RSSHub Joining the Open Information Layer - Bridging Web1 & 2 to Web3

RSSHub, one of if not the largest sources of RSS Feeds (consisting of thousands of federated nodes with one node already serving more than ~400 million requests per month), will be able to join the RSS3 Network. This historical partnership will exponentially increase the amount of content and number of content creators in Web3 through RSS3. Decentralized RSS3 Nodes will be launched with an incentivization system benefiting both content creators and Node hosts. The team will ensure a smooth onboarding process for existing RSSHub hosts to join the RSS3 Network.

The Unfinished Mission of Aaron Swartz - Ownership Economy

Aaron Swartz, a renowned Internet activist, programmer and co-founder of Reddit, also known as “The Internet’s Own Boy”, showing a strong alignment with effective altruism, dedicated himself to open access, and internet freedom. He was a core contributor of the original RSS Protocol. The original RSS however, was slowly strangled by data oligarchies resulting in the Internet we see today having its openness eroded. One of the reasons for this, in the RSS3 team’s opinion, lies in the fact that RSS does not generate sufficient incentives to motivate content creators, which is one of the unfinished works left behind by Aaron Swartz.

Through this partnership with RSSHub (one of if not the largest sources of RSS Feeds), RSS3 is making history by including the very first information dissemination open standard of Web1 & 2, RSS3, to the Web3 RSS3 Network. More importantly, RSS3 will be completing the unfinished mission of Aaron Swartz by adding an incentivization ownership economy layer to RSS. In other words, RSS3 will incentivize all creators of the RSS Feed contents.

Merging of Mass Web1 & 2 Content to Web3

Most importantly, this historical partnership is also expected to massively increase the content creator numbers of Web3 through the RSS3 Network, as it effectively skipped all the Web3 entry barriers and steep learning curves. For RSS3 ecosystem applications, this means exponential increase of accessible Open Information from the traditional internet.

RSSHub Hosts to RSS3 nodes Evolution

RSS3 will be rolling out decentralized RSS3 Nodes with an incentivization system, where RSSHub will become an integral part of the Nodes to serve information to users of the RSS3 Network. Hence, this historical partnership also intends to benefit the entire community of RSSHub, including the existing hosts of RSSHub. While no accurate statistic can be gathered due to its decentralized nature, currently, a major RSSHub node has been serving more than 400 million requests per month and there are approximately thousands of federated nodes being operated independently by the community.

According to the relevant tweets, the RSS3 Network will distribute pull requests (PR) to all Nodes and all PRs will be recorded for incentivization purposes and these Node incentives will be distributed to Node hosts periodically on a blockchain. In other words, all existing RSSHub hosts which join the RSS3 Network will be incentivized. More importantly, to ensure a smooth onboarding process, this new system’s PR allows outputs of all existing routes in RSS3 Unified Metadata Schemas (UMA) format.

For the RSS3 community and general Web3 community, this also means that in the near future, anyone would be able to quickly spin up a RSS3 node, join the RSS3 Open Information Network, which includes RSS Feeds from RSSHub, and be incentivized.