19 ms·

RSS is undead

• NicoJuicy 9y ago
  RSS is the core of my Reddit alternative. Still improving performance though http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest I currently use it for personal bookmarking and posting stories to HN. It's based on tags, eg. http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/ByTag?Name=artificial-intelligence http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/ByTag?Name=artificial-intellige... Ps. Performance is slow on the main page for sorting calculated columns ( eg. The Algorithm ), that's why I linked to the newest page
  • dc_gregory 9y ago
    I think we killed it :)
    • bryanrasmussen 9y ago
      you've got to double tap to make sure, rules of surviving rss is undead land.
    • NicoJuicy 9y ago
      Back alive atm ( disabled RSS sync :p ) If anyone knows how to performantly sort on non deterministic computed columns ( eg. the ranking algorithm for votes of posts + comments) in MS SQL server -> https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/203331/slow-calculated-sort-in-ms-sql-server https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/203331/slow-calculat... i'd be very happy :p, it's killing my "trending topic" performance... Edit: added non deterministic
      • pbalau 9y ago
        You don't do the calculation on the fly, you do it at data mutation time (if the column should be the same for every client) or in a separate "thread" (eg, a script). Basically, you pre calculate the column and simply add it to your table, indexed.
        • NicoJuicy 9y ago
          It's non deterministic because it has a time variation ( newer posts get ranked higher). Even then?
          • erpellan 9y ago
            Don't modify the scores of old posts, start newer ones with a higher score. Check out how reddit does it: https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms-work-ef111e33d0d9 https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo... The concept is that the time-based part of the score is immutable, fixed at post creation time. That way you only have to recalculate when a score-modifying event occurs, not every time the page is refreshed.
            • NicoJuicy 9y ago
              Good advice, thx!
  • JD557 9y ago
    The "receive new content" modal is really annoying. It appears every time my mouse exits through the top of the page, so it pops up every time I change tabs.
    • NicoJuicy 9y ago
      Yeah, I use it for myselve and I'm always logged in ( doesn't happen then). Will change that after improving performance
  • superkuh 9y ago
    Same here. I had used RSS less frequently as I used aggregators like Digg and Reddit more. But after leaving reddit last month I found a lot of the old URLs had decayed. No problem. Most had just moved URL slightly or changed format so finding them on the http site was easy enough. And while finding the new RSS URLs I often checked out the entire blogroll/webring/etc too and found new feeds to subscribe to. For me RSS is wasn't ever dead. But it may have been left to itself in the nursing home for a few years.
• discreditable 9y ago
  > losing your logo, colors, and fonts on an article is an effective way to kill enterprise value Dropping the garbage styles is one of my favorite things about RSS. Using my TT-RSS via phone app is a lot speedier than the "enterprise value" provided by the native site. This article loads 3.97MB with an adblocker. In TT-RSS, I can load the homepage and a full-page RSS article from Ars Technica for only 600kb.
  • mAEStro-paNDa 9y ago
    Exactly. In fact, this is a tremendous advantage that RSS has. The assertion that it needs some "sort of commerce layer" is not an issue of the technology, but a question of the industry of advertising and the structure of the economy. The problem of keywords as the author mentions is a cultural one, based on the way our society exchanges and prioritizes the information we receive.
    • discreditable 9y ago
      I think the author's wording is perfect. It's not "user value" they're concerned about, it's "enterprise value".
  • musage 9y ago
    When something can't be said to have value, go with "business value". If something can't be said to make sense, go with "makes business sense".
  • Vinnl 9y ago
    It's interesting, because that functionality is why I mentally usually draw parallels between AMP and RSS. Except AMP seems to have better success pushing management to implement it, which is probably due to Google's prominent placement of articles that have AMP versions available.
• JelteF 9y ago
  We're currently working on an Open Source and good looking RSS + podcast app that has personalization built in. If that sounds interesting to you be sure sign up here to be notified when the beta is released: https://getstream.io/winds/ https://getstream.io/winds/
• wwweston 9y ago
  > I think the solution is a set of improvements. RSS as a protocol needs to be expanded so that it can offer more data around prioritization as well as other signals critical to making the technology more effective at the reader layer. Maybe it's a failure of my imagination, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything at the protocol level that wouldn't make RSS worse as a general protocol, though it might improve at specific cases. Leave the protocol simple, let innovation happen at the client level, and then if necessary enhance the protocol to support generally effective solutions. "4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value. 5. All the Internet's value grows on its edges." http://www.worldofends.com/ http://www.worldofends.com/
• edhelas 9y ago
  The Movim (https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/) social network is relying heavily on the XMPP Pubsub standard. All the articles published on the network are actually Atom elements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)), it's then super easy to import and export Atom/RSS feeds in XMPP (for example https://nl.movim.eu/?feed/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim https://nl.movim.eu/?feed/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim). On top of that Pubsub brings you a fully real-time solution (no need to pull hundreds of feeds each 15min, the articles comes to you) with roles, subscriptions, comments (also relying on Atom, see https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html) and many other things :)
  • severine 9y ago
    Only Android 5.0 and up :(
    • edhelas 9y ago
      It's actually because older versions of Android doens't have a browser up to date enough to support Movim (see https://github.com/movim/movim_android/issues/1 https://github.com/movim/movim_android/issues/1). Sorry about that. You can still access Movim using any other browsers (Chrome, Firefox) on your phone and bookmark it on your launcher with a similar result :) The Android app is basically a wrapper around a WebView.
      • severine 9y ago
        Cool, yeah, I'm "stuck" with my old, tiny smartphone but I'm quite reluctant to change it (I even refuse to call it an upgrade [shakes fist]). But it's really insecure and slow also... I have a similar problem with Firefox, no updates since 55.0.2. But Movim looks really great, I should give it a go, thanks for the links!
• unicornporn 9y ago
  RSS never (un)died for me. I run FreshRSS[1]. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite (no migration troubles!). The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use https://twitrss.me/ https://twitrss.me/ to follow users. If you don't find a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/). [1] https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/
  • gsich 9y ago
    Twitter offered a RSS feed directly. But they disabled it, with their "new" API, because of some bogus reason.
    • opencl 9y ago
      They had a very simple reason, they can't show ads in the RSS feed.
      • jasonkostempski 9y ago
        There's nothing stopping ads in RSS feeds, just tracking. Those should be separate things.
        • naravara 9y ago
          >There's nothing stopping ads in RSS feeds, just tracking. Those should be separate things. Bingo. Plenty of my RSS feeds have ads, they just publish them as articles and say "This RSS feed is sponsored by. . ." It's the same ad model as podcasts basically. Other ones just give you an abstract or short blurb on your feed with a link to go back to the main site, which works just as well.
      • gsich 9y ago
        I always thought of a "marketing" "reason". Like "we want people on our site" which is not the case when a user reads postings with a RSS reader. At the same time they restricted apps more. Which, was probably because ads.
• nreece 9y ago
  RSS never died. On the contrary, its usage for content aggregation & monitoring has been increasing over the years, specially in the business world and niche markets. I'm speaking from my own experience running a growing & profitable startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com https://feedity.com, that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages. Our upcoming API and content explorer (a different kind of 'feed reader') have received thumbs-up from some customers who opted for early-testing.
  • plugger 9y ago
    +1. I start each morning in the office by firing up my RSS aggregator. Have been since the early days of Google Reader. I can skim through my feeds in minimal time, especially when compared to any other alternative.
  • c12 9y ago
    This makes me smile to hear. It looks like you have a great product - I remember maybe a year or two ago a similar provider went under due to lack of interest, but I think they were targeting the wrong market by aggregating users social media into a personal feed.
• amarant 9y ago
  what is dead may never die
• croisillon 9y ago
  OT: what has become of TechCrunch? I'm on a wide screen (1920 pixels), don't expect me to read paragraphs with 16px font! So I scroll down without really reading and I see "view comments", I scroll down a bit further and I see there is more stuff so maybe they buried the comments and I don't even need to click? I scroll further and... lose the whole article to land automatically on the homepage. Such a layout is plain horrible and I won't return to TC for a few more years.
  • stanislavb 9y ago
    yeah, it seems that with the goal of being modern, their usability has dropped enormously. I always feel confused whenever I happen to open a TechCrunch article.
  • gkya 9y ago
    The page almost looks perfect with JS disabled. If the major browsers were better at giving the user a way to use and maintain a whitelist of which web sites are allowed to run JS, maybe the websites become less JS-heavy. NoScript or UBlock don't even come close wrt UX to what xombrero was, and what qutebrowser is ATM (I've switched to it from Firefox, just awesome).
    • vanderZwan 9y ago
      I assume you've given uMatrix a shot?
      • gkya 9y ago
        Nope. I was using uBlock origin on Firefox with dynamic blocking and quite a bit of the provided blacklists enabled. I just gave quick uMatrix a look, and it does not seem fundamentally different to me. I like that I can easily add some globs and use version control on the blocklist without having to import-export my settings. Qutebrowser is a very interesting browser. It's easily scriptable using a config file in python, but not only. It has a nice Emacs Customize like UI, and then it has a system reminiscent of CGI for running external scripts against web pages or on events. A definite improvement for me over whatever is available. I maintain a handful of websites with js enabled (HN, reddit, youtube, a couple more), and for the web apps I'm forced to use, I just start up Chromium temporarily. It's been lovely so far.
• Aissen 9y ago
  No one has mentioned NewsBlur yet. It's fantastic as an RSS reader, and provides intelligence training (filtering) for only subjects you might be interested in, allowing you to tame high-rate RSS feeds quite easily: http://newsblur.com/ http://newsblur.com/
  • im_dario 9y ago
    Thanks for the reminder. I just recovered my account and I'll give a try to the intelligent filtering.
    • Aissen 9y ago
      Tip: if the RSS doesn't have proper tagging, you can select words in the title you wan't to use as a match :-)
  • pivotal 9y ago
    When Reader shut down I migrated to newsblur, vowing to pay for things I really use, so RSS never died for me :)
  • creatonez 9y ago
    Can this be self-hosted?
    • detaro 9y ago
      Click on the Github icon on bottom of the page and find out ;)
    • _up 9y ago
      It is not really meant for self hosting. Newsblur is build to scale and basicly needs 3 servers/envirements (app, db, task) and also Sentry, Redis, Celery, RabbitMQ, Postresql, MongoDB and Elasticsearch running.
    • jefurii 9y ago
      You certainly can - the code is on GitHub with install instructions. I considered self-hosting but it's cheaper to just pay the yearly subscription fee. Also I feel good about paying for a service that respects me by opening the source and by giving me the ability to export if I want.
• erikrothoff 9y ago
  At https://feeder.co https://feeder.co onboarding is one of our largest hurdles to solve. For a lot of reasons we're lucky to get a lot of users who are completely new to RSS. This means we have a huge job in educating what RSS and what it's not. We've seen that a lot of large sites have stopped advertising their RSS feeds on their homepages, making it harder to detect via the standard means. Also, we've never stopped growing and are approaching profitability on one full time employee so don't believe the RSS-is-dead hype.
  • c12 9y ago
    I used to use the feedafever agrigator (until upgrading my servers PHP version stopped it working) I could give it a website url and it would attempt to identify the feed from it; probably first by looking for relevant meta tags and then resulting in checking obvious url paths.
• JetSpiegel 9y ago
  > solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds > I would gladly pay money for an Amazon Prime-like subscription where I can get unlimited text-only feeds from a bunch of a major news sources at a reasonable price. It would also allow me to get my privacy back to boot. Facebook had a scandal over selling private data, so move to RSS for the privacy! RSS doesn't allow tracking (from Amazon), let's turn it into HTML.
  • gregknicholson 9y ago
    > solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds RSS is not a business model. Selling things people actually want is a business model. If you can't persuade someone to pay for your content (perhaps via willingly watching adverts), then it's not economically viable content. If you care enough to continue publishing it, great, but it's out of your own pocket.
    • gkya 9y ago
      > If you can't persuade someone to pay for your content (perhaps via willingly watching adverts), then it's not economically viable content. "useless content". FTFY.
      • gregknicholson 9y ago
        No, there's a difference between “economically viable” and “useful”. A labour of love may be very valuable to its author and its audience; it's just not a way to make money.
        • gkya 9y ago
          Certainly. What I meant was the content that was meant to make money but not inherently economically viable, i.e. all that clickbait ad-ridden stuff out there.
          • 9y ago
• jsmeaton 9y ago
  This seems like a weird article. People are advocating for RSS to avoid “the algorithm” and to increase privacy. Yet the author recommends adding analytics (tracking) and a way for publishers to indicate priorities. No. That’s the opposite of why people are again pushing RSS. If you want a read count, then add pingback urls and make the protocol support it so various feed aggregators can report true numbers. Curation should happen at the client, not the protocol. Tagging various feeds works well for me.
  • catach 9y ago
    > No. That’s the opposite of why people are again pushing RSS. Maybe the opposite of why users are pushing for RSS, but without analytics content producers have reasonable justification for being hostile instead.
    • jsmeaton 9y ago
      Which is why I suggested the middle ground of a pingback URL that clients or services can hit to give the publishers certain stats like aggregated counts. If certain publishers are not ok with those limitations there will still be a bunch of people writing blog posts that are not so concerned.
      • catach 9y ago
        > there will still be a bunch of people writing blog posts that are not so concerned. I assume that 80-90% of blogs already have RSS, just due to default configurations. Seems to me the context here is about pushing adoption and design significantly beyond that, both in terms of consumers and producers. I can't say for certain that a pingback URL system would be acceptable, but I strongly suspect a dramatic comeback requires drastic measures.
      • jasonkostempski 9y ago
        Clients are supposed to be user agents, they shouldn't be doing anything in the interest of the publishers especially when it's hostile to the user. It's a shame browsers have lost site of that, let's not let RSS readers forget as well, that would be the real death of RSS.
• tw1010 9y ago
  This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index", like GDP, to tell us just what proportion of users on the internet uses RSS anymore, we're stuck having to rely on socially propogated ideas about the state. This leads to all the typical problems with socially defined truth, such as drift as a consequence of incentives (or just random mutations due to statistically insignificant data, amplified by mimetics). Just remember that fact-space is only correlated, but not bijective, to common-sense-space.
  • jeremyjh 9y ago
    Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • simias 9y ago
      I'm sure they had, but what these numbers were and how they interpreted them is not known AFAIK. Google might have considered that RSS didn't fit with their long term plan for how the web would be consumed, I'm thinking in particular of AMP which has a certain overlap with RSS but gives Google a lot more control.
    • ArekDymalski 9y ago
      I guess that the decision to shut the Reader down didn't appear due to lack of users, but rather ambitions to shape the internet-news-experience by more tightly controlled, proprietary apps like Google Currents/Newsstand or maybe even Plus.
      • jerf 9y ago
        I think that's pretty likely, because compare the continuing grousing about Reader having shut down to, umm... those other services that Google shut down, whatstheirnames... Of course anything Google shuts down gets an immediate scream of pain from some people, but most everything else they've shut down has died out since then. (The other one I still hear about is Wave. Though that one seems to have a lot of people lamenting what could have been, rather than what actually was. For Reader, the complaints are about what actually was.)
• smarx007 9y ago
  Thank you, TechChunch, for resuscitating RSS! /s
• whisk 9y ago
  People who concerns their information source are keeping using RSS all the time. RSS can confirm you receives all the news you subscribed everyday and decide read which article by yourself. I hate some new media who provides App only. App can increase DAU and maybe better for their KPI, but will lose serious reader.
• SllX 9y ago
  > RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. This is a feature, not a bug. > Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make it in the competitive media environment. If you can't survive without tracking my behavior, then I guess you will die. Given the quality of writing I can expect from this "competitive media environment", it won't be a great loss. > RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively. This is a feature, not a bug. > They need to actively guide users to find where the best content is... Let me stop you here. An RSS directory is nothing challenging. You can make one by hosting an old timey "list of cool sites" .html on your own website. Brent Simmons included one when he developed and maintained NetNewsWire before selling to Black Pixel. Modern day Podcast clients often include a directory or access to a 3rd party directory. Anybody can create a directory, stuff it with all the criteria they need to sort by tags or algorithmically push users to the highest bidder and ship it in an RSS client. RSS is a good technology. In terms familiar to a newspaper or press corporation, it is a wire service, except one that goes from newspaper to reader rather than from the Associated Press (or whoever) to newspapers to readers. It does one thing, and it does it well, and doesn't support anything less than it needs to do it. RSS clients range the gamut from inboxes (NetNewsWire) to news rivers (River5) to machine-curated digital newspapers (Apple News), each of them solid form factors and useful for different types of feeds, and the only reason that variance of form factors is even possible is right there in the name: Really Simple Syndication. Dave Winer was right to freeze the spec, it's not perfect, but it is good enough. Letting newer iterations filter through would lead us to a situation like with the web, where the www went from a really great networked document browser to an application container. That's why when I visit a site like say, techcrunch.com in a browser with scripting disabled, almost nothing remains of the actual website, although surprisingly the entire article was fully readable, and perhaps more so than if I had enabled JavaScript to let all that Branding™ shine through. Let me be clear, the only parts of RSS that died are the parts that Google and a few social corporations within 50 miles of each other owned because they all had a stake in getting you into their own walled gardens and keeping you there. The Open Web is great, open standards are great, until you need to convert eyeballs into dollars and the exchange rate isn't looking good because you're too open and didn't introduce enough artificial scarcity into your business model. RSS never died, by and large the feeds that you subscribed to a decade ago in Google Reader are still alive and kicking, ever present and always underappreciated even at the height of Google Reader's popularity before Google decided to rebrand it to death.
• c12 9y ago
  I used to use the self install feedafever app which had a somewhat clever algorithm that would scrape all my subscribed feeds and provide me with a breakdown of whats hot over the past 30 days while also giving me the ability to view a chronological feed. Unfortunately it became unmaintained and is now abandoned by its author. It's been on my todo list for a while to write similar so I can have the same experience again.
• erpellan 9y ago
  Does 'RSS' also mean Atom feeds? The terms seem to be used interchangeably. I had thought Atom was supposed to be a better alternative to RSS but it doesn't seem to have landed. Is it necessary to always offer both? Most sites seem to.
  • Semaphor 9y ago
    Many sites offer both because common libraries and tools support both so it's easy. I don't think I've seen a reader that only supports one of the formats. IIRC from way back when, atom has a few more features but also some problems, but in the end, it doesn't really matter.
  • frabcus 9y ago
    My conclusion (quite a while ago now!) was to use Atom as it is a more consistent and reliable format, but to call it RSS in any user interface as that is what users know it as.
  • gkya 9y ago
    Usually RSS stands for "feed", so both RSS and Atom. I personally prefer RSS format for the feeds I make because Atom feels like premature optimisation, and I do not really comprehend UUIDs, and do not understand why I have to bother with them given a URL is a unique identifier anyways (i.e. https://example.com/a/b/c https://example.com/a/b/c points to one thing and one thing only at any given time).
• iagooar 9y ago
  RSS will never die, as long as podcasts are using it (and podcasting IS booming around the world right now). Many thought it dead even in the podcasting world, yet there is no viable alternative and there won't be in the next few years. A bit of a Javascript-y situation.
  • mkirklions 9y ago
    Standard formats are working great in 2018. RSS is the javascript of text.
• Tree1993 9y ago
  Thunderbird is my default rss reader and it works very well.
• leejo 9y ago
  Please stop claiming that RSS died, it didn't. Most of the new sites and blogs i come across usually have an RSS feed buried somewhere, so a more apt metaphor would be that it was buried alive, it didn't die. And please stop trying to feature creep RSS, it doesn't need any more "features". I already wrote about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15675823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15675823
  • tw1010 9y ago
    "Died" means "no one is talking about it". But that could just as well be a consequence of it doing its job without fault, silently being a good boy in the background, rather than any depletion of use.
    • vanderZwan 9y ago
      It also flies in the face of the walled garden approach that has slowly infected the internet
  • JD557 9y ago
    Not only sites and blogs, Mailchimp newsletters also support RSS feeds, which means that a lot of newsletters can be consumed by RSS readers. A agree that it never really died, it's just hiding.
    • oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
      It's hiding very well, thanks to browser manufacturers, unfortunately. Back in the day, my browser (from memory, any of the major browsers) alerted me, via an icon, when a site provided an RSS feed and clicking on that icon subscribed me to the feed. That was a much nicer situation than the 'View Source, CTRL-F "rss", Copy' dance I have to do nowadays.
      • Symen 9y ago
        In Firerox you can add the Subscribe button back to the toolbar using the personalization UI. They shouldn't hide this feature as much in my opinion, but it is still much better than manually looking for a feed URI in the source.
• firexcy 9y ago
  Intense RSS user as I am, I don’t think the recent hype of RSS practical and scalable for daily users. Algorithm-generated feeds are mostly critisized for buidling filter bubbles and leading to dependency, but either can be avoided by simply switching to RSS. It is you who choose what to subscribe to in RSS, and it’s hard to imagine many people would offense themselves by subscribing to sources contrasting their own ideologies. And any experienced RSS user will understand the stress of out-of-control unread counts, which easily leads to the crumbling of your RSS-based reading system. You may be like, “well, I’m nimble at selecting non-biased sources and spend a health time on my RSS feed.” Congrats, but one as rational and restrained as you is also unlikely to be solicited or tricked by News Feed. On the other way, you can’t expect one inclined to be biased and addicted to crappy stories to become less so just by using RSS instead. And that’s without mentioning the high technical barrier of RSS that filters ordinary users away. For many popular content providers, there’s no full text output, even no conspicuous feed address. Shall I suggest my mom switching to RSS and subscribing to her favorite WeChat official accounts by setting up an Linux server running web crawler? I haven’t be nerdy enough to do that. I do love the simplicity and transparency of RSS but don’t really think something invented in the 1990s can solve the problem of 2010s and decades to come. When the density of information available reaches a certain bar, you have to turn to something like algorithm. Being arbitrary and black-boxed is not inherently a problem. Haven’t we been happy with the works of DJs, curators, and food writers? What can be more arbitrary and black-boxed than we human? What needs be changed the most is not the tool people use to get information, but the mindset with which people live with the torrent of information in such a post-scarcity era of contents.
  • gkya 9y ago
    > And any experienced RSS user will understand the stress of out-of-control unread counts, which easily leads to the crumbling of your RSS-based reading system. Do not follow newspapers through RSS. That's the golden advice. Most often they have daily or weekly digest newsletters (NY Times and Guardian has excellent ones), use them instead. More generically, use periodical digests for high-volume news sources, and RSS for following websites that post anything less frequent than a couple or so times a day.
  • tasubotadas 9y ago
• rubenbe 9y ago
  Since google reader died, I've been self-hosting a TTRSS instance. I agree with the author that newspapers often have a waterfall of articles that's impossible to read. One of the solutions I saw on a local traffic alert site was that you could create a personalized feed URL which would only send you a notification when e.g. here is an accident on that specific road. This might be useful to solve the prioritization problem if you could create a custom feed based on your interests. Secondly this also provides the newspaper with some sort of analytics to incorporate "relevant ads" in the feed (I know I'm playing the devil's advocate here)
• franzwong 9y ago
  I am still using RSS for automatic downloading torrent files.
• dsr_ 9y ago
  "How exactly do you find good RSS feeds?" the article asks. Three steps: 1. Make sure your browser has the feed detector enabled. It used to be standard, now you need to go into settings and configure it. 2. Surf normally. 3. When you see interesting content and the Feed icon goes active, click on it. Now you've added a feed. Eventually you should categorize and prune your feeds, but this is a good start.
  • gkya 9y ago
    An alternate route is: view-source, search: "alternate".
• gkya 9y ago
  > RSS died. Whether you blame Feedburner, or Google Reader, or Digg Reader last month, or any number of other product failures over the years, the humble protocol has managed to keep on trudging along despite all evidence that it is dead, dead, dead. What a stupid thing to say... All this indicates is that RSS users didn't like those apps. I use elfeed, which has upwards of 500 stars on Github, and it's an Emacs feed reader. Many other feedreaders exist that you can run on your computer. Furthermore, Feedly and NewsBlur, along with other services, seem to be quite lively. My rather unknown blog gets some requests referred from the Flipboard app regularly. But a fact is that lots of incompetent site makers do not add RSS feeds to the websites they build. My uni's RSS feeds are going offline one by one as they redesign the web pages, and I have to maintain a scraper script to follow the updates. Many institutions' feeds are badly curated, e.g. a museum I follow, I figured out today that I wasn't getting any news because their RSS feed had a <!doctype html> and some conditional comments before the actual feed. Some feeds include javascript and XML readers fail on them. And then there's the Wix or Squarespace or whatnot websites, and they are a total failure (especially because they can't do this RSS thing whereas even Tumblr does it easily). I really believe we should somehow certificate programmers and some certain specialisations. That means ensuring that a "web developer" does know about the base specifications on which the web is built, and the most common best practices. If a web dev fails at making an RSS feed, that's a big problem.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    I’m a tradesman with a passion for tools of all sorts but especially the ones I personally find useful. As a non-developer, as an observer, if people want to call themselves “software engineers”, and I think it’s a fair title: you are designing and building systems people rely on, then you need to take the first steps toward self-regulation before it’s imposed upon you. Yes, if you want to call yourself an engineer then you ought be able to prove under examination that you understand first principles. What those first principles are ought be determined by the industry itself in collaboration with a peak-body for oversight. What we have not is practically the Wild Wild West that is actively doing harm in some areas.
  • corobo 9y ago
    Anecdata- When Google Reader was killed off I stopped using RSS feeds entirely with the exception of podcasts Since the recent post saying we should to back to using RSS I've given NewsBlur a go (I'd tried Feedly when GReader died, didn't like the way it scrolls). Honestly though I looked at a few articles on the day I signed up but I've not checked back once yet. I'm like the person that pays for the gym then never goes when it comes to RSS now apparently. I don't think I've ever had a problem with a site not having RSS feeds though, any site with regular articles that I want to follow has had one
• singingfish 9y ago
  I guess RSS is dead in the same sense that perl is dead.
• baud147258 9y ago
  I'm using RSS with a browser extension, which will check the feeds. Then I'd read the content on the site. Since it's a handfull of blogs and webcomics, I've got no problems with curation or finding the content I want to read.
• kinlan 9y ago
  I still love RSS like many people in this thread. I've been using them to aggregate and publicise a lot of the content that the developers we work with create https://web.gdedeck.com/ https://web.gdedeck.com/ (I created an aggregation client for myself) and likewise our team is starting to publish more activities https://devwebfeed.appspot.com https://devwebfeed.appspot.com - RSS is a great fit for consumption and sharing... However there are still a lot of issues that I see. * discovery is still an issue - more and more people are removing link rel alternate from their content so it's becoming harder to find the feeds. * ATOM vs RSS is still a thing even though all the feeds that I parse are actually mostly ATOM namespaced RSS feeds. * syndication and push - Pubsubhubbub is still hard and not widely supported. * Cross-Origin and HTTPS - for my needs I'd love to be able to fetch content directly from a web client and not have to proxy the content, however the web's sandbox model means that I need the pages to be on https and have the correct CORS headers - there's no clear incentive though for publishers to support this though.
• justanton 9y ago
  I’ve been using Unread app on my iPhone to read all my RSS feeds. I really don’t get all these “RSS is dead” arguments — for me it’s always been such a pleasant experience. People don’t talk about it much, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s “dead”.
• dalbasal 9y ago
  Dead & undead are not really interesting categories. Who is using RSS? How are they using it? What depends on or is enabled by RSS? What are the feedback loops, and what are the trends? There is difference between podcasts, news sites publishing a headline-only, twitter-like feed and a blog publishing full text essays. The protocol itself is a protocol. The interaction between consumer, publisher and protocol is what's interesting. That's a very wide field of possibilities. Fwiw, in the context of a FB alternative, id be looking out for trends that blur the lines between consumer and publisher. Its certainly not sufficient, but I imagine that any open (or not) alternative to social networks will have this quality.
• santhoshr 9y ago
  I would love to see the resurgence of RSS and other public protocol enabled start-ups and solutions. This is the time. RSS is also a prolific engine for curation, given how flexible and extendable the protocol is. The emergence of expert-run email digest frenzy should be built on foundation of RSS, where individuals can parse hundreds of sources and quickly construct a digest for easy circulation.
  • mkirklions 9y ago
    I can definitely see RSS taking off in the future more than ever. We finally are getting to standard formats in the digital age. JSON obviously is the leader in storing object data. RSS would be great for making multi-platform content. As a programmer and content creator, writing something 1 time and it working everywhere is the future.
• tompccs 9y ago
  I'm a PhD student, and one of the things you quickly become aware of is the fire-hose of new science that is published daily. The discovery/prioritisation problem is being "solved" by publishers recommending other articles (published by them) on their website, or sites like ResearchGate (basically Facebook for academics and researchers) doing the same with similarly obscure algorithms. I started a side project that pulls in RSS feeds from various academic publishers and uses a simple regression analysis based on tiles and abstracts to recommend you papers. I've become busy with my PhD but if anyone is interested, it's on github: https://github.com/tompccs/scoopy https://github.com/tompccs/scoopy
  • tekkk 9y ago
    Interesting. I just happened to think of a new side-project for myself using RSS and Scrapy of which I'm familiar with Scrapy. Cool if you can parse RSS-feeds so easily with feedparser-library. Makes it probably quite easy compared to the Scrapy hacks I've done trying to navigate through a messy HTML-structure that has no unique identifiers whatsoever. By the way you can easily put that thing into a Lambda without or with Serverless. I don't know do you need any data to be stored in S3 right now but it shouldn't take long to do it. =) Using machine learning would be for my own project only in the far future but still, data science yo. Single layer neural network with one activation function or what was the great description someone gave here for linear regression.
  • twic 9y ago
    When i was a PhD student, i early on set up alerts on Zetoc [1] for tables of contents on the top journals in my area. A couple of weeks later, i wasn't even reading all of the tables of contents, let alone the papers. What might have worked is getting together with a few like-minded students and postdocs and doing it collectively; it would have lowered the individual workload, and created a social pressure to actually do it. It could be a sort of superficial version of a journal club. Machine learning is cool, but in life sciences, it's traditional to solve problems by throwing more postdocs at them. You could perhaps do this with human effort, but mediated (and perhaps assisted) by machine. Imagine a tiny HN instance with a handful of users, where the new page is fed from RSS. Or, at a larger scale, Reddit, with subs for various disciplines, and some process for routing RSS items to the appropriate subs. [1] http://zetoc.jisc.ac.uk/ http://zetoc.jisc.ac.uk/
• barrkel 9y ago
  If you're a news publisher, sure it looks like RSS is dead, because all you see is its use for news publishing, and it seems unfit for purpose. I subscribe to hundreds of feeds, and none of them are news publishers. Still works for me.
• sarah2019 9y ago
  No Check This: <a href="http://allin1-net.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-ending-of-swedish-version-of_3.html">All http://allin1-net.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-ending-of-swedish... In 1 RSS</a>
• geraldbauer 9y ago
  FYI: Find another undead feed parser library (in ruby) @ https://github.com/feedparser https://github.com/feedparser Build the next facebook! The future of online news is... news feeds. See my humble talk notes from a tech meetup last year - https://github.com/geraldb/talks/blob/master/webfeeds2.md https://github.com/geraldb/talks/blob/master/webfeeds2.md
• Nition 9y ago
  Does anyone have a good RSS feed reader for Firefox? I don't need to be able to read the actual feed in the reader, I just want a list that'll notify me when a blog I've subscribed to has a new post. "Feeder"[1] looks like exactly what I want, but the requested permissions list is insane. Are there any that don't request to "Access [my] data on all websites"? I've tried a bunch and they all seem to - I guess so they can detect RSS links in web pages? I know Firefox has the built-in Live Bookmarks thing, but it doesn't give a notification when there's a new post to read. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feeder https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feeder
  • felixgallo 9y ago
    Rss files live on the websites' servers just like the HTML files do. All feed readers will need access to data on all websites (it's not your data, it's the websites' data).
  • juststeve 9y ago
    thunderbird?
  • contravariant 9y ago
    There were a couple that used firefox's native live-bookmarks system to register new feeds but I think that was killed off along with the old extension system. Now they can't handle RSS feeds natively so they need to access webpages to be able to register RSS links. Guess it shows how sacrificing usability for security doesn't necessarily lead to more security. I'm currently using Brief, and have been using it for quite some time. Still haven't found an alternative I liked. And I guess with the live-bookmarks dead it's harder than ever to switch. I might give Feeder a try.
    • severine 9y ago
      That's the 2nd reference to some trouble with Firefox and RSS or live-bookmarks. I use both a reader extension (Feedbro) and the native live-bookmarks, in Nightly (60.0b10-32bits) and haven't noticed anything. Anyone can clarify?
• Zhyl 9y ago
  Here are some things that would be useful for me, but that I don't currently know how to access easily. * A feed for all updates to a news story for a given news source * A feed for all updates and developments for a news story across all news sources. * A feed for all updates for a given area for a given news source. More specific than 'news category', more general than one specific thread of events. * Feed for all updates for a given area (as above) across all news sources. * [Client] Functionality to subscribe to related or more specific feeds from a given feed. * Functionality to see related commentary for a given item from given forums (for each story I'm interested in I will normally look at HN or reddit comments). I'm sure all these exist, but I haven't dug deep enough to find them yet.
  • namibj 9y ago
    For 2) you might want to look at GDELT. It is a big feed, so you might not want it on your phone, but a 5$ VM should do the job. It lacks 1), from what I remember, but that's about it.
• weichsel 9y ago
  I am also still using RSS - Preferably consumed via well-made, native apps on macOS and iOS. Since Google Reader went down, I am using the self-hosted Coldsweat: https://github.com/passiomatic/coldsweat https://github.com/passiomatic/coldsweat. It provides a web based aggregator but also can be used to sync native clients.
• PaulAJ 9y ago
  The article talks about analytics, but under GDPR you will have to have a sign-up wall before you can do any analytics. If someone comes on to your site without signing up then you are not allowed to track their IP address or any other identifying information, and without that you can't do much in the way of analytics.
  • FooBarWidget 9y ago
    But if you anonymize the data then it's fine.
  • DanBC 9y ago
    You can track an IP address. What you can't do without permission is link an IP address to an identity and then track that.
  • criddell 9y ago
    I think analytics often makes things less interesting. I wish more publishers would trust their own judgement and taste and quit trying to optimize for the lowest common denominator.
• artichokeheart 9y ago
  RSS will never die as long as someone can scrape a website and make their own feed.
• jackninja1 9y ago
  Pretty funny to see an article like this! For a course that I followed I needed to create a paper about the Internet. I chose the topic of RSS and what has let to its so called "death". What I found is that people used RSS but where not aware of it. Then Facebook became big and that became a hugh source of news for many. Now with the exodus happening at Facebook it makes sense that RSS is becoming popular again. Still, this is only the case for tech-savy users and I don't expect that movement to progress into the mainstream.
  • mkirklions 9y ago
    >What I found is that people used RSS but where not aware of it. Yep, I had no idea I was using it until I started a website years ago and saw RSS was everywhere.
• fxj 9y ago
  I wish we could go back to the old protocols like RSS, email and SMS. They were open and you could use any client you like and they never had problems with walled gardens. Sometime you have to lose your freedom to really value it like RMS said.
  • creatonez 9y ago
    While I mostly agree, I'm not sure going back to SMS is going to help solve a whole lot of problems-of-the-2010s. I'd rather break free from mass surveillance than embrace it, and standardizing new federated encrypted messaging protocols will do this. Unfortunately, as EFF points out in their recent series about encrypted texting, a one-size-fits-all solution is difficult.
    • fxj 9y ago
      I totally agree. However, SMS is a protocol that just works on ANY mobile phone.
• itakedrugs 9y ago
  I never stopped using RSS but Firefox has made it a bit more difficult to find out if a site offers RSS...
  • severine 9y ago
    Really? Haven't noticed, can you elaborate?
    • itakedrugs 9y ago
      If a website offered RSS, it used to be in plain view in the address bar, like this: http://screenshots.oldapps.com/3/large_87_Firefox%201.5.0.12-about.png http://screenshots.oldapps.com/3/large_87_Firefox%201.5.0.12...
      • severine 9y ago
        https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
        • itakedrugs 9y ago
          Tha's good, but an extension is just not the same... it hides the feature from most people.
  • JulienRbrt 9y ago
    I personally still have the "Subscribe" icon (Firefox 59). I had to move it from "Customize" to my toolbar but it is definitely there.
    • lunchables 9y ago
      Thanks for the tip, I just added it back.
    • itakedrugs 9y ago
• outsidetheparty 9y ago
  > RSS as a protocol needs to be expanded so that it can offer more data around prioritization as well as other signals critical to making the technology more effective at the reader layer. "We have to ruin RSS in order to save it." No thank you. The "features" he wants to add to RSS are the very features that users are trying to get away from by switching to RSS.
• badosu 9y ago
  I wonder if it would make sense to have a bidirectional mapping between RSS and ActivityPub...
• sametmax 9y ago
  Most of the problems the author mentions are, to me, the actual reasons I love RSS. No filtering. No comments. No proposal. No central way to find them. It's not the absence of curation. It's my curation. It's easy: I like a site, I want news, I get the RSS. I delete it when it's not to my taste anymore. The basic, deterministic, manual aspect of it is what's right with it. Not what's wrong. Another weird idea is that RSS should be for everybody. No. It speaks to a certain kind of people, and that's fine.
  • downer63 9y ago
    That's because the author is a tool of the global ad-tech agenda, writing articles with click-bait headlines. RSS isn't a particularly profitable utility to inject ads into, or suck personal info out of (less cookies, no pixels, makes an MBA yawn in meetings), so I guess that means it's "dead" right? Oh noes! Markdown is dead! Oh noes! SOAP XML is dead! Oh noes! RESTful JSON is dead! How the fuck would a non-coding journalist know the difference?
    • AlexeyMK 9y ago
      Danny Crighton has a CS degree from Stanford. I'm not entirely convinced by the article either, but your criticism would be a bit more credible if you managed to avoid being factually wrong.
      • matte_black 9y ago
        You can have a CS degree and never code.
        • cdblades 9y ago
          What in the article required being an active programmer?
          • matte_black 9y ago
            Perspective
• sbaha88 9y ago
  Sligthly off-topic, but I've been working on a rss-like feed for newsletters: newsletterhunt.com. I may be wrong but I have a feeling that rss moved to newsletters
• erpellan 9y ago
  I don't see anything in RSS itself that would preclude using it for an algorithmically curated feed, any more than HTML does. It's just a protocol.
• randomsearch 9y ago
  > Instead, users want personalization and prioritization All news sources I can think of implement prioritisation. Do users really want personalisation? Do you remember your Dad saying pre-web "oh, I just want a newspaper personalised to me, so I don't read outside of my core interests" or did he just sometimes read, sometimes skip less immediately-relevant articles? I'm not sure anyone really wants to live in a bubble, just some tech companies decided they should.
  • adbachman 9y ago
    Lots of personalization bubbles are fantastically useful. I prefer local news from my neighborhood over news from a neighborhood in another city in another state. I prefer technically detailed articles about software development over technically detailed articles about dog grooming. I choose feeds and sources that filter in my favor. Your dad always had the option of subscribing to the Wall Street Journal or People if their local paper didn’t cover business or celebrity gossip extensively enough. Maybe not bubbles all the way down, but it’s close.
    • bo1024 9y ago
      Good point. Maybe the issue is user-controlled, opt-in style personalization versus opaque, algorithmic, A-B-tested-on-other-people personalization. I'm definitely in favor of personally choosing what to subscribe to, but algorithms are very far from where I would trust them to make those choices for me.
• Tomte 9y ago
  Is there a real RSS reader for the desktop anymore, besides Thunderbird? And one for iOS and Android? I can only find frontends to online services like Feedly.
  • eythian 9y ago
    I used to use Liferea as a desktop application. Now I use TTRSS which has it's own web interface and Android (and others?) clients.
  • deepskyhacker 9y ago
    For desktop and mobile, I created my own (free) Slack workspace and then installed the RSS slack app (https://slack.com/apps/A0F81R7U7-rss https://slack.com/apps/A0F81R7U7-rss) allowing one to subscribe to feeds and benefit from Slack's notifications. Works well for me.
  • oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
    What do you need beyond e.g. the feedly webapp?
    • Tomte 9y ago
      I need something local. Not "cloud".
• ASipos 9y ago
  I check Feedly daily.
• rmc 9y ago
  Surely the issues with prioritization or filtering could be solved client side, ie with your RSS reader? Configure your software to hide things with tag X or word Y. You could even have up/down votes to train your RSS reader what is good and what is stuff you never want to see, and it could operate like a local spam filter.
• laktak 9y ago
  I really like http://goodnews.click/ http://goodnews.click/ as a news reader
• _bxg1 9y ago
  The important things is to keep the limiting/filtering features client-side. That keeps the user in control and the power dynamic in balance. The protocol should provide as much information as possible (priority level, tags, maybe even attributes for brand name or a logo image link), and it should be up to the client to provide the best possible experience given that information. That also allows for different clients for different types of users. One thing that could also be interesting is standardizing subscription/donation information as part of the protocol itself. So that users can easily do those things across all their sources at once (via their client), rather than going to separate websites and walking through their unique subscription forms.
• mwexler 9y ago
  As a guy who uses Feedly every day, I am glad to pay for it, and I hope to keep RSS in some state of life support for as long as I can. I still don't quite understand the fascination with video content: It's completely synchronous; a 10 minute video takes up 10 min of my time, with limited ability to consume more efficiently. Textual information puts the control back in my hands, with the ability to aggregate content and quickly consume. RSS has been the best way to do so while avoiding the dross that every social network has devolved into.
  • pinkano 9y ago
    Thank you so much for supporting us! Petr from Feedly
• jillesvangurp 9y ago
  The reason RSS is still here, is that things like feedly, inoreader, and others that filled the google reader gap continue to have millions of loyal users and just about every blog and news publisher still publishes rss feeds because it is easy to do and you lose potential clicks if you don't. Google killed Google reader to make buzz work (failed) and the several other thingies they have been pushing since (also failing). FB, twitter, and the "more of the same old shit" algorithms that they try to pass as machine learning are currently failing in the market. FB is losing users because it has nothing interesting to show to them and because they have been taken hostage by paying customers that depend on idiots clicking on click bait. Twitter is desperately trying to get rid of real time because they believe it is more "interesting" to keep week old tweets on top that are somehow "more relevant". The branding thing is a bit disingenuous; this is really about ads and tracking. Good luck with that, blocking all of it like most serious users these days and also GDPR is not going to help your cause. RSS as a publishing mechanism is fine. The firehose needs work though. It needs reliable filtering, curation, and aggregation. That's the gap filled by hacker news and other aggregators. And having access to the firehose is nice sometimes.
  • icc97 9y ago
    Google Buzz died first in December 2011. Google Reader died in July 2013.
    • xenomachina 9y ago
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/03/25/why-is-google-killing-google-reader/#5d7621a16022 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/03/25/why-is-google-...
• nathan_long 9y ago
  > ...many of these challenges are ultimately problems with the underlying protocol itself... > ...It’s an exhausting experience wading through articles from the style and food sections just to run into the latest update on troop movements in the Middle East. > Some sites try to get around this by offering an array of RSS feeds built around keywords. Yet, stories are almost always assigned more than one keyword, and keyword selection can vary tremendously in quality across sites. Now, I see duplicate stories and still manage to miss other stories I wanted to see. None of this is a problem with the protocol. The protocol just publishes a list of stories. If people want a feed of the "most important" stories, you can build that. You can let people build their own personal feeds based on tags, popularity, or any set of rules imaginable, and you can de-dupe the items in that feed. I used to subscribe to a podcast feed on The Conversations Network (no longer operating) which they let me personalize to include a mix of episodes from a variety of their podcasts. That was RSS. RSS has nothing to do with how you determine which stories to publish on which feed.
• jjallen 9y ago
  RSS is crucial for me to get custom keyword alerts from various SEC filings feeds from companies I watch. InoReader makes a great assistant in this way. I'm not affiliated at all.
• dankohn1 9y ago
  If you're considering giving RSS a try, here are a few of my favorite services: Inoreader, a fantastic Google Reader clone that supports advanced filtering and following Twitter feed. https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ HNRSS, for seeing all comments with some words. https://hnrss.org/ https://hnrss.org/ Nice paid service for visually scraping pages into RSS feeds https://feedity.com/ https://feedity.com/ Convert summary feeds into full text feeds http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ http://fivefilters.org/content-only/
  • AndrewStephens 9y ago
    I just tried out that fivefilters full text service on my own blog (which shamefully only provides summaries in the feeds) and it worked seamlessly. I shall be using it in the future.
• AndrewStephens 9y ago
  Don't call it a comeback - RSS never went away. I find the "pull" model of RSS much nicer to deal with than the "push" model of twitter and facebook. You simply cannot keep up with your twitter feed if you add 20 or 30 publishers that tweet every day. But those same 20 or 30 publishes in an RSS reader are easy to deal with. Of course, the publishers dislike RSS because it messes with their metrics, discourages stickiness, and makes advertising difficult. 3 things that aren't my problem.
• shurcooL 9y ago
  Does anyone know how well JSON Feed [0] is doing? [0] https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/
  • organsnyder 9y ago
    IMHO, the "problem" with RSS has never been the data format—it's the distribution model (which many of us actually prefer).
  • vaillancourtmax 9y ago
    Not that this should be any indicator of health, but it's worth pointing out that a few RSS readers (e.g. FeedPress [0], Cast [1], FeedBin [2]) have implemented JSON feed support a few weeks after the initial announcement. What's more, my own basic JSON Feed Viewer [3] is getting multiple hits every day. [0] https://feed.press/blog/2017/05/31/feedpress-adds-automatic-json-feed-support/ https://feed.press/blog/2017/05/31/feedpress-adds-automatic-... [1] https://blog.tryca.st/cast-update-experimental-json-feed-support-e983a14171ac https://blog.tryca.st/cast-update-experimental-json-feed-sup... [2] https://feedbin.com/blog/2017/05/22/feedbin-supports-json-feed/ https://feedbin.com/blog/2017/05/22/feedbin-supports-json-fe... [3] http://json-feed-viewer.herokuapp.com/ http://json-feed-viewer.herokuapp.com/
• andrethegiant 9y ago
  I loved using Fever back in the day for RSS! It was self-hosted and bubbled up stories of the same article from different sources. https://feedafever.com https://feedafever.com
• dreamfactored 9y ago
  It's been a while but ISTR Atom is extendable unlike RSS
• kmfrk 9y ago
  I don't know if this is as much of a comeback for RSS as a comeback for self-hosted services. I needed RSS enough to self-host Fever (on A Small Orange which is a POS that I need to migrate from, if anyone can recommend me a simple and user-friendly alternative). Similarly, I've been waiting for Pinry to release version 2, but this seems to have eluded the team for a few years unfortunately. It physically hurts when I see people purge their tweet history, because I can't imagine giving up all that history, especially when you can at least export your stuff first - which doesn't include your likes and DMs. I don't think the latest Instagram/Facebook/Twitter brouhaha has been a vindication for RSS per se, but definitely one for self-hosting, especially as services die or get acquired left and right. You might be cute and argue that for RSS being such a big deal, there sure aren't any overnight successes 15+ years in the making to migrate to at this point. I know Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard fame was working on an RSS reader, but that seems to have stalled. And Digg just shut down theirs, which was really good. Fever is also shut down, but that doesn't matter much when it's self-hosted - except for the crazy fees ASO is charging people like me.
  • cannonedhamster 9y ago
    Personally I've really enjoy The Old Reader for my RSS feeds. Not really a fan of the social aspects of it and it's not self hosted, which if it's a requirement for you this doesn't fill. I've used SelfOSS which was fine, but didn't like some of the feeds I tried to import. It's pretty lightweight though and based on your like of Fever this seems like it might be a little too light. I'm sure I'm going over stuff you've head of with Tiny Tiny RSS, so I won't go into that too much. A really small shared hosting reseller with decent support I've used for years is Hole In The Wall Hosting. It isn't a big operation but it just works and does what you need it to do, SSH is extra but the plans are relatively inexpensive.
• luxpir 9y ago
  Quick newsbeuter mention. Still going strong here as a fast CLI option.
• stunt 9y ago
  RSS (currently via Feedly) is how I use Internet. And some of the drawbacks mentioned in this articles are exactly why I use it.
  • pinkano 9y ago
    Happy to hear this! Thank you :) Petr from Feedly
• daveFNbuck 9y ago
  The complaint that prioritization is needed is bullshit. You can already achieve that through multiple RSS feeds once your feed has become too big for users to follow. You can even do categorization, which is what is really wanted/needed here. More importantly, this is already solved by RSS readers. All the online RSS services I've tried have algorithmic feed ordering options for those who want it. This means that users who want algorithmic sorting/filtering can not only get it but also have their choice of providers. More importantly, people like me who prefer to manually prune their sources and only subscribe to things they're actually interested in seeing can still do so. You can get a quick overview of what's trending and I can do a deep dive into what I like. Everyone wins.
• digi_owl 9y ago
  The one big thing for me with RSS is that it provides me a way to see what exactly is new, when it is new.
• FussyZeus 9y ago
  > It’s wonderfully idealistic, but the reality of RSS is that it lacks the features required by nearly every actor in the modern content ecosystem, and I would strongly suspect that its return is not forthcoming. Maybe every actor thinks RSS is a problem, but I as a consumer of content love it for all the reasons they find it problematic. It seems like the author is conflating what's bad for their industry and their marketing dept. and what's bad for the consumer. Consumers don't want intrusive advertising, we don't want analytics, we don't want social interaction. We want content. Full stop. There's a healthy and lively debate to be had about what needs to happen to allow news to work for both the people who make it and those who consume it, but currently, every discussion along those lines that I read like this are always written solely from the point of the publisher. No one is asking the important questions, like: 1) Did anyone ask the consumer why the "pivot to video" strategy failed? I can tell you in one sentence: No one on the consumer end wanted it. 2) Were consumers ever asked if we wanted our data shared with all manner of companies and possible bad actors? We answered anyway by ramping up adblock usage and noscript usage. All of these articles read so impressively tone-deaf to the wants and desires of the people they allege to be serving, and then they wonder in thinkpieces why news as an industry is dying.
• jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  You don't use RSS to follow news sites. You use RSS to follow infrequently updated sites so you don't have to keep checking them to see if there's any new content. It still works for this purpose and most sites that fit this format still have RSS or Atom feeds.
  • ASalazarMX 9y ago
    Seeing how faster it is for me (compared to the web interface) to keep up to date with HackerNews after the weekend, I disagree. RSS is excellent to sift and pick many articles.
    • chmaynard 9y ago
      RSS feeds for Hacker News? Please elaborate.
      • KyleGalvin 9y ago
        Not OP but I use feedly which has hackerNews as a source. Minimal digging and I found this third party HN feed provider: https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/
      • ASalazarMX 8y ago
        This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
  • doomjunky 9y ago
    This is exactly how i use RSS. It's so convenient to have one place instead of checking dozens of blogs that only get updated once in a while.
• DarkIye 9y ago
  Thanks to Wordpress publishing an RSS feed endpoint by default (/feed) and Feedly's aptitude at finding feeds, RSS is not dead, or undead, or anything of the sort and I have been using it on a daily basis for over a decade now.
  • pinkano 9y ago
    Happy to hear this, thank you for using Feedly! Petr from Feedly
• ourcat 9y ago
  Anyone who listens to podcasts uses RSS. RSS hasn't gone or been anywhere.
  • m-localhost 9y ago
    Unfortunately "Podcast" is becoming synonym with non-music content on Spotify & Co.
• zafiro17 9y ago
  A bit more obscure for some, but hugely useful to others: if you're a newsreader (Usenet) kind of person, there's Gwene, by the same folks who did Gmane. While Gmane took mailing lists and made them available as news articles, gwene takes RSS feeds and makes them available as news articles. You need a newsreader (Thunderbird will do, or emacs/gnus, knode, pan, slrn, alpine etc.). Start here: http://gwene.org http://gwene.org or just point your newsreader at news.gwene.org. There are millions of RSS feeds, each submitted by someone. (Or you can submit your own). It's managed by Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen, the guy who wrote gnus. I find it hugely useful.
• krychu 9y ago
  A self-plug, I built a simple RSS reader after Google shut down theirs, which I was using on regular basis. Perhaps someone will find it useful: https://readdu.com https://readdu.com
• guybedo 9y ago
  If you want to try a new RSS reader / news aggregator, you can check out http://aktu.io http://aktu.io