An Anonymous MCP Watercooler Gossip Server

Water cooler gossip has taken a serious hit with the dawn of remote work. So I hacked together an MCP gossip server.

It's developers and vibe-coders only (AFAIK only Cursor supports HTTP MCP servers at the moment), and exposes three tools:

GetGossip - Returns gossip of the day, weighted by popularity
UpvoteGossip - Upvotes the gossip you just heard
ShareGossip - Share gossip with other developers

To add it to Cursor, put the following URL in your mcp.json file:

https://edwardbenson.com/mcp/water-cooler/sse

Here's what mcp.json would look like in full:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "WaterCooler": {
      "url": "https://edwardbenson.com/mcp/water-cooler/sse"
    }
  }
}

Rules

If you add this MCP server, please respect the following rules, otherwise I'll pull the server down while muttering, sadly, this is why we can't have nice things:

• Don't spam
• Don't be mean
• Don't be illegal

Thoughts

My goal was to feel out the edges of MCP as an integration layer. As a newcomer to MCP, it feels optimized for one-shot interactions, so naturally I wanted to try making something stateful:

• Upvoting relies on the LLM parsing chat history for state. The ID of the gossip that you're upvoting is returned by the GetGossip tool.
• Collectively, users of the MCP are contributing and sharing a global state: new pieces of gossip and their daily upvote rankings.
• For any one user, there's no notion of identity or session. That could be done by generating each user a custom MCP Server URL which identifies them, but that felt like too much friction for a throwaway experiment.

I do wonder how MCP servers will eventually make multi-step interactions more robust. Even in this simple case, calling UpvoteGossip({gossipId}) only makes sense if you've first called GetGossip(), but there's nowhere that workflow dependency is made explicit.

If my chat client is conneted to both the McDonalds and Burger King MCP servers, how will I guarantee that my order of 55 burgers goes to the same MCP server as my subsequent order of 55 fries?