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Revisiting "how to rebuild social media on top of ...
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j
I've been thinking more about https://tfos.co/p/rebuild-social-media/ lately. One question I'm reconsidering is "is RSS actually needed, or is email good enough?" e.g. as I mentioned in #1069750998555435019 , I might even be removing RSS subscriptions from Yakread (because I'm trying to pare Yakread down to the essentials, and those who do use RSS could always use a separate service to forward RSS posts to email if they want to read them in Yakread). I also mentioned in #1067283870556369027 my ongoing thoughts about tweets vs. newsletters. One of the reasons I liked the idea of going with RSS over email is that it would make it possible to aggregate a user's short form posts from across the communities they're in and publish them all in a single feed. But is it actually essential to be able to subscribe to a particular person's short form posts? What if instead we should just try to get people to put their tweet energy into newsletters? Similarly, it would probably be sufficient if communities have email digests like what Discourse currently does. So it seems plausible that my recommendations for developers should be: - If you're making a publishing app, make sure readers can subscribe via email. - If you're making a reading app, give people an email address they can use to subscribe to stuff. - If you're making a community app, send out daily/weekly email digests. And that's it. Most of the work honestly is probably just in marketing and adoption, i.e. the kind of stuff I wrote about in #1062206468272705586.
One definite advantage of RSS over email is that it lets reader apps subscribe without forcing the user to open another page on some random website and fill in their email (and possibly do a captcha, and click a confirmation email). It's really nice to just be able to subscribe or unsubscribe to something with a single click. I think that mainly makes a big difference for search and recommendations, i.e. when you discover a publication from within the app that you'd like to subscribe to. If you're already on the publication's website, then it's easy enough to subscribe while you're already there by putting in your email. But RSS makes it possible for reading apps like Yakread to recommend new blog posts and then give people the option to subscribe in a single click, without any coordination from the blog post author. (The Sample does support 1-click subscribing for newsletters, but it was a pain to implement and it doesn't work for writers who haven't joined The Sample). So when I start doing more discovery/recommendation stuff in Yakread again, I would probably support RSS again. Unless I just only recommend newsletters that have been added to The Sample... actually that seems obvious in retrospect. Continued in #1069750998555435019 .
s
I tried Yakread specifically as RSS reader. I am not much interested in specialized newsletter reader as I am: a) not subscribed to many newslettters b) mostly ignoring their content for now 😄 But I will not be missing RSS functionality in Yakread as I am going to implement RSS reader myself this year. Also I am not a big fan of recommendation and algorithmic timeline despite that I am interested in experiments with it.
j
if you mainly want an RSS reader with a chronological timeline, I'm curious if you've been happy with any of the existing ones? are there missing features that you're planning to implement in your own rss reader?
j
When I first started using yakread, I thought I would just import all my RSS feeds over to it but I’ve instead leaned more into newsletters. For me as a user of Yakread now, RSS vs newsletter doesn’t matter much since the effect is pretty much the same in my feed.
j
very informative!
s
I am implemening is mainly as interop feature of my own Kyselo social network. And while I will be doing it I can precisely tune it to my own needs.
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