Yesterday I wrote a draft post about RSS Feeds and I wrote this:
A lot of pixels are being dedicated to writing about Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, which I think of as a “broadcast medium” for text and files.
It dawned on me later that what I wrote I think gets to the root of an issue with using RSS for two-way communication/messaging on the web. RSS is, like the web in general, a broadcast technology, by which I mean it enables one-to-many communication. Broadcasting to whomever what is new on a web site is why writers benefit from RSS, and having new writing appear in a river/timeline or inbox is the benefit of RSS to readers.
The problem as I see it is that RSS wasn’t natively designed for two-way communication. It might be that one can make it do so but that I think that’s the classic case of seeing all problems as a nail to be solved with a hammer. You can pound a screw in to a wall, but the right tool to get that screw in the wall is a screwdriver.
My experience with network communication pre-dates the Internet. Before the Internet became popular there were Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and online services like Compuserve that created and provided online threaded messaging. The experience was, you had areas dedicated to a topic called forums or boards, and users created new “posts” to the forums in which they could ask questions or share information. People replied to those “posts” that appeared in chronological order creating a coherent thread of messages.
Compare the threaded messaging I describe above to what you see on X/Twitter in which a person can reply to something that I post but that reply is just part of the social network timeline and not presented to the reader in any association to the original post, so there is no context and no coherence to the messaging without the user having to dig.
Micro.blog uses the same “mentions” method for associating a reply to a post, and I as a user can either be notified that someone mentioned me or I go to the mentions section of Micro.blog but what see there are only replies, I as a user have to click Conversation to see the entire thread and therefore the context.
I am inclined to think that the evolution of the non-threaded mentions approach is due to starting with the web and HTML rather than the prior art of BBS and its Internet sibling Usenet. There are web sites, like Discord, that you access via a web browser but in design function more like Usenet than the web.
For me, the river/timeline approach is not useful for messaging because it doesn’t provided context. One can’t even assume a topic as one could when accessing a Usenet group or a BBS board and you don’t see a chronological thread of the messages without digging.
As a writer, I see value in readers having an ability to comment/respond to a post but as that writer, what I need is simply to know that someone has responded to a specific post and I need to know which post so that I can read the feedback. Honestly, the best approach I have seen for this use case is pingbacks as implemented by WordPress that was developed by bloggers and predates the social network timelines.
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