46 ms·

Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

687 points by neflabs 8y ago

cmtx 8y ago
newsboat <3
- dpwm 8y ago
  Having just got back into RSS in the last week, I tried newsboat and found it does at least what I needed it to, from the terminal, without it adding features that get in the way. I haven't looked for anything else.
  - cmtx 8y ago
    it helps control my compulsory feed checking being in term. was a google reader fan from the beginning, and have tried and paid for most of the replacements. newsboat is fast, light and super easy on my data plan (1.5hrs/day on bus). my triage and read below... browser "links" macro l set browser "open -a Safari %u"; open-in-browser ; set browser "links" define-filter "Starred" "flags = \"s\"" macro m "edit-flags" s; ENTER macro k "edit-flags" ''; ENTER
parvenu74 8y ago
Can part of the renaissance be switching to a JSON format? Please?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/ has had some preliminary traction. Of course, the reason RSS works so well is that everyone uses the same format. So you wouldn't see so much of a "switch" as a bunch of readers accepting either format, for a very, very long time. That being said, I don't see what's "wrong" with XML in this context.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    Most of the complaints I've seen with the 'wrongness' of xml are centered around its human unreadability, which doesn't matter in this context. I'm curious if there's another reason.
    - digi_owl 8y ago
      Bunch of webheads that thinks JS is the end all be all of languages...
    - ken 8y ago
      Legibility isn't just for fun. The entire JSON spec is only about 3 pages long. (I don't know exactly how long because ECMA's webpage is down today!) I'm pretty confident that any popular JSON parser I use will abort correctly on bad JSON. There's no expansion or entities or escaping, so the parser is a pretty boring 1-to-1 translation. Give it a 1KB JSON file, and I'm going to get back a data structure that takes roughly 1KB. XML is incredibly complicated. My operating system's XML parser has had XXE-related security bugs in the recent past -- that's OWASP bug#4, and there's a Wikipedia article about it. There's other possible attacks, like the "billion laughs attack". I'm very nervous about running an XML parser on untrusted content.
      - eropple 8y ago
        Not to be flip, but if you're using a parser written by competent individuals post-2010 (really, post-2008), billion laughs is a nothing. And that follows for most XML stuff. If you are getting most bloggable with your tech stack, yes, there are certainly risks to XML (also to YAML, also to JSON--and there are definitely JSON parsers that have had some capital-I Issues out there, and a good number of the popular ones also parse not-JSON too). That said, if you're using anything remotely mainstream you can feel reasonably secure against the sorts of attacks you are likely to see because, TBH, your RSS reader is just not that valuable a target. (Or, in my case--the podcast service I'm writing.)
    - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
      While I shouldn't speak for JSON Feed's developers (Manton Reece of Micro.blog and Brent Simmons, original developer of RSS/Atom reader NetNewsWire), their argument basically boils down to "developers seem to be better at constructing valid JSON than they are at constructing valid XML." I know a lot of HN folks will say but you can just construct perfectly valid XML with library such-and-such or API this-and-that and, yes, I'm sure they're all absolutely, positively 100% correct. But in my real-world experience, Reece and Simmons seem to be correct in practice. Given that Simmons wrote NNW, worked at the now-defunct server-side RSS company NewsGator, and is now writing a new RSS (and JSON Feed) reader, I'm inclined to believe that when he says JSON Feed "reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds," he means it.
- heinrichhartman 8y ago
  Yes, and while we are at it. Can we make HTML JSON based, as well? { "head" : [...], "body" : [ { "name" : "H1", "text" : "Hello JSON" }, ... ] } So much easier on the eye. ; )
  - parvenu74 8y ago
    Ditching HTML for CommonMark (like MarkDown but without any daring fireballs) would be better IMO. Then again, the designers of HTML had no idea what it would become when they carved out a subset of SGML for their document markup. If we were starting over perhaps a mix of XAML for app-stuff and CommonMark for text would be a good mix... unless that totally screws up i18n. "It is what we have and it seems to work" explains HTML somewhat adequately.
  - franzpeterstein 8y ago
    Please. :)
- unicornporn 8y ago
  Sorry, no. RSS and Atom already does the job. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png
  - tomcatfish 8y ago
    Why didn't you link to the comic to allow Munroe to gain views/advertisement revenue/etc.?
    - Spivak 8y ago
      Because XKCD doesn't have any of that and he explicitly supports hotlinking?
- ropeadopepope 8y ago
  Why stop there? Let's go to cap'n proto or protobuf.
- joejoebob 8y ago
  I came here looking for this comment.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  That's probably the least important issue that could be addressed.
- gkya 8y ago
  Yeah certainly, then later we can port public signeage to JSON too. {"prohibition": {"act": "pissing", "message": "Please do not urinate on the wall", "code": 1232}}.
unicornporn 8y ago
RSS never went away for me. Try FreshRSS[1], it's awesome. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite. TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem. One of the best things 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/).
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I'm reasonably happy with TTRSS running on Sandstorm.io, but it's web client sucks. To me, the reason TTRSS wins is because there are about a dozen different clients that work with it, and most of them are vastly better than the server's UI.
  - jeena 8y ago
    Exactly, I do the same, TTRSS is running without problems since about 2013 but I never use it's frontend, just the API to read in different clients on my mobile phono and on my desktop (actually with my own client https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey). TTRSS does the work of gathering the feeds, updating and parsing them, and holding the 'read'and 'starred' information, everything else I do in the 3rd party clients.
- severine 8y ago
  You forgot the links, here they are: - Official website: https://freshrss.org https://freshrss.org - Demo: https://demo.freshrss.org/ https://demo.freshrss.org/ - Github: https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS -- Looks great, thanks! edit: aaargh, formatting
hprotagonist 8y ago
I am another long-time RSS user. For me, it is the only sane way to keep up with my scientific journal reading. That it's also a fine way to read webcomics and tech blogs is a nice bonus.
forapurpose 8y ago
I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem). By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it), delete the feed item. Repeat 1,000x. Deduplication is necessary but will only cut items process by maybe 5%, I would guess. 'Grouping' is much more valuable - grouping feed items by topic. For example, after the big event last night, instead of skimming dozens of headlines interspersed among 1,000 others, group together the feed items for that event under a single headers. Then I can quickly pick out the item I want to read and discard the remainder en masse. I'd guess that it would reduce the feed items I need to process by well over 50%. Other tricks are needed too: 1,000 in 20 minutes is just under 1 feed item per second.
- dewey 8y ago
  I don't want to tell you what to do but wouldn't it be more helpful to just be more selective on what you subscribe to? I subscribed to way too many feeds in the past and going through them with shortcuts / opening them in the background and then going through the opened pages to read them afterwards works well. It's even quite fast but as soon as you skip a day it just piles up until you can't work off the queue any more. I then just decided to really look at which feeds I really get most out of and unsubscribed from most of them. Way happier with that strategy and I don't feel like I'm getting overwhelmed by the unread count.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > wouldn't it be more helpful to just be more selective on what you subscribe to? I am very selective! Otherwise there would be far more. There are many feeds I cut despite having some excellent, irreplaceable content, because they also add too many unread feed items (i.e., poor signal-to-noise).
- jhund 8y ago
  At ContentGems.com we aspire to offer some of the features you're looking for. We fetch a ton of feeds each day, index them, and let you filter the items based on a powerful query api (Lucene). So in addition to reading your own feeds, you can also extract interesting content from other feeds and discover new feeds. It also deduplicates articles (on a sliding scale of similarity). We are in the process of building out the feed reader component (which is trivial compared to what we're already doing with search). An interesting twist on feed readers is that CG treats your Twitter home timeline like an RSS feed, indexing all shared articles and including them in the Firehose of feeds. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders.
dewey 8y ago
I'm always positively surprised how compatible the whole RSS ecosystem mostly is. They either implement the Google Reader API or the Fever API and you can choose between a lot of different apps for your platforms. My current combination that I'm happy with for a few years is: https://miniflux.net https://miniflux.net + Reeder on iOS and Mac
- codyogden 8y ago
  Curious, did you upgrade to 2.0? I went to check in on my site recently, and found that they nuked the project and rewrote it in Go.
  - dewey 8y ago
    Yep and as someone who works with Go at my day job that's just an additional point to like the project ;)
    - codyogden 8y ago
      Ahhh...that's cool! It was kind of intriguing that they removed a bunch of features/things. I built out some custom systems that rely on the semi-public RSS feeds the legacy project generated, so upgrading is more of a long-term goal, I guess.
- jboynyc 8y ago
  I also run miniflux and like it a lot. However, I was surprised to see that there are no viable Android apps that can speak to the Fever API. None of the current feed reader apps in the Google or F-Droid app stores qualify, and the APKs of an unmaintained app called Press floating around aren't too confidence inspiring.
ravenstine 8y ago
Is there anything that can turn your email into a secure personal RSS feed? A feed reader that also includes emails would replace quite a bit of what centralized social media provides.
- cbovis 8y ago
  I recently discovered Feedbin allows you to subscribe to email newsletters, which pretty much keeps you in RSS land for anything news related.
  - anotherevan 8y ago
    I believe you can do something similar with NewsBlur.
- paxys 8y ago
  Have you tried Thunderbird (https://www.thunderbird.net https://www.thunderbird.net)? Combines email, RSS and newsgroups.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    Is there any addon that for thunderbird that synchronizes RSS read status across devices? I use thunderbird, I love it, and I would love it more if I could use it on more than one device....
- mongol 8y ago
  Something like this? https://developers.google.com/gmail/gmail_inbox_feed https://developers.google.com/gmail/gmail_inbox_feed
- girzel 8y ago
  Gnus in Emacs :)
- jobigoud 8y ago
  This reminds me of the author of SuperMemo[1], which is a software for remembering things using carefully spaced repetition. (Started in 1982 and still maintained). They pioneered "incremental reading" a technique where an article is split into pieces and ingested by the software and fed back to you in an asynchronous manner at the most appropriate time. Then the main author apparently started to feed everything, including emails into this system, and so he would consume everything only through this channel. Replying to conversations sometimes month later depending on the algorithm. He describes a bit more the process at the bottom of [2] in the apology paragraph. [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/ https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/ [2] https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm
douglaswlance 8y ago
I'm surprised how often RSS is mentioned on Hackernews, and how infrequently some recommends Feedly. It has wonderful features, like saving articles, collection boards, team features, and popularity-based sorting options. (Full disclosure, I don't work for Feedly nor do I own any of the company. I just like the service!) http://feedly.com http://feedly.com
- findjashua 8y ago
  I have been a happy user of Inoreader (no affiliation, just a happy user)
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  yeah feedly has been my alternative since google reader died. but the issue is that even if some sources still have feeds, many sources strip feed of all the content and only give you a list of titles and links. that quite sad to witness if one lived trough the rss golden age
- kungfooguru 8y ago
  Agreed. But it has been very frustrating that they haven't allowed boards to be public. Maybe someone knows a service that lets you mark posts from your feed to be shared as a public collection?
  - Notre1 8y ago
    Newsblur kind-of has this. You can "Share to your Blurblog," but I don't see a way to have multiple Blurblogs. You can also tag stories and each tag can have a RSS feed that others to subscribe to, but I don't think there is a web page to send people to for your taggged stories.
- mongol 8y ago
  I can recommend Inoreader.
- dfee 8y ago
  My use of RSS has fallen (very recently) so I only consume a few feeds every day. However, I both enjoy and dislike Feedly. Here’s the rundown: Pros) - advanced features like highlighting, team management - pure free offering that just works - integration with pretty much every feed reader app out there Cons: - no ability/willingness to pull full text - iOS app is honestly kind of clunky I emailed them that I’d willingly migrate from a different app that I pay a subscription for if only they’d pull the full text, but they told me that is an intentional non-feature. Big bummer.
rexf 8y ago
> So the very idea of RSS - obtaining content from a website without having to visit the site itself - is due for a comeback. No ads. RSS content may or may not be free of ads, but that is based on what you subscribe to. I used Google Reader heavily, now I use theoldreader.
bobwaycott 8y ago
It’s starting to feel like everyone is jumping on the write-an-article-about-reviving-RSS bandwagon. Not disagreeing with the premise, but I think I’ve seen at least a half-dozen articles saying the same thing in the last few weeks. Can’t help but wonder if it’s getting click-baity (or perhaps click-hungry) every time I see yet-another-RSS-is-back-baby.
originalsimba 8y ago
Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug. I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for control and manipulation, but we'd at least have back the ability to read our news centralized.
  - dewiz 8y ago
    Readers don’t need/want analytics though, so this is a friction between content accessibility and businesses tracking usage
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    > RSS has no analytics. Great! Another selling point.
    - LoSboccacc 8y ago
      I agree, but realistically speaking that is why it’s being fought by content providers whether we the techies like it or not
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - gkya 8y ago
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
If RSS threatens to become mainstream again, expect pushback from content providers. I know a blog where the owner will ban any commenter from the site for even mentioning that there is an RSS feed. He believes that the RSS feed that his CMS provides by default, is somehow important for SEO, but he doesn’t want people getting his content through RSS because his way of monetizing the site requires that people reguarly visit the site itself.
- weberc2 8y ago
  Yeah, we need a new way of monetizing content on the Internet.
  - your-nanny 8y ago
    I wonder how much I'd pay for a full content rss feed from a good blog... Maybe 20cents/mo.? I know, cheap, but there is lots of content...
    - ubernostrum 8y ago
      Daring Fireball has experimented with this over the years. Currently it uses a sponsor system.
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      I actually don't want to pay anyone monthly. But I really like the Blendle model and would be happy to pay more through them if more relevant content (including blogs in my case) becomes available and easy to access: It is pay-per-view but reasonably priced and with reasonable (last I checked) refunds if you happen to click on some clickbait. I also like Spotify but I think Blendle has a better business model, at least for text. What I like: Authors get paid for the stuff I read. The more I read the more I pay. It doesn't drain my account when I don't use it.
      - jiggunjer 8y ago
        I like the pay-per-GB model, but not sure if it would work with feeds that contain video or audio, or just large trivial filler images.
disconnected 8y ago
"People" keep rattling on about how RSS needs to be revived. Do these people live in some sort of alternative reality where: - The guardian - BBC - Reuters - Ars Technica - LWN - Hacker News and a fuck ton others don't have an RSS feed? Or some sort or reality where Flym (or the myriads of RSS apps) don't exist? Because I sure as hell don't.
- jjrh 8y ago
  Main reason I don't exclusively use RSS (like I used to) is tons and tons of websites just provide a couple lines in the RSS feed and not the entire article. Super annoying.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    That's always been a complaint about RSS going back to its original age, the balance between short summaries and full articles; ads/pageviews/analytics versus "content is king". Have you tried an RSS Reader with an embedded web view for those types of sites? (I use Newsblur and it has a really neat view where it shows the original blog/page and uses a bit of logic to track your cursor to mark as read articles you read directly on the originating site in a frame inside of Newsblur. It doesn't work for all sites but the ones it does work for can be pretty magic. That said, I'm an old school "river" user and simply have a habit workflow that heavily makes use of keyboard shortcuts to open new tabs and close them quickly.)
  - k1m 8y ago
    I work on a service that tries to generate new full-text feeds from these partial ones. You can try it out at http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ http://fivefilters.org/content-only/
  - Spivak 8y ago
    What's the alternative though? The same will be true on all other aggregators.
- jklinger410 8y ago
  I think this uptick in RSS articles is just a bunch of journalists trying to inspire developers to do something more interesting with the tech.
keyle 8y ago
Thing is, RSS needs to change to become more user friendly. Yes it's really easy to understand, but it's a hell of a lot easier for someone to type "fa"<enter> in their browser to get their 'currated' news than some specialised app.
- jiggunjer 8y ago
  but facebook is also a specialized app? what's stopping you from typing "fe"<enter> in your browser to get your news feed?
frouge 8y ago
How about implementing RSS in the browser? My ideal implementation would be to click on my special RSS bookmark folder and immediatly see how many new items there are for each site of the folder, something like "kottke.org (5)" <- special mention to a lovely blog
- icebraining 8y ago
  Firefox has had that since version 1.0 (2004): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
  - gkya 8y ago
    Live Bookmarks has a very weird UI. I have upwards of 90 feeds currently, and it's simply impractical for me to check each one of them manually to see if there is soemthing new.
    - frouge 8y ago
      Yeah just tested and its close from what I want but I need to know how many new items I've got. Can't just remember from each site what was the last item
- xd1936 8y ago
  Firefox does pretty much exactly this. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Firefox also has an okay/not-great reading experience if you directly navigate to an RSS page, including a configurable bar at the top with options to subscribe to the feed as live bookmarks, or in a feed reader of choice. An interesting thing is IE had similar RSS support for rendering RSS feeds, configurable subscription options for them, and RSS feed-driven favorites folders. (Of course, none of that has made it into Edge. Yet?) Perhaps more interesting was that IE had a platform API for its RSS store. It supported using the same Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) that Windows Update and other systems use for background downloading things during "quiet" periods on the machine to update the feeds. That RSS store provided a lot of what you needed for a good RSS reader application, though few reader applications took advantage to my knowledge. (I recall having part of a hand-crafted one at one point.) Outlook used to use this RSS store for its RSS support (thus sharing its feeds with IE), and the shutdown of IE's RSS support may be part of why Outlook's RSS support hasn't really worked that well in the last several versions.
anotherevan 8y ago
In case the site is timing out for you like it is me. https://web.archive.org/web/20180423210101/https://neflabs.com/blog/rss-renaissance/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180423210101/https://neflabs.c...
aetherspawn 8y ago
Would anyone be interested in an RSS social network that allows you to 1. Pull in RSS news streams 2. Automatically generate your own RSS streams from your posts (and re-shares) 3. Provides content curation over the RSS streams amongst your friends that are subscribed on the same streams 4. Presents previews with images and scraped data in a 3/4-column summary layout that is easy to skim
- bhhaskin 8y ago
  There are already protocols out there that do that. Ostatus and Activitypub being two. Some examples of social networks already using them are GNU Social and Mastodon.
  - aetherspawn 8y ago
    I dont think any of the above social sites allow you to directly consume i.e. the hackers news rss stream on your timeline
    - dcbadacd 8y ago
      One of the primary issue with these alternative social networks is the lack of good content, RSS integration should honestly be one of their main priorities.
- stevenicr 8y ago
  I think this could take off... I've been kicking around thoughts on makings something along these lines with wordress + buddypress + bp my home... the trick is curation .. adding option for negative keywords per feed or something.. having other people you could follow or pull an opml into your own profile / page.. maybe it needs to become more like pin boards where people can sort in more general groups, and then make it more visual as well. I personally enjoyed the taptu app for it's visual layouts options with rss.. until it shutdown. RssDemon (premium version - no ads) has been a similar replacement for me with mobile devices. I do think this kind of thing could create network effects easy. I'd use it like a renaissance of netvibes / myyahoo feed pages that were cool back in the day. Now that I think of it, I probably stopped using those because they lacked the visuals, which should be easy to add these days.
smsm42 8y ago
I still use RSS (or alike) for almost all of my regular news consumption, in combination with Feedly. Works way better than anything Facebook or Twitter can offer - in fact, they are not even on the same category. If you want momentary distraction or some lighthearted content from your friends/family - go Facebook. If you want to consume information in an organized way - use an RSS reader. There's nothing better.
macawfish 8y ago
RSS & DAT could be the foundation of a wonderful decentralized social platform.
nreece 8y ago
Absolutely, RSS feeds rock! They're much less "noisy", and best of all - untouched by algorithmic sorting. * Shameless plug *: our service & API at https://feedity.com https://feedity.com helps create custom feeds for any public webpage.
dmix 8y ago
> No suspicious javascript. My only problem with this is the very positive trend towards design-heavy journalism... just like the NYTimes Wind Turbine article currently on the homepage: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/energy-environment/big-windmills.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/ener... I love the Instapaper/RSS style consumption as much as anyone but that doesn't mean that multi-MB pages with plenty of JS/CSS/Images are always a bad thing. Maybe the solution is to differentiate between our long-form high-quality content reading UX from the faster-paced blog/RSS style consumption?
- gkya 8y ago
  That'll probably die out as people understand that nobody gives a flying fuck to all that silly evil sorcery, except the guys who made them. The way analytics works today, most web publishers are basically living in a bubble that distorts the image of the outer world.
  - callumlocke 8y ago
    Can you expand on this? How do analytics distort publishers' perspective of what's popular? Not disagreeing, I just want to know what you mean.
    - gkya 8y ago
      Numbers don't tell much. You make a web page, say an interactive news article, and it's read (i.e. viewed top to bottom, but knowing even this is very hard, still let's assume that we can know) a hundred thousand times since it was published. What does this tell? That the interactive design helped make people read the article? How do you know if people would've read it anyways if it was a static HTML file, or just a normal page like others? How do you know people actually liked the design and did not just ignore it focusing on content? How do you know people came to play with the interface instead of reading the actual article? How do you know what percentage of those views are from people restoring their tabs? If all you want is to say "Hey I got a hundred thousand views, put your ads here!", than that's useful. But if you really want to know if users are content or they care, those numbers are just mute. But knowing whether users really care or not can lead you to better, cheaper design decisions.
remir 8y ago
A RSS/ATOM reader with a social aspect (comments) would be cool.
- jeena 8y ago
  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/micro-blog/id1253201335?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/micro-blog/id1253201335?mt=8
  - remir 8y ago
    Looks interesting, but there's not Android app unfortunately.
    - jeena 8y ago
      That is true, not yet. And in theory it's kind of compatible with https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/ but in practice I haven't been able to find out how to connect my website to this community so they can read it too in their app.
danboarder 8y ago
Has anyone launched an RSS reboot? I think RSS could catch on if there was a leading reader that produced a facebook-like wall, social commenting integrated, and some marketing effort behind it.
- KajMagnus 8y ago
  I was also wondering about that. I'm uninterested in subscribing to individual blogs via RSS — but if a new magic RSS format / technology, could list the blog posts I actually want to read (similar to how Facebook finds interesting FB posts), + notify me about @mentions & comment replies — then yes maybe. Would want some way to connect with other people too, probably (like, add friends).
doomjunky 8y ago
I have subscript the HackerNews RSS Feed. Using Thunderbird as my RSS client it bothers me to see multiple copies of the same post in my inbox every time the title a post is changed. Adding the <guid> tag containing the post id can help the RSS client to distinguish posts.
sporkland 8y ago
Totally agreed with the article. I was talking to a friend who uninstalled facebook/instagram and she thought the idea of RSS was cool having burned out on constantly refreshing for new items. As a happy https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ user, I can't recommend it enough. It is just basic reliable RSS, subscribe and you'll see new items from them, no intelligent feed recommendations. It has a few light social features which I easily ignore.
- PikachuEXE 8y ago
  I have been using it since Google Reader died in... I forgot when
smilbandit 8y ago
RSS is one of my favorite formats. An RSS reader is always the focus of my pet projects when I need to learn a new language.
dant00ine 8y ago
Now is also a great time to change that font-size
st26 8y ago
Coincidentally, I just switched to consuming news mostly through RSS. There just wasn't any better news aggregator that let me focus on news I actually cared about, and filtered out the crap I don't. What I long for is something like Google Newsstand, with the power to scrape the whole web for my interests- except Google Newsstand incessantly shows me all the inane "hot", "trending", "popular" etc mainstream stuff no matter how many hundreds of times I mark, "show me less like this". Using RSS is a little limiting because there's so little discovery for related subjects from new sources- but I can completely turn off the firehose of pop news.
phab 8y ago
Infuriatingly, this site is using vw units to set font-size; not only does this make the body copy text almost unreadably large on my HiDPI display (~330 PPI), but it means the text then refuses to scale when the page is zoomed out in the browser. Low quality.
chourobin 8y ago
One of my favorite mac/ios apps right now is the RSS reader "News Explorer" by Betamagic. It has replaced Reeder+Feedly for me and everything just syncs to iCloud. Highly recommend checking it out: https://betamagic.nl/products/newsexplorer.html https://betamagic.nl/products/newsexplorer.html
Brajeshwar 8y ago
RSS is wonderful. Like the few out there, I don't read the newspaper nor watch TV for news; but just a handful of RSS feeds that I subscribe to. I'd also stop subscribing to the few other newsletters if they have the same in RSS Feeds. [Plug] I rely solely on RSS Feeds to power a tiny in-house project[1] which helps us get contract leads and jobs for other people. Would love an RSS comeback. 1. Get Better Luck - https://app.getbetterluck.com/ https://app.getbetterluck.com/
dosycorp 8y ago
Is this actually happening? Are there paid RSS products?
- idle_processor 8y ago
  There're various freemium RSS services that cropped up after Google Reader shut down. https://zapier.com/blog/best-rss-feed-reader-apps/ https://zapier.com/blog/best-rss-feed-reader-apps/ lists a few.
tjadowski 8y ago
I love reading news via RSS using my piece of software[1]. [1] https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder
cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
Anyone who talks about revival of RSS without talking about how it will be sustainable is just ignorant or naive, because the main reason it became what it became has everything to do with money. Content providers centralized because centralized attention is more valuable than aggregation of decentralized attention in an ad driven economy. Just because you want RSS to make a come back doesn't mean it has any chance of coming back unless it makes sense economically. And I don't see any of that mentioned in this article, nor am I aware of one that's guaranteed to work as good as ad driven model. You might as well say it's a perfect time for the renaissance of steam engines.
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  Podcasts seems to work fine, which is the exact same concept with sound in place of text.
  - cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
    most people use podcasts through an app, not by adding the RSS feed to their RSS reader. When people talk about RSS being dead, they mean the consumer usage, and not about how it powers other things behind the scenes.
    - hvidgaard 8y ago
      When people say "RSS" they really mean articles delivered with RSS. And most people use "RSS" through an app(lication). My point is that the economic model that powers podcasts can power articles through RSS as well.
      - cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
        What is the "economic model" you speak of? It's surely not banner ads, and it's surely not search ads. Also it can't do behavioral targeting. Please educate me
        8y ago
FrozenVoid 8y ago
Related: HN has third party customizable RSS feeds. https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/
git-stash 8y ago
I like RSS given it provides the exact stuff I want, not more, not less. Or it can also be as simple as http://www.pxlet.com http://www.pxlet.com which I check every day for now to get the tech news.
os7borne 8y ago
While, to some extent, I agree that we should move back to RSS, shouldn't we think of RSS readers? While most of us in tech could figure it out, the mass of people find it tough to use an RSS Reader. Maybe in the future, RSS readers could take another form altogether. But solutions out there aren't as easy to use.
bingen 8y ago
+ Aaron Swartz
pferde 8y ago
RSS and/or Atom should primarily look at improving the format specification. both formats are woefully underspecified in some parts, leading to a lot of headaches for RSS parser writers, since RSS generators play fast and loose with the rules, and will take any possible and impossible shortcut just to make it a bit easier for themselves.
nunodonato 8y ago
Been using rss since the early days, and still growing strong :) Google reader was my go to app for rss needs, but since they killed it I switched to "The Old Reader" and everything continued as usual :) I do understand why some companies/people would prefer not to use RSS. From a money-standpoint, if you need to bring people to your website to get $$ from ads or other stuff, RSS makes it difficult. Basically, all content is free. Its great, but perhaps many websites with good content would not survive (perhaps many blogs neither)
Grumbledour 8y ago
Since we are talking RSS: For years I have tried to find a good RSS reader for my android phone and have failed so far. The feature that mostly kills it for me is, much to my surprise, layout. For applications made for reading text, they all seem to hate the idea of letting the user actually decide how he wants that text displayed. If you can even change the font size, often there are only predefined options, only works on certain views (article but not list etc.). Forget about changing the font itself or the colors aside from light/dark themes. It is ridiculous! Do any of you know of a reader app, that lets me really customize that stuff why also being somewhat minimalist? The best thing I found so far is Palabre, but it also clutters the screen with useless header images, buttons and "Similar content" sections.
- fooker 8y ago
  Make one? This sounds easy enough to do.
- luag 8y ago
  I personally just use the mobile web version of Feedbin. 3 theme options 2 article list options You can show/hide 4 interface elements (feedname, date, summary, image preview) 6 fonts options 9 type sizes It's enough for my needs.
- QAkICoU7IDNkpFu 8y ago
  After years of looking around I found https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ (also available as app). _Finally_ a decent replacement for Google Reader IMO. UI on the site is a bit clunkey IMO, but the app at least has some customization options (font-type, font-size, different layout sizes, open tabs inside the app or direct them to an external browser, etc) No affiliations, other than that I'm a happy user!
  - glaberficken 8y ago
    I also switched to inoreader recently (after going >GoogleReader>DiggReader) and I'm happy with it. I used to be a firm believer in a simple list of text headers, but with inoreader I found myself opting more and more for the thumbnail grid list.
PeterStuer 8y ago
I loved the 'RSS feed' ecosystem but it did have its problems. Plain old 'everything you can eat' RSS suffered from lack of a decent curation system. You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When the number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much, you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and still might do. Most never got round to this and so stuff piled on. A good personalized priority/curated feed out of your subscriptions would have been nice, but at the time nobody succeeded.
- criddell 8y ago
  Nuzzle does a pretty good job of this using your Twitter social graph.
- josefresco 8y ago
  > You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When the number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much, you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and still might do. Most never got round to this and so stuff piled on. This describes my social media feed / process, and I would imagine most others as well.
whazor 8y ago
I tried to use RSS and I added some websites I liked. However, websites have too much articles nowadays and many news sites have the same stories. I am going to need filtering and grouping of articles in order to use RSS again.
sirsuki 8y ago
Link is broken. Anyone have an alternative so others can read this article?
pcardoso 8y ago
Shameless plug: I made a small RSS to email service, which I use to keep up to date on rarely updated feeds. Has been working well for me. Give it a test at https://mailtheblog.com https://mailtheblog.com
anacleto 8y ago
Couldn't agree more. This kinda of `anti-active` pattern where you only take the output (no need to read the news online), could also be applied to SaaS products. You don't need to use the product, you just take the tech output that matters to your business. Recently wrote a thing on the topic: The Next Generation of SaaS Won’t Optimize for User Engagement While reading these comments, it popped up in my mind. [0] https://www.plainflow.com/blog/next-generation-saas-user-engagement/ https://www.plainflow.com/blog/next-generation-saas-user-eng...
bad_user 8y ago
I love RSS and I use an online RSS Reader (NewsBlur.com, but there are others). However the article makes the mistake of saying that RSS is about "obtaining content from a website without having to visit the site itself". That's definitely not true. RSS is about being notified of new articles. Subscribing to an RSS feed is like subscribing to a mailing list. But it won't deliver the content reliably — many RSS readers restrict the HTML being rendered, for good reasons I'm sure, but they mess it up, there's no standard for what kind of HTML is accepted of course, so it only works well for textual articles, but rich text (e.g. images, CSS) is very problematic. On my own website (alexn.org) I had many problems with rendering articles, due to images and code syntax highlighting, enough so that I decided to no longer render the entire article in the RSS feed, I prefer to deliver just a summary. Being notified of new content, with a good summary, is all you need. If a website's readability is shitty, you can always invoke the browser's Reader View (Firefox, Safari) or open it with Pocket or whatever.

687 points by neflabs 8y ago

cmtx 8y ago

newsboat <3

dpwm 8y ago
Having just got back into RSS in the last week, I tried newsboat and found it does at least what I needed it to, from the terminal, without it adding features that get in the way. I haven't looked for anything else.
- cmtx 8y ago
  it helps control my compulsory feed checking being in term. was a google reader fan from the beginning, and have tried and paid for most of the replacements. newsboat is fast, light and super easy on my data plan (1.5hrs/day on bus). my triage and read below... browser "links" macro l set browser "open -a Safari %u"; open-in-browser ; set browser "links" define-filter "Starred" "flags = \"s\"" macro m "edit-flags" s; ENTER macro k "edit-flags" ''; ENTER

parvenu74 8y ago

Can part of the renaissance be switching to a JSON format? Please?

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/ has had some preliminary traction. Of course, the reason RSS works so well is that everyone uses the same format. So you wouldn't see so much of a "switch" as a bunch of readers accepting either format, for a very, very long time. That being said, I don't see what's "wrong" with XML in this context.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Most of the complaints I've seen with the 'wrongness' of xml are centered around its human unreadability, which doesn't matter in this context. I'm curious if there's another reason.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    Bunch of webheads that thinks JS is the end all be all of languages...
  - ken 8y ago
    Legibility isn't just for fun. The entire JSON spec is only about 3 pages long. (I don't know exactly how long because ECMA's webpage is down today!) I'm pretty confident that any popular JSON parser I use will abort correctly on bad JSON. There's no expansion or entities or escaping, so the parser is a pretty boring 1-to-1 translation. Give it a 1KB JSON file, and I'm going to get back a data structure that takes roughly 1KB. XML is incredibly complicated. My operating system's XML parser has had XXE-related security bugs in the recent past -- that's OWASP bug#4, and there's a Wikipedia article about it. There's other possible attacks, like the "billion laughs attack". I'm very nervous about running an XML parser on untrusted content.
    - eropple 8y ago
      Not to be flip, but if you're using a parser written by competent individuals post-2010 (really, post-2008), billion laughs is a nothing. And that follows for most XML stuff. If you are getting most bloggable with your tech stack, yes, there are certainly risks to XML (also to YAML, also to JSON--and there are definitely JSON parsers that have had some capital-I Issues out there, and a good number of the popular ones also parse not-JSON too). That said, if you're using anything remotely mainstream you can feel reasonably secure against the sorts of attacks you are likely to see because, TBH, your RSS reader is just not that valuable a target. (Or, in my case--the podcast service I'm writing.)
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    While I shouldn't speak for JSON Feed's developers (Manton Reece of Micro.blog and Brent Simmons, original developer of RSS/Atom reader NetNewsWire), their argument basically boils down to "developers seem to be better at constructing valid JSON than they are at constructing valid XML." I know a lot of HN folks will say but you can just construct perfectly valid XML with library such-and-such or API this-and-that and, yes, I'm sure they're all absolutely, positively 100% correct. But in my real-world experience, Reece and Simmons seem to be correct in practice. Given that Simmons wrote NNW, worked at the now-defunct server-side RSS company NewsGator, and is now writing a new RSS (and JSON Feed) reader, I'm inclined to believe that when he says JSON Feed "reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds," he means it.
heinrichhartman 8y ago
Yes, and while we are at it. Can we make HTML JSON based, as well? { "head" : [...], "body" : [ { "name" : "H1", "text" : "Hello JSON" }, ... ] } So much easier on the eye. ; )
- parvenu74 8y ago
  Ditching HTML for CommonMark (like MarkDown but without any daring fireballs) would be better IMO. Then again, the designers of HTML had no idea what it would become when they carved out a subset of SGML for their document markup. If we were starting over perhaps a mix of XAML for app-stuff and CommonMark for text would be a good mix... unless that totally screws up i18n. "It is what we have and it seems to work" explains HTML somewhat adequately.
- franzpeterstein 8y ago
  Please. :)
unicornporn 8y ago
Sorry, no. RSS and Atom already does the job. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png
- tomcatfish 8y ago
  Why didn't you link to the comic to allow Munroe to gain views/advertisement revenue/etc.?
  - Spivak 8y ago
    Because XKCD doesn't have any of that and he explicitly supports hotlinking?
ropeadopepope 8y ago
Why stop there? Let's go to cap'n proto or protobuf.
joejoebob 8y ago
I came here looking for this comment.
maxxxxx 8y ago
That's probably the least important issue that could be addressed.
gkya 8y ago
Yeah certainly, then later we can port public signeage to JSON too. {"prohibition": {"act": "pissing", "message": "Please do not urinate on the wall", "code": 1232}}.

unicornporn 8y ago

RSS never went away for me. Try FreshRSS[1], it's awesome. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on SQLite. TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem. One of the best things 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/).

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
I'm reasonably happy with TTRSS running on Sandstorm.io, but it's web client sucks. To me, the reason TTRSS wins is because there are about a dozen different clients that work with it, and most of them are vastly better than the server's UI.
- jeena 8y ago
  Exactly, I do the same, TTRSS is running without problems since about 2013 but I never use it's frontend, just the API to read in different clients on my mobile phono and on my desktop (actually with my own client https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey). TTRSS does the work of gathering the feeds, updating and parsing them, and holding the 'read'and 'starred' information, everything else I do in the 3rd party clients.
severine 8y ago
You forgot the links, here they are: - Official website: https://freshrss.org https://freshrss.org - Demo: https://demo.freshrss.org/ https://demo.freshrss.org/ - Github: https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS -- Looks great, thanks! edit: aaargh, formatting

hprotagonist 8y ago

I am another long-time RSS user. For me, it is the only sane way to keep up with my scientific journal reading. That it's also a fine way to read webcomics and tech blogs is a nice bonus.

forapurpose 8y ago

I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem). By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it), delete the feed item. Repeat 1,000x. Deduplication is necessary but will only cut items process by maybe 5%, I would guess. 'Grouping' is much more valuable - grouping feed items by topic. For example, after the big event last night, instead of skimming dozens of headlines interspersed among 1,000 others, group together the feed items for that event under a single headers. Then I can quickly pick out the item I want to read and discard the remainder en masse. I'd guess that it would reduce the feed items I need to process by well over 50%. Other tricks are needed too: 1,000 in 20 minutes is just under 1 feed item per second.

dewey 8y ago
I don't want to tell you what to do but wouldn't it be more helpful to just be more selective on what you subscribe to? I subscribed to way too many feeds in the past and going through them with shortcuts / opening them in the background and then going through the opened pages to read them afterwards works well. It's even quite fast but as soon as you skip a day it just piles up until you can't work off the queue any more. I then just decided to really look at which feeds I really get most out of and unsubscribed from most of them. Way happier with that strategy and I don't feel like I'm getting overwhelmed by the unread count.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > wouldn't it be more helpful to just be more selective on what you subscribe to? I am very selective! Otherwise there would be far more. There are many feeds I cut despite having some excellent, irreplaceable content, because they also add too many unread feed items (i.e., poor signal-to-noise).
jhund 8y ago
At ContentGems.com we aspire to offer some of the features you're looking for. We fetch a ton of feeds each day, index them, and let you filter the items based on a powerful query api (Lucene). So in addition to reading your own feeds, you can also extract interesting content from other feeds and discover new feeds. It also deduplicates articles (on a sliding scale of similarity). We are in the process of building out the feed reader component (which is trivial compared to what we're already doing with search). An interesting twist on feed readers is that CG treats your Twitter home timeline like an RSS feed, indexing all shared articles and including them in the Firehose of feeds. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders.

dewey 8y ago

I'm always positively surprised how compatible the whole RSS ecosystem mostly is. They either implement the Google Reader API or the Fever API and you can choose between a lot of different apps for your platforms. My current combination that I'm happy with for a few years is: https://miniflux.net https://miniflux.net + Reeder on iOS and Mac

codyogden 8y ago
Curious, did you upgrade to 2.0? I went to check in on my site recently, and found that they nuked the project and rewrote it in Go.
- dewey 8y ago
  Yep and as someone who works with Go at my day job that's just an additional point to like the project ;)
  - codyogden 8y ago
    Ahhh...that's cool! It was kind of intriguing that they removed a bunch of features/things. I built out some custom systems that rely on the semi-public RSS feeds the legacy project generated, so upgrading is more of a long-term goal, I guess.
jboynyc 8y ago
I also run miniflux and like it a lot. However, I was surprised to see that there are no viable Android apps that can speak to the Fever API. None of the current feed reader apps in the Google or F-Droid app stores qualify, and the APKs of an unmaintained app called Press floating around aren't too confidence inspiring.

ravenstine 8y ago

Is there anything that can turn your email into a secure personal RSS feed? A feed reader that also includes emails would replace quite a bit of what centralized social media provides.

cbovis 8y ago
I recently discovered Feedbin allows you to subscribe to email newsletters, which pretty much keeps you in RSS land for anything news related.
- anotherevan 8y ago
  I believe you can do something similar with NewsBlur.
paxys 8y ago
Have you tried Thunderbird (https://www.thunderbird.net https://www.thunderbird.net)? Combines email, RSS and newsgroups.
- beagle3 8y ago
  Is there any addon that for thunderbird that synchronizes RSS read status across devices? I use thunderbird, I love it, and I would love it more if I could use it on more than one device....
mongol 8y ago
Something like this? https://developers.google.com/gmail/gmail_inbox_feed https://developers.google.com/gmail/gmail_inbox_feed
girzel 8y ago
Gnus in Emacs :)
jobigoud 8y ago
This reminds me of the author of SuperMemo[1], which is a software for remembering things using carefully spaced repetition. (Started in 1982 and still maintained). They pioneered "incremental reading" a technique where an article is split into pieces and ingested by the software and fed back to you in an asynchronous manner at the most appropriate time. Then the main author apparently started to feed everything, including emails into this system, and so he would consume everything only through this channel. Replying to conversations sometimes month later depending on the algorithm. He describes a bit more the process at the bottom of [2] in the apology paragraph. [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/ https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/ [2] https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm

douglaswlance 8y ago

I'm surprised how often RSS is mentioned on Hackernews, and how infrequently some recommends Feedly. It has wonderful features, like saving articles, collection boards, team features, and popularity-based sorting options. (Full disclosure, I don't work for Feedly nor do I own any of the company. I just like the service!) http://feedly.com http://feedly.com

findjashua 8y ago
I have been a happy user of Inoreader (no affiliation, just a happy user)
LoSboccacc 8y ago
yeah feedly has been my alternative since google reader died. but the issue is that even if some sources still have feeds, many sources strip feed of all the content and only give you a list of titles and links. that quite sad to witness if one lived trough the rss golden age
kungfooguru 8y ago
Agreed. But it has been very frustrating that they haven't allowed boards to be public. Maybe someone knows a service that lets you mark posts from your feed to be shared as a public collection?
- Notre1 8y ago
  Newsblur kind-of has this. You can "Share to your Blurblog," but I don't see a way to have multiple Blurblogs. You can also tag stories and each tag can have a RSS feed that others to subscribe to, but I don't think there is a web page to send people to for your taggged stories.
mongol 8y ago
I can recommend Inoreader.
dfee 8y ago
My use of RSS has fallen (very recently) so I only consume a few feeds every day. However, I both enjoy and dislike Feedly. Here’s the rundown: Pros) - advanced features like highlighting, team management - pure free offering that just works - integration with pretty much every feed reader app out there Cons: - no ability/willingness to pull full text - iOS app is honestly kind of clunky I emailed them that I’d willingly migrate from a different app that I pay a subscription for if only they’d pull the full text, but they told me that is an intentional non-feature. Big bummer.

rexf 8y ago

> So the very idea of RSS - obtaining content from a website without having to visit the site itself - is due for a comeback. No ads. RSS content may or may not be free of ads, but that is based on what you subscribe to. I used Google Reader heavily, now I use theoldreader.

bobwaycott 8y ago

It’s starting to feel like everyone is jumping on the write-an-article-about-reviving-RSS bandwagon. Not disagreeing with the premise, but I think I’ve seen at least a half-dozen articles saying the same thing in the last few weeks. Can’t help but wonder if it’s getting click-baity (or perhaps click-hungry) every time I see yet-another-RSS-is-back-baby.

originalsimba 8y ago

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

LoSboccacc 8y ago
RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug. I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for control and manipulation, but we'd at least have back the ability to read our news centralized.
- dewiz 8y ago
  Readers don’t need/want analytics though, so this is a friction between content accessibility and businesses tracking usage
- gerbilly 8y ago
  > RSS has no analytics. Great! Another selling point.
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    I agree, but realistically speaking that is why it’s being fought by content providers whether we the techies like it or not
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - gkya 8y ago

Mediterraneo10 8y ago

If RSS threatens to become mainstream again, expect pushback from content providers. I know a blog where the owner will ban any commenter from the site for even mentioning that there is an RSS feed. He believes that the RSS feed that his CMS provides by default, is somehow important for SEO, but he doesn’t want people getting his content through RSS because his way of monetizing the site requires that people reguarly visit the site itself.

weberc2 8y ago
Yeah, we need a new way of monetizing content on the Internet.
- your-nanny 8y ago
  I wonder how much I'd pay for a full content rss feed from a good blog... Maybe 20cents/mo.? I know, cheap, but there is lots of content...
  - ubernostrum 8y ago
    Daring Fireball has experimented with this over the years. Currently it uses a sponsor system.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    I actually don't want to pay anyone monthly. But I really like the Blendle model and would be happy to pay more through them if more relevant content (including blogs in my case) becomes available and easy to access: It is pay-per-view but reasonably priced and with reasonable (last I checked) refunds if you happen to click on some clickbait. I also like Spotify but I think Blendle has a better business model, at least for text. What I like: Authors get paid for the stuff I read. The more I read the more I pay. It doesn't drain my account when I don't use it.
    - jiggunjer 8y ago
      I like the pay-per-GB model, but not sure if it would work with feeds that contain video or audio, or just large trivial filler images.

disconnected 8y ago

"People" keep rattling on about how RSS needs to be revived. Do these people live in some sort of alternative reality where: - The guardian - BBC - Reuters - Ars Technica - LWN - Hacker News and a fuck ton others don't have an RSS feed? Or some sort or reality where Flym (or the myriads of RSS apps) don't exist? Because I sure as hell don't.

jjrh 8y ago
Main reason I don't exclusively use RSS (like I used to) is tons and tons of websites just provide a couple lines in the RSS feed and not the entire article. Super annoying.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  That's always been a complaint about RSS going back to its original age, the balance between short summaries and full articles; ads/pageviews/analytics versus "content is king". Have you tried an RSS Reader with an embedded web view for those types of sites? (I use Newsblur and it has a really neat view where it shows the original blog/page and uses a bit of logic to track your cursor to mark as read articles you read directly on the originating site in a frame inside of Newsblur. It doesn't work for all sites but the ones it does work for can be pretty magic. That said, I'm an old school "river" user and simply have a habit workflow that heavily makes use of keyboard shortcuts to open new tabs and close them quickly.)
- k1m 8y ago
  I work on a service that tries to generate new full-text feeds from these partial ones. You can try it out at http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ http://fivefilters.org/content-only/
- Spivak 8y ago
  What's the alternative though? The same will be true on all other aggregators.
jklinger410 8y ago
I think this uptick in RSS articles is just a bunch of journalists trying to inspire developers to do something more interesting with the tech.

keyle 8y ago

Thing is, RSS needs to change to become more user friendly. Yes it's really easy to understand, but it's a hell of a lot easier for someone to type "fa"<enter> in their browser to get their 'currated' news than some specialised app.

jiggunjer 8y ago
but facebook is also a specialized app? what's stopping you from typing "fe"<enter> in your browser to get your news feed?

frouge 8y ago

How about implementing RSS in the browser? My ideal implementation would be to click on my special RSS bookmark folder and immediatly see how many new items there are for each site of the folder, something like "kottke.org (5)" <- special mention to a lovely blog

icebraining 8y ago
Firefox has had that since version 1.0 (2004): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
- gkya 8y ago
  Live Bookmarks has a very weird UI. I have upwards of 90 feeds currently, and it's simply impractical for me to check each one of them manually to see if there is soemthing new.
  - frouge 8y ago
    Yeah just tested and its close from what I want but I need to know how many new items I've got. Can't just remember from each site what was the last item
xd1936 8y ago
Firefox does pretty much exactly this. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Firefox also has an okay/not-great reading experience if you directly navigate to an RSS page, including a configurable bar at the top with options to subscribe to the feed as live bookmarks, or in a feed reader of choice. An interesting thing is IE had similar RSS support for rendering RSS feeds, configurable subscription options for them, and RSS feed-driven favorites folders. (Of course, none of that has made it into Edge. Yet?) Perhaps more interesting was that IE had a platform API for its RSS store. It supported using the same Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) that Windows Update and other systems use for background downloading things during "quiet" periods on the machine to update the feeds. That RSS store provided a lot of what you needed for a good RSS reader application, though few reader applications took advantage to my knowledge. (I recall having part of a hand-crafted one at one point.) Outlook used to use this RSS store for its RSS support (thus sharing its feeds with IE), and the shutdown of IE's RSS support may be part of why Outlook's RSS support hasn't really worked that well in the last several versions.

anotherevan 8y ago

In case the site is timing out for you like it is me. https://web.archive.org/web/20180423210101/https://neflabs.com/blog/rss-renaissance/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180423210101/https://neflabs.c...

aetherspawn 8y ago

Would anyone be interested in an RSS social network that allows you to 1. Pull in RSS news streams 2. Automatically generate your own RSS streams from your posts (and re-shares) 3. Provides content curation over the RSS streams amongst your friends that are subscribed on the same streams 4. Presents previews with images and scraped data in a 3/4-column summary layout that is easy to skim

bhhaskin 8y ago
There are already protocols out there that do that. Ostatus and Activitypub being two. Some examples of social networks already using them are GNU Social and Mastodon.
- aetherspawn 8y ago
  I dont think any of the above social sites allow you to directly consume i.e. the hackers news rss stream on your timeline
  - dcbadacd 8y ago
    One of the primary issue with these alternative social networks is the lack of good content, RSS integration should honestly be one of their main priorities.
stevenicr 8y ago
I think this could take off... I've been kicking around thoughts on makings something along these lines with wordress + buddypress + bp my home... the trick is curation .. adding option for negative keywords per feed or something.. having other people you could follow or pull an opml into your own profile / page.. maybe it needs to become more like pin boards where people can sort in more general groups, and then make it more visual as well. I personally enjoyed the taptu app for it's visual layouts options with rss.. until it shutdown. RssDemon (premium version - no ads) has been a similar replacement for me with mobile devices. I do think this kind of thing could create network effects easy. I'd use it like a renaissance of netvibes / myyahoo feed pages that were cool back in the day. Now that I think of it, I probably stopped using those because they lacked the visuals, which should be easy to add these days.

smsm42 8y ago

I still use RSS (or alike) for almost all of my regular news consumption, in combination with Feedly. Works way better than anything Facebook or Twitter can offer - in fact, they are not even on the same category. If you want momentary distraction or some lighthearted content from your friends/family - go Facebook. If you want to consume information in an organized way - use an RSS reader. There's nothing better.

macawfish 8y ago

RSS & DAT could be the foundation of a wonderful decentralized social platform.

nreece 8y ago

Absolutely, RSS feeds rock! They're much less "noisy", and best of all - untouched by algorithmic sorting. * Shameless plug *: our service & API at https://feedity.com https://feedity.com helps create custom feeds for any public webpage.

dmix 8y ago

> No suspicious javascript. My only problem with this is the very positive trend towards design-heavy journalism... just like the NYTimes Wind Turbine article currently on the homepage: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/energy-environment/big-windmills.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/ener... I love the Instapaper/RSS style consumption as much as anyone but that doesn't mean that multi-MB pages with plenty of JS/CSS/Images are always a bad thing. Maybe the solution is to differentiate between our long-form high-quality content reading UX from the faster-paced blog/RSS style consumption?

gkya 8y ago
That'll probably die out as people understand that nobody gives a flying fuck to all that silly evil sorcery, except the guys who made them. The way analytics works today, most web publishers are basically living in a bubble that distorts the image of the outer world.
- callumlocke 8y ago
  Can you expand on this? How do analytics distort publishers' perspective of what's popular? Not disagreeing, I just want to know what you mean.
  - gkya 8y ago
    Numbers don't tell much. You make a web page, say an interactive news article, and it's read (i.e. viewed top to bottom, but knowing even this is very hard, still let's assume that we can know) a hundred thousand times since it was published. What does this tell? That the interactive design helped make people read the article? How do you know if people would've read it anyways if it was a static HTML file, or just a normal page like others? How do you know people actually liked the design and did not just ignore it focusing on content? How do you know people came to play with the interface instead of reading the actual article? How do you know what percentage of those views are from people restoring their tabs? If all you want is to say "Hey I got a hundred thousand views, put your ads here!", than that's useful. But if you really want to know if users are content or they care, those numbers are just mute. But knowing whether users really care or not can lead you to better, cheaper design decisions.

remir 8y ago

A RSS/ATOM reader with a social aspect (comments) would be cool.

jeena 8y ago
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/micro-blog/id1253201335?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/micro-blog/id1253201335?mt=8
- remir 8y ago
  Looks interesting, but there's not Android app unfortunately.
  - jeena 8y ago
    That is true, not yet. And in theory it's kind of compatible with https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/ but in practice I haven't been able to find out how to connect my website to this community so they can read it too in their app.

danboarder 8y ago

Has anyone launched an RSS reboot? I think RSS could catch on if there was a leading reader that produced a facebook-like wall, social commenting integrated, and some marketing effort behind it.

KajMagnus 8y ago
I was also wondering about that. I'm uninterested in subscribing to individual blogs via RSS — but if a new magic RSS format / technology, could list the blog posts I actually want to read (similar to how Facebook finds interesting FB posts), + notify me about @mentions & comment replies — then yes maybe. Would want some way to connect with other people too, probably (like, add friends).

doomjunky 8y ago

I have subscript the HackerNews RSS Feed. Using Thunderbird as my RSS client it bothers me to see multiple copies of the same post in my inbox every time the title a post is changed. Adding the <guid> tag containing the post id can help the RSS client to distinguish posts.

sporkland 8y ago

Totally agreed with the article. I was talking to a friend who uninstalled facebook/instagram and she thought the idea of RSS was cool having burned out on constantly refreshing for new items. As a happy https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/ user, I can't recommend it enough. It is just basic reliable RSS, subscribe and you'll see new items from them, no intelligent feed recommendations. It has a few light social features which I easily ignore.

PikachuEXE 8y ago
I have been using it since Google Reader died in... I forgot when

smilbandit 8y ago

RSS is one of my favorite formats. An RSS reader is always the focus of my pet projects when I need to learn a new language.

dant00ine 8y ago

Now is also a great time to change that font-size

st26 8y ago

Coincidentally, I just switched to consuming news mostly through RSS. There just wasn't any better news aggregator that let me focus on news I actually cared about, and filtered out the crap I don't. What I long for is something like Google Newsstand, with the power to scrape the whole web for my interests- except Google Newsstand incessantly shows me all the inane "hot", "trending", "popular" etc mainstream stuff no matter how many hundreds of times I mark, "show me less like this". Using RSS is a little limiting because there's so little discovery for related subjects from new sources- but I can completely turn off the firehose of pop news.

phab 8y ago

Infuriatingly, this site is using vw units to set font-size; not only does this make the body copy text almost unreadably large on my HiDPI display (~330 PPI), but it means the text then refuses to scale when the page is zoomed out in the browser. Low quality.

chourobin 8y ago

One of my favorite mac/ios apps right now is the RSS reader "News Explorer" by Betamagic. It has replaced Reeder+Feedly for me and everything just syncs to iCloud. Highly recommend checking it out: https://betamagic.nl/products/newsexplorer.html https://betamagic.nl/products/newsexplorer.html

Brajeshwar 8y ago

RSS is wonderful. Like the few out there, I don't read the newspaper nor watch TV for news; but just a handful of RSS feeds that I subscribe to. I'd also stop subscribing to the few other newsletters if they have the same in RSS Feeds. [Plug] I rely solely on RSS Feeds to power a tiny in-house project[1] which helps us get contract leads and jobs for other people. Would love an RSS comeback. 1. Get Better Luck - https://app.getbetterluck.com/ https://app.getbetterluck.com/

dosycorp 8y ago

Is this actually happening? Are there paid RSS products?

idle_processor 8y ago
There're various freemium RSS services that cropped up after Google Reader shut down. https://zapier.com/blog/best-rss-feed-reader-apps/ https://zapier.com/blog/best-rss-feed-reader-apps/ lists a few.

tjadowski 8y ago

I love reading news via RSS using my piece of software[1]. [1] https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder

cocktailpeanuts 8y ago

Anyone who talks about revival of RSS without talking about how it will be sustainable is just ignorant or naive, because the main reason it became what it became has everything to do with money. Content providers centralized because centralized attention is more valuable than aggregation of decentralized attention in an ad driven economy. Just because you want RSS to make a come back doesn't mean it has any chance of coming back unless it makes sense economically. And I don't see any of that mentioned in this article, nor am I aware of one that's guaranteed to work as good as ad driven model. You might as well say it's a perfect time for the renaissance of steam engines.

hvidgaard 8y ago
Podcasts seems to work fine, which is the exact same concept with sound in place of text.
- cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
  most people use podcasts through an app, not by adding the RSS feed to their RSS reader. When people talk about RSS being dead, they mean the consumer usage, and not about how it powers other things behind the scenes.
  - hvidgaard 8y ago
    When people say "RSS" they really mean articles delivered with RSS. And most people use "RSS" through an app(lication). My point is that the economic model that powers podcasts can power articles through RSS as well.
    - cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
      What is the "economic model" you speak of? It's surely not banner ads, and it's surely not search ads. Also it can't do behavioral targeting. Please educate me
      - 8y ago

FrozenVoid 8y ago

Related: HN has third party customizable RSS feeds. https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/

git-stash 8y ago

I like RSS given it provides the exact stuff I want, not more, not less. Or it can also be as simple as http://www.pxlet.com http://www.pxlet.com which I check every day for now to get the tech news.

os7borne 8y ago

While, to some extent, I agree that we should move back to RSS, shouldn't we think of RSS readers? While most of us in tech could figure it out, the mass of people find it tough to use an RSS Reader. Maybe in the future, RSS readers could take another form altogether. But solutions out there aren't as easy to use.

bingen 8y ago

+ Aaron Swartz

pferde 8y ago

RSS and/or Atom should primarily look at improving the format specification. both formats are woefully underspecified in some parts, leading to a lot of headaches for RSS parser writers, since RSS generators play fast and loose with the rules, and will take any possible and impossible shortcut just to make it a bit easier for themselves.

nunodonato 8y ago

Been using rss since the early days, and still growing strong :) Google reader was my go to app for rss needs, but since they killed it I switched to "The Old Reader" and everything continued as usual :) I do understand why some companies/people would prefer not to use RSS. From a money-standpoint, if you need to bring people to your website to get $$ from ads or other stuff, RSS makes it difficult. Basically, all content is free. Its great, but perhaps many websites with good content would not survive (perhaps many blogs neither)

Grumbledour 8y ago

Since we are talking RSS: For years I have tried to find a good RSS reader for my android phone and have failed so far. The feature that mostly kills it for me is, much to my surprise, layout. For applications made for reading text, they all seem to hate the idea of letting the user actually decide how he wants that text displayed. If you can even change the font size, often there are only predefined options, only works on certain views (article but not list etc.). Forget about changing the font itself or the colors aside from light/dark themes. It is ridiculous! Do any of you know of a reader app, that lets me really customize that stuff why also being somewhat minimalist? The best thing I found so far is Palabre, but it also clutters the screen with useless header images, buttons and "Similar content" sections.

fooker 8y ago
Make one? This sounds easy enough to do.
luag 8y ago
I personally just use the mobile web version of Feedbin. 3 theme options 2 article list options You can show/hide 4 interface elements (feedname, date, summary, image preview) 6 fonts options 9 type sizes It's enough for my needs.
QAkICoU7IDNkpFu 8y ago
After years of looking around I found https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ (also available as app). _Finally_ a decent replacement for Google Reader IMO. UI on the site is a bit clunkey IMO, but the app at least has some customization options (font-type, font-size, different layout sizes, open tabs inside the app or direct them to an external browser, etc) No affiliations, other than that I'm a happy user!
- glaberficken 8y ago
  I also switched to inoreader recently (after going >GoogleReader>DiggReader) and I'm happy with it. I used to be a firm believer in a simple list of text headers, but with inoreader I found myself opting more and more for the thumbnail grid list.

PeterStuer 8y ago

I loved the 'RSS feed' ecosystem but it did have its problems. Plain old 'everything you can eat' RSS suffered from lack of a decent curation system. You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When the number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much, you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and still might do. Most never got round to this and so stuff piled on. A good personalized priority/curated feed out of your subscriptions would have been nice, but at the time nobody succeeded.

criddell 8y ago
Nuzzle does a pretty good job of this using your Twitter social graph.
josefresco 8y ago
> You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When the number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much, you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and still might do. Most never got round to this and so stuff piled on. This describes my social media feed / process, and I would imagine most others as well.

whazor 8y ago

I tried to use RSS and I added some websites I liked. However, websites have too much articles nowadays and many news sites have the same stories. I am going to need filtering and grouping of articles in order to use RSS again.

sirsuki 8y ago

Link is broken. Anyone have an alternative so others can read this article?

pcardoso 8y ago

Shameless plug: I made a small RSS to email service, which I use to keep up to date on rarely updated feeds. Has been working well for me. Give it a test at https://mailtheblog.com https://mailtheblog.com

anacleto 8y ago

Couldn't agree more. This kinda of `anti-active` pattern where you only take the output (no need to read the news online), could also be applied to SaaS products. You don't need to use the product, you just take the tech output that matters to your business. Recently wrote a thing on the topic: The Next Generation of SaaS Won’t Optimize for User Engagement While reading these comments, it popped up in my mind. [0] https://www.plainflow.com/blog/next-generation-saas-user-engagement/ https://www.plainflow.com/blog/next-generation-saas-user-eng...

bad_user 8y ago

I love RSS and I use an online RSS Reader (NewsBlur.com, but there are others). However the article makes the mistake of saying that RSS is about "obtaining content from a website without having to visit the site itself". That's definitely not true. RSS is about being notified of new articles. Subscribing to an RSS feed is like subscribing to a mailing list. But it won't deliver the content reliably — many RSS readers restrict the HTML being rendered, for good reasons I'm sure, but they mess it up, there's no standard for what kind of HTML is accepted of course, so it only works well for textual articles, but rich text (e.g. images, CSS) is very problematic. On my own website (alexn.org) I had many problems with rendering articles, due to images and code syntax highlighting, enough so that I decided to no longer render the entire article in the RSS feed, I prefer to deliver just a summary. Being notified of new content, with a good summary, is all you need. If a website's readability is shitty, you can always invoke the browser's Reader View (Firefox, Safari) or open it with Pocket or whatever.