Digital Crossroads

Making the Web a little more open - one story at a time.

Digital Crossroads is a mishmash of the coolest updates, deep dives, and quirky insights from across the digital realm. We cover topics like RSS, the Fediverse, and the latest and greatest in the world of social media. Crossroads is for anyone who's ever been curious about the behind-the-scenes of the Internet, the future of online privacy, or just loves a good tech tale.

The Artisanal Web | Another Rodeo

6 days ago

I feel very seen here. This describes how I built The Session: There are still people building the web by hand, very much like we did it in the early days. They know all about what’s possible using modern tooling, yet they choose to expend their time and attention to the craft of doing it by han...

Using Thunderbird for RSS

7 days ago

I’ve started using the Thunderbird email client for reading RSS feeds again, and it’s honestly quite great. As opposed to it not honestly being great, which if true, would kind of defeat the point of writing this post. I’ve gone through a bunch of self-hosted web RSS clients. They had the advantage ...

Paywalls For Minimalists

7 days ago

What’s the least you can do to build an effective paywall for creators that’s mostly open-source? If we can figure that out, that might make it easier to cut out the big platforms.

Pluralistic: The web is bearable with RSS (07 Mar 2026)

8 days ago

Today's links The web is bearable with RSS: And don't forget "Reader Mode." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Eyemodule x Disneyland; Scott Walker lies; Brother's demon-haunted printer; 4th Amendment luggage tape; Sanders x small donors v media; US police killings tallied. ...

Speaking Freely: Shin Yang

11 days ago

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity. David Greene: Shin, please introduce yourself to the Speaking Freely community.  Shin Yang: My name is Shin Yang. I am a queer writer with a legal background and experience in product management. I am the steward of Lezismore, an independent, s...

Using Astro for a Combined RSS View and Generator

12 days ago

Ok, before I start, let me just clarify this demo is kind of a remix of my earlier post about building an RSS aggregator in Astro. I did run into some interesting issues this time around though and I figured it was worth a share. At Webflow, our developer docs are separated into different sections p...