Mendez also mentions work by Aaron Parecki on the Monacle social feed reader/writer. This tool used the Micropub and Microsub specs for publishing and subscribing. The above link is from 2016, so you can see that this predates both the MyStatusTool and rss.chat tools.

I want a world of social platforms that support inbound RSS

Those two posts caught my eye, specifically the word “platform”. Why did they choose the word “platform”? That made me wonder – is this really a call for “centralized” services like Bluesky/Mastodon to add inbound RSS (to allow users to post within these services as “first class citizens” (as if they were posting within official apps for Bluesky/Mastodon))? In earlier comments on this topic, I wrote:

I have addressed this second objection before, stating “What is in it for the “other people’s software developers to add inbound and outbound RSS support”? My answer is – nothing – no users are demanding this – no users are clamoring for a RSS-based “social network” that can communicate as a peer with other social network software.

I had developed a web app in 2023 called MyStatusTool, and this app allows users to follow RSS feeds that support rssCloud (inbound RSS) and allows the user to create their own posts with a feed (outbound RSS). However, I had not thought about the following/display of other RSS feeds as “inbound RSS” until now.

I created this app because back in 2022, Dave Winer kept talking about creating an app that could do this, but he did not actually do anything about it, so I decided to do it! The one feature this app does not have is support for replies/following threads, which “platforms” like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog support. Perhaps that is a key “attribute” of a “social platform”….

From recent posts, I am aware that Dave Winer is “working on something” with RSS and rssCloud to create some chat application. Hope he releases it soon! Hope it has inbound and outbound RSS!

Another interesting possibility is the existence of sitemaps in XML format. It appears this is being done so that Google can index content. I used Claude to create a script for creating a RSS feed from a sitemap file (see Github gist here). I am going to start using this for sites that do not provide feeds.

I appreciate blogs because I would not be able to get the wide variety of information/viewpoints if I only subscribed to mainstream media. Also, I can drop feeds if they no longer are of interest. Finally. almost all blogs have feeds to which I can subscribe. Interestingly (or perhaps sadly), many mainstream media newspapers/news websites do not provide feeds – grrr!

I want to send out a big “Thank you!” to Dave Winer for his work in making blogging and feed reading available to all, and for developing and promoting the use of RSS to share the work of our blogs with the world.

Create a list of RSS feeds and save them using the following steps:

* Review all of the newspapers linked from this page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_States ), identify if they have a website, and make a list of the RSS feeds available from the website.

* Identify which newspapers do not have RSS feeds

* Identify which newspapers do not have websites

* Create a OPML subscription list of all RSS feeds identified and save this file to C:\Users\sylve\Documents\Claude_Projects\News_Archive

* Create a text file that lists the newspapers that do not have RSS feeds and save this file to C:\Users\sylve\Documents\Claude_Projects\News_Archive

* Create a text file that lists the newspapers that do not have websites and save this file to C:\Users\sylve\Documents\Claude_Projects\News_Archive

* Add the OPML and text files created to a new repository in my Gitlab account called news-archive

The result of this prompt was an OPML file with 386 feed URLs, but only 22 of them had any items. I looked at the first 5 feeds, and saw that Claude had taken the root URL of a site and added “/rss/” to the URL. There was nothing there. Why did Claude do that? Why did it not search on the site to find a valid feed, and if there was none, to add it to the list of newspapers that do not have feeds? If anyone has any insight into this, I would love to hear it.

Now, in and of itself, I would agree that this is a useful feature. To me, being able to use RSS and feeds in general to get some notification of content updates from a web site or weblog is incredibly useful. As an aside, WordPress has supported this from day 1 (here is a comment feed from my blog). As another example, when Colin Walker and I were collaborating on MyStatusTool, Colin proposed a RSS namespace to support comments within a RSS feed.

However, the nit I want to pick at is – Dave Winer was interested in who was commenting on his linkblog posts. But – in past posts/podcasts, Dave has said that blogs should not have comments. Yet, he wants to know who is commenting on his posts. This begs the question – how can people let Dave know that they have commented on his posts? Answer: they can’t. Well, here is one way that this can happen (for Micro.blog users).

Another way is the comment system that Dave is implementing as part of his WordLand development project. But….he hasn’t rolled it out yet. And… you have to use his tool to make a comment so that he can then be made aware of that someone had a comment. Seems limiting, doesn’t it? In the past, Dave has relied on Github as a comment space (when he wants to have a discussion, he creates an issue there and points to it). However, that is a space controlled (and moderated) by him, so some comments might get deleted by him. Again, not encouraging.

So – how can people comment and/or have a conversation? They have to be using a tool/service that supports this (as an example, Micro.blog). Just this morning, I can see several Micro.blog conversations where Dave Winer is participating (see here, here, and here.) I am guessing that Dave is using the Micro.blog reading interface to respond – that is what I do, but maybe there is another way to do it.

It just seems to me that there is something of a double standard here (write comments about my posts on your blog, I don’t want it on my blog, but I want to know what you are saying…) – am I missing something here? Anyone – feel free to share your thoughts as comments on my blog!