<story><title>How to rebuild social media on top of RSS</title><url>https://tfos.co/p/rebuild-social-media/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>imiric</author><text>What would be the benefit of this, really? Easier consumption, I suppose, but RSS is a read-only protocol, and allows no participation. Users would still depend on centralized services to publish content, and there&amp;#x27;s little to no chance that these companies would interoperate using a standard protocol. Not only that, but why would a centralized service that depends on ads and promoted content allow you to use an open format to consume it? They _want_ to keep you on their platform as long as possible.&lt;p&gt;What decentralized protocols try to solve, and what the centralized web has failed us with, is data ownership. Users should have full control over the data they produce, and be free to migrate it to any other node without losing access to the service they&amp;#x27;re interested in.&lt;p&gt;I think Nostr looks very promising in that sense: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;nostr-protocol&amp;#x2F;nostr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;nostr-protocol&amp;#x2F;nostr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mind you, I don&amp;#x27;t think social media is worth reinventing. Connecting everyone on the planet is wrong on a societal level. But P2P services are a good fit for building smaller communities, which is a crucial missing component of the design of the WWW. I&amp;#x27;m still hopeful that something built for the masses can take over the current mess we&amp;#x27;re in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacobobryant</author><text>Easier consumption is pretty much it, yes. Specifically, it&amp;#x27;d make it easier to stay engaged with publishers and communities even if they aren&amp;#x27;t part of a centralized platform, which means that people who develop publishing and community apps will have an easier time growing their user base.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Users would still depend on centralized services to publish content, and there&amp;#x27;s little to no chance that these companies would interoperate using a standard protocol.&lt;p&gt;All you need is a blog&amp;#x2F;newsletter platform like substack, ghost, wordpress etc. They may not aggregate your social posts into another feed for you, but you can use a separate service to generate and host the feed, then link to it from your main site.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Users should have full control over the data they produce, and be free to migrate it to any other node without losing access to the service they&amp;#x27;re interested in.&lt;p&gt;RSS and email do this pretty well I think!</text></comment>
<story><title>How to rebuild social media on top of RSS</title><url>https://tfos.co/p/rebuild-social-media/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>imiric</author><text>What would be the benefit of this, really? Easier consumption, I suppose, but RSS is a read-only protocol, and allows no participation. Users would still depend on centralized services to publish content, and there&amp;#x27;s little to no chance that these companies would interoperate using a standard protocol. Not only that, but why would a centralized service that depends on ads and promoted content allow you to use an open format to consume it? They _want_ to keep you on their platform as long as possible.&lt;p&gt;What decentralized protocols try to solve, and what the centralized web has failed us with, is data ownership. Users should have full control over the data they produce, and be free to migrate it to any other node without losing access to the service they&amp;#x27;re interested in.&lt;p&gt;I think Nostr looks very promising in that sense: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;nostr-protocol&amp;#x2F;nostr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;nostr-protocol&amp;#x2F;nostr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mind you, I don&amp;#x27;t think social media is worth reinventing. Connecting everyone on the planet is wrong on a societal level. But P2P services are a good fit for building smaller communities, which is a crucial missing component of the design of the WWW. I&amp;#x27;m still hopeful that something built for the masses can take over the current mess we&amp;#x27;re in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>Benefit is that there is no third party that controls the feed.</text></comment>