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Will RSS3 become the information receiver of Web3?

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RSS3, or a similar protocol, will it still have its place in today's rising Web3? Do we still need an information aggregation source in a network platform based on blockchain and cryptocurrency?

Original title: "RSS3 Brings Syndication Feeds (and FriendFeed) to Web3"

Original author: Richard MacManus

Original compilation: Momotaro Kobayashi

One of the forgotten technologies in the current Internet age is RSS (full name Really Simple Syndication, simple information Aggregation), an information aggregation protocol that helps define Web2. Since the early millennium, RSS has enabled users to blog what they think and subscribe to RSS Readers with ease, making the web truly two-way (one I prefer The description is, readable and writable). However, in the following time, after social media such as Facebook and Twitter began to gain attention with their unique information sources, RSS naturally lost its meaning of existence. Culture is just another technology that has been put on the shelf.

So here comes the question: Will RSS, or a similar protocol, still have its place in today's rising Web3? Do we still need an information aggregation source in a network platform based on blockchain and cryptocurrency? To clarify this question, I chatted with the founder of a new protocol called RSS3, which aims to be "a standard for the next generation of information aggregation streams - designed to provide support for efficient decentralized information distribution". Obviously, RSS3 has nothing to do with RSS before it, but was inspired by the canonical format of RSS.

The read/write wars of the network

Let's put RSS3 in a big context first Let's talk about it, because so much has changed about "information flow" in the past two decades. Facebook has always been a core member of this information flow competition. Coincidentally, Last weekFacebook just announced the removal of the word "news" from the "news feed". Speaking of "news feed" in the past, there was always a strange feeling that could not be described, especially in the current era of messy information. In the early millennium, the RSS blog dream that everyone could post their feelings was crushed by Facebook, the "culprit". Of course, it’s not just Facebook. It’s the rise of all social media (first initiated by Facebook) that has shaped mainstream user habits—publish and then “subscribe (subsequently renamed “follow”)”. As a result, social media has won over ordinary people wholeheartedly in this read/write bloodbath. Although RSS is one of the losers, it doesn't mean the war is over.

One of the reasons for the popularity of the Web3 concept today is to fight against the monopoly of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other online social media. Web3 supporters like Marc Andreessen , claiming that "decentralized and non-threshold innovation" can regain users' control over themselves from platforms like Facebook. (It's worth noting that Andreessen has bets in both camps, with his own VC arm a16z is "relentless" in the Web3 world, but he himself is Meta's Director).

You must know that it is not easy to aggregate content in the blockchain world. The first problem is the high degree of financialization of the content platform. In human terms, you have to have money to play - and not only publishers, but readers also need to pay. Whether it is a comment or a like, you are interacting with the blockchain, and interaction means spending money (the source of miner fees).

Behind the scenes of RSS3 and its operating mechanism

In order to understand what RSS3 is doing, I reached out to the co-founder Joshua Meteora, his partner is a Twitter pseudonym @DIYgod 's anonymous geek at GitHub Yes Nearly 10K followers. A command @DIYgod famous The project is called RSSHub, one with RSS search tool with the slogan "RSS for everything".

RSS3 is being actively developed, the current stable version is v0.3.1, and the development of v4 is "hotly discussed" on the GitHub page. According to Tweets, Joshua and @DIYgod founded a company called Natural Selection Labs to build RSS3 company whose Seed round financing From CoinShares Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Dapper Labs, Arweave and Fabric Ventures, among others.

When I started researching RSS3, I didn't really understand what its purpose is: why Web3 bloggers can't continue to use traditional RSS to integrate their posts Woolen cloth? But after chatting with Joshua, I realized that the original RSS3 information source is not bundled with the blog, but a wallet address.

"We take Mirror.xyz as an example," Joshua said, "It is basically a blogging platform that uses a wallet address on the Ethereum chain as an account and stores its content in Arweave. So a user with an Ethereum wallet Users no longer need to register with Mirror (technically speaking), he can directly use this blogging platform. Since all articles are stored on Arweave (a p2p storage network), theoretically no one can own and supervise these data .And these articles are accessible without barriers. However, before the advent of RSS3, it was difficult for any application to call Mirror articles directly from Arweave, unless Mirror was used as a central party to transfer. So RSS3 actually created a Information source, this source will have a lot of "playability", and of course Mirror. Without RSS3, calling Mirror articles will be a big challenge for those decentralized applications."

So what needs to be clarified here is that when Joshua said that he created an information source, the subject here refers to a wallet address: a decentralized application on the Ethereum chain, Wallet addresses will equate to user IDs, and a user may have multiple wallets (this is common), so what RSS3 does is provide feeds for these IDs. Use the same wallet address to upload content online, no matter which platform there will be only one information flow to represent this user.

Revery: FriendFeed for RSS3

According to Joshua, there are already many Dapps in Implemented on the basis of RSS3, one of the applications called Revery allows users to connect unlimited wallet addresses, which means you can aggregate all your RSS3 streams in one place. It reminds me of an old Web2 app - FriendFeed, which can gather all social accounts in one place and publish content with one click. It was very popular among geeks at the time, but unfortunately it was acquired by Facebook in 2009.

Joshua's Revery page

Even if you don't use Revery Or similar applications, all you need to know is that RSS3 allows all content of the same user to be published across platforms through an aggregation protocol (provided that they hold the same wallet address).

Is there a future for RSS3?

For now, RSS3 is still in the initial stage, because the community is still working hard on various specification details. But in theory, it makes sense to create an information aggregation stream for Web3 based on wallet addresses rather than blogs.

One of the core challenges for RSS3 is that it is not yet known whether using a wallet address as an online ID will work as a long-term solution. Because there are too many potential dangers to do so, mainstream users tend to be those who are not technical users. In 2018, I tested a blockchain-based Twitter “competing product” Peepeth. At that time, I made a common mistake when using MetaMask, and immediately lost access to the account. Just because I lost my wallet's private key, I can no longer log in to my account! Although the decentralized network sounds great, but when you need to find customer service, you will encounter a gray nose, because there is no such thing as Web3!

Nevertheless, RSS3 is an interesting enough project that I will continue to follow its progress. Adding information aggregation flow will undoubtedly help improve the overall usability of Web3, because at present, this is indeed a major pain point in the encryption circle and blockchain.