Maybe Bluesky has "won"

Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

both bluesky and mastodon also emit RSS feeds

I agree but I fear it would be used as an excuse to no longer interact with the public and turn off all reply comments by default.

a bluesky appview that intertwingled RSS feeds into my home feed would be pretty killer.

Well, Mastodon is not a private business. Government agencies could post on their own instances.

One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above?

I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

Not to disagree with your post, but I'd *love* to support a renaissance of RSS. It was/is essentially peak distribution of content in a proper decentralized manner, putting users first and letting providers use whatever they want freely to generate it. No walled gardens. No restrictions.

> I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?

Podcasts are RSS. I don't think it's dead at all there.

I think those sorts of publishers should have a script that posts notifications to all sort of places automatically.

RSS in the large is a nightmare. My agent YOShInOn lives on the wrong side of an ADSL connection and has all its RSS fetching done by

https://superfeedr.com/

which I like operationally. I'm following about 110 RSS feeds which cost 10 cents/month each. I like having a simple AWS Lambda that puts the notifications in SQS and then fetching them at my convenience later. It's a steal for a feed from MDPI that has 1000+ papers a day or arXiv or The Guardian but not affordable to follow 2000 independent blogs which I would like to do. The poll and poll and poll some more and poll again and maybe poll too fast and waste resources and other times poll too slow and not only get content late but miss it entirely situation is just not cool. I could write an RSS poller but it would be slowing down my internet connection or adding to my cloud bills and would need maintenance.

Interactivity from the part of the reader

And no good tools. RSS readers in 2024 still keep failing with the same failing interfaces that failed in 1999.

No, I don't want a portal with a little box for every feed I follow.

No, I don't want a listing like an email client.

No, I never want it to show me a piece of content twice unless I ask for it. (e.g. as David Byrne says: "say something once, why say it again?")

Yes, I expect to subscribe to more RSS feeds than I can read entirely so I expect it to learn my preferences like my YOShInOn agent does. In a cycle of a few days, YOShInOn might find 3000 or so articles in RSS feeds and it chooses 300 to show me which I thumbs up or thumbs down. I knew such a thing was possible when I wrote this paper

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC387301/

but now it is not only possible but easy.

This is probably more rhetorical than anything, but why does it need to be interactive?

> These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

The problem is that it's very hard to justify spending money to accomplish this when Twitter/X/Bluesky/Threads/etc. is offering the service for free.

What information gain is there in most of the "interactivity" that is afforded by social media?

People seem to like it?

The fediverse very much is "the commons", at least it's as close as you can hope to get online.

Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.

if it’s not interactive and not littered with “likes”, how will i know to care about it or not?

But it's not because each node is still controlled by someone who can choose what's on it and who has access

Which is why it isn't each node that is the commons, but the entirety of the ecosystem.

Newspapers filled this role once, and they're privately owned. You have two choices: privately owned or government run. I'll take the private ownership route. Better than prior, now users can openly write back outside of "letters to the editor" and without paying money. People used to complain about Twitter censorship, now they complain about its ownership. One is about free expression. The other is about political tribalism.

> there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department.

Their website! Now get off my lawn! :p

This is exactly why WebSub, formerly Pubsubhubbub, was written. Publishers can push to a relay only when something new happens, never having to be polled.

It was created more than a decade ago.

You are presently commenting on a platform that has upvotes and replies. Even you apparently want to use a platform that has interactivity.

For things like a missing person alert, it provides an instant feedback mechanism and the ability to share things with people you might know in the affected area.

Otherwise, there’s absolutely utility to interacting over social media. We’re doing it right now!

You're collateralizing bad mortgages and rating them AAA.

I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/)

Why is information gain the correct metric?

We're talking about marketing here. Shouldn't it be conversions or awareness or something?

Likes could just be part of the RSS feed

Mastodon is not a bloated sloppy mess. Have you even used it? I use it every day and it's enjoyable. It felt like 2010s Twitter. It both makes me feel good and is also educational (because I have chosen to follow accounts that provide educational value, not just empty rhetoric).

I sure am! Just because I'm commenting on this platform doesn't mean that I actually care about upvotes and such (spoiler alert: I don't give a shit what my score is). I interact, but I never feel the need to and I don't find the interactions to be the important aspect of the site, rather the kinds of articles I find submitted here are what I appreciate the most. The commentary is secondary, "extra" if you will - take it away and I wouldn't care. Hell, I have an RSS-based news reader that I utilize on a daily basis that provides no interactivity and I find it a more pleasant experience than on this site, and you know why that is?

Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)

One important one is reposting that shows post to your followers who might not see the original. It is important way to see other content.

Also, liking it signal that other people were interested in the post. I don't global likes are useful for likes from people you follow are important.

Finally, replies mean can see interaction from people you follow. If you follow interesting people, you see interesting discussion.

With social media, it isn't possible to read everything, I know I used to try to read my whole Twitter feed. There needs to be some way to filter than just time when you looked. I think the current algorithmic feed is bad because it tries to show other stuff instead of ordering things that want to see.

> That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone.

When you want to reach people you go to where the people are. You fish where the fish is. It is that simple. People did not join twitter because the police was posting there, the police post on twitter because that is where they can reach the people.

> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

To be fair, that is what ActivityPub is - less simple syndication.

Why does a police department need a feed to be interactive? Actually, doesn't it being interactive invite improper interactions from citizens that should have used official channels?

ActivityPub is something like RSS. It is based on OStatus which used Atom and other standards. But it also does multidirectional syncing.

If Bluesky did ActivityPub, that will federate Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. There are tools for posting to old social media, we will probably see tools for the new ones. Should be easier since protocols are more open.

It is an official channel.

This is a platform for discussion, but if it was the example of a police department, why do they necessarily want to turn a feed of updates into a space they have to moderate (or if they can't moderate it, having to put up with most responses being along the lines of "ACAB"?). Communities can have value, but sometimes you wouldn't lose much by having your feed be read only.

> Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?

The users. You can put your news on RSS and approximately nobody will read them. Or you can put them on twitter and it will reach people.

This is true even now when the management of the bird app is seemingly hellbent on destroying the site. It was even more true when the decision was made.

I guess we can hope (or work) on an RSS based future, but the key thing to achieve is users, and then the rest will follow.

Yes. And it was a bloated sloppy mess I ran from screaming. It SUCKED, and STILL sucks.

I thought you could subscribe to an RSS feed for basically anyone on mastodon?

By "official" channel I was thinking of making a police report, or writing something in a complaints book. Tweeting at a PD's account is comparatively as official as scribbling something on the wall of the station bathroom.

The problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity.

Right now RSS is, for the vast majority of the public, a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it.

Have you ever tried to stand one up?

No, it's more like dropping a note card in a "Tips" drop box in the station lobby. It's literally an officially monitored communication channel that is explicitly authorized.

If anything, the transparency of a social media post is much better than, say, private emails that can be buried and ignored.

Except when they're on soundcloud, or spotify, or audible, etc...

For those who find Mastodon's default client a little bloated, please check out https://phanpy.social. It is one of the most thoughtful PWAs and websites I have ever used, and made Mastodon a daily for me now. It's feels like Threads but with deeper functionality.

It can just talk to your Mastodon server, which as the article notes is very easy to set up on Coolify/Digital Ocean, etc

But then you need to go to each website for updates. The benefit of these platforms was aggregation.

Twitter is a place where they can reach some people. Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not.

Credentialing. I frequently find myself reading Tweets from people I’ve never heard of because someone who I know to be an expert in a particular topic has liked or retweeted them. This kind of signaling helps surface more obscure content and make it available to people who wouldn’t have found it on their own. This is a huge deal.

Twitter almost literally started as a place to get updates on celebrities, designed closely to UI's seen in tickerboard updates. So the metaphor is more apt than you'd think.

They're a government department. This is literally something which should be coordinated by the government.

I.e. police.gov should just dashboard this for you using location services.

Realistically I think all social media should have been operating on an open standard years ago.

So in theory one could publish into the ATP network (or whatever it's called) and a bunch of ATP clients could receive it?

And Bluesky is a publisher and a client?

> The problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity.

Views exceed interactions by orders of magnitude.

I don't find it particularly interesting to argue about which analogy is more appropriate. My point is that it doesn't have the same degree of officialness as a report or some other public record, and it existing just invites to confusion on that matter.

This was solved 20 years ago with RSS, I guess it's about time for someone to rediscover the idea and reimplement something like it, push it like a great new invention, and make a couple of billions in the process.

I feel like that's fine, as another boomer. The internet wasn't designed with this idea that you only visit 10 websites and everything else is on the fringes. Did people forget that bookmarks exist?

Back to crushing reality, that's also why I'm a huge RSS fan. your feed should be based on websites you want to follow, not what the website's algorithms want you to follow. RSS puts the control back to the user while giving 95% of the convinience of a centralized platform.

But people don't bother looking on non-interactive platforms. This is a problem for outreach that aims to hit 100% of the public, ideally.

Unfortunately you are way more likely to get a blank stare when you say "add our RSS feed" than when you say "add us on Facebook" or similar, especially if you are an organization like a police department. Ordinary people do not tend to set up RSS readers or know how to handle feeds.

Picking a reader means making one or more choices (for your phone, laptop, tablet whatever), adding a feed is several steps, and it is easy to get overloaded with too many boring items (and too few interesting ones) because curation is left to the end user.

Centralized social networks require no choosing of readers, let you add an info source in one click, and ensure you have neither too few nor too many interesting items -- for some value of "interesting" -- regardless of how many entities you follow.

I love RSS and decentralization but creating a smooth, user friendly experience with such tools is a major unsolved challenge.

Interactions draw views. If someone asked the same question you had, and had it answered by the original poster, that's more valuable to you than a simple feed.

Twitter was never a majority of Americans let alone 80-90+% share that justifies being a single outlet for a taxpayer funded agency.

Huh that’s a great way of putting it.

These ‘federated’ systems are just recreating feudalism in cyberspace.

Edit: Well even worse in some ways, since it’s not like a majority of the ‘gentry’ and ‘nobles’ could challenge and seize control of e.g. a Mastodon instance from the owner.

It will never make sense cause Claude Shannon already told us why.

When everyone Broadcasts, info explodes, no one hears anything. And as a reaction, they shout louder and louder or increase the number of times they repeat their message. This compound the absurdity of giving everyone Broadcast capability even further.

When you use the word commons you dont even realize the commons never had Broadcast (1 to All messaging) for Free.

Technically we can give everyone a radio transmitter that support Broadcasting. But no one allows that anywhere on the planet ever since Claude Shannons Theory of Information came out. Because it clearly shows us everyone can not broadcast simultaneously.

Even the human body with more cells and more signalling going on than the entire dumb internet does not give every cell broadcast capability.

Correct. Bluesky is dogfooding AT Protocol.

https://atproto.com/specs/atp#protocol-extension-and-applica...

It was solved 20 years ago. But companies unsolved it by deciding to de-prioritize or even remove such RSS API's.

Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into), and as we're seeing right now companies are at each other's necks in real time over scraping.

ideally, yes. Realistically, companies were never going to willingly give up their centralization once they started chasing ad revenue and then later selling data to 3rd parties.

folks should just go to wholly owned websites like back in the day. on the other hand most major websites are absolutely unreadable with the ads/autoplay videos.

Good point. If Discord can make billions by essentially reinventing IRC...

An account costs nothing. You get an intern or someone to post on it now and then. It isn't exactly a deep commitment.

To be fair, RSS isn't an either/or. Quite the oppoiste. You make an RSS feed and bring users into twitter to reach them. Ideally being able to move people to your own hosted service and they then interface with the base news in the same way, on their chosen RSS. Even if the link may take them to a blog instead of a centralized service.

Issue is that the bird app doesn't want this middleman between them. They want all the users' attention.

> Using it was appropriate. Using it exclusively was not.

That I can agree with. Usually what I have seen, at least where i live, is that no public body used it exclusively. They still had a website, they still talked with journalist, talked with radios, used flyers, whatever was appropriate in each situation. (Or at least they tried, not saying everyone was getting it always right.)

What is the commons then? I think it's the internet at large, email, RSS, etc.

The people aren't on Twitter, pretty sure every time I've checked the stats Twitter users are a relative minority. It caters to the sort of people who enjoy communication without discussion - that might be the police's target audience for their communication but it isn't most people.

I've been annoyed over the years because (not having an account) sometimes Twitter won't let me look at Tweets. Hopefully none of them contained useful info.

What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess?

It was my understanding that Mastadon has _far less_ javascript than Twitter, not more.

The UI for mastadon always seemed far cleaner, more performant, and importantly - capable of actually loading, compared to twitter

Essentially, anytime something is shared from twitter I simply ignore it, because it may take a good 40 minutes to figure out the workaround to view it, compared to Mastadon which 'just works'.

It's federation that is the problem. Federation leads to fragmentation, which ultimately is a headwind to adoption. IMHO you need a single network that allows people to choose the "channels" that you can view/join and then people that join that channel start hosting and replicating the content. Also, great filtering controls are critical to the success of such a platform.

Not sure if there is really anything attempting to implement essentially Twitter with this model or not? I would be interested though if someone has run across or is working on a system like that.

Your local TV channels and newspapers aren’t commons either; they’re as privately owned as Twitter or Bluesky. Yet local governments make good use of them too, and have for many decades.

Things do not need to be publicly owned or distributed to be useful to society.

> Somehow publish to all of the above?

I would have assumed this one. What's the downside?

The ironic bit is that conceptually Bluesky is RSS with WebSub <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub>

- PDS are websites with an RSS feeds, each a publisher

- Relays are WebSub hubs aggregating many sources into a central host

- App views, labelers, Feed Generators, whatever are subscribers being alerted when a new entry is received, making their internal sauce. They're also hubs for pushing content to any step that comes after

- PDS are at the end, subscribers of labelers, app views and feed generators. They make their internal sauce to have a nice social-oriented UI.

A properly decentralized, boring-tech Bluesky can take this form. Steps are additive, not all of them are needed

1. A single, simple server that can receive and emit RSS feeds. Emission of RSS feeds must be able to include content from received entries. Directly subscribe to the people you want to follow, you're done. Social readers <https://indieweb.org/social_reader> do something like that with indieweb formats.

2. A network of WebSub hubs to more efficiently get and distribute everyone's content. superfeedr.com is one of them, https://switchboard.p3k.io/ is another one, but we need many more. Also RSS feeds need to have a server-side that sends a notification to the hub when something is published. Having hubs make searching and having a general view easier. In fact we already have something like that, it's called Planets <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)>

3. Any filtering can happen on top. "People with blue hair", "Posts without tuna in them", any algorithm is anyone's to build

All the layers already exist, but like any social endeavour it's all about the network effect. Having a simple thing to install where you can post, follow and search will make wonders

That's not the argument at all.

These public entities post _exclusively_ on Twitter as if it's the public square. It's not and it shouldn't be. The argument is not about how easy it is to create a Twitter account.

> You have two choices: privately owned or government run

Or worker owned, or shared ownership (basically 1/3 capital, 1/3 workers and 1/3 local council, ratios are not usually that, it is often 60% for the capital owners, but you see the point)

> What do you mean by Mastadon is a bloated sloppy mess?

Have you tried running a server? Even a single user instance is a resource hogger.

No, it only appears as a gotcha. It's actually providing an insight. There are read-only sites and there are sites that people use, and for the most part that splits the universe of sites. For better or for worse, even read-only users primarily go to sites that others interact with.

Please give me an example of a police station which post exclusively on Twitter.

Twitter used to be a good way to share information because the tweet link would expand into all the info you needed to see, regardless of whether you were a Twitter user or not. Today it sits behind an auth wall, and so is inaccessible to a majority of the population.

"social" means people interacting - replies, likes, etc.

If someone has an RSS reader with feeds from some news sources, official channels issuing announcements, etc - that's great, but does anyone consider that "social media"?

(Of course, you can believe that social media is bad and you don't want it, but that's a different question)

Journalists are (or were) on Twitter though

You're in danger of making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Email is far from perfect, but good enough and its federated nature means it's reasonable for institutions to use it as a default mode of communication and authentication.

What exactly is the alternative to federation? Is it possible for everyone to be their own admin?

In any case, under feudalism serfs didn't have the freedom to choose and switch their feudal lord as they saw fit.

Hmm, that makes me think that maybe it would be a good idea to have non-commercial public-access television.

RSS feeds simply return the last N posts, correct? How can RSS be used to serve a user's whole history?

Already, we talking about some other service that accumulates the history and provides search, history, etc. That and many other things (likes, replies, quotes, etc) are all things users expect (rightfully, IMHO).

While orgs/people simply issuing announcements should ideally provide an RSS feed, that type of content is a tiny part of "social media".

I challenge you again - wht is this any less official than any other officially controlled, officially monitored communication channel. You have offered absolutely no argument to that, yet you continue to say it.

> that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

Having seen this process of creation sustaining & decaying happen again and again, I totally get why you would feel this.

And I forgive you for applying the thinning broadly like this, casting insidious doubt widely like this.

But that's not what Bluesky is doing. Some links; first their o.g. app-lead (is that still right?),

> The network should outlast the company. Imagine if the Web died when Netscape or Yahoo did! It's strange to even think that. The same should apply to social networks.

https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3lau2bgyolc2g

(Or see 18 months ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35012757)

And ((new) board member) Mike Masnick & (founder) Jay Graber on protocols not platforms, 9 months ago (pre Mike on the board),

https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social/post/3kjtmw4m6...

Steve Klabnik has a post, How Bluesky Works, that talks about what Bluesky is. Yes, right now a variety of the layers of At Protocol are run by BlueSky alone. But the data can retain its integrity even if they fail, the network & data is by design open & transparent to all & transferable, and it's all based on protocols. https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work

This hypothesis that everyone else has been rug pulled & so BlueSky will too defies a ton of very hard careful work that Jay began when she very specifically worked to make sure BlueSky could be independent, to make it based on protocols.

filter out unimportant stuff

Internet publishing? we could create a generic document format that could be published on the net. you'd need some standard markup to define presentation. then a hypertext protocol of some kind could transmit.

That's a rather silly thing for an adult to ask. There's multiple reasons why a police report is more official than a tweet.

* A police report is a legal document.

* A tweet can be removed by either its poster or by the platform's operator after it's been posted, while only the police can make a report disappear.

* You can tweet at someone anything you want and they don't have to accept it to receive it, while the police can refuse to accept an unfounded report. An insurance company might require a police report be filed before accepting a claim, but it would not accept a tweet as a substitute.

I have friends who share links to podcasts on Spotify, and I can always get them as RSS in my podcast app.

Maybe it exists, but I have not encountered a situation where I could not access a podcast with RSS.

Well I was answering to a comment talking about announcements from a police department.

My experience with comments on announcements from public entities (like a police department) is that they are more toxic than informative.

Well in practice, if the police department doesn't care about your "tips" (not every station has a "tips" drop box, right?), there is no reason why they should care about your comments.

I have seen plenty of toxic comments on "official" announcements that allow comments that the official entity doesn't actually read. I'm happier with no comment than with toxic comments.

There used to be RSS readers that allowed you to create and share feeds with your friends, actually.

But all those features allow for optimization and create competition.

If you want likes, or views, or reposts, then you will have to "engineer" your post in such a way that it gets more attention. Not sure if that's always beneficial.

I'm not sure. People click on links all the time. Sometimes it opens a browser, sometimes it opens a social media app. Why wouldn't it work with an RSS feed?

Bluesky. It's fantastic.

Your statement quietly assumes that being able to accurately call it a "commons" is desirable. Who cares, it might be good even if it's not a commons.

There is not much point in attention when post is only seen by followers and reposts. It is indication that wrote a good post. The only currency is followers. It was hard to get those without outside fame.

The problem is with Twitter and others is that they now have algorithmic feed. That means posts get seen globally and clout metrics are valuable for reach. Comments also get clout so get lots of drive-by ones and less discussion.

I know RSS is basically old tech by now, but I'm a bit surprised how many seem to misunderstand how this works.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's goal is not to be "the" hub. It is a middleman that takes you to other websites that implement it. Be it twitter (on shakey ground), Your own website, or a game server (in theory). Anything that implements it and sends out messages can be caught by any number of clients made on top of RSS.

Asking for interactivity from an RSS Feed is like asking for interactivity from an email. The goal is to point you towards other content that may or may not be interactable. The RSS is simply there to consolidate all your feeds into one view.

I mean, there's plenty of clients for an RSS feed. It's kind of like saying "subscibe to our email list" but you never heard of gmail/yahoo/MSN. The user needs to put up some legwork to understand what's what.

But after that, it is at worst pasting a link into your client, or clicking a button if the site gives proper attention to it. Not that much more friction than following someone on any centralized platform.

Why would I need to? That's like saying before you can blog you must first write a static site generator.

You can get an RSS feed for any user on Bluesky

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 | https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds

My opinion is that their ATProto is better than ActivityPub b/c account migration and global search among other things

The bloated sloppy mess is on the backend so if you've not set one up it means you haven't looked in the places a bloated sloppy mess would be in.

For consumers that just want to write posts and get comments, there are many platforms out there. http://threads.net is an example of one.

no. i like twitter and think this is good.

Does DOGE (Dept of Govt Efficiency) post exclusively on Twitter? Just wondering

God I loved rss - my list was / is everything from breaking news headlines to random interesting peoples blogs.

I assumed that private or corporate control over something that becomes a default communications network is undesirable, because that was a basis for the discussion I was replying to.

I also believe it. I don't want to have to subject myself to the X dumpster fire or sign away my data to Facebook just to receive communications from my local police department or child's school.

Now we just need a site where we can browse a bunch of people’s feeds and find interesting ones. Sounds like Twitter.

It’s a lot of work to do, in part because you have an increasing number, and even more because you now have many more ways that people might respond. You need to monitor those accounts.

If setting it up was as easy as posting a tweet, sure. My parents don't even know what RSS is but they have heard of Twitter.

Policing in the US is fragmented. Unlike many European countries, the local police are not nationalized—each department has its own concerns, budget, etc.

I'm not misunderstanding anything. The original discussion was about why wouldn't RSS itself be a good backbone for replacing current types of social media. And my answer is because it's not interactive.

Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed. And they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.

Why would I need to know that? Do you know that the Threads backend isn't also a bloated sloppy mess?

Again as I have already said, it's like requiring a blogger to write an elegant static site generator. Who cares that the Wordpress backend is messy and bloated? Only on HN will you find this fetish about an elegant backend when you are merely a user.

>And my answer is because it's not interactive.

And I explained why that response is a bit nonsensical. Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.

>they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.

1. Thars overly presumptuous. Social media didn't give them a real choice.

2. You don't need an account for every blog. Not even for interacting. I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing. If you really want to like stuff sure. But that's not anything different from today.

>Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed.

Sure, Bluesky shows they don't have to but the service can still be successful. As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.

How's thst different from using something like Feedly? It's juet a different app view.

Oh, good point. I sorta forgot that you want to reply to people and it's not pure write-only broadcast.

> Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.

It does take it away. The current status quo has (1) a feed of content and (2) two-way interaction between poster and commenter in the same place. Switching to just RSS inherently takes away (2)

> Social media didn't give them a real choice.

Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.

> I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing.

People didn't but I doubt most people running blogs want to deal with anonymous comments. You already get so much spam and unhinged content when you require a signup.

> As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.

Part of it sure, but it also involved other layers to compensate for the parts that are lacking in RSS that users have come to expect.

> Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.

Can we say that people choose to get addicted to addictive stuff?

Except that RSS is an open standard.

How is one extra click taking away Twitter? This is like saying older apps (taken down because centralized services didn't like this) took away interactivity because they werre managing multiple feeds for you. That's all RSS is. Did Reddit/HN or any other link aggregator take away news sites? That's all RSS is.

And using other non RSS parts is fine again, RSS isn't a social media. It's a way to help aggregate content. You keep claiming to know how RSS works but demonstrate that you feel it's some competitor instead of a commodity.

And yes, the powers that be "won" becsuse they were at war with the idea of people not having all their time dedicated to their feed. Users "chose". to be manipulated becsuse their choices were taken down, weakened, or taken hostage. Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.

> Did Reddit/HN or any other link aggregator take away news sites? That's all RSS is.

Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them. Further, it's a known problem for both of those sites that people will not read the article and instead riff of the title. I'd wager the final 50% of every article could be removed and it wouldn't significantly change the comment sections here.

> Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.

Yes they did, they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour. The alternatives just aren't good enough.

>Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them.

Yes. And you can use RSS feed to do the same thing, either liking to a reddit comment section or actually reading the article and not bothering. Same structure except you're not limited to Reddit's servers.

>they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour

They lost choice and decided using the worst choice was better than moving off of Reddit. I guess if enshiftification is "choice", They did indeed choose. I chose to walk away.

And it's why I hate centralizafion. Because it reduces you down to two choices per owner. Their way or the highway. If you instead managed an RSS feed of a dozen websites and Reddit removed its API, your daily feed may be smaller but your browsing habits would not change. I can still interact with the other 11 sites as much as I want and not need extra time trying to figure out what's out there.

because it makes you unqualified to say that it's not a bloated sloppy mess. Because it is.

If the blogger just wants to write a blog and doesn't care about anything else, they can just use threads, or keep on using twitter, for that matter. But for some reason, this hypothetical blogger has decided that they don't want to use Twitter. They don't have to write their own static site generator, but in moving off Twitter, they're going to be exposed to some of the details behind the scene. If they're not an anti-intellectual, this hypothetical blogger can do some light reading to get up to speed.

I’m not disagreeing with you about the issues of centralization. I too walked away from Reddit and paid that cost.

My point is that (a) many people have not despite the cess pit Reddit and other sites have become, and (b) RSS is inherently incapable of replacing the experience because it’s a pull only mechanism.

Mastadon based itself on ActivityPub, not RSS.

We’ll see if the long term forces that consolidated and entities Twitter and it’s ilk will do the same to Mastadon instances. Cause I’m still not convinced that the general public is willing to or ready to run their own servers

This is because the US has a history of inadequate public infrastructure. Local safety alerts and things of that nature are a public service, and there should be a system in place to perform them. There isn't, and still really isn't to this day. Sure, we have amber alerts and such but that's not really the same thing.

You seem to think that the core of a microblogging platform is its software. Absolutely no. It's the community.

You seem to disagree with the statement "mastodon is a bloated sloppy mess" as if it describes the community, not the software.