What the hell do I mean by “inbound RSS”?
It looks like the first time I used the term on my blog was in 2022, when I was thinking about using Substack to do email distribution of my blog. I asked if I could use RSS to feed my writing into Substack, instead of having to copy/paste it. They apparently didn’t read the question and they told me about how Substack supports RSS. It was at that point that I realized there needed to be a distinction between inbound and outbound RSS.
I guess I thought it was pretty straightforward. Feed readers view RSS as inbound, and blogging tools regard it as outbound. But sometimes you want a feed reader to generate RSS feeds (FeedLand does) and sometimes you want blogging software to handle inbound feeds, thus acting a bit like a feed reader. As Manton points out, micro.blog does this.
Now it makes total sense to me and I think it will make sense to everyone else pretty soon that twitter-like systems which are starting to support outbound RSS would also support inbound.
The reason this is a good thing as in the case of Substack, is that I can use the writing tools I like best to publish through Substack. In fact I wasn’t willing to do the copy/paste thing, I had tried it with Medium and I hated it. It turned me into a piece of software. I have spent a considerable portion of my career working on APIs that get software to take their input from anywhere, not just from their own often pretty shitty editors. And Substack doesn’t want you uisng someone else’s editor, because that’s where a good portion of their lock-in comes from. And I suspect we’ll encounter resistance to the idea from Bluesky because despite their hype about the wonders of AT Proto, they really want you living in their environment and not posting to it from outside, so they benefit by making it hard to do so, while as it has been pointed out, their APIs make it possible to do it anyway. It’s the friction and complexity and fragility that helps keep them from being replaced. If they realllly believed in the open web, they would jump at the opportunity to support inbound RSS.
If you have any questions, let me know I’ll probably put an edited version of this on my blog in a few minutes.
