24 ms·

It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

• nanna 6y ago
  RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if it was extended a little. Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to something I can afford, while I'm at it? Bam, everything I could dream of doing this weekend, no Facebook and using a slightly modified version of a two-decade-old tech. Similar functionality for shopping. Why couldn't RSS be extended to something like this?
  • Crespyl 6y ago
    It's really not that RSS couldn't handle (/be extended to handle) this use case, it's that the parties publishing this information do not want you to have that much control over the feed. See how much effort Netflix puts into making their catalog hard to browse, to obfuscate the actual size of the catalog and promote specific things they need to show a large return on, or all the sponsorships/ad-deals/promotions that inevitably begin to clutter almost any commercial news feed. We have the technology, but publishers will fight tooth and nail to keep control over the platform away from the end user.
    • nanna 6y ago
      But Netflix is different from a gigging band, venue and cinema, whose financial models are based on actual ticket sales not whatever the hell Netflix's is. It takes so much labour and money for them to get eyeballs filtered through social media and paper ads and to attract customers to their sites. So for them this would simply be almost a free extra way to drive traffic. I think you're making a valid point about Netflix, but not seeing how it applies to more traditional financial models?
    • geerlingguy 6y ago
      Remember the heady days when Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, et all had almost open access to their 'social graphs', allowing people to grab content from one place, post to another, build connections using tools like Yahoo Pipes? I sometimes long for simpler days when companies were more open with their data. Didn't Netflix even have a more open api back in the day that you could rank and sort, and see new release dates, etc?
      • nl 6y ago
        You realise what the most successful thing built on top of that open social graph was, right? Cambridge Analytica.
        • bhashkarsharma 6y ago
          The issue there was collection of massive amounts of public data by Facebook. Open data APIs can be used to build nice things, if the data isn't user information.
          • nl 6y ago
            No, it was Cambridge Analytica using the old FB social graph API ("Open Graph") to build a network of people that they could make predictions on. The app "This is your digital life" let people do a psychological profile linked to their FB profile. The Open Graph API then gave Cambridge Analytica to (some of) their friend's data as well, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica-a-timeline-of-the-data-hijacking-scandal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica... https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-the-facebook-and-cambridge-analytica-debacle-b69fe692d747 https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-th... https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/ https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/
            • saagarjha 6y ago
              The problem here is that we don’t really have a consensus on what should happen if people share the information they know about you with others without asking you, not that we should not have API access to our own content on social networks.
    • wmeredith 6y ago
      This is it exactly. Realtors sued Zillow for essentially publishing MLS data. They lost, thank god.
    • tomjen3 6y ago
      The parties in that case would be the venues, cinemas, concert halls, etc. They don't to control any platform, they want that information to be freely available. They want lots of sites to show case them (remember, comoditize your complements).
  • 6510 6y ago
    You can publish an RSS feed for shopping search results. You can put a future date in RSS for events. To lazy to search for examples sorry.
  • VLM 6y ago
    From one direction 99% of the world's VCR clocks blinked "12:00" for the entire lifespan of that media format. The proposal is a lot of interactivity and cognitive load to demand from most of humanity. Only a very small segment of society, mostly engineers, can utilize parametric search. Even engineers are lazy or in a hurry sometimes, in theory investing time in a parametric search would benefit me, in practice I needed a USB cable and going to amazon for a generic search of "amazonbasics usb type-c cable" works well enough. From the other direction there's not much middle ground between the proposal and a REST API. You're asking for developer.ebay.com, I've fooled around with that a little and its fun. Sometimes I think the business people don't understand how much the devs are exposing in their APIs, which makes me worry about the staying power of public APIs. There are businesses where their business model and front-end UI could all be replaced by a very small shell script and I don't think the business people understand that weakness. Of course an API can be shut off with the flick of a switch once it eats into profits.
  • WWWWH 6y ago
    Yes, yes, yes! This is such a good idea. Working at a University, I’ve often thought this would be the ideal way of advertising seminars. I suspect the problem is chicken and egg, the technological barrier is just a little too high for this to be implemented when RSS readers are not widely used.
• mkchoi212 6y ago
  I so agree with the author. Less effort it takes to retrieve documents, the less it will mean to you, which means that you’ll less likely consume it.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• generalpass 6y ago
  I saw this pop up in my HN RSS feed.
  • number6 6y ago
    All this talk about rss being dead. Almost every major side offers an rss feed somewhere. I self host an rssreader and use it for new YouTube videos or release on github or hackernews and my favourite blogs.
• bertman 6y ago
  From the article: Not only will this reduce your anxiety and churn from constantly opening and closing various sites, but RSS also shows the content in a standard format, with less to distract you. Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you should probably go offline for a while.
  • thelazydogsback 6y ago
    I dunno -- bookmarking, checking up on sites, tab-management, etc., is all-in-all a pretty poor experience IMHO. There are plug-ins, but none are great and they are not interoperable.
  • iotku 6y ago
    >Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you should probably go offline for a while. You'll be able to go offline for a while thanks to RSS feeds. You can click one button to check for feed updates and know you're up to date on things or what's new. vs. 1) Open browser 2) Load folder of bookmarks for favorite sites 3) Look through each tab to see if there's new content. To me given those two scenarios RSS feeds seem much more efficient and I do get anxiety when I'm repeating menial tasks potentially multiple times a day for no perceivable benefit. RSS is another victim of the manipulation of social media companies trying to steal everyone's attention and time.
• gmoore 6y ago
  I love RSS - it's how I found this article :) I've been using The Old Reader every since Google reader shut down...I love it.
  • aSplash0fDerp 6y ago
    Same. Glancing over 1000 headlines on a fresh pull saves so much time and energy. The 30 minutes it takes to peruse makes for a good breakfast routine versus only making it 10 to 20 stories deep in the same amount of time.
  • encom 6y ago
    Though I don't use it for reading HN, I've been using The Old Reader since Google Reader shut down. It's basically a copy of Google Reader as it was. https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
    • hopesthoughts 6y ago
      RSS is pretty much the only way I read HN.
• docdeek 6y ago
  I really like Reeder 4.0. I use it on iOS and Mac and it's a dream.
• thelazydogsback 6y ago
  RSS is the only way I consume content regularly -- if Innoreader can't see a feed at a site that I may come across, I won't be visiting regularly. Too much of a PITA otherwise. No Twitter account either -- I don't want a "push" model, and the S/N ratio is way too low...
  • sys_64738 6y ago
    Totally agree. If I can't add an RSS feed for a site to Inoreader then I simply don't visit the site. RSS is the single thing that makes sites like CNN usable to me.
  • jadell 6y ago
    Same. A site having a feed is much more likely to get consistent recurring traffic from me than a site I can only consume via social network posts.
    • hopesthoughts 6y ago
      I turn those into feeds too.
• mrsaint 6y ago
  Consuming RSS with Inoreader here. Probably the most used app on my phone.
• dewey 6y ago
  Also if you don't want to sign up for another service there's also a bunch of self hosted RSS readers like https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app which I'll never get tired of recommending in threads like this.
• apostacy 6y ago
  This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1] RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon. It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspect that RSS goes against the interests of big tech who don't like RSS, because companies like Facebook go through so much trouble to make it difficult to scrape or modify their content. I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate underwriters. Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same tier gopher (no offense to gopher). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051
  • thelazydogsback 6y ago
    Innoreader can make a virtual feed from changes that appear in any site -- a new feature I haven't tried yet. Used to use Google Reader, but now I pay for Inno, which I'm happy to do.
    • apostacy 6y ago
      That is pretty cool. But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all. RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web is regressing. Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high maintenance, and can easily break with updates.
      • thelazydogsback 6y ago
        Sure -- not saying it's as good as presenting make-for-rss posts -- may be helpful in some cases though. At least I'll know that content changes, and if I don't like the virtual feed, I can just link out to the source and view it directly.
• _curious_ 6y ago
  I agree with this OP/authors thesis...long live RSS! But don't tell me the answer to anything is found in signing up for / purchasing a specific product, then it becomes a commercial :/ "It’s unclear what exactly destroyed RSS" The driving force (well before Google decided to close reader) is that many professional publishers (those who made a living/ran a pubco, notsomuch indie bloggers) stopped supporting RSS because it was harder to monetize RSS content consumers for obvious reasons. Even mid-late 2000s, I remember literally hacking constantly breaking RSS feeds from major sites or going back n forth with pubco support/webmaster requesting (at times even paying) for a custom feed because the format was so efficient.
• pembrook 6y ago
  The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it. Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode they do every day in between their posts. Annoying and worthless. Then, if you want to follow a site that publishes a lot of content, often you have to subscribe to everything or nothing. Sorry all mainstream tech news sites. I don’t want to read 1,000 low quality articles every day. Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you visit. If the site even has one.
  • thelazydogsback 6y ago
    Other than the issue of posting abridged content, it seem like all the other issues can be handled with a capable client. It's better to post more (inlc. the podcasts, etc.) and then filter as you desire, no?
    • pembrook 6y ago
      Whenever you put the burden on the end user to endlessly customize everything you’ve just lost 95% of the mainstream public and [insert thing] remains a niche tool used by people on HackerNews. ...and then mom still ends up getting her news from Facebook.
      • thelazydogsback 6y ago
        5% of users is fine -- nobody is saying that RSS should be the only interface to the internet-at-large. We just want to enable the 5% (or less) of users that are invested enough in the process that it's worth it for them to get their specialized content efficiently, but not lose out on valuable content.
  • akkartik 6y ago
    High-volume sites are not a good use case for RSS. We already have various social ways to filter. Like the site you're on. I think RSS should be for high-quality niche sites where you care about every single post. I subscribe to 200+ feeds, but only read a dozen or so stories a week on them: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml
• Thristle 6y ago
  After google reader went dark i used "The Old Reader" and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember) i moved to inoreader its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im checking 40+ websites every day for new content and that way i won't miss anything if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances are i just won't use that site
  • PappaPatat 6y ago
    The Old Reader works like a champ. I went the same route as you did, and have the same attitude towards sites that do not provide a RSS feed: they drop of my radar.
    • hopesthoughts 6y ago
      I have an accessibility issue with The Old Reader, I contacted them about it and they never fixed it. In list view, there are no links to articles at all, if you're using a screen reader like I am. That makes me have to use the reader in expanded view. While I love the use of headings, it's one of the features on my wishlist for my absolute most epic RSS reader ever, (and it was a design feature of Google Reader,) I don't want to navigate passed the heading with the title, and 15 additional headings, because people seem to think that using headings is good for SEO. Also, limiting the amount of feeds is a big nono in my book!! IF they didn't do that, and charged $10 monthly, I'd pay.
  • stevekemp 6y ago
    I always used rss2email (wrote a simple clone of that application in golang, so I could drop python from my servers), which ensures I don't miss updates and I have a local history I can search along with my email. https://github.com/skx/rss2email https://github.com/skx/rss2email
    • wei8wahL 6y ago
      +1, that's my favorite way of consuming rss as well. I love the fact that it takes advantage of all the privacy features of the mail (like not phoning home when you open the content). I rewrote it as well, but for an other reason: when the app on my server fetches an item, it will issue a http request to get the content of the actual article and put it as attachment of the email - because on many feeds, the rss item content is just an excerpt, sometimes useless. Although, it works well for me because I use mutt and it displays the attachment with `lynx -dump`, other mail clients may phone home to fetch images/css/js/whatever when you display the mail.
• edhelas 6y ago
  If we get back to RSS, can we at least all stick to Atom 1.0 :) ? It's way stricter, simpler and easier to use, and I never found a parser that was not accepting it.
  • calibas 6y ago
    When people don't use extra namespaces and everything is consistent, Atom 1.0 works great. And I understand why namespaces exist, but they create this system where each site speaks its own language and that fundamentally undermines the whole point of RSS as this shared way of communicating.
  • chrismorgan 6y ago
    I strongly agree: Atom is technically substantially superior to RSS, and in regular feed readers is supported universally (with fewer issues, e.g. fields like title and description are definitely plain text or HTML, as specified, rather than the RSS approach which leads to clients guessing all sorts of different things so that you can’t safely use things like angle brackets in titles). However, the podcasting industry seems to have ignored Atom, which is stupid. Podcast feeds are exclusively RSS, and from information found, most major clients probably don’t support Atom. But the area is a mess with no good documentation anywhere on what works or doesn’t (and all of the even-halfway-decent content of this sort is from 2006–2010). ———— People colloquially refer to feeds as RSS, even when they’re mostly Atom. Reminds me a bit of the SSL/TLS situation (where I think the name “TLS” is finally more popular than the name “SSL”).
  • qznc 6y ago
    Atom has one annoying characteristic: It requires a self link to be valid. For static website generators it means you configure the domain for no reason except Atom validity.
• Hoasi 6y ago
  RSS are great and there are plenty of good RSS aggregators. Been using NetNewsWire (free and open source), again since it returned to its original creator.
• synchrone 6y ago
  To reroute much of web-based feeds consumption to RSS - check out https://docs.rsshub.app/en/ https://docs.rsshub.app/en/ It works quite well, has vibrant community, and support for ripping twitter and instagram feeds among dozens of other sites. It also has a browser extension to help discover available feeds on sites that it can digest - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsshub-radar-en/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsshub-radar-... There's also a Chrome extension, but that one is not translated from Chinese yet.
• mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  The business model of RSS is harder than just slapping ads on your homepage and encouraging more page clicks. I think that's the real reason you don't see a strong RSS ecosystem. The content producers don't have a strong financial incentive to support it well.
  • hkt 6y ago
    In my experience RSS is at its best when dealing with infrequent publishers or niche audiences. People who don't expect to be paid for their writing because they want a wider audience, like think tanks or university departments.
    • wpietri 6y ago
      That's definitely where it shines for me. I follow hundreds of infrequently-updated sites using Newsblur. It's sort of the same value proposition for me as Twitter. I'd never follow the New York Times in either place; what I want is to get beyond what's commercially viable to publish.
      • hopesthoughts 6y ago
        The nice thing about RSS is a lot of sites offer filtered feeds. I only follow a few feeds from the NYT, for instance.
• hkt 6y ago
  I love RSS, but do think it needs to be developed. For a start, clients aren't great. Most have poor UX and are clunky, and I've used very few which don't choke on large numbers of feeds. Second, having lots of subscriptions really shows the value of an editor. I don't often want to scroll through everything that has been published by a recently hyperactive feed in order to see things with a lower cadence. There is no filter for relevance, which is perhaps something that could be added through an external service or added to a hosted reader. Maybe someone has already done this. Third, search and recommendations is pretty poor. I'd be very much in the market for "if you liked this then you'll like this" for RSS feeds. Perhaps this already exists, but I'm not aware of it. What I've always liked about RSS is the fact it can keep me in touch with more sources than I can track myself. It highlights the blogs that only publish once a month, and if I only check in weekly, it turns the internet into a handy snapshot of who has updated and who hasn't. The part I like less is filtering between relevance and irrelevance.
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    Google reader used to do the recommendations thing. I loved that!! Also not having to scroll through everything at once is the beauty of the feeds list format. In other words, you have a list of feeds, that should be the only thing on the page. When you open a single feed, the content is displayed. I won't use a reader that doesn't do things that way. They might have articles on the bottom, after the list of feeds OK fine I guess. I never use that part of the page willingly. The problem is that too many feed readers are being developed to look like HN. No, that isn't how readers should be.
• macawfish 6y ago
  RSS + Dat is a great combo, for what it's worth
• mcescalante 6y ago
  RSS has been really great for me over the last year or so (when I got back into it). I tried Feedly, and then Inoreader. I was not willing to pay for either and ended up trying out the two popular self-hosted options: ttrss (tiny tiny rss) and Miniflux. Stuck with Miniflux for its simplicity. Using the Fever API with Reeder on my Mac and Readably on my Android.
  • psycadet 6y ago
    Spinned up Miniflux a couple of hours a go, thanks for the recommendation. Software like this makes my self hosting cravings very satisfied.
    • hopesthoughts 6y ago
      My thing with self hosting is that I'm using a shared plan. I currently have over 500 feeds, and I don't think they'd be all that happy about it if well... um... I decided to use RSS on their servers.
• devinegan 6y ago
  If self-hosted is your thing I highly recommend tiny-rss and the iOS app accompanying it. https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/
  • kc0bfv 6y ago
    I came here via ttRSS, with the Android app. I host it via the hosting service I've used for years, it only requires PHP and a Cron job. The Android app lets me keep ttRSS and its authentication behind a separate HTTP basic auth, which I think keeps the attack surface low and security high-ish. I think it's fantastic.
  • cerberusss 6y ago
    You mean Android app? There's no official iOS app. A decent iOS alternative seems tiny Reader. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tiny-reader-rss/id689519762 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tiny-reader-rss/id689519762
• simonw 6y ago
  The single worst offense against the usability of Atom/RSS right now comes from Apple and iOS. If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content is unavailable. As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for anyone using an iPhone or iPad.
  • znpy 6y ago
    I wonder if the EU could, in theory, take action about this behavior. Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss readers.
    • tolle 6y ago
      How many EU countries are Apple News available in?
      • znpy 6y ago
        All of them, I guess?
        • pzumk 6y ago
          Apple News is not available in Germany. The only thing we get is the non-customisable News-Widget.
          • znpy 6y ago
            Well it might not be available as a service but apple might be handling the RSS URLs anyway.
          • tpush 6y ago
            Which is really awful. Always showing tabloid nonsense that you can't get rid of.
      • 6y ago
• awinter-py 6y ago
  I'm with the author in needing better reading tools, but the 'firehose' of RSS isn't by itself the answer aggregators solve a different variety problem vs RSS -- RSS gives you access to random sources that you curate yourself, whereas HN or link-heavy blogs give you access to a meaningful amount of high-impact articles from high-diversity sources (i.e. more different websites than you subscribe to in feedly) that everyone else is reading at minimum, I need a tool that lets me tame the RSS firehose with some kind of ranking or priority queue, plus mix in some aggregator reading so I don't miss things
  • trynewideas 6y ago
    That was why the friend-of-a-friend social features of Google Reader were such a big deal for me — I got curation and aggregation from a person I trusted, and the people they trusted. I didn't have to subscribe to anything to get content, I just had to follow people I knew, and even if they weren't sharing a lot, their first-level connections collectively shared plenty. The interface let me subscribe to whatever feeds they were sharing from, which is how I discovered a lot of content I never would've on my own, and in a lot of cases likely not through other aggregation methods either. Add the content they were clipping content with the bookmarklet and even sites that weren't syndicating their content were getting my regular traffic via shares.
    • awinter-py 6y ago
      +1 all kinds of trust networks are good
      • qznc 6y ago
        Devil's advocate: A public trust network is great for advertisers. They would know exactly who the influencers are and how to cover the population with a minimum of influencers.
        • awinter-py 6y ago
          I half-agree the accidental trust networks that dwell in existing social networks (fb, twtr, IG) are gameable a trust network where real-life experts gain and lose reputation based on their behavior should (in theory) punish corruption
• Zhyl 6y ago
  Haven't seen newsboat be mentioned so far. I've written a bunch of scripts that help subscribe to feeds (e.g. search YouTube for keyword and add RSS feed for channel of the top hit), scripts to curate (e.g. extract 'topics' from BBC articles that are only available on the page and not in the RSS feed) and consume (watch videos with mpv, open images in feh, add long videos to a backlog). It's one of the best news experiences I've had and is an improvement over what I was used to with Google Reader and Feedly. I feel much more in control of my content consumption.
  • niemenmaa 6y ago
    Care to share your scripts? Avid newsboat user here also!
    • Chirael 6y ago
      I used commafeed with various categories and have a mixture of websites and YouTube channels. It was a game-changer for me when I discovered that you can “subscribe” to a YouTube channel’s videos as an RSS feed by pasting the channel URL into a feed reader. All of a sudden YT became usable again.
    • Zhyl 6y ago
      They're very messy - they've built up slowly over the last year or so. Will add some comments over the next few days! https://github.com/daharka/newsboat_scripts https://github.com/daharka/newsboat_scripts
• Zaskoda 6y ago
  I would like to take one comment in this post to recognize Aaron Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
  • catacombs 6y ago
    What's his connection to RSS?
    • adambyrtek 6y ago
      It's literally in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia link above...
      • wmeredith 6y ago
        RTFA has never been more appropriate.
    • tuukkah 6y ago
      From the link: "At age 14, he became a member of the working group that authored the RSS 1.0 web syndication specification."
• ghostwriter 6y ago
  Is there an up-to-date alternative to Media RSS aiming at sharing feeds of media content (on-demand video, streaming video, photos)?
• Tepix 6y ago
  Luckily RSS support was already commonplace in blogging software by the time of Google Reader's demise so at many places, it never disappeared. I never used Google Reader, the corporation knows too much about me already, I don't want them to know what RSS feeds I subscribe to and what items I click on. Luckily there have always been alternatives.
• tschellenbach 6y ago
  If anyone wants to help, here's an open source project I worked on quite a bit: https://github.com/GetStream/winds https://github.com/GetStream/winds Goal is to build RSS for regular users instead of the power user audience that RSS readers tend to cater to. I think this is part of the problem. The market for RSS shrank. All commercial RSS readers focused on the people who pay (IE the power users). Creating a user experience that is just not viable for most consumers. You end up in this vicious cycle because of that. RSS usage drops, RSS readers become more power user focused, sites drop support, continue the cycle.
  • ghostpepper 6y ago
    I don't mean to sound harsh but if a user is either required to run their own React/NodeJS (which is not going to happen for your stated target audience of "regular users") or to use a centrally managed RSS service that could go away at any moment... doesn't this defeat the purpose of syndication / federation a little bit? If
    • tschellenbach 6y ago
      Yup, also picking up the tab to host it: https://winds.getstream.io/ https://winds.getstream.io/ Not sure if I'll keep on doing it though, bit expensive for a side project
• cygx 6y ago
  We should go more old-school and resurrect NNTP instead: Have clients that render Markdown, and servers where users can create their own access-controlled groups. Have a group where only the owner may post: That's a feed. Have a group where only the owner may post top-level articles, but anyone may respond: That's a blog.
  • zzo38computer 6y ago
    I had the same ideas about feeds and blogs as you have, and I agree. I have seen the idea about Markdown before, and have considered that too; it is not a bad idea. However, clients should only render Markdown if the article contains a "Content-type: text/markdown" header, and assume plain text otherwise. Clients that don't understand Markdown you can still read the article, since Markdown is meant as readable even when not rendered, so that is good, too. I even wrote a simple NNTP server software and NNTP client software. Both programs are based on SQLite. I have not considered your idea of servers where users can create their own access-controlled groups, although that doesn't seem so bad; some people may wish to run such servers, and may have some way of users controlling them. Also note, you could have multiple interfaces if wanted: HTML, RSS, email, and NNTP, with NNTP as the primary and preferred interface. (To these, Gopher can also be added for read-only access, if wanted.)
    • cygx 6y ago
      I have not considered your idea of servers where users can create their own access-controlled groups [...] One of the properties of traditional Usenet I don't like is that creating groups isn't a matter of minutes, but a matter of days or weeks. If we want an NNTP-based alternative to blogs, twitter and reddit, we can't have that. Instead, a user should just get control of a namespace managed by the server he's registered with. Also note, you could have multiple interfaces if wanted: HTML, RSS, email [...] That's a very important part of the equation: The server should auto-generate HTML pages and RSS feeds for the messages to allow seemless integration into the WWW. Let the power user use their news reader, but don't deny access to the 'layperson'.
      • 6y ago
• DevX101 6y ago
  RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, which was a bad user experience and just sucked. I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification. 1) client sends request for content with some header with payment information attached. 2) server verifies payment transferred. 3) server responds to client with content after payment verification. If this existed, RSS would be alive and well. Internet publishers would be alive and well. The internet would be a more beautiful place with a viable first-party alternative to ads. Challenges here would be: - Sufficiently low transaction costs to make micropayments viable. (Bundle payments?) - Verifying proof of payment extremely fast Someone(s) should create a new protocol. FTP was invented in 1971. SMTP was invented in 1982. HTTP was invented in 1989. RSS was invented in 1999. Bitcoin was invented in 2008. The amount of innovation around protocol has been abysmal relative to the explosion in creativity around applications on top of these protocols. And SMTP/HTTP are the only ones with any real mass adoption today.
  • xtracto 6y ago
    So maybe a combination of RSS and Brave?
  • zelly 6y ago
    Micropayments have been tried. They all failed. The fair market price for content is $0. What is happening is that the only publishers that will exist shall be only those who create it for free. There is simply a glut of content out there because the barrier to creating content is completely gone.
    • hinkley 6y ago
      Free, loss leader, or honeypot. Most places use content to get you to look at ads, but some places write content as a sort of ad itself - we said something thoughtful to build brand recognition, consumer confidence.
• symgryph 6y ago
  I’ve been using BAZQUX which is a nice aggregator and reeder4 Since 2013. I have a nice opml file. And my eyes don’t bleed because I could have text only webpages. For those of you who are adventurous you can try TINYTINYRSS. I don’t see why everyone said RSS is dead almost every site still supports it.
• Andrex 6y ago
  I'm moving from Feedly to self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS soon: https://tt-rss.org https://tt-rss.org Would be fun if others did the same and posted about their experiences!
  • trotFunky 6y ago
    I have been using self-hosted RSS aggregators for some time now (currently [FreshRSS](https://freshrss.org/ https://freshrss.org/ )) and I have been delighted ! I feel it complements HN or Reddit really well in giving me the ability to follow specific people or projects.
  • moogly 6y ago
    I moved to self-hosted tt-rss when Google Reader shut down and the 50 or so other clients/services I tried were not good enough. Been using tt-rss ever since and very happy with it.
  • squarefoot 6y ago
    Interesting, thanks for the link. I just noticed it is also packaged into Debian.
  • taborj 6y ago
    I used tt-rss for a long time, but about 6 months ago I moved over to FreshRSS. But either way, self-hosted RSS is the way to go. Nobody can take it away from you...
    • Andrex 6y ago
      Why did you move? What's your experience with FreshRSS been compared to TT-RSS?
      • taborj 6y ago
        Honestly, it's hard to articulate or even pinpoint one thing. I like the layout and options of FreshRSS, and a few little things; for example, I use categories, and when I hit 'mark as read' on a category in tt-rss, it would indeed mark everything as read, including items that had refreshed behind the scenes since the last time I opened the category, effectively marking items as read that I hadn't seen yet. FreshRSS seems smart enough to realize that those items haven't been displayed. Also, tt-rss' developer, fox, is rather abrasive, akin to Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD (which I love and will always use, despite Theo's abrasiveness). I will admit, the projects do generally benefit from this unyielding approach, but it makes it a chore to request help, knowing that you'll likely be upbraided for asking questions. I also like that FreshRSS has better 3rd party app support (at least on Android).
• nsuser3 6y ago
  Customizable HN feeds (inofficial): https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/ It's really easy to get posts on the frontpage only if they have more than x points: https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=x https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=x Or contain certain keywords: https://hnrss.org/newest?q=git+OR+linux https://hnrss.org/newest?q=git+OR+linux
  • franky47 6y ago
    This is awesome, configurable RSS feeds are critical for large-scale publishing platforms, thanks for sharing!
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    I use this every single day.
• zelly 6y ago
  Twitter has replaced RSS for all intents and purposes. I miss Google Reader and RSS too, but the world has changed. Another reason RSS is in the past is because it was a means of delivering long blog articles which only a small minority of internet users has the interest or attention span for. You miss RSS because you miss 2007.
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    Um... I was on Twitter in 2007. I think both things can coexist. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
• debaserab2 6y ago
  RSS was already broken and then medium came along and slurped up the majority of independent/longtail blogs (where most of the good stuff really is) and now we're stuck in some awful state that there seems to be no easy way out of. Content needs to be decentralized again before RSS can rule again.
• jayd16 6y ago
  It would be nice to see RSS come back and replace some of the centralized web. In theory social networks could be replaced by event feeds your friends publish. If you use something like IPFS you could, in theory, have a fully decentralized social network. There's still some business benefit to hosting, scraping, providing search etc. The business models are closer to the open web. I'm sure there's flaws and challenges in the idea. Even if private posts were encrypted you'd still leak some info publicly. Still I think its a neat idea.
  • cwmartin 6y ago
    That seems like the idea behind the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon and other similar social media platforms are based around.
• lildata 6y ago
  I believe Mastodon should support RSS, at least some users would use it at first as a feed aggregator as then progressively switch to the social media aspects of the platform.
  • messo 6y ago
    This! I would love to be able to add some blogs to my mastodon feed.
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    They do, or at least they used to. What I mean by that is they used to offer RSS feeds for user timelines.
• 6510 6y ago
  Books are dead too! Long live books. When someone has an opinion like this one should wonder if they ever used RSS. Web applications for RSS aggregation is worse than using IRC in a web interface. I cant take strong opinions about IRC seriously either if the person didn't install a client. With RSS the person is merely describing himself. Please do go install [or make] a client, gather some feeds, do some filtering. When you have your first 10 000 subscriptions I'd love to hear every angle of your story, the topics, the organization, what client you use, what language it was written in, what database it uses, who wrote it. ETC ETC The walled gardens full of [self] censorship, data mining, adware and bullshit content have useful features too! Aggregation isn't it. HN headlines only vaguely map to our interest but reading the comments is wonderful. (Reminds me to install thunderbird and backup my gmail. I'm not young enough to trivialize losing my data.)
  • MPSimmons 6y ago
    This comment is needless gatekeeping. Nobody cares how many RSS feeds you subscribed to back in your hayday. Really.
    • 6510 6y ago
      It doesn't matter how much other people care. It is that you want to have an informed opinion - for yourself. If I make an opinion prematurely I see myself defend it while familiarizing myself with the topic. I go blind to what contradicts it and remember only what fits my preconceived ideas. This is why I try to avoid it. Perhaps other people (you) are able to suspend their uninformed opinion but I highly doubt it. But okay, I will at least try (and no doubt fail) to describe the taste of the soup before you try it: The issue is that it gets so much better if you have a lot of subscriptions (sorted by pubDate) The experience is much like a search result but with everything you enjoy mixed together. There are no notifications of course since new articles happen much to frequently. In stead you gaze over the headlines periodically and open a few articles (in the browser) Because there are few people as interested in (the proverbial) antique silver thimbles as you those articles need to float to the top or live in a different folder. I for example one time crawled a bunch of fortune 500 websites looking for feeds. The flood of press releases really gave me a sense what is going on. Lots of boring corporate speak but at least every page described a serious effort to accomplish something. You really need to subscribe to every remotely interesting small weblog you can still find so that you can at least bother to read the headlines. The small blog really needs you. This is where the original content happens. You will also find out that the rest of the web is a giant echo chamber with thousands upon thousands of websites recycling the same topics. Trump is no doubt important enough to have thousands of articles written about a single sentence he spoke. David Bowie was no doubt important enough to have a millions articles about his death. Think of the bizarre number of topics handed down to us by Rupert Murdoch? But is it what I should be filling my head with? I tried lots of online aggregators. Around 1000 subscriptions they stopped working. How do I get my data out? Ill just put https://danielmiessler.com/feed/ https://danielmiessler.com/feed/ on the pile and ill be checking his headlines for years to come. Until the death of the website or the end of my existence. It's a perfect relationship. No need for a middle man - no thank you.
• danesparza 6y ago
  I never stopped using RSS. But man -- what a testament to how much I loved Google Reader that it still feels like a fresh wound to have it brought up again. Damn you, Google!
• crazygringo 6y ago
  A newsfeed is an extremely complex and tricky product to get right, even more so when it's an aggregated one. There are so many competing concerns to handle -- prioritization with a source, prioritization between sources, discoverability, UX flow, preview vs. full content, social content from your friends vs. institutional content, commenting, and last but not least, a business model: what is incentivizing content sources to cooperate in good faith and not ignore it or abuse it? Fact of the matter is, RSS is just far too simplistic to handle these competing concerns in any kind of balanced or reasonable way. But it's also possible there is no single answer. Which is why different "newsfeeds" for me (HN, Reddit, NYT, AV Club, Twitter) have drastically different interfaces and interaction models. I don't want my HN to work like Twitter, or my Twitter to work like the NYT. And I can't even imagine of any possible interface that could somehow aggregate them all.
• Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  I can't get back to RSS: I never left it. After the demise of Google Reader I just switched to Feedly and can happily recommend it to anyone. Feedly rocks! I'm even thinking to make a gate from RSS to XMPP, that would work just like these 'channels' do in Telegram.
• nergal 6y ago
  I used Google reader but went for feedly. But I missed some simple reader for the terminal since that's where I spend most of my time. So I built gorss to read rss/atom feeds. Ended up reading more news faster :) take it for a spin: https://github.com/lallassu/gorss https://github.com/lallassu/gorss
• larsrc 6y ago
  I would have taken this article more serious if an RSS feed icon had appeared among the social media icons below the title.
• larsrc 6y ago
  I would have taken this article more seriously if an RSS feed icon had appeared among the social media icons below the title.
• jadell 6y ago
  Nitpick: pretty sure Slashdot predated Google reader by almost a decade.
• gexla 6y ago
  This could somewhat be the fault of web developers. Unless there's a paywall, the (client|customer|boss) probably wouldn't object to throwing in an RSS feed. Maybe it would require a little extra time, but it's easier than jacking around with HTML / CSS. Most of the time, developers probably don't even think about RSS or it's at the bottom of their list. I read my feeds in Thunderbird. I don't want yet another 3rd party service for this. I get overloaded, but my web browser is a worse distraction. I probably waste less time surfing through RSS feeds than I do by mindlessly browsing. I can more easily develop a routine for browsing feeds and the view is less distracting. There's probably a lot of opportunity in aggregation. Newsletters such as "Inside" do a great job of this, but it's just one small slice.
• tetron 6y ago
  I use RssDaemon on Android, which had been around forever (8-9 years maybe?) is apparently so dead that the author just released a new version with major UI update. My most used been apps on my phone are RssDaemon and Twitter. I read Hackers news though RSS. Twitter on the other hand has been getting worse. The backlash against centralized social media platforms is building, but it is hard to say what comes next.
• rado 6y ago
  I read this via RSS.
• drdeadringer 6y ago
  I remember that brief time when free email addresses were being offered up before RSS was created. You could get daily news emailed to your inbox from such as USA Today, Wired, and so forth. An electronic newspaper tossed at your digital front door every morning. I actually looked forward to it. Then RSS was invented. Now RSS is supposed to be dead, and/or killed, what appears to be several times over. I never did get on the Google Reader bandwagon because I was subscribing to RSS feeds via other means. Nowadays, I have the app ‘Podcast Addict’ [free with ads, $0.99 once for no ads; I'm just a user here] installed on my tablet through which I subscribe to over 50 RSS feeds – podcasts, webcomics, even a comedian’s “upcoming shows” feed. There are countless other RSS feeds available via in-app search and discovery let alone the “add your own” option. By missing out on an RSS apocalypse folks seem to love to talk about from time to time, have I accidentally become one of those “welcome back” guys?
  • BrunoBernardino 6y ago
    I felt very similarly. If you’re interested in getting “the news” delivered to you daily, instead of having to check a reader app, I’ve built something that aggregates all your feeds (and websites without feeds) into a daily digest via email. I don’t want to “spam” so I won’t link here, but you can check on my submissions for “News, calm”. On the “RSS apocalypse” front, I can say that on this product I noticed that most websites “non-tech people” follow don’t offer RSS feeds, apparently over monetization concerns. I was definitely in a filter bubble as everything I followed had RSS.
• andrewnc 6y ago
  I had my first experience with RSS a few weeks back. I added a feed to my tech blog at request of one of those on my mailing list. I ended up writing a python script that transforms the HTML of my blog's landing page into an RSS feed. Not elegant, but it got the job done. My main problem is it seems hard for me to interact with my readers this way. They can, of course, reach out via twitter or some such. Anyway, I'm not sure there has been much value added on my end. But I'm happy to oblige.
  • detaro 6y ago
    How do you interact with readers that visit your blog directly?
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    For me personally, I always click the link to read any articles I'm interested in. If there are comments, and I'm really interested in what you said, I'll probably post one.
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    Could you give me a link?
• _samjarman 6y ago
  For me, I joined twitter, followed all the authors I loved, and then my RSS reader became redundant. It wasn't deliberate, it wasn't terribly conscious. I got the same content, a whole lot more personality, and even some interactions and discussions with the author and other readers.
  • adrian1973 6y ago
    I heard this same sentiment a ton when Twitter first got big. But there are things that RSS is incredibly useful for that Twitter is terrible for, and vice versa. For RSS, I use it to follow company and engineering feeds: every web browser and every major product all have feeds. e.g., I follow the Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox browser feeds to learn about current and upcoming updates. And the best part is I can read them only once a week, and they do not disappear from my "timeline". OTOH, I stopped subscribing to news via RSS years ago. Trying to make sense of every single headline some news site published--usually dozens per day for most of them--is impractical. And while there's a lot of blog authors I like to read, I just can't keep up with them either. Better to just set aside some time once a week and skim their sites. The thing about Twitter I never liked is the feeling that I had to be on it all the time, every second, or I would "miss" something. But screw that, I have things to do, and I'll catch up when I catch up.
• stevewilhelm 6y ago
  My I recommend IPTC's NewsML-G2 https://iptc.org/standards/newsml-g2/ https://iptc.org/standards/newsml-g2/
• durandal1 6y ago
  I recently configured FreshRSS on my Raspberry Pi 4 and I'm using both the web interface as well as Reeder syncing through its greader compatible API. While this setup may not be for everyone, reducing time on twitter in favor of reading blogs notably increased my happiness, and how content I am in terms of intellectual stimulation after taking an RSS reading break. As a bonus, the FreshRSS web interface, while not being the prettiest, is surprisingly effective for going through the unread articles.
• dollers 6y ago
  The first thing I noticed after setting up an RSS reader was gow click batey and dumb everything in my RSS feed was.
• baby 6y ago
  As someone who is a heavy user of RSS feeds (check my cryptography RSS feed[1]) and has had to implement RSS feeds for my websites: 1. we need to move away from XML. JSON would be a much better modern candidate. 2. we need better support in all web-first programming languages, and possibly in web frameworks. 3. we need to have a stricter set of rules on how to use HTML5 tags like articles, sections, and such. An RSS feed shouldn't have to be manually produced when a crawler should recognize modern HTML5 tag and produce one on its own. [1]: https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs https://github.com/mimoo/crypto_blogs
  • j-f1 6y ago
    For #1, check out JSON Feed (https://jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonfeed.org/). It’s at least supported by Feedly, and it’s probably supported elsewhere too.
    • juliogreff 6y ago
      I wonder how many websites publish JSON feeds though. I don't recall ever coming across one, or maybe have I just not been paying enough attention?
• Nition 6y ago
  I wrote this just yesterday in another thread but I'll say it here as well: I think RSS should be better built in to browsers. Make it as simple as a follow button is on centralised websites. e.g.: A little RSS icon pops up when RSS is available on a page, press it and you're now following that feed. Feeds window in the browser shows your feeds, and a small alert icon shows up somewhere when there's unread content. Your subscriptions are saved to your account. If you want to read the article, you click the link and read it directly on the source website. It doesn't need to be any more complex than that. Firefox had "Live Bookmarks" for RSS but it was relatively terrible, and eventually got removed.
• iagooar 6y ago
  If it wasn't for podcasting, I wonder if RSS wouldn't actually be dead by now.
• darekkay 6y ago
  Site aggregators and RSS don't contradict each other. In fact, I'm reading this very post through my HN RSS feed. RSS is not only great for providing _content_, but also for learning/trivia/facts. That's why I've created Tip of the Day [1], which provides daily tips on different topics (e.g. logical fallacies, chemical elements etc.). It's open source, so other topics can be added by anyone. [1] https://tips.darekkay.com/ https://tips.darekkay.com/
• mironov 6y ago
  You can read content from Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and a lot of other platforms using an RSS reader. You can even receive newsletters there. I wrote about the process here: https://blog.mironov.live/how-to-build-your-personal-news-inbox/ https://blog.mironov.live/how-to-build-your-personal-news-in...
• pedro1976 6y ago
  As one that loves and RSS and hated that many websites don't offer them anymore, I created a middleware that transforms the static HTML of most websites to an RSS/Atom feed. Its just a proof-of-concept, but maybe you like it :) https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy/ https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy/
  • k1m 6y ago
    This looks interesting, thanks for sharing the link! I work on a project that's somewhat similar but users have to be explicit (using CSS selectors) about the elements that will be used to create the feed.[1] I like that yours appears to try to pick out the best elements without user input. [1] http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
  • InnerGargoyle 6y ago
    damm that what i was looking for?
• Chirael 6y ago
  One of the best parts about an RSS reader is that it doesn’t report every click back to Advertising Central to update the profile they keep on you.
• pjmlp 6y ago
  > We all mourned when Reader died and took RSS with it, but it's time to return to what made it great I did not, I just kept using native clients like Outlook. No big deal.
• bane 6y ago
  RSS is dead, but API-drive API access to data on a monthly subscription is all over many industries. Why not just sell access to an RSS feed on a subscription?
• dantondwa 6y ago
  RSS works pretty well for me. Every single website I follow supports it, both the mainstream and the niche ones. I use on my desktop and phone NetNewsWire, which is a great, fast and simple piece of software. Overall, I’d say RSS is not the latest and greatest anymore, but it keeps working for me. In fact, I use RSS for this website as well.
• topherPedersen 6y ago
  Signed up for Feedly, now following danielmiessler.com, and added a super sweet RSS button to my WordPress blog, https://topherpedersen.blog https://topherpedersen.blog.
• jtth 6y ago
  Some of us never left. Reading this is weird, like someone "rediscovering" your suburban house.
  • wasdfff 6y ago
    I’ve been hearing the death bell for RSS for over a decade and here I am not noticing any difference in the quanitity or availability of feeds. RSS is no longer mainstream and deep into the nerd territory, but claims about its death have been greatly exaggerated.
    • hopesthoughts 6y ago
      Was it ever mainstream though? I mean I think the closest we've come is podcasts.
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    Right, exactly. It's one of my annoyances recently. I've never left blogging, either, and people say that's long dead.
• ddevault 6y ago
  Feedly seems nice but it's a total non-starter due to the lack of an email-based signup. I have none of the social media accounts it wants you to log in with and it'll be a cold day in hell before I share that much personal information with an RSS reader anyway. But a brief reading of the privacy policy will tell you that Feedly is a data hoarder and has every intention of selling that information: https://feedly.com/i/legal/privacy https://feedly.com/i/legal/privacy $6-$18/mo should be fucking enough for a service to keep my goddamn information to themselves. I'm using FeedReader[0], but I'm not especially happy with it. Would love to hear some more recommendations. https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/ https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/
  • akerl_ 6y ago
    Given that one of the options for Feedly is “Continue with Feedly”, which offers a “sign up” option where you provide a name, email, and password, I’m not sure what you mean about forcing social media access.
    • ddevault 6y ago
      Thanks, somehow I missed it. But with a privacy policy like that, I'm still a hard pass.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • jay_kyburz 6y ago
    Feedly has email sign up. The button is labelled "login with Feedly" instead of Login with Google ect.
  • pinkano 6y ago
    This is Petr from Feedly, please let us know where in the Privacy Policy you read we're a data hoarder and selling information? We're doing the exact opposite and we can afford it with Feedly Pro, Pro+ and Business as they feed our business so we can stay profitable without the need to sell any customer data.
• mememem 6y ago
  There are several nice apps for RSS feeds, but unfortunately, the low support on OS level makes RSS comfortable for geeks but not for ordinary people, who now mainly consume content in Twitter and Facebook whose feeds btw is a centralized and more comfortable version of their ancestor - RSS.
• arkanciscan 6y ago
  Whining about blogs and RSS is the "baby rabbits adopt old dog as their mother" of Hacker News. It just never fails to work y'all nerds into a frenzy.
• arkanciscan 6y ago
  Whining about blogs and RSS is the "baby rabbits adopt old dog as their mother" of Hacker News. It just never fails to work y'all nerds into a frenzy
• bullen 6y ago
  I never left: http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss Also has Pingbacks!!!
• gregn 6y ago
  This article is completely wrong. Slashdot, Digg and Reddit were already at 100% of full-power way before Google Reader ever shut down. And him citing that the causes are unknown is so completely naive. It's obvious. And it was obvious at the time to many who used RSS in 2012. Google is in the ad business, and RSS doesn't do adds. Not really, and not then. They realized they were competing with themselves and closed it; it's that simple. God, I feel like I got baited to reading that post because there was no new or insightful information whatsoever other than the title line. We should bring back RSS, and make the web more about conversations and communicating, than listicles and click-bait. 5-10MB of Javascript per page load, 1px tracking images, endless stupid ads, and now every single site that I go to has a pop-over that I should sign up for something, which gets in the way of the content that I am only going to spend 30 seconds reading anyway and then never return to that site ever again. The web has very quickly become a cesspool of non-information. It's like a bad shopping mall.
  • 6510 6y ago
    I completely agree except that I think google did it intentionally. They did a fine job shutting down other things in similar ways like newsgroups.
  • ryankrage77 6y ago
    > listicles and click-bait. 5-10MB of Javascript per page load, 1px tracking images, endless stupid ads, and now every single site that I go to has a pop-over that I should sign up for something, which gets in the way of the content that I am only going to spend 30 seconds reading anyway and then never return to that site ever again This exactly describes my experience on this website.
• xmly 6y ago
  Old time never comes back...
• 627467 6y ago
  I got rid of my overloaded feedly account and am now hosting a rss2email service that gathers posts from about 10 feeds
• cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  Has this guy been living under a rock? Slashdot and Digg? seriously? RSS died because better systems came along which did a much better job at following sources "directly". He talks as if we no longer have any relationship with authors anymore, when Twitter and Facebook actually made audience and publishers closer than ever. RSS died because it wasn't necessary anymore. It's a typical pattern of pendulum swinging between centralization and decentralization. If you're going to say "It's time to get back to RSS", at least understand why RSS is dead. Then maybe you will have a real solution instead of a non solution like "go download feedly". Lastly, people blame Google for "killing RSS" by abandoning google reader, but these people have no idea. RSS was dead long before Google discontinued it. Instead of coming up with conspiracy theory, think about more plausible reason for why something would be disrupted by another piece of technology.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  RSS was very bad at helping sites keep their content monetized. This is why it died.
• coronadisaster 6y ago
  I never stopped using RSS but I'm glad that more people are starting to use it.
• juped 6y ago
  RSS is incredibly far from dead, everything emits RSS (it's really easy to make something emit RSS), the only thing that ever died was Google Reader. It's not user unfriendly, all RSS readers let you put a site URL in and grab the meta tag for the RSS feed. If you aren't in RSS world, the question is, why aren't you?
• Seb-C 6y ago
  I don't know why people says that RSS is dead... It is very much alive. I am still using it for everything. Just because it stagnated and is not as popular as social networks does not mean it is dead.
• SlippyCrisco 6y ago
  I found this article via RSS.
• citizenpaul 6y ago
  Funny how there was a post earlier today about "is there a search engine that filters out popular media and such. Well you just answered it with this post.
• smcleod 6y ago
  I wasn't aware RSS went anywhere let alone died, I've been using Feedly for years and I couldn't imagine getting blog and product updates any other way. I highly recommend Reeder 4 on macOS/iOS as a client.
• 40four 6y ago
  Wait, shit. Was all that just an advertisement for Feedly !? Oh well. Anyway, for some reason, I do usually enjoy reading the 'Why CSS died' debate when it rears it's head from time to time. I have been toying with the idea of dipping my toes back into RSS. Let's say I don't want to pay for a Feedly subscription. Does anybody know some good places to start, to explore the landscape of available open source RSS readers?
  • danielrm26 6y ago
    Maybe in the article, where it links to a discussion of the top RSS readers?
    • 40four 6y ago
      Well honestly, I tapped out after the second 'Go Buy FEEDLY' pitch. But I did miss it, my fault, so I went back. I found said link at the bottom, and clicked it excitedly. Only to be led to some other guys article, yet another pitch for Feedly, and some other subscription service. Queue price is right fail horn. A quick scroll to the bottom did eventually mention Vienna RSS, and Tiny Tiny RSS, which both appear to be actively maintained. I guess I'll start there. Thanks, I did like your writing, and I'm intrigued by the idea of 'gardening' an RSS collection again.
      • freeAgent 6y ago
        Check out NewsBlur.
  • pinkano 6y ago
    This is Petr from Feedly, we have read this article this morning, Daniel hasn't even let us know about it, so this is definitely not an ad paid by us (we don't pay publishers to write about us)
    • 40four 6y ago
      Thanks for the response Petr, and for being transparent. I appreciate that. I didn't mean to suggest foul play on either party. In my head I was saying it in a facetious way, but I see it didn't come across that way. I was hoping to get recommendations on open source solutions that I could maybe integrate in a hobby project, or self-host. I will consider Feedly in the future though. By many accounts I've seen, you guys are the best.
• WCityMike 6y ago
  Personally, can't recommend Inoreader enough for those returning to RSS. They do it well and they're beginning to incorporate some good innovation outside the normal structure what with collecting newsletters, etc. for you. My two cents, at least; I'm a happy customer. (Mentioning this since, as 40four points out, the article is kind of one big Feedly ad.)
• ernsheong 6y ago
  I am building (at infancy stage, now), a subproduct at https://www.pagedash.com/ https://www.pagedash.com/ that behaves as a Reader. It won't be an RSS reader, but it will be an aggregator of websites / blogs in general. Drop your email here to be notified on launch (and to encourage me to keep building): https://forms.gle/XzZTrTEAtaAXfq6i6 https://forms.gle/XzZTrTEAtaAXfq6i6
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    What do you mean by it won't be an RSS reader? you have to allow custom feed URLs right?
• luord 6y ago
  I never stopped using RSS but this is a nice thought. I ain't following anything political, though. Between general news sites I've subscribed to (which I hope are neutral enough) and the many contacts in my social networks that never stop droning about their politics (a few of whom I agree with, many of whom I disagree with), I have enough negativity in my life. On a lighter note, I prefer "the old reader" over feedly. I feel that it's far less cluttered and gets out of the way. Wish they had an official android application, but their API is good enough that third party clients do the job.
• ekianjo 6y ago
  So wait the answer is to move from one big centralizer like Google Reader to another one, Feedly? Why not recommending the hundreds of RSS clients out there instead of selling your data yet again to another entity?
• est 6y ago
  The main drawback of RSS IMHO is that it's strictly one-way publishing. You can't comment, or like, or subscribe, or share, or sponsor directly to original author. Author might posted something really exiting and seen none of the reactions happening in all kinds of RSS readers. I think it's important if we can have a universal two-way format for long, rich written texts.
  • hopesthoughts 6y ago
    Accept you can because you don't have to stay inside the reader.
• afterwalk 6y ago
  I wonder why podcasts are thriving while writing-based RSS is declining.
• HaoZeke 6y ago
  Damn I have a draft about RSS languishing in my TODO for weeks. Great stuff though. RSS FTW!
• puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
  I've been hosting my own instance of Tiny Tiny RSS ever since Google Reader shut down. Highly recommended. https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/
  • pk78 6y ago
    Same! Started from: Google reader -> Digg reader -> Ino reader -> tried a bunch of other things and didn't like any -> settled on a self-hosted TT-RSS instance.
• extro 6y ago
  >Reasoning that RSS have less clutter. >Recommends a webclient. So the question is dear author: how much did Feedly paid for you?
• botolo 6y ago
  I think the comments here are mixing two different issues: information delivery and creators rewards. For information delivery, RSS is great and the author of the article is right. Creators reward is an issue that needs to be solved in any case. Ads help but you need a lot of traffic to make it worth it and they disrupt the reading experience. Hopefully crypto and tipping will solve this, but I still need to see a good implementation of this.
• tomjen3 6y ago
  You can do this: most rss feed readers allow you to add a website and it will find the feed for you. You can do this with youtube channels too, because youtube publishes an RSS feed for each channel. There are also RSS feeds for HN, which I know because I arrived here via one of them. Edit: This should have been in reply to a comment that I now can't find.
• Havoc 6y ago
  What's the best way to add yahoo pipes like filtering or some sort of programmability? Was considering node-red for it but not sure
• purplezooey 6y ago
  Yes, wtf, I miss the heck out of RSS.
• mikestaub 6y ago
  I think it is too late to go back to RSS, we should adopt the ActivityPub protocol.
• autorun 6y ago
  Back to the ~USSR~ RSS
• hopesthoughts 6y ago
  I never left RSS. In fact, I found this in my reader. Unfortunately though Feedly doesn't meet a long list of design criteria I have.
• hopesthoughts 6y ago
  Oh and by the way, I follow a whole bunch of Subreddits, and a couple Reddit searches via RSS.