standard.site, RSS, rssCloud, and FeedLand

No repository file, test, or entry point is named. First clarify whether this issue requests publishing or revising this comparison, and where that content should live; done should mean an agreed destination, scope, and reviewed documentation covering standard.site, RSS, rssCloud, and FeedLand.

It's time for me to learn what standard.site is and how it compares to the things I know and work with. This is the result of the conversation I had this morning with ChatGPT.

standard.site, RSS, rssCloud, and FeedLand

standard.site is a set of AT Protocol lexicons for representing publications and long-form documents. In practical terms, it gives ATProto apps a standard JSON record shape for things that look a lot like blogs, articles, essays, and posts. The main records are site.standard.publication for the site/publication and site.standard.document for individual documents.

A simple way to understand it:

Simple publication record:

{
	"$type": "site.standard.publication",
	"url": "https://scripting.com",
	"name": "Scripting News",
	"description": "Dave Winer's weblog",
	"preferences": {
		"showInDiscover": true
		}
}

Simple document record:

{
	"$type": "site.standard.document",
	"site": "at://did:plc:example/site.standard.publication/scripting",
	"path": "/2026/05/30/example.html",
	"title": "An example post",
	"description": "A short post used as an example.",
	"publishedAt": "2026-05-30T14:00:00.000Z",
	"tags": ["blogging", "atproto"],
	"textContent": "This is the plain text of the post."
}

The closest summary is:

standard.site is RSS-shaped publishing metadata for the ATProto world.

That does not mean it is “just RSS.” The important difference is where the metadata lives and how software discovers it.

RSS says:

the web is the publishing system
feeds describe what changed
readers subscribe to feeds
rssCloud can make updates realtime

standard.site says:

ATProto is the metadata system
publication and document records live in PDS repos
indexers watch the ATProto firehose
documents may point back to canonical web pages

That gives standard.site some real advantages for people already working in ATProto.

But FeedLand plus rssCloud already has a different kind of firehose: a realtime web-feed system based on RSS feeds and rssCloud notifications.

So standard.site is not the first firehose for web-like publishing. It is a firehose-oriented publishing format for ATProto.

FeedLand’s position is different:

FeedLand treats the web itself as the social web.

That means:

blogs
feeds
podcasts
news sites
personal sites
RSS
Atom
rssCloud
OPML

The claim is not that FeedLand replaces social networks. The claim is that the web already has many of the pieces of a social network:

The web already has identity: URLs.
The web already has publishing: sites.
The web already has syndication: RSS and Atom.
The web can have realtime updates: rssCloud.
The web already has subscription lists: OPML.
FeedLand ties these together into a social system.

The clearest contrast:

standard.site builds a publishing layer inside ATProto.

FeedLand builds a social layer out of the web.

Both approaches are coherent.

standard.site is attractive if you believe ATProto should become a common substrate for publishing metadata, discovery, identity, and social interaction. It gives developers in that ecosystem a common record format and a way to index long-form content from the firehose.

RSS/rssCloud/FeedLand is attractive if you believe the open web should remain the substrate, and that the job is to connect existing feeds, sites, readers, subscription lists, realtime notifications, and people without moving the metadata into a new identity and storage system.

The tradeoff is pretty direct:

A fair one-sentence summary:

standard.site is an ATProto-native way to do something RSS has long done for the web: describe publications and documents so readers, indexers, and social tools can discover and distribute them.

And the corresponding FeedLand summary:

FeedLand is a realtime social layer for the web’s existing feed ecosystem, using RSS, Atom, rssCloud, OPML, and web URLs as the foundation.