Apologia for RSS
RSS[1] was the original federated social media. RSS invented the "share" verb. RSS is easy, simple, and sustainable. RSS never died.
I'm sure a chunk of you already know what RSS is. Probably some don't. RSS is a protocol (really just a text format) for listing the posts on a website in a machine-readable way. Readers of your website post its RSS feed URL into their feed reader software, this reader periodically checks it for new posts, and it presents all the posts in a single unified list with useful features like "marking stuff as read". (Podcasts still[2] use the same technology.)
Back in the day, everything had RSS. Any site that had anything that mapped kind of onto "posts", from blogs to webcomics to the nascent social media sites, would expose an RSS feed as well because not to do so was to cut themselves off from what was at the time a massive audience. Even Twitter had RSS for a long time. This was great as a user, because you could easily read stuff from all across the web in a single place. It was great as an author, because your self-hosted blog wasn't intrinsically harder for people to read than anything else anywhere on the internet. It was a kind of federation, but one that didn't require each node to rack up server costs and DevOps time. If you could host a simple XML file that only updated when you made a post, that's all you needed.
If you're reading this, even if you used RSS a bit in its heyday, you may think "oh I can see why that would be useful" but you don't yet understand. All of this is just preamble. What really makes RSS spectacular is the ability to share[3]…