This was solved 20 years ago with RSS, I guess it's about time for someone to rediscover the idea and reimplement something like it, push it like a great new invention, and make a couple of billions in the process.

It was solved 20 years ago. But companies unsolved it by deciding to de-prioritize or even remove such RSS API's.

Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into), and as we're seeing right now companies are at each other's necks in real time over scraping.

Good point. If Discord can make billions by essentially reinventing IRC...

If setting it up was as easy as posting a tweet, sure. My parents don't even know what RSS is but they have heard of Twitter.

I feel like that's fine, as another boomer. The internet wasn't designed with this idea that you only visit 10 websites and everything else is on the fringes. Did people forget that bookmarks exist?

Back to crushing reality, that's also why I'm a huge RSS fan. your feed should be based on websites you want to follow, not what the website's algorithms want you to follow. RSS puts the control back to the user while giving 95% of the convinience of a centralized platform.

God I loved rss - my list was / is everything from breaking news headlines to random interesting peoples blogs.

They're a government department. This is literally something which should be coordinated by the government.

I.e. police.gov should just dashboard this for you using location services.

Policing in the US is fragmented. Unlike many European countries, the local police are not nationalized—each department has its own concerns, budget, etc.