I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
I agree with your overall sentiment but am I crazy or is RSS more popular than ever?
I doubt it is overall, but I’ve certainly seen more talk about it lately than I ever have. Not surprising considering how many reddit refugees I’ve been chatting with.
Is it? Maybe in absolute numbers it has gone up, but I remember when established newspapers and journalists would write on their blog and have full-text feeds, while nowadays everything seems to be on substack/medium and the RSS feeds just puts out a link to the gated content.
If you include podcasts, which are delivered via RSS by definition, undoubtedly RSS is more popular than ever.
It’s a little disingenuous to do that though, so in this context we probably shouldn’t count it.