So apparently YouTube is UNSUBSCRIBING PEOPLE FROM CHANNELS WITHOUT NOTICE?!

I got a recommendation a while back to watch a Todd in the Shadows video that I somehow miss’d, then discover’d that I wasn’t subscribed to him. I’d assumed this was an accidental click on my part, and resubscribed. Then I heard Roaming Millenial mention people reporting they were unsubscribed from her channel, and I’d assumed that someone at google was abusing their power to silence differing political voices. But apparently this is just the newest trend as google decides it knows what’s best for us?

No.

This is our fault really, for enforcing the oligarchy of modern media. I’m guilty of it for making reddit my primary content hosting system as much as I am for only using youtube as my video platform, etc. And it’s not like there aren’t really other options, so here’s that other option:

RSS is a subscription and syndication protocol. It does for content subscription what IRC does for chat and email does for notes, in that it’s an open system without central authority or an owner controls how it works on your behalf. If you really break down a system like youtube, producers publish videos to a syndication feed, some document that you never directly see which lists all of their content in order, and includes links to where that content is host’d internally. Your subscriptions page queries every syndication feed that you’re subscribed to and lists the content in order of release. So far, all of those features are shared by RSS. Here’s where differences begin: You don’t sign in to the website to access RSS, the RSS reader is own your own system. You can subscribe to any type of content that the producer makes a feed for, so my RSS feed includes comics, blogs, podcasts, video, etc. ^{Reddit technically includes RSS, but I don’t actually use reddit that way. If that’s what you want, the feed is http://rss.reddit.com/r/TheVeryMask for my material.} Importantly, you can decide how to group those feeds. By recent, by creator, all comics in one folder subdivided into dominant colour-scheme via subfolders, etc. If someone you follow loses all of their content, all they have to do is upload elsewhere and update where the syndication feed points and you never even notice.

The most important of those notes to me is that divorcing the hosting and subscription platforms prevents you from missing anything. It takes control away from the hosting platform and splits it between the creators and the fans. No one can stop you from using RSS, at least not for very long.

And a huge volume of people already use RSS, because podcasting as a technology is built on it. This is why the iOS podcast app will technically let you subscribe to xkcd.

So in response to this whole debacle, I’ll be doing a few things. Firstly is something selfish that you might be interest’d in: I’m publishing all of my subscriptions. First as a list, then with annotations. Such a list will of course be brittle, since I won’t be able to edit it after a while, but that brings my my next point. Redundant publication of my content. Everything I write here will go up on other services, notably tumblr, deviantArt, and wordpress. Any suggestions for other services to use? Blogger, maybe? The wordpress I intend to make fully self-host’d. That’s a bit of a project, but it will be the master system that has all of my content. While reddit will remain where I generate most of my content, robust copies will go to the wordpress’s RSS feed along side its publication here before going anywhere else. If reddit turns evil, as the recent Spez shenanigans suggest it already is, that will be the best way to find me.

E: If you want to use RSS like me, the apps I use are Newsify for iOS and RSS Reader by Svyatoslav Vasilev on Android. ~~I’ll update this with one for PC, but know that I use the devices to follow different categories of things so I’m not in a rush. /E~~ I’m in the process of trying out Bamboo Feed Reader for FireFox and FeedDemon for Windows, with some customization. As of Jan2017 I have no plans to experiment with other browsers. Will update this when I eventually start using linux more, but that’s a ways off.