25 ms·

It's time to head back to RSS?

• spacemonkey92 9y ago
  If any one who doesn't like RSS like me but wish to get all their news websites in one place, I made an app for that. https://7web.co https://7web.co Hope it helps someone.
• ahmetsulek 9y ago
  Hello founder of Panda here, you can use http://usepanda.com http://usepanda.com to read RSS as well. Right now you can add maximum 3 RSS feeds for free. With pro account you can add unlimited feeds. (It's as low as $2.99 per month) We're planning to start a Patreon campaign and our goal is to make all the premium features free for all the users as we reach our goals on the platform. As soon as we reach $2000 we'll make RSS feeds free for everyone. Hope you guys give it a try :)
• wemdyjreichert 9y ago
  Ive used it a bit, but i havent found any solution that can store about half a million aeticles without choking (even though my computer can handle it)
• wakkaflokka 9y ago
  I just started using Feedly again, but it looks like adding sub-Reddits is broken - they don't get updated. Anybody know of a way to side-step this? Use IFTTT to shoot new Reddit articles to an RSS feed that Feedly picks up?
• anomie31 9y ago
  Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article. But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article. I was trying and fell short of something witty to say. Just, wow, this is a sorry state of affairs. Just give me the damn content and I'll be on my merry way.
  • iamdave 9y ago
    I was trying and fell short of something witty to say. But you're right. I use feedly and have chrome extensions that's give me full articles in a readable fashion. I would LOVE to visit some of my favorite sites and read articles as the site designers meant for them to be read. But all of the js and ad fuckery makes reading articles online an absolute goddamn chore lately. So here we are. RSS revival? Bring it on. I'll play drums.
    • mercer 9y ago
      Inoreader.com has a feature that loads the whole page in-app (and possibly even 'readabilitized' it). I'm sure other feed readers do it too though.
    • fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
      TinyTinyRSS lets you use xpath to specify which element on the linked page is the “real” content. It was a life-saver when dealing with snippet-only feeds.
      • iamdave 9y ago
        Ohh I didn't know of this, thanks for the recommendation will definitely check it out.
        • fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
          BTW, you'll need the feediron plugin for the functionality I was talking about.
  • k1m 9y ago
    We have a service that can convert partial feeds to full-text for a lot of sites. If you're curious, you can try it here http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ and code for a slightly older version here https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss
• BuckRogers 9y ago
  I've been using the same method for about 16 years thanks to Firefox. RSS toolbar feeds[0] have been supported since Firefox was in beta (Phoenix). I never did use Google Reader, I viewed that as for the kids! Came and went and I never paid any attention to it, didn't need it and I waited out its existence apparently. RSS toolbar feeds are also the reason I never switched to Chrome, ever. Google never wanted anyone to have ad-free RSS feeds catch on when they could potentially prevent a site visit. For my iOS solution, I use Feedly by simply subscribing to the same sources as I do in Firefox. Not much else is necessary. Other than picking up Feedly for mobile, same tool all this time. [0]https://i.imgur.com/6LTAie1.png https://i.imgur.com/6LTAie1.png
• kemenaran 9y ago
  I found RSS feeds to be the best remedy for my accelerated bit-sized dopamine-inducing news consumption. RSS lets me focus on what I actually want to read, makes me take long-break (instead of short bursts of Twitter updates), and gives me longer and more structured content. I also use RSS for sharing articles, by giving the URL of your Pocket RSS feed to friends. I'm glad that, in the age of algorithmically curated timelines, RSS still exist!
• amriksohata 9y ago
  Agreed!
• jingwen 9y ago
  If you miss the clean UI and keyboard shortcuts of Google Reader, I highly recommend BazQux Reader. The front end tech is also pretty interesting: it's built with Ur/Web. [2] [1] http://bazqux.com http://bazqux.com [2] https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb
  • nanodeath 9y ago
    The Old Reader[1] has been my go-to. Looks similar. [1] https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
    • cmbailey 9y ago
      I'd been on The Old Reader ever since Google Reader shut down. Tried Bazqux thanks to a post here on HN and switched because it's much faster. Very noticeable with a lot of subscriptions (I have over 100). Only relative downside is that there's no integration with Firefox's "Subscribe to this page" button, which TOR has. That means you need to use a javascript bookmark to subscribe to new feeds, which feels kludge-ey in comparison.
  • spikej 9y ago
    BazQux coupled with FeedMe on Android is fantastic!
• robobro 9y ago
  Hot take: we should revive ATOM instead. RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the difference, this is a good article http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared -------- When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a feed for new threads but also for new comments (per thread and board-wide). Made it very easy to monitor updates on all my devices. Most wikis have RSS/ATOM feeds for recent changes which is a great power feature for admins. Mastodon is atom-based, I believe. Early twitter supported RSS / ATOM feeds which arguably made it easier to follow hashtags or news accounts. Another benefit of RSS/ATOM is that you can plug them into chatbots or use them to mirror content. I would love to see syndication come back to the spotlight!
  • avhon1 9y ago
    That comparison article is great! Is there anything that also compares JSON Feed too? https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/ As far as Twitter goes, I use TwitRSS to generate RSS feeds from of a couple of users. https://twitrss.me/ https://twitrss.me/
  • pasbesoin 9y ago
    That server's not responding, at the moment. https://web.archive.org/web/20170914094626/http://www.intertwingly.net:80/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared https://web.archive.org/web/20170914094626/http://www.intert...
  • dannysu 9y ago
    I wrote tweets2rss[1] and use it to turn my private lists into RSS feeds. For example, I have a feed in my RSS reader for interesting people (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc) and a list for interesting companies. [1]: https://github.com/dannysu/tweets2rss
    • mxuribe 9y ago
      Hey, this seems neat; I think I'll check it out. Thanks for contributing this!
• toasterlovin 9y ago
  If you haven’t tried RSS as your main mode of information consumption in a while, you should give it a shot. I went all-in on RSS recently and it’s been great. Way more thoughtful, long form content. Smaller dose information sources (Twitter, etc.) are useful in their own way, but I’ve found that the amount of time required to create a unit of media is a pretty good reverse indicator of how likely it is to use the baser emotions to acquire and keep my attention.
  • reificator 9y ago
    I've been using Feedly ever since Google Reader died, it's still the first place I look. I do wish I could have an easier time getting YouTube playlists in there[1], but video is really the only sore spot there. [1]: Playlists will now only give the top n videos in a playlist, so you basically have to follow a channel feed instead.
    • eswat 9y ago
      As a compromise I’ve used PodSync[1] to feed specific channels into Pocket Casts so I can avoid having to go to YouTube. [1]https://podsync.net/ https://podsync.net/
  • cyberpip 9y ago
    I've been using Newsboat (https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat) and Feeder (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ ) lately. I feel like I'm able to "cover" so much more news with these. It's just more efficient and focused for me, even though nothing is synced beyond the list of feeds (which I seem to only be adding or two every month). Next I need to re-think my usage of getpocket and newsletters, but the switch to relying more on RSS has been an overdue one.
  • JeremyNT 9y ago
    I've had pretty good results subscribing to a few select Twitter feeds via RSS. Some people do put useful content on Twitter, but the Twitter UI makes it very difficult to identify and extract.
• tschellenbach 9y ago
  Version 2 of Winds (open source RSS/Podcast app) is coming out next month: https://github.com/getstream/winds https://github.com/getstream/winds
  • ausjke 9y ago
    looks good, will try
• Havoc 9y ago
  RSS isn't conducive to advertising. That in itself makes it a non-starter
  • hnarn 9y ago
    What makes you say that? Text based advertising sure could be a part of RSS.
    • Havoc 9y ago
      >Text based advertising sure could be a part of RSS. Nobody cares about text based adverts
• adamnemecek 9y ago
  it's hard for rss to compete with say reddit
  • cyberpip 9y ago
    I'd only agree here if you're interested in image/audio/video primarily. Also, see https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss .
  • cheschire 9y ago
    That’s sort of like saying it’s hard for a fast food delivery service to compete with a fast food chain. They’re complementary services, not competition. Reddit supports the RSS standard.
  • superkuh 9y ago
    Actually with the recent increased censorship and bans on reddit I left completely and switched RSS feeds read in a native client reader on my desktop (+voat, trying to make it better by being a good person and ignoring the rest). It helps that I never stopped cultivating them over the years though.
• mandelbulb 9y ago
  Have been using https://inoreader.com https://inoreader.com since the Year Google Reader closed, and imho, it's better than Feedly. I'm also usually reading HN via my full-text feed. Meaning, I don't have to load a link every time, I focus on the articles first, and I can easily pre-load everything for offline reading on mobile. I think, in case of RSS such online services are superior to self-hosted solutions - whether server or client - as there is a greater chance someone is already aggregating a feed you might discover only some time in the future.
  • daveFNbuck 9y ago
    What makes it better than Feedly? I've been using Feedly since Google Reader closed and I think it pretty much nails this simple tool. How is it even possible to be much better?
    • mandelbulb 9y ago
      The dev has always been really responsive and closely watching the community, while Feedly focuses on premium support and feels more corporate. Several features are free: Unlimited sources and feeds, entire search for your own feeds, unlimited tags, sharing via inoreader email There is also: loading of mobilized content via single click/key, better shortcuts, comprehensive tagging management, more settings, better settings placement, contact management, better feeds stats info, save an entry as pdf or print it, more sharing options, better compact theme, more RSS export settings, export the entire profile which includes the content for favorites and save web pages Free Feedly boards are limited to 3 and have been only introduced last year, while tags in Inoreader are more powerful, free and part of the service since 2013
      • daveFNbuck 9y ago
        Now that I'm trying Inoreader, the killer feature for me is being able to open items in background tabs. Too bad that requires a plugin for Firefox.
        • 9y ago
• forapurpose 9y ago
  I'm interested in a reader that focuses on efficiency; like probably most people, no matter how much I try to cull them I end up with too many items in my list, more than I have time for. Let's say it takes an average of 2.5 seconds to read a feed item subject line, decide whether to read it[0], and nothing else - not opening or reading any articles. In half an hour of concentration you could do that with ~700 feed items - again, without reading one article. Let's call 700 feed items a generous maximum; I doubt many will want to devote 30 minutes of their day only to reviewing feed items. I end up with far more than 700 and I know I'm not the only one. How can I make it faster? 1. Obviously, the UI must not slow me down in any way. 2. Deduplication 3. Grouping of feed items covering the same topic. There may be dozens of items covering the march last weekend: If I don't want to read about it, I can ignore them en masse. If I do want to read about it, I can select the best looking feed item from the group and ignore the rest. 4. Display summaries instead of articles, at least optionally. If an item interests me, I can read the RSS summary and possibly save reading full articles that don't interest me or for which the summary contains the info I want. ... Is there a reader that does all that? Even if I have to pay for it? And it's still not enough; I doubt I could efficiently process all the items using only above. What else can be done? [0] Source: I just timed myself doing that with 10 feed items in 26 seconds
  • cyberpip 9y ago
    The major feature here would be deduplication, in my opinion. That would be hard to do though as it would have to parse the feed contents (which vary from links to articles to full blow articles sometimes) and use some kind of percentage to determine whether or not it's a dupe? Curious if there is a smarter solution to that feature possibility.
    • deevee 9y ago
      FYI Inoreader does some deduplication by default. As you scroll you see a message like 'Filtered one similar article'. I haven't noticed any duplicates. That doesn't help when everyone's talking about the same thing, of course.
    • forapurpose 9y ago
• pjmlp 9y ago
  It never went away, my native client has always worked.
  • jobigoud 9y ago
    This so much. Never saw the appeal of web based readers. Been using a desktop based newsfeed for more than a decade. And since we are using it to have a more focused experience, less clutter, etc. it seems logical to have it away from the browser where distractions are just a click away.
• tonylxc 9y ago
  I built a tiny website back in 2005-ish to aggregate RSS feeds from sites that I was interested in. Just for myself and didn't think too much that it could have been an actual product. That was before Google Reader launching in October 2005. Today it's sad to see Google Reader discontinued. Somehow I find this article very interesting in that it's kind of a sandwich that the promotion of Feedly is inserted in the middle, which makes me wonder if the article really wants to advocate the revival of RSS, or is just another marketing one. Does anyone have the same feeling here (confusing face)? Edited: fixed a typo: Google Reader launched in October 2005.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • pinkano 9y ago
    Hi Tony, just to be clear, it is not a promotion for us, we've been interviewed as well as all the other readers and only a fraction of what we've been asked was published. We had no control to review how the final article will look like either. -Petr @ Feedly
• alrs 9y ago
  bandsintown and bandcamp both ditched RSS only within the last year. What were they thinking? Under no circumstances am I installing either of their apps on my phone.
• crispinb 9y ago
  Syndicated feeds (whether RSS or ATOM) are fabulous and are by far the best way to aggregate a wide variety of sources with a minimum of corporate surveillance. There aren't many that don't emit RSS/Atom or can't be coerced in some way (even Twitter with services such as https://twitrss.me/ https://twitrss.me/)
• Alex3917 9y ago
  I implemented RSS on FWD:Everyone this past week (not deployed yet). It was super easy, didn't take more than a couple hours, and only required two or three extra lines of code for each endpoint. I have no idea how much use it will get, but seemed like an important thing to.
• andkon 9y ago
  I just remember the overwhelm: opening up Google Reader and forgetting what I went there to do because there were so many unread things. I don’t think this is endemic to a protocol, but the social filter on top of content is how I find most of the things that I find useful and interesting today.
  • fimdomeio 9y ago
    Yes. This might be a problem with software implementations but it's the reason why I don't use rss anymore. The anxiety caused by "There's 500000 unread items in your feeds"
  • icebraining 9y ago
    I always found RSS/Atom most useful for following sources (usually personal blogs and podcasts) that post infrequently, but where every post is worth reading. Like Oona Räisänen's blog: http://www.windytan.com/ http://www.windytan.com/ For sources that post a lot, it's less useful, since I can just visit every couple of days and have stuff to read. And this means one can easily keep up with the feeds.
    • randomsearch 9y ago
      How do you identify such sites?
      • icebraining 9y ago
        What do you mean by identify? Find them? Well, every way people find sites, from websearches that hit on a good post, links from other such sites, link aggregators, etc. I believe I got that one from Hackaday.
  • gunnihinn 9y ago
    I dislike most RSS/Atom readers for the same reason. I made my own minimal reader for my personal use [1] that only groups entries together by date and displays a feed/title URL I can click on. My browser can remember which links I've read and which I haven't. I find it works really well, it does exactly what I want. [1] http://magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader/ http://magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader/ - in case anyone is interested in what it looks like
• synesso 9y ago
  I spend a lot of time in Slack during the day, so I decided it should become my RSS reader. I created a dedicated team and used an RSS bot to subscribe. It works really well.
• cxromos 9y ago
  that's my ship on these vast oceans for 14 years now. every evening i open (now a beautiful macos reeder app) and depart on sailing as i see fit and where i want to. a treasure, rss feeds collected over the years, from compsc and programming related things, STEM, liberal arts, and several mischiefs.
• zsau 9y ago
  If you already use an email client and have a place to run cron jobs, I highly recommend a feed->email converter. No need for a separate RSS reader, and you get cross-device syncing for free. Options include feed2email[1], feed2imap[2], and my own feedmail[3] (just "released", but I've been using it for years). I prefer clients like the latter two that can upload via IMAP, since that gives better control than sending via SMTP. [1] https://github.com/agorf/feed2email https://github.com/agorf/feed2email [2] https://github.com/feed2imap/feed2imap https://github.com/feed2imap/feed2imap [3] https://github.com/zsau/feedmail https://github.com/zsau/feedmail
  • JimDabell 9y ago
    I find that I'm far more able to manage information overload by doing the exact opposite and moving non-human email into a newsreader. Email is for people, not newsletters or notifications. If you can move as much of the non-automated stuff into feeds as possible, then email actually becomes useful again. Feedbin has a feature [0] where it gives you an email address that places anything received into a feed, for example. [0] https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsletters-in-feedbin/ https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...
  • FranOntanaya 9y ago
    Thunderbird already supports feeds.
    • 8bitsrule 9y ago
      And for anyone who still thinks that the T-bird project died long ago, look again ... it's been greatly improved for the past few years and an interface overhaul is in the works. I don't subscribe to any podcasts that don't support RSS. Most do (altho a few make you use a search-engine to find out where).
    • zsau 9y ago
      I used to do that, but you're tied to Thunderbird that way and I don't recall it having syncing for RSS, either. With a cron job, you're free to use whatever clients you want across multiple devices, with free sync thanks to IMAP.
• meganibla 9y ago
  If wired is saying it’s time for a revival it’s probably long overdue
• huy-nguyen 9y ago
  I subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds of more than 100 technical sites using Reeder, hosted by Inoreader for free. Overall it’s been a great experience. The only gripe I have is that many sites these days (especially small blogs) don’t have an RSS feed or have one that isn’t discoverable.
• Abishek_Muthian 9y ago
  I always felt RSS/ATOM were underrated, So in 2015 for the love of RSS and information consumption we set out to build a completely customisable news aggregator app with fast parsing (RSS/ATOM), category selection, reorder categories, notification customisation -(schedule, DND), image toggle, data saving mode, filter, youtube, sharing news with own voice attached called Talk about News - https://talkabout.co.in/ https://talkabout.co.in/ Sharing news along with voice was the USP, so that the shared content gets more value. While working on this, we saw that not every site followed RSS/ATOM standards we had to individually handle different sites for the shortcomings. I'm certain that, though Feedly started as RSS aggregator they are now parsing the sites as a whole for content for the same reasons. By the time we built and released it, we understood Facebook has become the defacto news consumption source and without big marketing budget; our project was dead as soon as it arrived. We tried to salvage the tech and re-brand it as 'build your own app'for bloggers, but it didn't take off. But we did take the voice sharing feature from TaN to another product called larynx, as we understood the 'News' in the name of Talk about News was one of the main inhibitors for downloads. larynx (PH) - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/larynx https://www.producthunt.com/posts/larynx Note: If any of you tried the app and if didn't work as expected; my apologies as the app hasn't been actively developed for years now & the website exists only for historical reasons.
  • imagetic 9y ago
    They were. It was just too complicated for people. I couldn't get my parents to setup RSS. No way.
• geordee 9y ago
  True. RSS gives control over what and how we consume information. The curated newsfeed is prone to gaming and misuse. In fact, we should be able to select feeds, curation engines and reader apps. This way it would be less of a "platform" and more of "www".
  • sdfmxiid1 9y ago
    The issue of control with newsfeeds and RSS has been on my mind a lot the last year or so. RSS and Atom are great as a protocol, but where things break down for me is in discovery, filtering, and selection of content. There's a few traditional RSS/Atom readers I like, because I have complete control over the feeds I monitor. The problem with this is that then I have complete control over the feeds, and have no way to be alerted to content I might have otherwise missed. I think this is part of the "unread feed overload" problem mentioned by some others, that I just a firehose of feeds at me, with no prioritization of content. The other end are more curated things, like Feedly. This is great, because I get alerted to things that are popular, but they're very centralized, and it seems like the more you get curation, the less often you're able to customize your feeds. Also, for whatever reason, with the curated systems, it seems like you kind of get the same things over and over again from different systems, like there's a set of feeds they all dip into and don't deviate from. This is my ideal in an RSS/Atom reader (not saying it's realistic): 1. Open source 2. Good UI 3. Can import and export using OPML or other similar standard open format 4. Cross-platform, between desktop and mobile 5. Decentralized feed recommendation The last part is where things go a little off the beaten path, which is that it would be nice to have some way to get introduced to popular content without it going through some centralized service, like a recommendation system that's decentralized.
• username223 9y ago
  It always has been. I've been a happy NetNewsWire user for well over a decade. It even supports shell script feeds, so you can write scrapers for sites that don't provide an RSS/ATOM feed themselves.
• gbugniot 9y ago
  IMO, RSS is by far the best tool to get news content. Thanks to the ratio signal/noise. Problem is, how to convince website editors to promote theirs RSS feeds while there are many social networks out there with built-in ads feature.
• donpdonp 9y ago
  Also be able to consume activitypub feeds. http://activitypub.rocks/ http://activitypub.rocks/ supported by Mastodon sites and others.
• dirtylowprofile 9y ago
  Days ago I received an email from the makers of Airmail about their upcoming RSS Reader app called Cappuccino and invited me to their beta app. It still early but a promising app.
• aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  I'm bummed that no one has mentioned Feedbin, for which I have paid since it launched back in 2013(?). It's fast, not too larded up with unnecessary features, works across the desktop, iOS, and Android, and costs money, so I know that it'll be around for a while, and that I'm the customer and not the product. https://feedbin.com https://feedbin.com Edit: it's also OSS: https://github.com/feedbin https://github.com/feedbin
  • skosch 9y ago
    And it's really well designed!
  • b__d 9y ago
    Also early supporter here. For the great product/service I even voluntarily increaced my subscription rate, because $2 (what it started with) a month seemed way too cheap to me, especially for a heavy user like me. Still love it.
• sago 9y ago
  RSS is awesome. Bring on its resurgence. But. It is fundamentally not fit as a Facebook or social media replacement because of it's lack of simple commenting support. It suits some curmudgeonly old farts like me, perhaps. But even I want to feedback sometimes or join in the discussion (hence this comment). Are there solutions that a content creator can provide, via RSS, without requiring its readers to install particular jiggery pokery? Or is the only option HN / reddit style commenting sites, separate from the content?
  • manicdee 9y ago
    RSS for headlines and federation of feeds, Disqus for comments.
    • sago 9y ago
      Wouldn't that just make Disqus the new Facebook?
    • pmlnr 9y ago
      webmentions and microsub, please. Disqus is just another silo, it has nothing to do with RSS and federation.
      • manicdee 9y ago
        Thanks for the pointer. What facility does webmention have to support moderation of comments on my articles?
  • modernerd 9y ago
    There is ActivityPub: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16222478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16222478 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://github.com/w3c/activitypub https://github.com/w3c/activitypub But not enough implementations of it yet that tie into blog content.
    • 9y ago
• rhema 9y ago
  I've been slowly adding to my RSS feed since 2006. It's migrated from Google Reader to "The Old Reader". For some sources, it's the only way to keep up. I like that I can keep track of web comics I'm interested in. For thinks like Medium and Wordpress, they already have a feed reading compatible format. I also add my Github, so I can see when other people commit to repositories in my lab. Feed reading is great because it allows one to lurk. It gives the consumer more control over when to view material.
• anotherevan 9y ago
  Just to plug Newsblur, as others have been posting what they use. I've been using it since Google Reader shut down and am very happy with it.
• noam87 9y ago
  I've been a (paying) user of NewsBlur (https://newsblur.com/ https://newsblur.com/) since Google Reader shut down and haven't looked back. p.s: In HN spirit, it also happens to be one developer's side-project-turned-profitable-business, and the "social" features a totally non-intrusive, but there if you want to know what people are sharing and commenting on.
  • emit_time 9y ago
    I am also using newsblur, after trying several other services
  • Symmetry 9y ago
    After Google Reader went away I was actively looking for a reader where, by giving the creator money, I was ensuring it would stick around. And also where I was the customer rather than the product. There's a free version you can use to try it out but it's limited in the number of feeds. And $24 a year isn't a high price for what I'm getting.
    • frizkie 9y ago
      Looks like it's $36/year now.
      • pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Still easily worth it. I probably get my $2/month value's worth in a single couch session, throwing my saved YouTube feeds onto the Chromecast.
  • DaveWalk 9y ago
    Newsblur is also YC S12. And it has been worked on ever since with some cool features: you can forward your newsletters to it and turn them into RSS feeds(!) for example.
    • forty 9y ago
      That's a really awesome feature. Thanks for sharing that.
• borplk 9y ago
  The internet has become so hyper-commercialised that I don't think "innocent" technologies like RSS/Atom are going to make a comeback.
• imartin2k 9y ago
  RSS has been the backbone of my online information management and news consumption since 2006 and it's still unrivaled. A web without is impossible to imagine. In my eyes, Feedly has done a fairly good job at making the format accessible even to average users.
• imagetic 9y ago
  Amen. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. But almost nobody is offering RSS at the moment and most publishers who do drop the ball. Feeds are broken or partial. It might be time to start from scratch though, I'm not sure RSS is simple enough for normal people. Podcast delivery format would be nice, where you subscribe and discover from one aggregated portal and it's finding similar content and making solid recommendations. Maybe inject some type of medium / rank feature so you can track trending content and subscribe to channels of what's popular.
  • tehwalrus 9y ago
    Podcasts are RSS feeds aren't they?
    • grzm 9y ago
      Podcast feeds often are, though they can really be any web feed format[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed#Confusion_between_web_feed_and_RSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed#Confusion_between_web...
      • adrianN 9y ago
        The RSS feed makes a podcast out of a bunch of audio content imho.
• cmcginty 9y ago
  When did people stop using RSS? After Google Reader was available, I've never looked back.
  • kzrdude 9y ago
    I would say that Reddit and hacker news are direct "competitors" to RSS readers, it's a different kind of syndication flow that certainly replaced my RSS Reader for me.
    • zworks 9y ago
      hm, I'm actually reading both HN and reddit through RSS right now, just add .rss after any subreddit url and you are done: https://www.reddit.com/r/wtf/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/wtf/.rss
• tmikaeld 9y ago
  100% of my news feed is RSS and have been the past 7 years (It's how I read HN[1]). I use this Open Source RSS/Atom client: https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ Activate a couple plugins and it works just like Google Reader! [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
• mosselman 9y ago
  I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway? The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommending content to people, etc. |
  • Vinnl 9y ago
    Medium has had RSS for quite a while, it just didn't link them in a page's metadata. I believe they do now. For example: https://medium.com/feed/flockademic https://medium.com/feed/flockademic (publication) https://medium.com/feed/@flockademic https://medium.com/feed/@flockademic (user) The latter also includes responses to stories though, which can be noisy.
    • benjaminjackman 9y ago
      Oh wow thanks I didn’t realize there was a comment free version, that’s very handy. I worry though if rss is a secret feature that will get the axe someday since I was never able to find any reference to rss on the sites themselves and only came across the noisy @ version by chance from some other random comment on the internet someplace.
  • lovelearning 9y ago
    They provide feeds, but don't show a link anywhere on the UI (which is strange). [1]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feeds https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed...
    • gboudrias 9y ago
      Not that strange, every site on which I've looked for it has RSS/atom feeds where relevant, but hide them (eg this, github, etc). Interestingly enough, Firefox has a "feeds" section when looking at page info, which will show RSS feeds included in the meta tags (which they all seem to be). So really, I've never stopped using RSS, not sure how to go "back" to it. I understand the whole thing with Twitter killing it but as a dev I use RSS as todo lists and that still works wonders.
• cdancette 9y ago
  I used RSS while Google reader existed, and I stopped using it for a few years after it disappeared. Now, I'm using a service that sends some RSS feed to my email so so can read them directly from there. I think it's amazing as it has all the features I need (tagging, mark read / unread) and I don't need to open another website / application to read my news.
  • IlPeach 9y ago
    Have you got a link?
    • adrianmsmith 9y ago
      I do the same. I use https://blogtrottr.com/ https://blogtrottr.com/ and am very happy wit it.
      • kungtotte 9y ago
        Are you paying for it or do you just put up with the ads? If so, how intrusive are they?
        • adrianmsmith 9y ago
          I don’t pay for it. They’re not intrusive at all. Actually I’d forgotten there were ads until you mentioned it :)
      • jstanley 9y ago
        I use Blogtrottr too, and I have a "newsletter signup" form on my blog which just posts the input email address to Blogtrottr's form.
    • cdancette 9y ago
      I also use https://blogtrottr.com/ https://blogtrottr.com/ like another mentions. There are some ads, but they don't appear in the email if you have an adblocker. I'm think about paying the service, which I find very nice !
• jk2323 9y ago
  I never stopped using RSS. I follow a few hundred blogs (many of them have only very very few posts. Rule of thumb: The lower the post frequency, the higher the quality). I host my tinyRSS. I consider offering it to the public for free. Here is a good RSS feed for Hackernews: http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300 http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300 Here is a service to convert a twitter feed to RSS (never really understood twitter, sorry) Example http://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=Lsigurd http://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=Lsigurd Here is a service to convert many RSSless websites to an RSS feed. Works soso. https://feedity.com/ https://feedity.com/ EDIT: Hackernews RSS feed link was wrong
• x0x 9y ago
  Comparison of feed aggregators on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators
• pinfeed 9y ago
  Interesting timing. I'm in the process of launching a privacy-first feed reader with tight Pinboard integration. May add support for other services eventually, but I love Pinboard. Lmk what you all think of the idea: https://www.pinfeed.net/ https://www.pinfeed.net/
• modernerd 9y ago
  Yes. But please not RSS. At least newer initiatives like JSON Feed have maintainers who respond to requests for improvements. RSS feels like an abandoned standard. I tried to submit an improvement to the author directly to explicitly allow HTTPS URLs in light of upcoming iTunes changes to enforce HTTPS; they said by email that of course HTTPS resources are valid in their view, but they weren't prepared to actively update the spec to say as much. Until that's done some feed validators continue to mark HTTPS resources as invalid.
  • grzm 9y ago
    I agree RSS is pretty crufty. (I've got a soft spot for Atom.) Do you have a list of validators that don't accept HTTPS resources as valid?
    • modernerd 9y ago
      Feed Validator is one. (It returns “href must be a valid URL” for image resources that start https:// https:// because the RSS spec does not openly say that HTTPS image URLs are valid.) I tried and failed to change this, and was told that the RSS spec needed to change first: https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/issues/16 https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/issues/16 And I'm not the only one: https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/pull/30 https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator/pull/30 I respect Sam's opinion in those threads because really the spec needs to change, but I've given up trying to change it. We ended up serving all feed URLs over HTTP as a result because customers using Feed Validator kept complaining that our product generated invalid feeds.
      • grzm 9y ago
        Thanks for the links. Do you happen to know if the validator accepts Atom with https resources? I'd think it should (if I'm understanding correctly), given that it uses IRIs, and IRIs support https as a protocol.
        • modernerd 9y ago
• ilmiont 9y ago
  Erm.. I never stopped using RSS. I have never consumed news primarily on social media, I subscribe to hundreds of feeds and that's always where I get my news from. I use Feedly with the wonderful Nextgen Reader client for Windows. 10/mobile. Beautiful app, service, news experience.
• svalorzen 9y ago
  One thing I don't understand is people who use all these websites to handle RSS. I've always used Firefox addons in order to handle RSS (before LiveClick which was awesome, now FeedBro or similar). Why would you give control away for something as decentralized as RSS?
  • kemenaran 9y ago
    I would guess mainly for synchronization between different computers and devices?
  • sametmax 9y ago
    Regilar users don't know what a url is. They don't choose their gear. They may, sometime, accept a simple proposal. The HN bubble is strong, you need to pop it.
  • eitland 9y ago
    Same here: I tried all those services, then gave up on RSS, then found Feedbro a while ago and now I use that. (I mainly use it for work purposes: following updates from relevant projects, issues from selected github repos and a couple of people who write useful stuff about tech I use.)
• pvsukale3 9y ago
  I recently added RSS support to my sideproject blogging platform. https://stdlog.net/logs/show/stdlog-net-now-supports-rss-feeds-7693f1 https://stdlog.net/logs/show/stdlog-net-now-supports-rss-fee...
• singingfish 9y ago
  RSS never went away. Podcasting has made careers (e.g. deboarah francis-white, roman mars, andy & helen zaltzman, ollie mann and many others). The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS. And it ain't going away, or getting embraced and extended any time soon.
  • Zhyl 9y ago
    Podcasting feels like an alternate reality where none of the massive players took over and everything stayed federated.
    • thinkloop 9y ago
      Interesting you say that, I got into podcasts recently (a bit late I know) and found the space very confusing. It's kind'of all on iTunes, but not really, you can get them from their source sites, but also some apps have a subset. Understanding the model is not easy. I didn't know it was powered by rss until this thread. I am really pro federation, and I am not deterred, but I am an engineer on HN. I wonder why email, being federated as well, is easy for anyone to grok.
      • afterburner 9y ago
        Pocket Casts is a nice podcast app.
        • CAT0 9y ago
          They also have a nice web interface https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/ https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/
          • _asummers 9y ago
            There's a native OSX app, too, which has been mostly ok for me, so far. A few bugs occasionally, but it's better than running in browser in my experience.
• pacoverdi 9y ago
  > THE MODERN WEB contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers This is from a page that connects to (excerpt): c.amazon-adsystem.com z-na.amazon-adsystem.com tag.bounceexchange.com graph.facebook.com sb.scorecardresearch.com cdn.mediavoice.com odb.outbrain.com cdn.quantummetric.com native.sharethrough.com s.skimresources.com pixel.tapad.com d.turn.com p.typekit.net use.typekit.net cdn.yldbt.com segment-data.zqtk.net
  • icebraining 9y ago
    Well, you gotta write about what you know! /s
  • aoeusnth1 9y ago
    Yeah, but to be fair, the journalist who wrote this has little to no influence over the analytics choices made by the web developers who run wired.com.
    • pacoverdi 9y ago
      Sure. Couldn't help to notice the irony though :)
• rcarmo 9y ago
  I’ve pretty settled on using Feedly and Reeder in iOS, even though I experimented with RSS via IMAP[1] for a fairly long time. I zip through 1000+ news items a day over breakfast in this way, and my only real gripes are duplicated postings (which are usually best solved by careful handpicking of news sources) and the lack of a decent backlog/archival feature (I settled on Pocket for that). On and off, I try to build my own “most relevant/trending/hot items” feed via NLTK, but topics of interest vary too quickly in out industry for proper training... [1]: https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap
• fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  Can anyone clarify to me: why do people use web RSS readers, as opposed to local applications?
  • awiesenhofer 9y ago
    For me personally it's mainly about synchronisation. I use feedly on my phone, tablet and laptop and never have to see or archive a story twice. Plus i can star/save an interesting story on my laptop and read it on my phone later, say while commuting.
    • icebraining 9y ago
      Same here, although I use a self-hosted TinyTinyRSS server rather than a third-party service.
• z3t4 9y ago
  My phone, an old Nokia, has a built in RSS reader and when I visit a web site that has RSS I get a "follow" button next to favorite. I can even set the RSS reader to show me a notification when there's an update. The same convenience could probably be accomplished with a browser extension or native app.
  • sametmax 9y ago
    Firefox does this, albeit in a more subtile and hence less discoverable way.
• thinkloop 9y ago
  No voting, no comments. It's very tough trying to identify what's important, and when you do, you want to talk about it. Should/can RSS be extended to include voting and comments?
  • icebraining 9y ago
    Yeah, I think ActivityPub support could be nice.
• geraldbauer 9y ago
  Remember planets - public online news readers? Why not build your own little news feed with pluto [1] (and SQLite) and the universal feedparser library [2] supporting RSS, JSON Feed, Feed.TXT, HTML Microformat Feeds, and many more formats :-). [1] https://github.com/feedreader https://github.com/feedreader [2] https://github.com/feedparser https://github.com/feedparser
• nreece 9y ago
  RSS feeds rock! They're much less "noisy", and best of all - untouched by algorithmic sorting. * Shameless plug *: our service at https://feedity.com https://feedity.com helps create custom feeds for any public webpage.
• wybiral 9y ago
  I've been aggregating my news for my own use recently so I can keep a database of articles and grab articles from more sources than just RSS (some are parsed out of HTML). The Python code for some of the sources is here: https://github.com/wybiral/stream-sources https://github.com/wybiral/stream-sources On my network there's a bunch of those stream sources feeding into a Golang server that stores the articles and aggregates the ones I'm interested in for real-time updates/alerts. The nice thing is that I can attach temporary scrapers with alerts to monitor status pages and other updates that don't use RSS or anything. IMO WebSocket API's or streaming HTTP make more sense than RSS these days. But RSS can easily be converted into a format like that if you store the recent history and only push new content.
  • __bee 9y ago
    Generally speaking, is it legal storing RSS content (if the RSS contains the article)
    • wybiral 9y ago
      It's for my own use. Also I don't see why it would be any different than leaving it open in my browser or something. The articles here are mostly title, link, summary too. So not too unlike what someone would share on social media or something.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• duncan_bayne 9y ago
  For those getting into RSS, I can recommend two resources. For a SaaS newsreader, I really enjoyed using Newsblur. Great service, excellent functionality, and first-rate support. For a desktop newsreader, I suggest Emacs with elfeed. That's what I use today, and is the only reason I'm not still happily paying for Newsblur.
  • nicky0 9y ago
    You lost me at Emacs.
    • nslamberth 9y ago
      Even if you don't use Emacs as an editor, consider using it just for elfeed (or magit). It works on almost every platform in existence and is rock solid.
  • nslamberth 9y ago
    +1 for elfeed! Using that with eww for reading articles has made checking the news a very pleasant experience for me.
• knorker 9y ago
  I don't understand. If RSS went away, how did people read webcomics and stuff like that?
  • icebraining 9y ago
    I assume Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, email subscriptions or simply visiting the site regularly.
• tjadowski 9y ago
  I use my own piece of software as RSS reader - https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder.git https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder.git
• manmal 9y ago
  To me, RSS and Twitter/FB/etc are very different things. With RSS you are „alone“ while reading it. There’s no one to discuss things with you. I‘m not really qualified to make this statement, but I‘d say RSS feeds don’t have a social component, leaving your limbic system (responsible for social interaction) widely out of the process. You process the info and that’s it. With Twitter, everything is attached to a social context. If a link is posted by your personal idol, you engage in (pseudo?) social behavior if you read it. You may then feel compelled to discuss it, and you will feel rejected if nobody answers, or very good if you get a lot of likes. So, lots of limbic/social interaction. Both have their merits.. without Twitter, I would have a content discovery problem, and with (only) Twitter I‘ll live in a bubble, plus my IRL social interactions might be somewhat crowded out by the interactions on Twitter, plus Twitter can make me feel socially miserable for very petty reasons. Personally I would love a system that combines my personal RSS feed with recommendations resulting from mining Twitter and applying ML to generate relevant results.
  • addicted 9y ago
    Well, one reason Google Reader’s closure was such a loss was because it added a social layer to RSS. And it was a completely optional and non-intrusive social layer. I really wish Google had tried to enhance Reader instead of killing it to promote Google+. Allowing the ability to post short messages in your shared feeds would have made it very Twitter like, only nicer.
    • manmal 9y ago
      They should kill Google Plus and resurrect the Reader.
  • typon 9y ago
    Agreed. Imagine having an RSS feed for all the posts here on Hackernews and just reading that instead. I come here mainly for the comments - and not usually to debate or discuss even - a lot of times to contextualize the content in question because inevitably someone more knowledgeable will post their thoughts about it. RSS is not a panacea and it is no replacement for social platforms.
• janvdberg 9y ago
  May I suggest FreshRSS, a free and self-hosted RSS reader: https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS
• subroutine 9y ago
  This article comes just days after DIGG shut down their RSS reader. Sux, I used it every day. Me and my OPML file are looking for a new home... https://digg.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000678608 https://digg.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000678608
  • kabes 9y ago
    I went from digg to feedly. It's almost the same experience.
    • subroutine 9y ago
      Per your suggestion I checked out feedly; i like it. Thanks!
• mrmondo 9y ago
  I agree with those that say RSS never went away, for the last 10 years or so I’ve noticed my dependence on RSS grow and it’s critical to my keeping track of news across a number of blogs and websites. I wrote a shitty little blog post on it last year: https://smcleod.net/thoughts/2017/09/22/return-of-the-rss.html https://smcleod.net/thoughts/2017/09/22/return-of-the-rss.ht...
• bb101 9y ago
  I'd be bored out of my mind between sets at the gym if I didn't have my Feedly RSS feeds and gReader Pro on my Android. Facebook and Twitter are much poorer cousins in comparison.
• _pctq 9y ago
  Funny, I've set up a RSS reader again just this week. Prior to that, my main source of information was google feed (when you sweep right on android main screen - for those who don't know it, it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests). I totally loved it, as it properly detected my interests and shown articles about them even from websites I don't know about. But lately, I saw more and more posts I wasn't interested in. Well, it always happened, but those made me wondering because they were posts about brands, or very specific products. Was this promoted content? I don't have a clue. Be it promoted content or not, I realized I was vulnerable: anything could be pushed to me and I would think I see it because I'm interested in it. And I have no way of checking why something appears in my feed. So I decided to get back to RSS, and realized I could still have the discovery of new sources using... google alerts. I can set a google alerts using the advanced search semantics of google search, and get the result as a RSS feed. This means I discover new sources and I can verify why it appeared (it matches my custom search). Best of both world. And obviously, I can also subscribe to specific RSS feeds to be sure to not miss something I love.
  • wyclif 9y ago
    A lot of people don't seem to be aware of it, but you can "tune" Google News by adding or deleting sources. I've tweaked mine quite a bit and it works well as a lazy news source. It's not as finely granulated as my RSS consumption, and it won't replace my RSS reader, but it's better than I at first thought it would be after adjusting the defaults.
    • awiesenhofer 9y ago
      After having to remove "recommended" news sources and articles all the time I decided to "tune" it by deinstalling the Google Search App altogether therefore removing News. I use feedly instead now and am quite happy with the added battery runtime.
    • washadjeffmad 9y ago
      I've given up on that but haven't sought alternatives. I'm not sure what began influencing my feed, but even after removing sources, choosing what was useful and what I wasn't interested in, it still mainly gives me popular and political news, which were never set in my interests. Other than that, it gives me information that's a day late, which makes things like one-day sales notifications for not useful. I've largely switched to podcasts to make up for the content gap but would be interested in a aggregator that didn't try so hard to be smart.
• Jaruzel 9y ago
  RSS is the prime way I consume my daily news, and has been for several years now. I even knocked up a rather lame online reader on a spare domain I had: https://www.weegeeks.com https://www.weegeeks.com That way, regardless what machine I'm on, I can still get my fix. It needs a re-write to bring it up to modern standards, but it still does a sterling job.
• kakarot 9y ago
  Set up a reader a few months ago, it's been nice. I started on a python-based HTML scraper to summarize, tag, and prioritize news articles but put it on hold to work on other things.
• murrayb 9y ago
  I went to Blogtrottr https://blogtrottr.com/ https://blogtrottr.com/ when Reader shut down. I have been very happy with it and it means one less place to go look, my feeds just come to my inbox.
• cedricbonhomme 9y ago
  I use my own RSS reader since around 8 years now. It has evolved quite a lot. Before I was using aKregator. I started with a simple CherryPy project and a SQLite database. It is now using Flask, SQLAlchemy and React: https://www.newspipe.org/ https://www.newspipe.org/ I have something like 200000 articles in the database. And the oldest article is from February 1995!
  • foxhop 9y ago
    Oh a whim I decided to grab an account. Very cool! I'll likely use this. Because I have never really used an RSS reader before I'll likely not have any biases as a user which I think is good. I think one recommendation is that while Newspipe is pulling in a new feed for a new user, on the home page it should give a message like, "your posts will appear here"
    • cedricbonhomme 9y ago
      Thanks, I appreciate. I never thought about this. Good idea. Just updated Newspipe: https://github.com/newspipe/newspipe/commit/9479b9abf4bc3525f48dfc61b1daffc90b3379a1 https://github.com/newspipe/newspipe/commit/9479b9abf4bc3525... Feel free to open issues on GitHub ;-)
  • slater 9y ago
    Just a heads-up: Tried logging in before I got the confirmation e-mail, typo in error message: > User is desactivated Should probably be something like > User account has not been activated yet. Check your e-mail, etc. etc.
    • cedricbonhomme 9y ago
      Thanks, fixed. I used "Account not active", because an account can be deactivated later. Maybe it will be even better to just say something like 'bad login and/or password'. In order to give the minimum of information.
• mikulabc 9y ago
  goodnews.click been around a while :)
• mike-- 9y ago
  Another one - https://github.com/truerss/truerss https://github.com/truerss/truerss
• jasonkostempski 9y ago
  Multiple sources in one place, no new account, no giving away your email, no re-skimming over read/skipped articles (across sorces if your reader is any good), filters for known garbage (domains with pay/sign-up walls, blog spam, etc.). My frustration with YouTube subscription mechanics is what resparked my interest in RSS years ago, that's when I found out most channels have a hidden RSS feed. Reddit has them, but the way they're delivered makes them difficult/impossible to filter. Most blogs have them, even if they don't display a link.
  • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    This sort of thing makes me wonder .. well why are we on this proprietary site here; why isn't the HN community using a decentralised sharing system?
• captn3m0 9y ago
  Does anyone know of something that could help maintain OPML files? I would like to keep a long list of categorized RSS feeds in a simple YAML file and generate a OPML feed out of that.
• bad_user 9y ago
  I never stopped using an RSS reader, or writing on my own blog, hosted on my setup, with my domain for that matter. For its purpose an RSS reader is a much better experience than everything else. The only thing that comes close is Twitter, but it’s too noisy, you can lose really good, but less popular articles, between all the other shit happening on Twitter. It’s also addictive and time consuming. Sure, go back to RSS, but some of us never left it and we’ve been enjoying it.
• benbristow 9y ago
  I use TinyTinyRSS. Works pretty well. Fully free unlike services such as Feedly, just like Reader was back in the day. Works well on any shared hosting or VPS etc. as long as you've got PHP/MySQL/Postgres and the ability to setup a CRON job (CPanel/Plesk give you this) or the daemon.
• ashildr 9y ago
  Does anybody read Hacker News outside their RSS-Reader?
• blacklight 9y ago
  RSS have been my main source for consuming web content for the last 15 years. Social feeds? Ads? Trackers? I don't know what you guys are talking about :)
• nasalgoat 9y ago
  I still read tonnes of RSS feeds, including HN. It never went away.
• wordpressdev 9y ago
  Most of the information I consume is through RSS. I use Feedly for that.
• seba_dos1 9y ago
  I'm using a self-hosted instance of CommaFeed and it's awesome. Simple, no distractions, fast and reliable.
  • krn1p4n1c 9y ago
    This. Best reader I've found.
• fatfox 9y ago
  https://miniflux.net https://miniflux.net - simple and self-hosted
• consultSKI 9y ago
  Many of us never left. Yes, it was disappointing for a few days when google changed horses. Their loss. The article failed to mention that RSS feeds are the backbone of Amazon's Alexa Flash Briefings. Seems once again, Bezos and crew know best. Shameless plug for our Flash Briefing (available on Alexa, iTunes, and our website but only available the days ending in "y"): http://jmpurl.info/flashbriefing http://jmpurl.info/flashbriefing
  • mkirklions 9y ago
    I think the world is moving to a repeatable and reusable style of storing data. RSS and JSON have become standards that people can use for data on multiple platforms.
    • consultSKI 9y ago
      Agreed. It is an API world. I recall trying make sense of xml then came RSS feeds. Then, why JSON, and now you can have RSS like feeds (and a lot more) via JSON.
• dcalixto1 9y ago
  RSS is the best source of getting information that i've experienced until now.
• katebrooks 9y ago
  I just started with RSS. It's good thing to hav them back.
• dankohn1 9y ago
  I describe myself as the last "old" using RSS because after Google Reader went away, I found Inoreader. It's a clone, with tons more filtering features and (importantly) the ability to follow Twitter feeds and searches as well. I recently discovered HN RSS, which is awesome for showing comments: https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=kubernetes+OR+k8s https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=kubernetes+OR+k8s And here's the trick for seeing all new tweets with relevant hashtags but not retweets: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23kubecon+OR+%23cloudnativecon+exclude%3Aretweets https://twitter.com/search?q=%23kubecon+OR+%23cloudnativecon...
  • ukyrgf 9y ago
    I don't know why I ever stopped using Inoreader in favor of Feedly. Feedly's Android app is atrocious and I can't open links in Android Chrome using feedly.com, which just made me stop using RSS altogether. It wasn't broken in the first place, I have no idea why I meddled with it.
    • dankohn1 9y ago
      I prefer using Inoreader's mobile website to their iPhone app, since it opens links in my regular browser.
• kabanossen 9y ago
  Here's a feed I made with pages that have reached number 1 on Hacker News: http://enklo.se/hackernews/best-of-hacker-news.xml http://enklo.se/hackernews/best-of-hacker-news.xml
• p0nce 9y ago
  I've implemented RSS for my blog because its pull mode instead of push mode (like god awful notifications everyone wants you to enable). I don't know if anyone uses it though!
• SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Is there RSS used as a social platform?
• qwerty456127 9y ago
  Great idea. But why RSS when there is Atom?
• tootie 9y ago
  RSS + AMP. Let's do it.
• macmac 9y ago
  Never left.
• shortformblog 9y ago
  I support this, but I think that RSS services for publishers need to be a part of this conversation, too. I wrote a piece a while back about how FeedBurner has basically been allowed to survive in zombie form at Google—with literally no improvements since at least 2011. https://tedium.co/2017/11/14/google-feedburner-rss-history/ https://tedium.co/2017/11/14/google-feedburner-rss-history/ There are alternatives to FeedBurner that are quite good (I personally use FeedPress) but I think that if RSS is going to get any momentum back, we need more people making these tools again. The emergence of JSON as an alternative to RSS is a real opportunity here. (Side note: Was a long-term Digg Reader user, so its loss was felt. I found FeedBin a decent alternative for my needs, FWIW.)
  • maximevalette 9y ago
    I'm the CEO of FeedPress, thanks for your support! BTW we're supporting JSON feeds since the 1.0 release: https://feed.tedium.co/?format=json https://feed.tedium.co/?format=json Cheers
• theclaw 9y ago
  I've tried Feedly but my goodness, the corporate language is such a turn off. I just want a feed reader, I don't want to "Fuel your team's success," "Enrich articles with unique insights," "Automate your content workflows," "Reinforce your digital brand". These features may be cool and useful, but the way they're sold makes me gag. I used my ad blocker to remove the "Well done!" that appears when everything is marked as read, it's so patronising. Now I use rrss (https://github.com/pmarinov/rrss https://github.com/pmarinov/rrss) because it just reads feeds and doesn't constantly promote itself with management garbage.
  • SimeVidas 9y ago
    I’m viewing RSS on feedly.com for years. I just checked the features in Feedly Pro. It says that the free tier is limited to 100 sources, while Pro gets you unlimited sources. What does this mean? I’ve already added over 500 sources and it seems to work fine.
    • mandelbulb 9y ago
      You had the account before they put the limit in place. As for the parent comment, read my two posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16721859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16721859
  • criddell 9y ago
    I think it was Feedly that has sent me a survey asking what I want them to work on. My reply was that it does its job just fine. Reduce the team to a skeleton crew and slip into maintenance mode. It seems dangerous to keep expanding the feature set because you are just expanding your future maintenance budget. I don't think I've ever shared a single thing from my news reader. I don't want people sending me stuff so it only seems right that I don't spam them.
    • leonroy 9y ago
      This. Sadly though VC money doesn’t really align with a reasonable rate of return. Seems Feedly did take on a $1M round a little while back - that said they’ve been around since 2006... I use it everyday, one of my favourite apps — hope they’ll keep the product around in its present form for a long while yet.
• hacknat 9y ago
  I never left.
• chrisweekly 9y ago
  The focus here is on consumption, but IMHO it's also an ideal time to return to decentralized publishing, too [blogs, personal ("vanity") websites, etc.]. Of course the two go hand-in-hand... but maybe instead of trying to replace FB or Medium, it'd be better to take this alternate federated approach.
• emodendroket 9y ago
  I really just want a local app for doing this that doesn't suck. Google Reader really masterfully killed all the momentum behind local RSS clients, I guess.
  • Sylos 9y ago
    On what OS? And what are your criteria for "doesn't suck"?
    • emodendroket 9y ago
      Windows, and I guess what I mean is that I can generally read the articles without having to open them in my Web browser (which something like Thunderbird isn't really good for). If you have a recommendation I'd be happy to take a look at it.
      • Sylos 9y ago
        That doesn't seem like too hard of a criterion to fulfill, but well, I'm rather fond of QuiteRSS. It has all of the options for automatic filtering and tagging, and its UI is rather configurable, too. It's also open-source. https://quiterss.org/ https://quiterss.org/
• awat 9y ago
  I’ve been using a hosted copy of TIny Tiny RSS (https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wiki https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wiki) for a few years now combined with Fiery Feeds on iOS. It’s been rock solid for me, it took a few weeks to dial in my settings for TTRSS but once those were locked in It’s pretty empowering to filter out a lot of the noise in the news cycle.
  • eddyg 9y ago
    Agree that this is an excellent combo.
• lousken 9y ago
  After reading just the title - it was never time to leave RSS in the first place.
• NicoJuicy 9y ago
  Not finished ( performance), but my personal bookmarking site ( like HN or Reddit) supports the auto-download of Feeds and implements Tags through it ( RSS based). http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest For now, it's usefull for me personally, but it seriously needs a update. It also supports url customizers ( eg. preventing paywalls from certain sites to redirect through the facebook share url)
  • duiker101 9y ago
    Seems pretty dead. There's a timeout on the db.
    • NicoJuicy 9y ago
      Performance, it's probably syncing RSS feeds or too many people ( as mentioned, need to improve it). Seems to work fine though when i'm watching it: http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest but a db timeout could be indeed.
      • NicoJuicy 9y ago
        Edit: made it 50% faster by now. Not enough though
• arca_vorago 9y ago
  Yes and irc and usenet.
• nicolaslem 9y ago
  I recently started using RSS again after a long break. Like many of you I decided to build my own reader. Since RSS/Atom is quite easy to work with I didn't take me long to get something usable. I built a Python library[0] to parse feeds and a Django app using it[1]. It is not ready for prime time yet, but I use it daily and like it. [0] https://github.com/NicolasLM/atoma https://github.com/NicolasLM/atoma [1] https://github.com/NicolasLM/feedsubs https://github.com/NicolasLM/feedsubs
• reggieband 9y ago
  Maybe MRSS has a chance. I am old enough to remember the first go around at all this. I remember reading an article during the 1990s on O'Reilly about RSS, semantic web, etc. I used to read Dave Winer's blog pretty regularly. I remember being skeptical at the time and it turns out my skepticism was prescient. Nowadays it seems common to generate MRSS feeds for podcasts and video playlists. Devices like Alexa, Google Home, etc. are taking advantage of this format. Instead of it being used to "free-the-web" it is being used by content aggregators to ease vendor lock-in. This lock-in could not be achieved with textual content (where it is easy to write a competing application) but it can be achieved with hardware devices. I'm even more cynical now than I was in the 1990's. I do not see content creators providing unfettered access to their content. The whole point of vendor platforms like Facebook and newer devices like Alexa is that the content is marshalled by the platform NOT the user. Content creators will give that ground to another corporation that they can negotiate with but I don't believe they will ever give it to users directly.
• drdeadringer 9y ago
  I seem to have missed the "abandon all RSS" movement, which doesn't surprise me. I am missing That One Puzzle Piece which enables me to understand why people ditched RSS in the first place. I'd appreciate enlightenment.
  • alexandros 9y ago
    Google reader was introduced, made it look like it would be there forever and cost nothing, which killed any alternatives. Then Google killed reader in favor of Google+. At that point, there was no good reader, and even with not-as-good alternatives like feedly, a lot of people didn't feel like setting things up again. As a result, the whole ecosystem was knocked out of balance and never recovered.
    • drdeadringer 9y ago
      > Google reader was introduced Ah, a good point. This was a blip on my radar because, oddly, I had RSS and wasn't as plugged into Google at that time as I am now [yet am still 'on' RSS now more than ever].
  • fulldecent 9y ago
    The (perceived?) reality is that social grows your user base and RSS doesn't. Publishers care about growth more than serving existing customers.
    • drdeadringer 9y ago
      > (perceived?) reality is that social grows your user base and RSS doesn't Another fair point... in general RSS can be thought of as "broadcasting to users" instead of the illicit "user engagement". On another fair point though, the RSS app I currently use [Podcast Addict] has a "share" option with beget-plenty list of options [from eMail to Twitter]. I can't imagine other RSS apps not having the same in Current Year.
• fulldecent 9y ago
  A visitor that comes to your site via social is MUCH more valuable than someone that comes via RSS. The economics of this reality are what removed RSS from the limelight. Dear publishers, let's fix this. Whenever you publish a blog post, etc. please syndicate it on social and then go back to your site to add "DISCUSS THIS ON TWITTER/whatever AT https://t.co/aesou02" https://t.co/aesou02". Make sure that this also syndicates to RSS. Dear pubsubbers, let's fix this. In your reader software, please lint these special links and show the discussion below the news. We know you want to get into the content discovery business -- this is the first step. See the Slashdot RSS feed as a good example, they inline the discussion right in the feed.
  • dingaling 9y ago
    I am struggling to understand. Why is a social-origin visitor more valuable? Honest question. I would have expected an RSS-origin to be a more tech-savvy reader and more likely to engage.
    • freehunter 9y ago
      Engage where? Engage how? Tech savvy may not be what you're looking for, and is not always a good thing. I think what fulldecent is saying is that people reading on RSS have a barrier to sharing and a barrier to commenting that doesn't exist on social media. On Twitter or Facebook, the "share" action is intrinsically linked to the article in its native format. Not so on RSS.
  • DrScump 9y ago
    "DISCUSS THIS ON TWITTER/whatever AT https://t.co/aesou02" But some of us refuse to use Twitter for such purposes and won't click on shortened/anonymized URLs from strangers in any case.
  • danShumway 9y ago
    I've been wanting to set something like this up with Hacker News. The problem is that you have to do it two-stage; your website needs to go live, then you need to post it (so you can get the post url), then you need to update the website. It's not insurmountable, it's just a bit harder than it should be to automate, especially if you're running a static site or something that takes a minute or two to go live. I'd love if social sites had some kind of API for settting up a draft post or deterministic urls, so you could pre-include the link during your build step.
• sir_brickalot 9y ago
  I miss Sage++ (Higmmers Edition). [1] Sidebar RSS reader for Firefox. It was perfect for my use case. (Now its dead due to WebExtension) [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/sagepp-higmmers-edition/ https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/sagepp-higmmers-...
  • bostik 9y ago
    So do I, but I've discovered a reasonable replacement: Brief.[0] 0: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/brief/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/brief/
    • sir_brickalot 9y ago
      I try to get along with Feedbro but its just not the same. [0] [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/feedbroreader/ https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/feedbroreader/
• boterock 9y ago
  It's sad that no one has mentioned Pushbullet. Is a small app that notifies you when things happen, and you can set it to notify RSS news, it also integrates with IFTTT and has a bunch of other features. You should check it out. Edit: It also has top HN, and it notifies when a story reaches 100 points IIRC.
  • Tijdreiziger 9y ago
    A feed reader allows you to catch up on your feeds at a time that's convenient to you (much like old-fashioned magazines), rather than pestering you every time an article is published.
• braindongle 9y ago
  What is the best RSS reader that has a customizable tiled layout, like http://www.protopage.com/ http://www.protopage.com/? By this I mean, I have (nearly) the whole screen at my disposal, can choose the number of columns and rows, and the height (number of article titles) for each tile/feed. For my money, no other layout comes close in terms of information ingestion efficiency.
• Mauricio_ 9y ago
  I recommend blogtrottr for sending rss to your email. If you set a Gmail filter you get pretty much the same experience you had with Google Reader.
• Animats 9y ago
  The key thing to know about RSS is that most of the real news sources, those that have actual reporters who go out and find news, have RSS feeds. Reuters, the Associated Press, the New York Times, the BBC... Here's Reuters Top News.[1] Just the news, no ads, no clickbait. Reuters is useful because their RSS feed contains a readable story summary. Many RSS feeds just have a truncated sentence and a link. Both CNN [2] and Fox News [3] are like that. Voice of America is at the other extreme - the whole story is on RSS.[4] [1] http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews [2] http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss [3] http://www.foxnews.com/about/rss/ http://www.foxnews.com/about/rss/ [4] https://www.voanews.com/rssfeeds https://www.voanews.com/rssfeeds
  • Ajedi32 9y ago
    Pretty much everything has RSS feeds. Random blogs, webcomics, even major sites like YouTube. If it puts out content on a regular basis, chances are you can subscribe to it via RSS.
    • amerine 9y ago
      I think the OPs point is that there are very valuable first-party sources of information with RSS feeds that you shouldn’t ignore. Basically, there is gold out there.
      • Animats 9y ago
        Facebook and Twitter both used to have RSS feeds, and stopped supporting RSS to force people to use their ad-heavy client interfaces. But that's not where the good stuff is. While "social" has dropped RSS, it's still doing great for real news.
        • Jhsto 9y ago
          There is still the option to make your own client or just buy something like Tweetbot which has no ads. But I hear you. I find Twitter unusable without 3rd party client, and I think that is affecting my experience in an indirect way as well. I think the fact most people see ML picked tweets has caused fewer people responding to what I share now versus 4 years back.
• platz 9y ago
  Inoreader
• jtanza 9y ago
  I decided to build my own RSS reader a few months back after getting into the habit of consuming news via RSS, and not really being thrilled with any of the readers out there. The source is open and can be pulled/built locally from GitHub[0] or accessed at the public instance for free[1]. It also made it to the front page of HN through a Shown HN post a while back, so at least a few people here enjoyed it (: [0] https://github.com/jtanza/rufus https://github.com/jtanza/rufus [1] http://rufus.news http://rufus.news
• timdeneau 9y ago
  I want to use RSS to increment unread content badges on my bookmark icons, to show me so-and-so’s website added a new blog post since the last time I visited. Implemented into the standard bookmark browser, no reader necessary. Is this already a thing anywhere?
• _emacsomancer_ 9y ago
  Emacs has an interesting RSS feed reader: elfeed [ https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/blob/master/README.md ], which even has an Android client [ https://github.com/areina/elfeed-cljsrn/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/areina/elfeed-cljsrn/blob/master/README.m... ].
• kin 9y ago
  As a news publisher, wouldn't encouraging RSS hurt the value of my ad space? What's the incentive? Would readers pay for access to an RSS feed?
  • allhailkatt 9y ago
    Premium RSS feeds are one option, as well as putting only a brief summary of the article into the RSS with a link to the full site. The monetization model will probably look similar to Twitter, except without needing to dodge algorithmic uncertainty since RSS is a pure feed. Plus, Outlook does have an RSS feed function. The incentive can be the same as newsletter publication. It just depends on how you want to reach people.
• bartl 9y ago
  But Google News says "This RSS feed is deprecated"...?
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• pers0n 9y ago
  Yes let Web 2.0s dream of open standards win over this world walled web we have today
• cpeterso 9y ago
  RSS was not discoverable for non-techy users, in part because browser support was clunky and publishers were reluctant to send readers away from their websites (and ads). But these days publishers rely on Twitter and Facebook as a "worse is better" method to syndicate links to their content. Twitter and Facebook are discoverable and sharable. I feel like there is some opportunity to create new personalized social software or services using RSS in a post-Facebook world.
• specto 9y ago
  Frustratingly, feeds are gone for such things as reviews on amazon, instagram accounts, youtube, and other sites. It's dying because people don't use it anymore.
• noemit 9y ago
  Can we get Google Reader back?!?!?!
• importantbrian 9y ago
  RSS never stopped being a thing for me. When Google Reader shut down, which I still miss, I moved over to Digg Reader, and now that that is shutting down I finally decided to try out Feedly which I like so far. I just like curating my own content.
• iuguy 9y ago
  > You've read your last complimentary article this month. > To read the full article, SUBSCRIBE NOW. I'm surprised they haven't kicked off over my ad-blocker.
• zafiro17 9y ago
  I've continued using RSS for years, even when it was a "dying" technology. It certainly never died for me, and is super useful. It's probably the first app I reach for in the morning. I use a few apps not mentioned here. Each is for a Unix/Linux platform: Newsbeuter is a console RSS feeder that's a dream if you prefer keyboard driven software. You can update one feed or all of them, search across all feeds for key words, export to OPML, etc. I also used curn, a java app that can email you your custom feed update whenever you run it with cron. Lastly, rawdog updates feeds and publishes a custom web page. I use it on a VPS running a webserver, and visit it from wherever I like. RSS has been a good way for me to stay in touch with individual bloggers etc who publish sporadically. And I inherently distrust any software that wants to customize a feed for me based on my interests, etc. I always suspect they are more focused on pushing to me what others have paid them to push, than showing me what they think I'll like. How can any paid company ever keep straight those two inherently different things? ("Here, I think you'd like this because I earn money if you do").
  • hokus 9y ago
    > RSS has been a good way for me to stay in touch with individual bloggers etc who publish sporadically. This! This has to be the main selling point. The second would be to NOT use a web service but to run your own desktop feed aggregator. Everyone should stop using walled gardens for things you can easily do yourself: YOU should be responsible for what you publish - no one else. YOU should be responsible for what you read - no one else. It doesn't work any other way. I'm not able to decide what you can and cant write on your blog. I'm also not able to decide what you can and cant read. If your crap ends up on my webserver in whatever way I will be responsible for it(!) Someone once said: When you grow up you have to be your own mum. It might sound like a lame joke but if you want lame nothing can beat a formula where one ends up responsible for what other people publish. Any amount of needless centralization will have the usual suspects pressure that entity into censorship. What is legal in one country will land you in prison in the next. Employers, government, border and airport security etc cant "ask" you for access to your home desktop computer. But more importantly: Without RSS you cant read small websites that rarely publish. This also means you don't have to make your own website anymore in 2018 because no one reads it.
• chx 9y ago
  Problem is, Facebook for me is the tool to stay in touch with friends. Events are organized on Facebook and I can't just drop FB because of this.
• sbaha88 9y ago
  I've actually been working on RSS-like feed for newsletters website in my free time. It's still soon to tell if it's useful, but I am slowly starting to replace email subscriptions.
• daddosi 9y ago
  I role my own aggregator, its 1000 years ahead of the rest. Im only half kidding. Ill share my most recent idea: sort news items by the amount of time between its pubdate and the previous pubdate in that feed. (Discard items older than x where x is since last time you read the results, a fixed amount of time or more if the number of "winning" results is insufficient.) The idea is simple. That guy who never says anything. When he opens his mouth it should be interesting to hear what comes out. He will be delighted to have 1 reader. A much more enjoyable position than listening to some screaming news anchor or other attention whore.
• Digital-Citizen 9y ago
  The article asks if "anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online" and then offers choices which are either hosted web services or proprietary programs, both of which grant someone else the power to control what you see via that reader. So even though standards everyone is free to implement (RSS is certainly in that set) are critically important it's hard to take some of the article seriously. The real way to avoid the problem of non-freedom and deny the admins/programmers the power to control your reading is to use free software RSS feed readers instead of hosted services you don't host yourself or proprietary programs. Choose RSS readers that respect a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program. https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Internet-application/newsreader https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Internet-application... points to some.
• korjavin 9y ago
  I never left RSS, it is still better.
• sygma 9y ago
  I would argue that RSS survived because feeds are offered by default on Wordpress blogs, and Wordpress powers a significant part of online publishing. Luckily, Automattic isn’t the kind of company to pull off a Microsoft-style “Embrace, extend, extinguish” [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
• VirgilShelton 9y ago
  I never stopped using RSS !
• sudhirkhanger 9y ago
  Do you read HN and Reddit in your RSS readers?
• swlkr 9y ago
  Yes it is. I run some email newsletters and it’s kind of a pain to have someone give you their email just to stay up to date without a third party like twitter or Facebook, I like the idea of RSS feeds as a more direct way for people to subscribe to updates without giving up their email
• IronCore864 9y ago
  What feeds have you bookmarked? Let's share some good ones shall we!
• ryanpcmcquen 9y ago
  What is a good open source RSS reader with Android and Linux support?
• kevwil 9y ago
  This strikes a nerve, one still tender and stinging from Google's betrayal of Reader users. Yes, still. Things like Facebook's non-chronological feed algorithm still annoy me greatly, and a good RSS/Atom aggregator would please me to no end. I switched to Feedly but really need to take better control of my Internet news consumption so I welcome a revival of RSS.
• jhund 9y ago
  Shameless plug: We created https://contentgems.com https://contentgems.com as a feed reader on steroids: You can follow feeds, however you can also filter them based on powerful keyword based search (and other params). You can follow the CG firehose (tens of thousands of feeds we follow and index for you), to discover new feeds. And then you can curate and share the best articles from CG. It's a mashup of Feedly, Google Alerts, Buffer, and IFTTT/Zapier.
• ant6n 9y ago
  Yes.
• guybedo 9y ago
  i never thought it was time to give up on rss. Facebook has become a mess, and never was a place to get news from. After Google Reader was shutdown, i switched to Feedly, but was missing some features, so i decided to build something that would be a cross over between a regular RSS reader and a news aggregator like Google News. So now i can manage my rss feeds, and check out the news in the world that don't show up in my feeds. I also added automatic categorization, entity extraction, and will be adding recommendations, filters, rules, etc... If you want to give it a try and give me somme feedback, you're welcome :-) http://aktu.io http://aktu.io
• DeepWorker 9y ago
  I just subscribe to the weekly newsletters of news websites/blogs I'm interested in. Does RSS have any advantages over this?
• hopesthoughts 9y ago
  I never stopped using RSS. Currently between theoldreader and feedbin.