4 ms·

This seems to be a popular meme, especially on HN. RSS is not 'demised'. It's still used heavily for podcasts, wordpress (and many other blog sites) expose it,

This seems to be a popular meme, especially on HN. RSS is not 'demised'. It's still used heavily for podcasts, wordpress (and many other blog sites) expose it, and there are countless mobile and desktop apps for fetching RSS and displaying them. RSS is alive and well, even if Google Reader is no longer a thing. Or is considering that RSS did not replace everything on the internet 'proof' that it is dying?

mario0b1 8y ago
This. In the past year I have cleaned my mess of (social media) accounts and got rid of everything that is not needed and switched over to RSS (with Liferea). It works perfectly fine. No annoying notifications, no unnecessary mails, just new News when I feel like opening my RSS feed. A wonderful thing.
marxama 8y ago
RSS is one of the main ways I consume the web (including HN). Been doing it for years and I'm very happy with it. I don't know anything about how it works, but it seems lightweight in that I can keep using it without any problems even now when I'm in China, going through terrible internet connections which prohibits "normal" web usage (in addition to The Firewall, that is).
unicornporn 8y ago
True dat! For me, RSS is by far (still) the best way to access web content. I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it. One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every site and service that I wish to follow has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of. If you don't find a feed for a site, 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/ [2] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
- superkuh 8y ago
  I use a native application (QuiteRSS) as my reader but for twitter I use a modified version of the twitter_search_to_rss.pl and twitter_user_to_rss.pl + TwitRSS.pm from TwitRSS.me (https://github.com/ciderpunx/twitrssme/tree/master/fcgi https://github.com/ciderpunx/twitrssme/tree/master/fcgi). The resulting xml files are saved out into my ~/www/RSS/ directory and that URL path is used in my various readers.
- stunt 8y ago
  > For me, RSS is by far (still) the best way to access web content. Same for me. I'm using Feedly atm. But the majority of users don't use RSS and they never did. Perhaps that is never going change.
- nokya 8y ago
  +1 for everything you wrote. I'm still using quiterss and heavily relying on the filter actions on a daily basis. My only experience with an online self hosted client was tiny tiny, which I didn't like. Thanks for sharing the freshrss alternative, I guess I'll give it a try!
Sendotsh 8y ago
I've never stopped using RSS as my primary means of consuming content online, and other than being annoyed at Reader being killed and having to switch to Inoreader, I haven't noticed any dip in availability or difficulty finding feeds at any point. Subreddits, new websites and blogs, all have RSS still. This is just clickbait, plain and simple. It's fashionable these days to declare X or Y is dead/dying to bring more views in. It's tabloid media gone digital, nothing more.
- hkt 8y ago
  This!
apatters 8y ago
Yeah, the "RSS is dead" meme is totally nuts. This protocol is all over the place, the entire podcast industry is built on it, there's still a healthy industry of people who use RSS readers to consume their news, and its use in backend/site-to-site data exchange is massive. How does that equal dead? I think RSS just suffers from inflated expectations, a lot of technologists like Winer thought it was going to somehow trump the realities of the content industry (like content providers restricting licensing and distribution when it makes them more money). A protocol isn't a complete business, or app, or even user experience. It's just a piece you can combine with other pieces, and many people do. It's not even that big of a deal that some sites like Facebook are walled off from RSS. We should keep it around and use it for everything else, which still means tons of content. So what if you can't see your Facebook timeline in your RSS reader, FB is mostly junk content anyway. Here's a problem that needs some real attention: RSS syndicates articles and posts (or at least their excerpts), but we never got a good and widely adopted standard for syndicating comments, reactions, and identity. What would the Web look like today if we'd had a good standard for that stuff when Zuckerberg was building Facebook? ActivityPub's meant to address these areas, but it's a lot more complicated than RSS, and a big part of why RSS succeeded was because it was simple. It remains to be seen whether AP will take off -- maybe they need a simplified version 2.0.
- klez 8y ago
  > [...] we never got a good and widely adopted standard for syndicating comments, reactions, and identity. What would the Web look like today if we'd had a good standard for that stuff when Zuckerberg was building Facebook? You should take a look at https://indieweb.org https://indieweb.org . Work's being done there for quite some time about adopting web standards to make the open web social and moving away from data silos.

mario0b1 8y ago

This. In the past year I have cleaned my mess of (social media) accounts and got rid of everything that is not needed and switched over to RSS (with Liferea). It works perfectly fine. No annoying notifications, no unnecessary mails, just new News when I feel like opening my RSS feed. A wonderful thing.

marxama 8y ago

RSS is one of the main ways I consume the web (including HN). Been doing it for years and I'm very happy with it. I don't know anything about how it works, but it seems lightweight in that I can keep using it without any problems even now when I'm in China, going through terrible internet connections which prohibits "normal" web usage (in addition to The Firewall, that is).

unicornporn 8y ago

True dat! For me, RSS is by far (still) the best way to access web content. I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it. One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds. Every site and service that I wish to follow has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of. If you don't find a feed for a site, 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/ [2] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

superkuh 8y ago
I use a native application (QuiteRSS) as my reader but for twitter I use a modified version of the twitter_search_to_rss.pl and twitter_user_to_rss.pl + TwitRSS.pm from TwitRSS.me (https://github.com/ciderpunx/twitrssme/tree/master/fcgi https://github.com/ciderpunx/twitrssme/tree/master/fcgi). The resulting xml files are saved out into my ~/www/RSS/ directory and that URL path is used in my various readers.
stunt 8y ago
> For me, RSS is by far (still) the best way to access web content. Same for me. I'm using Feedly atm. But the majority of users don't use RSS and they never did. Perhaps that is never going change.
nokya 8y ago
+1 for everything you wrote. I'm still using quiterss and heavily relying on the filter actions on a daily basis. My only experience with an online self hosted client was tiny tiny, which I didn't like. Thanks for sharing the freshrss alternative, I guess I'll give it a try!

Sendotsh 8y ago

I've never stopped using RSS as my primary means of consuming content online, and other than being annoyed at Reader being killed and having to switch to Inoreader, I haven't noticed any dip in availability or difficulty finding feeds at any point. Subreddits, new websites and blogs, all have RSS still. This is just clickbait, plain and simple. It's fashionable these days to declare X or Y is dead/dying to bring more views in. It's tabloid media gone digital, nothing more.

hkt 8y ago
This!

apatters 8y ago

Yeah, the "RSS is dead" meme is totally nuts. This protocol is all over the place, the entire podcast industry is built on it, there's still a healthy industry of people who use RSS readers to consume their news, and its use in backend/site-to-site data exchange is massive. How does that equal dead? I think RSS just suffers from inflated expectations, a lot of technologists like Winer thought it was going to somehow trump the realities of the content industry (like content providers restricting licensing and distribution when it makes them more money). A protocol isn't a complete business, or app, or even user experience. It's just a piece you can combine with other pieces, and many people do. It's not even that big of a deal that some sites like Facebook are walled off from RSS. We should keep it around and use it for everything else, which still means tons of content. So what if you can't see your Facebook timeline in your RSS reader, FB is mostly junk content anyway. Here's a problem that needs some real attention: RSS syndicates articles and posts (or at least their excerpts), but we never got a good and widely adopted standard for syndicating comments, reactions, and identity. What would the Web look like today if we'd had a good standard for that stuff when Zuckerberg was building Facebook? ActivityPub's meant to address these areas, but it's a lot more complicated than RSS, and a big part of why RSS succeeded was because it was simple. It remains to be seen whether AP will take off -- maybe they need a simplified version 2.0.

klez 8y ago
> [...] we never got a good and widely adopted standard for syndicating comments, reactions, and identity. What would the Web look like today if we'd had a good standard for that stuff when Zuckerberg was building Facebook? You should take a look at https://indieweb.org https://indieweb.org . Work's being done there for quite some time about adopting web standards to make the open web social and moving away from data silos.