How to rebuild social media on top of RSS
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RSS seems like great tech but it doesn’t have great user facing apps (that is easy to find at least) to support it
I switched over to it ages ago after the death of google reader, and it's held up remarkably well for me, and now also includes welcome features for, e.g., intaking email newsletters, conducting automatic content-specific web searches, etc into the same RSS-reader UI.
It's one SW subscription I'm happy to pay for.
There’s a lot that goes into the success of social media over the last couple decades and figuring out the best ad revenue models was a big part of it.
It, of course, limits the medium to, well, social media proper, peers talking among themselves for the enjoyment, not making it a full-time job. It pushes for-profit stars elsewhere.
It of course does not solve the problem of hidden ads ("shilling"), product placement, etc, in more popular feeds.
There is certainly room for strictly non-commercial communication, where the value is in the human connection (talking to friends) or fame (being a local luminary). But certainly it's not going to be a medium fitting for everyone, and for al types of content.
It's not a technology issue, in today's world, most content that would be on an RSS feed comes with ads built in.
I still have these exports, backed up to a CD somewhere.
Edit: actually I would say its more like an infinite closet but the more clothes you had the longer it takes to find something to wear the next day until things becoming unbearable and you just close the door to your closet, lock it and then rent clothing for the rest of your life.
That in turn led to other companies with the ability to set things at the time gradually deprecating and removing their build-in feed readers (thanks Mozilla, thanks Apple) and the result is that RSS "failed".
It didn't fail, it was murdered so Google could promote their failed social media network.
However, RSS was never very popular outside some small tech circles, and Mozilla and Apple saw that the same way that Google did.
Mozilla is nothing more than controlled opposition that Google can prop up and say "See, we're not a totally monopoly" while Apple at the time could see nothing beyond the piles of money that the iPhone was making them, to the point where even their desktop/laptop lines suffered.
Instead of that, they removed the comments and replaced them with something worse that no one ended up using.
The former would be a more impersonal source of information and discussion, whereas the latter would have been where you put your personal connections.
Unfortunately Google wanted to do both in the same product, and thought that Circles would be sufficient to create the distinction, but the kind of stuff someone might want to expose to an impersonal connection is drastically different from the kind of stuff they want to expose to personal connections, to the point that they should arguably have completely different UIs.
Nevertheless it seems to me like the network effect was the main thing, and Reader could've been a huge step there.
To make money from Ads. So parent is right, RSS was killed because of the Internet Ads.
I'm finding increasingly harder to follow some podcasts as well.
More and more are centering their distribution through Spotify. Reason: money. Either to fund the minimum needed or to give them some margin that Patreon or similar methods are not able to.
There's really only two driving forces in online creative activities:
1) money
2) clout
RSS is a terrible medium for both.
Something like turning the radio om vs gathering and playing own records collection.
For the sake of discussion I opened the app again to see if anything had changed since I last used it. Still, I got the same kind of content that bored me away from the app last time. I'm not sure that's all that uncanny. Pretty much what you'd expect from a mediocre algorithm.
I don't really see RSS as being a curation channel as much as a notification channel, though. What RSS provides is a means to notify you when 'professional' curators have curated new content for you.
It's not really a fair comparison between a centralized product optimized for engagement and a distributed protocol that can be used in lots of different ways. Sure, the world doesn't care about RSS, that's pretty much the easiest strawman to come up with. On the other side though, it's not a foregone conclusion that what the world wants is to be mindlessly entertained by the algorithm of a faceless corporation. At this point TikTok is the new hot, but there is a long history of youth culture rebelling against corporate tastemakers, so it doesn't seem outrageous to assume that the next big thing will involve some measure of curation.
Not foregone, but not likely to be supplated by high effort individual curation.
Another plus of TikTok is that the only unitary identity is your content posts, rather than, e.g. your comment/post history.
TikTok is the evolution of SnapChat, which fucked up precisely at playing coporate tastemaker with its ephermeral content model. TikTok solved that.
There's a paradox at play. Or maybe a distortion in our thinking.
I like my niche. You like your niche. My family, colleagues and friends like their little niches. Ask around and you'll find that everybody, barring a small slice of 13 year old's who talk about "what everybody is doing", is quite happy in their niche. Indeed that's what social media is all about. If everybody was 13 and wanted to attend the universal party, and not be "left out", we'd switch back to broadcast technologies.
It leads me to the conclusion that the mentality around social media is really that of an insecure teenager, and that it's caused society some degree of arrested development.
I think this is the key point. Because saying "this is what you want" hides a part of the problem: who says it.
The implication is that when you chose what you want you are in control. You may miss stuff, but you are the one deciding. When, on the other hand, it is chosen for you, the algorithm may be the best ever but you're not in control.
For some people "being the decider" is more important than for some others.
Indeed, non-techies don't actually care that it is RSS under the hood, but I'm not sure techies really care either. It is the high level concept of what RSS embodies that is really being talked about. RSS merely gets suggested because it is an already defined standard that gets us there. No need for a 15th competing standard.
Corporations, governments, etc, are most happy with passive bystanders. They encourage this behaviour, and train people to be this way (deferring to authority figures, etc) as it makes everyone more regular and easier to manage.
The self-directed individual however, rejects this sort of entrainment. They would prefer to receive various information directly and in an un-intermediated fashion, so that they are able to make up their own mind.
Something that uses RSS but doesn't go on about using RSS would go down well I imagine. It works like this for podcasts for example.
Same with mastodon and all the other decentralised stuff. Nobody cares about the nerd bit! Market to the mainstream and let hackers hack. The only thing you need to do differently to improve things is reject the desire to wall up your garden when you're succeeding.
Technological implementation details aside, the single biggest issue I have with Mastodon as a replacement for the Twitter-shaped hole in my media universe, is that it has no extant established functional scalable utilized replacement for the distillation of a single feed,
specifically one which has a meticulously crafted "algorithm" aka secrket sauce for comprising posts from sources I have chosen to follow, to universally trending events, with a strong attention to network and correlated interests within it.
This is hard work and is indeed a sekret sauce.
And despite how abused it was, e.g. to drive engagement-through-enragement, and, as with the pathological death-spiral cases of Facebook and Instagram, how corrupted by paid-for and otherwise placed content, it was effective at constantly exposing me to things RSS does not and AFAIK cannot:
things I want to see but don't know to ask for.
Whoever cracks this for Mastodon in a fashion that plays well with the established norms around control, is liable to make a small fortune.
Much smaller than in a non-federated, centralized universe, that captures a broad audience...
...but a much sparklier fortune.
Of course, we have new modes of distribution and production, but whose to say Tik-Tok can ‘define’ what you want in order to give it? (A la. You can have any color you want so long as it’s black).
So there are people who watch broadcast TV or what’s “hot” or “trending”, or other well defined products (Star Trek, not Star Wars, parody fiction).
And then there are people whose entertainment involves choice, refinement of taste, and discernment. Plus a bit of the more plentiful Star Wars parody fiction.
I curate RSS feeds on specific topics[1] and populate them with highlights from what I'm reading from across the internet- this can be a literal highlight from an article, a comment on HN, Reddit etc., a Kindle highlight from a book, anything really, as long as it is on-topic.
There is always a link back to the original context for subscribers to dig in deeper if they want to.
I think this is a real sweet spot. I cannot go back to feeds of anything and everything, a hodge-podge mixture of bad one-paragraph summaries or overwhelmingly long RSS item bodies.
I want to know what exactly grabbed somebody's attention that made them think that something was worth sharing, what gripped them about it, and if it also grips me, I'll gladly go to the original context and read further to my heart's content.
But I don't want a never ending queue of things that I have to put an outsized amount of effort into filtering through to even answer the question "is this something that interests me?"
With the explosion of Mastodon I also added the ability for my RSS subscribers to comment on RSS items from my feed using their Mastodon accounts. So far, so good!
This seems like a much cleaner setup and can feed into indieweb as well.
Thanks for sharing, I wouldn’t have gone looking for this.
The outliner[0] feature allows you create someting similar to notado.
The Organize section could be like https://ooh.directory/
The Share section could offer a feed of all content that users are willing to share publicly. There could be support for ActivityPub to make it a worthwhile investment of time.
It should be a better sales channel to get new users hooked on good content first instead of forcing them to commit to a new account before trying anything.
They went down once in many years and I couldn’t use the web until it was back up.
Here is a workaround that I've had good luck with:
https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/
In addition to improving usability, it defeats attempts to measure clickbait summary efficacy, etc., since it breaks sites' ability to pull popularity / telemetry info.
How does it work? Looking at a feed.rss file, I don't see any links to Mastodon posts.
>I curate RSS feeds on specific topics
>I think this is a real sweet spot. I cannot go back to feeds of anything and everything, a hodge-podge mixture of bad one-paragraph summaries or overwhelmingly long RSS item bodies.
It is the sweet spot when it comes to consuming your feed on its own. In the context of other feeds, and you may have resolved it with Mastodon feedback, it still takes some time to find the best links in your feed. That's a quality on its own, so please don't feel pressured for change. However, these points would make it sweeter for me:
* Showing the most popular highlights of the week, month and year, by user vote and by the popularity of the main article on social networks, as well as your personal favorites.
* Find like-minded collectors who have included the same highlight or for further drill-down, a set of highlights.
* It would also be interesting to see a note from you why you have selected a highlight, when that's appropriate. Further tags that could be used for sorting and ranking would also be nice.
It uses a "just in time" model to create a Mastodon post if it doesn't already exist when a user clicks on the "Comment" link (it also does a bunch of other stuff to handle truncation, fitting within the submission limits of the instance, making space for source links etc).
I think it's important to try and be a good citizen on Mastodon instances run by volunteers and minimize unnecessary load. The reality is that not everyone is going to want to comment on every single item in a feed, so in my mind there is no point trying to having a 1/1 parity between RSS items and Mastodon points.
Comments initiated by subscribers are posted on Mastodon with the "unlisted" visibility so they don't spam the public discoverability features in the instance timeline, but can be boosted by the curator at their discretion. The commenting user can also boost the highlight on their instance if they wish.
> It would also be interesting to see a note from you why you have selected a highlight, when that's appropriate.
I do this sometimes[1] - curators have an option to post a highlight directly to the public feed of their instance (ie. not unlisted), and then reply to that themselves with notes.
I think I'm a little overdue in writing a blog post about this new feature! Stay tuned for a submission on HN hopefully sometime in the next week!
>>for my RSS subscribers
>It uses a "just in time" model to create a Mastodon post
What is 'It'? notado.app for people who have logged in? There is no links to comments when not logged in. How can new users or people who don't want to create an account discover the comments?
>no point trying to having a 1/1 parity between RSS items and Mastodon points.
To me, the interesting part would be an n/1 relation: One comment section where everybody from all RSS streams can meet to discuss an article. Like HN/new, there is no incentive to comment on a 3 day old post because hardly anybody will read it. The economics change if the comment section can appear on various RSS streams because then, there can be readers and replies to a comment even years later.
Is it acceptable or even desirable to share your mastodon comment sections, or do you see them as a place for the people who follow you?
The links to initiate new comments on the public HTML versions of the feeds show only for people who are logged in, because unfortunately bots and scrapers are not as respectful as they should be.
As a user's feed homepage is designed to be shared publicly, it only takes one bad actor to click on every "Discuss on Mastodon" link for every item in all of a curator's feeds and put undue load on a Mastodon instance which makes the whole "just in time" approach moot.
Where Mastodon posts have already been created for discussion (by authed users, or by any users subscribed directly to the RSS versions of the feeds), those links (ie. to the Mastodon posts) get shown on the public HTML versions of the feeds.[1]
Otherwise, anyone who subscribes to the public RSS version of the feed (unauthed by default, doesn't require an account etc.) is presented with a "Discuss on Mastodon" link at the end of each RSS item on any feed for which the curator decides to enable comments, and this link can be used to initiate new comments/discussions with a Mastodon identity.
> One comment section where everybody from all RSS streams can meet to discuss an article
This isn't really something I'm interested in for Notado, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone sees your comment and runs with this idea!
> The economics change if the comment section can appear on various RSS streams because then, there can be readers and replies to a comment even years later.
It's not quite the same as what you're suggesting, but I am thinking of providing an API for https://kulli.sh where article authors can embed comments on their articles from across all supported platforms at the bottom of their articles. This could go a long way towards keeping discussions fresh regardless of the time that passes since the initial submission due to comments being embedded with the source.
I just need to really sit down and work out a pricing model (or maybe separate models for individuals vs organizations) for the whole thing.
> Is it acceptable or even desirable to share your mastodon comment sections, or do you see them as a place for the people who follow you?
I think this depends entirely on the curator. I personally don't have any issues with mine being shared more widely, but there are settings that I've made available to allow people to restrict comments to approved followers (on Mastodon).
The nice thing about the Mastodon API is that if you enable public comments, you can filter for your posts that have been created by the "Notado Feeds" OAuth app, and then filter again by posts that have >N replies, and then embed those discussions on your personal website (or anywhere else).
[1]: Example here that you can see when unauthed https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development#399920c89...
What decentralized protocols try to solve, and what the centralized web has failed us with, is data ownership. Users should have full control over the data they produce, and be free to migrate it to any other node without losing access to the service they're interested in.
I think Nostr looks very promising in that sense: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
Mind you, I don't think social media is worth reinventing. Connecting everyone on the planet is wrong on a societal level. But P2P services are a good fit for building smaller communities, which is a crucial missing component of the design of the WWW. I'm still hopeful that something built for the masses can take over the current mess we're in.
> Users would still depend on centralized services to publish content, and there's little to no chance that these companies would interoperate using a standard protocol.
All you need is a blog/newsletter platform like substack, ghost, wordpress etc. They may not aggregate your social posts into another feed for you, but you can use a separate service to generate and host the feed, then link to it from your main site.
> Users should have full control over the data they produce, and be free to migrate it to any other node without losing access to the service they're interested in.
RSS and email do this pretty well I think!
I like to think that I'm pretty technically competent, but I really struggle to understand a lot of the standards/protocols that the fediverse/indieweb is built on...
Also has me thinking about how tools like logseq/obsidian could play in an RSS feed world. Never looked into it!
If you want to bolt interactivity on top of RSS then my question is why use an XML document with a very limited vocabulary when you can have a JSON document with a wide (and extensible) vocabulary in the form of ActivityPub. (I don't mean to imply that the later is perfect, but it's a better fit than RSS). An ActivityPub actor's Outbox is exactly an RSS feed by a different name. Instead of a list of "content" items, it has a list of "interactions" the actor had with the rest of the ActivityPub ecosystem, but once you reach the interactions which signal new content, you get that RSS feed experience.
Quite ironic reading this. Do you know what the "X" in XML stands for?
[edit] Never mind, I'm (somewhat)wrong. Both stipulate extensibility: https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#extendingRss and https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5023#section-6.2
However in ActivityPub extensibility is specifically mentioned in the growing of the vocabulary to cover areas that the initial specification doesn't include (the way some members of the community created source forge related objects and activities).
RSS is a protocol specification on top of XML. Whether the underlying data interchange format is XML or JSON doesn't restrict extensibility. XML namespaces are designed explicitly around the idea that document schemas can be embedded and remixed.
Ultimately, the mode and points of extensibility is a function of the design of the protocol and not the data format.
ActivityPub wouldn't be more or less extensible had it been built on XML instead of JSON (you can make the case that it would be a less wire efficient implementation on XML).
Wouldn’t that make ActivityPub a successor technology for RSS?
EDIT: maybe not — https://macwright.com/2022/12/09/activitypub.html
[2]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader
[3]: https://havenweb.org
I think non-algorithmic is a great baseline, HN and certain other communities are proof that it still works. There’s also a benefit of “everyone having seen the same stuff”, leading to interesting meta-conversations. This is the same “lost shared experiences” of only having one tv channel that old timers talk about, and it’s very real.
That said, there’s nothing inherently bad or destructive with algorithmic curation. What sucks is that we have no insight or control of them. If there was an open marketplace of curation algorithms, we’d be in a pretty good place.
Standardized there: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html
And generalized there: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0472.html
I've built Movim (https://movim.eu) on top of that and many users have already access to thousands of articles daily, pushed in real-time in their timelines.
For example here is the ArsTechnica page on Movim https://mov.im/?node/news.movim.eu/ArsTechnica
> For example, give this here link a click: https://feedrabbit.com/?url=https://meta.discourse.org/posts...
This is close to the way podcasts work now, and it kind of sucks. I was just looking at a show on the Apple Podcasts site (because it was the first result that showed up in the search results), and it has social media sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter and an icon to copy some markup to embed an iframe-based player. If you are not Facebook or Twitter or looking to embed an iframe, too bad. The reverse sucks as well: when I'm on the site of the podcast itself, and it gives me a bunch of options to subscribe using Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or watch on YouTube. If you use something else to consume podcasts, your best bet is to copy the link to the bare RSS feed and put that in. Problem is, some sites omit that one.
This is one thing that the fediverse is getting right, in comparison. If I use Mastodon and want to touch someone's post (i.e. react to it—by replying, starring it, or whatever), then I can trivially refer to that post with its URL. If I copy the link from my browser toolbar and then paste it into Mastodon, it works. (This isn't amazing. The workflows around it could use some polishing up, but the fact that it is at minimum possible is awesome.) For comparison, when I copied the Apple Podcasts show page URL and pasted it into the Google Podcasts search bar, it returns a message: "No podcasts found".
Related: Please make your products work with URLs (2020) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038065>
> Another suggestion: provide browser extensions and iOS/Android sharing menu items so that it's easy to open an web page in the reading app. If there's one or more RSS feeds detected, throw in a subscribe button with checkboxes for each feed. The "shareable subscribe links" should include a link to the original RSS feed in the page metadata. Then if I click on the subscribe link but want to subscribe with a different RSS reader, I can do so easily.
i.e. we should be sure to provide smooth user experiences both for people who don't yet use a feed reader and for people who do. Agreed that Mastodon does this nicely, and I think adding in some browser extensions/mobile apps would help to automate things a bit more.
* or collectively managed, at least; in the vein of w3id.org, for example
I subscribed to your feed and wish you luck with your nice projects! I did miss an RSS icon on your site, however. ;)
I actually haven't worried about the RSS icon on my site since I figure people who use a feed reader can just copy and paste the site URL and the reader app will auto-detect the feed, and people who don't use a feed reader can just subscribe with email. Maybe it'd still be helpful to link explicitly to the RSS feed I suppose, perhaps underneath the email subscribe box?
I think somewhere close to the email subscribe box will do the job. I even check the footer a lot, or the blog section of pages.
They're comprised of standardized CSS class names to be inserted into HTML and enable meaningful scraping. Especially given that more and more sites are produced using JS frameworks, which have a harder time producing XML than older generation PHP and the like, h-feed seems a no-brainer.
Then I remember when some RSS feeds stopped including the entire article, removing the "syndication" part of RSS. :(
Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
Question is, though, can we get a YC startup from that?
> could the problem of participating in the communities be solved through one app too?
My thinking is that it's a good-enough solution to leave writing comments etc. to the separate community apps. Most of the benefit the "one app" thing IMO is to provide a single feed to check--I want to have a habit of checking only one place when I have a few spare minutes to read something. While it would be kind of nice to also be able to leave comments and such without leaving that app, it's not too difficult to click on the post and leave a comment via another app. So I'd leave that kind of thing off of this list since I don't consider it to be essential. But it could still be worth experimenting with after the essentials are in place!
Another aspect to this is that protocols and interoperability have a downside since they require more coordination between different parties and can thus slow down development of new kinds of features. I think it's important to find the right amount of interop. There needs to be enough interop so that people can build new apps without having to fight against (the lack of) network effects, but not so much interop that people are unable to experiment independently with new kinds of features.
That's a long-winded way of saying I think it's actually better to not worry about making community interaction happen over a protocol, because it gives community app developers more freedom to experiment.
> How reading of different type of content should be handled,as some posts are just media, some are comments?
It may be helpful if community apps include various metadata in the feeds they provide, so reader apps can distinguish different types of posts (e.g. perhaps include a "in reply to" field for replies). When possible, reader apps can also try to infer things about the posts, similar to my suggestion of inferring if a feed is a "social feed" or a "regular feed" by looking at the frequency (and probably also the length) of posts.
> It may be helpful if community apps include various metadata in the feeds they provide, so reader apps can distinguish different types of posts (e.g. perhaps include a "in reply to" field for replies).
Fun Fact: The Activity Streams JSON-LD Vocabulary, which is used in ActivityPub, started, a long time ago, as a metadata extension for Atom (and RSS) feeds.
https://activitystrea.ms/specs/atom/1.0/
Additional Atom back in 2005 provided a minimal mechanism for copying feed items from one feed into a new feed – the "social feed" in your proposal – by specifying an element which references the original source feed.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4287#section-4.2.11
Over the years people have put a lot of time and thought into distributed social media APIs and related specs and are still doing it. Current efforts like ActivityPub and the Indiewebcamp stuff are a direct descendant of some of these specs.
(If I were you, my first thought would be to simply read, what has happened in the last 20 years. At the very least it can never hurt to know, what other people found worth doing.)
I'm interested if you have any reading recommendations? Indie Microblogging[1] is on my reading list. My impression so far of existing protocol-based social media efforts is that they're not really going in the same direction I'd like to go myself, but of course you're right that it doesn't hurt to have more background knowledge.
Both the Indiewebcamp wiki and Wikipedia often have pages on now defunct protocols and services. That is of course not a perfect approach but it gives one entry points.
- you can assign priorities to your feed subscriptions or their categories
- you can limit the number of items you can see per feed so that they can't overtake your "dashboard".
https://lenns.io/ (p.s. thanks for any feedback)
I've been thinking about doing this "manually" by parsing JSON responses from Reddit and etc, because about a year ago I realized that all my absurd volume of posts there, on twitter, here, basically constituted labor I was giving to these places for free, that drives up their valuations. I wanted to "take that back" and make it my own by reposting the material somehow on my website.
Obviously, a huge part of the "value" of these comments comes from the context, the fact that the websites exist to have discussions on. If I just posted my comments on my website verbatim, that value and parent comment context would just be lost, and I bet a majority of the content would be almost meaningless.
Still though I really like this idea of being able to link to "my posts across the internet," cause I do it a lot lol.
I want to see a good client that supports many different ways of following content: RSS, Atom, Twitter, Mastodon, nostr, youtube, whatever... with smart ways of dealing with different kinds of content (tweets versus blog posts versus videos).
I see these RSS-related recommendations as the next step: what can an app developer do to reduce the effort it takes for others to interop with them?
https://www.nelsonstar.com/news/nelsons-blaine-cook-helped-b...
I personally haven't been liking any content aggregation outside of RSS/reddit because I can't take the timeline model of unrelated things being streamed to my eyes without context. I tend to want to specialize what I read or otherwise I tend not to remember it or appreciate it as much (for instance I'd typically scan through news-like nodes during breaks and read art/science/in-depth feeds after work, but something that mixes both makes me uncomfortable).
But I do have a "people" node in my ttrss instance that aggregates from social network sources/blogs/shaarlis. Gives the best of both worlds, I think.
If we look to podcasts as a model — 490K new episodes in the last 90 days, delivered to users and to aggregators alike via "not dead yet" RSS — ads are placed inline with the content. There is no RSS-related "pact" that precludes the relationships you mentioned.
Related analyst estimate: "US podcast ad spending will surpass $2 billion in 2023 and will account for nearly one-third of digital audio services ad spending." https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/us-podcast-adver...
RSS makes it very difficult to measure the performance of an ad. Most players in this space wrap a publishers hosted podcast link with their own tracking link, and the main metric of engagement is a download. Downloads themselves are a pretty crude measurement and don’t hold up to something like minutes watched/listened.
Placing ads into the audio directly also just isn’t as performant as streaming it into the media like in video. Publishers and advertisers want more fine grained control over where the ad is placed, when it’s placed, and how it’s consumed by the listener. Podcast ads currently don’t deliver on that.
... and? From the perspective of whom?
> Publishers and advertisers want more fine grained control over where the ad is placed, when it’s placed, and how it’s consumed by the listener.
There you go.
Ad tech is behind when it comes to podcasts? Who fucking cares. Not the audience. Podcast advertising is the closest thing to traditional broadcast ads for TV and radio—when ads were still inert instead of sentient. There's not a damn person on this side of the divide that sees the things you mention as being a significant downside. Not having the self-awareness to realize it is pure déformation professionnelle; this entire comment reads like a burglar lamenting the fact that people keeping their money in the bank instead of at home under their mattresses makes it harder to break in and take it.
Because of that I think a standard that allows people to publish their own (cryptographically signed) things on a variety of publicly accessible servers (that could be restricted or not, have their own moderation policies or not, be paid or not or have other model) is the way forward: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
I first learned his name here on HN a while ago, although he doesn't seem to participate here. He thinks he's doing great new stuff, but as in this thread, his name rarely seems to come up in other people's discussions of RSS.
"Some feared that the inability for people to get along with Dave Winer would further damage the development of RSS."[0]
[0]http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ikeda/IRLS571RSS/controversy.html
If you want to follow @elonjet@mastodon.social, put this in your RSS reader: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet.rss
See also https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/ and https://www.jsonfeed.org/
[0] https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?url=&q=https://tfos.co/
Here’s my mini-site https://beluga.gcollazo.com
App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beluga-social/id1626349771
Any "rebuild" solution without heavy involvement of mobile first is destined to fail. Or it will just be a nich market on desktop websites for desktop browsers.
There's a reason why social media entities have become walled gardens. Some used to have RSS but removed it. Then they restricted anonymous viewing. Then they motivated users to use the app instead of the website. This isn't just driven by pure evil, it is fueled by the need to keep the lights on.
Running a social media behemoth for the masses costs billions per year. They need to keep online a staggering amount of content forever, develop lots of apps, have teams in every jurisdiction, comply with laws, it's a massive operation. All so that you can use it for free (with ads).
Why would these "hoarders" of social content open up using RSS? It's suicidal.
You cannot escape the monetization question. The Mastodon model moves this cost to individual volunteers, which will not scale to billions of users. The typical instance already has to stop registration after a few thousand users, media content is regularly purged, and instances constantly come and go, so your cohesive "identity" is based on quicksand, as well as subject to inconsistent and arbitrary moderation.
Apart from that, the RSS idea doesn't go beyond the aggregation of reading content. Say that I follow your social feed that way, how do I talk back? Where will my comment be posted? At which service? At which of the various sources that make up your combined feed? Who pays for the hosting? Who moderates? Who gets to see it? Who gets notifications? Which service pays for managing notifications?
What about a like, heart, retweet, all the various types of amplifications? In a decentralized scenario, what does this do, if anything?
What about discovery? How do I discover people to follow and relevant content? Supplying the current effortless experience?
How does blocking and privacy work in an open feed? I'm subscribed to your feed but don't like a particular person commenting on it. So I block him. Who maintains/stores this block?
How do ads work? How does verification work? How do creator fees work? How do subscriptions and newsletter work?
All of these things are standard features of modern social networks that people have to expect. Reading content is only a tiny part of the total social media experience.
A lot of the questions you ask are already resolved in the newsletter ecosystem.
The OPML feed changes, your RSS client picks up the changes and starts following the correct endpoints.
I currently use Reeder. I source in my usual news sources and HN and twitter and some subreddits.
I’m working toward a place where I can setup a feed, a frequency, and a service to use both to make an “old timey” newsprint like PDF into my inbox (or an rss feed!) each day so I can still try for that “back when papers were good” feel.
That was many moons ago.
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[0] Circa 2008, I could find several feeds from Janes that carried meaty non-subscriber extracts.
[1] LaTeX is picky about all sorts of "special" characters that are more common than one might expect.
Finding “full articles” is certainly a pain. I have little idea how reeder does it.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990568
Some readers either support <enclosure> or instead load inexplicably tiny/blown up/stretched/pixelated images, or just don't display any images at all.
Consider that podcasts use RSS - yet need a special namespace "itunes" in order to work:
<itunes:duration>30:00</itunes:duration>
Besides that, I also think this problem can be ameliorated to some extent by using and developing open-source feed parsing libs like Python's feedparser rather than using a plain XML parser and doing the rest yourself.
One of the problems is the spec tries to do everything. You have blogs, podcasts, random crap, and now social media all trying to cram in to the same spec. Ideally you want one spec per use case. With modern tech it's very easy to create a new JSON spec which is trivial to parse and serialize. And you can auto generate extremely accurate documentation.
I don't think we really need "another rss" which would just be fragmentation. We just do not need to be using RSS for social media just because you can.
One aspect of RSS that might appeal to marketers is the perfect delivery and no games trying to avoid spam folders, plus tracking via images and landing pages will work. The receiver gets easy unsubscribing and less in their real inbox.
But email replacement is just one thing you can do. Stock alerts; Reminders etc. could all be done this way. Social media of course too.
It's better than someone F5-ing a page and redownloading all the assets, but feed readers check automatically on a (usually short) timer, so it's not really comparable.
Does YouTube still offer RSS feeds? I remember those being extremely useful when they swtiched from reverse-chronological to the recommendation-driven Home feed.