I've been running a Mastodon instance and kicking around ideas for enhancements. "Let users subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds" is quickly feeling like the one that would be most useful; I really miss the days of Livejournal when I could subscribe to the updates of my friends on LJ, and have stuff from the RSS/Atom feeds of other sites mixed in between them.

In chronological order, of course.

Mastodon is built on top of OStatus and ActivityPub, which are inspired by RSS' successor Atom, but sadly I don't think either is compatible, so I'm gonna be cramming an RSS/Atom library in there. Ah well. It's not like Mastodon doesn't already have a dependency tree as long as your arm.

There seems to be a few plugins like this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/mastodon/, but it's not RSS, and ultimately different. It could all potentially work together nicely, and I wish federated services like Mastodon were more widely used. They could definitely lower the burden to publishing/consuming RSS.

I don't think social news delivery/publishing is an easily monetize-able business. Out of twitter/reddit, reddit seems to have found a model that works for them. Twitter hasn't found what works yet.

I think that if each site funded it's own social delivery, there would be no single "social publishing platform" to monetize. It would be a matter of just the publishers monetizing themselves, and the social platform would be the web.

And that's the promise of Mastodon. It is free because each instance pays the cost of keeping it alive in the form of hosting their instance. Like, right now, the NYTimes acts like a "database" with all the pages, and reddit or twitter like the content distribution feed, and both need funding. But if the NYTimes had its own Mastodon instance and published there, the rest of the Mastodon network would be its content distribution feed, each federation funding itself.

As a sidetone, it even solves the problem of verification I think, because if I have the Mastodon account [email protected] for example, I don't need a central system to confirm that I'm working for the nytimes, like for example twitter would.

And moreover, since Mastodon is just Atom, if people want to just see feed updates they can do that, or they can get a client that supports the full social features too. I think it's pretty cool.