Indieweb and Feeds

Dave Winer:

If this article about feeds on the IndieWeb wiki represents their philosophy, then their name is wrong — they’re not about independence, because feeds give us independence.

The article criticizes RSS and Atom for a few reasons, and those reasons are easy enough to swat away that I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

What gets me is where it notes some shutdowns: Google Reader, Apple removing RSS from Mail and Safari, Twitter removing feeds, etc.

For every shutdown of RSS feeds by a big company, an indie product such as Feedly, NewsBlur, Feed Wrangler, FeedPress, and Unread shows up.

RSS is at its most interesting and useful when big companies ignore it. It’s the domain of indie developers.