The open net forgot about feeds, and that is worth fixing, choom
Feeds let you publish once and let any rig read it, choom. As they got eaten by scavs, following became an account on some megacorp's turf. Owning what you read is independence.
Feeds were the quiet machinery that kept the net talking to itself, choom: publish once, and anything could read it. RSS and Atom meant a site, a reader, and a daemon could all agree on the same stream without asking permission from any corpo. That deal got eroded. Plenty of sites ship no feed at all now, and “follow us” quietly turned into “create an account on some megacorp’s platform”. Grabbing feeds back, and owning what you read, is a small but preem move for independence, and it is worth fixing.
What did feeds actually give us?
A feed is a promise: everything stays interoperable. The publisher throws their content out in a plain, open format, and the reader picks how to jack in: which app, what order, no algorithm sitting in the middle skimming your eddies. Nobody had to integrate with anybody. You published once and the open net handled the rest, no fixer required.
That decoupling is the whole point, choom. Your reading list was yours. It lived in your rig, not in some corpo’s database, and it survived that corpo changing its mind, its ranking, or its business model. The feed did not care who was reading or why, which is exactly the chrome that made it durable.
Why did the net drift away from them?
Platforms had every reason to slam the loop shut with ICE. A feed lets you delta. An account does not. So the megacorps swapped “here is my stream, read it however you like” for “log in to see updates”, and a whole crew of sites just stopped shipping feeds because the platform was where the crowd was.
The cost is subtle but real, choom. When following someone means an account on a platform, you do not own that connection. The corpo sits in the middle, ranks it, and can flatline it whenever it wants. You are renting your reading from a fixer who can raise the eddies any day. The open format that asked nothing of you got swapped for a login that wants everything.
How do we get feeds back?
We make owning your reading easy again, choom. That means a rig that treats feeds as a first-class citizen: pull in the sources you choose, normalise them into one stream, and keep that stream under your control rather than a corpo’s. It is not nostalgia. It is chrome for independence.
That drive is exactly why I built Neurowire as open source under Starside Labs: a feed-first reader that puts you back in charge of what you follow, no megacorp in the loop, now available as a hosted app at neurowire.app. I wrote about the thinking when the Neurowire docs launched, and the full documentation lives at neurowire.starside.io.
The open net did not need permission from any fixer to be interoperable. Feeds were how it stayed that way, and choosing to publish and read through open feeds is how we keep that choice alive, choom.