Just in terms of software models and consumer uptake, I think it’s abundantly clear that the way Twitter and Instagram work “won” and RSS “failed.”
Like, just forget about "push/pull" for a minute, what about feed discoverability? A couple years ago my father asked me how I read news, and I told him to install Reeder on his iPad, then he could just start filling in feeds from The Atlantic or whatever. “Okay how do I find those?” “Well, you could install a browser extension — wait you're not going to do that — or view the web page source and look for an RSS link — wait what am I saying —”
RSS depends on website designers making their feeds discoverable, and as a career web dev I can assure you that’s simply not on their radar. Only alpha geeks care. The only reason RSS is still around is that it’s built into enough CMS's so most web devs don't have to do any work, and they still can't be bothered to put a little radar icon in the footer.
Discoverability is intrinsic to social though. No, I don't know how someone on Bluesky will search accounts on other networks in "the atmosphere," but I’m positive this will get solved. RSS fans deny that discoverability is a problem to this day, because the only people who use it are the same alpha geeks who don’t care about UX at all.
Agree with all of your RSS points. AT Proto are data rails, but they are more fancy and open rails; they are a superior primitive imho while also inherently preventing ecosystem closure that has happened with every social network previously. Consumption and discovery can be solved for, and I argue, generative AI has a role to play here. u/echelon and u/wild_egg have comments that touch on this in another thread:
> I expect for this kind of tech to have really novel use cases. For it to sit between me and the internet and remove the ads, nuke time wasting clickbait, and obliterate low-information irrelevant noise. For it to be my personal bodyguard that protects me from any and all forms of attention stealer. ... I want this to be tech to give birth to an anti-Google, anti-social media algo, anti-advertiser terminator from the future. Something that torpedoes the previous paradigm and that does it so quickly that the old purveyors can't adjust in time. [1]
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> It's now my daily driver for web access. It monitors for content I'm interested in (that's how I found your comment), handles all my searches and feeds, can dynamically adapt its interface, and is working on integrations to submit content for me so that I don't have to leave that interface to write these replies. [2]
We can build and tailor the interface for both discovery and consumption of the data transiting the AT Proto rails. This could be a client on your device (what Apple Intelligence should be, exposing an API to other apps to perform this compute), this could be an agent that runs on your own PDS [3] and then provides a distilled feed for you based on what it learns about you through signal from your client that is not shared, and you would be able to share your customized discovery feed with others. Plug DeepSeek in for now (while keeping an eye towards drivers so you can plug any other LLM in and you're off the the races and the state of the art advances). In the book "The Internet Con", Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. AT Proto and Gen AI allows, to an extent, to sidestep the adversarial interoperability needed to diminish Big Tech control of the digital social fabric. We are currently on a path towards seizing the means of computation and users controlling their experience and consumption. To me, this is the most exciting part of the work ahead.
Just in terms of software models and consumer uptake, I think it’s abundantly clear that the way Twitter and Instagram work “won” and RSS “failed.”
Like, just forget about "push/pull" for a minute, what about feed discoverability? A couple years ago my father asked me how I read news, and I told him to install Reeder on his iPad, then he could just start filling in feeds from The Atlantic or whatever. “Okay how do I find those?” “Well, you could install a browser extension — wait you're not going to do that — or view the web page source and look for an RSS link — wait what am I saying —”
RSS depends on website designers making their feeds discoverable, and as a career web dev I can assure you that’s simply not on their radar. Only alpha geeks care. The only reason RSS is still around is that it’s built into enough CMS's so most web devs don't have to do any work, and they still can't be bothered to put a little radar icon in the footer.
Discoverability is intrinsic to social though. No, I don't know how someone on Bluesky will search accounts on other networks in "the atmosphere," but I’m positive this will get solved. RSS fans deny that discoverability is a problem to this day, because the only people who use it are the same alpha geeks who don’t care about UX at all.