RSS never tracked you

@Daojoan

Usenet news groups stayed on topic!

They were organized by topic.

I keep wondering why we abandoned that idea.

...

(Well yes, it's still there and one can still use it. But so much of it has been taken over by robots pushing spam. )

@kajord @Daojoan the way I would constantly refresh my RSS reader…

@Daojoan @lisamelton Hell, now most people use a browser that’s spyware from a marketing company. Dark times.

@mingistech @lisamelton Indeed.

@Daojoan yes! Agreed!

@Daojoan

You clearly never owed Email money.

Stop romanticizing the old web. It's flawed but should be acknowledged for what it is.

@patrick_h_lauke @Daojoan noticed how they never measure engagement with family and friends? Set KPIs for mental wellbeing and sleep cycle? It's like they work for big psychiatry!

@JeffGrigg @Daojoan pathetic penis pill pushing profiteers. Not just the placebos, but mostly.

@Daojoan Gemini and Gopher are still a thing fwiw. Check out Lagrange

@joeinwynnewood @Daojoan That's literally my daily life. It's still here, you just need to look.

@Daojoan is it really the old web? What's the new Web then?

I'd argue that the same proponents that label these technologies old, are the same ones trying to break the Web and other open standards. RSS, Email, blogs and other internet technologies are still the current open internet. We never had successors to them.

@patrick_h_lauke @Daojoan inflated by bots 🤪

@Daojoan Totally feel this. The old web had soul—messy, personal, and real. You made your corner, shared what mattered, and no one was chasing likes. It wasn’t perfect, but it felt human. Maybe it’s time we reclaim a bit of that.

@Daojoan there are individual RSS feeds that track you, you know? There‘s even a wikipedia page on RSS tracking

@martin_ueding @patrick_h_lauke @Daojoan yep. What analytics tools are folks using nowadays? Preferably self-hosted!

@neuhaus true, and I'm old enough to remember when every blog used feedburner for their RSS-feeds. Still, the web was funnier and in a sense better back then hehe @Daojoan

@Daojoan @HollyGoDarkly
It also never left.

It’s still there.

We just need to use it!

I still use RSS to track YouTube channels and podcast episodes at home, and a couple news outlets at work.
YouTube will block you if you set up an automated refresh, so you do have to refresh that particular feed manually, but it works fine otherwise. Even loads shorts as normal videos, which is a much better experience.

@Daojoan back then the only tracker was a php-generated image counting the number of visitors and incrementing it on every new session, and it was awesome