Thank you Dave Winer for creating RSS. For a while there, it seemed like we were on a path of making all data free, a truly decentralized web of information. I wish the internet would have continued on that route.
Sure, you can use Feedly quite easily and a lot of sites, blogs, etc. still generate RSS feeds.
On the other hand, it's not really a first-class citizen, it's not available on major services that want eyeballs, subscription fees, etc. And, frankly, a lot of us have just mostly gotten out of the habit of using it because we figure we'll learn about most interesting or important stuff on social media in some manner.
A second-citizen only internet.
A separate internet with strict open web considerations, federated protocols, rss, irc, or new updated things.
You can write web apps rather than mobile apps, publish on open source publishing platforms, use IRC, use RSS, etc. Yes, there may be discoverability and other downsides but nothing is actually preventing you from avoiding walled gardens for the most part.
There are lots of bands that have exited the mainstage of public notoriety that are still thriving in various ends.
1. It uses RSS where it's available.
2. It scrapes the content kinda like outline.com but local copies.
All data saved to your local machine, as flat files so you can use whatever backend mechanism you require.
I want to find some time this year and build this. Would anyone actually use this though?
I'd be interested in other folk's take on this.
However, I would argue a far greater problem was the early lack of editability; Berners-Lee originally conceived of his WWW as a network of editable documents, where every user could read and write with equal ease. His prototype web browser was, to use a desktop analogy, a “Word for the Web”; a true web editor, Opening and Saving documents stored online, just as Microsoft Word directly opens and saves documents stored locally.
But Tim got lazy and impatient, and shipped his first public browser as a cut-down web viewer. Which Mosaic then copied; and, before anyone knew any different, the web was recast as a read-only medium of the masses, with web editing the exclusive domain of technical and corporate elites only.
A single thoughtless corner-cutting mistake, creating an artificial bottleneck upon which trillion-dollar global empires have now been built. You can still see the remnants of the original direct interaction model in HTTP’s PUT and DELETE verbs, like the hindlimbs in a blue whale, rendered just as powerless from the ignorance and avarice of this new web’s Intelligent Design.
Tony Hoare named NULL his billion-dollar mistake, but that’s a rounding error on the scale of TBL’s fuckup. As for Dave Winer? Best and worst, maybe a couple of Benjamins.