Hey folks! Unfortunately, there’s not going to be a proper issue this month. The reason is pretty simple - I’m working on several big projects that I plan to roll out over the next two months, and I need to take some time to focus on getting them up and running. In lieu of the usual slate of recommendations, I decided that I would give you a little teaser of a big project I’m working on.
>: An RSS Reader for Normal People
Since starting FTS, I have increasingly come to believe that RSS is the key to getting us out of platform jail. It’s extremely easy to set up, already integrated into numerous load-bearing pieces of Internet infrastructure, way cheaper than sending emails (speaking from experience), and, of course, isn’t reliant on a centralized distribution platform.
Unfortunately, awareness of RSS among the general public is at an all-time low - so low that many places that have them (i.e. sites built on Wordpress and Squarespace, Substack blogs, podcasts, etc.) don’t even know that they do. On top of that, there really aren’t that many good cross-platform options for RSS readers out there right now. I adore my beloved NetNewsWire, but that’s only on Apple devices. There’s plenty of web options, but they’re largely catered to the Business Guy or Brand Marketer set1 - some of the only groups who have continued to rely on RSS during these lean years.
There needs to be a RSS reader option that isn’t just good at the meat and potatoes of content retrieval, but one that can provide some much needed scaffolding to get people in the groove of using RSS on a day to day basis. I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands, and to this end I’ve started development on Paperboi: a beginner-friendly RSS reader.
Aside from just being a good RSS reader, I want Paperboi to be the beachhead for a large-scale revival of RSS. I plan to do this with several key design decisions:
>: Linking to the existing Unplatform database.
On first launch, Paperboi will be able to recommend you active RSS feeds from your city using the same information that’s already in the Unplatform database.2 Not only do I think that this will vastly improve the onboarding process (“oh, wow, I can subscribe to [local event venue] on this?!”), it’ll also provide an incentive for more venues, organizations, and publications to add their feeds to the Unplatform database - or better yet, create new feeds for the purposes of adding them.
>: Making it easier to create RSS QR Codes.
Last week on Down The Ladder, I very loudly complained about how the vast majority of QR codes distributed at arts and culture events either link to (1) an Instagram account, or (2) a Linktree where the first link is an Instagram account. To ameliorate this, Paperboi is going to implement the same “feed:"" url scheme that NetNewsWire uses - and it’s also going to have a built-in tool to generate QR codes from a given RSS feed using the same URL scheme. This will make it a lot easier for interested event coordinators to provide direct links to their RSS feeds in a standardized and accessible way.
>: Including a suite of tools to create, manage, and keep track of local events.
This is the big one. Local events are one of the most powerful forces keeping people on social media - I’ve dedicated an entire page of the Unplatform guide to the topic because of it. The available options for hosting events are obsessed with platform lock-in, and it’s not hard to see why. They want to upsell you with email marketing, on-platform advertisements, and a whole platter of other annoying shit. For civic and political organizations, it’s even worse - I was quoted a number in the thousands of dollars for the price of using a popular political events app (that shall remain unnamed to protect my source).
RSS, in theory, is an ideal solution to this - and it’s already the case that many organizations use RSS to distribute information about upcoming events. With that said, vanilla RSS is definitely built for publishing more than it’s built for events - by default, the spec only has a field for “pubDate,” which doesn’t account for differences between an event’s announcement date and the date the event actually takes place (not to mention the lack of an “end date” for events that span multiple days).
However, the spec also provides support for namespaces: extensions to the base RSS format. As part of the Paperboi project, I’m creating a standard for an RSS namespace that’s designed to provide event-specific information to RSS feeds - including fields like start / end dates, addresses for physical locations, ticketing page links, ticket prices, and more. When finished, the spec for the namespace will be made available to the public, enabling any other RSS reader to add support for event tracking themselves.
All of this will be wrapped into a convenient suite of tools for the creation and management of events. These tools will include a “calendar” view inside the consumer-facing Paperboi app itself and a separate website where event coordinators can make an account to create event pages that will be linked to and listed on - you guessed it - an RSS feed.
>: The Point of All This
In the aforementioned piece on Down The Ladder, I was trying to think through the “network effect” problem - essentially the present situation where social media platforms have amassed so much power that they can compel people (especially artists) to stay even when they don’t want to. As I discussed in that piece, this situation is partially a political problem, as social media has captured a lot of the cultural institutions that we used to use for discovery: namely magazines, labels, and other kinds of artistic collectives. New tools or new technology aren’t going to rebuild those institutions on their own - it’s going to require real people getting together in real places and committing to real projects.
With that said, it’s clear that there’s still an infrastructural problem that needs to be solved as well. Leaving the platforms is expensive. Newsletters are expensive (unless, of course, you use Substack - which is itself a still-unprofitable, aspiring social media platform with its own set of issues), and even if you can create one, people remain reluctant to put their email on forms and even more reluctant to wrangle their overflowing inboxes. Tools cannot build institutions - but people using tools can, and RSS is an extremely powerful tool that has yet to be made widely accessible to the general public.
My goal here is not for Paperboi to become the most popular RSS reader, or for its attached events service to leave Eventbrite in the dust (though those things would be nice). My goal is to turn RSS - the flexible, human-readable, open standard that has existed for over twenty years - into the way that organizations distribute information. I want it to be even more popular than it was at its peak, and I want RSS feeds to be so common that they’re regularly listed alongside (and, eventually, instead of) social media handles, whether those handles are at a merch booth or on a website.
To make that happen, Paperboi obviously has to be very good at its job. Which is why - if you’re willing to be my guinea pig - I’d like your help. If you’re interested in being a beta tester for Paperboi when it soft launches in late April (or if you know anyone in your city who would be interested in this project), please shoot an email my way at [email protected].
Footnotes
-
A notable exception to this is Artemis, which is great - but its admirable focus on calmness and minimalism demands that it make certain design choices that I think would limit widespread adoption. ↩
-
As part of this, I’m working on a public API that will make it easier to fetch info from the Unplatform database so other developers can leverage its info as well. ↩