So if I have a blog called daveverse.org, which is a WordPress blog, and when I post something there, it’s also cross posted to Mastodon. And as far as I can tell, there’s no character limit. And it has styling, and it supports links, and it has images, and block quotes. It’s got a lot of the stuff. It even has titles. That’s right, it has titles too. If you go look at the Textcasting list, that’s pretty good coverage, right? It’s a major innovation, it’s a major step forward.

So what that does, hopefully it gets it onto the radar of the developers of Mastodon. The more people want that, okay, they have to make that clear. And right now, I don’t think people even know it exists. There’s not a lot of awareness of it. I’ve tried the best I can to, and I’ll keep pumping it for this reason. And the more successful it is, the more it puts pressure on Bluesky to do the same thing.

So it’s having the same effect that I’m hoping to have and, so I like it. Remember, I’m wearing a lot of hats here, but one of the hats I wear is, as a writer who wants the freedom to use all the writing tools, I don’t want to be given three strings, I want all five strings, using the guitar anology.

So this, what I’ve done is create something that has the potential of playing the role that, the core of Mastodon does. The whole thing. The whole thing, right? It’s not comparable to a plugin that connects WordPress to Mastodon because that’s a plugin, and what they’re doing is heroic, that’s the word I use for it, Matthias and his team are doing at Automattic, are doing is heroic, because it’s a hard problem to solve. It’s taking ’em a lot of time and they’re working really hard, but those guys really believe, they’re really committed. And I, love that. It’s both heroic and love inspiring. These guys are great. And they won’t have to do that for my system. They won’t, it’ll just come for free.

[00:50:04] Nathan Wrigley: With the Mastodon system, obviously the ActivityPub protocol will bind to a server of your choice. So many people go with mastodon.social as the sort of the default. Presumably there’s gotta be some part of the architecture for your system, which in that way, some central place.

[00:50:20] Dave Winer: There is a server component to what I’m doing. Okay. It doesn’t matter where that server is running. You can run it anywhere, somebody has to run it, and it’s open source, and it’s not even a GPL license, it’s MIT licensed. So go have fun with this thing.

And it’s on GitHub right now. I’m not asking people to install it yet because I want to get a chance to like lock it down before we start cloning it. It’s going to, it is designed to be no lock-in. It is, does, require somebody to run a server

[00:51:00] Nathan Wrigley: So the bit that I’m reading off the scripting.com website where, you know the piece entitled Think Different About WordPress. You have this sentence where it says, a storage service and it says, I’m going to run the server for you to get the bootstrap going, my treat. That was the bit.

[00:51:14] Dave Winer: That raised the alarms, right? It should raise the alarms.

[00:51:17] Nathan Wrigley: Exactly. It made me think Twitter in a way, it made me think there’s this central bit.

[00:51:21] Dave Winer: No, it’s not, because I have the answer that Twitter never had, which is I’m giving you all the code you need to run your own server. I’m giving that to you. I’m not making you write it. In Twitter you can’t even write it. If I wrote a server that did what Twitter’s server does, that’s great, but it wouldn’t be part of Twitter. It wouldn’t be available to everyone. The availability here is the same availability as RSS. So can I subscribe to your RSS feed, even if your thing is on another server? Of course.

That’s all you need to know. Ultimately, that’s all you’re going to need is to be able to. It’s just RSS, that’s all it is.

[00:52:01] Nathan Wrigley: It’s RSS all the way down.

[00:52:03] Dave Winer: But let me just say this, is that’s also a strength of the WordPress community, the skepticism. You’re always, you guys are always watching for the lock in.

[00:52:13] Nathan Wrigley: We’ve spent trying to encourage the world that you need to own your own data, or at least have.

[00:52:17] Dave Winer: Right.

[00:52:19] Nathan Wrigley: Unfortunately the world, on the whole, didn’t listen, so we keep banging that gong.

[00:52:24] Dave Winer: Yes. But let me point out that you are the distillation of the people. You’re the group of people who care deeply about that stuff. So keep it up because, and that’s why I’m ready to answer those questions because, and here’s the punchline. Even though I’m not part of your community, we share that religion.

[00:52:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s nice.

[00:52:43] Dave Winer: Why do we share the religion? Because it’s the web. Because that’s what the web taught us. Maybe we believed, maybe we were very naive in the nineties and the early two thousands. We were, we’re not naive anymore. I think the last, the very last sentence in the Think Different, go read that, right now.

[00:53:02] Nathan Wrigley: They lied to the users all the time, over and over. No, I don’t object to you making money, but I’m putting it out there. You can compete with me. I want you to compete with me, as long as you don’t try to cut off the interop. I’m not naive. Believe me, I expect that will happen.

[00:53:16] Dave Winer: That’s just all the credentials I need to be in your community, right? Not all the credentials. I don’t know half the stuff any of you guys know about the how to do. I don’t do PHP for example. I don’t know how to set up a WordPress server. I have somebody that helps me with that. So I’m not qualified to be a member of the WordPress community, but that’s the beauty of the web. I don’t have to be to connect with that community, because that’s what the web gives. And that’s pretty awesome, don’t you think? And the other thing is that makes it even more awesome is that all the other people like me will be able to do it too. Why? Because in the end they played straight with you.

[00:54:01] Nathan Wrigley: Depending on when this podcast is released, it may well be that you’ve done your presentation. If that is in fact the case, then I will make sure to link to the WordPress TV, the video that will have been captured. I’ll link that into this post. But also I’ll link to the Textcasting document and, also the Think Different About WordPress document. And encourage you, if you’ve got any interesting kind of, I’m gonna say rewinding the clock and returning the world to a different era where the blue sky was there, and there was less cloud, than go and explore those different bits and pieces.

And I will definitely be coming back to you, Dave Winer, to figure out exactly how it’s gone and maybe call it months or something like that. And we’ll see where you’ve got with the WordPress community.

[00:54:40] Dave Winer: If we’re still here.

[00:54:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But we will, we’ll leave it there. And, I will say thank you for chatting to me today about this really important subject. Thank you.

[00:54:48] Dave Winer: Thank you much, it was great. Have a good day.

On the podcast today we have Dave Winer.

Dave’s journey into the heart of Silicon Valley began in the early 1980s, when he left Wisconsin and moved to California with two products and a dream: to achieve fame and fortune in the world of technology. Driven by a deep belief that real communication involves people truly connecting, he set out to make his mark.

Early on, he found himself in a memorable meeting with Steve Jobs, both were in their early 20s, bursting with ambition and self-assurance. Their encounter was fiery and competitive, yet it marked the start of Dave’s lifelong mission to wire the world together, not just with technology, but by bringing people closer through it.

If you’ve ever subscribed to a blog, listened to a podcast, or shared your thoughts online, chances are you’ve benefitted from Dave’s pioneering work, he’s the developer behind influential technologies like RSS, and a long-time advocate for open, user-owned, publishing platforms.

He describes himself as someone who wrote the first versions of lots of software, wants to work with everyone, still has big ideas, he likes things to be open from top to bottom, and doesn’t care for greedy people.

Today we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the “walled gardens” of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

But the conversation isn’t just about nostalgia, it’s a call to action for reclaiming the internet’s potential. Dave explains what went wrong with the evolution of the social web, why he thinks blogging tech like RSS just needed “more love”, and how the influx of money and centralisation stifled the creativity and interoperability the web was built for.

You’ll also get to hear about Dave’s latest efforts to reignite those original web ideals, he reveals the thinking behind Wordland, a minimalist and powerful writing tool for WordPress users that puts freedom, portability, and open protocols front and centre.

Dave also lays out his “Textcasting” manifesto, challenging platforms to truly support writers with features like unlimited length, markdown support, and true ownership of content, without the need for permission or platform lock-in.

Dave truly is a pioneer of the internet, and is certainly not finished yet. He’s putting WordPress at the centre of many of his future endeavours.

If you’re passionate about owning your content, deeply curious about web history, or looking for inspiration on how technology can empower rather than control, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Dave’s MORE product

EFF

The birth of the Web – CERN

scripting.com

ActivityPub on Wikipedia

Fediverse on Wikipedia

Dave’s textcasting.org website

Think Different about WordPress post on scripting.com

About Wordland

Access to Wordland

Access to Feedland

WordPress and the open social web, Dave’s presentation at WordCamp Canada 2025

Daveverse