Feeds Are The New Websites
Mike McCue · 14 min
navigator back in the day. It was an incredible time. At that time, when I joined Netscape, people told me I was crazy because why would you, AOL was how everyone was online. AOL was super easy to use. You put a CD-ROM in your computer. Crazy. But I know, but that's what you did. And everyone thought that was awesome. And when you would talk about the web, they were like, hold on a second, I have to download something? What does that even mean? I have to put in HTTPS? I'm not doing that. That's going nowhere. And the web really was kind of sort of moving along, but at sort of a slow pace. What happened was two things. First of all, people started building amazing websites. Completely awesome websites. And those websites ultimately started to attract people to the web. And what Netscape did and what the browser did is it acted as a gateway of discovery to find those websites in the first place. And then allow you to easily surf those websites across the web. And this was basically the beginning of a virtuous cycle. Because as more people discovered more websites and could see what it could do way beyond AOL, they ultimately made more websites and more people joined. And this virtuous cycle happened. And ultimately, AOL was dethroned as the primary walled garden and the main way that we spent time online. So fast forward to today, we have a new set of walled gardens. And these walled gardens are more insidious because they actually own all of our connections to each other. Think about that. All of the connections between humans online are owned by just a few companies. You guys all know this. But this is a huge problem. And these companies need to be dethroned. So how do we do that? Well, let's get another virtuous cycle going. There's already some amazing things that are happening on the social web. And when I say the social web, I mean atmosphere, activity pub. These are two open protocols that have allowed us to standardize human connection online. That is very, very fundamental. And so, of course, what I've been working on, again, is yet another browser. This is a new kind of browser. This is a browser for a new kind of web, the open social web. This can actually download it. Actually, if you go to surf.social, you can sign up for the beta. And anyone who signs up today or tomorrow will make sure you get in. So operators are standing by. And what Surf does is it allows you to not so much browse websites, but browse feeds. We think of feeds as the new website, as a new destination that people can go to on the social web. Custom feeds are one of the most important things that Blue Sky innovated on. And there's a whole ecosystem of people who've already made amazing feeds on things like Graze. Is Devin here? On all sorts of other really fantastic tools. And what we want to do is help people discover all those amazing feeds. And not just, by default. And there's a whole other dimension of the web, which is built on RSS, another kind of feed model. So what Surf lets you do is it lets you basically browse and discover and surf any feed on the social web, at Proto, ActivityPub, RSS, and even more interestingly, bring them all together into totally new kinds of feeds. So I'll show you a little bit about how you do that. So what you're seeing here is Surf on the desktop web. This is actually a preview. We're going to be launching this in, knock on wood, hopefully a few days later this coming week. And up at the top, you can see you can search all posts across the social web on ActivityPub, at Proto, or RSS. And they're organized into lots and lots of different feeds. And then, of course, we can also feature different feeds. So we're featuring some fantastically awesome feeds that are on the social web. Shout out to Rudy with Black Sky. Black Sky is more than just a feed, to be clear. But people can experience it as a feed. It's a highly moderated experience. It's a destination. It's not just one of many things that you see and follow in Blue Sky and shows up in your timeline. It's a destination. It's a place to go. It's highly moderated. It's amazing. Also, you can see here, Film Feed. Is David Amell in the audience? Shout out to David Amell. He made this. He's a film photographer. And he's effectively created Instagram for film photographers here. You see posts that are federated via threads that come from Instagram and make their way through threads in an ActivityPub and end up in this feed. You see podcasts. You see YouTube channels. I'll show it to you in a second. We also have Andra's news feed here made on Graze. There's Devin. Shout out to Devin. Andra, is she here? She's amazing as well. She's made some incredible feeds. Andra, just incredible. And so you can, what we want to try to do with Surf is bring the social web to the masses, to my mom, to my teenage daughters, and have them discover all these incredible feeds that people have been making. We also want to make it easy for people to make feeds as well. A little bit more of like a fun way to make some feeds and ways that bring those multiple protocols together, RSS, ActivityPub, and AppProto, and then publish those feeds to Blue Sky and ultimately to the web. So let me show you how that works. So I'm just going to scroll down here, and I'm going to make a feed. And I'm going to make a feed about backpacking. So let's go ahead, and I'm just going to type in backpacking here. And here are some sources right away that we're going to recommend to you. And because we use AppProto and ActivityPub and RSS, these are coming from all these different places. So I'm going to start with just adding in a hashtag, backpacking. Now what's cool about this hashtag is it's multi-protocol. So if someone posts on threads with hashtag backpacking, or they post on Blue Sky, or on Black Sky, or on Pixel Fed, or on Skylight, or on YouTube, or on Flipboard, with that hashtag, that post will show up in this feed that I'm making. I'm going to go ahead and add some YouTube channels here. BackpackingTV, there's a ton of these great YouTube channels. I can always go just search for specific YouTube channels if I want to add them. Also, we've got podcasts. Because we support RSS, that gives us access to the world of podcasts. So every podcast on Earth you can put into a feed. So I'm going to go ahead and pick some of these. This is really fun to do, too, because a lot of times you don't even know these podcasts existed. And so you can just pull them all together. And then also what's really neat is that feeds, we think of feeds as like building blocks. So you can put feeds inside of feeds. It's sort of like iframing a website. It's actually kind of cool. So I actually made a feed called The Backpacker, where I went and found all my best YouTube channels, my favorite podcasts, my favorite newsletters, my favorite people on Blue Sky, on Macedon, and I pulled them together into one awesome backpacking feed. So I'm just going to make that a source. And then I'm going to add a few more feeds in here. These are from Flipboard magazines, which have been federated by Flipboard on ActivityPub. So these are publishers. These are users curating their favorite backpacking articles. I'm going to add an RSS feed here for Section Hiker, which is a fantastic gear review site. I can put in RSS URLs in here and go and specifically add specific RSS feeds. I can even add Blue Sky lists or Blue Sky starter packs. So let's And you can add Blue Sky custom feeds as a source too. So I'm going to add a British Columbia hiking and backpacking feed. And now I'll hit next and make my, I'm going to give it a name, backpacking, and I can add a community hashtag to it. I'm going to make this about Pacific Northwest backpacking. So I'll give it a hashtag. And now we're going out across the social web and pulling together all these different sources in this one really cool feed. Now, as I scroll through this, you're going to see some stuff that isn't actually on topic, like this one here, because I added some starter packs, right? People, as we know, post about all sorts of things. Just because they're in the backpacking starter pack doesn't mean they're not going to post about politics. So what I can do here is dial in this feed a bit further. I'm going to go into settings and I'm going to go ahead and say, you know what, let's keep this feed on topic. So I'm going to say, let's have all these posts that get into this feed just be about backpacking. I can also go ahead and turn off politics if I want. I can turn off news. I can turn off even Elon Musk. I don't want any Elon Musk in my feed, right? And then I can hit save and then reload this feed. And you should see a very different looking feed that has nothing but wall-to-wall backpacking goodness. Podcasts, videos, articles, conversations, all about backpacking. Then what I can do is say, all right, let's publish this feed to Blue Sky. So I can just go over here and say publish. And now this backpacking feed is on my profile in Blue Sky. You can go and see it now and pin it to your home. And then let's also publish it to the web as a social website. So I'm going to go ahead and say, let's just call this backpacking and hit publish. And now at backpacking.surf.social, if you go there, you'll see this awesome feed that I made. And you can try it right now. And this is really cool because now if I open up in a private window and I go to backpacking.surf.social, and let's say I've never heard of Blue Sky or the atmosphere or any of those things, but I love backpacking and my friends love this backpacking feed. I can just go to backpacking.surf.social and I can see everything that's in this feed. I can go in and I can watch all the videos. We have this like really cool sort of TikTok style watch mode. You can go look at all the articles, just the articles in this feed or all the podcast episodes in this feed. And then if I like this feed, I can just say join community and then I can join with my Blue Sky account or my Mastodon account or both. I can sign up for a completely new account, which is super easy, which behind the scenes creates an at proto actor and an activity pub actor. So I can just seamlessly engage with anyone wherever they're posting. And I'll just show you one last thing here. This is how cool this can be. So this is David's film feed. If you go to filmfeed.surf.social, you'll see here, this is after putting a little bit of time and energy into kind of making the feed look really cool. You can make it look awesome. And here's what this looks like. Nothing but like amazing film photography by really cool film photographers, curated YouTubers and podcasts that David has hand selected, great pictures being shared by those photographers. And I can go in and hit like or reply. This is a post from Pixel Fed. Here's a post from Threads. I can hit like. I can repost these things. You'll see Blue Sky posts in here. You'll see YouTube videos. So this gives you a sense of just how amazing the social web really is. And our goal is to really make it super easy to discover all the good stuff that's happening on the social web, get people excited about that, join the social web super easily, which then will inspire a lot more people to build even more cool things, and we'll get that whole virtuous cycle going, and we'll finally dethrone these walled gardens that have owned our human connections for the last 20 years on the Internet. Thank you.