Ben Werdmuller

2025-12-09 11:00:22

Why RSS matters

Yesterday morning, I woke up and checked my news app while still in bed. The headlines from ProPublica, The New York Times, and The Guardian loaded instantly: a curated stream of stories updated overnight. I scrolled through, tapped on a few pieces, then switched over to my podcast app to queue up something for my morning gym session. I queued up three new episodes: one from Search Engine, the first episode of the new ProPublica Narrated podcast, and an episode of Revolution.Social.

A treadmill run later, I sat down at my laptop. Slack notifications ticked through updates for software we depend on, and Reeder showed me the latest from the publications and blogs I follow.

Throughout my morning, I hadn’t visited a single source website directly. I hadn’t refreshed anything manually. Everything had just appeared, delivered automatically from each source to the app I'd chosen to read it in. My information diet runs on feeds.

Our friend the RSS feed

A single core standard powers all of it. When people think about RSS, they most often associate it with the long-departed Google Reader — but it’s far from dead. From direct subscriptions to syndication into apps that aggregate and re-present content, RSS remains the standard for feeds. It’s the glue that holds the timely web together.

Most people know RSS powers blogs and podcasts. But it powers popular news apps too, from aggregated headlines on MSN or in SmartNews to up-to-date headlines in business services like Lexis Nexis or Bloomberg. It’s also widely used to keep track of status updates of all kinds: weather, software updates, infrastructure uptime, and so on. Most of this activity happens behind the scenes. Publishers often think of feeds as an afterthought, but entire industries rely on them. It’s a workhorse that's become essential infrastructure for the web.

Even for something as simple as consuming news, RSS beats the alternatives. As Molly White wrote earlier this year:

What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper? It could include independent journalists, bloggers, mainstream media, worker-owned media collectives, and just about anyone else who publishes online. Even podcast episodes, videos from your favorite YouTube channels, and online forum posts could slot in, too. Only the stuff you want to see, all in one place, ready to read at your convenience. No email notifications interrupting your peace (unless you want them), no pressure to read articles immediately. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Yes, it would. And it is.

And yet, despite being everywhere, RSS is somehow invisible. It’s the plumbing of the web: essential, reliable, and routinely underestimated. Most people who consume news this way don't know they're using RSS, and a surprising number of people who work in media don't know they’re dependent on it for much of their reach and many of their partnerships.

That invisibility has created a misconception, in some quarters, that RSS is a relic. But the opposite is true: we’ve never relied on it more. And as the social web fractures, as platforms wall off content, and as AI agents begin remixing everything they can ingest, our dependence on neutral, open standards for distributing information is about to become existential.

It’s the strongest standard we have for feeds that syndicate content as published, without intermediation by third-party interests who seek to optimize for attention. Every RSS subscription represents a direct relationship between publisher and consumer, whether that consumer is a reader or a business partner.

But to be frank, it’s got terrible PR: it feels like a part of the old web (Google Reader, Web 2.0, Blogger, et al) even though it powers much of the modern one. And standards that enable direct publisher–reader relationships are inconvenient for companies whose business depends on sitting in the middle. Consequently, it’s under threat. The result will be that publishers will lose distribution sovereignty, and readers will lose one of the last tools that puts them, not algorithms, in control.

If we want an internet where publishers retain autonomy and readers retain agency, we need to treat RSS not as legacy plumbing but as strategic infrastructure. That means three things:

1. Protect and optimize our existing RSS infrastructure.
2. Build and support better, more sophisticated RSS-powered applications.
3. Consider the intersections between RSS and the wider social web.

Let’s discuss those in turn.

Protect and optimize our existing RSS infrastructure

If your publishing platform was built with the open web in mind, it already supports RSS. WordPress powers 43% of the web — including the website for my employer, ProPublica, and many other newsrooms — and has well-formed feeds built in. Similarly, platforms like Ghost were built with great feeds in mind. Even Medium, which puts much of its content behind a paywall, does a good job of providing feeds for its articles and publications. That’s important: although there’s been a lot of focus on email newsletters lately, I know that I receive more readers via RSS than email — and vastly more once I incorporate news portals that my site is syndicated to. Having a feed — or better, multiple feeds for topics, categories, etc — gives you a much bigger potential audience.

But not everything provides them. Beehiiv, the newsletter platform, supports the standard but leaves it off by default. Tracy Durnell has written a template letter to ask authors to turn it on. Sites built on services like Squarespace or Webflow often provide only rudimentary or crippled RSS feeds, if they offer them at all. And the newer generation of no-code or “vibe coding” tools frequently omit feeds entirely — not out of hostility, but because they don’t imagine syndication as part of the publishing experience. The result is predictable: content published on these platforms simply cannot travel. It won’t appear in aggregators, apps, readers, or enterprise workflows, and its reach is dramatically limited.

Where feeds are present, it’s important that they’re performant, and that they’re accessible to aggregators. Some sites provide feeds but accidentally block access through overactive use of bot or scraper prevention, negating the point of having them to begin with. On others, they take minutes to load. If you’re going to provide syndication, your feeds need to be snappy. They need to update as soon as new content is published. And they need to be available to all.

It’s also important to prioritize syndication methods that use RSS. For example, many “podcasts” have chosen to partner directly with streaming services rather than provide an open RSS feed. Whether these should even be called podcasts is in doubt; what’s not is that they’ve allowed those streaming services to intermediate their audiences. If they change their business priorities, those publishers could fully lose their audiences; it’s also a choice that weakens disintermediated freedom to subscribe for everyone else in the ecosystem.

Build better RSS-powered apps

Feeds have always been powerful for consumption. But the internet is a conversation, and the next generation of RSS-powered applications should unlock its potential for creation and collaboration. They should let publishers work together, readers become curators, and communities form around shared sources rather than platform feeds.

The good news is, we’re beginning to see what this could look like.

I have a long-standing dream to create an open source newswire made up of non-profit news sources that allow their content to be republished for free. ProPublica is one; The 19th, the Markup, Grist, and a few others all allow their content to be syndicated for free on any other website under a Creative Commons license.

What if you could read up-to-date content from all of these sources inside your own CMS and — with a click of a button — republish any articles you think your audience would enjoy? That, to me, is a non-obvious but exciting use of RSS feeds that would increase the reach and impact of these newsrooms and allow a thousand curation sites to flourish: local news hubs, topic-specific digests, niche expertise communities, and entirely new kinds of collaborative publications. In a world where platforms increasingly determine what audiences see, tools like this would let newsrooms collaborate on their own terms, without intermediaries.

Dave Winer’s Feedland is another interesting use of feeds: rather than keeping your subscriptions private, you can discover what your friends are subscribed to and, through them, find new publications and sources. In this world, the act of subscribing becomes the act of promoting sources you care about. It’s a social approach that comes close to following / followed lists on a traditional social media profile. A public subscription graph turns following into a decentralized discovery mechanism, with no algorithm or invisible ranking.

We also just need better, more fully-featured, less confusing consumer feed readers. Even apps like Reeder — my personal favorite — tend to complicate the experience by allowing you to pick multiple back-ends and subscribe to lots of different kinds of source formats. Feedly is loved by many, but positioned itself as a way to keep track of strikes and protests against your company a few years ago, marketing features to help companies monitor and respond to labor organizing. Even beyond this distasteful misstep, it has tried to be a corporate signals platform rather than a consumer tool.

We need a beautiful, straightforward feed reader designed for consumers who don’t care about the underlying technology but know they don’t want someone else’s algorithm getting between them and the content they want to read. In other words, we need a feed reader designed for the mainstream — not just the power users who remember Google Reader.

What these approaches share is a commitment to keeping power distributed. Unlike platform-based solutions, they don't require anyone to sit in the middle. Publishers retain control, readers retain choice, and the infrastructure remains open to anyone who wants to build on it.

One of RSS’s biggest strengths is how simple it is. You can build an RSS-powered app in an afternoon. That means it’s easy to pick up, it’s easy to innovate with, and a new ecosystem of apps can build quickly. We just need some tentpole services to organize around.

Build a more social feed ecosystem

RSS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Over the past few years, a new generation of social web protocols has emerged — ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and others — all of which share a basic intuition: the future of online communication should be decentralized, interoperable, and user-controlled.

ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and much of the fediverse, is built around the idea of following updates from actors you care about. AT Protocol, which underpins Bluesky, lets users move their identity and social graph between services. Nostr focuses on simple, portable events that anyone can publish and anyone can subscribe to. All of these ecosystems are built on the premise that you should be able to read — and move — your social world wherever you like.

Sound familiar?

In fact, Mastodon and Bluesky both support RSS feeds, and make it relatively easy (if you know the feature exists) to follow peoples’ profiles in a feed reader. That means you don’t need to be a Mastodon or Bluesky member to follow profiles you care about: you can just plug them into your reader of choice. And those platforms don't need to be a part of an interaction at all. If you have both inbound feeds and a feed of your own content publishing out, without heavy requirements for metadata, that’s a fairly complete social web in its own right.

This implies another opportunity, which is still relatively untapped: RSS can serve as a simple layer of connective tissue between today’s social protocols. It’s already universal, already well understood, and already deployed everywhere. Rather than reinventing syndication for each protocol, we could treat RSS as the common denominator. RSS lacks the complexity of ActivityPub or AT Protocol, which is a core strength. It’s a simple, universal transport format that everything can speak.

If the social web of the past decade was defined by walled gardens and algorithmic feeds, the next decade could be defined by interoperable layers, where RSS plays the same role for publishing that SMTP plays for email: a basic, universal substrate that everything else can build on.

The important thing about the open social web is not which protocol “wins.” It’s whether we build an ecosystem where publishers keep control of their distribution and readers keep control of their attention. RSS remains one of the strongest tools we have to make that possible.

RSS has always worked quietly in the background. In a moment when the web is being reshaped by enclosure, consolidation, and algorithmic mediation, its reliability is exactly what we need. It offers a simple, durable way for publishers to keep control of their distribution and for readers to keep control of their attention, without permission, platform lock-in, or hidden agendas. If we treat RSS not as a relic of an earlier web but as the strategic infrastructure it already is, it can continue to anchor a more open, more resilient, and more humane internet for decades to come.

Feedly launches strikebreaking as a service

The company claims to have not considered before launch whether their new protest and strike surveillance tool could be misused.

^{Molly White (Citation Needed)}

juergen_hubert

2025-10-27 10:25:32

A Long History of Ableism – The Changeling Narrative

The Devil as he replaces an infant with a changeling.

A few weeks ago, the American Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy claimed that use of the pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is linked to autistic children – an absurd claim without any scientific evidence to its name. But this fits into a larger pattern of hysteria about and against people with autism, including blaming the mothers for something allegedly being “wrong” with their autistic children.

While the specifics of this particular hysteria are new, the general pattern is not – as I shall show, it fits into the “changeling” narratives where “apparently healthy” infants were switched by spirits with entities that appeared to be “misbehaving” or disabled in some manner.

Content warning: Ableism, child abuse, and infanticide.

The Grass Devil

A long time ago, a maid lived at Siegburg who was a serf of the monastery.[1] She gave birth to a little boy before she was led to the altar by a man. She suffered a harsh punishment for becoming a mother in such a sinful manner. For when her child was a few months old and it was the time for the hay harvest, she took the little one with her to work when she was called up to do her labors on the meadow.[2] And when she was preoccupied with turning grass over,[3] she put him down on a half-dry heap. She was working at a stone throw’s distance in this manner when he started to cry pitifully. Then she went there in order to breastfeed him. But even though the child had been calm and content until now, she was no longer able to satiate him.

And he seemed to be completely changed, for he cried nonstop day and night and partook of so much nourishment that ten children might have been satiated by it otherwise. He furthermore caused a lot of hardship to the mother because of his overwhelming filthiness. During all this, he did not grow, did not gain any weight, but stayed like he was, which bothered the mother greatly and which she tearfully lamented to clever women.

Then she heard from everyone that the child had been bewitched, and that there would be no other way of curing him than to bring him to St. Cyriacus at Overrath, weigh him on the scales of Cyriacus, and give him something to drink from Cyriacus’ Well.[4] This was the custom in those times which is still adhered to in our days. Children who do not grow and thrive will be weighed on the great scales of St. Cyriacus, and people are then convinced that, by the ninth day after this, the fate of the weighed child will be decided to be either death or recovery.

The sorrowful mother saw no other path to saving her child, and thus went on the way, carrying her child, until she had reached the Acher bridge.[5] Then the little glutton seemed to be so heavy to her that she was unable to proceed further, and, gasping for breath and drenched in sweat, leaned against the guardrails of the bridge.

At this moment, a traveling mendicant monk came along the path, spoke to the exhausted woman in a friendly manner, bid her greetings, and said: “Well, my dear woman, what kind of horrible creature do you have on your back? That one will push you into the ground if you do not let it go.”

“It is my dear child”, replied the sorrowful mother, “who won’t grow and prosper. Thus, I am going to the scales of St. Cyriacus in order to weigh him, as the old women have told me. Then hopefully the poor little worm will get better again, for it seems that he has been cursed by an evil witch.”

“What witch?” exclaimed the wise padre. “There is no enchantment upon this brat. End your cuddling which is horribly wasted on this burden. Instead, throw it into the water, for this is not your child and no child of any human, but an actual grass devil! It is an old dwarf which has been switched with your child. Throw the trickster down into the water, for the love of your true child and your own salvation!”

“No,” answered the frightened mother, “how could I do such a terrible thing to my own flesh and blood? I have carried the poor little worm, stilled it, and raised it, and know that it is my child. But when I went out with other women in order to make hay on the abbot’s meadow and put the child on a dried heap of grass, an evil eye passed over him. For then he started to cry like he has never done it before, and from that moment on he seems to have changed for the worst.”

“At that moment, the malicious kobolds[6] from the Wolsberg[7] moment stole your child and put that creature at the same spot,” replied the monk. “They take care of your child within the mountain, like they have done with quite a few other stolen children. But if you throw this changeling into the water, then they must bring your child back within the hour. Then you will find it at home in the crib, healthy and hale, well-grown like other children – and not like this creature, which will suck you into the grave if you keep him for any longer.”

The devout monk said this with such conviction that the woman was barely able to stay on her feet. Then, in a whirlwind of fear, dread, and love, half will-less and subconsciously, she let the child drop over the guardrails. Then the little creature screamed horribly, and down in the water a ruckus arose as if the river was about to boil, and a roar as if bears and lindwurms[8] were moving around in it. Then the mother realized that the monk had spoken the truth. Driven by fear and hope, she hurried back home where she indeed found her child in the crib as the monk had predicted it – healthy and hale, and well-grown like other children.

Source: Montanus and Waldbrühl, W. v. Die Vorzeit der Länder Cleve-Mark Jülich-Berg und Westphalen. Erster Band. 1870, p. 148f.

[1] This refers to Michaelsberg Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1064 by Anno II, the archbishop of Cologne. It was finally dissolved in 2011 when the number of monks serving in it became too small.

[2] As a serf, she had to do corvée labors for her liege lord – in this case, the monastery.

[3] The goal was to dry the grass so that it could be collected as hay.

[4] This likely refers to a chapel that used to be located in what is now modern-day Cyriax, a district of Overrath. Both are named after Cyriacus, a Roman noble who converted to Christianity and was subsequently martyred in 303 during the Diocletianic Persecution. A monastery in this village was secularized in 1803, and its buildings were subsequently used for agricultural purposes. The whole journey would have covered a distance of more than 17 km.

[5] Most likely a bridge over the river Agger. The most logical location of this bridge would have been at Wahlscheid, a district of Lohmar.

[6] As a reminder, “kobold” is a generic term for “small, mischievous spirit” in German, similar to the British “goblin”.

[7] The Wolsberg is a hill located within the Wolsburg district of Siegburg.

[8] Another name for dragons, usually of a wingless and serpentine variety.

Commentary: Here we see the basics of the changeling narrative. First, it is the mother who is blamed for getting a changeling. The story claims that this is a direct consequence for having a child out of wedlock, without presenting any evidence for this. And then it is the mother’s inattention for allowing the spirits to switch the child, even though this was hardly a moral failing on her part – she simply did not have any support group which could have provided childcare while she was working, and was too poor to hire anyone (and her liege lords obviously did not care about this state of affairs, either).

The rest of the story is even more insidious: “This misbehaving, underdeveloped creature is not the woman’s real child – so the solution is to get rid of it in a likely-lethal way so that the real child (which is well-behaved and healthy) will be brought back by the spirits!”

I have to wonder: How many mothers of centuries past, upon hearing such tales, convinced themselves that their infant child was not their real child because it has some mental or physical disability? Or perhaps she was suffering from (obviously undiagnosed) postpartum depression, and used this narrative as an explanation for her moods. Or perhaps she was resentful about her pregnancy and new motherhood in general – after all, this was during a time when women barely had any control over their fertility other than in the most crude ways. No matter what the mother’s precise circumstances were, the changeling narrative was a useful justification for infanticide.

As for the rest of the community, rural populations who frequently experienced famine and starvation were often rather more enthusiastic supporters of eugenics than the laws of the land – or church doctrine. Their goal was to have healthy, grown-up men and women who would support their parents in old age, not people with disabilities who would consume resources but who would be unable to contribute as much as healthy people. Thus, changeling narratives were useful as a justification for infanticide for the rest of the community as well.

I have little doubt that a lot of children died because of such stories.

The Changeling. Premenk

(Haupt and Schmaler II, p. 267. Oral account.)

[1]Until the time when a child has reached an age of six weeks, there must always be a person nearby. For otherwise, an old woman might come from the mountains or from the forest and replace the infant with a changeling. This changeling is misshapen, as well as weak in body and mind. At the very least, people should place a hymn book next to the head of the child before they leave the chamber.

But if this misfortune has occurred due to neglect, then it is good if you realize this early on. Then you need only fashion a rod from the branches of the silver birch, and thoroughly beat the changeling with it.

When it screams, the old woman will come and have the switched child with her. She will give the child back, and leave with the creature. However, you must let her go on her way, and in no case berate or admonish her. For otherwise, you will be stuck with the changeling.

Source: Haupt, K. Sagenbuch der Lausitz. Erster Theil: Das Geisterreich. 1865, p.69.

[1] This refers to the second volume of “Volkslieder der Wenden in der Ober- und Nieder-Lausitz” by Leopold Haupt and Johann Ernst Schmaler. The relevant text – a slightly abbreviated entry in encyclopaedic form – can be found here.

Commentary: Again, the appearance of a changeling is blamed on negligence, although the mother is not explicitly singled out as being at fault for this situation. And again, the suggested solution is violence against the apparent infant. The true nature of the “old woman” is unclear, although she obviously is a spirit of some kind. But we never learn why she would switch out children, nor why she would bring them back if the changeling is abused.

Driving a Changeling Away By Beating Them With A Blunt Broom

The people on a large estate were busy with threshing grain. A new mother wanted to help with the work. She thus left her small child lying in the crib, and went into the barn in order to help with the threshing. When she came back to the chamber, her child was gone, and an ugly thing was lying in the crib which was extremely foolish[1] and which cried without pause. The child had thus been switched and a changeling had been put into the crib.

The women in the neighborhood thus gave her the advice that she should beat it with a blunt broom until she received her own child back. And indeed, she did so, and hit it so pitylessly that the changeling writhed horribly and screamed. But she did not stop, and soon bloody streaks were visible on its body. Then suddenly the door was ripped open and her own child was pushed in. The child was just as beaten up as the changeling, which was now suddenly gone.

(Oral tale from the cook Anna Cl. from Langenau at Katscher.[2] 1906.)

Source: Kühnau, R. Schlesische Sagen. Zweiter Theil: Elben- Dämonen und Teufelsagen. 1865, p. 158.

[1] The German term used was “Strudelkopf” (“Strudel head”, with “Strudel” representing a type of German pastry). I initially took this to be a comment on the appearance of the changeling, but it turned out that this used to be a metaphor for “an extremely foolish person”).

[2] Langenau was incorporated into Katscher, now the town of Kietrz in the Opole Voivodeship of Poland.

Commentary: Here the violence gets even more intense, with the mother continuing to beat the apparent infant until it is bloody all over. Whatever entity switched the changeling did obviously not appreciate this kind of treatment, as they returned the actual infant in a similar sorry state.

Of course, this narrative could also be used to cover up child abuse: “My child was switched by a changeling, so I had to beat up the changeling in order to get my real child back! And the spirits returned my child in this sorry state!” In other words, the mother did not just beat their own child until they were bloody in a fit of rage – it was the spirits’ fault!

Changeling Beaten By A Rod

(Prätor. Weltbeschreibung I. 365. 366.)

[1]The following true story occurred in the year 1580: A noteworthy nobleman lived near Breslau[2] who needed a lot of grass to be cut and turned into hay in the summer, and his subjects had to do these labors for him. Among these there was a new mother who had rested in bed after having given birth for a mere eight days. As she saw that this was the will of the noble and she was unable to refuse, she took her child with her, put the child on a small heap of grass, went away and assisted with the haymaking.

When she had worked for a good while and went to breastfeed her child, she looked at the child, screamed loudly, threw her hands up in horror, and wailed vehemently that this was not her child since it greedily sucked from her milk and howled in such an inhuman manner which she was not used to from her own child.

Despite everything, she kept it with her for many days, and it acted in such a horrible manner that the poor woman was close to ruin. She complained about this to the noble, and he said to her: “Woman, if you believe that this is not your child, so go and carry it to the meadow where you have put the previous child. There you should beat it heavily with a rod, and then you shall see strange things.”

The woman followed the advice of the noble. She went outside and beat the changeling with a rod so that it screamed loudly. Then the Devil brought her stolen child and spoke: “There you have it!” And with these words, he took his own child away.

This story is well known to both young and old in the same area in and near Breslau.

Source: Grimm, J. and W. Deutsche Sagen, Band 1. 1816, p. 144f.

[1] “Anthropodemus Plutonicus, das ist, Eine Neue Weltbeschreibung”, published in 1666 by Johannes Praetorius. The relevant section can be found here.

[2] Now Wrocław in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship.

Commentary: Beyond providing us a glimpse into the harsh labor conditions of 16th century Silesia, where women were expected to do hard work soon after giving birth (which was a widespread state of affairs – generally, only women from the upper classes or who lived in developed countries were able to rest for multiple weeks before resuming their usual daily work), this story implies that a changeling comes directly from the Devil – and like all spawn of Hell, it thus deserves no pity or consideration.

Which again fits into the larger, horrible narratives about changelings: If an infant does not “function to specifications” – that is to say, if they are too loud, too fussy, or if they have some kind of developmental disorders – then they are not a real human infant, and not the real offspring of the mother. Instead, they are an otherworldly creature that must be abused until the “proper” state of affairs is restored.

In other words, such tales are encouragement for child abuse – and while the folkloric changeling tales may be gone, similar modern narratives have taken their place. I’ve mentioned the recent anti-autism hysteria, but there are many others. How many LGTB children have been rejected by their parents for not fitting into their parents’ narrow world views – or being forced into “conversion therapy” (another form of child abuse which in its own way is no less cruel than the beatings that were portrayed in these tales)?

Folklore is not a thing of the past. It lives on – for good or ill. And we need to be aware of the latter, and how it shapes our politics, societies, and very lives.

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#ableism #autism #changeling #childAbuse #folklore #infanticide #RFKennedy #Tylenol

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^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}