The hype around this effort reminds me of the hype at the start of Atom. Thankfully the personal stuff does not seem to be coming along with it this time.
Is this something we should be focusing on?
I think we have to work on climate change and the fascism that’s trying to boot up in the US. Our systems for news suck, and there are obvious ways to improve them if we put our minds to it. And I think a new incompatible feed format not only doesn’t move us toward solving those problems, in a very small way (not worth worrying about) it moves us away from solving them. By using bandwidth that could be used to foster working-together, perhaps. By making things that would otherwise interop, not interop.
“Re Evan Williams and JSON Feed” by Dave Winer
But real problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to solve harder, more abstract problems that haven’t been sullied by contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an earth-like climate, rather than how to give Earth an earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like AI, rather than figuring out how to put ethical guard rails around the more pedestrian AI they are introducing into every area of people’s lives.
“Notes From An Emergency” by Maciej Cegłowski
Yes, I also jumped on the JSONfeed train and I still think it is a good idea. Reading the transcript from Maciej made me think a lot on my way home. I guess he’s right. It is way easier to build something from scratch that solves a new problem then tackling an existing one. JSON feed versus climate change? That’s a tough neighborhood.