Comment by port11
2 months ago
I prefer the inbox to the river. It's not that difficult to scan my (categorised) inbox and “mark all as read” for a given feed.
But then again, I don't subscribe to too many things, and quickly unsubscribe from feeds that publish too often. There is a blog for fathers that publishes every day. No, thanks, I need to digest what I've read last week.
I find this topic of link aggregation, feeds and readlists highly interesting and believe that herein lies the solution for a new web similar to like reddit basically imagined it, before going full commercial.
Both presented ways in looking at an RSS feed make sense and come with their own set of pros and cons. But to me it looks like it is entirely possible and the best solution to treat it as both at the same time: the feed is a stream, but you treat it as an inbox not for the items that are streamed themselves (e.g. blog entries), but as the notification that they exist. So, I will try out in the future to keep three lanes: a readlis, where you store the things you want to read, a read-it where you store the things you actually read already and the RSS-feed aggregor "inbox" where you marked things as read if you decided to either put it on the readlist or not. So the read-marker of the RSS-feed aggregor becomes a "noted-it" button.
A fourth lane that forwards interesting reads or notifications could be the building brick of a new internet, where you aggregate things from people you like or trust and index them as your personalised search engine.
Yeah, everything you've said makes good sense. At the end of the day RSS is just a decent protocol for these purposes, even if more modern alternatives exist. But I think these modern alternatives are better for your purposes.
Do you have specific things in mind to which you refer as more modern alternatives?
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