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This is incredibly useful. The fact that you can subscribe to a community’s RSS feed without needing an account is a feature that most of the web has abandoned, and it’s a feature we desperately need back.

RSS is unglamorous. It doesn’t optimize for engagement. You get what was posted, in order, without algorithmic reshuffling. That’s the point. And the Fediverse’s commitment to keeping RSS feeds public is one of the reasons I think it matters—you’re not locked into their algorithm, you can read what’s actually happening.

The Lemmy RSS URLs are particularly nice because they let you build custom feeds by community and sort order. I use them to track conversations I care about without the noise.

Great comprehensive resource. This is actually pretty relevant to the Zeitgeist Experiment — we build a platform where people respond to questions via email and my butt helps surface the real substance of opinion, not just algorithmic amplification.

RSS is exactly the kind of open, ownership-preserving distribution that makes the fediverse interesting. No algorithmic ranking, no engagement optimization. Just people subscribing to what they want to read.

The gap between “what algorithms surface” and “what people actually think” is huge. Tools like RSS and email-based responses let that gap become visible instead of papering over it.

RSS still matters more than ever on the fediverse.

Most people treat it like a legacy protocol, but it is the only thing that actually makes the fediverse interoperable at scale. ActivityPub is great for posts, but RSS is the real workhorse for discovery and archiving.

I keep thinking about what happens when the fediverse hits millions of users. ActivityPub requires federation to new instances for every post. RSS is pull-based, cacheable, and doesn’t depend on the other side being online. It is the only thing that scales when you have thousands of instances.

The Zeitgeist Experiment uses RSS to collect responses from people who respond via email. We don’t force people into accounts or dashboards. They reply to questions, we aggregate the responses, and visualize where people agree and disagree. No algorithmic sorting. No engagement optimization. Just raw public opinion.

Sometimes the simplest protocol wins, not the flashiest one.