13 ms·

What we lost – a paean, perhaps, to RSS

74 points by sandbags 5y ago

blakesterz 5y ago
As an old timer myself I remember Matt's work, and even exchanged emails on the topic with him way back in 2003! (I have most of my emails dating back to about '99) I agree and can't help but hope this RSS thing and blogs will make a come back!
- stanislavb 5y ago
  I've been monitoring this area and believe that there's an RSS resurgence going on. Albeit small and slow.
  - hopesthoughts 5y ago
    I believe the same thing, as well. You know what people talk about on Twitter these days? RSS. RSs readers, which ones they recommend etc. I have a daily alert that comes to me about this, and I've also done Twitter searches on this topic.
- sandbags 5y ago
  Hi Blake. Alas, most of my email archive from that period disappeared in the intervening years. I'd love to be reminded of what we were talking about. m@t
thaumasiotes 5y ago
When did we lose RSS? It's going strong right now.
- Gualdrapo 5y ago
  I think that, at least for young people, it is not as popular as it was for us older people. Things like the death of Google Reader and web browsers making it harder or even disabling subscriptions to websites via RSS were a huge deal. Allegedly all of that was because RSS lost momentum. People like me had to resort to use things like Feedly, but frankly it is not the same. I for one dream about the resurgence of RSS and making the web again a little less corporation-in-the-middle.
  - peanut_worm 5y ago
    Death of web browsers?
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    I know many people in my cohort (30+ techies) who still use RSS religiously (myself included). I have never seen someone under about 20 using RSS (and probably 90% of that age group has never heard of it). They all live in chat apps and algorithmic feeds :( I couldn't imagine my RSS reader displaying stories that it thinks I'd like (and not all, in chronological order). There's a reason I curate my feeds—I want to see the content in each of them!
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      I'm a little over 20 and I have used RSS and did not continue. I just don't see why I would want RSS over something like hacker news or visiting my local news website directly. Subscribing to blogs directly creates a huge firehose of mostly boring content while sites like HN sort content vaguely by how interesting it is. As well as the fact that most of the time, the actual content of the article is less interesting than the discussion it starts in the comments. I imagine most people checking reddit or HN are not there to read a long post but instead looking to discuss various opinions in the comments which RSS does not support.
      - e3bc54b2 5y ago
        Blogs and websites that generate lots of content are akin to News. You don't subscribe to them, and have HN to let you know of something important happens. RSS is for the long tail of blogs that don't post very frequently, but when they do, its worth your while. The ideal entry in my RSS feed is one that has new addition once per week or less. This way, I can follow a very wide array of people without getting overwhelmed, nor having to miss if their post don't make it to HN front.
        karatinversion 5y ago
        I guess the reinvented solution for this use case is email newsletters, that substack and the like have popularized recently. Most people have an email client, no matter how grudgingly.
- res0nat0r 5y ago
  We didn’t, it’s just folks still I think wanting to complain about Google Reader getting cancelled due to low usage. NewsBlur and other RSS aggregation sites are still around, have nice UIs and are still doing just fine.
- sandbags 5y ago
  As I've written in some other comments, because of my lack of foresight I wasn't clear enough. I've put this in other comments but, briefly, it's not the protocol RSS that has a problem. It's the RSS-enabled future that we imagined back in the early 00's that didn't happen. Those opportunities for connecting things together via content (esp. around the RSS micro-formats work that was going on) disappeared when content got swallowed by advserisers.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  That was my question too. I fell asleep earlier, and I'm like did I wake up in some twilight zone without RSS???
CobrastanJorji 5y ago
There's been a recent season of mourning the loss of RSS, but I remain confused about the whole thing because I'm still a happy RSS user. Sure, it's not exactly today's ascendant technology, but it still works fine, most of the websites and blogs I read still quietly support it, and there's a happy little ecosystem of RSS aggregator websites and programs. While I'm a bit sad that a lot of folks don't know about RSS (and also curious about how they even use the web), I'm not feeling any pain as a user.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Google's reader was very popular, and when it was killed I think a lot of people didn't switch to an alternative. I never really got into it properly (though I paid for and used feedbin for a while) not least because not everything supports it. Its main attraction to me is as being the one place I can go for everything, and if it isn't that, then.. meh, it's just another thing to check, and I gradually stopped. Not that I don't intend to go back (as much as I intend to do a lot of things..) - it just needs more setup to be useful to me, email subscriptions to RSS for example, or perhaps even the other way around, have an email folder full of subs with rss forwarded there too. Other things that annoyed me were latex not rendering, and the RSS article being just a tiny stub, or title only, linking to the real deal.
  - cameronbrown 5y ago
    > email subscriptions to RSS for example, or perhaps even the other way around There's actually quite a few powerful services to do this. I made a service called http://feedsub.com http://feedsub.com to do this a couple years ago. I'd also recommend http://mailbrew.com http://mailbrew.com which has a nice digest format. I think there's a lot of value in RSS as an underlying data layer for the web, and I think it's criminally underused on the consumption side nowadays. For example, I'd very much like to see blogrings make a comeback, and there's probably room for a website community driven entirely by mailing lists and one of these RSS-to-email tools.
  - wfleming 5y ago
    > email subscriptions to RSS for example Feedbin does this, FWIW. You mentioned you had used Feedbin before, maybe they introduced the feature after you left? It's super useful, and justifies the cost of the subscription all by itself for me. All my newsletter subscriptions go into my Feedbin feed, and my email inbox stays nice and clean (and my real email address stays nice and private).
lupinglade 5y ago
How does one monitor stories from different sources without RSS anyway? That's how I got here.
- OJFord 5y ago
  I use the site news.ycombinator.com. That's how I got here.
  - handrous 5y ago
    You mean the site "new [ENTER]"?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Most of my browsers happily complete it after just "n" :)
      - johnchristopher 5y ago
        If I type too fast or if something is slowing down my computer-from-hell then it launches a Google search. So I almost always type 'new' to have some leeway.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  First, get on Facebook. Next, "like and subscribe" the Facebook pages for all the sources of interest. Finally, refresh and scroll, scroll, scroll hoping that Facebook shows you the stuff you're subscribed to somewhere in amongst the ads, the "suggested based on pages you like", and other stuff. Oh, and hope that the sources that you like have money to cough up to "boost" their posts. Or, in the immortal words of Goodfellas, "Fuck you, pay me".
6510 5y ago
One or more <category> tags can be used in the <channel> and in each <item> to describe their content. They can either be single tags or they can be paths like /publishing or /publishing/rss Each one can have a domain attribute that points at an url that describes the categorization taxonomy. We no longer have such things for RSS I think? I only know of syndic8 but I've never seen it in action. There is also the <rating> element which is even more exotic. It supplies an advisory label for the content in a feed, formatted according to the specification for the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS). You can even run your own rating platform. The categories are for grouping things. A typical blog would have few of them and many entries in each. The tags are more chaotic. Its fine to have a single article with a tag. The domain attribute is for a web directory (I think?) And with the rating system you can give your own units to a property like how advanced, complex or RSS-ish an article is. (arrogance in nano-Dijkstra) All of that combined make for the best science fiction story.
- rektide 5y ago
  I didn't fully read this long post but thank you for replying to what a large large large part of this post is, which is a discussion of tagging.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  If I were to give you my OPML you'd see several examples of topic-based feeds. Whether that's a category or a tag.
  - 6510 5y ago
    If the goal is to connect people looking for [specific] content with websites [providing it for free] We have failed horribly with a mechanism where readers have to ask and give their OPML before the potential reader can find out their categories. With so many new websites being created and so many old ones deleted a static file is not a good solution. If we assume you manage to share your OPML with just the right audience it is almost impossible for a new blog to find its way into this promotional formula. You might find it eventually but it wont show up in the OPML for everyone you've shared it with. My personal client can do OPML but also loads flat feed lists from an url then keeps additional flat lists of feeds that seem broken or gone, lists of feeds that I assume are gone and lists of feeds I'm no longer interested in. Removing the dead feeds and adding new ones still [shamefully] involves periodic manual labor. Its great that one can manually categorize feeds in OPML and that one can provide categories, tags and even a rating service in the feed it self but if the data is never shared anyplace else their is [almost] no point in doing so. As a result most feeds have none. We have: Tags, categories, your own rating system, a shared or public rating service, OPML meta data and the one I forgot: The person (or entity) sharing the feed(s) with you is also meta data. I have no idea how we can wrap all of those into one discovery medium but the idea sounds awesome to me.
noman-land 5y ago
There are a number of fun ways to consume RSS. NextCloud has an RSS reader app. Thunderbird has a whole RSS subscriptions area. AntennaPod for podcasts. Those are just a few.
anigbrowl 5y ago
I don't think it's RSS (which as many people pointed out, still exists; it's just not fashionable any more). The real problem is that the web is like a flashy magazine with very little content surrounded by glaring eye candy. RSS (like many other things before it) was about data sources being fed into a client of your choice and configuration. The web has its good and bad points, but the web is different from the net, and much of what drives the web is bad for the net.
herodoturtle 5y ago
Lots of interesting comments on here discussing the benefits of RSS, I'm keen to try it out. Can anyone recommend a really simple RSS setup for Linux? I work in vim if that means anything in this context whatsoever (I honestly have no idea).
- hanklazard 5y ago
  Self host FreshRSS on a cheap cloud and access it through any browser. Works really well.
- eythian 5y ago
  Years ago I used Liferea for on the desktop, it seems to still be maintained. These days I self-host tt-rss and use either the web interface or the app for it (so it syncs across devices.)
- mxuribe 5y ago
  I have a nextcloud instance (up in the clouds somewhere) on a rented vps...and subscribe to rss/feeds there (via nextcloud's web-based rss reader)...then set up newsboat command line client on my local linux laptop to connect to that nextcloud instance, and read my feed from the command line of my laptop. I only mention this because you referenced "vim", so i made an assumption that perhaps you'd like to read rss stuff from the CLI...also, if i'm away from my laptop/command line - say away from home - i can just read the rss/feed stuff via nextcloud's web feed reader (which is the same interface i referenced above that is used to subscribe to the feeds in the first place). For me, it has been a nice setup...I hope that helps. Not sure if that is what you were looking for re: linux?
  - herodoturtle 5y ago
    This sounds awesome! And perfectly suited to my needs as I am a CLI kinda guy, and on the road often. Thanks friend.
    - mxuribe 5y ago
      Here's some info on newsboat: https://newsboat.org/releases/2.24/docs/newsboat.html#_newsboat_as_a_client_for_newsreading_services https://newsboat.org/releases/2.24/docs/newsboat.html#_newsb... You could skim some of that, as the nextcloud/owncloud stuff is in section 4.7. Good luck!
incanus77 5y ago
RSS is alive (again) and well again for me, too. NetNewsWire was the first Mac app I bought in 2002, and today I'm using the latest incarnation of it. The biggest difference to me about modern RSS is the unrealized potential and lack of imagination. There were some efforts at making it a bit more successful around 2005 with the likes of Feedburner and ads, but eventually it was realized that walled gardens were easier than open standards. If we had put one tenth as much effort and imagination into making RSS a way that you could get timely information from the web, in such a way that it was as common and no-brainer to people as email is, as we did for web ads, user tracking, and email spy pixels, I think the web would be a lot healthier today.
animesh 5y ago
The death of RSS/ATOM posts just confuses and amuses me. I am content with following all my favorite feeds (around 50) using QuiteRSS on the desktop. Have been doing this since the sunset of Google Reader. It works and there is a reason why popular bloggers and thought leaders publish a feed link on their blogs. Sometimes I feel people who see RSS/ATOM as a dead thing stopped seeing the existence of RSS feeds in their circles and then proceed to proclaim it dead.
- piokoch 5y ago
  QuiteRSS is such a great example of the software from the past. Not an Electron app, it runs blazing fast, does the right thing in an expected way and does not try to be anything more (like some AI that is "curating" feeds or tries to suggest other feeds).
  - mkotowski 5y ago
    Ironically, I think that in this case, an RSS reader being an electron app wouldn’t be so unreasonable. Especially if the content is on the more interactive side. Although, a bigger focus on security would be required toward the scripted content.
- sandbags 5y ago
  Not knowing how people might respond to this post I didn't think to be clearer. The RSS protocol works as well as it ever did. I'm not mourning the protocol. And yes there are sites that do publish feeds, some even full-feeds but many just excerpts. What I am mourning is the future where people published for themselves and shared content via RSS. But companies that depend upon advertising are inimical to that future and they won (at least for now). It's that future that I mourn for.
  - rambambram 5y ago
    I upped both of you. I didn't even really know about RSS up until recently (as in, I know what it is, looks like, etc. but never really used it). I find it sooo delightful that now I go looking for feeds, that (still?) basically every weblog has them. What a treasure! Definitely going to do something with it.
gego 5y ago
Just fire up your tinytinyrss server and os/mobile clients and you are good. RSS is still going strong... https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ You can also create feeds from sources that do not provide them, e.g. http://fetchrss.com/ http://fetchrss.com/
sandbags 5y ago
I'll address this here: it's something that I took as a given so didn't cover when I wrote the post. RSS is not dead, as a protocol it still works, some sites still publish RSS feeds and some of them are even more than useless excerpts designed to get a click. What is dead, or at least like Arthur, waiting for the right moment to come back is the idea of RSS as a system for connecting content streams together and building higher order services on top. When too much thought & conversation is captured inside Facebook, Twitter, Slack and all these other services who depend upon owning you & your content, the RSS system cannot thrive. I saw amazing possibilities arising out of individuals publishing their content, increasing use of micro-formats to add semantic information, and layering of services. That future didn't happen. That's what I am sad about.
- mkotowski 5y ago
  To be honest, I am still missing the point of the article. Let's compare emails and RSS: both are protocols, and both depend on the additional tools to make them more use-friendly (at least, I doubt if anybody reads raw RSS feeds). The similarity also doesn’t end here: both are regularly announced as dead and antiquated, but both somehow still stand strong. > What is dead, or at least like Arthur, waiting for the right moment to come back is the idea of RSS as a system for connecting content streams together and building higher order services on top. The closest to it is the situation with the podcast ecosystem, which if I recall correctly depends heavily on RSS feeds to propagate podcasts’ playlists. > When too much thought & conversation is captured inside Facebook, Twitter, Slack and all these other services who depend upon owning you & your content, the RSS system cannot thrive. I agree that information capture by various social media is quite troubling. I am currently worried the most about all development-related discussion in many minor projects and communities (not only programming-related) switching over to Discord, of all things. Despite this, I disagree with the assessment that it is a major bottleneck for the RSS ecosystem. I have never used Google Reader, so I don’t have any kind of before and after perspective, but in my humble opinion RSS is a standard that is in quite a good condition overall. Despite social medias’ walled garden approach and greater focus on instant messaging than blogging, I rarely stumble upon a website with content of episodic nature without any kind of RSS feed. The only significant exceptions are YouTube and Twitter. > I saw amazing possibilities arising out of individuals publishing their content, […], and layering of services. That future didn't happen. The thing you describe reminds me more of something akin to Mastodon and ActivityPub (albeit I never used any platform depending on it). From what I remember about ActivityPub was that it was designed from ground-up as both a protocol and an extendable system to plug into as a clear alternative to walled-garden design. From what I gather, RSS was never meant to be that. How such a system based on RSS only would even look like? > […] increasing use of micro-formats to add semantic information, […] Isn’t it basically what JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa do? With a bonus of not being tied to any walled garden (that I am aware of). Though I suppose having a way to use them in a more automatic way would be nice.
kryptiskt 5y ago
I wonder if what RSS needs is a bit of a rebranding. Or rather, the delivery of text content over RSS could use what podcasts did for the delivery of audio over RSS. Blogcast, podblogging, or something.
lkrubner 5y ago
Way back in 2006 I wrote a very detailed story about the battles that were raging around RSS. It's only history now, but I think it is both entertaining and educational. For anyone who might be interested: RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
salutonmundo 5y ago
i've decided that every time someone posts an article bemoaning the death of RSS i'm going to comment that i, in fact, found out about it through the HN RSS feed
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  Yeah you should keep doing this. Every! single! time!!!
hopesthoughts 5y ago
Wow I'm definitely not a fan of these kind of posts!! In fact, I can't stand them.

74 points by sandbags 5y ago

As an old timer myself I remember Matt's work, and even exchanged emails on the topic with him way back in 2003! (I have most of my emails dating back to about '99) I agree and can't help but hope this RSS thing and blogs will make a come back!

stanislavb 5y ago
I've been monitoring this area and believe that there's an RSS resurgence going on. Albeit small and slow.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  I believe the same thing, as well. You know what people talk about on Twitter these days? RSS. RSs readers, which ones they recommend etc. I have a daily alert that comes to me about this, and I've also done Twitter searches on this topic.
sandbags 5y ago
Hi Blake. Alas, most of my email archive from that period disappeared in the intervening years. I'd love to be reminded of what we were talking about. m@t

thaumasiotes 5y ago

When did we lose RSS? It's going strong right now.

Gualdrapo 5y ago
I think that, at least for young people, it is not as popular as it was for us older people. Things like the death of Google Reader and web browsers making it harder or even disabling subscriptions to websites via RSS were a huge deal. Allegedly all of that was because RSS lost momentum. People like me had to resort to use things like Feedly, but frankly it is not the same. I for one dream about the resurgence of RSS and making the web again a little less corporation-in-the-middle.
- peanut_worm 5y ago
  Death of web browsers?
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  I know many people in my cohort (30+ techies) who still use RSS religiously (myself included). I have never seen someone under about 20 using RSS (and probably 90% of that age group has never heard of it). They all live in chat apps and algorithmic feeds :( I couldn't imagine my RSS reader displaying stories that it thinks I'd like (and not all, in chronological order). There's a reason I curate my feeds—I want to see the content in each of them!
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    I'm a little over 20 and I have used RSS and did not continue. I just don't see why I would want RSS over something like hacker news or visiting my local news website directly. Subscribing to blogs directly creates a huge firehose of mostly boring content while sites like HN sort content vaguely by how interesting it is. As well as the fact that most of the time, the actual content of the article is less interesting than the discussion it starts in the comments. I imagine most people checking reddit or HN are not there to read a long post but instead looking to discuss various opinions in the comments which RSS does not support.
    - e3bc54b2 5y ago
      Blogs and websites that generate lots of content are akin to News. You don't subscribe to them, and have HN to let you know of something important happens. RSS is for the long tail of blogs that don't post very frequently, but when they do, its worth your while. The ideal entry in my RSS feed is one that has new addition once per week or less. This way, I can follow a very wide array of people without getting overwhelmed, nor having to miss if their post don't make it to HN front.
      - karatinversion 5y ago
        I guess the reinvented solution for this use case is email newsletters, that substack and the like have popularized recently. Most people have an email client, no matter how grudgingly.
res0nat0r 5y ago
We didn’t, it’s just folks still I think wanting to complain about Google Reader getting cancelled due to low usage. NewsBlur and other RSS aggregation sites are still around, have nice UIs and are still doing just fine.
sandbags 5y ago
As I've written in some other comments, because of my lack of foresight I wasn't clear enough. I've put this in other comments but, briefly, it's not the protocol RSS that has a problem. It's the RSS-enabled future that we imagined back in the early 00's that didn't happen. Those opportunities for connecting things together via content (esp. around the RSS micro-formats work that was going on) disappeared when content got swallowed by advserisers.
hopesthoughts 5y ago
That was my question too. I fell asleep earlier, and I'm like did I wake up in some twilight zone without RSS???

CobrastanJorji 5y ago

There's been a recent season of mourning the loss of RSS, but I remain confused about the whole thing because I'm still a happy RSS user. Sure, it's not exactly today's ascendant technology, but it still works fine, most of the websites and blogs I read still quietly support it, and there's a happy little ecosystem of RSS aggregator websites and programs. While I'm a bit sad that a lot of folks don't know about RSS (and also curious about how they even use the web), I'm not feeling any pain as a user.

OJFord 5y ago
Google's reader was very popular, and when it was killed I think a lot of people didn't switch to an alternative. I never really got into it properly (though I paid for and used feedbin for a while) not least because not everything supports it. Its main attraction to me is as being the one place I can go for everything, and if it isn't that, then.. meh, it's just another thing to check, and I gradually stopped. Not that I don't intend to go back (as much as I intend to do a lot of things..) - it just needs more setup to be useful to me, email subscriptions to RSS for example, or perhaps even the other way around, have an email folder full of subs with rss forwarded there too. Other things that annoyed me were latex not rendering, and the RSS article being just a tiny stub, or title only, linking to the real deal.
- cameronbrown 5y ago
  > email subscriptions to RSS for example, or perhaps even the other way around There's actually quite a few powerful services to do this. I made a service called http://feedsub.com http://feedsub.com to do this a couple years ago. I'd also recommend http://mailbrew.com http://mailbrew.com which has a nice digest format. I think there's a lot of value in RSS as an underlying data layer for the web, and I think it's criminally underused on the consumption side nowadays. For example, I'd very much like to see blogrings make a comeback, and there's probably room for a website community driven entirely by mailing lists and one of these RSS-to-email tools.
- wfleming 5y ago
  > email subscriptions to RSS for example Feedbin does this, FWIW. You mentioned you had used Feedbin before, maybe they introduced the feature after you left? It's super useful, and justifies the cost of the subscription all by itself for me. All my newsletter subscriptions go into my Feedbin feed, and my email inbox stays nice and clean (and my real email address stays nice and private).

lupinglade 5y ago

How does one monitor stories from different sources without RSS anyway? That's how I got here.

OJFord 5y ago
I use the site news.ycombinator.com. That's how I got here.
- handrous 5y ago
  You mean the site "new [ENTER]"?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Most of my browsers happily complete it after just "n" :)
    - johnchristopher 5y ago
      If I type too fast or if something is slowing down my computer-from-hell then it launches a Google search. So I almost always type 'new' to have some leeway.
cratermoon 5y ago
First, get on Facebook. Next, "like and subscribe" the Facebook pages for all the sources of interest. Finally, refresh and scroll, scroll, scroll hoping that Facebook shows you the stuff you're subscribed to somewhere in amongst the ads, the "suggested based on pages you like", and other stuff. Oh, and hope that the sources that you like have money to cough up to "boost" their posts. Or, in the immortal words of Goodfellas, "Fuck you, pay me".

6510 5y ago

One or more <category> tags can be used in the <channel> and in each <item> to describe their content. They can either be single tags or they can be paths like /publishing or /publishing/rss Each one can have a domain attribute that points at an url that describes the categorization taxonomy. We no longer have such things for RSS I think? I only know of syndic8 but I've never seen it in action. There is also the <rating> element which is even more exotic. It supplies an advisory label for the content in a feed, formatted according to the specification for the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS). You can even run your own rating platform. The categories are for grouping things. A typical blog would have few of them and many entries in each. The tags are more chaotic. Its fine to have a single article with a tag. The domain attribute is for a web directory (I think?) And with the rating system you can give your own units to a property like how advanced, complex or RSS-ish an article is. (arrogance in nano-Dijkstra) All of that combined make for the best science fiction story.

rektide 5y ago
I didn't fully read this long post but thank you for replying to what a large large large part of this post is, which is a discussion of tagging.
hopesthoughts 5y ago
If I were to give you my OPML you'd see several examples of topic-based feeds. Whether that's a category or a tag.
- 6510 5y ago
  If the goal is to connect people looking for [specific] content with websites [providing it for free] We have failed horribly with a mechanism where readers have to ask and give their OPML before the potential reader can find out their categories. With so many new websites being created and so many old ones deleted a static file is not a good solution. If we assume you manage to share your OPML with just the right audience it is almost impossible for a new blog to find its way into this promotional formula. You might find it eventually but it wont show up in the OPML for everyone you've shared it with. My personal client can do OPML but also loads flat feed lists from an url then keeps additional flat lists of feeds that seem broken or gone, lists of feeds that I assume are gone and lists of feeds I'm no longer interested in. Removing the dead feeds and adding new ones still [shamefully] involves periodic manual labor. Its great that one can manually categorize feeds in OPML and that one can provide categories, tags and even a rating service in the feed it self but if the data is never shared anyplace else their is [almost] no point in doing so. As a result most feeds have none. We have: Tags, categories, your own rating system, a shared or public rating service, OPML meta data and the one I forgot: The person (or entity) sharing the feed(s) with you is also meta data. I have no idea how we can wrap all of those into one discovery medium but the idea sounds awesome to me.

noman-land 5y ago

There are a number of fun ways to consume RSS. NextCloud has an RSS reader app. Thunderbird has a whole RSS subscriptions area. AntennaPod for podcasts. Those are just a few.

anigbrowl 5y ago

I don't think it's RSS (which as many people pointed out, still exists; it's just not fashionable any more). The real problem is that the web is like a flashy magazine with very little content surrounded by glaring eye candy. RSS (like many other things before it) was about data sources being fed into a client of your choice and configuration. The web has its good and bad points, but the web is different from the net, and much of what drives the web is bad for the net.

herodoturtle 5y ago

Lots of interesting comments on here discussing the benefits of RSS, I'm keen to try it out. Can anyone recommend a really simple RSS setup for Linux? I work in vim if that means anything in this context whatsoever (I honestly have no idea).

hanklazard 5y ago
Self host FreshRSS on a cheap cloud and access it through any browser. Works really well.
eythian 5y ago
Years ago I used Liferea for on the desktop, it seems to still be maintained. These days I self-host tt-rss and use either the web interface or the app for it (so it syncs across devices.)
mxuribe 5y ago
I have a nextcloud instance (up in the clouds somewhere) on a rented vps...and subscribe to rss/feeds there (via nextcloud's web-based rss reader)...then set up newsboat command line client on my local linux laptop to connect to that nextcloud instance, and read my feed from the command line of my laptop. I only mention this because you referenced "vim", so i made an assumption that perhaps you'd like to read rss stuff from the CLI...also, if i'm away from my laptop/command line - say away from home - i can just read the rss/feed stuff via nextcloud's web feed reader (which is the same interface i referenced above that is used to subscribe to the feeds in the first place). For me, it has been a nice setup...I hope that helps. Not sure if that is what you were looking for re: linux?
- herodoturtle 5y ago
  This sounds awesome! And perfectly suited to my needs as I am a CLI kinda guy, and on the road often. Thanks friend.
  - mxuribe 5y ago
    Here's some info on newsboat: https://newsboat.org/releases/2.24/docs/newsboat.html#_newsboat_as_a_client_for_newsreading_services https://newsboat.org/releases/2.24/docs/newsboat.html#_newsb... You could skim some of that, as the nextcloud/owncloud stuff is in section 4.7. Good luck!

incanus77 5y ago

RSS is alive (again) and well again for me, too. NetNewsWire was the first Mac app I bought in 2002, and today I'm using the latest incarnation of it. The biggest difference to me about modern RSS is the unrealized potential and lack of imagination. There were some efforts at making it a bit more successful around 2005 with the likes of Feedburner and ads, but eventually it was realized that walled gardens were easier than open standards. If we had put one tenth as much effort and imagination into making RSS a way that you could get timely information from the web, in such a way that it was as common and no-brainer to people as email is, as we did for web ads, user tracking, and email spy pixels, I think the web would be a lot healthier today.

animesh 5y ago

The death of RSS/ATOM posts just confuses and amuses me. I am content with following all my favorite feeds (around 50) using QuiteRSS on the desktop. Have been doing this since the sunset of Google Reader. It works and there is a reason why popular bloggers and thought leaders publish a feed link on their blogs. Sometimes I feel people who see RSS/ATOM as a dead thing stopped seeing the existence of RSS feeds in their circles and then proceed to proclaim it dead.

piokoch 5y ago
QuiteRSS is such a great example of the software from the past. Not an Electron app, it runs blazing fast, does the right thing in an expected way and does not try to be anything more (like some AI that is "curating" feeds or tries to suggest other feeds).
- mkotowski 5y ago
  Ironically, I think that in this case, an RSS reader being an electron app wouldn’t be so unreasonable. Especially if the content is on the more interactive side. Although, a bigger focus on security would be required toward the scripted content.
sandbags 5y ago
Not knowing how people might respond to this post I didn't think to be clearer. The RSS protocol works as well as it ever did. I'm not mourning the protocol. And yes there are sites that do publish feeds, some even full-feeds but many just excerpts. What I am mourning is the future where people published for themselves and shared content via RSS. But companies that depend upon advertising are inimical to that future and they won (at least for now). It's that future that I mourn for.
- rambambram 5y ago
  I upped both of you. I didn't even really know about RSS up until recently (as in, I know what it is, looks like, etc. but never really used it). I find it sooo delightful that now I go looking for feeds, that (still?) basically every weblog has them. What a treasure! Definitely going to do something with it.

gego 5y ago

Just fire up your tinytinyrss server and os/mobile clients and you are good. RSS is still going strong... https://tt-rss.org/ https://tt-rss.org/ You can also create feeds from sources that do not provide them, e.g. http://fetchrss.com/ http://fetchrss.com/

sandbags 5y ago

I'll address this here: it's something that I took as a given so didn't cover when I wrote the post. RSS is not dead, as a protocol it still works, some sites still publish RSS feeds and some of them are even more than useless excerpts designed to get a click. What is dead, or at least like Arthur, waiting for the right moment to come back is the idea of RSS as a system for connecting content streams together and building higher order services on top. When too much thought & conversation is captured inside Facebook, Twitter, Slack and all these other services who depend upon owning you & your content, the RSS system cannot thrive. I saw amazing possibilities arising out of individuals publishing their content, increasing use of micro-formats to add semantic information, and layering of services. That future didn't happen. That's what I am sad about.

mkotowski 5y ago
To be honest, I am still missing the point of the article. Let's compare emails and RSS: both are protocols, and both depend on the additional tools to make them more use-friendly (at least, I doubt if anybody reads raw RSS feeds). The similarity also doesn’t end here: both are regularly announced as dead and antiquated, but both somehow still stand strong. > What is dead, or at least like Arthur, waiting for the right moment to come back is the idea of RSS as a system for connecting content streams together and building higher order services on top. The closest to it is the situation with the podcast ecosystem, which if I recall correctly depends heavily on RSS feeds to propagate podcasts’ playlists. > When too much thought & conversation is captured inside Facebook, Twitter, Slack and all these other services who depend upon owning you & your content, the RSS system cannot thrive. I agree that information capture by various social media is quite troubling. I am currently worried the most about all development-related discussion in many minor projects and communities (not only programming-related) switching over to Discord, of all things. Despite this, I disagree with the assessment that it is a major bottleneck for the RSS ecosystem. I have never used Google Reader, so I don’t have any kind of before and after perspective, but in my humble opinion RSS is a standard that is in quite a good condition overall. Despite social medias’ walled garden approach and greater focus on instant messaging than blogging, I rarely stumble upon a website with content of episodic nature without any kind of RSS feed. The only significant exceptions are YouTube and Twitter. > I saw amazing possibilities arising out of individuals publishing their content, […], and layering of services. That future didn't happen. The thing you describe reminds me more of something akin to Mastodon and ActivityPub (albeit I never used any platform depending on it). From what I remember about ActivityPub was that it was designed from ground-up as both a protocol and an extendable system to plug into as a clear alternative to walled-garden design. From what I gather, RSS was never meant to be that. How such a system based on RSS only would even look like? > […] increasing use of micro-formats to add semantic information, […] Isn’t it basically what JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa do? With a bonus of not being tied to any walled garden (that I am aware of). Though I suppose having a way to use them in a more automatic way would be nice.

kryptiskt 5y ago

I wonder if what RSS needs is a bit of a rebranding. Or rather, the delivery of text content over RSS could use what podcasts did for the delivery of audio over RSS. Blogcast, podblogging, or something.

lkrubner 5y ago

Way back in 2006 I wrote a very detailed story about the battles that were raging around RSS. It's only history now, but I think it is both entertaining and educational. For anyone who might be interested: RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...

salutonmundo 5y ago

i've decided that every time someone posts an article bemoaning the death of RSS i'm going to comment that i, in fact, found out about it through the HN RSS feed

hopesthoughts 5y ago
Yeah you should keep doing this. Every! single! time!!!

hopesthoughts 5y ago

Wow I'm definitely not a fan of these kind of posts!! In fact, I can't stand them.