@sophieop yeah, its way more common than you'd expect, but unfortunately not universal, and its particularly annoying when its not universal for things that it would particularly be useful for!! (i was talking to a friend about how it'd be perfect for bands announcing tour dates or album releases)
@emaytch @sophieop for things like band tour dates (or similarly, "when is this artist going to be at a comics convention near me"), I've been wishing more people would adopt the other widely-supported standard of the same age as RSS: iCalendar. I'm frustrated about the obscurity of both standards for pretty much the same reasons
@jamey @sophieop yeah! i really want to get more into, i think its CalDAV? i don't love having other people's calendars on mine-- my experience with that on iCal was always kind of feeling overwhelmed and just turning everything off and missing everything, lol-- but its definitely the kind of thing that would be super useful for certain things
@emaytch @sophieop I haven't played with CalDAV, but I've heard from other people that it does the job well of letting you access your own calendars. personally I've been relying on importing various event calendars into mine in order to find out about events I want to go to, but I agree that it can be super overwhelming. my hypothesis is that there's way better UX that could be built for importing and filtering calendars but that nobody's doing the experiments because 1) iCalendar is too obscure so people don't think about it and 2) building experimental tools around RSS or iCalendar remains difficult. so I've been trying to find ways to address both of those challenges
@jamey @sophieop honestly something as simple as an end-user only setting for location, with a matching location code for each event published (which is already something usually included in some form in event calendars like that! so it's not even a lot of extra work), would allow users to automatically filter by events that were near them, and would greatly simplify it just as a start
@emaytch @sophieop yes! I've thought about building a standalone web app that pulls down a configurable set of calendars, filters them by location, and publishes a new iCalendar with only the selected events. but I haven't had the energy for that project yet. it could be useful both for private usage and for creating public curated calendars. the more extreme version would let you specify different locations at different times: "I'm traveling in three months, what should I do while I'm there?" I think there are a ton of opportunities to build useful things like that, and I expect there are lots of other ideas I'd never think of, so I really want to see what other people would do