Reclaiming RSS
“Before Twitter, before algorithmic timelines filtered our reality for us, before surveillance capitalism, there was RSS: Really Simple Syndication … As we move away from the centralised web to the peer web, it’s time to rediscover, re-embrace, and reclaim RSS.”
@aral Firefox still has the RSS feed button, it's just not in the default UI.
Also some (mostly commercial) sites do deliver tracking pixels linked from their RSS feeds, which kinda defeats the idea of not being tracked...
Some still publish their feeds through FeedBurner, providing usage information for the Google surveillance machine. Fat RSS feeds do create quite a bit of traffic on popular sites, as each client reloads the full file on each access... No real incremental updates...
@galaxis @aral There are ways around it, though. Leaner feeds (don’t go back far in time), add pagination via https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5005#appendix-B and make sure client and server use HTTP caching (simple use of if-modified-since headers and 304 responses). These already help a lot. The next step is caching the RSS to a file and letting the web server handle it. I had to do all this for Emacs Wiki, years ago.