I Have No Blog And I Must Feed

First came RSS Club from Dave Rupert wherein bloggers commit to some number of their posts being made available only through RSS. Definitionally this has varied from posts that literally only appear in RSS feeds to posts that technically still get publicly published to the blog but don’t appear in any post lists or searches on the blog itself.

This seems mostly useless to me, although at worst it’s just harmless fun. It does seem strange to me, though, that last approach. If you want it to be RSS-only, then make it RSS-only?

Then came The Underground, an entire blog from Chris McLeod that publishes solely via RSS (or, really, Atom), with nothing published to what would be considered the blog proper. There isn’t a blog proper. I’m not even sure using that TLD can be anything other than ironic?

Then again, people have had blogs where you had to create an account before you could read anything, and those were still blogs. I’m not going to be pedantic here, I just find all these linguistic nooks and crannies interesting, so long as I don’t let myself get lost in them.

I wouldn’t go as far as oguchi and call it “dangerous” (although that might be intentional hyperbole), but it definitely sits in a peculiar space with regards to the open web. It’s not closed, but it’s not locked or even lockable, but at least (since some RSS-only blogs technically do have the posts on the blog, too) you’re not supposed to link it, and it’s not even clear to me whether participants even want you discussing what they say in RSS-only posts…anywhere?

Anyway, I always feel vaguely uncomfortable when I come across an RSS-only post in my feed reader, for reasons I haven’t fully explored. We’ll see how I feel about them over time.

There will not be any RSS-only posts here, however. Even setting aside the technical headache that would introduce, I don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to decide who gets to see what. I’m having enough trouble with that right now regarding Bluesky and Mastodon as it is.