Why did Twitter win? Because the RSS developers wouldn’t work with each other. Thus subscribing to a feed was complicated. In Twitter, it a single click to subscribe, and another to unsub. You could also see who your friends subscribed to, again – one click to subscribe to one of the feeds. And eventually that grew into a Suggested Users List. RSS had none of that because the RSS devs refused to work with each other.
Dave is, of course, the biggest cheerleader of RSS in our industry. Rightfully so, the man created it.🙏🏼
Like Dave I see RSS as a great way to pull data, like a feed reader does, and push data. That latter bit is only used in one place I’m aware of: Micro.blog. I’d love to see Mastodon, Bluesky, WordPress, and many others support the import of RSS as a way to create posts. That would be a nice to have.
As Dave points out we’re missing one click subscriptions and recommendations. Which are big in the social network scene.
What else are we missing?
Discovery
Something Apple did many years ago was create a podcast directory and they shared it with the world. You can still use it, for free, to this day. I’d say that was a huge step for podcasting because it’s extremely difficult to discover new podcasts.
Apple doesn’t host the podcast files, just a profile of the podcast so folks can more easily find things. I’m sure it’s a large expense to them to host it but I it’s been beneficial to them. They’re being really nice, and people like really nice.
Now, like me, you may think “But a centralized directory is against everything RSS is about” and you’d be right. RSS is all about decentralization and allowing us normals to publish our works to the open web in a simple, standard, format. Not too different from HTML.
But… that centralized repository is what social networks offer and what Apple donated to the podcasting world. Remember, RSS is the format behind podcast distribution and having those podcasts in one easy to find place was a big deal.
Centralized? Are you nuts?!
Yep, totally, because what I’d like to see is bloggers, podcasters, and anyone else who uses RSS come together to build a centralized repository of basic attributes for bloggers and podcasters. It would be Apple’s directory but not limited to podcasts.
If the repository was “free” to feed readers and podcast players we could all pull from it to create recommended feeds and/or create separate timelines in our readers and players of latest posts. It opens the door to many possibilities. Bloggers and podcasters wouldn’t have to change a thing. Their RSS feed would remain the same. They’d have to do one tiny thing. Register that feed with the repository so it could make a nice card for you and list your podcasts.
Readers and players would direct any searches for blogs or podcasts to that directory and provide a list of items so the user could one click subscribe to it.
You could tell folks to “Subscribe wherever you get your feed” because RSS is completely open it doesn’t require you to be part of the centralized directory! The directory just helps with discovery.
Threaded Conversations
This is another thing missing from RSS and weblogs in general. How does RSS become a two-way conversation? Does it need to be?
For me the jury is still out. Mastodon has done an amazing job of making it easy to have your own instance interact with every other instance. That’s been really nice to have.
How would blogging solve that? I’d read a piece from Dave a number of months back that addressed this but I can’t find it now. I’d imagine others have worked on ways to make it happen.
Have you seen ActivityPub support in WordPress? It’s pretty nice and getting better all the time. When someone replies to your blog post on Mastodon it shows up in your blog as threaded comments! That’s incredible and going a long way toward making blogs more two way like conversations. It would be nice if it were a bit tighter with RSS but it’s a start.
Also of note is Automattic’s recent Radical Speed Month effort. It hooks blogging, Mastodon, and Bluesky into a single reading interface. Really nice stuff.
There are, of course, other examples of this, like The Iconfactory’s Tapestry or Reeder. Unread is starting to do some of this.
Ideas are getting better and better. Folks are trying out new things and experimenting more and more with formats.
I feel like we need more glue to make discovery and search better. That’s a big missing piece.❤️
