drop RSS - in favor of ATOM or even JSON in the future?

[rocky-III]

Let me ask a question to the ambitious podcast-namespace team:

I was told that rss v2 is relying on an obsolete format that is technically flawed and legally dubious.

For the future of sharing podcast wouldn't it be a good idea to drop RSS in favor of ATOM or even JSON?

[rocky-III]

Why not implementing ActivityStreams JSON-LD as a future oriented feed format?

RSS was superseded by Atom and Atom is being superseded by ActivityStreams.

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Activity_Streams

Definition
...
Big "A" Activity Streams : is a data format for encoding and transferring activity/event metadata. The first version of the specification was published in 2011 by the independent Activity Streams Working Group and is based on extending Atom. The current (2.0+) version of the spec is JSON-based.

[daveajones]

For the future of sharing podcast wouldn't it be a good idea to drop RSS in favor of ATOM or even JSON?

This was discussed ad nauseam for many years - the JSON versus RSS debate. It was even tried with the JSONfeed format, which went nowhere.

The reason ultimately boils down to interoperability during the transition phase. There will always be an indeterminate amount of time in which both the old and the new formats need to function. So during that time all publishers would have to produce two different feed formats instead of one. This transition time could last many years, and most likely would never fully resolve.

There would always be some unknown percentage of publishing software out there still producing RSS format which results in consuming applications having to also add support for both formats.

Ultimately there’s just no way to make the transition in a decentralized system that doesn’t result in two formats being imposed. Therefore nobody takes the first step since they don’t want that hassle either.

JSON is better than RSS in a lot of ways. But it’s not enough better to justify the pain of the transition.

[rocky-III]

Thanks for that - What you write does make sense.

Did not know about this ad nauseam debate ...

So it´s about the first step... maybe Podcastindex.org is in the position to push things here...
Isn’t there a way to convert JSON to RSS to some extent and could´t Podcastindex.org provide this conversion during this transition phase?

[brianoflondon]

This came up day one on PodcastIndex and @daveajones has been dealing with RSS probably longer than almost anyone. This is one of those fights that's just not worth the effort when there are so many other things we can put the scarce resources into.

Pick anything else to promote, switching the base layer protocol at this point would be like trying to re-write the rules of Bitcoin and get everyone to agree next week. Only a little bit harder in this case as there isn't even a method to ASK people if they want to do this and it would break every single part of the ecosystem just as that ecosystem is trying to grow out from the shadow it got put in by the centralised Internet giants.

[RocksteadyTC]

If you're going to go the JSON route.. Other projects were born from RSS's wishes that something new be both novel and carry a different name, here is a standard I'm working on. https://readme.loud.so/

[rocky-III]

@RocksteadyTC interessting

[saerdnaer]

Maybe we should add a note to the readme as this question get's ask so often... and close this issue.

I personally came to the conclusion that it does not make sense to define a new feed format, but rather an API schema / public language which can be extended. As I personally prefer GraphQL I started a project called audio-api providing schema and interface definitions, together with some adapters so you can use existing APIs (including RSS feeds) as data sources. The project is in a early development stage, but I can deploy the current stage somewhere if you want to play with a few queries...

And by the way: ATOM is dead. :-)