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 ☀️

Isn’t RSS more like any other protocol that moves stuff over the internet, meaning normies don’t need to know about it? “It just works.” Wondering how it seems different to you

🔭🔎 scouting near and far :: thought follower

Hmmm analogous to email clients tho? SMTP and POP*IMAP -like?

You have to consciously subscribe with a special client. Not like http etc which operate in non-subscriber mode. And are still vulnerable. Google successfully killed a lot of basic http and dns with amp etc. CDNs capture slow cached protocols