Comment by xnx

Comment by xnx 8 hours ago

19 replies

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RSS was too good and too decentralized to exist. It's a miracle that it's still possible to independently publish and subscribe to podcasts (notably, Spotify doesn't let you subscribe to unapproved podcasts).

I social web based on RSS would be heaven: publish anywhere you want, own your content and URL, no content moderation, pick your own service (separately) for discovery. Google should be pushing harder for this to bust content back out of the walled gardens of Instagram.

ikesau 7 hours ago

I think this is the direction ActivityPub is headed.

You can already add .rss to the end of someone's Mastodon account to get their posts as a feed (e.g. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic.rss) and ghost.org is working on their AP integration for longer form content (more info about the beta here https://activitypub.ghost.org/)

I think PeerTube has RSS support too, but I've not experimented with it.

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arch_deluxe 7 hours ago

I totally agree. Is there a community of like-minded folks out there somewhere? I'd love to see someone give this a try.

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  • xnx 7 hours ago

    The US is trying its best by kicking 170 million users out of their prefered app. Amazing that I haven't seen more effort to pick up the refugees. Twitter could've made a big video push. Tumblr (I know photomatt is a little distracted now) could've reminded the world it exists. etc.

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    • aquaticsunset 7 hours ago

      I take this as "nobody, including the competitors, think TikTok will actually go away"

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      • xnx 6 hours ago

        That could definitely be it. They might also be trying to play it cool, and not appear to gloat before the corpse is even cold. Instagram is running a lot of ads on TikTok now though.

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    • portaouflop 6 hours ago

      I know several people who are starting a new service to pick up those refugees - let’s see how it pans out!

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    • bigfatkitten 6 hours ago

      > Twitter could've made a big video push.

      They tried that with Vine and it was a tremendous flop. Launched 2013, finally killed off around 2017.

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      • codazoda 6 hours ago

        Vine was a massive hit at first. The stewards screwed it up.

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Animats 6 hours ago

RSS can distribute a feed, but that's all it does. There's no discovery or search or ranking.

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  • oefrha 5 hours ago

    People who chant RSS seem to never get this. Publishing is trivial, search and discovery is all that matters, saying “pick your own service (separately) for discovery” is like saying write down int main(), now write down the rest of the program and you’re done. What the hell is that service? That’s 99% of the work.

    In addition, only discovering feeds (followed by chronological aggregation of said feeds) is crude and outdated. Anyone who has subscribed to hundreds of feeds can probably tell you how great the signal to noise ratio is. It’s not. And that’s just for subscribing to blogs that tend to be on topic, throw in microblogs (Twitter and clones) and you quickly get all kinds of nonsense you don’t care about, e.g. baseball and politics if you follow John Gruber for Apple news. Realistically there are a small handful of really high quality feeds you don’t want to miss, and for the rest you want to follow topics, not people. TikTok lets you effortlessly do that; traditional RSS subscription model doesn’t, and no one has built that “your own service for discovery”. Ironically Reddit may be the closest thing for the following topics part, if you ignore all its problems.

    There was an article on HN a couple years ago that goes into more details: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...

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  • xnx 6 hours ago

    That's even better. Disaggregate those functions into separate services. Don't like "the algorithm", pick a different one.

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theamk 7 hours ago

Meh, I remember time when blogs I read moved from LiveJournal to RSS, and discoverability went way down.

In LJ, if you liked someone's post, you could click on "friends" and see _their_ feed. I've discovered a lot of new blogs this way. There was even "all friends of all friends" page if you really wanted a firehose.

In RSS world, all of this is gone. Sure, one blog I read had a separate "posts I found interesting" feed, and I've discovered some new feeds this way.. but this was only one site, most of the websites had nothing like this.

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packetlost 7 hours ago

RSS/Atom works for certain kinds of content, but not as well for others. It basically necessitates long polling and for anything that needs realtime publishing it just straight up won't work at any meaningful scale

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