A great article on the history of reading online that might just nudge me into trying out and eventually becoming a Reader paid subscriber.

http://docs.feedland.org/firstThings.opml

https://opml.glitch.me/

Get websites and RSS Feeds of the people you follow on Twitter. Import the OPML-file with your favorite feedreader. Examples: Feedly, Inoreader Tiny Tiny RSS, NewsBlur.

I'm wondering exactly what problem that LOUD standard is meant to be solving exactly? It doesn't appear that any of the meta data they're listing is over and above anything that's already extant?

If you're going to propose a new set up, why not add some bits to fix the newer problems that have popped up like for paying creators? Being able to inject ads? Better track the number of listens? How far into the file did the listener get? How many ads did they hear?

And let's not forget:

https://adactio.com/journal/18322

It's not always easy work getting one's feed reader to do this, but it's ever so nice when one does.

This is a solidly comprehensive overview of much of what I'd want in my own personal reader. I'll have to revisit it as I'm reading and using other readers to see if there are any other pieces missing.

Being able to sort by social distance, by community/tags, and by posting frequency and/or post type (ie separating articles from notes from bookmarks, etc) would be some of the bigger must haves.

Some interesting, but small subtleties between Atom and RSS described here. So few people dig into these things at this level anymore.

There are other options out there, though in many cases distribution is uneven. There are new specs like JSONFeed which many sites and feed readers support just in the last year.

There are also simpler methods than RSS now including the microformats-based h-feed which one can use to create a simple feed that many feed readers will support.

Part of RSS's ubiquity is that it is simply so prevalent that most common CMSs still support it. The fact that the idea of RSS is so old and generally un-evolving means there isn't a lot of maintenance involved once it's been set up.

certainly a laudable goal!

It helped me a lot to simply delete most of the social media apps off of my phone. I scribbled a bit about the beginning of the process back in November and there's a link there to a post by Ben doing the same thing on his own website.

More people are leaving social feeds for RSS feeds lately. I've recently started following Jeremy Felt who is taking this same sort of journey himself. See: https://jeremyfelt.com/tag/people-still-blog/

Kudos as well to making the jump here:

Taking a bit of a Twitter break. I'm going to try to stay off until the new year, but likely lack the willpower to stay off for more than a few hours. Wish me luck!<br><br>....but silently. Not via reply to to this tweet. Cause that'll just suck me back into the vortext.

— Clint Lalonde (he/him) (@edtechfactotum) December 19, 2019

In part, it's what prompted me to visit your site to write a comment. (Sorry for upping your cis-gendered white male count, but 2019 was a bad year, and hopefully we can all make 2020 better as you've indicated.)

I've outlined a bit about how feed readers could be slighly modified to do some of this in the past: https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/

This is an intriguing idea. In particular, it would be cool if I could input my OPML file of people I'm following and have a plugin like this work with other social readers.

Interestingly, I came to this post in my feed reader while randomly looking for something I could use as an example in something I was writing about feed readers!!!