I was so onboard with RSS (no acronym tag because no one can even agree what it stands for) back in the day. I wrote a blogging platform that stored data in RSS and used Python to render that into HTML for viewing. Subbing in an ‘.rss’ file extension would give you the raw RSS. It wasn’t scalable but that was more my naivete as a developer and limitations of the ISP host I was using at the time.

RSS was ultimately killed by social media platforms. And political infighting. And incurious web users. Every time I listen to an acquaintance bemoan Facebook hiding people or pages of interest on their wall I mutter to myself. Blogs + Personal Portals + RSS + IRC can do all of social media. Only better. It just takes a little effort and, well, therein lies the rub I guess.

We could have had an awesome WWW. We were just too lazy.

Anyway, here’s a link with a concise summary: https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/16/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss.html