the thing about RSS is we all know what it is and what it can do. there is no mystery to it at all.
we should insist that all the new social media platforms AT LEAST provide outbound RSS so our ideas aren't locked into their databases.
@davew it seems like RSS and a few other things could provide almost all of what we seek out in Mastodon, except for how quickly the messages propagate.
So I guess we need reader which understands threading and references to other posts, and convince people to blog on their own domains again.
And I need to fix my RSS feeds to be more usable in a modern world.
i've been giving this a lot of thought and no i don't think we need any of that. start simple with the current limits of RSS and get something working and use it and then see what we need.
btw. we have instant notification built into RSS and it's supported by WordPress, which we will soon see as the product that's leading this, quietly, a product the size of mount everest, that doesn't impose its will on anyone and uses open protocols that are quite powerful.
@davew yeah, I guess my current thing is finding an RSS reader I'm happy with. For reasons, I've moved to Mac from Linux, which means that I'm not using Claws+RSSyl right now. I'm adding RSS support to my job early beta Mac desktop app, but that's not a tool that works for the sorts of interaction I'm thinking of.
And I never got into using Feedly or any of those web based readers, so I'm kinda trying to find a new workflow for consuming RSS.
i can help you there. i spent the last 1.5 years building a product called FeedLand, and have covered feed stuff from top to bottom, building a lot of open source software along the way.
you can start by running your feed through the feeder app and see what it does with it.
http://feeder.scripting.com/returnjson?feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fscripting.com%2Frss.xml
also a tried and true method is to look at a current feed from a site people subscribe to, and do what it does. that'll get you up and running very quickly.
what's your feed address?
and btw RSS is pretty freaking stable. if it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of thing. ;-)
@davew the one that might get read is at https://www.flutterby.com/main.rdf
It's generated using a Perl module that I've never quite trusted, and I've had several different versions over the years that put different bits of the body of the blog entry into the RSS (there used to be a difference between that and mainlong.rdf), because the early spec had limits on such things.
And I guess I'm putting a full HTML block in the <description> now....
@danlyke @davew OStatus = ActivityStreams + Atom + PuSH/WebSub, it's what Fedi ran on before 2019.
Mastodon switched to ActivityPub mainly because of a simpler protocol stack and explicit support for scoped addressing, which enables DMs. This caused other Fedi applications to move as well, as well as leading to a cambrian explosion of entirely new applications.
So while using the equivalent of RSS for all this is clearly possible, it was leaving that behind that created the network we see today.
Still, Mastodon does offer RSS feeds for all users: mastodon.social/@clacke.rss
no problem with all that. but we're looking for a common denominator between all the different social networks.
it's good that mastodon and hopefully the other activitypub apps support outbound rss.
if this becomes something all the different networks do, not just those that are AP based, then we will be able to build across that.
we're going to anyway, simply because mastodon supports rss and so does wordpress, btw. ;-)
@pdcawley @davew @clacke @danlyke
There is an issue for that:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/15350
I would also like to see:
- Like an RSS feed item
- Reply to RSS feed item
- Boost an RSS feed item
@Ciantic that's where I think the RSS consumption is interesting. Ages ago I dumped my OPML file out from whatever reader I was using at the time, and I've got a cron job that looks for inbound blog links from blogs in that list. It's kinda cool. It'd be more cool if people were still blogging.
But I don't do it to the wider world than that because at the time, too many levels out the spam got to be to much to deal with.
And "Boost" and RSS item in the context of blogs means link to it.
@blabberlicious @danlyke @pdcawley @davew The way is add that functionality to Mastodon.
If Gargron won't accept it, maybe glitch-soc or one of the other forks could add it.
@clacke @danlyke @blabberlicious @pdcawley
I would be happy to advise anyone who wanted to do that, on the RSS issues. I have a very strong background there.
@danlyke @davew One issue I have with this idea is tying it to #clearnet domains.
Even without any care for #anonymity or #privacy, it puts a clear monetary hurdle to participation.
I know, because daily I read and mostly fail to comprehend Scripting News, that there's some sort of techie war-for-hearts-and-minds going on over RSS and... Tagged: sex blogging, liquid silk, lube, real doll orgy, real dolls, sex, sex blog, sex dolls, violet blue
i would if i had any idea what that means. ;-)
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