Using RSS to replace social media
lukesmith.xyz
lukesmith.xyz
Half the time I use YouTube through NewPipe, a FOSS Android alternative to the YouTube app. If you import your subscriptions, it shows you exactly all the videos from your subscribed channels in chronological order, not what it or YouTube thinks you want to see. The search is seemingly less algorithmically influenced and there is no autoplay. There's a "trending" tab, but that's easy to ignore and you can just set your subscription feed as the default tab. The very fact that I don't feel like what I'm seeing is what corporations and billionaires want me to see changes my usage into something that is active rather than passive. It feels different, better, to participate in the power process to not only have confidence in that I'm seeing all the updates I specified to see but that I have to seek out what I want to watch/listen to. Psychologically, it's healthier, IMO.
EDIT: Also, random semi-related complaint; YouTube on web never honors when I click "Set Reminder". It doesn't matter if I permanently allow notifications in my browser or what. I get no emails either. I have a hard time believing the YT devs have written any tests for it. Then again, I've never tried it in Chrome. ¬‿¬
> there is no autoplay.
There is now, it got turned on when I installed a recent update. The option is: settings->video and audio->auto-queue next stream.
The beautiful thing about flipping through a magazine, or browsing a library, is that everyone gets the same options regardless of who they are. It allows me, someone who isn't into a particular thing, to discover that thing. To accidentally read something I wouldn't have thought I agreed with, and discover that they actually made a decent point.
I think these types of popularity algorithms are deeply problematic.
I think all alternatives to youtube fail because of the dead comment sections. Not sure if there would be some way of creating distributed comment sections without them turning into pure spam and . Maybe chains of trust where you only see messages by users that have been "whitelisted" by someone you trust.
With Reddit you can subscribe to RSS feeds of subreddits and see the new topics. Click through to reddit if you want to engage.
It has its uses and frankly it's my method for info consumption. If something doesn't have an RSS interface then I don't use it. Life is too short.
Twitter used to have RSS (Atom?) until March 2013.
Hopefully people start to wake up to this finally? One can hope.
RSS plays well but is not sufficient
This could look like a WordPress blog with the ActivityPub plugin installed.
It could also look like the incumbent social media services white-labeling their websites so orgs can be social from their own domains.
Groups I'm talking about are your newspapers, cable news channels, fire departments, colleges, heads of state, et cetera.
(If you want to know more of my beef against RSS (both as a technology and as a term for web feeds regardless of actual format): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+atom+rss&type=comm.... RSS should have been killed off about fifteen years ago in favour of Atom.)
Perhaps both should be killed off in favor of a JSON-based format.
JSON stuff? Eh, I feel that’s largely a solution looking for a problem. It’s too late to get universal support in clients (feeds aren’t popular enough and too much of the software basically on life support), so you’re always going to need to serve Atom or RSS as well, and once you’re implementing one of them, why would you bother with the JSON format at all? As for the one serious attempt, JSON Feed, I have one thing that I really like about it and one thing that I don’t. The don’t: it specifies that titles are plain text, which I think is a shame; Atom lets you put HTML in your titles so you can do things like <code>, <em>, <sup> and so forth (and I do, oh yes! I do)—though I wish Atom had let you specify both plain text and HTML (sometimes I want <code></code> to “degrade” to backticks; refer to the titles of my last few blog posts for examples, with plain text in the <title> and HTML in the body). And that’s the thing I think JSON Feed got right for the content, that you can provide both HTML and text, whereas Atom forces you to choose.
Before I say anything else, your viewpoint is totally valid. :) I can't truly argue against it in an objective sense, I think.
It's funny that you say that, however, because that's my perspective on XML in general; it's a solution looking for a problem. Sure, we have Atom, it's here, let's just use it, and I kind of agree. Yet if Atom has already been in a sort of decline, if you will, the complexity it adds only detracts from any sort of resurgence in adoption. The entire syntax is designed to support types, which as far as I've seen is something that has never really been used. I mean, whose feed actually uses custom XML namespaces/tags? Feeds are these verbose and overly-abstract markup files for a purpose nobody really asked for. If someone needs to stick more metadata into their feed, they can already do it with JSON by just adding a non-standard key to the object. Done. No need to have anything beyond primitive types or declaring namespaces.
As far as the HTML thing goes, that's a fair point, but I have to disagree. I don't want HTML to taint titles of things in a feed reader. It's bad enough that people can use emojis and different stylized unicode characters in them, but HTML would just make things worse. I don't need titles to have bold or italics or colors or whatnot. If that's going to be in the actual content body, then so be it, but what you are suggesting sounds like a horrible idea. Granted, I didn't have that problem back when I used to use a feed reader.
Where did this come from? You refer to an atom feed as RSS, someone decides to add RSS to their site, and they implement atom because that's how you do RSS. What's the problem?
No, they implement RSS because that’s all they’ve heard of.
As long as XML has DTD and Schema, it will be superior to JSON
I've thought about how to implement an open-standards social media site. Maybe with a feed server (FastCGI or otherwise) that takes authentication tokens in the request header or URL (over HTTPS only obviously), and - if the token is linked to a valid "friend" or "following" relationship, returns an RSS feed of the person's recent posts.
It's my claim that for all the work that goes into Mastodon, Solid, etc, none of them will truly succeed without the ability for programmers themselves to effectively put them into practice on static sites, especially those associated with their GitHub profile using GitHub Pages. (I despise GitHub, FWIW, and really hate that so much of the world of development has settled there, but I can know what I know from seeing what I see.) When it's simple enough to do that, that's the point where non-niche productized services for non-programmers to do the same will start popping up and off-Twitter chatter will take off. Despite the inroads that Mastodon has made, I don't consider in non-niche; it's being held back by the same factors described here.
https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ formerly PubSubHubbub was used to notify subscribers, but it was optional and subscribers would fall back to polling. WebSub could be a separate service.
The trickiest part is handling replies, which involves some cryptography to prevent spoofing. But this too could be done by polling, only then you only get replies from those you subscribe to. ActivityPub does this with crypto too IIRC.
https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
Just saw, it works also with other websites like youtube. But I have never tried this.
This has been my opposite experience, all RSS bridges i have tried gets error with Facebook pages.
We are on our way to fix this problem :) https://newzy.io
Facebook is now what RSS was supposed to be, but for the non-tech masses. Sure, I still use RSS for tech blogs, but how do I find about local concerts and events, schedule changes for kid’s aikido, etc? All these small organizations, clubs, bands, artists, venues use Facebook as a way to notify their members/fans.
After some curating, I really like my Facebook. But I don’t use it as a social network, i.e. there’s not much social stuff there. “Loud” friends or relatives they are muted. But that’s where I find out about next concert of bands I follow, which I wouldn’t find elsewhere.
I never read social media feed. For Twitter my Tweetbot client is configured to filter out all retweets and I use a 'mustered' list for the people whose tweets I don't want to miss.
With "soy" here being an old dogwhistle that refers to the "theory" that men are being feminized through the estrogen contained in meals that have soy as ingredient.
'Soyware' is possibly a simple 'spyware' typo.
I know neither you nor The Famous Article's author, but your remark does not instill confidence in your judgement.
I have my criticisms on Luke Smith, but as a fellow man, I respect him.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's important not to react to the most provocative thing in an article by copying it into the comments to complain about it. It just leads to the threads turning into the same flamewars over and over again, which is the opposite of what HN is supposed to be for. We want comments to come from a place of curiosity.
I know it takes a certain self-regulation not to take the bait, and this is not easy - it seems to go against hard-wiring - but it's something that we all need to work on as a community. The idea is to maximize interesting discussions and minimize hideous ones.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
A one way rss feed of content is the complete opposite.
...upon which you'd have re-invented something resembling Mastodon, GNU Social or XMPP, give or take few bits.
Maybe it could have a crytographic addon where you own handle and data cryptographically and can move it to a new server as long as you keep a backup locally and the private key.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA
Should we not be using RSS to replace social media because the person saying so might be a racist? Should racists be silenced when talking about other things?
The linked blog post is the kind of informational pablum that anybody with a handful of years of programming or IT experience could write.
That's what Luke Smith specializes in: milquetoast technological advice wrapped in a veneer of alt-right language designed to titillate his audience. I see no reason why we should give him center stage in our attentions when plenty of other, better, and more qualified people can talk cogently about the same topics.
You mean Brodie?
Not unlike Scott Adams. I find Dilbert funny. Am I supposed not to laugh because his political views do not align with mine (at all)?
Not everybody knows, because he's a relative nobody who occasionally gets laundered through HN. My only role in this entire thing is making sure that the bits that I know are available for consideration.
Same thing with Jordan Peterson. I must not agree with his stand points and positions, but his arguments are compelling at times and it is fun watching and following his stuff. I can only broaden my view if don't look into the same direction all the time.
And so... you'd rather just badmouth him on HN instead? This entire subthread is an ad hominem, and entirely inappropriate.
Where's the badmouthing? His reactionary politics are a critical part of the personal brand that he uses to advance his (again, incredibly mundane and well-trodden) content.
And guess what: I agree that it's inappropriate for HN. All things being equal, I'd prefer not to spend even the limited time I've spent today thinking about this. But for as long as reactionaries continue to use HN to launder their reputations, I'll continue to be the annoying commenter who points them out. I'm sorry if you think that's inappropriate.
Suppose you follow 1k accounts, you have to subscribe 1k RSS. What a waste. Twitter's core functionality was based on how to aggregate all 1k updates into one feed.