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Back to the Future with RSS
- mkr-hn 5y agoI'm glad I'm not the only one doing this. RSS can make a comeback, but it's going to take a little education. I use a "you probably already use this" framing by connecting it to podcasts. https://viewfinderfox.com/follow-by-rss/ https://viewfinderfox.com/follow-by-rss/
- clircle 5y agoI agree with the paragraph at the end: > Now you know how to escape the attention-draining, empathy-killing, critical-thought-suffocating siren song of the algorithms. The only way I got my sanity back to cut out everything that's not RSS. I still use HN's algo, but everything else goes to NewsBlur. I'm trying to quit the HN algo, but can't do it yet... mainly because the content is actually interesting.
- hinkley 5y agoWhen I first started using a feed reader, I looked for patterns in articles I liked from posts on sites like HN. after a while I had enough to keep me busy. I don’t think it’s an either or thing so much as a matter of intervals. Come back from time to time to top up with new sources you missed before.
- andrewsardone 5y agoYep, similar experience over here. As an FYI in case you’re not funneling HN through your reader, this is pretty handy: * Hacker News RSS https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ You can subscribe to the front page, the firehouse, comments, search queries, and more. I really like it!
- Yaina 5y agoI love RSS, hope it makes a resurgence. But I don't think the only reason for the death of RSS was the discontinuation of Google Reader. RSS can become very messy super quickly, and I think we need clients that don't look like the ones we know from 15 years ago, but ones that help users to keep their subscriptions neat and clean.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- robobro 5y agoAtom > RSS
- laurent92 5y agoApple Podcasts is an example of client which doesn’t look like a tool from 15 years ago. This is quite what RSS needs: Killer usecases for the Z generation. And podcasts are only halfway fashionable. Instagram, OnlyFans… it seems RSS needs a payment model to be fashionable ;)
- smolyeet 5y agoI know this is subjective, but it's so hard to find a good rss reader with a modern UI and isn't inexpensive/free
- menotyou 5y agoI use http://www.netvibes.com http://www.netvibes.com
- dntbrsnbl 5y agoI wrote https://github.com/fallaciousreasoning/progrssive https://github.com/fallaciousreasoning/progrssive for this reason(and for offline support). It's free, and should be trivial to selfhost (there's also a live version at https://readr.nz https://readr.nz)
- mulderc 5y agoReeder and net news wire are both pretty good imho
- jjav 5y ago> I know this is subjective, but it's so hard to find a good rss reader with a modern UI and isn't inexpensive/free To me RSS and the reader are and should be separate. RSS is the protocol to query and retrieve updated articles. The reader can be anything you like. Personally I use rss2email for retrieval and my UI is my email app.
- vanilla_nut 5y agoI recently added an RSS feed to my personal blog, hosted on github pages, and I was astonished at just how easy it is. I wish all of my friends just had blogs and RSS feeds instead of Facebook or Instagram accounts.
- Jorengarenar 5y agoTo highlight how easy it is to add RSS feed to your Jekyll blog: it's a matter of enabling one plugin
- vanilla_nut 5y agoPrecisely. For anybody else who'd like to do something similar, I followed the guidance of this post: https://dzhavat.github.io/2020/01/19/adding-an-rss-feed-to-github-pages.html https://dzhavat.github.io/2020/01/19/adding-an-rss-feed-to-g... Though it turns out a few of those config parameters were already in my config, so it's even less work than described here. It is worth noting, for the pedantic among us, that this feed is technically Atom, not RSS. But as some other commenters have posted out in this very post, most clients seem to treat those interchangeably these days and honestly I don't really understand the difference myself.
- jamesvandyne 5y agoYou may like micro.blog. It’s a blog/rss based social network. You can create a blog with them or import an existing RSS feed (what I do). It’s all chronological. And since it’s “just rss”, you can use different apps to use it like Instagram or Twitter.
- vanilla_nut 5y agoThis seems like the only kind of social network I'd be on board with at this point, thanks for sharing!
- jarcane 5y ago... you ever see a project and realize it's exactly the one you've had knocking around your brain for ages and just never had time to get to?
- kickscondor 5y agoIf you're interested in furthering RSS (and Atom, JSON Feed) - one way to help this along is to continue extending it to bring it modern. For instance, I've documented an extension for adding temporary 'status' to the feed - useful for pinned posts or broadcasting that a livestream is beginning. https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Extensions https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/wiki/RSS-Atom-Exten... It feels like there is still a lot of room to extend these formats - part of the advantage to them is how easily they can be extended. The media enclosure extension is the reason they've been so useful for podcast subscriptions.
- zozbot234 5y agoIt seems like a weird approach when the ActivityStreams spec is getting a lot more traction and semi-official endorsement.
- mkr-hn 5y agoIs there any implementation that doesn't require a server-side component? One big appeal of RSS is it's plain old XML that can come from anything over HTTP.
- zozbot234 5y agoActivityPub is the part that requires server-side logic. ActivityStreams is a more basic layer that can be entirely static or even serverless, and ActivityPub is built on it.
- kickscondor 5y agoI don’t enjoy ActivityPub related specs - they give me SOAP vibes - and I’ve struggled with interoperability. (Tried to make my blog act kind of like a Mastodon instance and the learning curve was just way too out there. I’m happy with feeds.)
- onli 5y agoWhat would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean: 1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI 2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text 3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one. This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a default feature. And thus support the official mission of Mozilla. Would mozilla block it if a RSS advocate group would provide the development work to get this back into the browser? Is there a technical issue, like that there is no fitting RSS/XML parser that can be used?
- SimeVidas 5y agoI use Feed Preview https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feed-preview/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feed-preview/
- onli 5y agoThe extension really covers the functionality. That with a slightly nicer design and on by default, that is what is needed.
- 12ian34 5y agoAfter a 12 year hiatus I got Thunderbird again and have been enjoying it as both a mail client and RSS reader. Whilst I do miss the Firefox functionality, I'm happy with Thunderbird
- onli 5y agoThis would be more about making RSS visible for browser users than making Firefox a feedreader. There are many great readers. But the one thing where RSS really is worse off now than it was a decade ago is discoverability. That hurts the open web. Making a change in a browser could improve the situation a lot, and the one browser that would fit to that is Firefox. And it would be a huge marketing win for Mozilla in tech circles.
- 5y ago
- Havoc 5y agoThe tech is great, the feeds are just garbage / 2nd tier citizens. Garbage in, garbage out rule still lives. e.g. I've got an economist sub - a reputable source of news. Checked out the feed...picked one...week in review. Title on every post is week in review. Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing.i.e. Would need to click through to find out topic on each one. Might as well not use RSS... Love the concept but have concluded in practice it is a non-starter. The usefulness of it depends entirely on what providers stick in the feed. And all their focus is on pushing their app/twitter/insta etc. Not hard to monetize RSS.
- sys_64738 5y agoI have Economist feeds like this so what are you seeing that's different? It works fine for Economist feeds in my experience. https://www.economist.com/feeds/print-sections/69/leaders.xml https://www.economist.com/feeds/print-sections/69/leaders.xm...
- Havoc 5y agoThis one as an example. ( https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/rss.xml https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/rss.xml ). No descriptions, useless titles. Business this week Politics this week KAL’s cartoon Politics this week Business this week etc Was more about the wider point than bitching about economist: RSS readers are in a uniquely vulnerable position. There is damn near zero incentive to do this right from providers PoV - if anything the opposite. If you're trying to consume news/info better that seems like a bad starting point to me...even with superior tools. I've got a self-hosted freshrss install floating around on my home server...so might give it another try at some point. Not massively optimistic given the dynamics though. Everything is about dark patterns these days, not open ad free convenient hard to monetize stuff like RSS.
- axiolite 5y ago> Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing. Run it through an RSS full article extractor: https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#full-article-extractors https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#full-article-extra... Many feeds are useless without one, but tremendously useful with one. And if you don't like a website's RSS feed, make one yourself, formatted as you see fit: https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#webpagehtml https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS#webpagehtml
- afinlayson 5y agoRSS has a lot of benefits for accessibility that we don't talk about enough. I often wish RSS was still a thing so I can diff pages when they update. The content is what matters not the chrome.
- lupinglade 5y agoRSS still very much is a thing. I got here via RSS.
- 0des 5y agoA relevant piece, while we discuss RSS. Since RSS is closed to revisions, new tech is emerging. [0] Nobody Cares About Feeds Anymore [0] - https://hackmd.io/@kmmfg_W2T3GIIOzc0aKNrQ/Sk6vc3mhO https://hackmd.io/@kmmfg_W2T3GIIOzc0aKNrQ/Sk6vc3mhO
- robobro 5y agoI've been writing a decentralized messageboard[0] with some friends lately; the global index and tags have atom feeds, and each thread has an atom feed. There's also an atom feed of recent comments. I've written some simple tools to fake a desktop client for the messageboard and have some of the atom feeds linked to various IRC/matrix rooms. Pretty handy. I wish that all messageboards had RSS feeds for thread lists (or better yet, each thread also has its own) because having to jump from site to site to site is a pain, I'd rather just get notifications in a simple way. Is JSONfeed actually used by anyone on HN? [0] - https://0chan.vip https://0chan.vip
- manuelmoreale 5y agoNot sure if that’s what you’re asking but my personal site does serve content using JSONfeed. So yes, someone on HN is using it.
- lanamo 5y agoI am sure that RSS is the way to go, to fight clutter and stay on top of the information noise out there. I love Reeder https://www.reederapp.com https://www.reederapp.com - a really good looking and well designed RSS reader. (unfortunately only for the apple eco system).
- lupinglade 5y agoYes, seconding Reeder here as well -- highly recommend it on iOS/macOS.
- manuelmoreale 5y agoI’ll second this. Reeder is great and the latest version does let you use iCloud to sync feeds across different devices.
- tofukid 5y agoRSS is great. But it’s just a delivery mechanism. A great reading experience for me is a chronological news feed, and a list of each source’s latest post. I don’t check my newsfeed daily so a list of each source’s latest post and when they last updated is critical for me to not miss out. I use https://sumi.news https://sumi.news which has both of these views, and can follow RSS, Twitter, and newsletters. Another reader with the per-feed view is https://fraidyc.at https://fraidyc.at, but it’s a browser extension with no newsfeed view.
- hopesthoughts 5y agoMiniflux will also let you do a per-feed view, from the feeds and/or categories pages. I'm pretty sure Feedbin does as well.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- realsimplesynd 5y agoI may be biased, but I really love RSS. Did you know that Aaron Swartz worked on the RSS spec when he was 14 years old?
- Animats 5y agoSo what's a good general news feed? The Associated Press shut theirs down. The New York Times doesn't update much throughout the day. I'd like a good news feed that only has really important stories. No filler, no press release stuff.
- mackrevinack 5y ago> I'd like a good news feed that only has really important stories. No filler, no press release stuff newsblur has a 'trainer' feature where you can train it to hide certain topics or authors and highlight others. it doesn't work with every feed though so you'll have to try it out yourself or maybe there are other readers that do something similar
- beagle3 5y agoIt’s basically a “highlight / stop” list for words in title, stories, author names, etc. nice interface for that, but from my experience not very effective. Iirc Samuel Mentioned they are working on something better that trains statistics/ML on examples. But at present it’s just a “highlight/stop” list.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- UncensoredNews 5y agoShameless Plug: https://UncensoredNews.US https://UncensoredNews.US I import the best progressive news feeds, and recommend the best articles (in blue). The other articles are also available if you re interested. The RSS links, link to the original articles, not to my site.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoGreat article. Necessary now more than ever. Those of us in the FOSS community now need to also move away from GitHub. They are taking our code and putting it into their ML-based copilot product to allow proprietary developers to use FOSS code without having to conform to a FOSS license. This practice makes GitHub is hostile to the FOSS community. Decentralization is key to preserving our software rights. https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410037309848752128 https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410037309848752128
- shapefrog 5y agoRSS is web 3.0
- axegon_ 5y agoAnd each time I see an article like this, I realize how much I miss google reader. So much so that last year I decided that I'd rebuild it myself but it's definitely not something one person can pull off on his own.
- BostonEnginerd 5y agoI’ve been a happy Newsblur customer since the Reader shutdown. Every now and again, I look into setting up TinyTinyRSS and similar hosted software but always go back to Newsblur.
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoThere is on issue, RSS is advert and cookie free. Meaning it creates a clean web, but as such prevents monetization, so I guess it was not suitable technology. But on the other hand there are many blogs that do not care about Google Ads or similar, so it would be interesting to revamp RSS again.
- hutattedonmyarm 5y agoI follow a few monetized feeds. They’re usually one of: - One post per week, showcasing the sponsor - Embedding a static image into every feed entry for their current sponsor - Adding a text-based „this post is sponsored by“ sentence/paragraph to every post For me personally they’re fair tradeoffs
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoThat is interesting, so I guess tracking engagement would be only through RSS feed access statistic?
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoNothing forbade the RSS providers to deliver adverts as RSS. Which some did, as I recall, because it annoyed me.
- msurdi 5y agoShameless plug of my own RSS reader side project: https://github.com/msurdi/feedo https://github.com/msurdi/feedo. It's not great nor complete, but is very simple and does the basic thing, it has no ads and there is no risk somebody will turn it off or push it in commercial ways. I built it about a month ago over the weekend and haven't looked back to other popular services. If you're a developer, making an RSS reader you like seems like a very nice side project to try out new tools, frameworks, etc... more useful than a TODO list and also very simple to build.
- allenleein 5y agoThanks for sharing! One small suggestion: add an UI screenshot in the repos would be nicer
- dntbrsnbl 5y agoCool project! I completely agree, it's my go to playground for tryi g out new ideas. Mine is here: https://github.com/fallaciousreasoning/progrssive https://github.com/fallaciousreasoning/progrssive
- dvt 5y agoThis is very cool, thanks for sharing -- starred!
- chrismorgan 5y agoIt never ceases to frustrate me that these sorts of articles invariably focus on RSS, and say little to nothing about Atom. This article mentions Atom once: > (Note: there's something very similar to RSS called "Atom", but all modern apps work equally with both.) Here’s what I say about it: If you’re doing podcasts, use RSS, because almost nothing supports Atom there, because for all practical purposes Apple took over and froze the ecosystem at a certain point in time that was just before Atom became popular and fixed up the mess that was RSS. If you’re doing any other type of feed, use Atom, because it’s technically substantially superior to RSS and supported just as well. Where Atom and RSS are both supported, you should always prefer Atom, because RSS has the potential to mess things up because it leaves the client to guess whether certain fields are text or HTML. RSS is simply a hopelessly incorrect format, whereas Atom models content types properly. RSS is even harder to write correctly than Atom, due to things like using a weird date format. (Look through older comments of mine for more explanation and reasons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=chrismorgan%20atom&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....) Can we please stop talking about RSS and talk about feeds? A bit like we finally mostly stopped talking about SSL in favour of TLS.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI think arguing RSS versus Atom is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic: It's a stupid waste of discussion points, because they are so interchangeable. Let's focus on the general concept of getting feed readers back in to vogue, then push our preferred format.
- chrismorgan 5y agoIt’s not terribly common in general, but in content about HTML, if you put things like HTML tag names in titles, it will get mangled by some (most?) feed readers if the feed is RSS. I’ve seen such titles that are broken because the publishers didn’t use Atom more than a few times, and written a couple of titles myself that show up fine because I produce Atom rather than RSS. (I also put things like <em> and <code> in my titles for italics and monospacing, though most feed readers will strip that out and reduce HTML titles to plain text. The almost universal convention that titles are plain text with no formatting is silly.) RSS is worse than Atom in real, practical ways. Unless there’s a concrete reason for you to use RSS (which largely means “it’s a podcast”), you should use Atom, because it will protect your content against being mangled when you have things like less than signs and ampersands in it. Returning back to the matter of the naming: I think there are two sound reasons to stop calling it “RSS” and start calling it “feeds”: ① Using one specific, inferior technology to describe it is factually wrong, and perpetuates the wrongness and inferiority, because people hear of RSS and so implement RSS, rather than Atom. ② When someone isn’t familiar with the stuff, “RSS” is just a meaningless name (or could remind you of other organisations that use the acronym, e.g. in India it means commonly-extremist Hindu nationalism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh), but “feeds” invokes a concept that is more likely to be familiar and immediately understood.
- smusamashah 5y agoGoogle Chrome killed RSS. When it came, all other browsers had native RSS support. Everyone switched over to Chrome but to this day Chrome cannot read RSS natively.
- stiltzkin 5y agoHas anyone found a way to build RSS from Facebook pages?, seems FB made it more difficult for instances as RSS Bridge to build RSS and the only solutions i have found are premium services which need monthly payments.
- dustymcp 5y agoWhat is the incentive for websites setting it up? Isnt that the reason why mpst websites removed it givibg away content for free, with no ads? I never used it myself so im pretty clueless but isnt this why people dont use it anymore ?
- nokya 5y agoFor those still looking for a standalone RSS reader that can work offline, or if like me your web consumption was fully filtered by FeedReader for years, I can recommend QuiteRSS.
- hichamino 5y agoI recommand greader .. app on android. You can use multiple accounts to connect. Very useful and for me the best rss application out there
- mro_name 5y agoTalking RSS and meaning "that feed stuff, you know" is extremely harmful because it adds to the confusion and makes the closed monopolists shine for their "simplicity". So please talk about Atom and let RSS rest in peace. Atom is technically superior if only because of the reliable standard.
- hopesthoughts 5y agoWell, I think the opposite is correct. The only solution is to archive everything. therefore I do, I accomplish this with a Miniflux instance with about 360,000 items in it. Then again I kept all my blog content going back until 2009, for 10 years,. That is until 2019, when I decided to start completely over.
- Jorengarenar 5y ago>Some feeds only give you the excerpt of a post, with a link to see the full post at their site. Don't follow those: they break you out of the RSS reading experience, and trick you into losing time on their site. That's... how I prefer to read them.