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Comment by bikamonki | Hacker News Reader

I think we are moving towards a descentralized Internet. The RSS feed needs a central server, the newsletter can be broadcasted and then forwarded peer to peer. I'd argue the opposite then: save the newsletter, just maybe evolve it into something better (maybe with schema email??)

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Sounds like Usenet :)

RSS is probably easier to layer on top of those new fangled HTTP-over-P2P networks like IPFS.

Heck, I remember proposals for combining RSS and BitTorrent, so an RSS feed could be spread via BitTorrent, with incremental updates being applied, and with each entry containing BitTorrent magnet links. This was proposed as a distributed way to provide podcasts ("podcatching"). Not sure if it got implemented.

Usenet is, unfortunately, ancient and arcane enough that a vast amount of the the current veteran dev people never ever heard of it. It's an awesome thing, even though it has it's capacity limits, and it really should be revived ( and not the way it is at the moment, as a torrent replacement ).

Yes of course, RSS over a distributed channel works as well!

NNTP is one of the most underrated protocols. It's a distributed superset of email + RSS + twitter.

There are parts of it that have aged really badly, though. I was working on an NNTP-related project last year. Article numbers and threading are a bit crappy. The conflation of messages and commands (like cancel) also sat rather uncomfortably with me.

I was impressed with it as a piece of history, but more thorough exposure left me with a much decreased interest in building a system on it. More modern approaches to pubsub feel more natural (and are also more fun to work with!)

An RSS feed is just a periodically updated XML file with an URL. If your decentralized internet can't present a file at an address (the use case for ever single web page ever), it's not actually going to be the internet.

The rss feed contents can be replicated, distributed to other peers, not unlike ipfs, etc.

lol, rss does not depend on a centralized server. it's a shame you think it does.

Read the spec.

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