32 ms·

How to rebuild social media on top of RSS

316 points by jacobobryant 4y ago

huedaya 4y ago
the problem with RSS is only one directional protocol also with no auth system. there's something like BlueSky's new ATP protocol that I think better to your case.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  See my other comments: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990568 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289
tommica 4y ago
This is a really good idea, but to the point of not needing a different apps to read all the different social media sources, (and I might have missed the answers to these in the post), could the problem of participating in the communities be solved through one app too? How reading of different type of content should be handled,as some posts are just media, some are comments? Could there be something like "rss+social" spec?
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Thanks! > 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.
  - ttepasse 4y ago
    > > 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). 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/ 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 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.)
    - jacobobryant 4y ago
      Yep, I'd certainly recommend not adding new metadata extensions without first checking for existing ones that would suffice. 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. [1] https://book.micro.blog/ https://book.micro.blog/
      - ttepasse 4y ago
        I would have recommended that book, yes. 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.
lloydatkinson 4y ago
I think RSS needs fixing first before building anything on top of it. At the risk of that xkcd meme about 15 competing standards, RSS + images is a total mess. Every reader supports different ways of rendering images. Sometimes it's inline HTML, sometimes it's the RSS <enclosure> element, sometimes its something entirely else. 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>
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  This is one reason why it's important to not try to do too much over RSS. The question isn't "can we re-implement every social media feature using RSS," it's "what is the minimum amount of interop we need in order to for an ecosystem without gatekeepers to flourish," which hopefully will make things bearable. 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. [1] https://feedparser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://feedparser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Having had to work with importing RSS feeds. I absolutely despise the tech. The sources generating RSS have almost no consistency on how things are done and the actual spec itself doesn't show much opinion on which of the 5 ways to do things is the preferred one. That's before you get in to the mess of invalid RSS and then invalid XML which is extremely common. 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.
- ectopod 4y ago
  Yes, RSS is terrible, use Atom. They do the same job, most tools support both, and one of them was thoughtfully designed.
behindai 4y ago
Why? There are many other good decentralised solutions on the market
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Basically it's because decentralization has downsides, and I think the optimal amount of decentralization is less than what e.g. Mastodon/ActivityPub provide. See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289
zozbot234 4y ago
Why not ActivityStreams instead of RSS? It would have free and seamless interop with ActivityPub, with the only difference being a "pull" model as opposed to the "push" inherent in ActivityPub.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Anyone can host an RSS feed with just a web server. Everything from a shared host to a VPS to a Raspberry Pi at Home. It takes a lot more resources and administration effort to run an ActivityPub server.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    ActivityStreams can be hosted in the exact same way, hence the "pull" model. It's not the same as ActivityPub, although the latter builds on it.
  - shadowfacts 4y ago
    That's true of current implementations, but the spec is flexible enough to allow much simpler ones. You can have an outbox which is a collection of activities (that could even be statically generated) and software could poll the outbox just like RSS. Existing software requires a push-based model, which means handling follows, which means a database, but fundamentally there's nothing stopping ActivityPub from being pull-based.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    Or even a static website that you can deploy on many free CDNs, such as cloudflare pages, vercel or netlify.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Maybe that'd work too! I'm honestly not very familiar with ActivityStreams. My main concern is figuring out a lowest common denominator/the simplest thing that works, and I think RSS is sufficient. I'll have to do some more reading + thinking on ActivityStreams.
rambambram 4y ago
Nice to see a different application of the same concept I'm pursuing with Hey Homepage. I chose to have the feed creator and feed reader in one-and-the-same app. Just like with Facebook or Twitter, where you can read and post in the same interface. It's combined with a microblog/timeline, that can just as easily be viewed by regular people in the browser who've never heard of RSS. Openness and accessibility are key, no walled gardens. My website system also publishes an OPML file and an accompanying list of recommended other websites (just like a blogroll or webring). I subscribed to your feed and wish you luck with your nice projects! I did miss an RSS icon on your site, however. ;)
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  This is cool! Other People's Meaningful Links is great :). I've subscribed to your feed as well. 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?
  - rambambram 4y ago
    Thanks! Indeed, I auto-detected your feed with my system and you're right about the people who know about RSS will find it, but I catch myself looking for an icon first. It also signals that RSS is still alive. 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.
cxr 4y ago
> My main idea here is that every reading app should let you create shareable links where people can subscribe to an RSS feed and sign up for the reading app at the same time. If I want to invite people to join my community or subscribe to my social feed, I give them one of these shareable links. > For example, give this here link a click: https://feedrabbit.com/?url=https://meta.discourse.org/posts.rss 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038065>
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  I think this is the same thing I was trying to address with this paragraph at the end: > 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.
mawise 4y ago
Good read! Aligns a lot with everything happening with the IndieWeb community[1] (including social readers[2]) and what I'm working on with Haven[3]. The additional piece (I know, more parts make everything harder for everyone) is using these tools for _private_ sharing. That's been my focus--publishing RSS with http basic auth for access control--while keeping subscribing as simple as copy/pasting a URL or using a browser extension that recognizes RSS auto-discovery[4]. [1]: https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/ [2]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader https://indieweb.org/social_reader [3]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org [4]: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Thanks--and I'm glad to hear you're working on access control. My current approach to that hairball has been basically to work on everything else first and think about it later. Maybe it's not actually a hairball, but the fear of it being one has been enough to keep me from thinking about it.
- deleted 4y ago
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thirdplace_ 4y ago
My small contribution here is a web tool [0] which helps to discover feeds. See also https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/ https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/ and https://www.jsonfeed.org/ https://www.jsonfeed.org/ [0] https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?url=&q=https://tfos.co/ https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?url=&q=https://tfos.co/ [1] https://discovery.thirdplace.no/api?q=https://tfos.co/ https://discovery.thirdplace.no/api?q=https://tfos.co/
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Very nice--I like all the "Follow in" links. The one for Feedly in particular is pretty much what I'm envisioning, since it shows a page for the feed itself even if you're not signed into Feedly, instead of just redirecting to the landing page/sign-in page like the other ones do.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Andrex 4y ago
Currently making my own social network from scratch and it's more media-based than text-based, but I love the idea of RSS feeds for everything. My only concern would be extra bandwidth requirements if there's a ton of readers out there constantly fetching updates. 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.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Youtube does still have feeds. The bandwidth can be reduced if readers use the If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since headers when requesting feeds (so if the feed hasn't been updated, the server can return an empty response). I also imagine that as feed readers become more mainstream, you'd start to see more intermediaries for fetching feeds like Superfeedr[1]. [1] https://superfeedr.com/ https://superfeedr.com/
imiric 4y ago
What would be the benefit of this, really? Easier consumption, I suppose, but RSS is a read-only protocol, and allows no participation. 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. Not only that, but why would a centralized service that depends on ads and promoted content allow you to use an open format to consume it? They _want_ to keep you on their platform as long as possible. 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 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.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  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!
- amelius 4y ago
  Benefit is that there is no third party that controls the feed.
askhan 4y ago
Shout out to the h-feed / h-entry microformat https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed, sadly underutilized but an extremely easy way to make the web much more syndicable. 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.
- epeus 4y ago
  Tumblr supports them as of May https://changes.tumblr.com/post/683524731509653505/friday-may-6th-2022 https://changes.tumblr.com/post/683524731509653505/friday-ma...
musicale 4y ago
RSS used to be cool, and Safari even used to have an RSS button. Then I remember when some RSS feeds stopped including the entire article, removing the "syndication" part of RSS. :(
- zagrebian 4y ago
  I only care about the "notification" part of RSS :)
  - stanislavb 4y ago
    I'd say that you are the perfect user for my new RSS reader/tracker https://lenns.io/ https://lenns.io/. What is more, you assign priorities to both subscriptions and categories so that you can have the ones you care the most always at the top. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
- randomdata 4y ago
  RSS is still cool, even if rebranded as Podcasts. What's not cool anymore is text.
  - defrost 4y ago
    Unless that text is subtitles . . . all the Kool Kids love subs (or so I hear ) Question is, though, can we get a YC startup from that?
- timbit42 4y ago
  I don't read in my RSS reader. It's browser isn't as good and doesn't support adblockers or other add-ons. I read in my regular web browser with uBlock Origin and all my other add-ons.
stanislavb 4y ago
With this in context, anyone here that wants to beta-test my feed-reader (opinionated) that gives you tools to better track feed reads? - 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/ https://lenns.io/ (p.s. thanks for any feedback)
bsnnkv 4y ago
I've made quite a few comments before on HN about how I have come to use RSS feeds- essentially as a way to distribute highlights rather than distributing entire articles or previews of entire articles with a meaningless blurb in the feed item body. 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! [1]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado https://notado.app/feeds/jado
- j45 4y ago
  I have used Diigo for a long time in a similar way - bookmarks are useless, and I only remember the sentences in the links I’m after, not the url, plus tagging them. 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.
  - factsaresacred 4y ago
    Diigo is great - a web 2.0 sites that has just kept chugging along - and way underrated. The outliner[0] feature allows you create someting similar to notado. [0] https://www.diigo.com/outliner/start https://www.diigo.com/outliner/start
    - s3000 4y ago
worldhistory 4y ago
I don’t like self-promoting in comments but this feels incredibly coincidental. Just a few days ago I published an iOS app called Beluga which tries to reproduce a “Twitter-like” experience on top of JSON Feed (with some extensions) and RSS. The app does all the work on the device and uses an S3 compatible account to publish a feed and a statically generated mini-site. Here’s my mini-site https://beluga.gcollazo.com https://beluga.gcollazo.com App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beluga-social/id1626349771 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beluga-social/id1626349771
lxe 4y ago
But where do the ads go? How do publishers or authors (or content aggregators) monetize the content? The reason RSS is dead (unfortunately) and social media is very much alive is because of a pact between content aggregators, publishers, creators, and advertisers.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > But where do the ads go? 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-advertising-2022 https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/us-podcast-adver...
  - jacobobryant 4y ago
    Yes--there's also plenty of money being spent on newsletter advertising. I make about $2k/month in revenue from that myself.[1] Publishers have lots of flexibility on how to monetize; you can do ads, or paid subscriptions, or a mix of both.... I'm planning to do paid subs + free with ads for Yakread. [1] https://thesample.ai/ https://thesample.ai/
  - prions 4y ago
    I work in this space (podcast ads) and the podcast ads tech maturity is years behind other media, like video, due to RSS. This lag is also reflected in that advertisers generally spend less on podcasting. 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.
flandish 4y ago
I’ve been trying to think of an RSS driven daily newspaper. 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.
- kmstout 4y ago
  I used to do this. A long time ago, I had a setup that would sync feeds from BBC, CNN, Janes [0], and a few other places; extract and sanitize [1] the text of the articles for the previous day; and ultimately prepare a nicely typeset, five column, landscape oriented PDF. It took some trial and error to get something usable, but the printed result was a pleasant way to stay informed. That was many moons ago. --- [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.
  - flandish 4y ago
    Cool to know! It’s a low prio project for me for sure, but good to know it’s been done. Finding “full articles” is certainly a pain. I have little idea how reeder does it.
    - kmstout 4y ago
      In many cases, following the links in the item entries will get you full text. Just to get something going quickly, you can do a `links -dump <url>` to get just text and then cut it down with some bash-fu. That said, if you pull a lot from a given source, it's worth figuring out a reliable way of cracking out the title and text so you can format them sensibly.
kornhole 4y ago
Why not put RSS into something like Mastodon? Take the code of a project like TTRSS and merge it with Mastodon to allow people to subscribe to both activity pub and RSS feeds. They are both chronologically sorted. People could comment on RSS items which would simply turn into shares for their followers.
- zeckalpha 4y ago
  Mastodon already supports RSS
  - cxr 4y ago
    Huh? How do you subscribe to an RSS feed in Mastodon?
    - kornhole 4y ago
      Right. It is not possible. But what if you could follow both fediverse accounts and RSS feeds all from your Mastodon account?
      - ezst 4y ago
        IMO it makes much more sense to do the opposite, and follow mastodon posts in the UX of a RSS reader. 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.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - timbit42 4y ago
assetlabel 4y ago
Consumers of content don't get to choose the system or protocol of the person they follow. 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).
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Agreed, and this is actually my "top level" recommendation for anyone building apps in this space: if you make a reading app, make it read from anything; if you make a publishing app, make it readable anywhere; etc. Don't fixate on implementing a specific protocol. This is what I'm trying to do with Yakread.[1] 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? [1] https://yakread.com/ https://yakread.com/
cf100clunk 4y ago
Founding Twitter engineer's thoughts on what should come next: https://www.nelsonstar.com/news/nelsons-blaine-cook-helped-build-twitter-and-he-has-a-few-ideas-on-what-should-come-next/ https://www.nelsonstar.com/news/nelsons-blaine-cook-helped-b...
hosh 4y ago
When I started digging into the specs for ActivityPub, it uses something called JSON-LD. Despite its name, it is essentially RDF encoded in JSON. Wouldn’t that make ActivityPub a successor technology for RSS? EDIT: maybe not — https://macwright.com/2022/12/09/activitypub.html https://macwright.com/2022/12/09/activitypub.html
- maxbond 4y ago
  (Copy & paste the link, can't confirm on my phone but I'm guessing they redirect HN referers to Google)
- nightpool 4y ago
  ActivityPub was explicitly designed as a successor to OStatus, which was built on Atom and Pubsubhubbub (now websub), which was a successor technology to RSS (AP also integrated lots of fundamental design concepts from pump.io, which was an intermediate step between OStatus and AP). The RDF vocabulary it uses still has roots in the same RDF vocabulary used for OStatus (ActivityStreams 1).
  - hosh 4y ago
    Though it looks like ActivityPub is push, and RSS is pull. But one should be able to construct transformers between the formats of ActivityPub and RSS/Atom.
captn3m0 4y ago
A related idea I have is to support subscription for OPML feeds. That way, instead of getting a private personal feed URL that merged hundreds of feeds that you follow on the server side, clients should support subscribing to an OPML feed, which can just be links to whatever you are following (games, posts, users, discussions etc). The OPML feed changes, your RSS client picks up the changes and starts following the correct endpoints.
detuned 4y ago
Mastodon produces an rss feed of each person. https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/100523448408374430 https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/100523448408374430
fyresala 4y ago
I would love to see more thoughts on interactions e.g. comments, likes. Reusing existing protocols is good but I expect a lot of trouble to implement some common social media features on RSS.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  I think interactions should be done within community apps. No need to do it over a protocol. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289
dado3212 4y ago
RSS has got to be the thing that Hacker News loves the most that every non-tech person on Earth doesn't care about. So many techies love this model of designing their feed and collating what content they consume, while the quickest growing social network's entire pitch (TikTok) is "we'll deliver you what you want without you having to follow anyone".
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Agreed, hence the importance of treating RSS as an implementation detail rather than a user-facing feature. I'd also love to see more reading apps experiment with algorithmic recommendation too; that's been one of my own focuses for a while.
- twelve40 4y ago
  and what's wrong with that? why can we have both RSS for people who like it, and TikTok for people who like TikTok? Are you saying everyone should dumb themselves down into the fastest growing fad of this year, or people can have different preferences?
  - chii 4y ago
    a content producer would forgo RSS in favour of tiktok, if they only have resources for one or the other
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  The only rss feed reader I have used that hasn’t gone away or become sketchy is thunderbird, and it’s not a great ux (I haven’t used it in a while, maybe I’m wrong) RSS seems like great tech but it doesn’t have great user facing apps (that is easy to find at least) to support it
  - Helmut10001 4y ago
    I love Miniflux [1], but you need to self-host it - probably not something for the typical Twitch user. [1]: https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/
barbariangrunge 4y ago
This is honestly a provocative and appealing idea. I really like this article and it has me thinking about ways I could support the idea one day…
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Thanks! Feel free to email me if you want any ideas for contributing; I have a never-ending supply :). Email's in my profile.
venk12 4y ago
The only problem when I used any of these RSS feed readers is that the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad. I always get notified of topics I do not really care about (Liking a particular website does not mean everything they put up will be relevant and interesting). That's when I found HN and it resonated well.
- klabb3 4y ago
  There’s an upper bound to SNR for non-algorithmic feeds. You can of course rely on human curation but then you rely on unpaid labor or you’re back with ads again. Podcasts went very much that way, for instance. 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.
  - jacobobryant 4y ago
    Yep--a core feature of Yakread (the reading app I'm developing, mentioned in the article) is that it uses algorithmic curation.
- timbit42 4y ago
  I use QuiteRSS and use the filters to increase the signal to noise ratio.
dmtroyer 4y ago
can't wait to re-read this headline in the morning so I can spit out my coffee.
mariusor 4y ago
I would mostly agree with these ideas if only there wouldn't be one large obstacle in the face of having RSS publishing and consuming be considered "social media": the main tenet that makes social media, well "social", is the consumers' ability to interact with the content they're consuming. If the plan is missing that essential component, then it's not "social" media, it's perhaps a better way of consuming and aggregating media, but that's 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.
- CharlieDigital 4y ago
  > 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 Quite ironic reading this. Do you know what the "X" in XML stands for?
  - mariusor 4y ago
    I'm sure it's not for "Extendable RSS" or "Extendable Atom". [edit] Never mind, I'm (somewhat)wrong. Both stipulate extensibility: https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#extendingRss https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#extendingRss and https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5023#section-6.2 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).
    - CharlieDigital 4y ago
      XML is a data interchange format specification that allows extensibility. 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).
komali2 4y ago
> It would be sweet to have a page + RSS feed on my website that contained all my comments from Hacker News, Reddit, Mastodon, Twitter*, and of course Discourse. 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.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  I think it's worth doing! Just make sure the posts link back to the original so people can see the context if the comment looks interesting.
fitzroy 4y ago
Isn't this idea basically FriendFeed (which Facebook bought to kill)? I've always wondered why nobody has simply recreated it.
- usrusr 4y ago
  Facebook stopped buying that kind of company, eliminating the closest thing to a revenue stream things like that really had?
birdyrooster 4y ago
RSS is too dumb for social media, it's like trying to solve social media on the blockchain. Solutions in search of problems.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  The dumbness is a feature. See my other comments: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990568 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990738 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289
edhelas 4y ago
The social features on top of XMPP are basically Atom 1.0 + XMPP Pubsub Standardized there: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html And generalized there: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0472.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0472.html I've built Movim (https://movim.eu 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 https://mov.im/?node/news.movim.eu/ArsTechnica
est 4y ago
Open article, Ctrl+F, mobile, app, no apparent statements. Close tab 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.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Nothing in the proposal is at odds with building mobile apps, and yes I would encourage people to do that.
  - est 4y ago
    Mobile apps is the client solution, the problem is most people are "consuming" mobile-only content. E.g. from other mobile apps. RSS doesn't tackle this the slightest.
quickthrower2 4y ago
RSS needs it’s QR moment. By that I mean Covid was the accelerator for QR adoption. RSS needs something so that most people are happy and used to collecting feeds. An RSS can be used for anything where you want to update someone at the same pace as an email: soon but not realtime. I use RSS to get alerted to deals. 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.
- isthisthingon99 4y ago
  This shows the bubble different people live in. I literally never dealt with QR codes with respect to covid but I use them for electronics/documentation all the time.
fiatjaf 4y ago
The problem with RSS is that to join the social media you need a server and normal people will never host servers. Even tech people don't like to host servers (see how many DBaaS and PaaS and hosted offerings of open-source server software exist). 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 https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
fleddr 4y ago
Intentions are good, but these types of ideas need real world scrutiny. 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.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  The proposal isn't to make a twitter clone that just happens to use RSS under the hood. I'm basically just saying we should take the existing trend of smaller, focused communities (like you find on slack or discord) and try to add a bit of glue so it's easier to keep tabs on a large number of communities. That's about half of the proposal, anyway. A lot of the questions you ask are already resolved in the newsletter ecosystem.
PopAlongKid 4y ago
Judging from his blog, Dave Winer is trying to build something that will tie in RSS with Twitter, Mastodon, and so on. 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 http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ikeda/IRLS571RSS/controversy.html
- timbit42 4y ago
  Mastodon already supports RSS. You don't even need to log into a server. If you want to follow @elonjet@mastodon.social, put this in your RSS reader: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet.rss https://mastodon.social/@elonjet.rss
Tengs-Penkwe 4y ago
Does he know rsshub? https://rsshub.app https://rsshub.app

316 points by jacobobryant 4y ago

the problem with RSS is only one directional protocol also with no auth system. there's something like BlueSky's new ATP protocol that I think better to your case.

jacobobryant 4y ago
See my other comments: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990568 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289

tommica 4y ago

This is a really good idea, but to the point of not needing a different apps to read all the different social media sources, (and I might have missed the answers to these in the post), could the problem of participating in the communities be solved through one app too? How reading of different type of content should be handled,as some posts are just media, some are comments? Could there be something like "rss+social" spec?

jacobobryant 4y ago
Thanks! > 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.
- ttepasse 4y ago
  > > 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). 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/ 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 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.)
  - jacobobryant 4y ago
    Yep, I'd certainly recommend not adding new metadata extensions without first checking for existing ones that would suffice. 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. [1] https://book.micro.blog/ https://book.micro.blog/
    - ttepasse 4y ago
      I would have recommended that book, yes. 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.

lloydatkinson 4y ago

I think RSS needs fixing first before building anything on top of it. At the risk of that xkcd meme about 15 competing standards, RSS + images is a total mess. Every reader supports different ways of rendering images. Sometimes it's inline HTML, sometimes it's the RSS <enclosure> element, sometimes its something entirely else. 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>

jacobobryant 4y ago
This is one reason why it's important to not try to do too much over RSS. The question isn't "can we re-implement every social media feature using RSS," it's "what is the minimum amount of interop we need in order to for an ecosystem without gatekeepers to flourish," which hopefully will make things bearable. 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. [1] https://feedparser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://feedparser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Gigachad 4y ago
Having had to work with importing RSS feeds. I absolutely despise the tech. The sources generating RSS have almost no consistency on how things are done and the actual spec itself doesn't show much opinion on which of the 5 ways to do things is the preferred one. That's before you get in to the mess of invalid RSS and then invalid XML which is extremely common. 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.
ectopod 4y ago
Yes, RSS is terrible, use Atom. They do the same job, most tools support both, and one of them was thoughtfully designed.

behindai 4y ago

Why? There are many other good decentralised solutions on the market

jacobobryant 4y ago
Basically it's because decentralization has downsides, and I think the optimal amount of decentralization is less than what e.g. Mastodon/ActivityPub provide. See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289

zozbot234 4y ago

Why not ActivityStreams instead of RSS? It would have free and seamless interop with ActivityPub, with the only difference being a "pull" model as opposed to the "push" inherent in ActivityPub.

giantrobot 4y ago
Anyone can host an RSS feed with just a web server. Everything from a shared host to a VPS to a Raspberry Pi at Home. It takes a lot more resources and administration effort to run an ActivityPub server.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  ActivityStreams can be hosted in the exact same way, hence the "pull" model. It's not the same as ActivityPub, although the latter builds on it.
- shadowfacts 4y ago
  That's true of current implementations, but the spec is flexible enough to allow much simpler ones. You can have an outbox which is a collection of activities (that could even be statically generated) and software could poll the outbox just like RSS. Existing software requires a push-based model, which means handling follows, which means a database, but fundamentally there's nothing stopping ActivityPub from being pull-based.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  Or even a static website that you can deploy on many free CDNs, such as cloudflare pages, vercel or netlify.
jacobobryant 4y ago
Maybe that'd work too! I'm honestly not very familiar with ActivityStreams. My main concern is figuring out a lowest common denominator/the simplest thing that works, and I think RSS is sufficient. I'll have to do some more reading + thinking on ActivityStreams.

rambambram 4y ago

Nice to see a different application of the same concept I'm pursuing with Hey Homepage. I chose to have the feed creator and feed reader in one-and-the-same app. Just like with Facebook or Twitter, where you can read and post in the same interface. It's combined with a microblog/timeline, that can just as easily be viewed by regular people in the browser who've never heard of RSS. Openness and accessibility are key, no walled gardens. My website system also publishes an OPML file and an accompanying list of recommended other websites (just like a blogroll or webring). I subscribed to your feed and wish you luck with your nice projects! I did miss an RSS icon on your site, however. ;)

jacobobryant 4y ago
This is cool! Other People's Meaningful Links is great :). I've subscribed to your feed as well. 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?
- rambambram 4y ago
  Thanks! Indeed, I auto-detected your feed with my system and you're right about the people who know about RSS will find it, but I catch myself looking for an icon first. It also signals that RSS is still alive. 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.

cxr 4y ago

> My main idea here is that every reading app should let you create shareable links where people can subscribe to an RSS feed and sign up for the reading app at the same time. If I want to invite people to join my community or subscribe to my social feed, I give them one of these shareable links. > For example, give this here link a click: https://feedrabbit.com/?url=https://meta.discourse.org/posts.rss 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038065>

jacobobryant 4y ago
I think this is the same thing I was trying to address with this paragraph at the end: > 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.

mawise 4y ago

Good read! Aligns a lot with everything happening with the IndieWeb community[1] (including social readers[2]) and what I'm working on with Haven[3]. The additional piece (I know, more parts make everything harder for everyone) is using these tools for _private_ sharing. That's been my focus--publishing RSS with http basic auth for access control--while keeping subscribing as simple as copy/pasting a URL or using a browser extension that recognizes RSS auto-discovery[4]. [1]: https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/ [2]: https://indieweb.org/social_reader https://indieweb.org/social_reader [3]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org [4]: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery

jacobobryant 4y ago
Thanks--and I'm glad to hear you're working on access control. My current approach to that hairball has been basically to work on everything else first and think about it later. Maybe it's not actually a hairball, but the fear of it being one has been enough to keep me from thinking about it.
deleted 4y ago
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thirdplace_ 4y ago

My small contribution here is a web tool [0] which helps to discover feeds. See also https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/ https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/ and https://www.jsonfeed.org/ https://www.jsonfeed.org/ [0] https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?url=&q=https://tfos.co/ https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?url=&q=https://tfos.co/ [1] https://discovery.thirdplace.no/api?q=https://tfos.co/ https://discovery.thirdplace.no/api?q=https://tfos.co/

jacobobryant 4y ago
Very nice--I like all the "Follow in" links. The one for Feedly in particular is pretty much what I'm envisioning, since it shows a page for the feed itself even if you're not signed into Feedly, instead of just redirecting to the landing page/sign-in page like the other ones do.

deleted 4y ago

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Andrex 4y ago

Currently making my own social network from scratch and it's more media-based than text-based, but I love the idea of RSS feeds for everything. My only concern would be extra bandwidth requirements if there's a ton of readers out there constantly fetching updates. 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.

jacobobryant 4y ago
Youtube does still have feeds. The bandwidth can be reduced if readers use the If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since headers when requesting feeds (so if the feed hasn't been updated, the server can return an empty response). I also imagine that as feed readers become more mainstream, you'd start to see more intermediaries for fetching feeds like Superfeedr[1]. [1] https://superfeedr.com/ https://superfeedr.com/

imiric 4y ago

What would be the benefit of this, really? Easier consumption, I suppose, but RSS is a read-only protocol, and allows no participation. 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. Not only that, but why would a centralized service that depends on ads and promoted content allow you to use an open format to consume it? They _want_ to keep you on their platform as long as possible. 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 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.

jacobobryant 4y ago
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!
amelius 4y ago
Benefit is that there is no third party that controls the feed.

askhan 4y ago

Shout out to the h-feed / h-entry microformat https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed, sadly underutilized but an extremely easy way to make the web much more syndicable. 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.

epeus 4y ago
Tumblr supports them as of May https://changes.tumblr.com/post/683524731509653505/friday-may-6th-2022 https://changes.tumblr.com/post/683524731509653505/friday-ma...

musicale 4y ago

RSS used to be cool, and Safari even used to have an RSS button. Then I remember when some RSS feeds stopped including the entire article, removing the "syndication" part of RSS. :(

zagrebian 4y ago
I only care about the "notification" part of RSS :)
- stanislavb 4y ago
  I'd say that you are the perfect user for my new RSS reader/tracker https://lenns.io/ https://lenns.io/. What is more, you assign priorities to both subscriptions and categories so that you can have the ones you care the most always at the top. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
randomdata 4y ago
RSS is still cool, even if rebranded as Podcasts. What's not cool anymore is text.
- defrost 4y ago
  Unless that text is subtitles . . . all the Kool Kids love subs (or so I hear ) Question is, though, can we get a YC startup from that?
timbit42 4y ago
I don't read in my RSS reader. It's browser isn't as good and doesn't support adblockers or other add-ons. I read in my regular web browser with uBlock Origin and all my other add-ons.

stanislavb 4y ago

With this in context, anyone here that wants to beta-test my feed-reader (opinionated) that gives you tools to better track feed reads? - 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/ https://lenns.io/ (p.s. thanks for any feedback)

bsnnkv 4y ago

I've made quite a few comments before on HN about how I have come to use RSS feeds- essentially as a way to distribute highlights rather than distributing entire articles or previews of entire articles with a meaningless blurb in the feed item body. 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! [1]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado https://notado.app/feeds/jado

j45 4y ago
I have used Diigo for a long time in a similar way - bookmarks are useless, and I only remember the sentences in the links I’m after, not the url, plus tagging them. 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.
- factsaresacred 4y ago
  Diigo is great - a web 2.0 sites that has just kept chugging along - and way underrated. The outliner[0] feature allows you create someting similar to notado. [0] https://www.diigo.com/outliner/start https://www.diigo.com/outliner/start
  - s3000 4y ago

worldhistory 4y ago

I don’t like self-promoting in comments but this feels incredibly coincidental. Just a few days ago I published an iOS app called Beluga which tries to reproduce a “Twitter-like” experience on top of JSON Feed (with some extensions) and RSS. The app does all the work on the device and uses an S3 compatible account to publish a feed and a statically generated mini-site. Here’s my mini-site https://beluga.gcollazo.com https://beluga.gcollazo.com App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beluga-social/id1626349771 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beluga-social/id1626349771

lxe 4y ago

But where do the ads go? How do publishers or authors (or content aggregators) monetize the content? The reason RSS is dead (unfortunately) and social media is very much alive is because of a pact between content aggregators, publishers, creators, and advertisers.

CharlesW 4y ago
> But where do the ads go? 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-advertising-2022 https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/us-podcast-adver...
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Yes--there's also plenty of money being spent on newsletter advertising. I make about $2k/month in revenue from that myself.[1] Publishers have lots of flexibility on how to monetize; you can do ads, or paid subscriptions, or a mix of both.... I'm planning to do paid subs + free with ads for Yakread. [1] https://thesample.ai/ https://thesample.ai/
- prions 4y ago
  I work in this space (podcast ads) and the podcast ads tech maturity is years behind other media, like video, due to RSS. This lag is also reflected in that advertisers generally spend less on podcasting. 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.

flandish 4y ago

I’ve been trying to think of an RSS driven daily newspaper. 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.

kmstout 4y ago
I used to do this. A long time ago, I had a setup that would sync feeds from BBC, CNN, Janes [0], and a few other places; extract and sanitize [1] the text of the articles for the previous day; and ultimately prepare a nicely typeset, five column, landscape oriented PDF. It took some trial and error to get something usable, but the printed result was a pleasant way to stay informed. That was many moons ago. --- [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.
- flandish 4y ago
  Cool to know! It’s a low prio project for me for sure, but good to know it’s been done. Finding “full articles” is certainly a pain. I have little idea how reeder does it.
  - kmstout 4y ago
    In many cases, following the links in the item entries will get you full text. Just to get something going quickly, you can do a `links -dump <url>` to get just text and then cut it down with some bash-fu. That said, if you pull a lot from a given source, it's worth figuring out a reliable way of cracking out the title and text so you can format them sensibly.

kornhole 4y ago

Why not put RSS into something like Mastodon? Take the code of a project like TTRSS and merge it with Mastodon to allow people to subscribe to both activity pub and RSS feeds. They are both chronologically sorted. People could comment on RSS items which would simply turn into shares for their followers.

zeckalpha 4y ago
Mastodon already supports RSS
- cxr 4y ago
  Huh? How do you subscribe to an RSS feed in Mastodon?
  - kornhole 4y ago
    Right. It is not possible. But what if you could follow both fediverse accounts and RSS feeds all from your Mastodon account?
    - ezst 4y ago
      IMO it makes much more sense to do the opposite, and follow mastodon posts in the UX of a RSS reader. 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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - timbit42 4y ago

assetlabel 4y ago

Consumers of content don't get to choose the system or protocol of the person they follow. 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).

jacobobryant 4y ago
Agreed, and this is actually my "top level" recommendation for anyone building apps in this space: if you make a reading app, make it read from anything; if you make a publishing app, make it readable anywhere; etc. Don't fixate on implementing a specific protocol. This is what I'm trying to do with Yakread.[1] 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? [1] https://yakread.com/ https://yakread.com/

cf100clunk 4y ago

Founding Twitter engineer's thoughts on what should come next: https://www.nelsonstar.com/news/nelsons-blaine-cook-helped-build-twitter-and-he-has-a-few-ideas-on-what-should-come-next/ https://www.nelsonstar.com/news/nelsons-blaine-cook-helped-b...

hosh 4y ago

When I started digging into the specs for ActivityPub, it uses something called JSON-LD. Despite its name, it is essentially RDF encoded in JSON. Wouldn’t that make ActivityPub a successor technology for RSS? EDIT: maybe not — https://macwright.com/2022/12/09/activitypub.html https://macwright.com/2022/12/09/activitypub.html

maxbond 4y ago
(Copy & paste the link, can't confirm on my phone but I'm guessing they redirect HN referers to Google)
nightpool 4y ago
ActivityPub was explicitly designed as a successor to OStatus, which was built on Atom and Pubsubhubbub (now websub), which was a successor technology to RSS (AP also integrated lots of fundamental design concepts from pump.io, which was an intermediate step between OStatus and AP). The RDF vocabulary it uses still has roots in the same RDF vocabulary used for OStatus (ActivityStreams 1).
- hosh 4y ago
  Though it looks like ActivityPub is push, and RSS is pull. But one should be able to construct transformers between the formats of ActivityPub and RSS/Atom.

captn3m0 4y ago

A related idea I have is to support subscription for OPML feeds. That way, instead of getting a private personal feed URL that merged hundreds of feeds that you follow on the server side, clients should support subscribing to an OPML feed, which can just be links to whatever you are following (games, posts, users, discussions etc). The OPML feed changes, your RSS client picks up the changes and starts following the correct endpoints.

detuned 4y ago

Mastodon produces an rss feed of each person. https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/100523448408374430 https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/100523448408374430

fyresala 4y ago

I would love to see more thoughts on interactions e.g. comments, likes. Reusing existing protocols is good but I expect a lot of trouble to implement some common social media features on RSS.

jacobobryant 4y ago
I think interactions should be done within community apps. No need to do it over a protocol. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289

dado3212 4y ago

RSS has got to be the thing that Hacker News loves the most that every non-tech person on Earth doesn't care about. So many techies love this model of designing their feed and collating what content they consume, while the quickest growing social network's entire pitch (TikTok) is "we'll deliver you what you want without you having to follow anyone".

jacobobryant 4y ago
Agreed, hence the importance of treating RSS as an implementation detail rather than a user-facing feature. I'd also love to see more reading apps experiment with algorithmic recommendation too; that's been one of my own focuses for a while.
twelve40 4y ago
and what's wrong with that? why can we have both RSS for people who like it, and TikTok for people who like TikTok? Are you saying everyone should dumb themselves down into the fastest growing fad of this year, or people can have different preferences?
- chii 4y ago
  a content producer would forgo RSS in favour of tiktok, if they only have resources for one or the other
barbariangrunge 4y ago
The only rss feed reader I have used that hasn’t gone away or become sketchy is thunderbird, and it’s not a great ux (I haven’t used it in a while, maybe I’m wrong) RSS seems like great tech but it doesn’t have great user facing apps (that is easy to find at least) to support it
- Helmut10001 4y ago
  I love Miniflux [1], but you need to self-host it - probably not something for the typical Twitch user. [1]: https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/

barbariangrunge 4y ago

This is honestly a provocative and appealing idea. I really like this article and it has me thinking about ways I could support the idea one day…

jacobobryant 4y ago
Thanks! Feel free to email me if you want any ideas for contributing; I have a never-ending supply :). Email's in my profile.

venk12 4y ago

The only problem when I used any of these RSS feed readers is that the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad. I always get notified of topics I do not really care about (Liking a particular website does not mean everything they put up will be relevant and interesting). That's when I found HN and it resonated well.

klabb3 4y ago
There’s an upper bound to SNR for non-algorithmic feeds. You can of course rely on human curation but then you rely on unpaid labor or you’re back with ads again. Podcasts went very much that way, for instance. 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.
- jacobobryant 4y ago
  Yep--a core feature of Yakread (the reading app I'm developing, mentioned in the article) is that it uses algorithmic curation.
timbit42 4y ago
I use QuiteRSS and use the filters to increase the signal to noise ratio.

dmtroyer 4y ago

can't wait to re-read this headline in the morning so I can spit out my coffee.

mariusor 4y ago

I would mostly agree with these ideas if only there wouldn't be one large obstacle in the face of having RSS publishing and consuming be considered "social media": the main tenet that makes social media, well "social", is the consumers' ability to interact with the content they're consuming. If the plan is missing that essential component, then it's not "social" media, it's perhaps a better way of consuming and aggregating media, but that's 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.

CharlieDigital 4y ago
> 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 Quite ironic reading this. Do you know what the "X" in XML stands for?
- mariusor 4y ago
  I'm sure it's not for "Extendable RSS" or "Extendable Atom". [edit] Never mind, I'm (somewhat)wrong. Both stipulate extensibility: https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#extendingRss https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#extendingRss and https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5023#section-6.2 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).
  - CharlieDigital 4y ago
    XML is a data interchange format specification that allows extensibility. 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).

komali2 4y ago

> It would be sweet to have a page + RSS feed on my website that contained all my comments from Hacker News, Reddit, Mastodon, Twitter*, and of course Discourse. 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.

jacobobryant 4y ago
I think it's worth doing! Just make sure the posts link back to the original so people can see the context if the comment looks interesting.

fitzroy 4y ago

Isn't this idea basically FriendFeed (which Facebook bought to kill)? I've always wondered why nobody has simply recreated it.

usrusr 4y ago
Facebook stopped buying that kind of company, eliminating the closest thing to a revenue stream things like that really had?

birdyrooster 4y ago

RSS is too dumb for social media, it's like trying to solve social media on the blockchain. Solutions in search of problems.

jacobobryant 4y ago
The dumbness is a feature. See my other comments: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990568 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33990738 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33976289

edhelas 4y ago

The social features on top of XMPP are basically Atom 1.0 + XMPP Pubsub Standardized there: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html And generalized there: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0472.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0472.html I've built Movim (https://movim.eu 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 https://mov.im/?node/news.movim.eu/ArsTechnica

est 4y ago

Open article, Ctrl+F, mobile, app, no apparent statements. Close tab 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.

jacobobryant 4y ago
Nothing in the proposal is at odds with building mobile apps, and yes I would encourage people to do that.
- est 4y ago
  Mobile apps is the client solution, the problem is most people are "consuming" mobile-only content. E.g. from other mobile apps. RSS doesn't tackle this the slightest.

quickthrower2 4y ago

RSS needs it’s QR moment. By that I mean Covid was the accelerator for QR adoption. RSS needs something so that most people are happy and used to collecting feeds. An RSS can be used for anything where you want to update someone at the same pace as an email: soon but not realtime. I use RSS to get alerted to deals. 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.

isthisthingon99 4y ago
This shows the bubble different people live in. I literally never dealt with QR codes with respect to covid but I use them for electronics/documentation all the time.

fiatjaf 4y ago

The problem with RSS is that to join the social media you need a server and normal people will never host servers. Even tech people don't like to host servers (see how many DBaaS and PaaS and hosted offerings of open-source server software exist). 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 https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

fleddr 4y ago

Intentions are good, but these types of ideas need real world scrutiny. 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.

jacobobryant 4y ago
The proposal isn't to make a twitter clone that just happens to use RSS under the hood. I'm basically just saying we should take the existing trend of smaller, focused communities (like you find on slack or discord) and try to add a bit of glue so it's easier to keep tabs on a large number of communities. That's about half of the proposal, anyway. A lot of the questions you ask are already resolved in the newsletter ecosystem.

PopAlongKid 4y ago

Judging from his blog, Dave Winer is trying to build something that will tie in RSS with Twitter, Mastodon, and so on. 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 http://www.u.arizona.edu/~ikeda/IRLS571RSS/controversy.html

timbit42 4y ago
Mastodon already supports RSS. You don't even need to log into a server. If you want to follow @elonjet@mastodon.social, put this in your RSS reader: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet.rss https://mastodon.social/@elonjet.rss

Tengs-Penkwe 4y ago

Does he know rsshub? https://rsshub.app https://rsshub.app