Ash Huang & Ryan Putnam on a microsite:
For the month of January, we’ll make a pact to blog a few times to get into the habit, and create a directory of all the creators who participate. Readers can then find new makers to follow before we all scatter to the winds. Win-win!
I’m all about blogging, obviously. Do their challenge!
But also.
I wonder if the term “blog” has too much baggage. Too much history for it to really catch on again and make a dent.
Maybe “publish your own feed” is a better framing. “Own your RSS.” A feed doesn’t care what it contains. It is content-style agnostic. It’s just timestamped HTML, in a way. Put some audio in it, and it’s a podcast. A feed could be exactly what you would have tweeted before tweeting became cringe.
I’m starting to see this a little, and I like it. For example, Adam Argyle’s site is essentially a feed of tweets. If you like the format of any particular social media site, your feed can copy that format. Acceptable and encouraged.
Any template-powered site-building software can produce an RSS feed. Loop over your most recent content and spit out feed-friendly code. Now make the feed prominent on your site so people can find it. Done! Hey CMS’s: make cool-looking templates that encourage publishing unique types of feeds. Think photo-of-the-day-with-caption. Think that-old-140-character-arbitrary-limit. Think dream-journal. Think list-of-the-day.
Making a dent then is a two-parter:
- You (and everybody) start publishing a feed, and don’t be shy about it.
- You (and everybody) make reading feeds one of your primary modes of content consumption.
Doable.
Maybe, as Jacob O’Bryant suggests, we can rebuild social media on top of RSS.
I’ve seen this on Mastodon but I thought it would be best to comment on the blog post. :)
I’m following the guide at https://indiewebify.me/ to get my blog publishing ActivityPub (and thus being discoverable on Mastodon and the Fediverse).
I found https://fed.brid.gy/ to be quite useful for it, even though the technical jargon is mostly new to me. There’s work to be done in making it accessible to the less technical bloggers, but if it’s done well that would be a shift away from the big social media platforms back to your own domains.
I like the idea!
The question is how to get into the habit of making your own
blogfeed as I think many of us lost the habit since approx. the times when Twitter became mainstream?Also there was a great RSS reader (Google Reader) in 2006-2007 and it’s no more. I know there are other options now but I still miss the Reader. (I even think Reader was sundowned on purpose, so that we stop caring that much about our own self-made and self-hosted content. RSS and blogs at the time were a very strong thing.)
Do I remember correctly that you could comment on stuff directly in Google Reader and any of your friends could see your comments (and you theirs) such that it was kind of a mini social network?
100% agree. You never know when some billionaire and/or group will take over your Preferred Platform. If you own it, then they can’t touch it.
I’m loving feeder.co Chrome extension right now to start grabbing RSS feeds again.
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