Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit
Post-Platform Digital Publishing workshop at 39C3
We hosted a workshop on the first, second, and fourth days of the 2025 Chaos Communication Congress, 39C3. We discussed digital publishing methods that operate independently of big tech platforms and products. We examined an example of RSS (.xml) file for personal websites and blogs as an extended method of online publishing. We also discussed various forms of pirate publishing, both online and offline. We debated the AI crawler blockers and how we position ourselves towards the double bind discourse surrounding blockers that either protect copyright or become instrumentalized in crawling for AI training. Furthermore, we discussed how to continue enabling open access to our published data.
One of the ideas we had during the workshop was using RSS feeds, even when you don't have a website associated with that specific feed. For example, you can create multiple RSS feeds using the .xml file example here. One of those feed could have actual links to the things you publish on your site. But you could also have other, more specific feeds, for other things you want to publish. This could be your articles, similar to a newsletter or Substack, which you want to deliver to people who are subscribed to your feed. Since you can put any links to the RSS feed, you can treat the <link> element as a placeholder, for example, entering the homepage URL of your website.
Some other ideas, tips and suggestions for online publishing and RSS feeds we had from the workshop group:
- When using Thunderbird's “News and Feeds” as your RSS reader, you can create rules and filters for your feeds. If you get overwhelmed when you see thousands of unread articles on your RSS reader, inducing notification anxiety, or you don't want to see all the news about literally everything, but instead, just want to browse certain topics or “moods,” which can be more specific than the categories you have created for your feeds, you can use the rules and filters for very specific things to filter the articles in your subscribed feeds. These can be words mentioned in articles (it can include or not include certain words). This is basically Thunderbird's same functionality to filter emails, but you can also use it for RSS feeds. It could be used as, let's say, sort of a personal (dumb) algorithm, which you have to manually create beforehand.
- Open Publication Distribution System was mentioned, which can be included in a DIY online publishing workflow.
- Smolweb, and Gemini Protocol, which are naturally lurking in the background when we talk about these DIY, and lightweight approaches to digital publishing.
- E-book software Calibre's “recipes,” which came up during multiple conversations we had during the 39C3. You can create specific recipes for specific websites, which then take their content and turn it into an epub file, for example.
- Also talked about event calendars (federated, community-operated, off of big tech). Here are two examples currently under development: prikbord.page and NOMA Calendar.
