More discussion on “Inbound RSS” and “Outbound” RSS

Dave Winer writes today about the Open Social Web, and puts forward a solution on “linking the collection of social twitter-like sites into a real honest to goodness open social web”:

  • Add inbound RSS feeds. The social site allows a user to specify an RSS feed that represents their posts. When a new one shows up, it appears in the timelines of people who are following the user. They can add items to that feed however they like. It can come from anywhere. That’s 1/2 of “open.”#
  • Add outbound RSS feeds. This gives you the other half. When a new item shows up in a users feed, however it got there, it appears in their outbound feed, which can be tied into the input feed of one or more other sites. #
  • Support links in users’ posts. You really can’t claim to be part of the web if you don’t implement this core feature of the web. #

Is this something of a shift from what Dave has written in the past? Let’s take a look back…

In April 2025, Dave wrote:

Feed readers view RSS as inbound, and blogging tools regard it as outbound. Same feed, different contexts. Like trains going in and out of a station. Inbound and outbound. 

I responded with my take shortly after that:

As far as I know, the only service/tool that takes a RSS feed as an input and allows users to publish based on the content of that RSS feed is the Micro.blog service. 

So far, looks the same to me. Perhaps the way to probe further is to create some use cases. Say a person is using OpenSocialTool, they can subscribe to feeds from other people (not necessarily on OpenSocialTool), and they can create posts with OpenSocialTool, and those posts are included in a feed to which other users can subscribe. This is a good description of MyStatusTool (see demo version here).

Now, let us say that BlueMastoThread lets users specify feeds from others that they want to follow (inbound RSS) and displays the content of those feeds in BlueMastoThread, and the user can create an outbound feed of this aggregated content (outbound RSS). In addition, the user can create posts in BlueMastoThread and have those posts appear in their outbound feed, or maybe a separate outbound feed, I don’t know (outbound RSS). I think this use case describes the situation that Dave Winer talks about in his post today (inbound RSS can be an input into outbound RSS), which is a little different from most, if not all, blogging/social tools today. I do not think that there is any tool available today that implements this use case, but maybe there is, and I just don’t know about it.

My thoughts on the Los Angeles protests

As I posted earlier today, the Monday protest were handled by local law enforcement. The National Guard and Marines were not needed. Trump should back off on this, but he will not. Sounds like there is a hearing scheduled for Thursday on California’s suit against Trump.

I am against violence and property damage. I am also against unrestricted actions to sweep up people off the streets and deporting them to foreign countries without due process. In my opinion, this is what the protests are about. The actions of ICE in Los Angeles were the ignition point.

I live in the Portland, Oregon area, and I covered the 2020 protests on Portland Protest News. To me, the reason why protests continued for so long is that there has been a demonstrated evidence of racist behavior by the Portland Police Bureau, and people had had enough. Were there bad actors? Sure. Were there people inciting violence? Yes. But there was also the Wall of Moms, there were other protesters of the racist behavior who were peaceful. Was there attempts to defuse the situation? Not really.

Protests are spreading across the nation. No Kings protests are being planned across the nation. There is a growing number of people who are protesting the actions of the Trump adminstration.

Further reading:

I watched the live coverage of the LA protests Monday on CNN, looks like local (California) law enforcement were handling it, no need for National Guard/Marines/Feds. They should go home. More on this later….