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Using RSS to replace social media
- yur3i__ 5y agoThe issue with these solutions is that they're only really one way, if I actually want to interact with anything posted to the RSS feed I have to navigate to the main website anyway, which renders the initial reading of them in a freer way pretty pointless.
- illegalmemory 5y agoI agree, but that is beautiful right? The choice is in user’s hand if they want to interact with content or not. If they don’t want to read the content from that publisher in future they can simply do that, rather than getting three drip mails in 2 week intervals on why I haven’t read emails sent to me by them.
- piggybox 5y agoSince you mention choice, then this is just an option rather than a replacement. If it's a replacement then it takes away the option to interact with content (such as commenting).
- 0xabe 5y agoIf you want to interact, the way you do that is to own your own blog where you post your “reply” and use a trackback[0] url. Then the conversation is even freer and you’re in control of your content. Don’t forget to create your own RSS feed for others. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback
- karatinversion 5y agoThis is another way of achieving the same end, yes. Like any such solution, it requires both author and commenter to use software supporting it, which Twitter does not.
- hopesthoughts 5y agoI use the RSS feed as a link stream anyway. I just open the links and I'm at the main site. If I want to post a comment, and nothing else stops me like CAPTCHA I'll do it.
- Kaze404 5y agoIt's fascinating to me that even in a post for something as simple and mundane as RSS feeds somehow Luke Smith still manages to sprinkle in some of his disgusting alt-right vocabulary. I have to respect the grift.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoCan you please explain what you mean by 'disgusting alt-right vocabulary'? After your comment I read his post twice and didn't find anything remotely political.
- Kaze404 5y ago> Nitter.net is a Twitter proxy that mirrors Twitter, but without Javascript soyware and spying. With "soy" here being an old dogwhistle that refers to the "theory" that men are being feminized through the estrogen contained in meals that have soy as ingredient.
- smitty1e 5y agoYou are offering significant interpretation here. Note the adjaceny if 'o' and 'p' on the QWERTY. 'Soyware' is possibly a simple 'spyware' typo. I know neither you nor The Famous Article's author, but your remark does not instill confidence in your judgement.
- hnaccy 5y agoI use social media because it's social. A one way rss feed of content is the complete opposite.
- the_third_wave 5y agoYou could import the RSS feed into a tool which allows you to comment to specific entries with your comments being served through RSS to interested others... ...upon which you'd have re-invented something resembling Mastodon, GNU Social or XMPP, give or take few bits.
- Ambolia 5y agoThe bad thing about Mastodon is that you don't own your handle and your data unless you run your own instance. Maybe it could have a crytographic addon where you own handle and data cryptographically and can move it to a new server as long as you keep a backup locally and the private key.
- the_third_wave 5y agoMaybe you could but there is something to be said for running your own instance of whatever platform you use to spread your thoughts. It is close to the last word in avoiding censorship as long as the network operators remain (or become in the case of AWS and probably some others) neutral. As to whether this is scalable... remains to be seen but for "normal" people with a few thousand "followers" at best it should work fine even on a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi. That same SBC could host your mail - using a smart host (which could be run as a service) to push mail to the world so as to avoid an avalanche of spam. While it is doing its thing anyway you may as well add whatever web-related thing you might want to put out for the world to see, or maybe not for the world but at least for family and friends. It can host media services, a VPN service, etc. In short, it can be a stepping stone towards a decentralised net - which I deem to be a good thing.
- est 5y agoTwitter with an RSS feed is a waste of crawling traffic. Suppose you follow 1k accounts, you have to subscribe 1k RSS. What a waste. Twitter's core functionality was based on how to aggregate all 1k updates into one feed.
- jamietanna 5y agoThere's a tool built by friends in the IndieWeb community called https://granary.io https://granary.io that allows you to produce a single RSS feed for lots of handy things - like your full feed, specific lists, or specific people!
- hopesthoughts 5y agoThis is something epic! It would be nice if I could filter out images though, like I just want the links from my timeline.
- hopesthoughts 5y agoI mainly subscribe to sites that don't have RSS via Twitter. Or sites that the generator couldn't create a feed from.
- streamofdigits 5y agoReplacing existing approaches to social media needs a two way protocol like activitypub https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ RSS plays well but is not sufficient
- riffic 5y agoto add on top of this, we *really* need players like media, institutions, and government to start adopting ActivityPub and to have those groups start spinning up sites which pump out communication onto this system. This could look like a WordPress blog with the ActivityPub plugin installed. It could also look like the incumbent social media services white-labeling their websites so orgs can be social from their own domains. Groups I'm talking about are your newspapers, cable news channels, fire departments, colleges, heads of state, et cetera.
- Ambolia 5y agoThe difficult part is replacing the comment section and the network dynamics that make those sites grow. I think all alternatives to youtube fail because of the dead comment sections. Not sure if there would be some way of creating distributed comment sections without them turning into pure spam and . Maybe chains of trust where you only see messages by users that have been "whitelisted" by someone you trust.
- edoceo 5y agoSigned ActivityPub?
- Zash 5y agoForgotten OStatus have we? That was essentially RSS feeds + optional extras like ActivityStreams and push, all gracefully degrading into plain ol' RSS / Atom feeds.
- cxr 5y agoAlong with Atom, RSS is simple enough (it's in the name) that you can add RSS support even for static sites. ActivityPub, the most popular carrier for ActivityStreams, is "designed around the concept of an inbox and outbox" <https://lwn.net/Articles/741218/ https://lwn.net/Articles/741218/>, requiring that the server itself provide support. If you know of a realistic demonstration of ActivityStreams-without-ActivityPub that establishes a pattern that can be appropriated for re-use elsewhere (e.g. on static sites), then ActivityStreams is worth discussing, but otherwise probably not. It's my claim that for all the work that goes into Mastodon, Solid, etc, none of them will truly succeed without the ability for programmers themselves to effectively put them into practice on static sites, especially those associated with their GitHub profile using GitHub Pages. (I despise GitHub, FWIW, and really hate that so much of the world of development has settled there, but I can know what I know from seeing what I see.) When it's simple enough to do that, that's the point where non-niche productized services for non-programmers to do the same will start popping up and off-Twitter chatter will take off. Despite the inroads that Mastodon has made, I don't consider in non-niche; it's being held back by the same factors described here.
- Zash 5y agoActivityStreams was originally an XML extension for Atom <https://activitystrea.ms/specs/atom/1.0/ https://activitystrea.ms/specs/atom/1.0/>. It worked just fine with a static site. https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ formerly PubSubHubbub was used to notify subscribers, but it was optional and subscribers would fall back to polling. WebSub could be a separate service. The trickiest part is handling replies, which involves some cryptography to prevent spoofing. But this too could be done by polling, only then you only get replies from those you subscribe to. ActivityPub does this with crypto too IIRC.
- spansoa 5y agoUses this for Miniflux https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/
- hopesthoughts 5y agoYou mean you use Miniflux for that? which I do as well.
- sys_64738 5y agoTwitter is especially good for RSS as you can see almost all 140 chars in a single line and see all the recents tweets for the twitter account. I've no interest in comments in twitter. With Reddit you can subscribe to RSS feeds of subreddits and see the new topics. Click through to reddit if you want to engage. It has its uses and frankly it's my method for info consumption. If something doesn't have an RSS interface then I don't use it. Life is too short.
- throw0101a 5y ago> Twitter is especially good for RSS as you can see almost all 140 chars in a single line and see all the recents tweets for the twitter account. Twitter used to have RSS (Atom?) until March 2013.
- sys_64738 5y agoThe RSS service I use has a Twitter gateway which does translation. It works really nice.
- dharmaturtle 5y agoWhat RSS service you're using? I'm in the market.
- gaius_baltar 5y agoAny suggestion for a good HTML scraper that generates RSS feeds from Twitter profiles without relying in the API or third-party services?
- navmed 5y agoIs there one for Instagram?
- debarshri 5y agoSocial media tells you what you should see based on some implicit determination. Sure sometimes you can discover new things that did not interest you. You can feel serendipitous. With RSS feed, you can actually gain control, you could actually say when you see items in the feed, alert me. With current social media, I am constantly discovering things, which gives me a short high of finding new things which lasts for few minutes and then I find another new thing. I haven't been able to find what interests me for eg. In YouTube, where I get bored quickly even though I keep seeing new things, new domain I just discovered.
- ravenstine 5y agoYouTube is far better if you can completely bypass their algorithm. Half the time I use YouTube through NewPipe, a FOSS Android alternative to the YouTube app. If you import your subscriptions, it shows you exactly all the videos from your subscribed channels in chronological order, not what it or YouTube thinks you want to see. The search is seemingly less algorithmically influenced and there is no autoplay. There's a "trending" tab, but that's easy to ignore and you can just set your subscription feed as the default tab. The very fact that I don't feel like what I'm seeing is what corporations and billionaires want me to see changes my usage into something that is active rather than passive. It feels different, better, to participate in the power process to not only have confidence in that I'm seeing all the updates I specified to see but that I have to seek out what I want to watch/listen to. Psychologically, it's healthier, IMO.
- atatatat 5y agoPeep the settings, you can remove the Trending tab altogether.
- Quillbert182 5y agoYouTube itself does have that same option under the subscriptions tab, it will only show videos from your subscriptions in chronological order.
- ravenstine 5y ago
- tofukid 5y agoI think RSS is a way to read social media, it's not a replacement for social media. But that's a good thing! I just want to stay updated with blogs, forums, and social media – in one place. I built and use https://sumi.news https://sumi.news to follow Twitter, newsletters, and RSS in a peaceful, chronological feed, and it works well for me. I still comment, reply, and interact, but I only have to check one website for updates.
- spockz 5y agoWhy? We could have something federated where I add my response to a particular post/thread to my RSS feed. We then leave it up to the client to generate a proper tree representation of a discussion.
- skymt 5y agoMastodon uses an HTML microformat called h-feed for federation of user feeds. h-feed is based on hAtom, which is a microformat encoding of the Atom feed format. So your idea isn't all that far off from how the most popular federated social network system is designed (though there's more to it).
- throwdecro 5y agoHow much of this does an end-user need to think about? It seems very complicated.
- chrismorgan 5y agoTechnical correction: YouTube, GitHub and GitLab all produce Atom feeds, not RSS. (Nitter has /rss in its URLs but I can’t confirm they’re actually RSS because the feeds seem to be broken, producing HTML “user not found” error pages.) (If you want to know more of my beef against RSS (both as a technology and as a term for web feeds regardless of actual format): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+atom+rss&type=comment&sort=byDate https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+atom+rss&type=comm.... RSS should have been killed off about fifteen years ago in favour of Atom.)
- ravenstine 5y agoI'm curious, why do you think it should have been killed off in favor of Atom? Do you mean in the sense of the terminology, or is there something inferior about RSS? Perhaps both should be killed off in favor of a JSON-based format.
- chrismorgan 5y agoRefer to my earlier comments: Atom is technically superior and more sound, and calling them all “RSS” is harmful by encouraging the inferior. JSON stuff? Eh, I feel that’s largely a solution looking for a problem. It’s too late to get universal support in clients (feeds aren’t popular enough and too much of the software basically on life support), so you’re always going to need to serve Atom or RSS as well, and once you’re implementing one of them, why would you bother with the JSON format at all? As for the one serious attempt, JSON Feed, I have one thing that I really like about it and one thing that I don’t. The don’t: it specifies that titles are plain text, which I think is a shame; Atom lets you put HTML in your titles so you can do things like <code>, <em>, <sup> and so forth (and I do, oh yes! I do)—though I wish Atom had let you specify both plain text and HTML (sometimes I want <code></code> to “degrade” to backticks; refer to the titles of my last few blog posts for examples, with plain text in the <title> and HTML in the body). And that’s the thing I think JSON Feed got right for the content, that you can provide both HTML and text, whereas Atom forces you to choose.
- ravenstine 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kugutsumen 5y agoI use Reeder to follow the sites I enjoy reading e.g. slashdot, ars technica, xkcd, swift and golang blogs, some sections of the NY Times, etc. I never read social media feed. For Twitter my Tweetbot client is configured to filter out all retweets and I use a 'mustered' list for the people whose tweets I don't want to miss.
- woodruffw 5y agoI'll post this every time someone tries to launder Luke Smith through HN: he is a reactionary with a relatively popular YouTube channel in which he openly espouses and trades in racist talking points[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA
- tasuki 5y agoThat's... bad, and also totally orthogonal to the linked blog post? Should we not be using RSS to replace social media because the person saying so might be a racist? Should racists be silenced when talking about other things?
- woodruffw 5y ago> That's... bad, and also totally orthogonal to the linked blog post? The linked blog post is the kind of informational pablum that anybody with a handful of years of programming or IT experience could write. That's what Luke Smith specializes in: milquetoast technological advice wrapped in a veneer of alt-right language designed to titillate his audience. I see no reason why we should give him center stage in our attentions when plenty of other, better, and more qualified people can talk cogently about the same topics.
- stiltzkin 5y ago> RSS-bridge is the ultimate RSS feed helper and will not just give you RSS feeds for Facebook pages, but basically anything else. This has been my opposite experience, all RSS bridges i have tried gets error with Facebook pages.
- jsilence 5y agoI share this experience. Frustrating. But made me give up on FB completely. For good.
- poopsmithe 5y agoI've been enjoying using https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/ for the past year or so. It ingests RSS and is smart enough for everything else. I use it to follow people on Twitter, know when a favorite youtuber uploads a video, subscribe to a number of blogs, and know exactly when a new post is added to the subreddits I frequent.
- grujicd 5y agoI’m doing it the other way, using social media instead of RSS! Ok, only half joking. Facebook is now what RSS was supposed to be, but for the non-tech masses. Sure, I still use RSS for tech blogs, but how do I find about local concerts and events, schedule changes for kid’s aikido, etc? All these small organizations, clubs, bands, artists, venues use Facebook as a way to notify their members/fans. After some curating, I really like my Facebook. But I don’t use it as a social network, i.e. there’s not much social stuff there. “Loud” friends or relatives they are muted. But that’s where I find out about next concert of bands I follow, which I wouldn’t find elsewhere.
- pacman2 5y agoFor Twitter I use this Bridge to get RSS https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge Just saw, it works also with other websites like youtube. But I have never tried this.
- HaloZero 5y agoHas anybody used rss-bridge to replace the Facebook newsfeed? It seems like you have to point to individual people so I'm curious if you'd get blocked if you tried to follow more than a few friends.
- smsm42 5y agoI hope RSS is finally old enough to be in fashion again, and people are starting to wake up to the fact that it's much superior to social media as a periodic content consumption venue. Social media is for posting cat pictures, wedding invitations and ancient jokes you heard for the first time yesterday. RSS is for creating curated periodic content streams. I've been using it since forever, and there's never been anything better. Well, maybe better format - RSS, Atom, whatever - but the idea is the same. Hopefully people start to wake up to this finally? One can hope.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hopesthoughts 5y agoI think it's been on an upswing for about a couple years now.
- torstenvl 5y agoI've thought about how RSS and social media relate to each other a lot. Social media works off the "feed" paradigm pretty explicitly (News Feed, Twitter feed, etc.). I've thought about how to implement an open-standards social media site. Maybe with a feed server (FastCGI or otherwise) that takes authentication tokens in the request header or URL (over HTTPS only obviously), and - if the token is linked to a valid "friend" or "following" relationship, returns an RSS feed of the person's recent posts.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI love the loud colors and 90s feel to this site. RSS does not have the breadth of a combination of twitter, reddit, and curated youtube. I only read a couple news sources and blogs so bookmarks are fine there.
- achirie 5y agoIt could be a solution! But in both cases (RSS reader or social media) there are a lot of noise... We are on our way to fix this problem :) https://newzy.io https://newzy.io