Feed Subscriptions on the Small and Not So Small Net

The Small Net thrives to create a human-sized net devoid of any big-tech gravity. Subscribing to feeds allows for a non-infrastructural semi-network. People are somewhat connected and receive updates automatically.

But currently, at least like most feed readers are setup by default and most people use it, there’s constant traffic. Requesting feeds, even though they didn’t change. The web has a HTTP 304 “Not Modified” return code, which limits the downloads somewhat, but the requests are still being sent. Gemini doesn’t have anything like that. A feed will always be downloaded.

To limit this unnecessary traffic, I switched to manual update for all feed-related software on all my platforms some years ago. I even sent a patch to Lagrange to allow for manually selecting the feed fetch interval, bound to be released in the next version.

If I’m not going to read the subscribed feeds right now, why should the software fetch them in the background? Having run something in the background is mostly a good thing in the mind of most users and especially developers. But given the impeding resource problems all over the world, why waste even a little on requesting mostly unchanged feeds again and again while nobody’s reading them?

Just launch the app and update the feeds when you want to read them.