Edit: the bits barely had a chance to dry on my comment when I came across https://rss-parrot.net/

This is a way of integrating RSS feeds into your personal timeline on Mastodon. I don’t know how this affects the work I describe at the bottom of this comment, but I bet it has a role to play.

I find it hard to believe that people would like to browse to x different websites to see if an artist has new works, only to find out that they don’t.

RSS FTW!

Every site I’ve ever created or been involved with in even the tiniest capacity has supported RSS. Sometimes it was enabled just to shut me up.

I’m not sure how to better promote the use of RSS and get people to use feed readers, but I think it is the answer to at least that particular issue.

My personal opinion is that a “platform” should really be just a collection of searchable and categorized feeds with it’s own feed. That way there is both discoverability and the ability for individuals to construct their own personal feed on their own personal device (no server required!) while staying abreast of new feeds on the master feed aggregation “platform.”

There are innumerable ways for people to get their own content into something that supports RSS and that feed could be easily submitted to the master feed aggregation “platform” to deal with the discoverability issue. For example, Mastodon and most compatible systems support RSS and registration is child’s play on any server that allows public registration.

In fact, the “platform” could set up a crawler to automatically discover RSS feeds. If the author has done the metadata right, the results would even be automatically categorized.

Done right, the “platform” might actually run on a pretty small server, because it would be linking to sites, and only pulling summaries from them.

Even comments could be supported with a little creativity. As I said, there are innumerable ways for people to get their own content out there. If there were a standard metadata tag “comment: <link to article or another comment>”, some fancy footwork could produce a threaded discussion associated with a particular article, even if the original author has no internal commenting system. (And my favoured internal comment system would permit nothing but pure HTTPS links to the commenters own content, extracting a short summary for display.)

Side note: I acquired a domain explicitly for the purpose of setting up such a feed aggregation “platform.” Now that I’m retired, I’m slowly working on creating it. Everything is highly experimental at this point and, to be honest, shows no visible progress to that end, but that is my ultimate goal.