Either my cognitive capacity just is too low today, or much of Venkatesh Rao’s piece on “the extended internet universe” is beyond my capacity outright, but I’m stuck on one snippet.

social media, dated to the invention of RSS, is 20 years old

I am trying to figure out how Rao gets to this idea, that we should date social media to the invention of RSS. Are we defining social media simply as “a feed of stuff from people you follow”?

That would seem weird to me, as there’s literally no social in that. What am I missing?

(For what it’s worth, I landed on the Rao piece because a Nadia Eghbal newsletter led me to a Maggie Appleton tweet.)