this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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RSS feeds have provided this experience for years. The problem is that a lot of sites stopped serving RSS feeds for their content. But sites like rss.app and openrss can be used to get RSS feeds for sites that don't have them.
RSS is great for content consumption. It's a shame that many sites stopped serving it- same thing with podcasts, now everyone wants you to listen on this or that platform instead of just publishing a normal RSS feed full of MP3 files.
That said though, RSS doesn't help for participation, it's a one-way tech.
I guess if you have forums that put out RSS feeds you could aggregate them together for post titles, but that's still clumsy. Lemmy does it much more elegantly.
My understanding of RSS is that it's basically a list of metadata and links for content... Its always seemed to me to be a great way to aggregate the content you want to see. He did specifically mention keeping an Identity across multiple forums and I'm not aware of any RSS implementation that provides that functionality though... are you? That's a huge feature to miss if we're talking about social link aggregators like Reddit and Lemmy.
One of the main advantages of RSS is that it doesn't track you or require an account for it to work. As you said it's only a XML or JSON file wth the latest items posted on the website.
Yeah, sorry I was specifically replying to part about seeing the content from communities (or everything on the internet, really) in one view. Keeping your identity across multiple forums is platform-specific and would be solved by Lemmy directly. RSS feeds would just give you the updates and the links directly to the content. But once you click through to go to each website, you'd just be using your already-logged-in state on the platform.