I used to be a heavy user of RSS, back in the Google Reader days. I loved it for following a wide array of different blogs. I'm not really sure why I stopped with rss - I switched to viable alternatives to Google reader when it died.

Recently I've been keen to get back into this way of using the web, because I have evidently been sucked into scrolling on the platforms until the algorithms give me something I want to see.

The other day, one of my favourite web dev blogs (and one of the only blogs I actually seek out) created this fantastic compendium of Web Performance resources and blog links, along with an associated rss opml file. Surely this is the push I needed to get back to the glory of the web.

https://infrequently.org/links/

But I definitely need to put in the effort to discover other eclectic blogs. I really miss reading long, authentic things on diverse topics

I am an RSS user but it is pretty frusterating these days being one. All of the I guess "first tier" sort of sites you'd really want an RSS feed for don't have one any more or offer a truncated one that forces you onto the platform (yes I roll my own morss, doesn't always get the content). You are left with sort of second tier news websites that pollute their feed with reposted AP content you might even see on several same feeds you follow.

And the biggest issue is that no one is starting a new site and implementing RSS. Seems like for a lot of RSS feeds I follow, the only reason they still exist is because the webmaster has not yet culled the service for whatever reason; like some of these links are found on vestigial web pages that look like 2007 internet whereas the rest of the site is modern.

And it makes sense why RSS is dying. It is a huge free bone tossed to the community. You don't see free bones tossed out anymore without a string attached to pull you back into some profit making angle. Everyone wants you on their site so they can serve you ads. They don't want you using a feed reader and getting that content without having to see an ad.

A ton of good discussion of things has left Reddit/Facebook/Twitter for all the obvious reasons and gone to Discord because of discoverability is low, so is discovery by trolls and AI scraper bots and plagiarists.

Which is great - if you have the invite and like the Discord UI.

It really sucks if you'd prefer to follow RSS or longer-form in general.

Ignoring is not how it works. Internet is a basically huge social circle, if not enough people got on broad, a site can die out really quickly. I've observed quite few examples of small community closed down because no one was there anymore, some websites that I loved as a child no longer exists because of this reason too, gone with it is all the content they once hosted.

Here's the problem:

1. Software/Infrastructure have a cost: If you want to self-host, there's a consistent dread of maintaining things. It wears you down, slowly maybe, but eventually.

2. The problem of discovery: Back to the past, people used to sharing links and resource manually, often on a forum ("forum life", i call it). But now days people are more rely on platform recommendations (starts from "Just Google it"). If your content/link is not recommended, then you can't reach far. Also, people now days really hates registration (and memorizing/recording account/password), and they will not even try to use "strange" websites.

3. Government regulation: The government pushing laws upon laws that could restrict self-hosting content, by either making self-hosting difficult, or forcing websites to self-censor (which most personal sites just don't have enough admin to do).

4. Some people who has the capability and know-hows on solving the problem are "solving" it the wrong way. Instead of creating systems that modern users would love to use, they tries "being back the old way" so do speak, but not giving any consideration on why people abandoned "the old way" in the first place. The software they created maybe even quite hostile to regular non-tech-savoy people, but hey at least they themselves thinking it's cool.

There are few projects gets it right, like Mastodon, and maybe Blue Sky etc. But, then these project still don't earn a lot of money and political capital, meaning it still can't escape the point 1 above and maybe point 3 as well.

Over all, I think it's less that the platforms exploiting the Internet, it's mainly that most people just "moved on" to what could make their life easier. Internet is a tool after all.

P.S. If someone wants to solve the social media over-monopolization problem, I'd recommend that you make sure you're "user forced", user, user, user, regular old man/woman John/Marry Doe user. That's how you create social circle/network effect and that's how you grow and sustain.

Freetube is a way to achieve this with YouTube. You just get RSS feeds, you avoid endless scrolling.

https://freetubeapp.io/

That's something the few can do, but not the many.

As open source improves at user onboarding, and user experience, there might be a chance.

I worry that AI/bot presents as a desincentive for proper RSS distribution. Authors may not don't want to provide easy access to their content by bots. Maybe paywalling? Maybe proof of work solves this?