I just stumbled upon a 2024 blog post by Robert Alexander (@alexsci.com) that offers a brief history of the blogroll and why it is still relevant today, in a post entitled "RSS blogrolls are a federated social network".
At its core a social network is a collection of links between users. The terminology varies, but these links could be friends, followers, subscribers, professional connections, etc. If we wanted to make RSS social, we’d need a way to define links between the feeds.
I like Robert's explanation that "An RSS feed is mostly just a list of posts" and that blogrolls as originally conceived in the early days of the web were "a list of hyperlinks to suggested websites". The problem is that there was never a similar convention for a list of feeds.
Discovering these blogroll links programmatically is challenging. Search engine crawlers can do it by exhaustively crawling the web, but the purpose of each hyperlink is unclear. There’s no specification for how to find a blogroll page or determine which hyperlinks are part of the blogroll. What’s missing is a specification for machine-readable blogrolls and a way to link to them from a homepage or RSS feed.
For as much time as I've spent on @opml.org, I don't know how I missed that Dave Winer (@scripting.com) already started promoting linking to OPML blogrolls from HTML and from a feed back in March 2024. I love it.
I continue to think that we need to talk about RSS without saying RSS (or "blogroll"), but in order to get there we will need to rally around conventions like Dave is promoting with OPML blogrolls.
My thanks to Robert for the helpful blog post. And to Dave for publishing a discoverable blogroll, where I discovered the @alexsci.com feed while browsing the @scripting.com profile in HyperTexting. 🤌