I bet it scared the shit out of Zuck and still does today.

Add websub and few more and you have a social network, duh. Decentral. People owned.

this is what Reader was and has always made me even more confused as to why Google killed it off. They had the right start for a unique take on content focused/small group discussion based social networking and the tossed it for “circles”

Google itself is part of Big Tech Social Control. They're not willing to engage in services where they're not ultimately in control, like RSS. They suffered in the short term, but if you've struggled to find the RSS feed for a website or a podcast lately, that's exactly what they were trying to achieve.

Google has given up on RSS completely. They are still supporting https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ and bringing back a variation of rss reader https://in.pcmag.com/browsers/145379/google-follow-rss-reade.... “Follow the web” is the new theme.

and so did facebook (=> remember friendfeed).

That's not social network because there's no interaction between entities and most people wouldn't set up a blog.

> most people wouldn't set up a blog

well, that's the unspoken fallacy: becoming active is cumbersome.

But that doesn't have to be, it could be as easy as renting a domain and copying a single file. (Plug: https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo)

But if taking a breath is too much of an effort, one may well remain unheard.

Twitter obviously hates it too.

I think the same. RSS and Atom feeds couldn't be riddled with ads/trackers and dark patterns so they don't generate revenue/control for corporations. However, they are great for the users. Keep them alive people.

I suppose you could call it an agenda, I think it’s just the consequence of every major social networking platform being incentivized to reduce outgoing links as much as possible to keep everyone in their walled garden of data collection and engagement.

At some point we need to stop trying defend the idea that capitalism is good for tech.

> At some point we need to stop trying defend the idea that capitalism is good for tech.

Why would a state-owned social media platform be any better? I can think of numerous ways in which it would be dramatically worse. And if given the choice, do you really think people would choose Fedbook over Facebook?

Can you elaborate on your reasons why it would be a bad thing?

I think the argument for this is mainly that this would be funded by taxes, so it would not need to rely on advertisements and exhibit the predatory behaviours that Facebook and other social media do.

Why does it need to be "owned" at all?

How about Mastodon/Fediverse options?

Same convenience of platform features - finding friends, social gaming, comments, likes, etc. - nobody trying to monetize your eyeballs or actively surveil you.

Right on.

Of course it's not "too expensive" or "too confusing" but the demand is practically nonexistent.

I think the demand is high but doesn’t show up in some dumb ways that people think represents demand.

I get tons of requests in my web logs for my RSS feed. And I’m not a big site or anything, just have a scrub personal blog.

So that’s lots of demand.

I suspect that every platform owner sees their rss requests and sees it as high. So any claims that there’s no demand without clarifying that they don’t get http gets for RSS feeds seems disingenuous to me.

“I don’t see any demand for RSS when I ignore looking at all the RSS requests I get tiny site.”

Do you also conclude from your logs that there is a huge demand for regular users to log in to your Web server through ssh?

Yes, most certainly people sure do want to ssh into my servers.

Yeah but they're not regular users who are just interested in reading the content. And probably neither are the RSS scrapers.

I don’t think war drivers trying to break into my host aren’t regular users.

But I think successful requests to my RSS feeds are regular users who are routinely checking my feed and have set up some tool to do so. So that’s demand. And it’s pretty regular.

The people trying to ssh are likely doing so automatically on every host in existence.

> but the demand is practically nonexistent.

You mispelled "the way for me to monetize it is practically non-existent".

No I didn't. Go ahead and canvas 100 people and figure out how many of them even know what RSS is, let alone would like to use it.