5 ms·

RSS is still alive and kicking. I came here via RSS. But the masses browse a locked down web. That is true. We might have another shot at an open web for the

by TekMol 5y ago

RSS is still alive and kicking. I came here via RSS. But the masses browse a locked down web. That is true. We might have another shot at an open web for the masses via the whole crypto movement. If content goes on decentralized blockchains in the future, nobody can lock the content down like big tech did for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. Projects like Arweave show how it is possible to store huge amounts of data on a blockchain without using much resources. If we get there, it will be trivial to build blockchain-to-rss bridges. I am ready to build some to get my favorite content into my RSS reader. My feeling is that there might be a way towards a decentralized web via financial incentives. In a decentralized web, crypto currencies can float around freely. Making it easy for the actors to earn. Old platforms will probably be slow to open up to crypto currencies.

mnd999 5y ago
Oh please go away.
diogenesjunior 5y ago
- woofcat 5y ago
  Isn't https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss a thing?
  - commoner 5y ago
    Yes, and hnrss also has customized RSS feeds for HN: https://hnrss.github.io https://hnrss.github.io
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
wizzwizz4 5y ago
Alright, I'll bite. Consider a “decentralised” blockchain system that does the work of The Pirate Bay – providing hashes of particular files, along with their names, so that people can select and request data from the P2P network. How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in any way? Additionally, how does this system help with the “censorship” issues that The Pirate Bay has? Even when The Pirate Bay remains up, that doesn't mean anybody's seeding. And a blockchain-based system has to have this limitation. If all the data is directly on the blockchain, nobody can actually download it all, so the blockchain becomes unverifiable and ceases to have any cryptographic properties at all. (In short, there's no benefit to a blockchain at all.)
- TekMol 5y ago
  How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in any way? You cannot make a Twitter-2-RSS bridge because Twitter block access to the data. In a decentralized system, access to the data is inherent. Even when The Pirate Bay remains up, that doesn't mean anybody's seeding That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised. If all the data is directly on the blockchain, nobody can actually download it all Blockchains have come a long way since Satoshis version in 2009. We have approaches now where participants only need to download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the network as a whole keeps the chain intact.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    > In a decentralized system, access to the data is inherent. Well, yeah – but we already have that. It's called the Fediverse. No blockchain in sight. (In fact, it predates Bitcoin.) > That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised. The margin for any given piece of content will be low, so there's an economic incentive to honour takedown requests, no matter how fraudulent or unenforceable, if the effort to check whether they're valid is lower than the expected average reward minus the expected average legal cost. > We have approaches now where participants only need to download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the network as a whole keeps the chain intact. We had those back in Satoshi's time, too. They work by having n centralised trusted nodes, then asking all your peers to double-check what you got from those trusted nodes. That approach is, surprisingly enough, also vulnerable to censorship! (Also, I don't really think your proposed scheme is good enough to have Satoshi's name associated with it. The innovation of Bitcoin was the coin melting pot thing, not the blockchain; Satoshi's original blockchain, which Bitcoin still mostly uses, was just a worse version of Git repositories.)
_zllx 5y ago
Mirror.xyz currently renders HTML from its Arweave backend, but not RSS, which is a bit disappointing, as there are a few Mirror blogs I'd love to have in my news reader. If it's capable of rendering HTML, RSS should be just a few lines of code away, but I can't find any repository for the frontend to try and implement it myself. More disappointing is the overall reactions to this comment including totally unhelpful comments that are basically just "OMG GTFO" and likely violating HN guidelines.

by TekMol 5y ago

mnd999 5y ago

Oh please go away.

diogenesjunior 5y ago

woofcat 5y ago
Isn't https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss a thing?
- commoner 5y ago
  Yes, and hnrss also has customized RSS feeds for HN: https://hnrss.github.io https://hnrss.github.io
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

wizzwizz4 5y ago

Alright, I'll bite. Consider a “decentralised” blockchain system that does the work of The Pirate Bay – providing hashes of particular files, along with their names, so that people can select and request data from the P2P network. How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in any way? Additionally, how does this system help with the “censorship” issues that The Pirate Bay has? Even when The Pirate Bay remains up, that doesn't mean anybody's seeding. And a blockchain-based system has to have this limitation. If all the data is directly on the blockchain, nobody can actually download it all, so the blockchain becomes unverifiable and ceases to have any cryptographic properties at all. (In short, there's no benefit to a blockchain at all.)

TekMol 5y ago
How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in any way? You cannot make a Twitter-2-RSS bridge because Twitter block access to the data. In a decentralized system, access to the data is inherent. Even when The Pirate Bay remains up, that doesn't mean anybody's seeding That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised. If all the data is directly on the blockchain, nobody can actually download it all Blockchains have come a long way since Satoshis version in 2009. We have approaches now where participants only need to download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the network as a whole keeps the chain intact.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  > In a decentralized system, access to the data is inherent. Well, yeah – but we already have that. It's called the Fediverse. No blockchain in sight. (In fact, it predates Bitcoin.) > That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised. The margin for any given piece of content will be low, so there's an economic incentive to honour takedown requests, no matter how fraudulent or unenforceable, if the effort to check whether they're valid is lower than the expected average reward minus the expected average legal cost. > We have approaches now where participants only need to download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the network as a whole keeps the chain intact. We had those back in Satoshi's time, too. They work by having n centralised trusted nodes, then asking all your peers to double-check what you got from those trusted nodes. That approach is, surprisingly enough, also vulnerable to censorship! (Also, I don't really think your proposed scheme is good enough to have Satoshi's name associated with it. The innovation of Bitcoin was the coin melting pot thing, not the blockchain; Satoshi's original blockchain, which Bitcoin still mostly uses, was just a worse version of Git repositories.)

_zllx 5y ago

Mirror.xyz currently renders HTML from its Arweave backend, but not RSS, which is a bit disappointing, as there are a few Mirror blogs I'd love to have in my news reader. If it's capable of rendering HTML, RSS should be just a few lines of code away, but I can't find any repository for the frontend to try and implement it myself. More disappointing is the overall reactions to this comment including totally unhelpful comments that are basically just "OMG GTFO" and likely violating HN guidelines.