I think, as someone that has a RSS feed on my blog, that RSS is a total mess and Atom was probably the better choice.
Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK, but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?
Anyway, after dealing with the mess of images and inline HTML with CDATA in RSS, I have complete fatigue of the whole endeavour.
That’s what JSON Feed is. It’s supported by several RSS readers.
> but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?
No, that’s for social networking.
RSS works. Atom splitting the standard into two probably did more harm than good. In the end it doesn't matter since every reader supports both and both do the job well.
Beyond this, maybe a framework to show a single header ad on the reader giving the revenue credit and money to the original content site.
The reason for newline separated json, is simply that you can do a partial content download in the reader... the most recent 100kb or 2mb or whatever... you the most recent is on top, and allows a site to publish more than just the most recent, but you don't have to grab that. Or maybe just standardize a since=(iso-style-datetime) or last=## (number of articles).
Just a couple loose thoughts on this.
People found the web more boring, because it became more boring.
They found the algorithm more interesting, because it allowed them to see what was going on with people they barely knew (from former school mates they'd lost touch with to celebrities without press filtering), and that was compelling.
But there's a next phase available to us, which is to make the web more interesting, entertaining and compelling again.
I love that b3ta.com still exists. I love that metafilter.com is moving on. I think it's great that web comics I love still publish to RSS.
I just think more of us need to provide more demand, and more people will wake up to supply, and the flywheel will start to turn.
RSS beat ICE, and it can beat Meta and X if people want it too, albeit for different reasons.
RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still requiring someone to turn those feeds into a singular feed for the user.
First, RSS has a bit more friction. Smashing the follow button on Twitter et al is faster than adding the feed to your RSS reader of choice unless your OS has support for default RSS app.
Second, discoverability. Just like with any distributed system vs monolithic platform, you need to find what to read yourself. For some niches this works well. If you are a software developer/hacker, you are more familiar with blogs in your area of interest. But if you have a wide range of interests you’d need to find the blogs yourself and hope their RSS feed is well formatted.
Third, the algorithm. A monolithic platform can do more to try to mix in new content based on your interests and intelligently mix up the content from sources you follow. This is of course controversial because feed algorithms can also try to cram bullshit into your feed or hide important stuff from you or create an echo chamber. But in the best case scenario they can also expose you to new sources of content you wouldn’t have found otherwise. An RSS reader would mean it is up to you to do this discovery which is more friction.
And ultimately content creators realized that they get more eyeballs on their stuff by using platforms like Facebook, Medium, Instagram, Twitter, than on blogs especially since blogs tend to be then repackaged by blog spam bots, Google’s AMP, and now LLMs.
So IMO RSS is just too manual and requires too much work. And of course since you can’t effectively advertise through it there is less incentive for creators and platforms to support it.
Then I remembered that Twitter was once referred to as "micro blogging," so I put those folks in my blog list on Feedbin, and was happy again.
I do miss the glory days of Twitter, tbh.
(In contrast, ICE did not weather RSS.)
They still are in most cases.
Meanwhile, RSS is barely relevant today. For decades (Youtube turned 20 this year), people have had access to feeds curated by "the algorithm" operated by a commercial interest (hoping to maximize the amount of ads you look at); and most people seem to prefer it that way, if they're even aware of alternatives.
Ironically, my microsoft feeds are pretty active, and xkcd is still there, The Daily WTF is still going strong.... but a lot of my feeds are just dead.