This morning I have stumbled on a post by Kev Quirk on how people read his blog, which made me think a bit.

Kev’s poll of his readers revealed that over 80% of them consume his blog over RSS, while just over 5% come to it directly. I find those numbers in keeping with my own experience. While I have done no detailed analysis of how my own blog is read (and don’t care that much), I know from the occasional glance at the http log samples and the limited cabin analytics that I use on the blog that RSS hits considerably outweigh direct access to the site.

I don’t find that surprising either; I myself consume most of the web via RSS these days, curating my own ever growing collection of feeds that span broad variety of subjects and perspectives. It is not only highly time efficient, but, most importantly, I am my own algorithm.

But there is also an obvious elephant in the RSS room that those numbers reveal: the indie web is, yet again, another echo chamber. Tied together by a disillusionment and distrust of Big Tech, RSS has become an essential tool of our resistance.

Inescapably, the RSS / direct access numbers represent the in / out worlds respectively, showing that our contact with the out, and hence any sort of an influence beyond ourselves, is bordering on non-existent — writing a blog can often feel like speaking to an empty room; the (self-curated) RSS hits in our server logs mean that even if it is not entirely so, we are almost certainly preaching to the converted.

Over the last year or so, I am gradually coming to the conclusion that any faith in changing the world via the web is a delusion; as much as for the blogger as for the SM clicktivists. The web is a useful communication channel, but that’s really all it is. Once I factor in the proliferation of AI, the inescapable conclusion is that the future of human culture lies with real life communities, that the way forward is through the old fashioned notion of breaking of bread.