Terry Godier
With Current, Sourcefeed, and Byline all in the world now, the thesis is probably close to being clear.
- I fundamentally believe that people want to make things and people want to engage with things made by other people.
- We’ve got robots now that are close to, if not already, making most of the things published online. This will only grow.
These two things are in conflict.
I see RSS as a protocol that offers very little incentive for a robot or a person with a robot to operate on. The reason for that is both cultural and structural:
- No algorithmic amplification
- No discovery surface
- No sales funnels, behavior metrics, or things to optimize
It’s not a rich format, it’s not a billion dollar growth platform. It’s boring and it’s old and it’s wonderful.
Here is what I’ve done.
Current is my take on an RSS reader client. Modern, and with enhanced user agency. You get to control how much of each thing comes in and how long it lasts - crucial functionality I felt was missing. It’s also an easy place for me to push out experimental functionality that furthers this mission (more on that in a minute).
Sourcefeed is my take on RSS as a first-class-citizen. Instead of RSS being a byproduct of making a Wordpress blog, now it’s the whole thing. Sourcefeed launched about a week ago and it’s growing significantly every day. The sincerity of the writing there is emotional and inspiring. There are thousands of posts being created every day, a couple hundred public, the rest private. People are using it in ways I hadn’t thought of.
Byline is my take on extending RSS (and Atom/JSON Feed) in a way that helps provide more context about who writes a thing, and what that thing might be. I’ve been working with a handful of other folks to review and improve the spec, and soon it’ll make its way to Sourcefeed for creation and Current for consumption (in the voices view, of course). A handful of folks who had already stumbled across this implemented it already (hi Stuart!).
So, to recap: a client for people to use, a first-class publishing/distribution platform for people to engage with, and an extension spec to showcase the person behind the thing.
If you believe in this as I do, please, come hang out. Pop something up on Sourcefeed, sub to some tags, or think about implementing Byline (or contributing to the spec!), or keep an eye on Current for the Byline implementation coming soon. Or don’t - that’s what is amazing about RSS. You can bring your own tools and beliefs!