14 ms·

Chrome testing RSS-powered ‘Follow’ button

225 points by Breadmaker 5y ago

torstenvl 5y ago
I love RSS and hope this brings it back into the mainstream. Another article on the front page is about the Amish and carefully evaluating how tech fits into your life and values, and who it serves. Applying that here -- RSS does serve those who want to get updates from a site, and does not serve advertisers and cookie-traffickers. RSS is peak "good old days" of the Web.
- frankfrankfrank 5y ago
  I totally agree and it is not only a step in the direction of redistributing the internet and information, but it also concerns me a lot that Google is working on this because I have next to zero amount of confidence that they will not abuse RSS and this will not track you and essentially kill RSS by simply taking it over. What is that dark pattern called again that Microsoft is so famous for? … join and effort, co-opt/compromise it, and then take it over and make it their own; leaving the original effort totally eviscerated? Edit: apparently someone else (sthnblllII) smells exactly the same trap but knew the term/phrase; "embrace extend extinguish".
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  I like RSS for serving users trying to get updates from the site. But I've heard that it requires creating a massive feed file containing many articles, including text and images, which can produce a large bandwidth load from clients that pull it frequently. As a result, some blogs (like christine.website) stopped serving article contents in the RSS feeds. Is it a problem in practice (cannot be solved by removing images or similar)? Could it be improved through smarter polling or some "last updated since" header? Or by using an "active" RPC-like protocol where the reader specifically queries for "list of all articles since this timestamp" and can fetch them together or individually, with or without images?
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    > But I've heard that it requires creating a massive feed file containing many articles, including text and images So a) no, it doesn't contain images, just URLs to images where necessary; an RSS or ATOM feed is just a text XML document adhering to a certain schema, and b) the feed file is only as big as the site decides it needs to be. For example, a typical blog or news organization could generate a feed containing the last 24 hours worth of new content. Feed readers will poll that and pull in new content while ignoring existing content. In short: this should be a non-issue unless you're turning out massive amounts of new material on a regular basis, in which case you're probably a major news organization and can afford it. > As a result, some blogs (like christine.website) stopped serving article contents in the RSS feeds. This isn't because of bandwidth concerns. This is because they can't advertise in an RSS feed so they want to drive eyeballs to the site. Personally, I run ttrss and use a plugin that scrapes the content from the source site and embeds it right in my feed. As a result I only have to leave my feed reader if I really want to for some reason (e.g. to read comments on the originating site... like, say, HN!)
    - kixiQu 5y ago
      To be clear, I don't think it's the case that christine.website has any advertising whatsoever (or even meaningful JS?) but I think your diagnosis is correct more broadly.
      - moehm 5y ago
        It also doesn't seem to be the case that christine.website strips their content from the feed. https://christine.website/blog.rss https://christine.website/blog.rss
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    A LOT of sites only serve the article headline and maybe just the intro sentence for exactly this reason. Also by forcing you to click through, you land on the site proper and feature in their visitor counts, AND get to look at ads on the page too.
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  And fortunately, RSS never really went away. Yeah, there's some sites that have killed their RSS feeds, and feeds can be tough to find (though there's browser extensions that fix that issue), but most major news organizations, blogging platforms, etc, support RSS. And for those that don't (including Twitter, Instagram, Github, etc), RSS Bridge can often fill the gap: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge In short: RSS is my frontend to the web, and it's fantastic!
  - tristan957 5y ago
    Do you have a preferred browser extension for finding RSS feeds for a site?
    - CarelessExpert 5y ago
      For Firefox I use Awesome RSS: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ For Chrome I can't vouch for anything recently but I came across this a while back: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-rss-feed-url/kfghpdldaipanmkhfpdcjglncmilendn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-rss-feed-url/k...
    - kgwxd 5y ago
      Just about every RSS reader supports discovery if you just put in the address you have in the browser. Personally, though it'd be nice to see the indicator that a site has an RSS feed, I'd rather not clog up my browser with add ons and just throw the address in my RSS reader on the rare occasion I come across a new site I'd like to follow.
    - gnagatomo 5y ago
      I've been use FeedBro for Firefox for the last couple years and it's great. https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
    - breput 5y ago
      Not the gp but Drop Feeds (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/) is great Firefox RSS reader add-on. It sits in the sidebar and automatically updates so you can immediately see when a feed updates, then the feed renders in the main panel. This is very useful for news, status pages, and things like live YouTube events.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  I think you're correct in that this doesn't seem to serve advertisers and given that this looks like a server side (Google) feature, I won't assume this is going to be around for long.
  - jsnell 5y ago
    This appears to be basically another mode of operation for Discover, which definitely has ads. (At least on Android. Not sure if on Chrome yet.)
  - fragileone 5y ago
    This feature doesn't preclude Google putting ads on the RSS reader page. All Google has to do is put an algorithm on the feed and they've made it a Twitter or Medium competitor.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  RSS is kinda old hat these days. ActivityStreams can express everything that RSS is used for, and more - the whole Fediverse ecosystem is entirely built on the ActivityStreams standard. This move from the Chrome developers just feels like too little, too late.
  - shrikant 5y ago
    Without even looking it up, I'd hazard that Chrome has at least a couple orders of magnitude more users than the Fediverse. This renders any move the Chrome developers make available and usable to something approaching an actual critical mass of usage, even if it is a less open standard. And I say this as a Firefox user and someone who wants open standards to win out over whatever corporate lock-in Google decide to roll out.
  - pmlnr 5y ago
    Rss/atom can be static files, AS can't.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Why can't AS be static files? ActivityPub adds dynamic "push" support, but that's optional and separate to the basic ActivityStreams spec.
      - pmlnr 5y ago
        Would you mind giving an example of a static file AS, please? I wasn't able to find any.
kevincox 5y ago
This is great news. Sure, it is still "algorithmically curated" but at least it pushes sites to have RSS feeds. Then users can use the built-in simple Chrome reader or upgrade to something more powerful. My only major concern is that the format of appearing on the New Tab Page may encourage short "summary" style feeds instead of full-content feeds.
sthnblllII 5y ago
>if a site doesn’t use RSS, Google will fall back to its existing content index to keep users updated. This sounds like an "embrace extend extinguish" strategy. Piggyback on websites that have RSS for basic functionality, but use Google's control over the browser to ultimately push websites into something like update aggregation to "reduce server load" that allows Google to track people even when they think they are using an open alternative. It's similar to Google's recent move on FlOC. Making small easily reversible moves towards an open web that protect Google's core position from regulation and users choosing alternatives. EDIT: If Google deserved the benefit of the doubt they wouldn't still be reading people's email to build creepy profiles on everyone's interests and browsing history. I'm not a fool, I'll consider giving them the benefit of the doubt after they stop that and delete all the data they have collected.
- livre 5y ago
  You may be right but I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, that may be just to keep the UI consistent and avoid the trouble of people complaining that they see the button on some websites but not on others.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  They already did the extinguish thing when they killed Google Reader to try to prop up the failing Google+ network. RSS never recovered from that inflection point. I'm still mad.
  - hopesthoughts 5y ago
    RSS has recovered fine, if it ever was actually wounded.
- pschuegr 5y ago
  Google is certainly not without faults, but it does not read your email. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads." Disclaimer: I currently work at Google.
MR4D 5y ago
Nicely offsets their crappy AMP stuff. Also allows them to sidestep all sorts of cookie limitations on personal data. Smart.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  > Also allows them to sidestep all sorts of cookie limitations on personal data Can you explain what you mean by that?
  - MR4D 5y ago
    The simple version (the longer version takes more time than I have to write today).... If 3rd party cookies are blocked, then it's hard for Google to know what people are looking at, and also hard to sell ads at the highest rates. However, if you connect an RSS feed into a user's google account via a browser button, then you now have access to all the things a user likes (by virtue of the fact that the user has clicked the follow me button, thereby signaling, "hey, I'm interested in this!"). I have no idea how this gets implemented for Google, but if there isn't some tie in to their advertising revenue, I'd be surprised.
    - hopesthoughts 5y ago
      That's where I'll never use it, because I never use Chrome with an account.
mattowen_uk 5y ago
Here's a question... does that 'follow' button actually just extract the RSS feed tag from the page, and store it locally for use in your new tab page... OR does it do a round robin to Google so they can track which feeds are being fetched? If it's the latter, then no-thank-you.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  From the feature it does look like it's a server side feature but it might not me.
mfer 5y ago
RSS is a great piece of technology. It's like plumbing. What we need is good experience built on top of it.
- rado 5y ago
  NetNewsWire
smusamashah 5y ago
Before there was chrome, browsers use to have native RSS support. To this date chrome does not support RSS natively. They are responsible for killing RSS. Now they are bringing it back with a social media buzz word 'follow'. This is a shitty play.
- asdff 5y ago
  Firefox has RSS support until like last year iirc. It wasn't chrome that killed that, it was Mozilla shifting engineering priorities.
  - smusamashah 5y ago
    I have been an Opera user from v5 till v11 (it became unbearable at that point). It had RSS, Email, IRC etc support. I seem to remember both internet explorer and firefox back then could open RSS feed albeit poorly in comparison. Then came chrome. I resisted switching from Opera until it became useless, but we had Google Reader for feeds even though chrome couldn't read RSS. Reading feeds was not a problem until they killed Reader. Then we were left with chrome with no rss support and no Google Reader. Feedly was to bloaty to keep using. This how i see the progression of chrome killing rss.
    - onli 5y ago
      There are many alternatives to Feedly. Bazqux is probably the best of them. The old reader was back then very similar to Google Reader and still looks similar. FreshRSS is a very nice option to self-host.
      - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
        Also there are few cross-platform standalone RSS softwares; QuiteRSS and RSS-Guard. For Chrome alterivates, Vivaldi have native RSS support. It need to be enabled in the setting to use RSS. Also there are tt-rss for selfhosting.
    - dfabulich 5y ago
IceWreck 5y ago
Ah,so RSS is coming back to prominence ? nice. Meanwhile, we have RSS-Bridge as a bandaid for those sites which dont support RSS.
- torstenvl 5y ago
  Didn't know RSS-Bridge existed, that's great! Sadly, I already reinvented the wheel for the primary RSS-less site I use (the DoN's ALNAVS listing: https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/References/Messages/ALNAV-2021/ https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/References/Messages/ALNAV-2021...). On my site, myrss.xml is a symbolic link to myrss.py, which reads the ALNAVs site, parses the main table, updates a sqlite database of titles, links, publication dates, and descriptions, and spits out the RSS representation of everything in the database. https://pastebin.com/TeQiWN42 https://pastebin.com/TeQiWN42 Maybe I'll have to play with RSS-Bridge next time I run into something similar!
  - onli 5y ago
    That's pretty much the use-case (+filtering and merging of feeds) for which I resurrected pipes, at https://www.pipes.digital/ https://www.pipes.digital/. This specific example might be hard to parse though, but you probably already have the selectors figured out, then it should be easy to port over.
PretzelFisch 5y ago
Is this going to be a true client side RSS that talks to all 5k of websites I follow or a service provided by Google that polls for new content? I would be fasinated to see what telemetry/buisness objective has them moving back in this direction.
smbv 5y ago
I actually run my own RSS feed aggregator (FreshRSS) and I can tell you that it's great. Combine that with an iOS app like NetNewsWire, I have hundreds of sites that are synced between my devices. It's actually how I read HN at this point (via hnrss).
greggman3 5y ago
I wrote up a blog post on an idea of what if google had a site that looked similar to youtube, but was links to webpages instead of videos. Like youtube it would let you "subscribe". Also like youtube if would recommend other articles based on your subscriptions and/or clicked links. My "aha moment", assuming it was an aha moment, was noticing the number of views on certain youtube channels and believing that blog posts generally don't get a similar number of view. At first I thought the obvious reason is people like videos more than blog posts. But then I thought, well, maybe one reasons is because youtube recommends more things to watch as well as lets you subscribe and blog posts don't. https://games.greggman.com/game/google-like-youtube/ https://games.greggman.com/game/google-like-youtube/
- zozbot234 5y ago
  That's a nice idea. You could call it Google Reader, or something. Or make it a Youtube-like site that only shows Google-hosted "channels" and call it Google Plus!
erikrothoff 5y ago
This is so ironic, because the lack of RSS in Chrome was the reason I built the RSS Feed Reader extension for Chrome back in 2010 when switching from Firefox. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pnjaodmkngahhkoihejjehlcdlnohgmp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pn...
TrianguloY 5y ago
> That said, the algorithmic feed will use your follows to surface content. If this means that feeds will be sorted/hidden based on a black box trained to sell me things, sorry but I won't call that rss. Rss for me is an aggregator, a list where all and every item of multiple lists are placed together and sorted chronologically, optionally with tags to filter if needed. I choose the lists to aggregate, I decide which posts to read and which not, and if I don't like the content of a list, I'm the one to remove it. I have full control, not an algorithm.
- Kye 5y ago
  Seriously. I've already started adding YouTube channels I want to follow to Inoreader because Google does such a poor job of showing me new videos.
- notriddle 5y ago
  RSS is a file format. If Chrome uses it, then webmasters will publish it, and I won't have to use their reader.
brundolf 5y ago
1) This makes perfect business sense: Google failed to create its own social feed that would stick, so instead it's piggybacking off of a standard technology (and I'm sure it'll collect plenty of data just like it would from an actual social feed). This is what Google did in the early days with other technologies like the open web and email, and it's generally a good thing for everybody (until they enter the "extend" and "extinguish" phases later on) 2) Question as someone who's new to RSS: is there a standard URL path that a reader can use to automatically find your XML feed? I've already added RSS to my site, but right now there's just a home page link to the XML document, I'm not sure how it would be auto-discovered for such a "follow" button
- scrollaway 5y ago
  > Question as someone who's new to RSS: is there a standard URL path that a reader can use to automatically find your XML feed? Yes. Add a link like this: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My articles" href="/articles/rss/" /> (Or more likely, application/atom+xml -- rss is not great, atom is generally what you want, and what you'll be publishing)
  - brundolf 5y ago
    Nice! I'll add that. Probably I'll just add both versions.
    - clscott 5y ago
      Honestly adding both isn't necessary. Just use Atom because RSS is an ill defined hodgepodge. I work for a service that creates "RSS" feeds as a side effect of what we do and they've all be Atom for 10+ years with no issues. Please let the RSS format die.
      - brundolf 5y ago
        I have no horse in this race (I don't even know what Atom is tbh; I'm inferring that it's some kind of refined subset and/or extension of the RSS spec), and I'd prefer my site to be accessible to as many readers as possible.
Giorgi 5y ago
Why the hell was it abandoned in the first place?
- J5892 5y ago
  Maybe they figured Google Reader was the future of RSS.
throwaway29303 5y ago
Hopefully this gets adopted en masse! THANK YOU!
evmar 5y ago
Chrome originally integrated RSS feeds in the new tab page, to show you when there were new posts on sites you frequently visited. We cut the feature just before launch, because it wasn't fully baked, and never resurrected it. (I know this because I worked on this code.) With more perspective on the problem, I think the way we implemented it at the time was wrong, with the XML processing done in unsandboxed C++. At the time, Chrome didn't use any HTML for its UI like the new tab page, so only web content was sandboxed, but with today's perspective it's obvious to me you want to process XML content with the same sandboxing indirection you use for other untrusted data formats. So in retrospect I'm glad the feature didn't launch as it was, because it would've been a security disaster. Also my recollection is that the code wasn't great. (I feel allowed to say that because I authored it -- I'm not slagging on my coworkers.)
k1m 5y ago
And surprisingly enough, Google News produces RSS feeds for its top stories, topics and even searches. Anyone's guess how long they'll keep it around. I wrote about it here: https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-news-rss-feeds/ https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-news-rss-feeds/
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Yes it does, and alerts, and Youtube channels, oh and Feedburner's still around, even though they're trying to get rid of it.
mastrsushi 5y ago
All I ever wanted was a plaintext website where I can add my rss subscriptions linked to my account via email address and a front page where all my feed titles show. Why does this not exist?
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Miniflux exists.
  - mastrsushi 5y ago
    That looks to be a Linux app you have to host.
    - hopesthoughts 5y ago
      yeah it is, although I'm having a service that was launched here on HN manage it for me.
willio58 5y ago
RSS didn’t completely die, it’s used for podcasts still for example.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  If you run a blog long enough, even these days, you'll eventually get messages from readers asking you to provide, update, and periodically reconfigure your RSS feed.
- zenlot 5y ago
  It's used everywhere. Just because Google killed their RSS reader at a time - it didn't die. I use it for pretty much all my news, updates from sites. If a site doesn't provide feed, I won't bother visiting it and checking for updates. And I host it myself with miniflux + postgresql.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    Does HN have an RSS feed?
    - happytoexplain 5y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
      - manjana 5y ago
        Also: https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/
      - johnchristopher 5y ago
        Neat, user name checks out :).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 5y ago
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
I'm sick of the hodgepodge of different techniques needed to get notified of blog updates. But I'd prefer this was a separate web service rather than tied to chrome so I can view it on safari on my phone too. But if Google makes it more attractive for websites to support RSS then more tools/readers will become available.
- detaro 5y ago
  "will"? There are already tons of feed reader options out there.
  - helsinkiandrew 5y ago
    But support by news sites, blogs and websites tends to be a bit hit and miss - in providing RSS feed at all, feeds with broken content, or entries getting republished as new - a Chrome/Google RSS reader would result in more people using RSS and likely make more websites caring about them.
stanislavb 5y ago
For quite some time I've been sharing my beliefs that RSS is having some kind of a renaissance. I've been planning to build a feed/RSS/content reader for quite some time and even started coding in the beginning of this week. Google's "revival" of RSS is reassuring that my beliefs/observations might not be too wrong.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  I agree, I've believed this for a while now, but no one wants to listen to me lol.
ashneo76 5y ago
Right after they disabled rss feeds and people lapped up chrome even when google canned RSS as dead. Forcing Firefox to follow that. And now google comes back with, look at this shiny new RSS. Fuck you Google. Youre a plague and cancer to the internet.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Would you mind cussing them out after they've normalized PWAs as first class citizens, and RSS is a common technology among even techies again.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Official blog post from Chromium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217283
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  Bulk of discussion happening over here mostly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210819
imgabe 5y ago
I never left RSS. When Google Reader ended, I migrated to feedly and continue to follow a bunch of blogs there. I hope the current newsletter fad comes around to RSS as well. FWIW, I noticed that Substack has RSS feeds for its newsletters, so that is an option.
- pinkano 5y ago
  We have also Newsletter feeds, Twitter feeds, Reddit feeds and soon page2RSS for those who want more sources :)
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  Never left it either. My crawler with tags support is on https://handlr.sapico.me https://handlr.sapico.me ( yeah, i like the hn format) It could be optimized though, there's currently a lot of data in it and hadn't had a lot of time.
- LinAGKar 5y ago
  Nextcloud News for me
- kjsingh 5y ago
  Ya feedly is really nice.. now they have AI to predict which posts are critical to you
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  There's also kill-the-newsletter.com.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
happytoexplain 5y ago
Very nearly all of my web browser activity that isn't Googling things for work starts with my RSS feed. It's how I get 100% of my news, including Hacker News. It's how I monitor things I'm shopping for. It's how I consume podcasts, youtube, music blogs, and comics. My friends do the same. When people say RSS became unpopular, are they referring to consumers, producers, or both?
- senectus1 5y ago
  This is exactly me as well.. I filter through a good 1K articles and posts a day in very little time using this method.
- rado 5y ago
  Same.
- random314 5y ago
  How do you monitor things you are shopping for via RSS?
  - rcarmo 5y ago
    Look up “camelcamelcamel”, for instance. I used to get RSS feeds from sites like that.
- amphitheatre 5y ago
  What are your workflows for consuming YT videos and podcasts from RSS? Do you have something that automatically downloads that content or do you just click through to their sites? I’ve been trying to set something up for the former but haven’t yet found anything that I like.
  - unixfg 5y ago
    Check out rss-bridge I used to have direct feeds from my YouTube subscriptions, but they either killed or moved that feature. This runs on the same $5 vm as my RSS feed reader and works great. https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
beshrkayali 5y ago
It was never dead. If you like RSS, don't rely on Google. They'll probably kill it again [0] after this experiment runs its course, or wait until more people adopt it by default and then try to break yet another open standard. If you'd like a recommendation, Feedbin is fantastic. 0] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- slver 5y ago
  Let’s define dead: it was very mainstream at one point, you had to have rss if you had a content site. And now it’s absolutely irrelevant except to a small niche of users. It’s dead.
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    A "small niche" is a big exaggeration. It's nowhere near dead.
    - slver 5y ago
      Flipboard is the most popular RSS app with 80 million users. Everything else has about or below a million of users. 80 millions is a lot, yes? We have 4660 million web users. Twitter has 200 million users. TikTok has 700 million users. Instagram has 1000 million users. WhatsApp has 2000 million users. Facebook has 2701 million of users. Youtube 2740 million users. All of those one-off platforms dwarf the supposedly ubiquitous RSS format, and all those one-off platforms have one-off apps with their own push notifications for content. RSS is today a small niche. It's on a path to becoming like IRC, where a small core of people swear it's the most important thing ever, but actually they didn't get the memo that most everyone has moved on.
  - beshrkayali 5y ago
    > it was very mainstream at one point, you had to have rss if you had a content site. And now it’s absolutely irrelevant except to a small niche of users. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. There's more people using internet now in general. Saying "it's absolutely irrelevant except to a small niche of users" is an egregious statement.
ddingus 5y ago
Lol, I like and use RSS. Given recent conversations, I just have to point out that RSS goes right into email. Great match, will work like a treat, just saying.
senectus1 5y ago
The status of RSS never changed for me, the only thing that changed was the move from Reader to Feedly.... on that subject, anyone know of a way to filter out keywords on a feed in feedly? ie I have a RSS feed that has Amazon stuff popping up in it, I loath anything amazon and don't want to see anything with the word Amazon in it.
- pinkano 5y ago
  Yes, you can learn more about filtering out / mute filters here https://blog.feedly.com/leo-and-mute-filters/ https://blog.feedly.com/leo-and-mute-filters/
ironMonkey 5y ago
I saw Brave bragged brining RSS subscriptions back. Observing a direct link.
solnyshok 5y ago
bring Google Reader back, cowards!
- detaro 5y ago
  I honestly don't see a need for that anymore. Go use an alternative by people that care long-term instead of wishing for Google to get back in it temporarily.
lolive 5y ago
And then Google discovers that RSS-as-a-service is a much more versatile option. And Yippie Kay Yay, welcome back Google Reader! #soLongGooglePlus
dperalta 5y ago
RSS all the things!
vbezhenar 5y ago
Hopefully it'll be released. I miss RSS, not enough to warrant installation of a separate software, but enough to use it if it's built-in.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Old open Web 2.0 til infinity heads rejoice. Sure it's a pseudo-killer app/tech on the net we lost somewhat (yes I know, never went away really) but it's also been there done that. Firefox had this. Email apps and "Readers" had it. But we moved to following Twitter feeds and social. And the number of sites publishing out there went down anyways. Yes, there's been an uptick in personal sites and blogs again for sure. But despite what we see in the tech bubble are there really that many sites/feeds out there worth following? That aren't being followed elsewhere already? Having Options for ways to keep in touch are good sure but history repeats when we'll see again the feature isn't worth maintaining or provides no return for publishers. Sorry I missed the googleio discussion earlier.

225 points by Breadmaker 5y ago

I love RSS and hope this brings it back into the mainstream. Another article on the front page is about the Amish and carefully evaluating how tech fits into your life and values, and who it serves. Applying that here -- RSS does serve those who want to get updates from a site, and does not serve advertisers and cookie-traffickers. RSS is peak "good old days" of the Web.

frankfrankfrank 5y ago
I totally agree and it is not only a step in the direction of redistributing the internet and information, but it also concerns me a lot that Google is working on this because I have next to zero amount of confidence that they will not abuse RSS and this will not track you and essentially kill RSS by simply taking it over. What is that dark pattern called again that Microsoft is so famous for? … join and effort, co-opt/compromise it, and then take it over and make it their own; leaving the original effort totally eviscerated? Edit: apparently someone else (sthnblllII) smells exactly the same trap but knew the term/phrase; "embrace extend extinguish".
nyanpasu64 5y ago
I like RSS for serving users trying to get updates from the site. But I've heard that it requires creating a massive feed file containing many articles, including text and images, which can produce a large bandwidth load from clients that pull it frequently. As a result, some blogs (like christine.website) stopped serving article contents in the RSS feeds. Is it a problem in practice (cannot be solved by removing images or similar)? Could it be improved through smarter polling or some "last updated since" header? Or by using an "active" RPC-like protocol where the reader specifically queries for "list of all articles since this timestamp" and can fetch them together or individually, with or without images?
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  > But I've heard that it requires creating a massive feed file containing many articles, including text and images So a) no, it doesn't contain images, just URLs to images where necessary; an RSS or ATOM feed is just a text XML document adhering to a certain schema, and b) the feed file is only as big as the site decides it needs to be. For example, a typical blog or news organization could generate a feed containing the last 24 hours worth of new content. Feed readers will poll that and pull in new content while ignoring existing content. In short: this should be a non-issue unless you're turning out massive amounts of new material on a regular basis, in which case you're probably a major news organization and can afford it. > As a result, some blogs (like christine.website) stopped serving article contents in the RSS feeds. This isn't because of bandwidth concerns. This is because they can't advertise in an RSS feed so they want to drive eyeballs to the site. Personally, I run ttrss and use a plugin that scrapes the content from the source site and embeds it right in my feed. As a result I only have to leave my feed reader if I really want to for some reason (e.g. to read comments on the originating site... like, say, HN!)
  - kixiQu 5y ago
    To be clear, I don't think it's the case that christine.website has any advertising whatsoever (or even meaningful JS?) but I think your diagnosis is correct more broadly.
    - moehm 5y ago
      It also doesn't seem to be the case that christine.website strips their content from the feed. https://christine.website/blog.rss https://christine.website/blog.rss
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  A LOT of sites only serve the article headline and maybe just the intro sentence for exactly this reason. Also by forcing you to click through, you land on the site proper and feature in their visitor counts, AND get to look at ads on the page too.
CarelessExpert 5y ago
And fortunately, RSS never really went away. Yeah, there's some sites that have killed their RSS feeds, and feeds can be tough to find (though there's browser extensions that fix that issue), but most major news organizations, blogging platforms, etc, support RSS. And for those that don't (including Twitter, Instagram, Github, etc), RSS Bridge can often fill the gap: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge In short: RSS is my frontend to the web, and it's fantastic!
- tristan957 5y ago
  Do you have a preferred browser extension for finding RSS feeds for a site?
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    For Firefox I use Awesome RSS: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ For Chrome I can't vouch for anything recently but I came across this a while back: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-rss-feed-url/kfghpdldaipanmkhfpdcjglncmilendn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-rss-feed-url/k...
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    Just about every RSS reader supports discovery if you just put in the address you have in the browser. Personally, though it'd be nice to see the indicator that a site has an RSS feed, I'd rather not clog up my browser with add ons and just throw the address in my RSS reader on the rare occasion I come across a new site I'd like to follow.
  - gnagatomo 5y ago
    I've been use FeedBro for Firefox for the last couple years and it's great. https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
  - breput 5y ago
    Not the gp but Drop Feeds (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/) is great Firefox RSS reader add-on. It sits in the sidebar and automatically updates so you can immediately see when a feed updates, then the feed renders in the main panel. This is very useful for news, status pages, and things like live YouTube events.
barbazoo 5y ago
I think you're correct in that this doesn't seem to serve advertisers and given that this looks like a server side (Google) feature, I won't assume this is going to be around for long.
- jsnell 5y ago
  This appears to be basically another mode of operation for Discover, which definitely has ads. (At least on Android. Not sure if on Chrome yet.)
- fragileone 5y ago
  This feature doesn't preclude Google putting ads on the RSS reader page. All Google has to do is put an algorithm on the feed and they've made it a Twitter or Medium competitor.
zozbot234 5y ago
RSS is kinda old hat these days. ActivityStreams can express everything that RSS is used for, and more - the whole Fediverse ecosystem is entirely built on the ActivityStreams standard. This move from the Chrome developers just feels like too little, too late.
- shrikant 5y ago
  Without even looking it up, I'd hazard that Chrome has at least a couple orders of magnitude more users than the Fediverse. This renders any move the Chrome developers make available and usable to something approaching an actual critical mass of usage, even if it is a less open standard. And I say this as a Firefox user and someone who wants open standards to win out over whatever corporate lock-in Google decide to roll out.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  Rss/atom can be static files, AS can't.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Why can't AS be static files? ActivityPub adds dynamic "push" support, but that's optional and separate to the basic ActivityStreams spec.
    - pmlnr 5y ago
      Would you mind giving an example of a static file AS, please? I wasn't able to find any.

kevincox 5y ago

This is great news. Sure, it is still "algorithmically curated" but at least it pushes sites to have RSS feeds. Then users can use the built-in simple Chrome reader or upgrade to something more powerful. My only major concern is that the format of appearing on the New Tab Page may encourage short "summary" style feeds instead of full-content feeds.

sthnblllII 5y ago

>if a site doesn’t use RSS, Google will fall back to its existing content index to keep users updated. This sounds like an "embrace extend extinguish" strategy. Piggyback on websites that have RSS for basic functionality, but use Google's control over the browser to ultimately push websites into something like update aggregation to "reduce server load" that allows Google to track people even when they think they are using an open alternative. It's similar to Google's recent move on FlOC. Making small easily reversible moves towards an open web that protect Google's core position from regulation and users choosing alternatives. EDIT: If Google deserved the benefit of the doubt they wouldn't still be reading people's email to build creepy profiles on everyone's interests and browsing history. I'm not a fool, I'll consider giving them the benefit of the doubt after they stop that and delete all the data they have collected.

livre 5y ago
You may be right but I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, that may be just to keep the UI consistent and avoid the trouble of people complaining that they see the button on some websites but not on others.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
They already did the extinguish thing when they killed Google Reader to try to prop up the failing Google+ network. RSS never recovered from that inflection point. I'm still mad.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  RSS has recovered fine, if it ever was actually wounded.
pschuegr 5y ago
Google is certainly not without faults, but it does not read your email. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads." Disclaimer: I currently work at Google.

MR4D 5y ago

Nicely offsets their crappy AMP stuff. Also allows them to sidestep all sorts of cookie limitations on personal data. Smart.

barbazoo 5y ago
> Also allows them to sidestep all sorts of cookie limitations on personal data Can you explain what you mean by that?
- MR4D 5y ago
  The simple version (the longer version takes more time than I have to write today).... If 3rd party cookies are blocked, then it's hard for Google to know what people are looking at, and also hard to sell ads at the highest rates. However, if you connect an RSS feed into a user's google account via a browser button, then you now have access to all the things a user likes (by virtue of the fact that the user has clicked the follow me button, thereby signaling, "hey, I'm interested in this!"). I have no idea how this gets implemented for Google, but if there isn't some tie in to their advertising revenue, I'd be surprised.
  - hopesthoughts 5y ago
    That's where I'll never use it, because I never use Chrome with an account.

mattowen_uk 5y ago

Here's a question... does that 'follow' button actually just extract the RSS feed tag from the page, and store it locally for use in your new tab page... OR does it do a round robin to Google so they can track which feeds are being fetched? If it's the latter, then no-thank-you.

barbazoo 5y ago
From the feature it does look like it's a server side feature but it might not me.

mfer 5y ago

RSS is a great piece of technology. It's like plumbing. What we need is good experience built on top of it.

rado 5y ago
NetNewsWire

smusamashah 5y ago

Before there was chrome, browsers use to have native RSS support. To this date chrome does not support RSS natively. They are responsible for killing RSS. Now they are bringing it back with a social media buzz word 'follow'. This is a shitty play.

asdff 5y ago
Firefox has RSS support until like last year iirc. It wasn't chrome that killed that, it was Mozilla shifting engineering priorities.
- smusamashah 5y ago
  I have been an Opera user from v5 till v11 (it became unbearable at that point). It had RSS, Email, IRC etc support. I seem to remember both internet explorer and firefox back then could open RSS feed albeit poorly in comparison. Then came chrome. I resisted switching from Opera until it became useless, but we had Google Reader for feeds even though chrome couldn't read RSS. Reading feeds was not a problem until they killed Reader. Then we were left with chrome with no rss support and no Google Reader. Feedly was to bloaty to keep using. This how i see the progression of chrome killing rss.
  - onli 5y ago
    There are many alternatives to Feedly. Bazqux is probably the best of them. The old reader was back then very similar to Google Reader and still looks similar. FreshRSS is a very nice option to self-host.
    - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
      Also there are few cross-platform standalone RSS softwares; QuiteRSS and RSS-Guard. For Chrome alterivates, Vivaldi have native RSS support. It need to be enabled in the setting to use RSS. Also there are tt-rss for selfhosting.
  - dfabulich 5y ago

IceWreck 5y ago

Ah,so RSS is coming back to prominence ? nice. Meanwhile, we have RSS-Bridge as a bandaid for those sites which dont support RSS.

torstenvl 5y ago
Didn't know RSS-Bridge existed, that's great! Sadly, I already reinvented the wheel for the primary RSS-less site I use (the DoN's ALNAVS listing: https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/References/Messages/ALNAV-2021/ https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/References/Messages/ALNAV-2021...). On my site, myrss.xml is a symbolic link to myrss.py, which reads the ALNAVs site, parses the main table, updates a sqlite database of titles, links, publication dates, and descriptions, and spits out the RSS representation of everything in the database. https://pastebin.com/TeQiWN42 https://pastebin.com/TeQiWN42 Maybe I'll have to play with RSS-Bridge next time I run into something similar!
- onli 5y ago
  That's pretty much the use-case (+filtering and merging of feeds) for which I resurrected pipes, at https://www.pipes.digital/ https://www.pipes.digital/. This specific example might be hard to parse though, but you probably already have the selectors figured out, then it should be easy to port over.

PretzelFisch 5y ago

Is this going to be a true client side RSS that talks to all 5k of websites I follow or a service provided by Google that polls for new content? I would be fasinated to see what telemetry/buisness objective has them moving back in this direction.

smbv 5y ago

I actually run my own RSS feed aggregator (FreshRSS) and I can tell you that it's great. Combine that with an iOS app like NetNewsWire, I have hundreds of sites that are synced between my devices. It's actually how I read HN at this point (via hnrss).

greggman3 5y ago

I wrote up a blog post on an idea of what if google had a site that looked similar to youtube, but was links to webpages instead of videos. Like youtube it would let you "subscribe". Also like youtube if would recommend other articles based on your subscriptions and/or clicked links. My "aha moment", assuming it was an aha moment, was noticing the number of views on certain youtube channels and believing that blog posts generally don't get a similar number of view. At first I thought the obvious reason is people like videos more than blog posts. But then I thought, well, maybe one reasons is because youtube recommends more things to watch as well as lets you subscribe and blog posts don't. https://games.greggman.com/game/google-like-youtube/ https://games.greggman.com/game/google-like-youtube/

zozbot234 5y ago
That's a nice idea. You could call it Google Reader, or something. Or make it a Youtube-like site that only shows Google-hosted "channels" and call it Google Plus!

erikrothoff 5y ago

This is so ironic, because the lack of RSS in Chrome was the reason I built the RSS Feed Reader extension for Chrome back in 2010 when switching from Firefox. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pnjaodmkngahhkoihejjehlcdlnohgmp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pn...

TrianguloY 5y ago

> That said, the algorithmic feed will use your follows to surface content. If this means that feeds will be sorted/hidden based on a black box trained to sell me things, sorry but I won't call that rss. Rss for me is an aggregator, a list where all and every item of multiple lists are placed together and sorted chronologically, optionally with tags to filter if needed. I choose the lists to aggregate, I decide which posts to read and which not, and if I don't like the content of a list, I'm the one to remove it. I have full control, not an algorithm.

Kye 5y ago
Seriously. I've already started adding YouTube channels I want to follow to Inoreader because Google does such a poor job of showing me new videos.
notriddle 5y ago
RSS is a file format. If Chrome uses it, then webmasters will publish it, and I won't have to use their reader.

brundolf 5y ago

1) This makes perfect business sense: Google failed to create its own social feed that would stick, so instead it's piggybacking off of a standard technology (and I'm sure it'll collect plenty of data just like it would from an actual social feed). This is what Google did in the early days with other technologies like the open web and email, and it's generally a good thing for everybody (until they enter the "extend" and "extinguish" phases later on) 2) Question as someone who's new to RSS: is there a standard URL path that a reader can use to automatically find your XML feed? I've already added RSS to my site, but right now there's just a home page link to the XML document, I'm not sure how it would be auto-discovered for such a "follow" button

scrollaway 5y ago
> Question as someone who's new to RSS: is there a standard URL path that a reader can use to automatically find your XML feed? Yes. Add a link like this: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My articles" href="/articles/rss/" /> (Or more likely, application/atom+xml -- rss is not great, atom is generally what you want, and what you'll be publishing)
- brundolf 5y ago
  Nice! I'll add that. Probably I'll just add both versions.
  - clscott 5y ago
    Honestly adding both isn't necessary. Just use Atom because RSS is an ill defined hodgepodge. I work for a service that creates "RSS" feeds as a side effect of what we do and they've all be Atom for 10+ years with no issues. Please let the RSS format die.
    - brundolf 5y ago
      I have no horse in this race (I don't even know what Atom is tbh; I'm inferring that it's some kind of refined subset and/or extension of the RSS spec), and I'd prefer my site to be accessible to as many readers as possible.

Giorgi 5y ago

Why the hell was it abandoned in the first place?

J5892 5y ago
Maybe they figured Google Reader was the future of RSS.

throwaway29303 5y ago

Hopefully this gets adopted en masse! THANK YOU!

evmar 5y ago

Chrome originally integrated RSS feeds in the new tab page, to show you when there were new posts on sites you frequently visited. We cut the feature just before launch, because it wasn't fully baked, and never resurrected it. (I know this because I worked on this code.) With more perspective on the problem, I think the way we implemented it at the time was wrong, with the XML processing done in unsandboxed C++. At the time, Chrome didn't use any HTML for its UI like the new tab page, so only web content was sandboxed, but with today's perspective it's obvious to me you want to process XML content with the same sandboxing indirection you use for other untrusted data formats. So in retrospect I'm glad the feature didn't launch as it was, because it would've been a security disaster. Also my recollection is that the code wasn't great. (I feel allowed to say that because I authored it -- I'm not slagging on my coworkers.)

k1m 5y ago

And surprisingly enough, Google News produces RSS feeds for its top stories, topics and even searches. Anyone's guess how long they'll keep it around. I wrote about it here: https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-news-rss-feeds/ https://www.fivefilters.org/2021/google-news-rss-feeds/

hopesthoughts 5y ago
Yes it does, and alerts, and Youtube channels, oh and Feedburner's still around, even though they're trying to get rid of it.

mastrsushi 5y ago

All I ever wanted was a plaintext website where I can add my rss subscriptions linked to my account via email address and a front page where all my feed titles show. Why does this not exist?

hopesthoughts 5y ago
Miniflux exists.
- mastrsushi 5y ago
  That looks to be a Linux app you have to host.
  - hopesthoughts 5y ago
    yeah it is, although I'm having a service that was launched here on HN manage it for me.

willio58 5y ago

RSS didn’t completely die, it’s used for podcasts still for example.

themodelplumber 5y ago
If you run a blog long enough, even these days, you'll eventually get messages from readers asking you to provide, update, and periodically reconfigure your RSS feed.
zenlot 5y ago
It's used everywhere. Just because Google killed their RSS reader at a time - it didn't die. I use it for pretty much all my news, updates from sites. If a site doesn't provide feed, I won't bother visiting it and checking for updates. And I host it myself with miniflux + postgresql.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Does HN have an RSS feed?
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
    - manjana 5y ago
      Also: https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/
    - johnchristopher 5y ago
      Neat, user name checks out :).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

I'm sick of the hodgepodge of different techniques needed to get notified of blog updates. But I'd prefer this was a separate web service rather than tied to chrome so I can view it on safari on my phone too. But if Google makes it more attractive for websites to support RSS then more tools/readers will become available.

detaro 5y ago
"will"? There are already tons of feed reader options out there.
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  But support by news sites, blogs and websites tends to be a bit hit and miss - in providing RSS feed at all, feeds with broken content, or entries getting republished as new - a Chrome/Google RSS reader would result in more people using RSS and likely make more websites caring about them.

stanislavb 5y ago

For quite some time I've been sharing my beliefs that RSS is having some kind of a renaissance. I've been planning to build a feed/RSS/content reader for quite some time and even started coding in the beginning of this week. Google's "revival" of RSS is reassuring that my beliefs/observations might not be too wrong.

hopesthoughts 5y ago
I agree, I've believed this for a while now, but no one wants to listen to me lol.

ashneo76 5y ago

Right after they disabled rss feeds and people lapped up chrome even when google canned RSS as dead. Forcing Firefox to follow that. And now google comes back with, look at this shiny new RSS. Fuck you Google. Youre a plague and cancer to the internet.

atatatat 5y ago
Would you mind cussing them out after they've normalized PWAs as first class citizens, and RSS is a common technology among even techies again.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Official blog post from Chromium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27217283

ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Bulk of discussion happening over here mostly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210819

imgabe 5y ago

I never left RSS. When Google Reader ended, I migrated to feedly and continue to follow a bunch of blogs there. I hope the current newsletter fad comes around to RSS as well. FWIW, I noticed that Substack has RSS feeds for its newsletters, so that is an option.

pinkano 5y ago
We have also Newsletter feeds, Twitter feeds, Reddit feeds and soon page2RSS for those who want more sources :)
NicoJuicy 5y ago
Never left it either. My crawler with tags support is on https://handlr.sapico.me https://handlr.sapico.me ( yeah, i like the hn format) It could be optimized though, there's currently a lot of data in it and hadn't had a lot of time.
LinAGKar 5y ago
Nextcloud News for me
kjsingh 5y ago
Ya feedly is really nice.. now they have AI to predict which posts are critical to you
hopesthoughts 5y ago
There's also kill-the-newsletter.com.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

happytoexplain 5y ago

Very nearly all of my web browser activity that isn't Googling things for work starts with my RSS feed. It's how I get 100% of my news, including Hacker News. It's how I monitor things I'm shopping for. It's how I consume podcasts, youtube, music blogs, and comics. My friends do the same. When people say RSS became unpopular, are they referring to consumers, producers, or both?

senectus1 5y ago
This is exactly me as well.. I filter through a good 1K articles and posts a day in very little time using this method.
rado 5y ago
Same.
random314 5y ago
How do you monitor things you are shopping for via RSS?
- rcarmo 5y ago
  Look up “camelcamelcamel”, for instance. I used to get RSS feeds from sites like that.
amphitheatre 5y ago
What are your workflows for consuming YT videos and podcasts from RSS? Do you have something that automatically downloads that content or do you just click through to their sites? I’ve been trying to set something up for the former but haven’t yet found anything that I like.
- unixfg 5y ago
  Check out rss-bridge I used to have direct feeds from my YouTube subscriptions, but they either killed or moved that feature. This runs on the same $5 vm as my RSS feed reader and works great. https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

beshrkayali 5y ago

It was never dead. If you like RSS, don't rely on Google. They'll probably kill it again [0] after this experiment runs its course, or wait until more people adopt it by default and then try to break yet another open standard. If you'd like a recommendation, Feedbin is fantastic. 0] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

slver 5y ago
Let’s define dead: it was very mainstream at one point, you had to have rss if you had a content site. And now it’s absolutely irrelevant except to a small niche of users. It’s dead.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  A "small niche" is a big exaggeration. It's nowhere near dead.
  - slver 5y ago
    Flipboard is the most popular RSS app with 80 million users. Everything else has about or below a million of users. 80 millions is a lot, yes? We have 4660 million web users. Twitter has 200 million users. TikTok has 700 million users. Instagram has 1000 million users. WhatsApp has 2000 million users. Facebook has 2701 million of users. Youtube 2740 million users. All of those one-off platforms dwarf the supposedly ubiquitous RSS format, and all those one-off platforms have one-off apps with their own push notifications for content. RSS is today a small niche. It's on a path to becoming like IRC, where a small core of people swear it's the most important thing ever, but actually they didn't get the memo that most everyone has moved on.
- beshrkayali 5y ago
  > it was very mainstream at one point, you had to have rss if you had a content site. And now it’s absolutely irrelevant except to a small niche of users. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. There's more people using internet now in general. Saying "it's absolutely irrelevant except to a small niche of users" is an egregious statement.

ddingus 5y ago

Lol, I like and use RSS. Given recent conversations, I just have to point out that RSS goes right into email. Great match, will work like a treat, just saying.

senectus1 5y ago

The status of RSS never changed for me, the only thing that changed was the move from Reader to Feedly.... on that subject, anyone know of a way to filter out keywords on a feed in feedly? ie I have a RSS feed that has Amazon stuff popping up in it, I loath anything amazon and don't want to see anything with the word Amazon in it.

pinkano 5y ago
Yes, you can learn more about filtering out / mute filters here https://blog.feedly.com/leo-and-mute-filters/ https://blog.feedly.com/leo-and-mute-filters/

ironMonkey 5y ago

I saw Brave bragged brining RSS subscriptions back. Observing a direct link.

solnyshok 5y ago

bring Google Reader back, cowards!

detaro 5y ago
I honestly don't see a need for that anymore. Go use an alternative by people that care long-term instead of wishing for Google to get back in it temporarily.

lolive 5y ago

And then Google discovers that RSS-as-a-service is a much more versatile option. And Yippie Kay Yay, welcome back Google Reader! #soLongGooglePlus

dperalta 5y ago

RSS all the things!

vbezhenar 5y ago

Hopefully it'll be released. I miss RSS, not enough to warrant installation of a separate software, but enough to use it if it's built-in.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Old open Web 2.0 til infinity heads rejoice. Sure it's a pseudo-killer app/tech on the net we lost somewhat (yes I know, never went away really) but it's also been there done that. Firefox had this. Email apps and "Readers" had it. But we moved to following Twitter feeds and social. And the number of sites publishing out there went down anyways. Yes, there's been an uptick in personal sites and blogs again for sure. But despite what we see in the tech bubble are there really that many sites/feeds out there worth following? That aren't being followed elsewhere already? Having Options for ways to keep in touch are good sure but history repeats when we'll see again the feature isn't worth maintaining or provides no return for publishers. Sorry I missed the googleio discussion earlier.