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To be honest, I am still missing the point of the article. Let's compare emails and RSS: both are protocols, and both depend on the additional tools to make the

To be honest, I am still missing the point of the article. Let's compare emails and RSS: both are protocols, and both depend on the additional tools to make them more use-friendly (at least, I doubt if anybody reads raw RSS feeds). The similarity also doesn’t end here: both are regularly announced as dead and antiquated, but both somehow still stand strong. > What is dead, or at least like Arthur, waiting for the right moment to come back is the idea of RSS as a system for connecting content streams together and building higher order services on top. The closest to it is the situation with the podcast ecosystem, which if I recall correctly depends heavily on RSS feeds to propagate podcasts’ playlists. > When too much thought & conversation is captured inside Facebook, Twitter, Slack and all these other services who depend upon owning you & your content, the RSS system cannot thrive. I agree that information capture by various social media is quite troubling. I am currently worried the most about all development-related discussion in many minor projects and communities (not only programming-related) switching over to Discord, of all things. Despite this, I disagree with the assessment that it is a major bottleneck for the RSS ecosystem. I have never used Google Reader, so I don’t have any kind of before and after perspective, but in my humble opinion RSS is a standard that is in quite a good condition overall. Despite social medias’ walled garden approach and greater focus on instant messaging than blogging, I rarely stumble upon a website with content of episodic nature without any kind of RSS feed. The only significant exceptions are YouTube and Twitter. > I saw amazing possibilities arising out of individuals publishing their content, […], and layering of services. That future didn't happen. The thing you describe reminds me more of something akin to Mastodon and ActivityPub (albeit I never used any platform depending on it). From what I remember about ActivityPub was that it was designed from ground-up as both a protocol and an extendable system to plug into as a clear alternative to walled-garden design. From what I gather, RSS was never meant to be that. How such a system based on RSS only would even look like? > […] increasing use of micro-formats to add semantic information, […] Isn’t it basically what JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa do? With a bonus of not being tied to any walled garden (that I am aware of). Though I suppose having a way to use them in a more automatic way would be nice.

sandbags 5y ago
There are lots of threads I could respond to but let's take this one to begin with: >Despite this, I disagree with the assessment that it is a major bottleneck for the RSS ecosystem. I have never used Google Reader, so I don’t have any kind of before and after perspective, but in my humble opinion RSS is a standard that is in quite a good condition overall. Despite social medias’ walled garden approach and greater focus on instant messaging than blogging, I rarely stumble upon a website with content of episodic nature without any kind of RSS feed. The only significant exceptions are YouTube and Twitter. As I have mentioned in several other comments, there is nothing wrong with RSS2.0 the protocol (at least nothing that wasn't also wrong with it in 2003). Without being funny about it, perspective is important. In 2003/4 publishing via RSS was a nascent thing. Blogs did it, but blogging was still in it's infancy. Some corporations were starting to do it, and were being encouraged to share value through RSS feeds. There were aggregators (we built one, but there were several) that were starting to show what you could do by bringing these disparate content streams together. We were also having a little susccess in persuading companies to encourage their employees at all levels to blog and to create internal aggregators. But, over time, applications like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord have taken the momentum. Facebook, to pick one example, has at present 2.85 billion active users, many of them posting content which is not available outside Facebook. Twitter had RSS feeds but discontinued them. (Additionally, many blogs which do provide RSS feeds only provide excerpts of the content intended to draw you to their website & adverts). You can't aggregate this content. These systems are also closed over creating, you use the tools they provide or you don't play. Want to do an experiment with how you create Facebook content? You can't. Facebook/Twitter reserve that to themselves. If you try and start a project now you will struggle with the fact that a huge % of your potential userbase are already in Facebook, Twitter, etc… and captured there. So while RSS still works and, yes, my blog still has an RSS feed, and you can read it in your RSS reader of choice, this is not the same situation as it was back then. And the futures that seemed possible from there do not seem possible from here. I don't know, perhaps it's only with the perspective of being there that this feels this way.

sandbags 5y ago

There are lots of threads I could respond to but let's take this one to begin with: >Despite this, I disagree with the assessment that it is a major bottleneck for the RSS ecosystem. I have never used Google Reader, so I don’t have any kind of before and after perspective, but in my humble opinion RSS is a standard that is in quite a good condition overall. Despite social medias’ walled garden approach and greater focus on instant messaging than blogging, I rarely stumble upon a website with content of episodic nature without any kind of RSS feed. The only significant exceptions are YouTube and Twitter. As I have mentioned in several other comments, there is nothing wrong with RSS2.0 the protocol (at least nothing that wasn't also wrong with it in 2003). Without being funny about it, perspective is important. In 2003/4 publishing via RSS was a nascent thing. Blogs did it, but blogging was still in it's infancy. Some corporations were starting to do it, and were being encouraged to share value through RSS feeds. There were aggregators (we built one, but there were several) that were starting to show what you could do by bringing these disparate content streams together. We were also having a little susccess in persuading companies to encourage their employees at all levels to blog and to create internal aggregators. But, over time, applications like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord have taken the momentum. Facebook, to pick one example, has at present 2.85 billion active users, many of them posting content which is not available outside Facebook. Twitter had RSS feeds but discontinued them. (Additionally, many blogs which do provide RSS feeds only provide excerpts of the content intended to draw you to their website & adverts). You can't aggregate this content. These systems are also closed over creating, you use the tools they provide or you don't play. Want to do an experiment with how you create Facebook content? You can't. Facebook/Twitter reserve that to themselves. If you try and start a project now you will struggle with the fact that a huge % of your potential userbase are already in Facebook, Twitter, etc… and captured there. So while RSS still works and, yes, my blog still has an RSS feed, and you can read it in your RSS reader of choice, this is not the same situation as it was back then. And the futures that seemed possible from there do not seem possible from here. I don't know, perhaps it's only with the perspective of being there that this feels this way.