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461 points GavinAnderegg | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.449s | source
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llm_nerd ◴[] No.42150659[source]
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.

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gjsman-1000[dead post] ◴[] No.42150683[source]
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anonyfox ◴[] No.42150891[source]
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.
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1. PaulHoule ◴[] No.42151106[source]
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.