Microblogging with RSS

27 thoughts
last posted Oct. 21, 2014, 5:35 p.m.

4 earlier thoughts

0

Follower counts: This is a little more difficult. As anyone with a podcast will tell you, it's nearly impossible to tell how many individual subscribers you have based on who's checking your RSS feed.

RSS feed subscriptions rely on anonymous fetches, so new items don't come to you, you have to go pull them — and you don't have to give out any identifiers to do so.

So any given six feed requests could be coming from one person six times, or five people one time, or three people checking from two devices, or two people checking from three devices, etc. etc.. There's really no built-in way to tell how many people are generating those feed requests.

22 later thoughts