Cory Doctorow with an RSS sermon. There’s something rather quixotic about fighting for RSS. Can’t put my finger on it but it feels like a lost cause because something is technically missing in the paradigm. Not because evil anti-protocol types killed it. It worked for a while because it wasn’t meaningfully stress-tested. The day we understand why RSS failed and what might have saved it/could revive it in the future, we’ll have figured out everything important about protocols. My intuition is that it wasn’t social. People want their online reading to have a social component. Anything that’s solo read-only is doomed.

Cory Doctorow with an RSS sermon. There’s something rather quixotic about fighting for RSS. Can’t put my finger on it but it feels like a lost cause because something is technically missing in the paradigm. Not because evil anti-protocol types killed it. It worked for a while because it wasn’t meaningfully stress-tested. The day we understand why RSS failed and what might have saved it/could revive it in the future, we’ll have figured out everything important about protocols. My intuition is that it wasn’t social. People want their online reading to have a social component. Anything that’s solo read-only is doomed.


https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

Public RSS feeds were great but not capitalist enough. No one who wants to make money offers an RSS feed that someone else will just intermediate. Vertical integration finds a way.