13 ms·

RSS as a Facebook alternative

237 points by dgrin91 6y ago

colesantiago 6y ago
Perhaps 'Facebook News' alternative rather than Facebook itself? Unless you consider getting your friends cousins updates, and liking their posts through an RSS feed as a Facebook alternative.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  If there was an open standard api/protocol for liking/commenting I reckon this could actually work quite well. I guess you'd also need some kind of standard for identity and "friending" too (perhaps something akin to Open ID).
  - Yhippa 6y ago
    It wasn't an open protocol but Google Reader had this. And it had commenting. I had some of the most thoughtful and productive conversations on there. Total shame we don't have that anymore.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    I mean, ActivityPub? That's basically what it is.
    - rektide 6y ago
      Yeah. One can go read the protocol. But the Activity Vocabulary probably gives a good idea for the versatility, the use of (core) ActivityPub[1]. ActivityPub is streams of actions, most of which we know & are familiar with already from existing social media. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#activity-types https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#activity-t...
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      I guess so. ActivityPub seems a lot more complicated than what I have in mind. With RSS itself, most developers could create a reasonable implementation in a weekend. I see no reason why couldn't have something of similar simplicity for commenting.
      - thejohnconway 6y ago
        There’s [Webmention](https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention), which is considerably simpler than ActivityPub.
- lliamander 6y ago
  The pivot of Facebook from "here's a way to connect with family and friends" to "here's a steady drip of 'engaging' content made to generate 'likes'" is very interesting.
  - mminer237 6y ago
    Plenty of people still use it primarily to connect with friends and family though. Just there's news and memes too
    - asdff 6y ago
      Don't forget the sprinkles of propaganda
      - artificial 6y ago
        Propaganda is endemic, nobody is immune, it's the matrix around us. Self selecting echo chambers with the brand of propaganda containing the message they like best, and if they don't like it, switch to another brand. DRINK MORE OVALTINE!
  - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
    I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. Facebook does so much stuff, everyone uses it for different reasons. Like me, I use it for the marketplace nowadays, and for events. Some people like groups, some like meme pages
- senectus1 6y ago
  yeah thats what I immediately thought as well. Unfortunately FB has somewhat successfully added a lot of services to its product that are now the "default".
- TheHideout 6y ago
  It would be interesting to have something like FB Purity [0] run in a headless browser that will RSS you meaningful posts based on rules you provide. I'd totally use something like that. [0] https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/
stanislavb 6y ago
I love the recent resurgence of RSS.
- jug 6y ago
  There has been a resurgence? I thought the opposite!
paxys 6y ago
Wait what happened to newsgroups?
- rektide 6y ago
  newsgroups = big community spaces filled with activity rss = a person or entity's personal space. which can also be fed into a planet / aggregator to make a shared space. they each have great uses, but rss maintaining the sense of identity & ownership & knowability over the space is a huge boon (to reader & writers both) imo, & where-as newsgroups have always felt (reading or writing) like i was venturing off into wild-lands.
D13Fd 6y ago
RSS is great. I use it every day. Monetization is an issue due to the general lack of ads and tracking, but there are some possible solutions, like Ars Technica’s model of $50/yr for access to the full-text RSS feed.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  $25. $50 is the pro++ version. i say this as a happy subscriber. I know a few other sites that do the same, and being able to access a plaintext feed is a huge plus to me. Only the first image of Arstechnica's image is available in a feed, though, and videos they sometimes embed in the header do not show. I assume both are bugs, but I can open the page if the article is interesting.
  - alert0 6y ago
    What does the authentication process on RSS look like?
    - rlayton2 6y ago
      HTTP auth seems to be "the way".
    - AnonC 6y ago
      If your question is specific to the Ars Technica subscription, there is no authentication. Each subscriber is given a unique feed link (for whatever they want to subscribe to) so any fetch operation for the link is tied to the subscriber. Ars says that it monitors the use of feeds and will take action if any abuse is detected, but doesn’t go too deep into explaining that part. Some other services like Stratechery follow the same model, AFAIK.
  - AnonC 6y ago
    IIRC, one of the main people at Ars (Aurich?) dislikes RSS a lot and believes that it’s painful to support for Ars’s format and articles.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
EccentricBunny 6y ago
It's a shame he didn't recommend cli programs like sfeed or newsboat. I recently also stopped using youtube to be notified about new videos from the channels I follow, and now I use exclusively RSS with some scripts to made my life easier. Because youtube doesn't provide a RSS with all your subscriptions anymore, I had to extract all of them using the browser console[0] and convert all the links to the (hidden) RSS feed. This issue also happens with LBRY but this time I had to use an external service (I don't blame them because by design, you can't have something like a linear RSS feed in a blockchain). I also used twitter for a while but at one point I felt tired of letting them tell me what I want to read. I was usually distracted by other tweets and feelt like I was wasting my time and didn't find any important or interesting stuff. Because there are still good twitter users in this platform and they don't support RSS feeds anymore, I managed to follow them using nitter[1]. I can tell you that, now, I see those two platforms like they were 10 years ago and I'm enjoying them like never before. [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/85275454?hl=en&msgid=86912868 https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/85275454?hl=en&msg... [1] https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/
- HDMI_Cable 6y ago
  You can still get an RSS feed for individual channels (not subscriptions though) with the following URL: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[Channel https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[Channel ID here]
  - drdeca 6y ago
    You can even subscribe to a particular playlist! (So, say someone produces many videos, but you only want the ones that they add to a particular playlist, you can do that.)
  - EccentricBunny 6y ago
    Yes, I wanted to use sfeed and they show how to get the good url in their config example [0]. With a simple for loop in bash, I added them to the list of my rss feeds. I had 50+ youtube channels and didn't want to make something complicated. [0] https://git.codemadness.org/sfeed/file/sfeedrc.example.html#l13 https://git.codemadness.org/sfeed/file/sfeedrc.example.html#...
Eric_WVGG 6y ago
RSS as a Facebook alternative is like suggesting a fresh caesar salad, a medium-rare steak tenderloin, and a glass of seven-year-old french cabernet as an alternative to some chunks of roof shingles and pond water. Like… yeah, it's good, give it a try. Do recommend. four and a half out of five stars.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  Every time I’ve seen someone retain the old ways of RSS it always looks like an ADD workflow. Very little different than Twitter.
  - aendruk 6y ago
    Looking back, at least my “old ways” of using RSS involved a lot of FOMO and inevitable information overload. A key lesson I’ve since learned is to be much more minimalist and deliberate about what I subscribe to. The news feed under my control now feels serene relative to the adversarial offerings of major social media outlets.
    - naravara 6y ago
      One thing I wish RSS readers were better at is more granular controls over how they do workflows and notifications. Podcasts actually do this well, but regular old text-RSS does not. There are some feeds where I just do not care about anything older than a day or 3 and would rather it just automatically ignores them on refresh. There are some feeds where I prefer them held indefinitely. I'd love a master dashboard where I can program this in on a per-feed basis. There's also feeds where grouping matters. Like with webcomics where chronology is important and I'm a few issues behind, I'd like them to be presented in chronological order and grouped together. In ones where it's not I'd prefer them as part of the feed. And then there's the tendency to collapse all content into one format. There's blogs where visuals are very important and I'd prefer they be displayed in the page's default and there's others where I'd prefer a "reader" view. Some apps design around it, but many still don't.
  - anonporridge 6y ago
BuckRogers 6y ago
Social media is not a news source, it's a pit of misery and sadness. Of all of them, I only find some redeeming value in Instagram as it seems by default to give you something positive. RSS can be a news source. I used Firefox live bookmarks for years, and now use LiveMarks on Firefox. I'm currently doing one of my test drives on Edge to see if it's time to switch, where I use Inoreader instead. If you try Inoreader, remember to disable uBlock Origin for it so the author can be supported. It has a great mobile app too!
bnbond 6y ago
Can anyone recommend any good blogs to add to my RSS feed? I see a lot of really interesting content being shared here on HN, especially the material that isn't super technical.
- aendruk 6y ago
  We could even devise a system where HN users submit blog posts they like and then vote daily for the ones they most recommend. :)
  - bnbond 6y ago
    Haha, thank you for that. I suppose that was warranted.
- AnonC 6y ago
  One way you can find what’s interesting to you from the HN crowd is to go to hn.algolia.com, search for stories by date and enter keywords like “Ask HN”, “recommend”, “blog”, “follow”, etc. Over the years there have been many “Ask HN” posts about what sites to follow. You may initiate one too, preferably after narrowing down on interest areas and including examples of what you’ve found.
betwixthewires 6y ago
I've been living this way for a decade. No Facebook, use RSS or Atom for every possible thing that I can. I even use it to subscribe to video feeds, such as YouTube channels. It really boggles my mind what so many billions (!) of people tolerate just to avoid having to learn to do something simple themselves.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  Me too! It's great. I started doing it for YouTube when the algorithm started selectively showing updates for channels I like. Now the algorithm is irrelevant.
  - myth2018 6y ago
    I'm facing this issue as well. Too many short, addictive videos being recommended instead of the ones included in the channels I subscribed to. I'm going to include yt in my subscriptions.
    - naravara 6y ago
      I'd kill for YouTube to start recommending short videos again. All I get recommended now are 20 minutes worth of content on something interesting stretched out to an hour long video. The recommendation algorithm seems to prioritize longer-form content, but the result has been creators being pushed to streeeeeetch and that usually means not editing down stuff that ought to be edited out.
      - myth2018 6y ago
        Interesting how the experiences are diverse. In my case, the short videos I'm talking about are things like Dragon Ball Z scenes and GTA V screw arounds. Yt will now and then show me one of those on my page and, if I watch one, it starts to flood the page with similar content.
- throwaway316943 6y ago
  It’s hard to produce an easier alternative for people who are too busy and disinterested to deal with anything technical. You need to beat Facebook on ease of use, cost, and network. The first one might not be too hard but the next two are almost impossible at this point. The only thing that could beat free is if it actually pays you to use it. The only thing that beats ubiquity is maybe exclusivity?
mullingitover 6y ago
There was a time when you could plug any old RSS feed into your facebook account. I had my posts from del.icio.us, flickr, and twitter all going to facebook with that feature. It was glorious, until facebook unceremoniously ripped it out. I look at that event as the time when facebook went from a neutral entity to a malevolent one.
annadane 6y ago
Or how about legislation where Facebook is forced to stop being a walled garden and make friends' posts available to you via RSS?
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Other people are thinking along the same lines: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech-problem https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech...
- ernesth 6y ago
  I don't have a facebook account myself but follow some people's publications using rssbridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge). I would indeed prefer that facebook provides those feeds themselves as it sometimes break because Facebook changes things (the latest breakage I encountered being Facebook replying with "You must be logged in to view this page").
blakewatson 6y ago
For Mac users, combining the desktop app NetNewsWire with the service Feedbin is a pretty sweet combo.
- asdff 6y ago
  I can't stand these thousands of 3 column apps. Ended up going all on with newsboat and I avoid having to use an external service in the process.
- deergomoo 6y ago
  NNW is great, I'm also quite partial to Reeder too. It can sync feeds via iCloud, so if you're all-in on the Apple ecosystem there's no need for an external feed service.
worldhistory 6y ago
Just today I was thinking this exact thing. I'm trying to stop using Twitter and decided to setup and RSS reader as my source for finding out about news.
- aquir 6y ago
  Twitter is awful! Unfortunatly most of the communities used to be on forums are moved to Twitter :(
tijuco2 6y ago
https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ host your own RSS server
aquir 6y ago
I am using RSS since the early 2000s, it's great! The best way to get focoused information about what I want and when I want without scrolling through shit I pay for Feedly Premium because with it I can - filter stuff out (coronavirus, trump etc.) - subscribe for Twitter - has this Leo thing what is trying to prioritize stuff that you read most Higly recommended
myth2018 6y ago
I started again to use RSS and Atom feeds last week. I used to use facebook as an aggregator, but its curated list has become too poisoned since the pandemics and "political outbreaks" that followed. The algorithms noticed that I've been (automatically/inadvertently) interacting too much with such content, and decided to focus on that in order to keep me hooked. Facebook and other platforms profit by subtracting value from society. I ask myself if that will stop someday.
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  I've had the opposite experience. Facebook's been actively unfollowing and hiding my political groups for me. Every few days I have to go through a list of pages, check to make sure I'm still following them, and interact with posts to keep them in my feed.
  - asddubs 6y ago
    that seems like the point where you'd stop using facebook, when you're altering your behaviour to appease the algorithm, because it won't just let you control what you want to see anymore. although i admit I also open all youtube videos of categories i don't intend to watch regularly in private tabs
    - crocodiletears 6y ago
      It's been an issue for quite a while, but it's becoming unbearable since they started really clamping down on 'extremism' (left and right) around November. Unfortunately, there's no tool quite like it online for getting access to such a wide swath of firsthand knowledge, opinon and experiences.
      - beagle3 6y ago
        Twitter has an option to just skip the algorithm and let you drink from the firehouse - switch to timeline view and put everyone you are following in “alarm” mode (otherwise, they’ll filter it as THEY see fit). Most of the people I care about post on both, and when there’s an important long form article they post a link to it (whether on Facebook or their private blog)
lemming 6y ago
For me, the main problem with Facebook is the amount of content which is exclusively available on it. We homeschool our daughter and the whole homeschooling community is organised on Facebook. I'm involved in some niche exercise (handbalancing), and that is also pretty much exclusively on Instagram/Facebook. I would love a way to get the content of Facebook groups via RSS since I have no interest in the social aspects and I miss out on a lot by not using it.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
There is a very convenient RSS-to-telegram bot, so you don't really need to install any additional app. I follow reddit with it, for example.
gxqoz 6y ago
Am I the only one who still largely keeps up with stuff via explicitly going to a website? The thing I never liked about RSS is that it fed on my inbox zero compulsion. I don't feel that I'm missing out on content when I just don't see it because it's moved to an older section of a website I regularly visit. I did add a read it later app into the mix several years ago. This is helpful for consuming longer content, but I have to explicitly put articles there.
- kickscondor 6y ago
  RSS also strips out all of the styles. I personally like to see posts as they were intended.
  - netghost 6y ago
    There's a happy medium in my mind where you just use RSS to notify you of new content, and then click through to see the real post. That's the approach I take with the RSS reader I've built anyways.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Me, I will bookmark sites and visit them when I feel like it. RSS never worked properly for me when it was "big" in the 2000s. Half the time I'd click the RSS icon on a site and it would display XML code and an error message I didn't understand. At the end of the day, it's also still a 'feed'. The websites I visit write about a variety of topics, and I'm only interested in a couple. For that use case, it's simpler to just visit the site on a regular basis. I do save articles to Pocket though, as I can't stand the news website trend of breaking up the article flow with embedded tweets, Related Articles links, email signup CTAs and what not.
iamAtom 6y ago
One major reason for people to rely on FB is every post carry some weight like author/friend who shared it/likes/comments RSS is a great alternative but definitely won't make a dent in FB
raindropm 6y ago
More people should know about RSS. I explain how it work to my friends, they seems wowed, but don't see much used of it(It's the thing that you need to experience yourself, I guess) I can't imagine how one keep track of various website of interest. It's like they don't know better, or unknowingly think that Facebook feed is everything they need and no other internet outside it (It's understandable, I don't blame them)
somishere 6y ago
i would very much like a hn style ui for my favourite sources of news/music/social chaff .. like a reader mode .. if anyone can suggest anything foss? Not enough sites support rss for it to be useful. Had started on a 'feed filter' browser extension for soundcloud a while back but wasn't so much for aggregating as for highlighting the gold slash filtering out the dross in /stream.
ybalkind 6y ago
RSS being awesome is the one thing that everyone on HN seems to agree about. Every couple of years I give it a try but for some reason I'm struggling to get into it. Something prevents me from checking my Feedly feed. Seems uninteresting even though I populated with sources I like. Can someone set out a "getting started" guide? Like does it help to have good categorisation? Are there some tricks that make a big difference (adding email newsletters perhaps?)? Is there a recommended App or workflow that brings out the best in RSS?
nunodonato 6y ago
Shameless plug: kalaksi.com, a social network built on top of RSS
- skinkestek 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing! Looks like a great starting point - and I have tried to look into a good number of such solutions. Two questions: is it open source and do you plan for federation? None of these are showstoppers IMO, but without them one has to work harder to convince me that it wont be discontinued/sold etc.
  - nunodonato 6y ago
    not yet :) several people asked me the same
- spurgu 6y ago
  Curious: How did you pick the name? In Finnish fish is kala. And galaxy is galaksi. So it sounds a bit like a mix of the two words, like fishaxy and it's also quite close to how you actually pronounce galaksi. Or it could mean "to fish", as in "[jokin] vaihtui kalaksi" = "[something] changed to fish". :)
  - nunodonato 6y ago
    its galaxy in another language(can't remember which one lol). Galaxy because of the "planets" concept in aggregators... and it being a collection of planets
bastawhiz 6y ago
This is a solution for getting away from Facebook, but it neglects the problem of news discovery. Unless you don't care about finding interesting things that aren't available from your choices of news sources, you're going to miss out on things that folks in your social circle find and want to share. To me, that's the value of a social network. At the very least, it doesn't really make RSS an alternative to Facebook, it serves a different purpose. The folks that the article mentions who rely on Facebook as their exclusive source of messaging are already relying on news discovery, since a story is either shared by a friend or promoted to you as an ad.
mro_name 6y ago
I wonder why atom feeds are so rarely styled for direct browser consumption: https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo
- osobo 6y ago
  Yeah, why would people not republish their content without all the monetizing around it? Hmmmm.
  - mro_name 6y ago
    who said republish? I didn't. Also I don't care about those making money, they can well help themselves. There's many others though.
jug 6y ago
I'm amazed RSS is still supported. It just seems like one of those trusty old technologies that would be forgotten in the emergent web clustered around social networks, "mobile first" sites, Javascript generated content / single-page applications, wrapped into Google AMP sites... I mean, it doesn't even advertise itself for user awareness.
j4yav 6y ago
What’s the best RSS reader service these days? I was a big user of Google Reader but never found something I liked after, that I could access from all my devices. It’s been a few years since I last asked, though.
- imgabe 6y ago
  I moved to Feedly after Google Reader shut down and have been using it ever since. No complaints.
- bonchicbongenre 6y ago
  I can't speak to "best", but I can say that I've been very happy with BazQux Reader. It has good keyboard shortcuts, is very fast, lets you make filters within your subscriptions, has a good in-reader article view, a good mobile site (no app, which I like), and also allows to subscribe to see social media sites if that's your thing. I had previously used Feedly and much prefer BQR
- mineP 6y ago
  There are quite few readers you can try: InoReader (https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/) FeedBro Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedbro/mefgmmbdailogpfhfblcnnjfmnpnmdfa https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedbro/mefgmmbdai...) A little google will give you many.
wohfab 6y ago
Deactivated my FB account years ago. Let me tell you, you don't need an alternative.
- adenozine 6y ago
  This is obvious. The bigger question is how to persuade and educate people who find false value in Facebook to leave the platform. A big part of polarization in American politics (not that you necessarily care or participate) has to do with social media consumption. Facebook users see a highly formulaic subset of events in their stream, and that reinforces their idea of what's going on around them. I see comments like yours often, it's just that it never really leads to anything productive for those still trapped in the cycle. They just see outsiders from their POV, who don't do what they're doing. I don't think the average social media users is that cognizant of the behavioral modification possibility of using socials in the first place, or even of advertising in general.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Isn't it the kind of hoarding / addiction that you feel you'll lose something if you drop it. But the next day you do, you already forgot you had it and you miss nothing ?
xtiansimon 6y ago
> “..relying on Facebook as a primary news source” This seems bananas to me. Came to Facebook for the social network, found news?!?!
XCSme 6y ago
What a coincidence, I just added RSS support for my open-source "blog" scaffold: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog#changelog https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog#changelog
pictur 6y ago
endless RSS romance ...
mickotron 6y ago
I think some are missing the point when we say "RSS as a Facebook alternative". Yeah, current feed readers will not replace Facebook. RSS as an exchange medium of content (in my naive opinion) can replace Facebook. It's just that a project needs to build around it. Follow friends? Click "Follow" in UI, it subscribes to their feed. Live streams? Live stream link can be contained in the RSS feed, subscribers see it in their feed. Facebook groups? Same as users, just a subscription to an RSS feed. Security? Perhaps feed content is encrypted, and only Friends can decrypt? Exchange of keys at Friending could provide this functionality? It would take a lot of work to make this decentralised, secure, private, and usable to regular users. But I think this kind of model sounds much nicer than what is currently on offer. What do others think?
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
tldr; Twitter accounts replaced RSS. Follow the accounts to get their feeds.
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
tl;dr Twitter accounts replaced RSS. Follow the accounts to get their feeds.
Seb-C 6y ago
> RSS as a Facebook alternative You mean that you stopped using facebook as an RSS alternative, right?

237 points by dgrin91 6y ago

Perhaps 'Facebook News' alternative rather than Facebook itself? Unless you consider getting your friends cousins updates, and liking their posts through an RSS feed as a Facebook alternative.

nicoburns 6y ago
If there was an open standard api/protocol for liking/commenting I reckon this could actually work quite well. I guess you'd also need some kind of standard for identity and "friending" too (perhaps something akin to Open ID).
- Yhippa 6y ago
  It wasn't an open protocol but Google Reader had this. And it had commenting. I had some of the most thoughtful and productive conversations on there. Total shame we don't have that anymore.
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  I mean, ActivityPub? That's basically what it is.
  - rektide 6y ago
    Yeah. One can go read the protocol. But the Activity Vocabulary probably gives a good idea for the versatility, the use of (core) ActivityPub[1]. ActivityPub is streams of actions, most of which we know & are familiar with already from existing social media. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#activity-types https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#activity-t...
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    I guess so. ActivityPub seems a lot more complicated than what I have in mind. With RSS itself, most developers could create a reasonable implementation in a weekend. I see no reason why couldn't have something of similar simplicity for commenting.
    - thejohnconway 6y ago
      There’s [Webmention](https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention), which is considerably simpler than ActivityPub.
lliamander 6y ago
The pivot of Facebook from "here's a way to connect with family and friends" to "here's a steady drip of 'engaging' content made to generate 'likes'" is very interesting.
- mminer237 6y ago
  Plenty of people still use it primarily to connect with friends and family though. Just there's news and memes too
  - asdff 6y ago
    Don't forget the sprinkles of propaganda
    - artificial 6y ago
      Propaganda is endemic, nobody is immune, it's the matrix around us. Self selecting echo chambers with the brand of propaganda containing the message they like best, and if they don't like it, switch to another brand. DRINK MORE OVALTINE!
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. Facebook does so much stuff, everyone uses it for different reasons. Like me, I use it for the marketplace nowadays, and for events. Some people like groups, some like meme pages
senectus1 6y ago
yeah thats what I immediately thought as well. Unfortunately FB has somewhat successfully added a lot of services to its product that are now the "default".
TheHideout 6y ago
It would be interesting to have something like FB Purity [0] run in a headless browser that will RSS you meaningful posts based on rules you provide. I'd totally use something like that. [0] https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/

stanislavb 6y ago

I love the recent resurgence of RSS.

jug 6y ago
There has been a resurgence? I thought the opposite!

paxys 6y ago

Wait what happened to newsgroups?

rektide 6y ago
newsgroups = big community spaces filled with activity rss = a person or entity's personal space. which can also be fed into a planet / aggregator to make a shared space. they each have great uses, but rss maintaining the sense of identity & ownership & knowability over the space is a huge boon (to reader & writers both) imo, & where-as newsgroups have always felt (reading or writing) like i was venturing off into wild-lands.

D13Fd 6y ago

RSS is great. I use it every day. Monetization is an issue due to the general lack of ads and tracking, but there are some possible solutions, like Ars Technica’s model of $50/yr for access to the full-text RSS feed.

MayeulC 6y ago
$25. $50 is the pro++ version. i say this as a happy subscriber. I know a few other sites that do the same, and being able to access a plaintext feed is a huge plus to me. Only the first image of Arstechnica's image is available in a feed, though, and videos they sometimes embed in the header do not show. I assume both are bugs, but I can open the page if the article is interesting.
- alert0 6y ago
  What does the authentication process on RSS look like?
  - rlayton2 6y ago
    HTTP auth seems to be "the way".
  - AnonC 6y ago
    If your question is specific to the Ars Technica subscription, there is no authentication. Each subscriber is given a unique feed link (for whatever they want to subscribe to) so any fetch operation for the link is tied to the subscriber. Ars says that it monitors the use of feeds and will take action if any abuse is detected, but doesn’t go too deep into explaining that part. Some other services like Stratechery follow the same model, AFAIK.
- AnonC 6y ago
  IIRC, one of the main people at Ars (Aurich?) dislikes RSS a lot and believes that it’s painful to support for Ars’s format and articles.
ObsoleteNerd 6y ago

EccentricBunny 6y ago

It's a shame he didn't recommend cli programs like sfeed or newsboat. I recently also stopped using youtube to be notified about new videos from the channels I follow, and now I use exclusively RSS with some scripts to made my life easier. Because youtube doesn't provide a RSS with all your subscriptions anymore, I had to extract all of them using the browser console[0] and convert all the links to the (hidden) RSS feed. This issue also happens with LBRY but this time I had to use an external service (I don't blame them because by design, you can't have something like a linear RSS feed in a blockchain). I also used twitter for a while but at one point I felt tired of letting them tell me what I want to read. I was usually distracted by other tweets and feelt like I was wasting my time and didn't find any important or interesting stuff. Because there are still good twitter users in this platform and they don't support RSS feeds anymore, I managed to follow them using nitter[1]. I can tell you that, now, I see those two platforms like they were 10 years ago and I'm enjoying them like never before. [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/85275454?hl=en&msgid=86912868 https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/85275454?hl=en&msg... [1] https://nitter.net/ https://nitter.net/

HDMI_Cable 6y ago
You can still get an RSS feed for individual channels (not subscriptions though) with the following URL: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[Channel https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[Channel ID here]
- drdeca 6y ago
  You can even subscribe to a particular playlist! (So, say someone produces many videos, but you only want the ones that they add to a particular playlist, you can do that.)
- EccentricBunny 6y ago
  Yes, I wanted to use sfeed and they show how to get the good url in their config example [0]. With a simple for loop in bash, I added them to the list of my rss feeds. I had 50+ youtube channels and didn't want to make something complicated. [0] https://git.codemadness.org/sfeed/file/sfeedrc.example.html#l13 https://git.codemadness.org/sfeed/file/sfeedrc.example.html#...

Eric_WVGG 6y ago

RSS as a Facebook alternative is like suggesting a fresh caesar salad, a medium-rare steak tenderloin, and a glass of seven-year-old french cabernet as an alternative to some chunks of roof shingles and pond water. Like… yeah, it's good, give it a try. Do recommend. four and a half out of five stars.

threatofrain 6y ago
Every time I’ve seen someone retain the old ways of RSS it always looks like an ADD workflow. Very little different than Twitter.
- aendruk 6y ago
  Looking back, at least my “old ways” of using RSS involved a lot of FOMO and inevitable information overload. A key lesson I’ve since learned is to be much more minimalist and deliberate about what I subscribe to. The news feed under my control now feels serene relative to the adversarial offerings of major social media outlets.
  - naravara 6y ago
    One thing I wish RSS readers were better at is more granular controls over how they do workflows and notifications. Podcasts actually do this well, but regular old text-RSS does not. There are some feeds where I just do not care about anything older than a day or 3 and would rather it just automatically ignores them on refresh. There are some feeds where I prefer them held indefinitely. I'd love a master dashboard where I can program this in on a per-feed basis. There's also feeds where grouping matters. Like with webcomics where chronology is important and I'm a few issues behind, I'd like them to be presented in chronological order and grouped together. In ones where it's not I'd prefer them as part of the feed. And then there's the tendency to collapse all content into one format. There's blogs where visuals are very important and I'd prefer they be displayed in the page's default and there's others where I'd prefer a "reader" view. Some apps design around it, but many still don't.
- anonporridge 6y ago

BuckRogers 6y ago

Social media is not a news source, it's a pit of misery and sadness. Of all of them, I only find some redeeming value in Instagram as it seems by default to give you something positive. RSS can be a news source. I used Firefox live bookmarks for years, and now use LiveMarks on Firefox. I'm currently doing one of my test drives on Edge to see if it's time to switch, where I use Inoreader instead. If you try Inoreader, remember to disable uBlock Origin for it so the author can be supported. It has a great mobile app too!

bnbond 6y ago

Can anyone recommend any good blogs to add to my RSS feed? I see a lot of really interesting content being shared here on HN, especially the material that isn't super technical.

aendruk 6y ago
We could even devise a system where HN users submit blog posts they like and then vote daily for the ones they most recommend. :)
- bnbond 6y ago
  Haha, thank you for that. I suppose that was warranted.
AnonC 6y ago
One way you can find what’s interesting to you from the HN crowd is to go to hn.algolia.com, search for stories by date and enter keywords like “Ask HN”, “recommend”, “blog”, “follow”, etc. Over the years there have been many “Ask HN” posts about what sites to follow. You may initiate one too, preferably after narrowing down on interest areas and including examples of what you’ve found.

betwixthewires 6y ago

I've been living this way for a decade. No Facebook, use RSS or Atom for every possible thing that I can. I even use it to subscribe to video feeds, such as YouTube channels. It really boggles my mind what so many billions (!) of people tolerate just to avoid having to learn to do something simple themselves.

fartcannon 6y ago
Me too! It's great. I started doing it for YouTube when the algorithm started selectively showing updates for channels I like. Now the algorithm is irrelevant.
- myth2018 6y ago
  I'm facing this issue as well. Too many short, addictive videos being recommended instead of the ones included in the channels I subscribed to. I'm going to include yt in my subscriptions.
  - naravara 6y ago
    I'd kill for YouTube to start recommending short videos again. All I get recommended now are 20 minutes worth of content on something interesting stretched out to an hour long video. The recommendation algorithm seems to prioritize longer-form content, but the result has been creators being pushed to streeeeeetch and that usually means not editing down stuff that ought to be edited out.
    - myth2018 6y ago
      Interesting how the experiences are diverse. In my case, the short videos I'm talking about are things like Dragon Ball Z scenes and GTA V screw arounds. Yt will now and then show me one of those on my page and, if I watch one, it starts to flood the page with similar content.
throwaway316943 6y ago
It’s hard to produce an easier alternative for people who are too busy and disinterested to deal with anything technical. You need to beat Facebook on ease of use, cost, and network. The first one might not be too hard but the next two are almost impossible at this point. The only thing that could beat free is if it actually pays you to use it. The only thing that beats ubiquity is maybe exclusivity?

mullingitover 6y ago

There was a time when you could plug any old RSS feed into your facebook account. I had my posts from del.icio.us, flickr, and twitter all going to facebook with that feature. It was glorious, until facebook unceremoniously ripped it out. I look at that event as the time when facebook went from a neutral entity to a malevolent one.

annadane 6y ago

Or how about legislation where Facebook is forced to stop being a walled garden and make friends' posts available to you via RSS?

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
Other people are thinking along the same lines: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech-problem https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech...
ernesth 6y ago
I don't have a facebook account myself but follow some people's publications using rssbridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge). I would indeed prefer that facebook provides those feeds themselves as it sometimes break because Facebook changes things (the latest breakage I encountered being Facebook replying with "You must be logged in to view this page").

blakewatson 6y ago

For Mac users, combining the desktop app NetNewsWire with the service Feedbin is a pretty sweet combo.

asdff 6y ago
I can't stand these thousands of 3 column apps. Ended up going all on with newsboat and I avoid having to use an external service in the process.
deergomoo 6y ago
NNW is great, I'm also quite partial to Reeder too. It can sync feeds via iCloud, so if you're all-in on the Apple ecosystem there's no need for an external feed service.

worldhistory 6y ago

Just today I was thinking this exact thing. I'm trying to stop using Twitter and decided to setup and RSS reader as my source for finding out about news.

aquir 6y ago
Twitter is awful! Unfortunatly most of the communities used to be on forums are moved to Twitter :(

tijuco2 6y ago

https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ host your own RSS server

aquir 6y ago

I am using RSS since the early 2000s, it's great! The best way to get focoused information about what I want and when I want without scrolling through shit I pay for Feedly Premium because with it I can - filter stuff out (coronavirus, trump etc.) - subscribe for Twitter - has this Leo thing what is trying to prioritize stuff that you read most Higly recommended

myth2018 6y ago

I started again to use RSS and Atom feeds last week. I used to use facebook as an aggregator, but its curated list has become too poisoned since the pandemics and "political outbreaks" that followed. The algorithms noticed that I've been (automatically/inadvertently) interacting too much with such content, and decided to focus on that in order to keep me hooked. Facebook and other platforms profit by subtracting value from society. I ask myself if that will stop someday.

crocodiletears 6y ago
I've had the opposite experience. Facebook's been actively unfollowing and hiding my political groups for me. Every few days I have to go through a list of pages, check to make sure I'm still following them, and interact with posts to keep them in my feed.
- asddubs 6y ago
  that seems like the point where you'd stop using facebook, when you're altering your behaviour to appease the algorithm, because it won't just let you control what you want to see anymore. although i admit I also open all youtube videos of categories i don't intend to watch regularly in private tabs
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    It's been an issue for quite a while, but it's becoming unbearable since they started really clamping down on 'extremism' (left and right) around November. Unfortunately, there's no tool quite like it online for getting access to such a wide swath of firsthand knowledge, opinon and experiences.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      Twitter has an option to just skip the algorithm and let you drink from the firehouse - switch to timeline view and put everyone you are following in “alarm” mode (otherwise, they’ll filter it as THEY see fit). Most of the people I care about post on both, and when there’s an important long form article they post a link to it (whether on Facebook or their private blog)

lemming 6y ago

For me, the main problem with Facebook is the amount of content which is exclusively available on it. We homeschool our daughter and the whole homeschooling community is organised on Facebook. I'm involved in some niche exercise (handbalancing), and that is also pretty much exclusively on Instagram/Facebook. I would love a way to get the content of Facebook groups via RSS since I have no interest in the social aspects and I miss out on a lot by not using it.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago

There is a very convenient RSS-to-telegram bot, so you don't really need to install any additional app. I follow reddit with it, for example.

gxqoz 6y ago

Am I the only one who still largely keeps up with stuff via explicitly going to a website? The thing I never liked about RSS is that it fed on my inbox zero compulsion. I don't feel that I'm missing out on content when I just don't see it because it's moved to an older section of a website I regularly visit. I did add a read it later app into the mix several years ago. This is helpful for consuming longer content, but I have to explicitly put articles there.

kickscondor 6y ago
RSS also strips out all of the styles. I personally like to see posts as they were intended.
- netghost 6y ago
  There's a happy medium in my mind where you just use RSS to notify you of new content, and then click through to see the real post. That's the approach I take with the RSS reader I've built anyways.
rchaud 6y ago
Me, I will bookmark sites and visit them when I feel like it. RSS never worked properly for me when it was "big" in the 2000s. Half the time I'd click the RSS icon on a site and it would display XML code and an error message I didn't understand. At the end of the day, it's also still a 'feed'. The websites I visit write about a variety of topics, and I'm only interested in a couple. For that use case, it's simpler to just visit the site on a regular basis. I do save articles to Pocket though, as I can't stand the news website trend of breaking up the article flow with embedded tweets, Related Articles links, email signup CTAs and what not.

iamAtom 6y ago

One major reason for people to rely on FB is every post carry some weight like author/friend who shared it/likes/comments RSS is a great alternative but definitely won't make a dent in FB

raindropm 6y ago

More people should know about RSS. I explain how it work to my friends, they seems wowed, but don't see much used of it(It's the thing that you need to experience yourself, I guess) I can't imagine how one keep track of various website of interest. It's like they don't know better, or unknowingly think that Facebook feed is everything they need and no other internet outside it (It's understandable, I don't blame them)

somishere 6y ago

i would very much like a hn style ui for my favourite sources of news/music/social chaff .. like a reader mode .. if anyone can suggest anything foss? Not enough sites support rss for it to be useful. Had started on a 'feed filter' browser extension for soundcloud a while back but wasn't so much for aggregating as for highlighting the gold slash filtering out the dross in /stream.

ybalkind 6y ago

RSS being awesome is the one thing that everyone on HN seems to agree about. Every couple of years I give it a try but for some reason I'm struggling to get into it. Something prevents me from checking my Feedly feed. Seems uninteresting even though I populated with sources I like. Can someone set out a "getting started" guide? Like does it help to have good categorisation? Are there some tricks that make a big difference (adding email newsletters perhaps?)? Is there a recommended App or workflow that brings out the best in RSS?

nunodonato 6y ago

Shameless plug: kalaksi.com, a social network built on top of RSS

skinkestek 6y ago
Thanks for sharing! Looks like a great starting point - and I have tried to look into a good number of such solutions. Two questions: is it open source and do you plan for federation? None of these are showstoppers IMO, but without them one has to work harder to convince me that it wont be discontinued/sold etc.
- nunodonato 6y ago
  not yet :) several people asked me the same
spurgu 6y ago
Curious: How did you pick the name? In Finnish fish is kala. And galaxy is galaksi. So it sounds a bit like a mix of the two words, like fishaxy and it's also quite close to how you actually pronounce galaksi. Or it could mean "to fish", as in "[jokin] vaihtui kalaksi" = "[something] changed to fish". :)
- nunodonato 6y ago
  its galaxy in another language(can't remember which one lol). Galaxy because of the "planets" concept in aggregators... and it being a collection of planets

bastawhiz 6y ago

This is a solution for getting away from Facebook, but it neglects the problem of news discovery. Unless you don't care about finding interesting things that aren't available from your choices of news sources, you're going to miss out on things that folks in your social circle find and want to share. To me, that's the value of a social network. At the very least, it doesn't really make RSS an alternative to Facebook, it serves a different purpose. The folks that the article mentions who rely on Facebook as their exclusive source of messaging are already relying on news discovery, since a story is either shared by a friend or promoted to you as an ad.

mro_name 6y ago

I wonder why atom feeds are so rarely styled for direct browser consumption: https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo

osobo 6y ago
Yeah, why would people not republish their content without all the monetizing around it? Hmmmm.
- mro_name 6y ago
  who said republish? I didn't. Also I don't care about those making money, they can well help themselves. There's many others though.

jug 6y ago

I'm amazed RSS is still supported. It just seems like one of those trusty old technologies that would be forgotten in the emergent web clustered around social networks, "mobile first" sites, Javascript generated content / single-page applications, wrapped into Google AMP sites... I mean, it doesn't even advertise itself for user awareness.

j4yav 6y ago

What’s the best RSS reader service these days? I was a big user of Google Reader but never found something I liked after, that I could access from all my devices. It’s been a few years since I last asked, though.

imgabe 6y ago
I moved to Feedly after Google Reader shut down and have been using it ever since. No complaints.
bonchicbongenre 6y ago
I can't speak to "best", but I can say that I've been very happy with BazQux Reader. It has good keyboard shortcuts, is very fast, lets you make filters within your subscriptions, has a good in-reader article view, a good mobile site (no app, which I like), and also allows to subscribe to see social media sites if that's your thing. I had previously used Feedly and much prefer BQR
mineP 6y ago
There are quite few readers you can try: InoReader (https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/) FeedBro Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedbro/mefgmmbdailogpfhfblcnnjfmnpnmdfa https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/feedbro/mefgmmbdai...) A little google will give you many.

wohfab 6y ago

Deactivated my FB account years ago. Let me tell you, you don't need an alternative.

adenozine 6y ago
This is obvious. The bigger question is how to persuade and educate people who find false value in Facebook to leave the platform. A big part of polarization in American politics (not that you necessarily care or participate) has to do with social media consumption. Facebook users see a highly formulaic subset of events in their stream, and that reinforces their idea of what's going on around them. I see comments like yours often, it's just that it never really leads to anything productive for those still trapped in the cycle. They just see outsiders from their POV, who don't do what they're doing. I don't think the average social media users is that cognizant of the behavioral modification possibility of using socials in the first place, or even of advertising in general.
agumonkey 6y ago
Isn't it the kind of hoarding / addiction that you feel you'll lose something if you drop it. But the next day you do, you already forgot you had it and you miss nothing ?

xtiansimon 6y ago

> “..relying on Facebook as a primary news source” This seems bananas to me. Came to Facebook for the social network, found news?!?!

XCSme 6y ago

What a coincidence, I just added RSS support for my open-source "blog" scaffold: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog#changelog https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog#changelog

pictur 6y ago

endless RSS romance ...

mickotron 6y ago

I think some are missing the point when we say "RSS as a Facebook alternative". Yeah, current feed readers will not replace Facebook. RSS as an exchange medium of content (in my naive opinion) can replace Facebook. It's just that a project needs to build around it. Follow friends? Click "Follow" in UI, it subscribes to their feed. Live streams? Live stream link can be contained in the RSS feed, subscribers see it in their feed. Facebook groups? Same as users, just a subscription to an RSS feed. Security? Perhaps feed content is encrypted, and only Friends can decrypt? Exchange of keys at Friending could provide this functionality? It would take a lot of work to make this decentralised, secure, private, and usable to regular users. But I think this kind of model sounds much nicer than what is currently on offer. What do others think?

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

tldr; Twitter accounts replaced RSS. Follow the accounts to get their feeds.

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

tl;dr Twitter accounts replaced RSS. Follow the accounts to get their feeds.

Seb-C 6y ago

> RSS as a Facebook alternative You mean that you stopped using facebook as an RSS alternative, right?