I miss the decentralized world.

Dave Neary

I miss the decentralized world. We used to have individual WordPress powered blogs, with aggregators of our favorite content allowing us to filter. Now we have Medium, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts that get lost in a flood of algorithm-dominated posts. I've debated restarting a personal blog. But I don't know how I would get people to read it. Are RSS, Atom, and aggregators still a thing?

Jeff Geerling

@dneary Most definitely, but mostly for a small niche of us techie folks right now.

Google really buried mainstream RSS popularity when they killed their own Reader

But it's still thriving, underground. I consume most of my industry news through Feedly/Reeder

Paul Cutler

@dneary I still pay for my feedreader, Feedbin. And subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds still.

Dave Neary

@geerlingguy It feels like the Internet giants have even killed curated news aggregators like Slashdot and similar tech news sites - AI search and social media sites have frozen out all that recurring traffic.

Tom Marble

@dneary I love what @pluralistic does with https://pluralistic.net

I too am thinking of the good old Internet.

I wonder how @timbray would answer this question?

Ross Burton

@dneary absolutely, especially as eg substack/ghost/most other “newsletter platforms” (aka hosted blogs) support them. I pay hard cash for a @feedbin account because it’s still the best way to use the internet.

Edward Hervey

@dneary totally worth it and still around. I add around 2/3 sites a month on average to my news reader that I discover from other places (mostly mastodon). I really love having my curated newsfeed I can go to whenever I want.

Marcin Juszkiewicz 🙃

@dneary RSS is still there.

FreshRSS is easy to setup and use. Can offer an account on my instance of it.

Troed Sångberg

@dneary I still have mine, moved from Wordpress to static Hugo a little while ago. I know at least one person uses the RSS/Atom feed (due to having told me it was buggy at one point) and the way I promote it to others is to post here whenever I've made a new entry.

Dave Neary

@tmarble @timbray I've wondered whether Cory has a tool to post the serialization of his articles to multiple platforms.

Ilkka Tengvall

@dneary you could at least use one of the rss bots for mastodon for visibility here. Like mastofeed, rss-parrot etc. I use such to follow some rss sites. Of course you still reach minority of people