I would love to have an RSS interface where I can republish articles to a number of my own feeds (selectively or automatically). Then I can follow some my friends' republished feeds.
I feel like the "one feed" approach of most social platform is not here to benefit users but to encourage doom-scrolling with FOMO. It would be a lot harder for them to get so much of users' time and tolerance for ads if it were actually organized. But it seems to me that there might not be that much work needed to turn an RSS reader into a very productive social platform for sharing news and articles.
This interface already exists. It's called RSS. Simply make feed titled "reposts" and add entries linking to other websites. I already have such a thing on my own website with the precise hope that others will copy it.
At some level yes, but I would like to be able to de-duplicate if multiple people/feeds repost the same article, and it would need a lot more on the discovery side (so I can find friends-of-friends, more feeds from same friend I follow, etc). Like a web-of-trust type of construct which I see as necessary with the accelerating rise of bots on all platforms.
I'm not simply saying that discovery is out of scope, but that it's an actively harmful feature. The computer has no good metric to judge what is shown to you. I think the old ways are much better, that is you hear about something if a human decides to share it with you. This process seems impossible to automate and the effects of trying have been very detrimental.
That said, the web has already developed a solution to this issue. It's basically just indexing. It's a very valuable technology, hence why Google got so much money from doing it.
I don't want it automated, I want the tool to help. I don't need it to pick feeds and follow them, but being able to lists what other feeds are splitting off of feeds I already follow, or find the feeds being reposted to me, ... would be helpful. This can be built on OPML, this can be built on RSS, but your notion that we already have everything we need does not resonate with me.
You don't have to get all defensive about RSS, I think it's fantastic technology, but it is missing a few key components to be a replacement for social media in a meaningful sense. I know you know this, because you are here on a social media site right now instead of reading OP's feed. Whereas I don't want to ever leave my reader and instead consume news and recommendations and comments from my friends (of friends) right from there, instead of using gameable/botable centralized platforms with topics and moderators I don't control or trust.
My vision is not clear I know, I hope I can find time to prototype (or at least spec out) what I mean some time soon.
I feel like the "one feed" approach of most social platform is not here to benefit users but to encourage doom-scrolling with FOMO. It would be a lot harder for them to get so much of users' time and tolerance for ads if it were actually organized. But it seems to me that there might not be that much work needed to turn an RSS reader into a very productive social platform for sharing news and articles.