I am not going to write that RSS is dead, because it’s not. If you happily receive episodes of your favourite podcasts in your favourite podcast player, then the RSS standard is working and working for you.
But as someone who has recently tried to displace social media with a re-commitment to reading blog posts, I can tell you that finding RSS feeds for posts and stories is no longer and obvious or a “simple” thing to do. Very few sites display an RSS icon or even tell you that a feed is available. I have found that I have need to resort to looking the HTML sourcecode (Control-U) to find feeds.
This is why I’m so very excited about the prospect of WordPress sites as being available to be federated using the ActivityPub plug-in. Instead of having to having to share a long url that ends in .xml, I can instead let you know that you can subscribe to the posts on this blog by following MitaWilliams@librarian.aedileworks.com from your favourite ActivityPub reader.
One response to “Can ActivityPub give blogging another chance?”
I use the Inoreader browser extension and with this it is quite easy to see if a site supports RSS feeds. I just use a keyboard shortcut (in my case set to Alt I) on the site and then it either gives the feed or says there is none available etc