RSS and Atom feeds are longstanding technologies that provide a simple, elegant, and familiar way for users to collect and follow online activity on their own terms.
What has your experience or approach been to using RSS or Atom feeds as a key way to share your musical activity? What techniques or tools do you use? What types of material do you find are well-suited to RSS feeds (as opposed to another platform or outlet)? What role do self-hosted feeds play in your work?
I love RSS, but I’m not sure many people use it for music feeds. However, I do. It’s a cool way to find new music.
However, it’s a bit overwhelming scrolling through your feed when there’s lots of interesting music being posted, and you can only listen to one thing at a time…
Maybe this exists already: a browser extension to bookmark and queue stuff to listen to later?
I’ve really appreciated Faircamp RSS, in combination with key13’s Webring for initial discovery/browsing.
Keeping with that self-hosted path, my RSS strategy for the last few years has been:
Things stay in sync between all devices, and I just have a “Faircamp” category for the peeps I’m interested in. I don’t need the music to play in the reader, just tell me when there’s something new and open it in a browser tab to listen. 
I started producing RSS feeds back in the iPod days around 2005. It seemed like a great thing. Each track an episode, had a fugg ton of subscribers. It was great. But then it just stopped. I don’t really remember why. Probably iTunes made changed something? I kept my RSS feeds alive, but ditched the iTunes part. Mostly using them to aggregate posts on my websites to other platforms. It worked great when facebook and twitter were novelties. But then that just stopped. If i remember correctly, algorithms started to downgrade automated posts. But i kept my feeds up anyways, there was still that google read thing. But then that just stopped.
But RSS is cool as fugg, so kept them anyways. And they are super useful on fedi! It’s like the best bridge ever built on the internet!
I’ve used a lot of things to output them, from drupal, to handwritten, via peertube and Static Site Generators.
I’m super excited about podcast2.0. Seems like a really cool thing. The value4value movement has really embraced its potential and are building interesting tools that can work like recommendation systems, with built in granular transactions and automagic splits of revenue. Like say i have a song, and a there’s one guest tortellino blowing the horn like a devine pesto on my track between minute 02:14 and 02:56. Now if someone is listening to that solo, and they go “yeah i feel this tortellino so much here take my money”, the tortellino would get their fair cut from that generosity. We can set that up, and we don’t even have to think about it anymore. No one else but generous listener, horn-blowing tortellino and me are involved.
It’s dope because you can create central points where you curate feeds for an audience, but you could also create an app where everyone can curate their feed themselves. Like a totally distributed spotyface!
RSS is a dope! The strategy is to keep on not stopping just because everyone else does. Seems like it goes in circles anyways. And i shall have the feeds up until i eat my last plate of tortellini.
HEre is a funky cool tool for making a podcast2 feed: https://musicsideproject.com/
It’s half borked and half baked, but it works with some patience.
Here’s templates for the hardcore hardcoder: GitHub - de-mu/demu-feed-template: Template for releasing decentralized music.
There are some webshits like wavlake[.]com and tunestr[.]io but i’m breaking the link because they Suck ass a Service, trying to encapsulate widlerness with sexy UI. 
https://lnbeats.com/ is a good webshit though. Brutally anti-encapsulating. I don’t know if the UI is a testimony of that, or just the product of non-compromising idealism. But i’m here for it. 
I maintain three Atom feeds: one for my practice log, one for my now page, and one dedicated to updates for the string instrument I designed (and am still revising…). These are just reformatted XML documents of the same pages on my static website (first following the HTML Journal spec and then deviating slightly to work around some case-specific bugs).
There are no comments so I have no clue whether anyone actually follows these, so making updates simultaneously feels like shouting into the void and like people are watching. As a result, I’m not sure these have any value in terms of connecting to people, but they are really useful as a way to briefly collect and think about activity.
After reading @setto’s post I’m reminiscing about the days when a group of highschool friends kept in touch through blogs as we went off to undergrad. Maybe I should figure out a way to get comments working…
I would love something like this. Every time I come up with an ersatz read/listen-to-it-later solution, it gets completely overwhelmed by backlog…
Well that sounds like a whole research I need to do
Hi @here, would you be interested in creating (or at least starting) a doc
for our Knowledge base about how music makers and friends can use RSS to their own benefit?
I have started RSS for music makers. Edits and comments welcome!