The '00s were such a wonderful time, the explosion in open access information, mashups (how I miss mashups!), easy publishing and the reach you could get from your sofa. RSS is the epitome of that, it's such a shame we have ended up with these walled garden social publishing platforms that lock our content down.

This, adding the RSS icon to the address bar, was an inspired move to surface discoverability. Compare that with the fight to get Apple to surface the availability of PWAs!

The big thing that has changed since that time is the monetisation, these walled platforms have had to instigate revenue share with large creators. But still, the wish for a simpler more open web is in the background. There is evidence of a swing back that way (the fediverse, blue sky?), I just hope "big business" doesn't destroy it (the rumour of Facebook embracing the fediverse...).

RSS isn't dead, it's the backbone of podcasts, but it's such a shame our Twitter feed, our Facebook, or even our Twitch isn't available as RSS.

Back in '06, my "mashup" was a social feed aggregator, it gave you a single "homepage" with all your activity from Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Flickr, and many other sites. A lot of that was built on RSS, and you could add any RSS fead to your page. Sadly it went nowhere, but I learnt a lot...