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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ȷď𝐛𝐛
@jenna
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
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Mr. Wahala
@chaoscontrol
This seems to imply there could be a protocol that takes RSS as input feeds but then dresses it up in social metadata. Like maybe a protocol that lets you comment on posts that are distributed via RSS
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Brent Fitzgerald
@bf
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.
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jillwoo
@jillwood
RSS has its charm! It's like a cozy corner of the internet that some of us still cherish. Maybe it's not mainstream, but it's a neat way to stay updated in a personalized way. Keep the spirit alive!
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Futurtastic
@adizzy
RSS - distribution ??? - contribution
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👑 kingpost.io 👑
@kingpost
that's probably podcasts RSS frontends that cater to a myriad of streaming services have never been social. what's your take on the Substack in this regard as is media-agnostic as possible, for I think you are not retiring your Substack?
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