"Converged applications will evolve into the core of the Internet economy, where businesses and individuals are able to control their personal data on the Web while enjoying the advantages of a network at scale." -- Kevin Werbach
This text is a prediction made by technology critic Kevin Werbach in 1999, when people believed that the future of the Internet would be based on syndication protocols such as RSS, where people would be able to keep their own data while being able to connect to each other in an easy, decentralized way, aggregating information from different sources, replacing one-stop services.
However, the actual history of the Internet, as we all know, has taken a different direction, with users rapidly moving towards centralized but almost barrier-free Internet services.
As for the RSS program, which can instantly aggregate information from different sources according to users' personal subscription preferences, after its launch in 1999, although it was once prevalent all over the Internet after the millennium, it has been losing ground due to the inferior experience of users and developers and the lack of a business model, and was "declared dead" by all media after the rise of social media in 2010, gradually fading from the public's view.
What Werbach said, perhaps a premature prediction, was not untrue. This ideal of aggregated network did not die because of the temporary victory of Web2 services, and after years of silence, the ideal of combining blockchain technology and WEB3 has made a comeback, once again standing on the front edge of Internet technology development, provoking the unfinished information revolution of that year to the technology platform beast that manipulates information recklessly, trying to snatch back the network User autonomy and openness to data.
A simple, straightforward and highly modular web3 information flow protocol, rss3, was created to ignite this revolution.
What is RSS?
Before analyzing RSS3 further, we would like to briefly review the foundation of RSS and its simple development history, so that we can better understand what RSS3, which originated from RSS, is actually trying to solve.
RSS is called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and in general is a simple open-source program that allows users to subscribe to content on their own initiative.
But why did decentralized RSS lose out to centralized content platforms?
However, as the platform giants providing centralized content services rapidly expanded and gained more data and users, RSS, which is based on consistent open source specifications, was unable to meet the development needs of individual developers, and because of internal divisions and splits within the open source community, it gradually became unable to compete with centralized platforms. These data-closed technology giants also began to gradually refuse to comply with RSS's open specifications and adopted their own technical specifications to expand the competitive advantage of closed platforms.
In addition to competition from centralized platforms, the decline of RSS has its own problems, starting with consistent specifications, slow development, poor user experience and a certain barrier to entry.
On the other hand, RSS itself does not have any business model, so it lacks sufficient capital investment to develop updates more actively. In addition, although traditional RSS is open does not take away ownership of data, publishers are completely unable to track subscriber data, which has led publishers with commercial needs to turn to centralized web services that can provide data tracking services.
RSS and Social Media Platforms
The real breakthrough in RSS may be the emergence of social media.
Social media not only fulfills the core function of RSS - to actively subscribe and aggregate information from different sources based on user preferences - but also creates socially interactive content that RSS programs cannot satisfy, creating a platform for information output and aggregation with lower barriers to entry and more instantaneous communication and interaction.
With the increase of platform users, the information content provided by social media platforms is no longer simply like RSS, with a simple time-sorting of information from different sources, but relies on huge user data combined with algorithms to infer user preferences for content, while meeting the needs of information review and advertisers, allowing algorithms to filter information content to platform users.
Whether users need algorithms or not may still be a controversial issue, but users do not have any option to refuse to have their data sold and to refuse to use algorithms.
The opaque information recommendations and data selling by centralized platforms have not changed because of public opinion events like the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, but rather because the growth of new users has slowed down and platforms have become more aggressive in launching schemes to cash in on the interests of existing users in order to maintain high business growth.
To some extent, social media did once satisfy the core functions of RSS and provide additional services, thus completely eliminating the need for RSS. Now, with the prevalence of Web2 platform algorithms, social media in turn cannot obtain the basic functions of RSS, aggregating user-initiated information content, and this type of basic autonomous information aggregation function is absent from the Internet.
RSS3, born on the shoulders of RSS, has ushered in a new historical opportunity in the era of WEB3.
RSS3: RSS for the Web3 era
What is RSS3?
As co-founder DIYgod says, **the "RSS" in RSS3 stands for a tribute to history (RSS), and the "3" stands for Web3.**
A WEB3 era RSS picks up the baton of the spirit of openness and freedom.
RSS3 allows users to take ownership of and subscribe to content themselves, and to syndicate and present content in a way that does not rely on a centralized platform, and decentralizes at the storage level, giving users control over their content.
RSS3 will be gradually upgraded through several modular projects, such as RE:ID, which maps WEB2.0 content to RSS3; Web3 Pass, a personalized homepage; and Revery, which can aggregate content and subscription mechanisms.
Overall, this is a gradual "To 3" process.
In the first step, an attempt to map user-created content from a centralized platform to RSS3, freeing the WEB2 platform from absolute control of the content.
The second step is to aggregate information into an independent portal.
The third step is to build a decentralized network of content that can be subscribed to and associated with each other.
Confronting the value of data and user autonomy
RSS3 allows users to store data on a decentralized network, with the ownership and private key of the information entirely in the hands of the user. It also combines the advantages of the traditional RSS scaled decentralized network to effectively scale and syndicate information based on user preference and choice.
Unlike traditional RSS, which ignores the commercial potential of information aggregation, RSS3 focuses on the value of data and is expected to enable users to effectively use their personal network data to generate additional economic value.
Reinventing the social function of Web2 in the spirit of Web3 decentralization
Unlike traditional RSS, which has declined due to a lack of social interaction, RSS3 reinvents the social functions of Web2 in the spirit of Web3 decentralization.
At the simplest level, we can perhaps imagine RSS3 as Twitter and Facebook without censors and without algorithmic filtering, with information aggregation applications that appear on whatever information users subscribe to.
RSS3, of course, does not stop there. For example, the scope of its information aggregation is open to the entire Internet, and as long as there is a centralized or decentralized application that supports RSS3, RSS3 can automatically aggregate information according to user preferences and publish it to the RSS3 feed.
Modular applications
Mapping of RE:ID Web2 applications
Content in Web2 can be mapped directly to RSS3 through RE:ID, free from algorithmic constraints of the platform.
Web3 Pass: Personal profile creation on Web3
RSS3 imitates the personal pages often found on Web2 social platforms. Users can use Web3 Pass to freely set up RNS domain names, edit personal profiles on them, and present personal activities on decentralized networks, such as NFT collections, etc.
Revery RSS3 Feed Reader
Revery is an RSS3 feed reader that can subscribe and track different users and addresses. Currently, RSS3 is working closely with several decentralized applications such as Mask/Arweave/Mirror, and is expected to provide tracking subscription services for related applications in the future.
On January 13, 2022, RSS3 entered into a partnership with the WEB2 social product Instant APP. RSS3 already supports Instant APP content indexing, and the content of Instant APP can be viewed in its eco-product REVERY.
This all did not happen overnight, but is a gradual development process, and it is worth noting that these are open source DEMOs that allow developers to freely Fork (develop) to create their own on-chain homepage or on-chain reader.
Currently, over ten applications including Mask Network, Showme, Revery, Cheers Bio, InGroup and Flowns are using the information distributed by RSS3.
**Openness is what makes WEB3.**
Economic and Governance Model
Blockchain technology not only makes a decentralized information aggregation protocol possible, but also introduces a self-sufficient and effective economic model with sufficient economic incentives, treating the open source community and users as the Stakeholders of the project, recognizing the value of user data and encouraging non-Shareholder members to contribute to the community with sufficient economic incentives.
According to the white paper, the RSS3 DAO is designed to manage all transactions related to RSS3 and its network, and its governance token is called RSS3.
According to the latest disclosure, $1 billion of $RSS3 will be issued, all of which will be generated immediately upon creation, with no additional mining mechanism, and most tokens will immediately enter a lock-up and slow release period of one to five years, except for public offerings and airdrop rewards, the allocation details of which are shown below.
As a governance token, RSS3 will be used to govern the following transactions.
1.Selecting the overall index and service node operators
2.Determining the number of RSS3 archives in each service node
3.Distributed key fragmentation generation threshold
4.Subgroup scaling
5.Module upgrades
6.Cycle time per Epoch round
7.How to apply vault assets
8.Incentive Management
Team and Investors
The development team behind the RSS3 project party, Natural Selection Labs Natural Selection Labs, is a distributed organizational type similar to an open source community with a certain hacktivism tinge.
According to previous media reports, founder Joshua claims to have initially worked on RSS-related work in 2018, during which he discovered the famous RSS project RSSHub on Github, but did not make much of a splash at the time.
In the second half of 2020, Joshua recalled RSSHub and wanted to "take the best from it" and got in touch with its creator, DIYgod, and with the help of Mask Network founder Suji, Natural Selection Labs Natural Selection Labs completed a seed round of funding with the help of Mask Network founder Suji. In addition, Joshua says Suji was the first to suggest changing the project's name (formerly "AIR") to "RSS3".
DIYgod is an open source god with over 43,000 stars (favorites) on GitHub, and all 11 team members visible on GitHub have a track record of actually contributing to the project, even if there is no way to know their actual identities. Even if there is no way to know the actual identity, from the perspective of "Talk is cheap, show me the code", the development strength of the team is trustworthy.
In June 2021, RSS3 completed a seed round with participation from Sky9 Capital, Mask Network, ByteDave, Hash Global, Chen Yutian, Liang Xinjun, SPT Capital, and Variable Capital, raising millions of dollars.
In December 2021, RSS3 announced the completion of a new round of funding led by CoinShares Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Mask Network, HashKey Group, Arweave, Dapper Labs, Youbi Capital, Headline VC, Formless Capital, imToken Ventures, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and other prominent investors.