Blog

Had to remove --incremental from my Eleventy watch command because my RSS feed were not being regenerated after a post creation on this blog, it’s a bit sad because full rebuild just to update the RSS feed is a lot.

The other thing I notice about the #Epstein case but also the case that concern me and my friends is that, the general public is much more interested in by the Predators and their compromised network than by helping the victims.

As someone who have spent 11 years in courts fighting against sexual abuses and impunity of the white men, I posit that the chronic inaction against this predator and his associates is going to organize the impunity of the predators that deploy their tangled web of abuses after him with the certainty that if they have a good relationship network, their impunity is secured.

Voir ou Revoir le Documentaire ARTE : Bouddhisme, la loi du silence

dispo sur notre chaîne Youtube (oui c’est moi à l’écran et c’est ma voix dans la version française)

I made customization to many #indiekit parts, they are all available here : https://www.npmjs.com/~rmdes

Asta : https://asta.allen.ai/ A scholarly research assistant that combines literature understanding and data-driven discovery. Asta uses 108M+ abstracts and 12M+ full-text papers to find, summarize, and analyze scientific evidence. A project from Ai2.

This is a #Websub publisher test

My Roadmap page is taking shape

Added a Search feature to my #indiekit / #Eleventy powered blog/site https://rmendes.net/search/ itself powered by pagefind, works really well !

I have never really been a collector of anything. Maybe music for a while, back in the MP3 era, twenty years ago. Other than that, there was never something I felt passionate enough to collect, at least not in real life, not physical objects.

I never truly understood the collectors around me. To me, collecting always felt like a burden. Something you had to carry, move, store, maintain.

And yet, today, I realized something.

I have been collecting for years.

RSS feeds.

I even manage, maintain, and curate a whole fleet of Bluesky news bots entirely powered by RSS feeds: https://skyfleet.blue/fr/skyfleet

These feeds were not gathered overnight. They were collected over the years, fixed when they broke, cleaned up, reorganized. More than once, I went as far as contacting individual creators, journalists, or news organizations directly, asking them to provide an RSS feed for their content.

I run several FreshRSS instances. That is not by accident. At some point, my RSS collection grew so large, and my need to search through old articles became so important, that I adopted a strict policy: never delete aggregated items. Ever.

Over time, I organized everything into folders and topics. Eventually, I split the collection across multiple FreshRSS instances so I could manage large thematic areas more easily and keep things usable.

A few years ago, I even built a full monitoring service based on Inoreader. Its purpose was to track news sources related to innovation across multiple fields: robotics, technology, climate, and many others. It was essentially a mega aggregator, with extensive filtering and auto highlighting to support content discovery. The goal was to help the company I was working with stay ahead of the topics they needed to understand and master.

If I had to do it all over again today, I would probably design it very differently. Still, that experience taught me a lot. How to identify high quality sources. How to detect bias. How to spot conflicts of interest. How to recognize compromised or unreliable sources, especially when covering sensitive topics like Ukraine, Palestine, or other geopolitical fault lines.

Curating RSS feeds was manual labor. It often meant interrupting my morning coffee or stopping halfway through an article because I knew I would forget otherwise. This is a good source. I need to subscribe now. It belongs in this specific folder, on that specific FreshRSS instance.

Even today, when I come across an enlightening article found on the web or another blogging platform, I make a point of subscribing immediately and routing future updates to the right place. From there, automation takes over. That is how I benefit from future articles inside what eventually became my own open news monitoring system.

That system, in the end, found its public face on Bluesky, after the mollusk took over Twitter.

For many years, my primary RSS reader was not an RSS app at all. It was Twitter. I used n8n to automate exactly the content I wanted to consume there. A FreshRSS instance would sit at the beginning of the pipeline, feeding selected content directly into my Twitter timeline. I was consuming RSS in the open, without ever opening a traditional RSS reader.

Looking back, it feels obvious now.

I may not collect objects.

But I have been collecting signals, sources, and streams of information for a very long time.

All of this is also why RSS still matters today.

RSS is old. It is quiet. It does not try to seduce you. It does not algorithmically decide what you should see next. And that is precisely why it remains subversive.

Recently, people like Anil Dash and Ernie Smith have been reminding us of something that feels obvious once you see it again: RSS is one of the last pieces of truly open infrastructure on the web. Twenty five years old, and still doing exactly what it was designed to do. No lock in. No central owner. No platform deciding who gets reach and who does not.

You can see its power most clearly in podcasting. The entire ecosystem is built on RSS based distribution. Podcasts are not owned by Apple, Spotify, Google, or any single company. They can be listened to anywhere. “Wherever you get your podcasts” is not just a convenience, it is a political statement. It means creators own their work, their distribution, and their relationship with their audience. No intermediary can silently rewrite the rules overnight.

That same logic applies far beyond podcasts.

RSS lets you build your own public square. Your own information diet. Your own map of the web. It allows you to follow people, ideas, and institutions without asking permission from a platform or submitting to opaque ranking systems. It lets you escape the constant pressure to perform, to optimize, to chase engagement.

In a world where social platforms increasingly resemble gated malls, RSS remains a set of public roads.

Looking back, I realize that my collecting was never about hoarding information. It was about preserving agency. About choosing sources instead of being fed content. About building systems that outlast platforms, hype cycles, and billionaire takeovers.

RSS does not promise virality.

It promises continuity.

And right now, that might be one of the most radical things left on the open web.

More recently, I pushed this logic even further by embracing Microsub.

I implemented a Microsub endpoint for Indiekit, which effectively turns my own blog CMS into a feed reader. It allows me to read, follow, and organize RSS feeds directly from my site. But more importantly, it lets me react to what I read. I can comment, like, repost, or bookmark an article straight from my reader and publish that interaction back to my own blog using Micropub.

Reading and publishing are no longer separate activities. They happen in the same place, under my control.

What this changes is subtle but profound. I am no longer consuming content inside someone else’s interface and then exporting my thoughts elsewhere. My reactions live alongside my writing. My bookmarks become part of my public memory. My reading activity becomes part of my site, not a data point trapped inside a platform.

I also added a /news page to my site, where I expose a very small, carefully curated selection of RSS feeds. Out of thousands of sources I follow, these are the ones I genuinely want to surface and share publicly. It is a hand picked window into my information landscape, available to anyone, without algorithms or engagement tricks.

I did the same for podcasts with a /podroll page. My website is no longer just a publishing tool. It has become a reading tool, a listening tool, and a place where discovery happens slowly and deliberately.

Microsub closes the loop.

RSS brings the open web in. Micropub sends my voice back out. And my site sits in the middle, not as a brand, not as a platform, but as a personal hub.

In a time where most online experiences are designed to extract attention, this feels like reclaiming something simple and powerful.

Reading, thinking, and responding. On my own terms.