Blogrolls are a federated social network

I just stumbled upon a 2024 blog post by Robert Alexander (@alexsci.com) that offers a brief history of the blogroll and why it is still relevant today, in a post entitled "RSS blogrolls are a federated social network". At its core a social network is a collection of links between users. The terminology varies, but these links could be friends, followers, subscribers, professional connections, etc. If we wanted to make RSS social, we’d need a way to define links between the feeds. I like Robert's explanation that "An RSS feed is mostly just a list of posts" and that blogrolls as originally conceived in the early days of the web were "a list of hyperlinks to suggested websites". The problem is that there was never a similar convention for a list of feeds. Discovering these blogroll links programmatically is challenging. Search engine crawlers can do it by exhaustively crawling the web, but the purpose of each hyperlink is unclear. There’s no specification for how to find a blogroll…