About this episode

Dave Winer discusses the limitations of current social web platforms and the potential of AI to foster innovation through open formats.

Notes prepared by Claude.ai. In this episode, Dave returns to a theme he's been circling for years: the social web's central failure isn't a lack of features, it's the locked doors. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, and Amazon build genuinely useful tools, but they're designed to capture users and prevent the combining of one tool with another to make something new. This is the oldest fight in software—the tension between the "programming priesthood" who believe they have all the answers, and the tool makers and users who want new ideas to flow in around the programmers rather than be limited by what those programmers happened to imagine. He recalls the early web arguments with Microsoft, when the freedom was exhilarating: "I want to ride up front with you. I don't want to get locked in the trunk." The danger, as always, is the moment a venture-backed company spots an open thing and races to turn it into a jail. Dave is blunt about the current pretenders—Bluesky, in particular—who claim to be revolutionary and open but control their users every bit as much as the platforms that came before, offering essentially the same impoverished toolset Twitter shipped back in 2006…

People in this episode

Host: Dave Winer

Topics covered

• AI
• social web
• software development
• open formats
• platform control
• innovation

Keywords

• social web
• AI
• platforms
• innovation
• open formats
• software
• Bluesky

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, Amazon, Bluesky, Anthropic, OpenAI

Products: Claude Code

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