Mixing vocabularies of RSS feeds and an API is confusing #10

After reading the "Becoming Sponge" article about Constant's feminist infrastructure, it made me realise that logics of a feed (RSS) and lock and key (API) mechanisms are very different. Mixing these two terms in the description of the Multifeeder feels weird and contradictory now.

In 2006, Twitter announced itself as a “micro-blogging” site. In another case of embrace, extend, and extinguish, Twitter initially made extensive use of RSS, allowing the service to co-occupy a space with other blogging practices. By 2013, with a deeply established base of users, the service “upgraded their API,” dropping its RSS feeds and following an industry trend to only offer feeds or other structured data via an “authenticated API.” This means that aggregators not only need to include Twitter-specific code but also need to use a so-called API key: a user-specific password given in response to an individual (click) signing a legal agreement stipulating that if the terms of the API are not followed, the key can be revoked. In other words, protocols designed literally to feed a distributed community of practice are replaced by the lock and key logic of non-negotiable terms protecting the interests of increasingly centralized and commercial services.

https://march.international/becoming-sponge-sustaining-practice-through-protocols-of-web-publishing/