Excursions avatar

Excursions

Stories are written so that mind stays free to wove some more stories. It works more often than not -- and so needs to be done more often than not.

So Blot still seems to be down. So I have dusted my old Hugo based journal, just to see if things are up - working. I hope it is. I believe it is.

The Rise and Demise of RSS

This is such fascinating write up by Sinclair Target on history behind the challenges RSS has faced over the years. And also why it just never managed to succeed — even though it had the backing of all the major publishers, at least everyone adopted and served it.

Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was. Lots of people have offered explanations for why RSS lost its broad appeal. Perhaps the most persuasive explanation is exactly the one offered by Gillmor in 2009. Social networks, just like RSS, provide a feed featuring all the latest news on the internet. Social networks took over from RSS because they were simply better feeds. They also provide more benefits to the companies that own them.

RSS isn’t dead, yet. It still serves all the podcasts feeds, and there are a large number of users, including me, for whom it is the only source of any timeline of sort. But the fact cannot be denied that it does not draw any attention from big technology companies. With Firefox too recently dropping the built-in feed support, it became clear everyone wants the standard to exists but no one wants to work on improving and maintaining it. Wish it did not stagnate.

RSS might have been able to overcome some of these limitations if it had been further developed. Maybe RSS could have been extended somehow so that friends subscribed to the same channel could syndicate their thoughts about an article to each other. Maybe browser support could have been improved. But whereas a company like Facebook was able to “move fast and break things,” the RSS developer community was stuck trying to achieve consensus. When they failed to agree on a single standard, effort that could have gone into improving RSS was instead squandered on duplicating work that had already been done.

I believe that is the story of how standards proliferate. But I just hope more people realize the importance of the RSS standard for the existence of open web and work on evangelizing and advance it.

If we stay dependent on technology companies to back it, we will always end-up with siloed timelines. For them, achieving consensus and coexisting with other players is costlier. It is cheaper to foster user engagement in a walled platforms controlled centrally by the owners. Companies will always go with the cheaper options.

So we name the moons of other planets - Titan for example - but our moon is just the “moon”. Not sure what that says about us humans. 🤔

It doesn’t matter what is right or wrong, true or false regarding Facebook’s behavior. The constant stream of negative press has to affect overall perception of the service. And even more, the morale of the employees at the org. The fight’s getting ugly.

Another episode of Third-Person Voice is out now.

For them, the walk was supposed to be about finding something that was lost. He, however, had a hidden agenda of his own — that of finding “someone”.

I have been on an unplanned official travel for the last week - one full of crazy full day schedules. And boy did it affect my routine. I could hardly follow up on anything I had planned. Plus it‘s left me with so much to do. Travels should be about memories, not missed moments.

I wish there was a way to ignore the limit for Screen Time on iOS at the complete device level, rather than doing for each app. “I want to use my phone, the whole of it, for another 15 minutes dammit, not just this app”. The persistent bugging gets irritating.

I always loved this quote from Terry Pratchett and just came across this gem again today.

If you have enough book space, I don’t want to talk to you.

He was smart not to include a reference to a book shelf in there - makes sure it holds true even in the age of eBooks 🙂

Social community that you decide to be part of, matters. And this fact remains true even online. Every time I scroll through the Micro.blog timeline, I realise that the place is full of creators. So each visit inspires me to create more. It matters what you read.