Erosion of RSS Feeds a Part of the 'Commercialisation' (as in Commercial, Proprietary, DRM-Saddled) of the Web
Over time, Web browsers neglect, remove, or hide RSS features, as do Web sites; RSS feeds are inadequate carriers of ads and other misleading/distracting/abusive junk
EARLIER on today we posted some analysis of portals and social control media, both of which are waning*. Too many bots, fakes, and misleading analytics. Clickbait, time-wasting, and FOMO-type addiction that loses its grip when people experiment with breaks or dabble in something else.
Many news sites find themselves pondering aloud, where have people migrated to? Freenode continues to fall (down about 20% this year), Libera.Chat is down to about 30,000 users (and bots), and OFTC stopped growing, as did the total number of IRC networks. Matrix is in ruins after layoffs, so we cannot assume people flock to IRC and/or Matrix. That's just what the numbers say anyway; we don't suppose Jabber is seeing a sharp upswing, either.
What are people using?
The Web is over 30 already. 30 years ago (1993) people were hand-crafting sites, in 2003 blogs/RSS feeds took off, by 2013 social control media had become more dominant (even at the expense of RSS, as some people conflated Atom/RSS feeds they had subscribed to with some heavily-censored or 'curated' "feeds" controlled by corporations by means of centralisation), and in 2023 we see many "apps" running on portable skinnerboxes.
Things have gotten so bad that when linuxsecurity.com moved to Joomla this past September it broke (or discontinued) all its RSS feeds (no updates since then in any of their feeds e.g. 1, 2], in effect continuing or reaffirming an old, worrisome trend. Many sites are rendering themselves obsolete by disconnecting from loyal readers and many wrongly assume that "follow us in Facebook" or "follow us in Twitter" won't turn out to be a disaster when those private companies fail or sell to someone else.
To better understand what people do "online" one need to study what software they're using. Many "apps" are just browsers and they are used to directly connect to companies' servers, not engaging in any site interaction per se but using some sort of "webapp". They add more and more restrictions and lockdowns, in effect jailing billions of people through their fist or palm. The skinnerboxes then become chainless handcuff, attached primarily to one's feeble brain rather than hip, ankle, or wrist.
It would be nice to have more sites, active sites, and more RSS feeds out there. But this is not where "the industry" (e.g. Chrome) is moving. In fact, the concept of "webapps" is barely compatible with RSS feeds. █
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* "MSN is basically just a captive portal for anyone who uses Edge at this point," Ryan told me later. "There's basically no human involvement with it anymore."