The mainstream ended up using social media to solve the problem RSS had already solved years earlier… it just had poor marketing.

A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.

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ksec 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>A lot of people do use RSS without realizing it, via podcasts.

A lot of people were using Google Reader without ever knowing what RSS was all about. And when Google reader was gone, they stopped using it, Facebook then taken the newsfeed over.

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Grombobulous 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

While that may be true, I just don’t believe for a second that RSS had any chance of becoming mainstream outside of techie circles.

“Solving the problem” is only one aspect of the reason something becomes popular in the mainstream.

I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.

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zdunn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But RSS did become mainstream; podcasts are a normal part of media now and non-techies seem to have no problem finding and consuming them. They don't have to know about RSS.

There's no reason similar UIs can't exist for text based content. Google Reader, and then G+, had a path to becoming "mainstream outside of techie circles"

There's nothing special about TikTok's user experience. It uses an algorithm that isn't interested in providing a chronological feed, but I don't see why RSS couldn't be used to build something similar. Again, podcasts use it and it works well for that. The discovery aspect happens outside of the scope of RSS, but once you find things you like, RSS works well for tracking them.

The tiktok (or any corporate social media, really) comparison is also a bit odd because they don't need RSS, even if they wanted to provide a chronological feed. The platform hosts the content so it knows when there's new stuff and how to access it to provide to followers. RSS is useful in a decentralized environment where the content could be hosted anywhere and you want to aggregate it

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Grombobulous an hour ago | parent [-]

I think this is a lot like saying that SQLite is super popular with my grandma.

Technically, that’s true. But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular just like SQLite isn’t the reason why XYZ app is popular.

Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS.

My whole point about TikTok as a comparison is that the centralization is part of the convenience and feature set of TikTok for the layperson. The interactivity provided by having a centralized platform is above and beyond RSS. Namely, commenting, posting your own content, etc. Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub.

	▲	zdunn 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> But RSS isn’t the reason why podcasts are popular I don't understand the relevance of this point. RSS is infrastructure so why would end users need to know about it? They don't know about IP addresses when they type a domain name into a browser, but you wouldn't argue that it isn't mainstream tech. > Some of the most popular podcast platforms like YouTube and Spotify are completely detached from RSS. This is a quibble and beside the point, but neither of these platforms have podcasts. I can't subscribe to their audio tracks in a podcast player. But again, I don't see the releavnce. Some platforms not using RSS doesn't detract from the usage that RSS does have. > Decentralizing that type of interactivity has only recently been achieved by ActivityPub. This was not a recent occurence. ActivityPub is descended from a long line of work (Ostatus, pump.io, etc) some of which used Atom. Dave Winer (one of the developers of RSS) is experimenting with building a full social network on top of RSS. Podcasting 2.0 (https://podcasting2.org) is working on adding chat/commenting to podcasts. Your original assertion was that RSS can't be used to build something like TikTok, but there have been multiple projects built with either RSS or a close enough analog that show it can be done

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TFNA 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the early millennium, I read a wide variety of blogs on art, humanities, and the religious denomination I was part of. This audience trended non-techie and rather elderly, and yet in blog comments readers would often reveal in passsing that they were largely consuming blogs through RSS. The technology was much more accessible than you assume.

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al_borland 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I also don’t think the user experience offered by products like TikTok is possible with RSS.

I use an app called Feeeed on iOS that scrolls my RSS feeds like a social media feed.

If the TikTok reference is more about the never ending algorithmic feed… RSS not doing that is a feature. Of course, I think many among us have been guilty of overloading an RSS reader to the point where it feels like a never ending feed that’s impossible to catch up on.