On the beauty of RSS and decentralization in general
2023-08-12
Just recently, I was interested in the infrastructure behind the currently very popular podcasts and amazed to find out that this is one of the last bastions of truely decentralized infrastructure - namely RSS feeds. This inspired me to add such a feed to my website, since I knew about them for a long time, but didn't really realize their potential, and write an article about the topic. So, let's find out what RSS feeds actually are, why they're amazing and how decentralization can help with keeping the web a free place...
Even though RSS has changed what it stands for multiple times over the years from RDF Site Summary to currently Really Simple Syndication , the main idea behind it has always remained the same. It's a simple, robust and decentral way of distributing the knowledge about new news, articles, podcasts or everything you can imagine in a live-ticker-like way to subscribers. Standardized over multiple versions one such RSS document. which can be hosted by everyone and is referred to as "feed", consists of one or possibly multiple channels for different topics, each of which has a title, a description, a link to the related web site and most importantly so-called "items". For every new article or whatever you're distributing a respective item is created that contains at least a title and link to the related content, but this can be expanded to short summaries or even the whole content.
Unlike other systems that can be used for distribution of content such as email, the subscriber and not the publisher has to take the initiative and frequently check the subscribed feeds for changes. This results in the publisher not having to keep a record of subscribers greatly reducing the effort of publishing and the subscriber not having to worry about spam or passing-on of his data, as he is in full control of his subscription, which is a win-win for both parties. But the benefits of RSS don't stop there, its simplicity for example makes this system really robust, easy to maintain and prevents ads or trackers on a design level, since these can only be realized with more advanced technology (especially when the whole content is published via the RSS feed). Its openness and decentralization also prevent vendor lock-in, eliminate the need for unnecessary apps on your mobile device just to read a certain magazine and reduce the need to search the web or deal with badly designed web pages to get the lastest news, as everything is available in the feed reader of your choice.
Most, if not all, of these advantages apply to other decentralized technologies as well and show why they are just great. Sadly, there is a strong trend towards proprietary, centralized solutions these days, which puts the free web at risk in my opinion. Single sources of failure are always bad regardless of the field you are working in and we are creating these left and right, when only a single entity has the knowledge and right to provide a service. This makes it not only more vulnerable to hackers, but also censorship and other governmental influences such as data mining for federal agencies. The only viable way to prevent this is, is by building technologies in such a way that makes them highly secure, anonymous and decentralized by design. One such example is the messenger Signal , which literally doesn't no anything about a user apart from it's phone number, date of registration and date of last use basically rendering it useless for the CIA to request information.
Granted, every technology can be used for good and bad, but banning certain ones (such as strong encrpytion) for everyone, just because some terrorist use it, won't help either, since they don't care about laws anyway. Together with more and more people admiring complexity instead of simplicity, this abuse of the honourable goals of preventing terrorism or stopping child abuse in order to gather more information about your loyal citizens is one of the biggest problems of societies around the globe today. So, let's shift focus back to simple, decentral technologies that are proven to work, use strong encryption where it really matters and spread the word about awesome, but less known solutions such as RSS...