A history of the sprawling personality clashes over RSS

Sinclair Target's long, deeply researched history of the format wars over RSS are an excellent read and a first-rate example of what Charlie Stross has called "the beginning of history": for the first time, the seemingly unimportant workaday details of peoples' lives are indelibly recorded and available for people researching history (for example, Ada Palmer points out that we know very little about the everyday meals of normal historical people, but the daily repasts of normal 21 centurians are lavishly documented).

I was there for the RSS format wars: I had some of the key players like Rael Dornfest and Aaron Swartz in my home while these flamewars were going on, and I talked about their mailing list contributions as they worked through the issues; I also was there during face-to-face arguments among some of they key players (I volunteered for several years as a conference committee member for the O'Reilly P2P and Emerging Tech conferences, where much of this played out).

That all said, I think Target's piece focuses too much on the micro and not enough on the macro. The individual differences and personalities in the RSS wars were a real drag on the format's adoption and improvement, but that's not what killed RSS.

What killed RSS was the growth of digital monopolies, who created silos, walled gardens, and deliberate incompatibility between their services to prevent federation, syndication, and interoperability, and then fashioned a set of legal weapons that let them invoke the might of the state to shut down anyone who dared disrupt them. Read the rest