Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
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/
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Daniel Fernandes
@dfern.eth
I use RSS every day! It's called my podcast player. RSS for text didn't work because major websites only started putting out headlines rather than the whole article in their feeds: they want you to click through for the ad impressions. That...and we don't need a separate application for pushing text: Substack showed us SMTP works just fine, and it's actually sustainable as a business when you also have paid-subscription newsletters. Authors want to own their readership. This is much easier to do when you have an exportable e-mail list than having a Wordpress blog that's 'pull not push'
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I think it’s vulnerable though
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