Hacker News Reader

Easier consumption is pretty much it, yes. Specifically, it'd make it easier to stay engaged with publishers and communities even if they aren't part of a centralized platform, which means that people who develop publishing and community apps will have an easier time growing their user base.

> 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!

Benefit is that there is no third party that controls the feed.

OP talks about centralized vs decentralized and RSS is about as decentralized as it gets to the point that it has to be literally aggregated.

I mentioned in another post I added the ability to comment on my items from RSS feeds with Mastodon accounts recently. Sure, it's not part of the protocol, but it does the job without any fuss and people who want to interact with me (the majority of them are on Mastodon, I guess this is the key point) in the context of certain RSS feed items can do so very easily.

Do you support web mentions as well? That was the first attempt at adding social to RSS, ActivityPub is very similar with an angle to federation instead of self hosting

Honestly I don't know much about web mentions. It would be very cool however, if when I add a HN/Reddit/Twitter/Mastodon comment by somebody to a curated feed, that that person could be notified by a web mention. From my limited understanding, though, I think this would require web mentions to be implemented wherever the comment/highlight originated from?

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...

Could each user not have their own RSS feed that refers to the raw feed item of the other?

Also has me thinking about how tools like logseq/obsidian could play in an RSS feed world. Never looked into it!

Well you're wrong that it doesn't allow participation. It just separates read from write. Participation can be in the form of additional feeds. It can be in the form of a feed remixer (moderation or aggregation).

I’ve always thought a social api built on email as the transport and mailing lists for organization would be ideal. The infrastructure is there and scales.