18 ms·

Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS

555 points by tschellenbach 8y ago

jeena 8y ago
I like #ReviveRSS but: > Powered By: Stream, Algolia, MongoDB, SendGrid, AWS My feed reader is an old PHP script running on a NUC.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Yeah I kinda feel like over engineering on RSS is going against the point. It's a simple tech, for a simple usage.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    …for a simpler time?
    - tschellenbach 8y ago
      I asked for tables, but the team went with fancy CSS
      - sametmax 8y ago
        More like i asked for a shared config file and they went with a blockchain.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      It's like tring to make very fancy coins. Go notes. Use eletronic money. But if you use coins, you usually do it because it's simple.
- gizzlon 8y ago
  Any recommendations for cross-platform, light RSS readers? PDF export would be _great_, but not necessary
  - joeseeder 8y ago
    Tiny tiny rss, all the way, you have great web based desktop ui and good mobile apps
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      Yes, agree, this is my choice of reader too.
  - gkya 8y ago
    Elfeed, if you are using Emacs. You can view most blogs and lighter websites w/ no problems with Emacs's web browser, EWW. Or you can tell Emacs w/ one variable to open links with an external browser.
- barakm 8y ago
  Agreed; it's impossible to self-host and is therefore a non-starter. For what it's worth, I've been pretty happy with FreshRSS (https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/)
  - JelteF 8y ago
    All these services have free plans either if you have little traffic or if it's open source. So it's definitely possible to self host this (although maybe not completely trivial). Disclaimer: I work at Stream (but haven't really worked on Winds)
    - dsr_ 8y ago
      An outage at any one of five services will stop your thing from working, and it won't necessarily be obvious what happened. Now you need to monitor five services, plus the one you actually built. Oh, and the free plans will stop being free once you cross a threshold of use, which is probably about when it becomes important to you. If each of those services has an outage once a year, you'll get to feel all of them. Compare to tt-rss: if your own web server and database are running (and there's an internet connection), it's working.
      - cornholio 8y ago
        Those are enterprise services that offer at least four nines of availability each, probably more. AWS even advertises 11 nines for a select set of features. They should add up to a service that has an availability in the 99.98%. Meanwhile, obtaining anything over 99.9% is usually a challenge for the amateur. Even if you are on call on every day of the year, it's very easy to go to sleep with your phone muted and wake up the next morning to discover the service is down for whatever reason.
    - barakm 8y ago
      That's not self-hosting. That's paying a cloud provider for a lot of services I don't need. To me, self-hosting means I can (theoretically) run everything I need, on my bare-metal -- a cloud provider or cloud service (eg, RDS) then becomes a choice, not a requirement. Suppose you swapped out every piece with a free, local one -- it'd still have the problem of being way overdesigned for what I'd need. Even if the UI looks decent.
- dewey 8y ago
  For those who look for a simple self hosted reader I can recommend: https://miniflux.net/ https://miniflux.net/
  - JetSpiegel 8y ago
    I'm running it on a RPi and it works perfectly.
jeffreyrogers 8y ago
Did RSS ever go away? Almost all of the blogs I follow still have RSS feeds. Maybe I'm just in a bubble. I think the decline in relative importance of RSS is certainly real, but that's more an effect of people getting their information from more centralized sources (like HN).
- stillbourne 8y ago
  I have no idea. I'm still using it and all the blogs I read still use it. I'm a little confused. I think the death of rss has been greatly exaggerated. As an aside I described one of my worst experiences with food poisoning as "having the winds" I'm a little biased against the name I guess.
- CharlesW 8y ago
  It didn't. But supposing it had, a combo newsreader/podcast player wouldn't have been the thing that brought it back.
- pchristensen 8y ago
  I don't think many sites removed RSS, but many new sites and services in the last ~5 years, never implemented or served it in the first place. The typical share icons now are FB, Instagram, and Twitter. Email is less common (although usually there's an email newsletter signup). For a while, there wouldn't be link to RSS on the page, but you could still find the .rss or .atom link in the HTML header. But a lot of times that's not there anymore either. It makes me sad to have to settle for Liking a company's FB page, since it's up to FB whether or not I ever see it.
  - jake_the_third 8y ago
    Youtube is like this. They don't advertise rss feeds but include them in the page source of youtube channels. In the one or two times I couldn't find the link in the source, I'd just copy the channel id of the channel and use the feed url from another channel. Works like a charm!
    - 8y ago
dismal2 8y ago
Why is this a downloadable app instead of a web app? It's built entirely using web technology. I think RSS belongs in my browser, so I can easily access it from whatever computer I might be using.
- nparsons08 8y ago
  This is a great point; however, we wanted to bring the user experience to the desktop. You are more than welcome to submit a PR to make this application web compatible.
  - entropie 8y ago
    Yeah, great passive aggressive way of dismissing a absolutely valid point.
    - entropie 8y ago
      Yeah, 3 downvotes in 60 seconds. Totally not brigading here.
      - dang 8y ago
        Your comment broke the HN guidelines, so it was properly downvoted. This one too. Could you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all? We're hoping for something a bit better here.
        entropie 8y ago
        Well yeah, ofcourse. I dont see where my inital post broke anything. It was esentially as meaningfull as OPs reply. Ofcourse, the point of "this app should run in a browser" is very valid. The reply, he can just code it himself is in my eyes a passive aggressive way of saying "no, i said your point is valid, but actually think it isn't and therefore ill ignore it anyway." Its obvioulsy, that a well developed web app should be runable in a browser and the developers could have thought about it earlier. They know their project better than anyone, so the afford of understanding how this piece of software works for an outsider is way to high.
CharlesW 8y ago
For a company who wants to "#ReviveRSS", the Stream site seems to avoid the word "RSS" like the plague except in this new blog post. Do they support RSS in their service, and if so does this product use their service for RSS feed polling, etc.?
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  Stream is an API for building activity feeds. You use it when you want to follow things in your application. Another use case is notification feeds. RSS readers are a tiny fraction of our customer base, but it's something we care about. API tour is here: https://getstream.io/get_started/ https://getstream.io/get_started/ Currently Stream powers the feeds for over 300 million end users, Stackshare did a nice post about our tech: https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-news-feeds-for-over-300-million-end-users https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-news-feeds-for-ov...
kav2k 8y ago
To "revive" RSS, wider support from content providers is needed, not from software to consume feeds. Can't display a feed that doesn't exist!
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  It's a circle that right now is spiraling the wrong direction. I hope that the community can come together and improve the user experience around RSS. This in turn will help show the value of RSS to publishers. The current user experience around RSS isn't always very use friendly. On the other hand, the people that care about RSS are designers, developers and journalists. We should be able to turn the tide.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  We did our part. As of a couple weeks ago, you can now syndicate your published email conversations as an RSS feed: https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=Alex3917 https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=Alex391...
  - kav2k 8y ago
    Don't forget an important part of the picture — feed autodiscovery tags. See https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-atompub-autodiscovery-01 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-atompub-autodiscovery...
devang1707 8y ago
Why can't I upload OPML file? App does nothing when I upload it.
- aspett 8y ago
  Same problem here
  - tschellenbach 8y ago
    It's bugged, the team is pushing a release, but it will take 24h before it's in the app store.
384243423 8y ago
This makes me weep. We are returning to RSS _because_ of dumb over-engineering web apps. The solution is not a dumb over-engineered web-based RSS reader.
skrause 8y ago
> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well. After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way, I'm using Inoreader every day.
- tunesmith 8y ago
  A site should still be able to choose to not produce RSS if they don't want. Encouraging RSS is different than forcing RSS feeds on sites that don't want them.
  - catach 8y ago
    Site creators have the freedom to produce what they want, and users likewise have the freedom to consume how they want.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      Do they? I'm fairly certain they don't. Otherwise everyone would just be torrenting and stripping commercials.
      - catach 8y ago
        Sure, as a broad absolutist statement there's plenty of practical, legal, metaphysical holes you could poke in it. Not aware of any anti-user-made RSS laws, though.
      - evrydayhustling 8y ago
        Torrenting is illegal because you (generally) weren't authorized to make a copy. Stripping commercials isn't because you're removing something, or changing the way you read it. There might be some legal case if you have to make another copy of media in order to alter your consumption, but thank God I'm aware of no case attempting to control your personal use of media. (DMCA doesn't count, it's about circumventing things that prevent you from copying, not change your consumption.)
k1ns 8y ago
Just a friendly PSA that WordPress comes with RSS feeds enabled by default. Since an overwhelming majority of content websites use WordPress, I think it's safe to say RSS is still widely available. Try going to your favorite blog and append "?feed=rss2" to the end of the URL. Like so: http://example.com/?feed=rss2 http://example.com/?feed=rss2
- catach 8y ago
  Related: Firefox still offers an RSS button that you can place in a toolbar. Lights up when a site has a feed available.
  - gkya 8y ago
    Also related: if your browser can not do this, view source, and look for a <link> with rel=alternate.
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    Chrome also has an official extension (by Google) to do the same: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-extensio/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-e... It can be configured to send the selected feed URL to your (online) aggregator of choice.
- Semiapies 8y ago
  Yeah, even in 2018, sites I encounter without RSS are few and far between.
- icc97 8y ago
  Medium has them too [0]: medium.com/feed/@Medium Plus Blogger [1]: blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss [0]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feeds https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed... [1]: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/97933?hl=en https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/97933?hl=en
- josefresco 8y ago
tasubotadas 8y ago
How about Feedpresso? Would anyone be willing to give it a go?
grizzles 8y ago
Since we're on the topic, are there any new-ish open source alternatives to pump & stream-framework?
burtonator 8y ago
It won't ever come back because there's no monetary incentive for people to share content. Just the opposite in fact.
- catach 8y ago
  And yet, Reddit.
- trophycase 8y ago
  I've never used an RSS reader so correct me if I'm wrong, but RSS can basically allow you to read the content without advertising? Sharing is fine, but I think they would prefer sharing in a way that can make money.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    I use RSS/Atom to keep up-to-date on the 100+ webcomics I read, and the content in those feeds can vary wildly. Some include the full comic page, some only a thumbnail, some contain an accompanying blog post, others are empty and you need to follow the link to see the post. If you want to read everything in your feed reader, those "incomplete" feeds are disappointing, but I just use it as a kind of newsletter to get notified of updates. I even use Thunderbird's built-in feed support.
  - catach 8y ago
    Feeds can contain ads, as Daring Fireball's does [0]. Granted, advertisers don't get analytics that way so it's certainly less appealing. [0] https://daringfireball.net/feeds/main https://daringfireball.net/feeds/main
  - josefresco 8y ago
    Most feeds only contain "excerpts" - which require you to visit the website to read the entire article. Thankfully, "reader mode" exists. Ads are also entirely possible, but not commonplace.
- symlinkk 8y ago
  Ironically you're posting this to a website where people are sharing content for free.
Zhyl 8y ago
Is there an app/service that does the following?: * Has a feed a la RSS readers * Allows items on that feed (from all the sources) to be earmarked * At the end of reviewing the unread items of the feed, summarise a 'checkout' of earmarked items * Sends a payment to each of the publications for the content earmarked * Compiles the content into a consumable format such as kindle, PDF or download for mobile I can only think of instapaper/pocket type services that don't allow for payment, or for browsers like Brave that use blockchainy things that seem new and scary. Or are just RSS readers.
- usrusr 8y ago
  Pretty much my thoughts: if you want RSS to live, turn it into the platform for content micropayment. If you just want it to be a better adblocker, don't act surprised if nobody wants to play along.
keithnz 8y ago
I'm still angry (ish) at google for killing google reader, it met my RSS needs really nicely. I use feedly now. Which is pretty good. For me having it has a web site is most useful, rather than a device oriented thing that manages feeds.
- BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
  The thing that bugs me about the Feedly website is that it doesn't really feel like a RSS reader, at least on the free service. Maybe the paid version is (much) more customizable but I doubt it. It reminds me more of Flipboard. Edit: It's tailored to marketing people so I think that's why.
  - greenyoda 8y ago
    You might want to try NewsBlur.com - it's quite similar to how Google Reader used to be. It has a free version (64 RSS feeds) and a paid version (unlimited feeds). (I remember trying Feedly when Google Reader died, but ended up going with NewsBlur instead.)
- talonx 8y ago
  I switched to inoreader.com when Google Reader went away. Not the best but it works for me, a tad slow to load the first time. I tried Feedly but gave up when their nginx LB timed out after a minute because my OPML import was a big file. Plus, the interface does not feel like an RSS reader, as somebody else points out.
- josefresco 8y ago
  I use the Feedly iOS app - never used or even seen the website. What I like about the app, is the "all done!" message at the end of your daily feeds. It's a nice reminder/poke to get off the phone and get on with life.
dlbucci 8y ago
Question: why am I constantly hearing about RSS and never Atom? Isn't Atom newer and supposedly better? Are the two basically interchangeable, or did Atom never catch on enough that people want to revive it?
- BryantD 8y ago
  Atom was an improvement, but not enough of an improvement to convince people to upgrade from a large installed base.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  Basically interchangeable, to the point where it is extremely rare that a tool will work with one and not the other. (Not the same code path, just that a tool to work with RSS will usually end up also supporting ATOM and vice-versa.)
- icc97 8y ago
  It seems that RSS just caught on as the name everyone remembers. Atom is indeed better [0]. [0]: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
- cjbprime 8y ago
  They're interchangeable; any significant RSS reader is also an Atom reader.
- fenwick67 8y ago
  Most rss readers work with Atom too, but more people know what RSS is than "atom", which is also text editor and a processor and a particle
- Alex3917 8y ago
  At this point Atom is basically just the technical name for protocol that powers RSS.
- strkek 8y ago
  I think it's a situation sort of like with SSL and TLS, where the former term implies the latter. I mean, it's not rare to find people using the term "SSL Certificates" even on TLS-only setups. Also: https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Libssl_API https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Libssl_API > libssl is the portion of OpenSSL which supports TLS It's for TLS support yet they call it "libssl". So yeah, you can just mentally replace "RSS" with "RSS/Atom" and most of the time it'll be fine.
andrepd 8y ago
Sadly, instead of Flatpak or Appimage, they decided to use Ubuntu Snap for packaging their Linux app.
- favadi 8y ago
  Why it is sad?
  - jake_the_third 8y ago
    Not the guy, but one reason to avoid ubuntu snaps is that it is designed not to allow users to have complete control over software updates. With snaps, the developer controls the update process, not the user. Some people believe that the user should have the final say in what his or her system does. Snap goes against this. It's a great project otherwise. See: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for-snap-from-store/707 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...
    - andrepd 8y ago
      I'd add to that a general dislike of the "splitter" attitude taken by Ubuntu. Unity vs Gnome, Mir vs Waylaid, now Snap vs Flatpak. The latter works well, the former doesn't improve in any meaningful way. Why fragment?
      - oblio 8y ago
        Gnome 3 was quite widely disliked by a big part of the community. I'm not sure Unity was necessarily a bad idea.
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  App Image is also available! https://s3.amazonaws.com/winds-2.0-releases/releases/winds-2.0.210-x86_64.AppImage https://s3.amazonaws.com/winds-2.0-releases/releases/winds-2...
russellbeattie 8y ago
I'm amazed RSS has lasted this long. In terms of technology, it's a dog. Beyond the problems associated with malformed XML, and crazy namespaces (I once went through several hundred thousand feeds and found over 100 different tags), the process of polling for new content is inefficient and wasteful. I recently moved my personal blog from one server to another and was amazed at the amount of bot traffic I get - over 5 years after I stopped blogging regularly. In terms of business sense - why would a publisher ever want to create an RSS feed in the first place? I'm still surprised they bother. RSS feeds don't drive sufficient traffic to justify their existence, and allows easy copying/republishing. There's zero financial incentive. I'm a news junkie and loved blogs in their heyday, but those days are over and they aren't coming back.
unicornporn 8y ago
I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app. 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/). [1] https://freshrss.org https://freshrss.org
- sengork 8y ago
  Since Google Reader retired, I've moved to www.netvibes.com
  - marpstar 8y ago
    I forgot all about Netvibes.com! I remember setting up a personal dashboard with my emails, news, Digg, etc way back in ~2006. It may very well have been my first foray into RSS, now that I think about it...
- allanbreyes 8y ago
  100% agree with self-hosting an RSS aggregator. It's awesome. Personally, I gave tt-rss and FreshRSS a shot, but went back to Miniflux[1]. One binary to run (written in Golang) and plugs into Postgres. Easy to set up, but I prefer Miniflux for the same reasons I prefer Hacker News' website—simple and functional. [1] https://miniflux.net/ https://miniflux.net/
  - tschellenbach 8y ago
    Fun fact, Stream is almost entirely written in Go. Winds is based on Node/React. I think it's nice as it enables more people to contribute. (everyone knows JS)
jeffbax 8y ago
I'm not sure what this non-native application is offering me over plenty of Mac (and presumably Linux & Windows) native versions using way less memory and having platform-native UI controls. RSS's challenge has never been apps, it's support from publishers to keep using open formats.
- jammi 8y ago
  I'd also say a large part of its issue is lack of internal consistency of the format itself. Firstly there are the various official RSS versions, then there are all those Atom things and probably others as well, and then there's the thing about how you're supposed to render the things correctly. XML as the content format is also pretty much antiquated. A modern format would no doubt have to be JSON- or YAML-based and have its human-readable content in plain text or markdown, so it'd have to be pretty much readable with a plain text http client, like curl. So, just let RSS die the slow death it's been going through for good reasons and bring something consistent and straight-forward into its place. Something that you could easily generate and parse from any modern language without specific libraries. Bringing RSS back is like trying to bring SOAP as a RPC system back; it just won't fly anymore no matter how much hot air you try to pump into it. We know better now and have better ways to do the things.
  - jeena 8y ago
    https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/
xpil 8y ago
Two words: News. Blur. I have been using https://newsblur.com https://newsblur.com for years now (ever since Google Reader died) and am not switching to anything else soon. RSS is not dead.
- edpichler 8y ago
  wow, I really liked it.
- greenyoda 8y ago
  I've also been a happy user of NewsBlur since then. I use the paid option ($36/year), which gives you unlimited RSS feeds. There's also a free option that gives you up to 64 feeds. They have both a web app and mobile (iOS/Android) apps.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Groxx 8y ago
  Yea, I'm thrilled with NewsBlur. Significantly happier than I even was with Google Reader, plus it's open source, plus the dev is fairly steadily introducing well-thought-out features (like highlighting articles from infrequent posters). Glad to pay for it to keep it running.
- LaSombra 8y ago
  I did exactly the same thing. I tested quite a few services on the downfall of Google Reader and stuck with Newsblur ever since. I cannot think of any other service that works as smoothly as Newsblur and provides me with exactly what I need; keyboard shortcuts, good mobile clients, open source, decently priced, constant improvements.
tschellenbach 8y ago
Thanks for all the feedback, this is awesome. Sounds like a lot of people would like a web and mobile version. What other problems do you currently have with your RSS readers and Podcast apps? Anything in particular that you're missing?
- forapurpose 8y ago
  I have far too many feed items to read. I'd like to review ~1,000 items in 20 minutes, as a start. (Review means: Read the headline, possibly read the summary, decide whether to read the full story, do whatever is needed to open full story, move to next item; I'll read the full stories after I've gone through all the feed items.) * Deduplication: Which might remove ~5% of my feed items * Grouping: This would be by far the most important feature. I need something to group articles covering the same story (e.g., all the news publications' stories on the big game or big speech or big calamity last night). Then I can quickly choose one and ignore the rest. * Speed: UI that responds at the speed of thought and maximizes throughput when reviewing feed items. A keyboard interface is essential. * Complex filters: So I can automatically process items as desired. * EDIT: Automate handling of broken feeds: On one hand, I want to spend as little time on broken feeds as possible; perhaps the reader can retry for x hours, then try obvious alternative addresses (perhaps Stream can maintain a db of the new addresses, saving each user from redundantly solving the problem themselves), then notify me with an efficient interface for resolving the problem. * Micropayments: Maybe over-ambitious, but it would be a great way to support the authors. A possibly world-changing feature.
tw1010 8y ago
The whole rss is dead -> long live rss narrative has been an eye-opening experience for me in terms of practically illustrating just how powerful and influential the news is on technological development. Engineers can apparantely be a lot more easily manipulated than what I previously thought. (I'd argue we never knew whether or not RSS was dead because it was based on small and skewed sampling biases.)
- byproxy 8y ago
  the tide of sentiment rises and falls. the glow of opinion waxes and wanes. the wave of reaction ebbs and flows.
  - tw1010 8y ago
    and the question persists; how can this insight earn me profit?
h43z 8y ago
For websites I want to follow that don't provide an RSS feed I wrote a 30 line python script which runs in daily cronjob and creates me an an XML feed that I can import locally in my reader (newsboat). Easy and it works great.
- hypocrazybr 8y ago
  do you have this python script in some kind of github/bitbucket repo? would you mind to share it? Newsboat is awesome!
  - h43z 8y ago
    Yes I have. Here you go https://github.com/h43z/rssify https://github.com/h43z/rssify
tambourine_man 8y ago
Is that another Electron app? If so, no thanks
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  Web and React Native are coming soon
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
    Sorry, but I’m very skeptical it can compete with a truly native Cocoa app such as NetNewsWire on UX. It’s such an unfornutate trand.
boardwaalk 8y ago
I'm surprised rss2email (or something similar) has hardly been mentioned. Getting your RSS in your email makes a surprising amount of sense. You can filter, organize and archive it. You can search it. You can mark it read or put flags on it. You can forward it to friends if that's your thing. And it works everywhere you have an email app. I also have small scripts that run as cron jobs and scrape a few Twitter feeds and a few subreddits and email new items to me. Having all my updates in one place I can consume in one place when I want is just great. I'm not sure what I'd get out of Winds looking at it.
- wbillingsley 8y ago
  The thing I most hated about RSS readers was they treated it like email (or even old-style newsgroups), assuming you cared how many articles you hadn't read. Nope, most of it's news (whether tech or some other kind), and the social media stream kind of access (where you care about what's current, but if you missed it so what) seems a lot more appropriate.
  - boardwaalk 8y ago
    I mean, if you want to support that kind of view, you could certainly just purge anything more than 10 articles old or whatever from the RSS feed from your inbox. We probably just use these things differently though. Like, if a product I'm interested in gets reviewed I want to see that -- I don't want to have to go search the website later because maybe it was reviewed but I wasn't hovering over my RSS feed the hour or two it was the top story. Basically, it completely replaces the website's front page for me, and if I have to go there I've failed.
- harrygeez 8y ago
  never used it before but I imagine it wouldn't work well with hundreds of updates everyday? Plus centralized feed management is easier with an RSS service like Feedly. I don't want to scour through all my mails for my feeds, as if it wasn't hard enough keeping with mailing lists already.
  - 8y ago
paulcole 8y ago
I’ll disagree. It’s been however many years since Google Reader shut down and I haven’t replaced it with anything. Don’t really feel the need to add RSS back into my life.
- josefresco 8y ago
  How do you consume / aggregate the content you previously consumed via Google Reader?
  - paulcole 8y ago
    Found out I could live without most of it. Now I visit Reddit and HN more.
    - josefresco 8y ago
      Same here - I use Feedly less often than I used Twitter when my media feeds were housed there. I also find this same behavior after we recently ditched cable TV. Those TV shows and networks that were "important" to me before are not nearly as much now that I've broken free.
SnowingXIV 8y ago
I’m still looking for a reader that can crawl the web and find articles based on specific keywords and exclude sites of my choice. I want to follow certain topics in a particular niche but the best solution is setting weekly roundup with google alerts in their news which only includes those that are part of “google news.”
- jhund 8y ago
  Shameless plug: This is exactly what we built https://contentgems.com https://contentgems.com for. It is entirely driven by feeds (both RSS/Atom as well as Twitter home timeline). You can filter by content (Lucene query), by feed, by domain (suffix) and a few other parameters.
  - SnowingXIV 8y ago
    I gave it a try, it wasn't able to find anything related to the keywords I'm trying to track but this seems to be useful if it did hah.
eridius 8y ago
Does this app support RSS syncing services like Feedbin? I don't see any mention of that in the description, which suggests that it doesn't. If so, that's a pretty big missing feature.
jaequery 8y ago
if someone comes up with RSS in a pure JSON format, I'd think we may see a revival.
- Tepix 8y ago
  Parsing RSS is hardly a problem. Even jQuery has builtin support. If you want a replacement for the Google Feed API, use Feednami.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  https://jsonfeed.org https://jsonfeed.org Already supported in Feedly and Feedbin, probably more.
- yrro 8y ago
  Why?
- unicornporn 8y ago
  RSS works pretty well as is. Few users would care the data format. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
_wmd 8y ago
(deleted useful feedback but ultimately neggy comment -- sorry, these guys are launching an app, I don't want to shit on that in a top comment where it's the reader's first experience).
- jxcl 8y ago
  > - Opens in App Store, which gets stuck (as always) asking me for billing info. > - Rustle around for PayPal password. Why not just provide a .dmg? > - +4 minutes, finally get App Store working. Download. This seems to be more a complaint about your operating system than the app.
  - apocalyptic0n3 8y ago
    No, it's a complaint about the availability of the app itself. You're not forced to use the App Store and most freeware is offered both in and out of it. I gave Winds 2.0 a look last week and had the same experience. It took like 5 minutes just to get a download link and it takes me to the App Store where I have to sign-in (after signing in to LastPass and pulling out my phone for 2FA). Then I finally get it installed and immediately get asked to register for yet another account. It's a pretty app, but the install process was terrible and it's honestly not a great RSS reader. It's a worse version of Flipboard with somehow less control over the content you see.
    - jxcl 8y ago
      > You're not forced to use the App Store Is this true if you're a developer? I've stayed away from macs because you need xcode to get any sort of dev tools and xcode is only available on the App store (at least this was the case the last time I tried to develop on a mac).
      - apocalyptic0n3 8y ago
        I meant for providing your apps to users. Apple's software is only available via the App Store, but you can put your app up for download anywhere you want. As an example, Slack can be downloaded from both their site or via the App Store. [1] [1]: https://slack.com/downloads/osx https://slack.com/downloads/osx
zahreeley 8y ago
RSS in JSON format? Or may be yaml
- unicornporn 8y ago
  Please, no. RSS works pretty well as is. Few users would care about the data format. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
craptocurrency 8y ago
RSS in json format. Or yaml
Groxx 8y ago
Of course it's an Electron app. :| That said, pleasantly speedy! Nice work. There are a fair number of minor UI glitches (suggestions list frequently flickers when going to/from it, follow/unfollow can sometimes escape bounds of window and cause scrollbars, etc) but overall it feels pretty nice. I'll give it a try for a while. If you're taking recommendations though: - It'd be really awesome if I could paste a URL into the search field and have one of the options be "add a new feed" rather than clicking the +. - And the "featured" section is probably a decent intro to new users (keep it!), but I'm unlikely to ever use it, and it's taking up a LOT of real-estate. Maybe an option to hide it / make it able to scroll away, to give more room for the stuff you already follow below.
pcmiller 8y ago
How can you revive RSS without either producing great RSS content or dethroning the main two sources of content that will definitely not ever (again) go back to RSS (Twitter and FB)?
lylo 8y ago
For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly. For iOS I use Reeder (https://reederapp.com https://reederapp.com) but for Mac (which Reeder also supports) I use the excellent ReadKit (https://readkitapp.com/ https://readkitapp.com/). Most blogs still appear to support RSS but you do get the odd one now and again that doesn’t, but that’s their loss as far as I’m concerned.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly. Interesting, I also migrated to feedly but I do use the web application on the desktop, though the feedly app on my phone. On desktop, the webapp works really well for my purposes — which is mostly going through all updates (all sorted by oldest, "j" for next), and once in a while opening one in a full browser window ("v") or sending the page to instapaper.
- phnk 8y ago
  I use FetchRSS to generate feeds for the odd ones [1]. [1]: http://fetchrss.com/ http://fetchrss.com/
- mrmondo 8y ago
  I also highly recommend Reeder for both iOS and macOS, it’s absolutely brilliant and it’s an actual native program not more of this JavaScript in a web frame bloat/slothware.
- josefresco 8y ago
  Am I missing something? Feedly has an iOS app - is it new?
begriffs 8y ago
Why has this become so complicated? I use Newsboat https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/ to read RSS, and follow about 100 very interesting authors that way. I just put the RSS urls into a text file and the self-contained 1.7mb program does the rest. Somehow it gets by without using a combination of Electron, Mongo, Algolia, Redis, machine learning (!), and Sendgrid. Maybe the comparison with a text-based RSS reader isn't fair and Winds does some crazy cool stuff, but it's hard to see what that is exactly.
- LaSombra 8y ago
  Ah, that's great. It can work as a Newsblur client. I'll definitely give it a try.
- jghjg 8y ago
  ehm, I don't think a console rss reader isn't complicated for the common non tech user
  - oblio 8y ago
    I'd expand on this: do you know any non-tech user that uses any console application: * knowingly * not having been introduced to it by a techie * not being forced to use it by their workplace ? I don't know any...
    - mtreis86 8y ago
      And how many tech people also avoid console applications.
  - z3t4 8y ago
    What's even more simple is to punch the URL in ASCII numbers to the cards, and put it in the "RSS" deck, then on every Monday morning press play on the program tape, that loads the URL's from the card deck and after a few hours prints all new articles on the mainframe's printer.
- anilgulecha 8y ago
aaronbrethorst 8y ago
I pay a couple bucks every month for Feedbin and couldn't be happier: http://www.feedbin.com http://www.feedbin.com
- luag 8y ago
  Only a couple? How? I pay 5 / month :/
  - aaronbrethorst 8y ago
    Judging by my billing history, it looks like I signed up the same day it was announced back in 2013. I must be grandfathered in. I'd happily pay $5/mo for Feedbin if the grandfathered plans were removed. In terms of cost per hour of use, it's probably the service I pay the least for.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
garganzol 8y ago
Winds 2.0 was easy to setup but it immediately asks to register an account upon the first app launch. Why? I prefer to store my settings locally or in Dropbox. I uninstalled the app without moving any further.
advanced__pizza 8y ago
plug: http://flatreader.com/ http://flatreader.com/ Idea is to be super simple. Unlimited feeds in beta. Will post the github if anyone is interested in helping out. Sinatra / Ruby, Postgres.
- unicornporn 8y ago
  > Unlimited feeds in beta. That isn't a great selling point to me. That means I might become locked into a service with bad terms.
yoz-y 8y ago
RSS never died. Many sites (at least those of interest to me) still release feeds. It's just that they are not advertised as much and the RSS logo kind of disappeared.
hd4 8y ago
When I read the headline, I immediately knew this was some RSS reader built on Electron.
bad_user 8y ago
N.B. this isn't fully open source because it relies on the Stream API: https://getstream.io/ https://getstream.io/ They have a free quota of 3 million feed updates (not sure if total, I'm guessing per month?). Important to keep in mind because the app may be open source, but they can pull the plug on it by shutting down the web service. And so you can't self host it independently. It might be nice, not saying otherwise, but for example something like Newsblur.com is open source and hosted, so you can pay a yearly fee for the service, while having the peace of mind that you can fork it and self host it yourself should the product die, which is what many of us want after Google pulled the plug on Reader ;-)
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  NewsBlur is a great project. Winds relies on Stream, Algolia and Mercury API. NewsBlur supports Mercury. You can run both Winds or Newsblur on your own server. I wonder if we could do a project together with Newsblur where we list if sites properly support RSS. Similar to how the Python 3 ready sites popped up.
rado 8y ago
RSS came back to light after privacy concerns and Winds requires registration to work?
wolololo33 8y ago
I use Liferea. It used to work well 6 years ago and still works good. I don't need to share my feeds with the "cloud" and I don't need to run yet another instance of Chrome and have yet another copy node_modules. Pricing: 0$/month.
oelmekki 8y ago
I've been using rss again for a few months, and it's been really nice. It's like twitter without the noise. The "wow" moment for me was when I discovered google alerts allows to get alerts as a rss feed (individually for each alert). So this means content discovery through RSS is now possible (the main reason why I started to replace RSS with twitter). Alerts have two modes, one "main articles only" where google applies some blackbox magic to limit the amount of items talking about the same thing, and "all articles". I'm seriously thinking about using this to build my own privacy oriented clone of google feed. I could have a browser extension performing keyword extraction from my web history to detect my interests, then have google alerts set up on those keywords and a local app chewing all similar content from items through textrank to produce a "news", with a list of sources, maybe sorted through alexa rank. Sounds like quite a job, but worth it.
josefresco 8y ago
I recently unfollowed most "media" on my Twitter, and transitioned those sources to RSS / Feedly app on iOS. Feedly works good enough, and my Twitter feed is now much quieter, and I feel good about spending less time on Twitter (for various reasons). I have found that finding an RSS feed for a website/brand can sometimes be difficult. Feedly does a good job making this easy, but sometimes I need to resort to Google, to find the proper feed. I also find it rewarding to follow (on Twitter) journalists, instead of the paper/website/org they work for. You get more personal tweets, story follow ups, and can engage them in conversation, unlike most media feeds which are managed by staff uninterested in engaging.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
se7entime 8y ago
Thunderbird Feeds feature is enough for me and i don't see if i want another rss reader client email + feeds? Thunderbird!
pixelrevision 8y ago
Lack of a good client is not the issue here. RSS needs to either add a standard way to serve ads or some sort of revenue model. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense for most publishers to adopt or maintain it.
- aeorgnoieang 8y ago
  Why does RSS need "a standard way to serve ads"? Feed content can easily include ads.
  - nie 8y ago
    So 'we' can block it. NLP for ads detection would be disastrous as a problem to tackle. And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs.
    - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
      The comment to which I was replying claimed that it was necessary for publishers to adopt RSS. I'm pretty sure they were thinking that, if RSS had some kind of standard way to increase the probability of ads being seen, publishers would adopt it more widely (and that's probably true). My point is that feed content can already include ads as regular text or images or whatever. Feed readers and aggregators complicate ad-tracking, but not ads themselves (like what newspapers and magazines have used for decades [or centuries]). Some of my favorite feeds are sites with plain ads and the advertisers seem to be targeting the site's audience instead of individuals. That seems to work well enough given that it's existed in its current form for several years now at least. > And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs. We're probably writing past each other. I think you're imagining a much more widespread adoption of RSS in which this would be a real problem. Or maybe I'm just weird. But I don't see the problem with, e.g. following a feed of someone's Twitter activity that includes an (obvious) ad every n feed items for some suitable value of n. And my imagined world wouldn't require any changes to RSS.
triplee 8y ago
Revive? How do you think I got here in the first place? RSS isn't all that dead since some of us olds never stopped using it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pickypickle 8y ago
How about everyone gives the creators of Winds some credit instead of bitching about RSS, the interface, the desktop experience, etc. I would imagine they put months of effort into building out such a complex application.
kchr 8y ago
I don't the problem is a lack of clients or interest from consumers; it's that publishers want more control of the content and how it is consumed (for example by forcing you to use their own platform).
vladimir-y 8y ago
It's built on Electron.js, so for Desktop only, how is it useful then? https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ is still working well by the way.
grappler 8y ago
That looks like a nice desktop app, and that's certainly a start. If other users are anything like me, then to really revive RSS you have to think more multi-device. Assume the user will want to get to their feed of stuff to read from their phone, tablet, or laptop. Assume the user will want to listen from their phone most of the time (iphone or android), but maybe their watch while exercising, their car stereo while driving, and through speakers like Echo or Sonos at home. Get these things to sync up nicely and I bet people wouldn't mind a bit that RSS is underneath somewhere, making it go.
dlutcat 8y ago
I didn't find any more cool features in Winds than in other Google Reader clone products. I have been using inoreader(https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/) since Google Reader was shutdown, and it works very well for me.
orschiro 8y ago
I like these two open source readers: 1. https://www.feedbunch.com https://www.feedbunch.com 2. https://www.commafeed.com/ https://www.commafeed.com/ :-)

555 points by tschellenbach 8y ago

I like #ReviveRSS but: > Powered By: Stream, Algolia, MongoDB, SendGrid, AWS My feed reader is an old PHP script running on a NUC.

sametmax 8y ago
Yeah I kinda feel like over engineering on RSS is going against the point. It's a simple tech, for a simple usage.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  …for a simpler time?
  - tschellenbach 8y ago
    I asked for tables, but the team went with fancy CSS
    - sametmax 8y ago
      More like i asked for a shared config file and they went with a blockchain.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    It's like tring to make very fancy coins. Go notes. Use eletronic money. But if you use coins, you usually do it because it's simple.
gizzlon 8y ago
Any recommendations for cross-platform, light RSS readers? PDF export would be _great_, but not necessary
- joeseeder 8y ago
  Tiny tiny rss, all the way, you have great web based desktop ui and good mobile apps
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    Yes, agree, this is my choice of reader too.
- gkya 8y ago
  Elfeed, if you are using Emacs. You can view most blogs and lighter websites w/ no problems with Emacs's web browser, EWW. Or you can tell Emacs w/ one variable to open links with an external browser.
barakm 8y ago
Agreed; it's impossible to self-host and is therefore a non-starter. For what it's worth, I've been pretty happy with FreshRSS (https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/)
- JelteF 8y ago
  All these services have free plans either if you have little traffic or if it's open source. So it's definitely possible to self host this (although maybe not completely trivial). Disclaimer: I work at Stream (but haven't really worked on Winds)
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    An outage at any one of five services will stop your thing from working, and it won't necessarily be obvious what happened. Now you need to monitor five services, plus the one you actually built. Oh, and the free plans will stop being free once you cross a threshold of use, which is probably about when it becomes important to you. If each of those services has an outage once a year, you'll get to feel all of them. Compare to tt-rss: if your own web server and database are running (and there's an internet connection), it's working.
    - cornholio 8y ago
      Those are enterprise services that offer at least four nines of availability each, probably more. AWS even advertises 11 nines for a select set of features. They should add up to a service that has an availability in the 99.98%. Meanwhile, obtaining anything over 99.9% is usually a challenge for the amateur. Even if you are on call on every day of the year, it's very easy to go to sleep with your phone muted and wake up the next morning to discover the service is down for whatever reason.
  - barakm 8y ago
    That's not self-hosting. That's paying a cloud provider for a lot of services I don't need. To me, self-hosting means I can (theoretically) run everything I need, on my bare-metal -- a cloud provider or cloud service (eg, RDS) then becomes a choice, not a requirement. Suppose you swapped out every piece with a free, local one -- it'd still have the problem of being way overdesigned for what I'd need. Even if the UI looks decent.
dewey 8y ago
For those who look for a simple self hosted reader I can recommend: https://miniflux.net/ https://miniflux.net/
- JetSpiegel 8y ago
  I'm running it on a RPi and it works perfectly.

jeffreyrogers 8y ago

Did RSS ever go away? Almost all of the blogs I follow still have RSS feeds. Maybe I'm just in a bubble. I think the decline in relative importance of RSS is certainly real, but that's more an effect of people getting their information from more centralized sources (like HN).

stillbourne 8y ago
I have no idea. I'm still using it and all the blogs I read still use it. I'm a little confused. I think the death of rss has been greatly exaggerated. As an aside I described one of my worst experiences with food poisoning as "having the winds" I'm a little biased against the name I guess.
CharlesW 8y ago
It didn't. But supposing it had, a combo newsreader/podcast player wouldn't have been the thing that brought it back.
pchristensen 8y ago
I don't think many sites removed RSS, but many new sites and services in the last ~5 years, never implemented or served it in the first place. The typical share icons now are FB, Instagram, and Twitter. Email is less common (although usually there's an email newsletter signup). For a while, there wouldn't be link to RSS on the page, but you could still find the .rss or .atom link in the HTML header. But a lot of times that's not there anymore either. It makes me sad to have to settle for Liking a company's FB page, since it's up to FB whether or not I ever see it.
- jake_the_third 8y ago
  Youtube is like this. They don't advertise rss feeds but include them in the page source of youtube channels. In the one or two times I couldn't find the link in the source, I'd just copy the channel id of the channel and use the feed url from another channel. Works like a charm!
  - 8y ago

dismal2 8y ago

Why is this a downloadable app instead of a web app? It's built entirely using web technology. I think RSS belongs in my browser, so I can easily access it from whatever computer I might be using.

nparsons08 8y ago
This is a great point; however, we wanted to bring the user experience to the desktop. You are more than welcome to submit a PR to make this application web compatible.
- entropie 8y ago
  Yeah, great passive aggressive way of dismissing a absolutely valid point.
  - entropie 8y ago
    Yeah, 3 downvotes in 60 seconds. Totally not brigading here.
    - dang 8y ago
      Your comment broke the HN guidelines, so it was properly downvoted. This one too. Could you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all? We're hoping for something a bit better here.
      - entropie 8y ago
        Well yeah, ofcourse. I dont see where my inital post broke anything. It was esentially as meaningfull as OPs reply. Ofcourse, the point of "this app should run in a browser" is very valid. The reply, he can just code it himself is in my eyes a passive aggressive way of saying "no, i said your point is valid, but actually think it isn't and therefore ill ignore it anyway." Its obvioulsy, that a well developed web app should be runable in a browser and the developers could have thought about it earlier. They know their project better than anyone, so the afford of understanding how this piece of software works for an outsider is way to high.

CharlesW 8y ago

For a company who wants to "#ReviveRSS", the Stream site seems to avoid the word "RSS" like the plague except in this new blog post. Do they support RSS in their service, and if so does this product use their service for RSS feed polling, etc.?

tschellenbach 8y ago
Stream is an API for building activity feeds. You use it when you want to follow things in your application. Another use case is notification feeds. RSS readers are a tiny fraction of our customer base, but it's something we care about. API tour is here: https://getstream.io/get_started/ https://getstream.io/get_started/ Currently Stream powers the feeds for over 300 million end users, Stackshare did a nice post about our tech: https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-news-feeds-for-over-300-million-end-users https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-news-feeds-for-ov...

kav2k 8y ago

To "revive" RSS, wider support from content providers is needed, not from software to consume feeds. Can't display a feed that doesn't exist!

tschellenbach 8y ago
It's a circle that right now is spiraling the wrong direction. I hope that the community can come together and improve the user experience around RSS. This in turn will help show the value of RSS to publishers. The current user experience around RSS isn't always very use friendly. On the other hand, the people that care about RSS are designers, developers and journalists. We should be able to turn the tide.
Alex3917 8y ago
We did our part. As of a couple weeks ago, you can now syndicate your published email conversations as an RSS feed: https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=Alex3917 https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=Alex391...
- kav2k 8y ago
  Don't forget an important part of the picture — feed autodiscovery tags. See https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-atompub-autodiscovery-01 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-atompub-autodiscovery...

devang1707 8y ago

Why can't I upload OPML file? App does nothing when I upload it.

aspett 8y ago
Same problem here
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  It's bugged, the team is pushing a release, but it will take 24h before it's in the app store.

384243423 8y ago

This makes me weep. We are returning to RSS _because_ of dumb over-engineering web apps. The solution is not a dumb over-engineered web-based RSS reader.

skrause 8y ago

> I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about. Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well. After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS reader. Those have actually never gone way, I'm using Inoreader every day.

tunesmith 8y ago
A site should still be able to choose to not produce RSS if they don't want. Encouraging RSS is different than forcing RSS feeds on sites that don't want them.
- catach 8y ago
  Site creators have the freedom to produce what they want, and users likewise have the freedom to consume how they want.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Do they? I'm fairly certain they don't. Otherwise everyone would just be torrenting and stripping commercials.
    - catach 8y ago
      Sure, as a broad absolutist statement there's plenty of practical, legal, metaphysical holes you could poke in it. Not aware of any anti-user-made RSS laws, though.
    - evrydayhustling 8y ago
      Torrenting is illegal because you (generally) weren't authorized to make a copy. Stripping commercials isn't because you're removing something, or changing the way you read it. There might be some legal case if you have to make another copy of media in order to alter your consumption, but thank God I'm aware of no case attempting to control your personal use of media. (DMCA doesn't count, it's about circumventing things that prevent you from copying, not change your consumption.)

k1ns 8y ago

Just a friendly PSA that WordPress comes with RSS feeds enabled by default. Since an overwhelming majority of content websites use WordPress, I think it's safe to say RSS is still widely available. Try going to your favorite blog and append "?feed=rss2" to the end of the URL. Like so: http://example.com/?feed=rss2 http://example.com/?feed=rss2

catach 8y ago
Related: Firefox still offers an RSS button that you can place in a toolbar. Lights up when a site has a feed available.
- gkya 8y ago
  Also related: if your browser can not do this, view source, and look for a <link> with rel=alternate.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Chrome also has an official extension (by Google) to do the same: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-extensio/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-e... It can be configured to send the selected feed URL to your (online) aggregator of choice.
Semiapies 8y ago
Yeah, even in 2018, sites I encounter without RSS are few and far between.
icc97 8y ago
Medium has them too [0]: medium.com/feed/@Medium Plus Blogger [1]: blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss [0]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feeds https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed... [1]: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/97933?hl=en https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/97933?hl=en
josefresco 8y ago

tasubotadas 8y ago

How about Feedpresso? Would anyone be willing to give it a go?

grizzles 8y ago

Since we're on the topic, are there any new-ish open source alternatives to pump & stream-framework?

burtonator 8y ago

It won't ever come back because there's no monetary incentive for people to share content. Just the opposite in fact.

catach 8y ago
And yet, Reddit.
trophycase 8y ago
I've never used an RSS reader so correct me if I'm wrong, but RSS can basically allow you to read the content without advertising? Sharing is fine, but I think they would prefer sharing in a way that can make money.
- yorwba 8y ago
  I use RSS/Atom to keep up-to-date on the 100+ webcomics I read, and the content in those feeds can vary wildly. Some include the full comic page, some only a thumbnail, some contain an accompanying blog post, others are empty and you need to follow the link to see the post. If you want to read everything in your feed reader, those "incomplete" feeds are disappointing, but I just use it as a kind of newsletter to get notified of updates. I even use Thunderbird's built-in feed support.
- catach 8y ago
  Feeds can contain ads, as Daring Fireball's does [0]. Granted, advertisers don't get analytics that way so it's certainly less appealing. [0] https://daringfireball.net/feeds/main https://daringfireball.net/feeds/main
- josefresco 8y ago
  Most feeds only contain "excerpts" - which require you to visit the website to read the entire article. Thankfully, "reader mode" exists. Ads are also entirely possible, but not commonplace.
symlinkk 8y ago
Ironically you're posting this to a website where people are sharing content for free.

Zhyl 8y ago

Is there an app/service that does the following?: * Has a feed a la RSS readers * Allows items on that feed (from all the sources) to be earmarked * At the end of reviewing the unread items of the feed, summarise a 'checkout' of earmarked items * Sends a payment to each of the publications for the content earmarked * Compiles the content into a consumable format such as kindle, PDF or download for mobile I can only think of instapaper/pocket type services that don't allow for payment, or for browsers like Brave that use blockchainy things that seem new and scary. Or are just RSS readers.

usrusr 8y ago
Pretty much my thoughts: if you want RSS to live, turn it into the platform for content micropayment. If you just want it to be a better adblocker, don't act surprised if nobody wants to play along.

keithnz 8y ago

I'm still angry (ish) at google for killing google reader, it met my RSS needs really nicely. I use feedly now. Which is pretty good. For me having it has a web site is most useful, rather than a device oriented thing that manages feeds.

BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
The thing that bugs me about the Feedly website is that it doesn't really feel like a RSS reader, at least on the free service. Maybe the paid version is (much) more customizable but I doubt it. It reminds me more of Flipboard. Edit: It's tailored to marketing people so I think that's why.
- greenyoda 8y ago
  You might want to try NewsBlur.com - it's quite similar to how Google Reader used to be. It has a free version (64 RSS feeds) and a paid version (unlimited feeds). (I remember trying Feedly when Google Reader died, but ended up going with NewsBlur instead.)
talonx 8y ago
I switched to inoreader.com when Google Reader went away. Not the best but it works for me, a tad slow to load the first time. I tried Feedly but gave up when their nginx LB timed out after a minute because my OPML import was a big file. Plus, the interface does not feel like an RSS reader, as somebody else points out.
josefresco 8y ago
I use the Feedly iOS app - never used or even seen the website. What I like about the app, is the "all done!" message at the end of your daily feeds. It's a nice reminder/poke to get off the phone and get on with life.

dlbucci 8y ago

Question: why am I constantly hearing about RSS and never Atom? Isn't Atom newer and supposedly better? Are the two basically interchangeable, or did Atom never catch on enough that people want to revive it?

BryantD 8y ago
Atom was an improvement, but not enough of an improvement to convince people to upgrade from a large installed base.
dsr_ 8y ago
Basically interchangeable, to the point where it is extremely rare that a tool will work with one and not the other. (Not the same code path, just that a tool to work with RSS will usually end up also supporting ATOM and vice-versa.)
icc97 8y ago
It seems that RSS just caught on as the name everyone remembers. Atom is indeed better [0]. [0]: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
cjbprime 8y ago
They're interchangeable; any significant RSS reader is also an Atom reader.
fenwick67 8y ago
Most rss readers work with Atom too, but more people know what RSS is than "atom", which is also text editor and a processor and a particle
Alex3917 8y ago
At this point Atom is basically just the technical name for protocol that powers RSS.
strkek 8y ago
I think it's a situation sort of like with SSL and TLS, where the former term implies the latter. I mean, it's not rare to find people using the term "SSL Certificates" even on TLS-only setups. Also: https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Libssl_API https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Libssl_API > libssl is the portion of OpenSSL which supports TLS It's for TLS support yet they call it "libssl". So yeah, you can just mentally replace "RSS" with "RSS/Atom" and most of the time it'll be fine.

andrepd 8y ago

Sadly, instead of Flatpak or Appimage, they decided to use Ubuntu Snap for packaging their Linux app.

favadi 8y ago
Why it is sad?
- jake_the_third 8y ago
  Not the guy, but one reason to avoid ubuntu snaps is that it is designed not to allow users to have complete control over software updates. With snaps, the developer controls the update process, not the user. Some people believe that the user should have the final say in what his or her system does. Snap goes against this. It's a great project otherwise. See: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for-snap-from-store/707 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...
  - andrepd 8y ago
    I'd add to that a general dislike of the "splitter" attitude taken by Ubuntu. Unity vs Gnome, Mir vs Waylaid, now Snap vs Flatpak. The latter works well, the former doesn't improve in any meaningful way. Why fragment?
    - oblio 8y ago
      Gnome 3 was quite widely disliked by a big part of the community. I'm not sure Unity was necessarily a bad idea.
tschellenbach 8y ago
App Image is also available! https://s3.amazonaws.com/winds-2.0-releases/releases/winds-2.0.210-x86_64.AppImage https://s3.amazonaws.com/winds-2.0-releases/releases/winds-2...

russellbeattie 8y ago

I'm amazed RSS has lasted this long. In terms of technology, it's a dog. Beyond the problems associated with malformed XML, and crazy namespaces (I once went through several hundred thousand feeds and found over 100 different tags), the process of polling for new content is inefficient and wasteful. I recently moved my personal blog from one server to another and was amazed at the amount of bot traffic I get - over 5 years after I stopped blogging regularly. In terms of business sense - why would a publisher ever want to create an RSS feed in the first place? I'm still surprised they bother. RSS feeds don't drive sufficient traffic to justify their existence, and allows easy copying/republishing. There's zero financial incentive. I'm a news junkie and loved blogs in their heyday, but those days are over and they aren't coming back.

unicornporn 8y ago

I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app. 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/). [1] https://freshrss.org https://freshrss.org

sengork 8y ago
Since Google Reader retired, I've moved to www.netvibes.com
- marpstar 8y ago
  I forgot all about Netvibes.com! I remember setting up a personal dashboard with my emails, news, Digg, etc way back in ~2006. It may very well have been my first foray into RSS, now that I think about it...
allanbreyes 8y ago
100% agree with self-hosting an RSS aggregator. It's awesome. Personally, I gave tt-rss and FreshRSS a shot, but went back to Miniflux[1]. One binary to run (written in Golang) and plugs into Postgres. Easy to set up, but I prefer Miniflux for the same reasons I prefer Hacker News' website—simple and functional. [1] https://miniflux.net/ https://miniflux.net/
- tschellenbach 8y ago
  Fun fact, Stream is almost entirely written in Go. Winds is based on Node/React. I think it's nice as it enables more people to contribute. (everyone knows JS)

jeffbax 8y ago

I'm not sure what this non-native application is offering me over plenty of Mac (and presumably Linux & Windows) native versions using way less memory and having platform-native UI controls. RSS's challenge has never been apps, it's support from publishers to keep using open formats.

jammi 8y ago
I'd also say a large part of its issue is lack of internal consistency of the format itself. Firstly there are the various official RSS versions, then there are all those Atom things and probably others as well, and then there's the thing about how you're supposed to render the things correctly. XML as the content format is also pretty much antiquated. A modern format would no doubt have to be JSON- or YAML-based and have its human-readable content in plain text or markdown, so it'd have to be pretty much readable with a plain text http client, like curl. So, just let RSS die the slow death it's been going through for good reasons and bring something consistent and straight-forward into its place. Something that you could easily generate and parse from any modern language without specific libraries. Bringing RSS back is like trying to bring SOAP as a RPC system back; it just won't fly anymore no matter how much hot air you try to pump into it. We know better now and have better ways to do the things.
- jeena 8y ago
  https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/

xpil 8y ago

Two words: News. Blur. I have been using https://newsblur.com https://newsblur.com for years now (ever since Google Reader died) and am not switching to anything else soon. RSS is not dead.

edpichler 8y ago
wow, I really liked it.
greenyoda 8y ago
I've also been a happy user of NewsBlur since then. I use the paid option ($36/year), which gives you unlimited RSS feeds. There's also a free option that gives you up to 64 feeds. They have both a web app and mobile (iOS/Android) apps.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Groxx 8y ago
Yea, I'm thrilled with NewsBlur. Significantly happier than I even was with Google Reader, plus it's open source, plus the dev is fairly steadily introducing well-thought-out features (like highlighting articles from infrequent posters). Glad to pay for it to keep it running.
LaSombra 8y ago
I did exactly the same thing. I tested quite a few services on the downfall of Google Reader and stuck with Newsblur ever since. I cannot think of any other service that works as smoothly as Newsblur and provides me with exactly what I need; keyboard shortcuts, good mobile clients, open source, decently priced, constant improvements.

tschellenbach 8y ago

Thanks for all the feedback, this is awesome. Sounds like a lot of people would like a web and mobile version. What other problems do you currently have with your RSS readers and Podcast apps? Anything in particular that you're missing?

forapurpose 8y ago
I have far too many feed items to read. I'd like to review ~1,000 items in 20 minutes, as a start. (Review means: Read the headline, possibly read the summary, decide whether to read the full story, do whatever is needed to open full story, move to next item; I'll read the full stories after I've gone through all the feed items.) * Deduplication: Which might remove ~5% of my feed items * Grouping: This would be by far the most important feature. I need something to group articles covering the same story (e.g., all the news publications' stories on the big game or big speech or big calamity last night). Then I can quickly choose one and ignore the rest. * Speed: UI that responds at the speed of thought and maximizes throughput when reviewing feed items. A keyboard interface is essential. * Complex filters: So I can automatically process items as desired. * EDIT: Automate handling of broken feeds: On one hand, I want to spend as little time on broken feeds as possible; perhaps the reader can retry for x hours, then try obvious alternative addresses (perhaps Stream can maintain a db of the new addresses, saving each user from redundantly solving the problem themselves), then notify me with an efficient interface for resolving the problem. * Micropayments: Maybe over-ambitious, but it would be a great way to support the authors. A possibly world-changing feature.

tw1010 8y ago

The whole rss is dead -> long live rss narrative has been an eye-opening experience for me in terms of practically illustrating just how powerful and influential the news is on technological development. Engineers can apparantely be a lot more easily manipulated than what I previously thought. (I'd argue we never knew whether or not RSS was dead because it was based on small and skewed sampling biases.)

byproxy 8y ago
the tide of sentiment rises and falls. the glow of opinion waxes and wanes. the wave of reaction ebbs and flows.
- tw1010 8y ago
  and the question persists; how can this insight earn me profit?

h43z 8y ago

For websites I want to follow that don't provide an RSS feed I wrote a 30 line python script which runs in daily cronjob and creates me an an XML feed that I can import locally in my reader (newsboat). Easy and it works great.

hypocrazybr 8y ago
do you have this python script in some kind of github/bitbucket repo? would you mind to share it? Newsboat is awesome!
- h43z 8y ago
  Yes I have. Here you go https://github.com/h43z/rssify https://github.com/h43z/rssify

tambourine_man 8y ago

Is that another Electron app? If so, no thanks

tschellenbach 8y ago
Web and React Native are coming soon
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  Sorry, but I’m very skeptical it can compete with a truly native Cocoa app such as NetNewsWire on UX. It’s such an unfornutate trand.

boardwaalk 8y ago

I'm surprised rss2email (or something similar) has hardly been mentioned. Getting your RSS in your email makes a surprising amount of sense. You can filter, organize and archive it. You can search it. You can mark it read or put flags on it. You can forward it to friends if that's your thing. And it works everywhere you have an email app. I also have small scripts that run as cron jobs and scrape a few Twitter feeds and a few subreddits and email new items to me. Having all my updates in one place I can consume in one place when I want is just great. I'm not sure what I'd get out of Winds looking at it.

wbillingsley 8y ago
The thing I most hated about RSS readers was they treated it like email (or even old-style newsgroups), assuming you cared how many articles you hadn't read. Nope, most of it's news (whether tech or some other kind), and the social media stream kind of access (where you care about what's current, but if you missed it so what) seems a lot more appropriate.
- boardwaalk 8y ago
  I mean, if you want to support that kind of view, you could certainly just purge anything more than 10 articles old or whatever from the RSS feed from your inbox. We probably just use these things differently though. Like, if a product I'm interested in gets reviewed I want to see that -- I don't want to have to go search the website later because maybe it was reviewed but I wasn't hovering over my RSS feed the hour or two it was the top story. Basically, it completely replaces the website's front page for me, and if I have to go there I've failed.
harrygeez 8y ago
never used it before but I imagine it wouldn't work well with hundreds of updates everyday? Plus centralized feed management is easier with an RSS service like Feedly. I don't want to scour through all my mails for my feeds, as if it wasn't hard enough keeping with mailing lists already.
- 8y ago

paulcole 8y ago

I’ll disagree. It’s been however many years since Google Reader shut down and I haven’t replaced it with anything. Don’t really feel the need to add RSS back into my life.

josefresco 8y ago
How do you consume / aggregate the content you previously consumed via Google Reader?
- paulcole 8y ago
  Found out I could live without most of it. Now I visit Reddit and HN more.
  - josefresco 8y ago
    Same here - I use Feedly less often than I used Twitter when my media feeds were housed there. I also find this same behavior after we recently ditched cable TV. Those TV shows and networks that were "important" to me before are not nearly as much now that I've broken free.

SnowingXIV 8y ago

I’m still looking for a reader that can crawl the web and find articles based on specific keywords and exclude sites of my choice. I want to follow certain topics in a particular niche but the best solution is setting weekly roundup with google alerts in their news which only includes those that are part of “google news.”

jhund 8y ago
Shameless plug: This is exactly what we built https://contentgems.com https://contentgems.com for. It is entirely driven by feeds (both RSS/Atom as well as Twitter home timeline). You can filter by content (Lucene query), by feed, by domain (suffix) and a few other parameters.
- SnowingXIV 8y ago
  I gave it a try, it wasn't able to find anything related to the keywords I'm trying to track but this seems to be useful if it did hah.

eridius 8y ago

Does this app support RSS syncing services like Feedbin? I don't see any mention of that in the description, which suggests that it doesn't. If so, that's a pretty big missing feature.

jaequery 8y ago

if someone comes up with RSS in a pure JSON format, I'd think we may see a revival.

Tepix 8y ago
Parsing RSS is hardly a problem. Even jQuery has builtin support. If you want a replacement for the Google Feed API, use Feednami.
yoz-y 8y ago
https://jsonfeed.org https://jsonfeed.org Already supported in Feedly and Feedbin, probably more.
yrro 8y ago
Why?
unicornporn 8y ago
RSS works pretty well as is. Few users would care the data format. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

_wmd 8y ago

(deleted useful feedback but ultimately neggy comment -- sorry, these guys are launching an app, I don't want to shit on that in a top comment where it's the reader's first experience).

jxcl 8y ago
> - Opens in App Store, which gets stuck (as always) asking me for billing info. > - Rustle around for PayPal password. Why not just provide a .dmg? > - +4 minutes, finally get App Store working. Download. This seems to be more a complaint about your operating system than the app.
- apocalyptic0n3 8y ago
  No, it's a complaint about the availability of the app itself. You're not forced to use the App Store and most freeware is offered both in and out of it. I gave Winds 2.0 a look last week and had the same experience. It took like 5 minutes just to get a download link and it takes me to the App Store where I have to sign-in (after signing in to LastPass and pulling out my phone for 2FA). Then I finally get it installed and immediately get asked to register for yet another account. It's a pretty app, but the install process was terrible and it's honestly not a great RSS reader. It's a worse version of Flipboard with somehow less control over the content you see.
  - jxcl 8y ago
    > You're not forced to use the App Store Is this true if you're a developer? I've stayed away from macs because you need xcode to get any sort of dev tools and xcode is only available on the App store (at least this was the case the last time I tried to develop on a mac).
    - apocalyptic0n3 8y ago
      I meant for providing your apps to users. Apple's software is only available via the App Store, but you can put your app up for download anywhere you want. As an example, Slack can be downloaded from both their site or via the App Store. [1] [1]: https://slack.com/downloads/osx https://slack.com/downloads/osx

zahreeley 8y ago

RSS in JSON format? Or may be yaml

unicornporn 8y ago
Please, no. RSS works pretty well as is. Few users would care about the data format. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

craptocurrency 8y ago

RSS in json format. Or yaml

Groxx 8y ago

Of course it's an Electron app. :| That said, pleasantly speedy! Nice work. There are a fair number of minor UI glitches (suggestions list frequently flickers when going to/from it, follow/unfollow can sometimes escape bounds of window and cause scrollbars, etc) but overall it feels pretty nice. I'll give it a try for a while. If you're taking recommendations though: - It'd be really awesome if I could paste a URL into the search field and have one of the options be "add a new feed" rather than clicking the +. - And the "featured" section is probably a decent intro to new users (keep it!), but I'm unlikely to ever use it, and it's taking up a LOT of real-estate. Maybe an option to hide it / make it able to scroll away, to give more room for the stuff you already follow below.

pcmiller 8y ago

How can you revive RSS without either producing great RSS content or dethroning the main two sources of content that will definitely not ever (again) go back to RSS (Twitter and FB)?

lylo 8y ago

For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly. For iOS I use Reeder (https://reederapp.com https://reederapp.com) but for Mac (which Reeder also supports) I use the excellent ReadKit (https://readkitapp.com/ https://readkitapp.com/). Most blogs still appear to support RSS but you do get the odd one now and again that doesn’t, but that’s their loss as far as I’m concerned.

masklinn 8y ago
> For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly. Interesting, I also migrated to feedly but I do use the web application on the desktop, though the feedly app on my phone. On desktop, the webapp works really well for my purposes — which is mostly going through all updates (all sorted by oldest, "j" for next), and once in a while opening one in a full browser window ("v") or sending the page to instapaper.
phnk 8y ago
I use FetchRSS to generate feeds for the odd ones [1]. [1]: http://fetchrss.com/ http://fetchrss.com/
mrmondo 8y ago
I also highly recommend Reeder for both iOS and macOS, it’s absolutely brilliant and it’s an actual native program not more of this JavaScript in a web frame bloat/slothware.
josefresco 8y ago
Am I missing something? Feedly has an iOS app - is it new?

begriffs 8y ago

Why has this become so complicated? I use Newsboat https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/ to read RSS, and follow about 100 very interesting authors that way. I just put the RSS urls into a text file and the self-contained 1.7mb program does the rest. Somehow it gets by without using a combination of Electron, Mongo, Algolia, Redis, machine learning (!), and Sendgrid. Maybe the comparison with a text-based RSS reader isn't fair and Winds does some crazy cool stuff, but it's hard to see what that is exactly.

LaSombra 8y ago
Ah, that's great. It can work as a Newsblur client. I'll definitely give it a try.
jghjg 8y ago
ehm, I don't think a console rss reader isn't complicated for the common non tech user
- oblio 8y ago
  I'd expand on this: do you know any non-tech user that uses any console application: * knowingly * not having been introduced to it by a techie * not being forced to use it by their workplace ? I don't know any...
  - mtreis86 8y ago
    And how many tech people also avoid console applications.
- z3t4 8y ago
  What's even more simple is to punch the URL in ASCII numbers to the cards, and put it in the "RSS" deck, then on every Monday morning press play on the program tape, that loads the URL's from the card deck and after a few hours prints all new articles on the mainframe's printer.
anilgulecha 8y ago

aaronbrethorst 8y ago

I pay a couple bucks every month for Feedbin and couldn't be happier: http://www.feedbin.com http://www.feedbin.com

luag 8y ago
Only a couple? How? I pay 5 / month :/
- aaronbrethorst 8y ago
  Judging by my billing history, it looks like I signed up the same day it was announced back in 2013. I must be grandfathered in. I'd happily pay $5/mo for Feedbin if the grandfathered plans were removed. In terms of cost per hour of use, it's probably the service I pay the least for.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

garganzol 8y ago

Winds 2.0 was easy to setup but it immediately asks to register an account upon the first app launch. Why? I prefer to store my settings locally or in Dropbox. I uninstalled the app without moving any further.

advanced__pizza 8y ago

plug: http://flatreader.com/ http://flatreader.com/ Idea is to be super simple. Unlimited feeds in beta. Will post the github if anyone is interested in helping out. Sinatra / Ruby, Postgres.

unicornporn 8y ago
> Unlimited feeds in beta. That isn't a great selling point to me. That means I might become locked into a service with bad terms.

yoz-y 8y ago

RSS never died. Many sites (at least those of interest to me) still release feeds. It's just that they are not advertised as much and the RSS logo kind of disappeared.

hd4 8y ago

When I read the headline, I immediately knew this was some RSS reader built on Electron.

bad_user 8y ago

N.B. this isn't fully open source because it relies on the Stream API: https://getstream.io/ https://getstream.io/ They have a free quota of 3 million feed updates (not sure if total, I'm guessing per month?). Important to keep in mind because the app may be open source, but they can pull the plug on it by shutting down the web service. And so you can't self host it independently. It might be nice, not saying otherwise, but for example something like Newsblur.com is open source and hosted, so you can pay a yearly fee for the service, while having the peace of mind that you can fork it and self host it yourself should the product die, which is what many of us want after Google pulled the plug on Reader ;-)

tschellenbach 8y ago
NewsBlur is a great project. Winds relies on Stream, Algolia and Mercury API. NewsBlur supports Mercury. You can run both Winds or Newsblur on your own server. I wonder if we could do a project together with Newsblur where we list if sites properly support RSS. Similar to how the Python 3 ready sites popped up.

rado 8y ago

RSS came back to light after privacy concerns and Winds requires registration to work?

wolololo33 8y ago

I use Liferea. It used to work well 6 years ago and still works good. I don't need to share my feeds with the "cloud" and I don't need to run yet another instance of Chrome and have yet another copy node_modules. Pricing: 0$/month.

oelmekki 8y ago

I've been using rss again for a few months, and it's been really nice. It's like twitter without the noise. The "wow" moment for me was when I discovered google alerts allows to get alerts as a rss feed (individually for each alert). So this means content discovery through RSS is now possible (the main reason why I started to replace RSS with twitter). Alerts have two modes, one "main articles only" where google applies some blackbox magic to limit the amount of items talking about the same thing, and "all articles". I'm seriously thinking about using this to build my own privacy oriented clone of google feed. I could have a browser extension performing keyword extraction from my web history to detect my interests, then have google alerts set up on those keywords and a local app chewing all similar content from items through textrank to produce a "news", with a list of sources, maybe sorted through alexa rank. Sounds like quite a job, but worth it.

josefresco 8y ago

I recently unfollowed most "media" on my Twitter, and transitioned those sources to RSS / Feedly app on iOS. Feedly works good enough, and my Twitter feed is now much quieter, and I feel good about spending less time on Twitter (for various reasons). I have found that finding an RSS feed for a website/brand can sometimes be difficult. Feedly does a good job making this easy, but sometimes I need to resort to Google, to find the proper feed. I also find it rewarding to follow (on Twitter) journalists, instead of the paper/website/org they work for. You get more personal tweets, story follow ups, and can engage them in conversation, unlike most media feeds which are managed by staff uninterested in engaging.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

se7entime 8y ago

Thunderbird Feeds feature is enough for me and i don't see if i want another rss reader client email + feeds? Thunderbird!

pixelrevision 8y ago

Lack of a good client is not the issue here. RSS needs to either add a standard way to serve ads or some sort of revenue model. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense for most publishers to adopt or maintain it.

aeorgnoieang 8y ago
Why does RSS need "a standard way to serve ads"? Feed content can easily include ads.
- nie 8y ago
  So 'we' can block it. NLP for ads detection would be disastrous as a problem to tackle. And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs.
  - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
    The comment to which I was replying claimed that it was necessary for publishers to adopt RSS. I'm pretty sure they were thinking that, if RSS had some kind of standard way to increase the probability of ads being seen, publishers would adopt it more widely (and that's probably true). My point is that feed content can already include ads as regular text or images or whatever. Feed readers and aggregators complicate ad-tracking, but not ads themselves (like what newspapers and magazines have used for decades [or centuries]). Some of my favorite feeds are sites with plain ads and the advertisers seem to be targeting the site's audience instead of individuals. That seems to work well enough given that it's existed in its current form for several years now at least. > And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs. We're probably writing past each other. I think you're imagining a much more widespread adoption of RSS in which this would be a real problem. Or maybe I'm just weird. But I don't see the problem with, e.g. following a feed of someone's Twitter activity that includes an (obvious) ad every n feed items for some suitable value of n. And my imagined world wouldn't require any changes to RSS.

triplee 8y ago

Revive? How do you think I got here in the first place? RSS isn't all that dead since some of us olds never stopped using it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pickypickle 8y ago

How about everyone gives the creators of Winds some credit instead of bitching about RSS, the interface, the desktop experience, etc. I would imagine they put months of effort into building out such a complex application.

kchr 8y ago

I don't the problem is a lack of clients or interest from consumers; it's that publishers want more control of the content and how it is consumed (for example by forcing you to use their own platform).

vladimir-y 8y ago

It's built on Electron.js, so for Desktop only, how is it useful then? https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ is still working well by the way.

grappler 8y ago

That looks like a nice desktop app, and that's certainly a start. If other users are anything like me, then to really revive RSS you have to think more multi-device. Assume the user will want to get to their feed of stuff to read from their phone, tablet, or laptop. Assume the user will want to listen from their phone most of the time (iphone or android), but maybe their watch while exercising, their car stereo while driving, and through speakers like Echo or Sonos at home. Get these things to sync up nicely and I bet people wouldn't mind a bit that RSS is underneath somewhere, making it go.

dlutcat 8y ago

I didn't find any more cool features in Winds than in other Google Reader clone products. I have been using inoreader(https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/) since Google Reader was shutdown, and it works very well for me.

orschiro 8y ago

I like these two open source readers: 1. https://www.feedbunch.com https://www.feedbunch.com 2. https://www.commafeed.com/ https://www.commafeed.com/ :-)