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Turn to RSS Feeds to Regain Control of the World Wide Web
- estranhosidade 6y agoThe problem I think is that nowadays more and more it's harder to find RSS support services and you send up having to resort to some third party application or service that will get some content and convert them into a RSS format. Like, for instance, instagram obviously doesn't offer support to RSS, the same goes for facebook and so forth.
- URfejk 6y agoAnother problem is that there are sites out there that have RSS, but they are hiding it from the users: https://stop.zona-m.net/2021/02/the-snob-rss-hall-of-constructive-shame/ https://stop.zona-m.net/2021/02/the-snob-rss-hall-of-constru...
- netfl0 6y agoHow many technologists on this site are responsible for the death of RSS. Shame on you people.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoWhat death? RSS is as alive as ever.
- Acrobatic_Road 6y agoTwitter removed RSS in 2013. Facebook removed it too. Youtube didn't remove it, but you have to go into the page source to find the feed link.
- jjulius 6y agoThree sites out of thousands upon thousands that still use it hardly seems like it would be worth calling it "dead".
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago"Three sites out of thousands" is disingenuous. Twitter alone is enough to make the difference. For "RSS is as alive as ever" to be true, it would follow that you'd expect to find as many people publishing their content via RSS as the case before. They're not. There are many, many, many derelict blogs, all effectively abandoned because their authors migrated to Twitter, intentionally/consciously or not.
- maximente 6y agofairly strong claims from someone who had no trouble calling someone else's disingenuous. care to share the data so that we can see what you have seen, ostensibly related to blog atrophy over time? should be fairly easy to spot when twitter cropped up if, as you've claimed, "they're not [publishing their content via RSS as the case before.]" or, it could be - just floating this - that lots of blogs are posting on RSS, /and/ twitter has gotten a lot more traffic from previous RSS users.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y agoAlthough you might be, I'm not here out of an a priori desire to experience the pleasure of disagreement, nor to engage in debate as an academic exercise (i.e. with truth and understanding being an incidental concern). Your request for data is in bad faith, and you're commenting in bad faith.
- 8bitsrule 6y agoTwitter is a web-killer. Oh no, I mean, they want you there so badly.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoThey are large (popular) sites though. They have actively decided to not support RSS as they believe it is counter to their advantage. It's not like they don't have the resources to support RSS. What this means is that we have a moral obligation to support and push RSS in our work/spare time. This is something I now recognise I need to do at least.
- k4c9x 6y agoAny decent RSS reader will find that link for you if you point it at the url that gets you the html. Twitter and Facebook no longer support it because they're predatory, I take it as just one more indication the entire platform should be avoided.
- nickthegreek 6y agoI use Inoreader for my rss reader. it supports Twitter, faceboook (public pages) and YouTube even though they don’t have RSS feeds. So even though some sites kill there rss, the technologists provide.
- hutattedonmyarm 6y agoSmall nitpick: YouTube does have RSS feeds for every channel (and playlist), they just don’t have an icon in their UI linking to it
- mkup 6y agoRSS-Bridge can convert twitter feeds to RSS feeds (this is a self-hosted solution). I host it on my server along with TT-RSS.
- sp332 6y agoTwitter is extremely app-hostile. I wouldn't blame "technologists" for that, because most of them/us would prefer a more accessible Twitter feed.
- snomad 6y agoNitter has RSS feeds. Better UI too
- pedro1976 6y agoI would love if people would see that their networks they maintain are of incredible value. As a consequence I would like to profit of e.g. information network a person x has. My idea is that every person exposes an aggregated RSS feed of feeds they consume. Every interesting person that tells me their secret RSS link would empower me. I started a couple of projects in that area, one is a piece of glue code [0] to automatically get a feed of a site, even if there isn't one. It maps html to a feed structure, which works decent, fixing broken feeds after the html changes is now the main concern. [0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
- Acrobatic_Road 6y agoDoes it support private websites where you have to login to see anything? Like nextdoor.com.
- phailhaus 6y ago> every person exposes an aggregated RSS feed of feeds they consume I like this idea, and I think it is something that RSS is missing. The "bubbles" that we decry on social networks is largely caused by our inability to share feeds. Every feed is tailor made to the person seeing it, so everyone is in their own bubble by default. This is unlike Reddit, in which members of a given subreddit can see the same feed. RSS empowers users with complete control over their own feed, but there is still no mechanism by which we can share our reality. We are still bubbled away by default, and thus will result in the same toxic bubbles as social networks.
- drummer 6y agoI really love the recent resurgence of RSS feeds. It's so simple, yet very powerfull way to return to a more decentralized web.
- word8 6y agoWhat decentralized web? Everything is behind some stupid WAF that blocks your IP for "being a robot" now unless you want to execute code for an unbounded amount of time before being able to get access to the paragraph of text you were tricked into reading from an SEO'd search reuslt. Even reading an RSS feed will probably get you blocked for a scraping attempt if the website is behind Cloudflare or some imitator.
- drummer 6y agoI don't see Cloudflare as part of a decentralized web. They are part of the problem as you also describe.
- leephillips 6y agoRSS is great. I think it might have suffered a bit due to its associations with the childish behavior of a group of supposed adults (one in particular) squabbling over credit and control over something as trivial as the RSS spec. Many so-called RSS feeds actually use the superior Atom specification, which was described early on by at least one of its authors as “RSS without the psychopaths”.
- refulgentis 6y agoalas, can't turn up that quote or anything close to that via Google :( I don't think you're being downvoted for your thoughts, but rather, it's unclear what you're saying and how to read more about it - we appreciate the honesty :) EDIT: Appears the references are to Dave Winer - this is an excellent history, I wish I found a shorter one, but this is really great: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-o...
- leephillips 6y ago“can't turn up that quote or anything close to that via Google” It’s not there. But I have no doubt about its accuracy. It didn’t survive long enough to be indexed.
- spockz 6y agoThe thing that holds me back from using RSS again is three things. First of all my workstations are geared towards content creation and I shut down all notifications. My tablet and phone are what I use to consume and discover content and these form factors or maybe the app implementations don’t really lend to RSS for me. Secondly, there is so much more content out there compared to 10-15 years ago. I used to follow some sites that would have posts every so often. But sites like hacker news and Twitter have so much content it is hard to keep up. Thirdly, I just have too many other responsibilities to keep track of it all anymore.
- zozbot234 6y agoRSS is nice as far as it goes, but we should think about enabling more than that. ActivityStreams is essentially RSS on steroids (for use cases beyond simple syndicated content) and is generally more appropriate for the "social" use cases that are quite popular nowadays. For example, it's essentially the underlying data format behind the Fediverse.
- sp332 6y agoAnd having a hub, like WebSub, is nice for helping mobile users keep up with feeds without polling a ton of websites constantly and running down the battery.
- tschellenbach 6y agoOpen source RSS reader aiming to work well for regular users: https://github.com/GetStream/winds https://github.com/GetStream/winds Could definitely use some more contributors
- ashishb 6y agoI built a custom RSS Reader just to streamline my reading list. If I am bored and want to read something I don't go to social media I read what I marked for reading later. https://reading.ashishb.net https://reading.ashishb.net
- post_below 6y agoJust a note: Your front page text doesn't wrap on mobile (android), requiring side scrolling.
- ashishb 6y agoThanks. That's a regression. I'll fix it soon.
- KirillPanov 6y agoYeah, tell that to Craigslist, who nuked their RSS feeds recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840310
- smsm42 6y agoNon-rhetoric question - why would one need a feed on craigslist? I've ever used craigslist only in two ways: 1) trying to sell something (about 20% success rate) 2) trying to buy something for cheap. In both cases, RSS feed serves to useful function - as a seller, I only need to publish one post, as a buyer, I need to find who sells cheap used bikes, call/email them and be done with it, I'm not going to monitor cheap used bike market for years to come. Is there some important craigslist use case I am missing here?
- terinjokes 6y agoIf you're looking to buy something locally, you could subscribe to an RSS feed of the search results. If an item became available, it would appear in your feed.
- Acrobatic_Road 6y agoI do exactly this + piping the feed title to notify-send to get a desktop notification.
- KirillPanov 6y agoI've used craigslist many times to (a) find an apartment to rent or (b) find a used car to buy. In both cases I was prepared to wait a month or perhaps more until what I wanted came along. Who wants to spend a month clicking reload on a webpage every half hour? I also used to watch a feed of all the used stuff for sale within 20 miles of me (I'm in a remote area), with a bunch of filters to remove stuff I didn't care about. Quite often I came across bargains on stuff I wasn't actively looking for. Like unique handmade high-quality furniture. The usage mode for buying on craigslist is nothing like the usage mode for buying on amazon. It is not instant gratification.
- phailhaus 6y agoRSS allows us to decentralize aggregation of content, but still has some of the same critical pitfalls of social networks. Most notably, the "bubble" effect is as strong as ever: my feed is entirely unique and non-reproducible. I have complete control over it, but I cannot see a feed as another user without perfectly replicating their setup. I think there is a missing component that would allow us to create a decentralized social network of RSS feeds. If we cannot share our reality with others, we're going to reproduce the same toxic patterns that social networks exhibit today, but it's going to be completely unmanageable.
- anthropodie 6y agoBut I think in real life as well people live in their own bubbles. We see the world as we are but not for what it is. It's just that Internet takes it to whole different level. I like to see Internet as catalyst. It accelerated speed of people becoming more conscious or more stupid. The choice is still in the hands of individual like it was before Internet.
- phailhaus 6y agoThere are definitely bubbles in real life, but they are far less insular and toxic. I can't "unsubscribe" from a person that I work with. Everyone around me shares in a lot of the content that I see. Content streams like TV channels give me the ability to switch channels and see what others are seeing. Like you said, the internet takes this to a whole different level, and then takes control away from me. How do I tell Youtube that I'm just interested in researching Qanon, and not that I want to be recommended it? How do I tell facebook to stop recommending me content related to some topic? I can't change the channel anymore, and I'm at their mercy. That's a huge problem. RSS is fantastic in that it gives you complete control over your content streams, but there's still something missing to let you "change the channel."
- pharke 6y agoWhat's the difference between a bubble and personal interests? A technology that allows no way of filtering out the things you find uninteresting is about as useless as one that doesn't provide any means of discovering new interests. Regardless, this isn't the issue we should be focusing on, communities turn toxic when they feed into the delusions, bad habits, vices, and narcissism of their members. That's less of a technological problem and more of a moral one. You can't produce moral behaviour by creating a new (or changing an existing one into a) platform that strictly enforces it, people will either subvert your rules by inventing ways to get around them or they will simply not use your platform and go elsewhere. The same problems exist in the offline world, and it's always more effective to address the root causes of the problem than it is to legislate and punish.
- symlinkk 6y agoOk so what are some good feeds to follow?
- deathlight 6y agoThis was on hn recently: https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ Any youtube channel you like Any subreddit you like: https://old.reddit.com/wiki/rss https://old.reddit.com/wiki/rss Nitter allows RSS feeds of twitter accounts, useful for low post volume accounts like those of your local government functions. Many (possibly most?) news websites have some RSS functionality. And lets not forget the wide world of podcasting. Some interesting blogs I follow are https://unintendedconsequenc.es/feed/ https://unintendedconsequenc.es/feed/ and https://astralcodexten.substack.com/feed/ https://astralcodexten.substack.com/feed/
- possiblytom 6y agoI used QuiteRSS for a long time but ended up switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. I like the convenience of syncing my reading between devices too much.
- deathlight 6y agoI switched to QuiteRSS from whatever I was using before awhile back. It works great and it has some niche features like auto tabbing back to the reader after opening a link.
- FriedrichN 6y agoA tip for those who love RSS but bemoan the slow death it's suffering. Sometimes it helps to simply send an e-mail to the owner of the website and thell them their RSS feed is broken or missing. I've done that and succeeded three times so far. Sometimes they break the feed because they changed something but didn't bother to check if it affected their feed. This of course won't be of any effect to the big SV type companies, but it might with your local newspaper, municipality website, favourite blog, etc. Doesn't hurt to try.
- eisa01 6y agoAgree, some times they even have a feed that is just not exposed!
- toyg 6y agoA massive amount of websites built on wordpress have feeds that the owners themselves don't know about.
- sneak 6y agoI get a few emails a year, every year, asking why I don't have an RSS feed on my blog. I totally have RSS on my blog, and have for every blog I've had for 20 years. It even has the appropriate HTML headers pointing to /feed.xml, so you can just pop the bare website URL into a feed reader and it will find it.
- naravara 6y agoThe main impediment I have had are magazines I subscribe to who are behind paywalls. Ars Technica and Talking Points Memo have a subscriber feed, but it's basically just an honor system thing for you to not go sharing it but they're the only ones. I'd honestly be okay if they just gave you a stub and had you click through, but they seem resistant to doing even that.
- SecurityLagoon 6y agoIt's pretty basic to implement some kind of token scheme for the feed to bypass the paywall. It happens all the time for paid podcast feeds. If you see large numbers of geographically dispersed feeds you can then look up who shared their key and have a word... Skeptically I belive most sites just don't want to supply RSS/atom feeds as it bypasses their ability to track and advertise to you and having something like needing to deal with auth is a convenient excuse.
- smsm42 6y agoBeen using Feedly for years now, since Google Reader died, one of the most useful tools around. And more sites support it than you think. RSS (and Atom, etc.) are not dead, they are just not fashionable.
- alangibson 6y agoRSS's decline was/is due to 2 main factors. The first is a contagion effect. People just started to assume RSS was 'over' because big names like Twitter and Craigslist dropped support after they realized supporting it isn't in their interest. The second much more powerful factor is that the vast majority of users just want to see new stuff when they scroll. They probably never bothered to use RSS (you'd find these people on cat meme sites most of the time), and if they did they were happy to give it up the first time they saw the Facebook news feed. The fact that far greater numbers of people were watching the Fb news feed meant that RSS was more or less instantly irrelevant just based on sheer numbers of eyeballs available.
- steveharman 6y agoCan anyone recommend an RSS app for Mac & Android that allows me to sync my feeds and their read/unread statuses between the two platforms?
- adrian1973 6y agoNewsblur
- metasyn 6y agoFeedly!
- CharlesW 6y agoSure, you can use Feedly* as a sync service and then use Mac and Android apps that use Feedly as their back-end. https://feedly.com/apps.html https://feedly.com/apps.html * I assume there are other ways to skin this cat, but this is what I do.
- smsm42 6y agoFeedly for the third time :) Been using it for years. Works fine on desktop/mobile, synchronizes great, has a bunch of useful features (bookmarks, tags, IFTTT integration, etc)
- dmje 6y agoReeder on Mac, Feedly on Android. Works for me.
- podiki 6y agoIf you don't want an app/want to control your data, you can use other services that can be self-hosted service too (miniflux, ttrss, etc.). It will handle syncing and often has a fine web client, or else compatible with most RSS readers through e.g. Fever API. Miniflux has hosting they provide if you don't want to self-host. Been using miniflux for a few weeks and enjoying it, but I know ttrss and others are popular too.
- TY 6y agoInoreader. Has all the features of Feedly (that I care about) at half the price. I switched recently after using Feedly for years and so far I'm very happy with it. Migration process was very painless. On mobile, it has a killer feature. For the feeds that only give a short snippet and then require you to go to the site (i.e. ArsTechnica), you can just pull the page down and release. Inoreader will load the full article without requiring you to go to the website. I also use it to subscribe to all the newsletters to keep my mailbox clean and Twitter users that I want to monitor but not follow on Twitter itself.
- pk78 6y agoBeen using it for over a decade now. My only source of info. It was google reader -> digg -> ino reader -> self hosted TTRSS (using now). Anyone got suggestions for good non-mainstream rss? in area of Tech/dev/design/ui/business/finance etc.,
- type0 6y agoRecently I noticed more and more podcasts don't provide RSS/Atom feeds directly, they link to iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud etc but no feed, in some cases they link to one of the podcast hosting services that do have feeds for every podcast but not visible by any link or not being in the meta tags. Finding the URL for the feed becomes some sort hunting, in a few cases even though I liked a podcast I still can't subscribe because I don't maintain an account on those services.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoBut Facebook or Amazon or FAANG are not just feeds. Facebook has also all the other components - discovery for example, also basic storage provision (let's not forget that!). If RSS did the job we wanted it would be used everywhere. It is a great solution to one tiny part of the jigsaw - and as half the comments on here are already "I have a great idea to extend RSS so that..." we all know this. Decentralising is a good thing - but boy there is still a lot to solve.
- clankyclanker 6y agoIf you’re interested in fixing some of them, check out: https://spritelyproject.org/ https://spritelyproject.org/
- mikeiz404 6y agoI haven’t used RSS in a long long while but one problem I had with it was filtering. This was especially true where a site had frequent updates, say a news site, but there was no way to filter on the feed by topic unless the site provided custom feeds for each topic/category/tag. Has this gotten better? From skimming around it looks like this still might be a limitation.
- sp332 6y agoNewsBlur has a filtering feature, but I don't see a way to tweak it beyond mashing thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons and hoping it gets the idea. Might be worth a shot, though, it's definitely better than nothing.
- Groxx 6y agoIf the feed contains tags, you can do this per tag. But sadly there's nothing inferred / you can't do it based on other content. There are definitely some feeds I follow where I'd immediately filter out an author or three, but alas.
- guybedo 6y agohttps://aktu.io https://aktu.io is a news aggregator / rss reader that does just that. It automatically categorizes your feed items (politics, science, tech, etc...), extract topics and aggregates your feed items to news stories. You can then browse/filter your feeds by categories/topics.
- 6y ago
- rangoon626 6y agoCan we all just agree to coalesce around atom this time?
- account42 6y agoWhy? What is the benefit atom provides to the user?
- yakubin 6y agoThe biggest blow to RSS was dealt by browsers dropping support for displaying it in human-readable form, not Twitter/whoever ceasing publishing them. Thanks to that, now when someone, who doesn't know what that is, stumbles upon a website linking to one and follows such a link, they'll be greeted with gibberish. Previously, they could see buttons exposing the functionality of subscribing to such feeds and find out about this wonderful technology. Now, they'll just get the hell out of that page. Mozilla, champion of the free internet, right...
- avivo 6y agoCan someone actually explain to me why Mozilla stopped building in an RSS reader into Firefox? If it also can subscribe to substacks, it's like a Pocket that actually gets updates. Heck, they can just build it on Pocket! It seems like that could be incredibly valuable for the open web — and a free tool for conveniently reading newsletters built into Firefox might even increase market share? Looks like they removed it in 2018...but I never heard of people switching to Firefox from Google Reader, so I assume it was never very good, or poorly advertised?
- clankyclanker 6y agoIt took me years to find this, but here’s a summary: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/25/mozilla-plans-to-remove-rss-feed-reader-and-live-bookmarks-support-from-firefox/ https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/25/mozilla-plans-to-remove-rs... In short, updating the feature to competitive UX and security expectations wouldn’t have been worth the effort based on the usage numbers.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dingaling 6y agoIt's frustrating how Mozilla will use usage statistics as justification to kill a feature, whilst at the same time using nagging UI prompts to promote underperforming corporate decisions like Pocket and FFSync. Perhaps they should have a rule that any feature proposed for deletion should be promoted equally aggressively for six months. If usage still doesn't increase then remove it.
- podiki 6y agoBig fan of RSS since back at least to the Google Reader days. I realized I was just checking the same websites over and over and decided to streamline the process. (That ended up in building up a backlog of entries in a feed and scrambling before whatever was about to expire, but that's another story). After that shutdown I was on Feedly for a while, and now moved to self hosting miniflux [0] which I'm quite happy with. Haven't found the perfect Android app, but the miniflux web view (minimal, but effective) is growing on me. I also self-host rss-bridge [1] to wrangle some less ideal feeds (you can grab whole content, format as you like, etc.) [0] https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/ [1] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
- 8bitsrule 6y agoTurns out Mastodon has RSS/Atom. "Your feed URL is [instance]/users/[username].rss or .atom" [0] NOTE may vary from instance to instance. E.G. "social.tchncs.de/@[useralias].rss And (haven't tried it) an RSS-TO-Mastodon method: [1] using 'Feed2toot' [0] https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/100523448408374430 https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/100523448408374430 [1] https://carlchenet.com/get-your-rss-feeds-to-mastodon-with-the-feed2toot-bot/ https://carlchenet.com/get-your-rss-feeds-to-mastodon-with-t...
- kevincox 6y agoThe downside here is that it doesn't support private toots. It would be nice if you can subscribe to anything in the fediverse then mastodon could create a private feed for you.
- teaneedz 6y agoHow many of us did the RSS mashups with Yahoo Pipes? Those were good days.
- rakoo 6y agoAnother interpretation: RSS "died" because it didn't do enough. RSS (even with WebSub) is unidirectional: you only retrieve content from someone and can't interact with it. That's what indieweb people have been working on piece by piece, but the UX wasn't there until they came up with Social Readers (https://indieweb.org/social_reader https://indieweb.org/social_reader) recreating the whole Twitter/Facebook experience, this time with open protocols. The cool thing is that it's incremental: start with providing RSS and you can already be "followed" in the usual sense. Add some websub and your followers will see you in real-time. When people tell you they've written a comment on their website about your post on your website, automate a way to retrieve content at some url to display the reply under your post (definitely not the easiest to do). Sprinkle some webmentions and people can like, boost and reply to your stuff automatically. There definitely is a space here for someone to build this on larger scale.
- SecurityLagoon 6y agoI love RSS for this reason. Everything is so social media now it's nice to get away from it and just consume in my own way. If I feel the need to comment on something I will click the feed link to visit the website and comment (like this post) .
- rakoo 6y agoRSS, even alone, has a lot of value. I discovered Fraidycat the other day and by default the refresh rate are way way lower than usual, so it kind of follows the "slow web" movement: feeds are updated once a day, so you know there's no need to check the tab every 10 minutes. "Unfortunately" our use case is the minority and most people want a social network -like experience. That's where users are, and if RSS can't reach them they way they want websites won't implement RSS and will resort to private social networks. As much as we don't want to use websites that way we still need to make it possible so that the whole ecosystem can rely on it. Also, if you can do it with a website, you can subscribe to its RSS feed and never reply if you don't want to.
- musicale 6y agoAs I've noted before, I quit using RSS after too many sites I had followed switched their feeds to teasers/clickbait rather than full text. I could imagine trying to return to RSS but I expect I would be turned off by the teasers, clickbait, and advertisements. HN is probably decent on RSS though I wonder how comments are handled, as they are often the most interesting content.
- SecurityLagoon 6y agoThe feeds provided by hnrss.org are great. I came here via the RSS feed. I don't see the problem with not having comments inline. It's just the same as using the website. If I'm interested enough to read the comments I click through.
- tucif 6y agoDoes HN have RSS feeds?
- tbe 6y agoAre there any standalone Android RSS readers? What about for iOS?