The one that would really open them up is inbound RSS, the protocol that all the other twitter-like systems refuse to support. Want to blow the doors off now instead of some vague time in the future? Support outbound and inbound RSS. Let the trains come into the station and leave the station on a well established protocol. It could be done in a few weeks, really. Maybe the very intelligent and curious people who read this blog would like to take the time to understand what this means and the doors it would open? It’s a way to change the subject from “good idea but hopeless” to “hey we can have freedom now."#
When I first saw Dave mention inbound and outbound RSS I thought he was taking about a mechanism to do threaded replies using RSS so we could have something akin to Mastodon or Bluesky.
I was wrong. He would like to have the ability to not only subscribe to an RSS feed but also populate a social service timeline with an RSS feed. That’s a good idea.
Mastodon or Bluesky could add the ability to have your timeline subscribe to an RSS feed. When that feed changes it could publish the content into the timeline. There would be some intelligence baked in to know if it’s already posted the feed, and I’d imagine some other niceties, but the idea is really good!
The problem is the platform folks tend to say “use our API.” Which makes sense, but most API’s are painful in some way because of authentication or some hoop you have to go through. If the platform natively supported inbound RSS it would greatly simplify the developer and user experience. Let me pick an RSS feed to follow and use it! BOOM! 💥
Dave also believes Bluesky is leading us down the same path as Twitter. We’re all jamming our content into a centralized system. That’s not great. By having your own site with a weblog and the ability to publish RSS and have that content or link to that content published to Bluesky you’re not so locked in. Your blog is the primary source. A source you control.
To date I believe Micro.blog is the best at doing this. It supports ActivityPub so your @micro.blog account can be used as a Mastodon account and show up in your timeline. It also has its own timeline and it’s a full on blogging system. The post you’re reading now is a Micro.blog managed blog!
The other great thing it does is publish to other systems. My blog post text is either fully published to Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky or a link to the post is published if it has a title and goes over a certain character count. I believe this is the perfect solution to the limited character count issue on the various social networks.
E.G. when I publish Saturday Morning Coffee that post goes to this blog. Here’s what it looks like on Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky.
The main source is my blog. It’s then distributed to these secondary sources. Mastodon and Bluesky get links and Tumblr gets a full copy. 👍🏼
Now, Micro.blog goes to all the trouble to connect to those API’s so it can publish to each platform. That’s a royal pain for the team at Micro.blog. I am grateful they support all these platforms, but wouldn’t it be cool if Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr let me, the user, go to a settings screen and tell it to use my RSS feed instead? Yes, yes it would! 😃
Another great post from Dave.
Developers: This is the WordPress API. Compare it to AT Proto and ActivityPub. It's got a lot of advantages. It does the basics of social media. It scales, is mature and stable, and well-managed. A better foundation imho to build on than the others. developer.wordpress.com
