jadero

I was referring more to the people around me who are outside tech. Based on interactions with friends and family, I’d guess that a little over 50% know what a bookmark is, around 25% actually use bookmarks, fewer than 5% know what RSS is in very general terms and I know only one other person who actually has any RSS subscriptions.

I know people who work in IT who have never heard of RSS!

Just thinking about how far we have to go and how badly trained people are sometimes makes me want to cry. And I’m just a hobbyist; what must I be missing out on?

I host a personal instance of GoToSocial, because it’s written in go, a language I want to learn. It supports RSS for those without a Mastodon account. (Not that anyone knows what RSS is. Most of the people I know are surprised when I show them how to bookmark something! 😀)

I also use RSS-Mastodon services to stuff my feed with things I’m interested in. This is not just for websites, but other socials that support RSS. So far, I’ve had the best luck with Mastofeed. (There is a different Mastofeed project that lets you embed a Mastodon feed into your website. I haven’t yet tried that, but it’s on my list.)

I think “federated” is in danger of becoming synonymous with ActivityPub. I haven’t investigated the inner workings of ActivityPub, but I can’t imagine any way for my personal ActivityPub server to interact with other ActivityPub servers except through some kind of automation.

There are other federated systems out there: email, RSS/Webmention, Bluesky, Usenet, etc.

I don’t think anyone is less federated just because they choose to bridge to a federation rather than run the federated software directly.