RSS is pub/sub, right? Doesn't social media like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter - where you post stuff and other people post stuff - resemble that? Replace 'your' account, profile or page with your own website.
With the right website software it's easy to have an RSS feed nowadays, so the only thing that's missing is website software that also works like an RSS reader. In the most basic sense you only have to read XML with your program.
So now there's your own feed and other people's feed, mixed up in a nice and honest timeline (however you program that). To me this sounds a lot like the first principles behind social media, but without the obscure algorithms to fvck your timeline and without the intruding ads (I have nothing against ads per se).
P.S. Sorry for ranting about the weapons metaphor. I triggered on it and felt the need to tell what I think about language.
Edit: I forgot to say that RSS feeds have been there all the time for a lot of websites based on Wordpress. That has big value, because it means there's no need for technical adoption. These are all websites with feeds up and running right now. I've been hating on Wordpress for other reasons, but this was a good move for the open web from them.
https://micro.blog for example does exactly this, sort of RSS based Twitter (i.e the idea is that your feed contains mostly shorter posts, but that’s not a hard restriction) . Give it the RSS of your website (they can also host one for you), "follow" other people (=subscribe to their rss feed) and boom there is your "social media"
Nice! I really like their idea, and very friendly UI. I get a social vibe from it.
Your explanation is exactly what I was thinking of as the ideal social media, but I don't see that explained on their website. No mention of RSS. As long as the feeds from my software can work with their feeds (and the other way around) I'm good.
Have you heard of Scuttlebutt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt)? The entire protocol revolves around 'pulling' other people's feeds - unlike most all modern social media, it's a pull-based rather than push-based model. It sounds quite similar to what you're looking for, at least based on the way you describe it in this particular comment.
Yeah, I've seen it come across here on HN. For my intended web application I already chose RSS as the way to go, especially because there exist so many feeds and because I'm familiar with XML.
If you have a blog and/or RSS feed somewhere online, let me know. I'll add it to my 'to follow' list.
> the only thing that's missing is website software that also works like an RSS reader. In the most basic sense you only have to read XML with your program
This is a fascinating idea. I often think that Twitter's success, unlike Facebook's or Google's, is fundamentally as a protocol - and one which shouldn't have been centralised under the control of one company. And incidentally it seems Jack Dorsey thinks the same way, since he's suggested the possibility of having one core protocol for tweets, on top of which people could build their own frontends, and users could choose from a marketplace of both (a) frontends and (b) algorithms for filtering and ordering what they see.
I do agree with you: what's missing from RSS is not the existence of the protocol, nor even necessarily the 'supply side' of websites providing it (like you say, largely courtesy of Wordpress), but the 'demand side' which really needs a well-designed interface to consume that kind of content. I absolutely agree with you that this feels like a huge area of potential.
And thinking on a more second-order level: I wonder if one thing that's preventing these innovations is a suitable, easy 'base' for people to build this software on. For example, take `create-react-app` for the web. Countless things have been made because people know that they have that simple base to start with. For building a web browser alternative, there's no equivalent for most people: they don't know where to start. If we had a simply bundled toolkit such that people only had to write some business logic, I wonder how much more would be done.
> P.S. Sorry for ranting about the weapons metaphor. I triggered on it and felt the need to tell what I think about language.
No prob at all! Susan Sontag wrote a really interesting essay 'AIDS And Its Metaphors' in the same vein, specifically about the use of war metaphors about AIDS and cancer: "fighting", "losing the battle", &c. (It's the culmination of a series of essays on the same topic, but this is the most thought-provoking of them, IMO.) You might enjoy it. I particularly liked:
> The metaphor implements the way particularly dreaded diseases are envisaged as an alien 'other', as enemies are in modern war; and the move from the demonisation of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient is an inevitable one, no matter if patients are thought of as victims. Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
With the right website software it's easy to have an RSS feed nowadays, so the only thing that's missing is website software that also works like an RSS reader. In the most basic sense you only have to read XML with your program.
So now there's your own feed and other people's feed, mixed up in a nice and honest timeline (however you program that). To me this sounds a lot like the first principles behind social media, but without the obscure algorithms to fvck your timeline and without the intruding ads (I have nothing against ads per se).
P.S. Sorry for ranting about the weapons metaphor. I triggered on it and felt the need to tell what I think about language.
Edit: I forgot to say that RSS feeds have been there all the time for a lot of websites based on Wordpress. That has big value, because it means there's no need for technical adoption. These are all websites with feeds up and running right now. I've been hating on Wordpress for other reasons, but this was a good move for the open web from them.
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