RSS never tracked you

@Andres they can have my RSS reader when they pry it from my cold dead hands

@Daojoan it's still there, I'm convinced we've just collectively forgotten how to surf the web

@Andres @Daojoan +1 (all but the hosting)
I even follow a few Bluesky accounts via RSS

@Daojoan

Now that's some nostalgia I can get behind.

@Daojoan A friend of mine got a bill from Telekom for replying to a mailing list - each recipient was billed separately, and only 200 e-mails per month were included.
But that was maybe an even older web

@Daojoan

I will say that email platforms absolutely definitely throttled you but only in the same way that a human person was not allowed to stick a hundred thousand pieces of lettermail in the corner box.

@Daojoan warning: Message delivery request rate limit exceeded: 50 from hostname Daojan

@Daojoan my Dragonball Z angelfire fan page with an endless scroll of stolen gifs however did beg for dopamine

@Daojoan

As always, it's what happens to a good thing when money grabbing capitalists abuse it for monetary gain.

@Daojoan
... Or more likely when i forget to pay the invoice for my vps

@Andres

@Daojoan blogs definitely begged for dopamine, but it was slower release than the kind we have now.

@Daojoan Even these got ruined nowadays. RSS feeds often don't have the full article text. Email contains tracking pixels and links. "Blogs" have texts behind paywalls and cookie warnings. We need the old web back.

@undefined_variable @Daojoan I still use IRC on a daily basis. It's not gone.

@forst Problem with that is - we often paywall our stuff these days so that it isn’t all just scraped and summarised by a smorgasbord of bots. It’s such a balancing problem

@Daojoan Old web gave serotonin. Mmmm.

@Daojoan this is just euphoric recall - at least nor/xor you have total recall

@Daojoan to join the "well actually" crowd, email absolutely did have throttling, although retry and backoff logic tended to be much more reliable and well-tested back then

there was a lot of the old internet that wasn't democratized and "yours" (e.g. acquiring connectivity, acquiring compute), although the details have shifted around a lot

@Daojoan@mastodon.social

RSS never tracked you.

Email never throttled you.

@Daojoan I wish the major browsers would bring back built in RSS!

@Daojoan

Tracked you? Hmm, they all left logs. I processed logs in the 1990's to see where people where located. I mean, no cookies, but they did everything they could to track you then. Yes, we throttled email, but they came through after a day or two. Server could not handle the volume.