7 ms·

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 y

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.
  - pantulis 5y ago
    Unless you use a "reader mode" capable RSS reader, that is.
    - k1m 5y ago
      Or use something like this to convert partial feeds into full text before subscribing: http://ftr.fivefilters.org http://ftr.fivefilters.org (a project I work on).
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  I don't think performance/load has ever been a real reason to only serve partial content. The actual reason has always been getting users onto the site where you can deliver advertising more flexibly along with analytics. For my extremely minimal site, the RSS feed is still smaller than normal pageloads because it only has graphics by reference. RSS readers scrape surprisingly often, but the file is small and highly cacheable, and most of them do a HEAD request only initially and never ask for the file if it hasn't changed. Despite accounting for a large percentage of requests, RSS clients account for only a small portion of traffic. The cool thing is that a lot of these RSS readers are shared (commercial feed readers, ttrss instances, etc) and so they are caching the feed on their end and actually saving me bandwidth vs an equivalent number of users accessing the site directly - a lot of these put the subscriber account in their UA string so I can see that e.g. Feedly is making regular requests during the day but has 30-some users behind those requests. It's a better deal from a cost-perspective than those 30-some people checking each day.
- acdha 5y ago
  The load issues were a concern with very early implementations around the turn of the century but they're really not now. Feeds are usually extremely cacheable and readers have supported conditional fetches using If-Modified-Since since the early days. These days the average site is serving considerably more data in JavaScript, not to mention the images and video which you're going to see in any case (they're just links in RSS). The real reason why sites started switching to partial content is advertising. This is why personal or corporate blogs usually provide full content and some sites like ArsTechnica.com offer it to paid subscribers.
- onli 5y ago
  In addition to the answers you got refuting load as a problem: "Last updated since" headers are indeed a thing. Look for example at how RSS gets cached in wordpress [0] or the classical blog engine serendipity [1]. Also, push instead of pull is also common. Made popular for feeds by pubsubhubbub, since enterprise-ready renamed to WebSub [2]. Readers like bazqux do support that. [0]: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/270f2011f8ec7265c3f4ddce39c77ef5b496ed1c/wp-includes/rss.php#L471 https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/270f2011f8ec7265... [1]: https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/blob/e2044472c202a8368774282264b9d55286cb636c/rss.php#L69 https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/blob/e2044472c202a8368774... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
- pantulis 5y ago
  RSS was almost killed because it's more difficult to monetize the contents for content publishers/creators, not due to performance problems. Obviously Google has something in mind.
- xena 5y ago
  Owner of christine.website here. I did stop doing it in the atom feed (though i don't remember why) however the RSS and JSONFeeds do have article text in them. If you want to do more advanced queries against the data I could whip something up I guess. It's a really dumb webapp written in Rust and I'm more than happy to put some extra fun into it.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    Well if you’re taking requests I would love that, and would also like a writeup on the implementation in your blog.
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.

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.
- pantulis 5y ago
  Unless you use a "reader mode" capable RSS reader, that is.
  - k1m 5y ago
    Or use something like this to convert partial feeds into full text before subscribing: http://ftr.fivefilters.org http://ftr.fivefilters.org (a project I work on).
jcrawfordor 5y ago
I don't think performance/load has ever been a real reason to only serve partial content. The actual reason has always been getting users onto the site where you can deliver advertising more flexibly along with analytics. For my extremely minimal site, the RSS feed is still smaller than normal pageloads because it only has graphics by reference. RSS readers scrape surprisingly often, but the file is small and highly cacheable, and most of them do a HEAD request only initially and never ask for the file if it hasn't changed. Despite accounting for a large percentage of requests, RSS clients account for only a small portion of traffic. The cool thing is that a lot of these RSS readers are shared (commercial feed readers, ttrss instances, etc) and so they are caching the feed on their end and actually saving me bandwidth vs an equivalent number of users accessing the site directly - a lot of these put the subscriber account in their UA string so I can see that e.g. Feedly is making regular requests during the day but has 30-some users behind those requests. It's a better deal from a cost-perspective than those 30-some people checking each day.
acdha 5y ago
The load issues were a concern with very early implementations around the turn of the century but they're really not now. Feeds are usually extremely cacheable and readers have supported conditional fetches using If-Modified-Since since the early days. These days the average site is serving considerably more data in JavaScript, not to mention the images and video which you're going to see in any case (they're just links in RSS). The real reason why sites started switching to partial content is advertising. This is why personal or corporate blogs usually provide full content and some sites like ArsTechnica.com offer it to paid subscribers.
onli 5y ago
In addition to the answers you got refuting load as a problem: "Last updated since" headers are indeed a thing. Look for example at how RSS gets cached in wordpress [0] or the classical blog engine serendipity [1]. Also, push instead of pull is also common. Made popular for feeds by pubsubhubbub, since enterprise-ready renamed to WebSub [2]. Readers like bazqux do support that. [0]: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/270f2011f8ec7265c3f4ddce39c77ef5b496ed1c/wp-includes/rss.php#L471 https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/270f2011f8ec7265... [1]: https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/blob/e2044472c202a8368774282264b9d55286cb636c/rss.php#L69 https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/blob/e2044472c202a8368774... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
pantulis 5y ago
RSS was almost killed because it's more difficult to monetize the contents for content publishers/creators, not due to performance problems. Obviously Google has something in mind.
xena 5y ago
Owner of christine.website here. I did stop doing it in the atom feed (though i don't remember why) however the RSS and JSONFeeds do have article text in them. If you want to do more advanced queries against the data I could whip something up I guess. It's a really dumb webapp written in Rust and I'm more than happy to put some extra fun into it.
- tomcam 5y ago
  Well if you’re taking requests I would love that, and would also like a writeup on the implementation in your blog.

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.