ChatGPT: Was rssCloud superseded by WebSub?

[scripting]

Short answer: No — WebSub did not supersede rssCloud.

Different technical philosophy

• rssCloud assumes a decentralized RSS network where each feed URL is the identity, and publishing = updating the feed.
• WebSub assumes a hub-based architecture with a broker intermediary between publisher and subscriber.

These are fundamentally different models and not successive versions of the same protocol.

Different adoption histories

• rssCloud is widely adopted quietly. It works in real-world RSS ecosystems and powers real-time feed updates across existing infrastructure.
• WebSub got W3C attention but limited adoption. It never reached critical mass among RSS readers or publishers.

Persistence of infrastructure

If WebSub actually replaced rssCloud:

• WordPress would have dropped rssCloud — it didn’t.
• Feed readers would have switched — they didn’t.
• Real-time RSS distribution would have moved — it didn’t.

Simplicity vs abstraction

• rssCloud: notify all subscribers directly.
• WebSub: publisher → hub → subscriber

WebSub introduces more moving parts and centralized intermediaries, which is a poorer fit for the decentralized ethos of RSS.

Practical reality

People sometimes claim WebSub replaced rssCloud because it sounds like a neat narrative:

• new official spec → old protocol obsolete

But in practice:

• rssCloud stayed in production
• WebSub never became the default
• the ecosystem didn’t migrate

Conclusion: rssCloud was not superseded by WebSub. They are different approaches that co-exist, and rssCloud remains actively used in the real world.

[scripting]

I asked ChatGPT to explain the first section, because while I understood how rssCloud works, I didn't get how WebSub works.

It turns out WebSub is more like FeedLand than rssCloud.

Here's what it said.

Relationship to feedlandsocket (FeedLand real-time channel)

FeedLand’s feedlandsocket provides a real-time update channel over WebSockets that applications can subscribe to. This allows FeedLand to push new or updated feed items directly to connected clients.

Key distinctions:

• Granularity: feedlandsocket pushes individual changed items rather than entire feed documents.
• Efficiency: it uses a persistent WebSocket connection instead of repeated HTTP POST requests.
• Feed autonomy: identity remains the feed URL; feedlandsocket is a transport mechanism, not an identity substitute.
• No intermediary authority shift: FeedLand does not replace the feed as the authority — it distributes updates without altering the publisher-subscriber trust relationship.

Conceptually:

• rssCloud sends notifications of change.
• WebSub sends content (full feed).
• feedlandsocket sends structured, item-level updates.

feedlandsocket is not a replacement for RSS or for feed polling — it is an incremental real-time infrastructure layer built on top of existing RSS conventions.

Connectivity: HTTP POST vs WebSockets

WebSub delivers updates to subscribers via HTTP POST. This requires each subscriber to expose a publicly reachable HTTP endpoint so the hub can initiate connections. In practice, this limits WebSub to server-to-server use and makes it unsuitable for clients running behind NAT or firewalls, which typically cannot accept inbound HTTP requests.

FeedLand’s feedlandsocket uses WebSockets instead. Clients initiate an outbound WebSocket connection to FeedLand and receive a continuous stream of updates over that channel. This model works naturally for browser-based apps and other clients behind firewalls, because they only need to make outbound connections, not accept inbound ones.