Interesting article about the difficulty of getting/discovering replies in a RSS Chat world and possible solutions.
https://quantumgardener.info/notes/rss-replies-are-promising,-but-discovery-is-the-hard-part
That makes me think about a possible role for Downread's feed catalog. Downread already evaluates and stores RSS Chat's inReplyTo. But it's not using it yet. It could, however, use it to create a list of replies to a post or feed. Maybe that's a useful feature worth exploring.
I believe RSS syndication has a fundamental problem that limits its adoption. It's not anything technical — not the format, not the readers. It's the content: it is very hard to make a living by publishing full content via RSS.
How the web pays for content today
Most profess...
You may have heard about Dave Winer's rss.chat, a social network designed to find out whether RSS 2.0 "can be used as the backbone of a real social network".
This is what it looks like when you visit https://rss.chat:
The whole thing confused me initially, and if you have h...
I have come across this article about CSS-related vulnerabilities in email clients. It's quite shocking what you can do with CSS if you render arbitrary CSS from a third party. RSS readers have challenges similar to email clients: they both embed HTML from untrusted third pa...
There is this old argument about whether Atom is really superior to RSS. It comes back every once in a while, and also this weekend on Hacker News. Like so often, the central point is the format and encoding of texts and dates. Here, the main example is the <title> ele...
There was a time, back in the 2000s and early 2010s, when RSS was nearly mainstream. All enthusiasts knew it, and most used it. Websites prominently featured their RSS buttons. Web browsers had built-in RSS support. And Google Reader made RSS accessible to regular users. But...
Hi,
Human here! I just wanted to give you some background on this blog, why it exists, and how everything came together. Just be aware that you are reading this weeks after I originally wrote it, in July 2026. I’m a bit of a serial project abandoner. More on that later, but...
