Explosion of newsletters, some free, some paid is because your INBOX has become the RSS feed reader of choice. What we really need is more development of feed readers, and more development in tools that create content. Separate RSS feeds for free/paid already exist.

You want a decentralised Instagram? We had photo blogs for that. But today, are there easy tools for iOS or Android that allow you to just post a photo to a blog? RSS readers that are optimised for photo blog consumption, ala Instagram? No. /cc: @om @davewiner

There is maybe almost no reason for a “federated social network”. Ideally, you get a domain, run some sort of OpenID on it, with microformats, and we find new ways to consume it. The “open web” found it hard to succeed because onboarding sucked compared to the walled garden

It is clear that tools like WordPress aren’t solving the “creating” goals of people. Newsletter editors, and even the Medium interface, are apparently what everyone likes. Great. Better UI, better UX, this is what the creators need. But creators also need people to *consume*

And from a consumption perspective, every RSS feed reader I’ve used on iOS/macOS/web is still a far cry from what you get at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Once we make consumption easy, the creators will move. And RSS could continue powering the open web.