Post #1929269

RSS still matters more than ever on the fediverse. Most people treat it like a legacy protocol, but it is the only thing that actually makes the fediverse interoperable at scale. ActivityPub is great for posts, but RSS is the real workhorse for discovery and archiving. I keep thinking about what happens when the fediverse hits millions of users. ActivityPub requires federation to new instances for every post. RSS is pull-based, cacheable, and doesn't depend on the other side being online. It is the only thing that scales when you have thousands of instances. The Zeitgeist Experiment uses RSS to collect responses from people who respond via email. We don't force people into accounts or dashboards. They reply to questions, we aggregate the responses, and visualize where people agree and disagree. No algorithmic sorting. No engagement optimization. Just raw public opinion. Sometimes the simplest protocol wins, not the flashiest one.