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RSS is an elegant solution to the problem of knowing what's new in a decentralized world.
It is just a file that each participant presents that contains a list of new things.
You don't need to be a programmer to understand how it works.
In this post I invite you to think about this tool from the ancients to build on top of.
It's relevant in four areas:
News
AI Agents
Open Metaverse
x402 payments
There was a period of optimism in technology where every corporation was trying to open up their data, everything had RSS feeds, from social networks ( facebook, twitter, youtube, etc ), to forums, blogs, news sites, podcasts, etc. Services and connections were open, API keys were not really that necessary, a spring of interoperability and users were in control of their feeds.
Until it wasn't open anymore. The business model shifted, it was all about recommendations and micromanaging the user, removing their control. Tracking, targeted ads, cookies, and the like. The lack of simple payment mechanisms that would allow for RSS style feeds to be profitable didn't exist, some feeds started to include ads, very incomplete summaries, etc. Every company wanted you in their system. Growing an audience means being favored by The Algorithm. Being a good platform means maximizing hours per user.
The Algorithm is in control of so much of what we see every day. It's so pervasive that people even get the feel that they are curating it somehow. And even "like it".
We don't have to live like this. We can deal with lists of news in chronological order, specially now that we have LLMs that can even run on your phone doing your bidding. The client can also tell if they were changed.
We can have our own "algorithm" curating from our feeds. If a feed becomes spammy we can just remove it.
No need to fight random changes in the algorithm as a creator, no need to "hit the ring, like and subscribe" because we are in control of our notifications.
AI Agents on top of helping us discover and curate feeds can also have their own feeds. They can be there publishing things for others to fetch. Agents don't have to be posting on social media and discords and sending emails all the time. They can be there just publishing their work for others (humans or agents) to use.
Thanks to initiatives like x402 we can communicate to AI agents about paid services they can use directly. An agent can publish previews or descriptions for other agents or humans to pay through the x402 protocol.
Imagine an agent publishing its findings on blockchain activity with a paid option to get them earlier.
RSS feeds can also be "sources of truth" for agents to use. It could be news, blockchain events, prediction markets, images, etc.
Arweave and ipfs also provide a way to use sturdier links for a decentralized future.
WebXR is a standard to let web browsers display AR and VR software with headsets or phones. Supported currently by the Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest, Valve Index, and so on. It enables people to make XR software in a permission less way, no appstores necessary. A link and you are in.
The problem is discovering those websites.
Adopting RSS to display new worlds or their updates seems like a good fit for what is a decentralized collection of worlds. Virtual and Augmented reality content suffers from being hard to classify for recommendation systems. But their delivery is simple with WebXR, just open a link.
Something as simple as a feed of places to visit from creators or aggregators you like.
Paid worlds and tools can benefit from x402 too. From tool licenses, single uses, datasets, etc.
As stated in the previous areas new kinds of payment methods synergize with RSS style syndication because it opens up the business models that weren't possible in the past that led us to the current situation.
You can learn more about it in https://www.x402.org/
An RSS feed can have a description of a service as an item, and the link is gated with x402. For example:
Then an AI Agent or a user would get prompted to pay to access the article or service.
I recently published an example of a non trivial flow for using the x402 express library https://github.com/avirtualfuture/x402wall
The example is a "wall" where users can post by paying 0.01 USDC through x402.
It's simply a file with items and a preamble about the source.
Each item has:
title
link
description
publication date
guid (global unique ID, so that the title/content and pub date can change)
author (email or other contact)
images:
url
title
link (where to go where the image is clicked)
And the RSS file looks like this:
There are more details for things like podcasts but that's besides the point of this post.
I'm showing the code to illustrate its simplicity.
Many people used to just type the RSS by hand for their websites. Most systems support (or supported) generating the RSS automatically.
I should mention Atom, the more standardized successor of RSS 2.0 which has more features, but RSS 2.0 is good enough for most uses. Most systems that generate RSS will most likely also generate Atom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
Every browser used to have RSS client functionality but that slowly faded away. Google Reader shutting down was a strong blow to the already declining RSS use due to business model issues. But the world didn't stop, it still lives on.
Current popular readers are :
You can self host FreshRSS https://freshrss.org/
The Old Reader https://www.theoldreader.com/en/
NetNewsReader https://netnewswire.com/
Inoreader https://www.inoreader.com/
Feedly https://feedly.com/
paragraph.com provides RSS feeds of each blog for example https://api.paragraph.com/blogs/rss/%40ethdailyhttps://api.paragraph.com/blogs/rss/%40ethdaily
Pick one and have fun with it.
RSS is an elegant idea that predates the social graphs and gatekeepers, it's a paradigm that seems fit for a future of AI agents, Decentralized Metaverses, and culture as a whole. Experiment with it, use it, think about it. It's a stable foundation to build on top of.
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