It seems that.. from talking to a few people via email, basic feed discovery with rel alternates are ineffective. Simple redirects work better for organic discovery.

1. /atom -> /path/to/real/{atom,rss}/feed
2. /rss -> /path/to/real/{atom,rss}/feed
3. /feed -> /path/to/real/{atom,rss}/feed

I was reading web.dev recently and couldn’t help but think that in tech circles/articles online it’s easy to get the impression that Firefox is a major competing browser. Firefox actually doesn’t even register. Firefox has an estimated 3% points in global market–share and doesn’t even show up in mobile market–share estimates.

Users implicitly use Safari (Apple) and/or some derivation of Chromium (Google Chrome). When was the last time you saw someone irl using Firefox? Not recently if you’re outside the tech bubble.

Of course in my case the social media applications within the Fediverse are not what’s most interesting. It’s the generality of its protocol. ActivityPub appears to have an easier time with different use cases than other protocols.

The link to a Fediverse server list in a previous post died but fediverse.party also shows the diverse types of applications that use the ActivityPub protocol.

Insularity is a term that shows up in the philosophy of the Fediverse every so often. Generally, the more insular a community, the more populous/extreme/niche. Some Fediverse indexes calculate insularity rates.

Imagine similar stats for the WWW. Like — what’s the URL and domain linking insularity within/between Facebook relative to other small/large islands? That would be extraordinary, especially for journalism which is pretty much dead.

This goes without saying but… any sufficiently ambitious group of business persons want more than just to be on the Internet, they want to own it completely, the Fediverse is no exception :)

Back when looking into JSON Feeds it didn’t link to its schema, but there’s one in SchemaStore/schemastore and sonicdoe/jsonfeed. You could validate a feed with a cli tool like check-jsonschema.

$ check-jsonschema --schemafile jsonfeed-v1.1.json feed.json
ok -- validation done

The upside of the JSON Feed is a lot more human than technical in the sense that it’s a mapping of RSS/Atom to the js world. There are many people who prefer JSON over XML.

Btw if anyone tells you that RSS is dead — they’re in a bubble. Bing is our witness; the hasfeed: prefix returns sites with a feed, the feed: prefix gives a direct feed link. No… I’m not a secret Microsoft™ agent — DuckDuckGo and others support this too ;-) 38B+ are big boy numbers.

‘One thing well’ is alive again. cbformat looks extremely useful — might just beat my current method of formatting code blocks in Markdown.

I’ve been doing a bit of research into XSLT. There was a time where XSLT was almost removed from chromium. The early consensus was that “XSLT is failure wrapped in pain” :-) imo, it’s good as a no build/compilation XML transformer and has fp vibes but way over engineered.

Random neo is a nice way to randomly browse Neocities. I’m always on the lookout for sites to add to my rss feed collection. It might be fun to upload a small meme micro blog on there once I get around to adding color/background image customization, if ever.

The best articles on RSS are from about 15 years ago. In hindsight, RSS was probably thrown away by influential companies and technologists because it was too hard to monetize. The great thing about RSS though is that the spec can be explained to a non–programmer in about an hour — that’s probably why it’s hard to kill.