The Boring Internet is a wonderful post by Terry Godier about what’s dying and what remains as the internet changes. It echoes my own sentiments about RSS surviving its own death. The core idea is that we shouldn’t care about the platforms, even if they once offered us convenience; we should care about the standards and ways of communicating.
Anyways, the core idea of what we should care about aren’t the platforms, even though they offered us things. We should care about standards and ways of communicating:
The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.
But it has one enormous advantage over the platforms that replaced it in your imagination.
No one owns it.
ATProto and ActivityPub are the latest incarnations of this philosophy. As the major platforms begin to sunset or pivot, protocols are where I’m looking to build new ways of publishing and connecting.
Also, Phantom Obligation on the UX of RSS readers is also excellent.