Just saw a post on Mastodon about how Mastodon will still be there in five, ten and twenty years. It's true it will be. And Usenet, IRC, email. RSS will be there too as will Markdown and I'd bet Linux and WordPress will as well.

RSS is just as permanent even though there was an awful campaign by the big companies to kill it. Not just PR, Google owned the market and then killed their product. That was about as hostile a thing you could imagine. An old slogan from 80s tech: "Buy em out, shut it down." That's how people talked trash about their competition. 

But here's the thing, RSS persists. 

I didn't invent RSS and honestly I think it would be better if other people stood up for it, to take over for me, because I've given enough, and so many other people have benefited. I want them to care for it and protect it, as they would with something they made a mission of developing and protecting. Linux wasn't the first Unix. WordPress was built out of a fork of another blogging system. RSS was the result of work Netscape did building on work I did, and then needed protection from an incompatible fork. None of these things are simple, but the result is — interop, no lockin, no billionaires owning the result. 

So I'd say if you undermine RSS, as so many have, what RSS wants you to know it — it'll still be here long after you're gone. It wants everyone to use it to interop. So it's not just enough to speak up for one platform, anything that can't be owned should be connected and tested with everything else that can't be owned. And there should be a NATO pact among them, Article 5 which says an effort to undermine one open product or process is an effort to undermine all. I think it is both  literally true and metaphorically true. 

Others would be so much more effective than I am. For some reason people think I make money from RSS. Or I invented it so I feel possessive. I didn't invent it, I adopted it, built on it and then did what anyone should do, I stood up for it not being owned by anyone. The more people feel I own it in some fashion the worse off everyone is, including me. 

I've given a lot to RSS but I haven't used anywhere near as much as others have. How about some balance? I don't know if you agree, but to me this sounds like what others have been saying about other free platforms. Why is RSS different? The answer — it isn't.