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.

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.

> 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?

Interactivity from the part of the reader

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'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.

>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.

> 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.