Tournez à gauche | alt-wrong (Twitter)“So, RSS fans, particularly those who wish google hadn't shuttered reader: what would you pay to have it back as an indieweb project?”
Looking at the current responses it seems like most respondents don’t have a very solid conceptualization of how to define “indieweb”. Almost none of the products mentioned in your thread are IndieWeb from my perspective. Most of them are corporately owned data silos.
I have to admit that getting me to switch would be pretty hard, it would need to be worth the hassle of switching (losing read status and old articles history, missing apps/integrations), given that I understand feed wrangler to be indieweb. Good luck if you decide to go ahead!
— Jean Hominal (@jhominal) December 30, 2019
To me IndieWeb needs to have a focus on allowing the user to keep and own big portions of their data. Things like read status and old articles history should be owned by the user and not by a third party. Readers that do this are just as bad as Google Reader which took that data down when they closed.
If you’re using the IndieWeb.org definition of a reader, would you be considering building a Microsub server, Microsub client, or both?
that’s quite a bit more than most people have indicated 🙂
I think that far too many people are stuck on thinking about how old, clunky feed readers work, in part, because that’s their only experience. If you built one in a model closer to the feeds on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud, LinkedIn, etc., but where all the content is all conglomerated across massive social silos, blogs, websites, magazines, newspapers, etc. then you’d have a closer conceptualization about the power of what I’m talking about and why it’s so much more valuable.
Spend some time digging into the ideas behind IndieWeb.org and then try out something like Aperture in combination with Monocle or Together and you’ll have a much better idea of what the value proposition is about.
Syndicated copies:
as it happens, i work on an activitypub-based social network. Though I hadn’t really thought about the reader as linked to it.
I’ve tinkered with ActivityPub a bit, so my WordPress website supports portions of it. Though it’s not “perfect” yet, you can subscribe to it at @chrisaldrich. Are you working on Mastodon or something similar?
Almost all modern social platforms have integrated readers, though they’re also almost exclusively proprietary to their own platform. Because people are forced to use those interfaces, there’s little, if any, competition to make them better, prettier, more user friendly. As long as social platforms have vaguely standard feeds (RSS, atom, JSONfeed, h-feed, others?) why shouldn’t one be able to use a reader to subscribe to almost any website on the net? Feed readers can then give users a lot more control over what they choose to see, how it’s filtered, how they choose to be notified. These are just some of the reasons that a solid feed reader can be important. Readers give people control that social services don’t or won’t give them. (Remember those great early days of Twitter where there were dozens and dozens of Twitter reader clients and you had choices? I miss those days…)
Further, giving people the ability to compose their replies to content in a reader and publish to their own website by means of Micropub allows them to own their own content. Then individual sites or social silos can provide Webmention notifications to allow site-to-site communication. I’d give my left arm if Mastodon supported sending Webmentions. (For more details on this, see my A List Apart article Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.)
In practice, I think Micro.blog is one of the few social services that provides a complete .json output of all the people I’m following on it, so that I can input
https://micro.blog/feeds/c.jsoninto a feed reader and immediately have all that content I’ve subscribed to on their platform. I wish I could do this with other social platforms.Micro.blog is also one of the few “social readers” that will allow you to subscribe to accounts in other platforms. I think it’s currently got support for both Mastodon and Tumblr.
I could go on (the benefit of posting from my own site instead of a social silo), but think about some of this for a bit and then go build the best reader the net has ever seen. We desperately need it!!
Syndicated copies:
it’s a brand new platform still under development, but because of AP, it supports mastodon, pleroma etc.
finished reading your long post. what’s become clear to me over the last few days is that the product i want rather than the product i’m paid to build is “my inbox”, that speaks all the things to all the sites.