Revisiting RSS

“RSS is dead.” — The tech press, en masse, circa 2013

“It’s time for an RSS revival.” — Wired, 2018

RSS, a feed format first introduced by Netscape in 1999 and rapidly improved by Dave Winer and others, is today a piece of mostly forgotten plumbing behind the Web. The format had its moment in the sun in the mid-2000s when an ecosystem of reader applications and feed-rich websites flourished. Early reader apps made it easy to consume content sourced from countless websites and to see new content nearly as soon as it was published.

RSS’s “mainstream” popularity peaked with the advent of Google Reader, the first non-beta version of which shipped in 2007. Reader was unceremoniously axed in mid-2013, a casualty of changing consumption habits and of Google’s strategic disinterest. Growing social networks, including Facebook but most especially including Twitter, stole much of RSS’s thunder. Personalities and publications became co-equal voices. Flowing rivers of news, not inboxes with unread counts, became the dominant UX metaphor.

In a twist of fate, in the half a decade since Reader’s demise, RSS has both exited the public consciousness and exploded in daily use. This is entirely due to the growth of the podcast ecosystem: every podcatcher app is secretly an RSS app; every podcast is secretly an RSS feed. NPR is perhaps the world’s largest purveyor of RSS feeds, with nearly 17M monthly unique listeners.

Beyond podcasting, a community of healthy lifestyle businesses has emerged to replace what was lost with Google Reader. Feedly is perhaps the largest player in the space, providing an excellent sync platform and web reading UI along with power features targeted at high-volume consumption of content by researchers, analysts, and teams.

I suspect that opportunities exist both to improve the reading experience and to provide new vectors for content discovery.

The fundamental limitation on consumption is time; as metaphors, inboxes and rivers both dance around this limitation. Inboxes invite consumers to “capture it all” but immediately frustrate them with unread counts that make plain their inability to do so. Rivers remove “total capture” as an expectation but force consumers to tread water as the volume increases. Shallow engagement with content, and (perhaps) increased media polarization, are the results. A consumption service that takes limited time as a fundamental premise would offer an intriguing counterpoint to these metaphors.

Discovery is a tricky beast. Few consumers today would claim that they lack new content to consume! At the same time, humans are foragers. We value new content not only as a function of its quality and utility, but also as a function of how we find it. Ask any music lover about their favorite albums and you’ll quickly discover that the circumstances of and path to discovery are just as important as the music itself. As a result, services that provide additive and unique new vectors for content discovery may prove successful. On the other hand, solo services claiming to “solve” the discovery problem are probably missing the point.

The broader RSS ecosystem is about much more than consumption. Today, RSS is as much a format as it is a signifier of a better, more open, and decentralized¹ future for the web. The self-styled Indie Web community is its standard bearer. Along with newer (sometimes informal) standards like Microformats, Micropub, Webmention, and ActivityPub, RSS represents a potential counterpoint to the closed and centralized social networks of today.

In the past several years, a number of early federated social networks have emerged. A few, including Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and micro.blog, have shown modest but intriguing traction. Mastodon, for instance, has 1.4M registered accounts across its network and sees over 100k actives weekly. During its two year lifespan there have been 154 million “toots”. The network continues to grow, albeit at a modest pace, and demonstrates unexpected use cases. For example, shortly after the passage of the FOSTA/SESTA bills, a major new Mastodon instance emerged to serve the needs of sex workers in the United States.

I believe there is sizable untapped potential in federated social networks, although it is difficult to predict future scale and probable economic winners. To date, the Fediverse has contented itself with replicating the features of its centralized counterparts. This is uninspiring and unlikely to attract an audience. “Own your own content” is not a mainstream value proposition; neither is “Delete your Facebook”. An opportunity exists to provide users with new social capabilities that the centralized social networks are unlikely to ship on their own. These capabilities don’t need to be radical departures from the past: if the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that even small deviations from currently mainstream modes of expression can quickly attract large audiences.

As a final note, it is worth mentioning the world of cryptocurrency as it relates to the future of decentralization. Some prominent figures, like Chris Dixon of a16z, believe that cryptocurrencies — or, at least, blockchains — have a foundational role to play in a future “re-balancing of power” away from centralized services like Facebook and towards the open web. While provocative, my perspective is that Dixon and others are simply confusing the issue: there are plenty of federated systems — like email! — operating at scale today that have no dependency on crypto tech. At the same time, it’s difficult to imagine a future ecosystem of any kind (whether tethered to speculative assets or not!) where the distribution of influence is flat or nearly so: power laws are the norm, not the exception. We should acknowledge that unequal outcomes in networks are the result of many factors, perhaps primarily including nontechnical factors.

[1] I typically avoid the word “decentralized” but acknowledge it is the common term, at least today. I get the impression that “decentralized” is often used to imply an equal balance of power among participants. In practice, it seems that large networked ecosystems almost never find a flat balance of power. Email is federated; Gmail is its behemoth… and that’s okay, I think?