46 ms·
“We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
- badwolf 5y agoEvery time this comes up, the discussion always rapidly becomes "Those idiots aren't using the web the way I want to, in my text only command line!"
- dethos 5y agoThat is a complete nonsense. RSS is one of the most useful tools for those that don't have "social media" accounts. Don't expect people to keep coming back to your website/blog just to check if there is new content/news. If it doesn't provide a feed (Atom or RSS), the most probable scenario is that I will not remember to comeback any time soon.
- api 5y ago> RSS is one of the most useful tools for those that don't have "social media" accounts. That's why RSS is dying. It doesn't facilitate in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive... err I mean "maximize engagement." RSS is a user-friendly technology not an advertiser-friendly or surveillance-friendly technology and surveillance driven advertising is the business model of the Internet.
- derbOac 5y agoI think the original idea of Twitter was basically to allow people to have "personal RSS" feeds without having technical knowledge or having to start up a blog. That plus built-in aggregation. So personal RSS for nontechnical folks + built-in aggregation. It's a little ironic to me, then, that this concern is being posted on Twitter of all places. I agree with the concern, I think RSS (or something closely related, like a decentralized version) should be maintained as a communication method, but I think there's a usability issue that's driving it.
- timbit42 5y agoI'm OK with not reading websites involved in in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive. They're the poor quality news sources that no one should be reading.
- dabinat 5y agoHow is social media an alternative to RSS? There’s no guarantee users will actually see what you post. I think the big problem with RSS is that non-technical users didn’t use it. I see this as a marketing failure - browser support was never great and it was too hidden / non-obvious as a feature.
- SahAssar 5y agoSeems slightly ironic that the hashtag #RSSaintdead hasn't been used since 2015
- superkuh 5y agoIs it? The idea of RSS was to escape complicated, centralizing, proprietary platforms like twitter. In order to read the post in this discussion's twitter link I'd have to execute their code on my machine. There's no way to access twitter via text. I certainly hope that most RSS users are shying away from such a terrible platform.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThis highlights, in an interesting way, one of the downsides to RSS as a technology in the era of centralized services. Really, of all decentralized services in the era of centralized services. When you want to make a pitch to somebody that RSS is valuable, you don't have direct statistics on its global use. You can pull access logs for your own servers, but if you're trying to justify to a boss the investment of setting up an RSS service where you don't have one already, you're going to have to use someone's proxy numbers on how popular it is. Meanwhile, Twitter's access logs are a direct signal on the popularity of Twitter. Their story for telling potential investors how many users they have is very short.
- boring_twenties 5y agohttps://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
- SahAssar 5y agoRSS was first released/specified in 1999, so to say that the idea was to escape platforms like twitter is rewriting history (myspace didn't even launch until 4 years later, friendster three years later). The idea of RSS seems to (originally and still in some ways) to be able to keep track of updates to many different sites from one application. My point was rather that twitter is a place where brands listen and also a place where a lot of web devs talk. If RSS is to continue being seen as relevant twitter would be a good place to advocate for it.
- nicbou 5y agoI wish that government entities used it, or at least released a changelog for certain pages. Following coronavirus guideline updates in Berlin has been very difficult. For now I use Wachete to achieve this.
- dqv 5y agoThis is one of those things where I would have expected the opposite in your country vs the US, my country. Here pretty much everything important has an RSS feed. The Internal Revenue Service, Health and Human Services, even my local news.
- nicbou 5y agoThe Berlin government is not good at digital services.
- pavel_lishin 5y agoThe town I live in publishes their updates via their Facebook page. :|
- dqv 5y agoNo! Facebook always surfaces news like two weeks after it happens, so you always have to check the individual Facebook pages to get timely updates. It’s time to move towns ;)
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y agoThe US has a reputation abroad for being cutthroat and business oriented, but in reality US public administration can be remarkably civically minded. For example, look at the wealth of data that the NOAA gives away for anyone to do what they please with. Whereas their European counterparts are mostly just unhelpful, or they gouge you with fees. The most glaring exception I can think of is not making it easy to file tax returns, for the benefit of companies like Intuit.
- rado 5y agoI discovered this post by RSS.
- eadmund 5y agoMe too! It ain't dead yet … Now, if only there were a good way to sync elfeed and an Android feed reader!
- shadowgovt 5y agoAs much as I pine for the days when RSS was ubiquitous, I trust them to have the access logs to conclude that nobody is using their RSS feed.
- mdp2021 5y agoDefining a demographics.
- Maxburn 5y agoToo true, these days the audience is people typing google into the browser omni bar. Plus "we couldn't figure out how to monetize RSS"
- rendall 5y agoYou would trust the web developer of this unnamed NGO you heard about 3rd or 4th hand to do what now?
- shadowgovt 5y agoI extend to them the same default I extend to every random site maintainer on the internet: an assumption of basic competence until shown evidence to the contrary. It is, perhaps, giving too much credit. Perhaps the average is lower than I think it is. But if it is, we would arrive at the same situation, because a developer that struggles below the average will struggle to maintain an RSS feed. We could anticipate them cutting whatever corners they can justify cutting to decrease their workload.
- selfhoster11 5y ago> assumption of basic competence Basic sysadmin/tech competency != Basic webmaster competency. Whoever maintains their WordPress site may not even know the logs exist, and if they do know, not have access to them. Server literacy is not widespread.
- adrianmonk 5y agoI wouldn't say I trust them, but I would say it's the most likely explanation. It could be that they've failed to understand how RSS could help their organization achieve its goals. But it's probably just that RSS isn't worth it to them.
- mdp2021 5y agoObsolete?! Replaced by what?!?!?!? I think obsolescence implies replacement!
- throwaway1777 5y agoReplaced by social media.
- geerlingguy 5y agoI'm guessing they think that social media and a subscription email newsletter are adequate replacements. But they are not.
- criddell 5y agoWe can't really know looking in from the outside. Presumably they know how often their newsletters are sent out and how many social media followers they have and how often the RSS feed is pulled.
- TacoSteemers 5y agoI do believe that online feed readers will only pull the feed once per x minutes for all their subscribers, instead of pulling the feed n times per x minutes. For example, all of Feedly's subscribers will only count for one pull.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI was thinking accidental denial of service attack by badly scripted bot crawling their site every 15 minutes was an adequate replacement, but they didn't agree with that.
- eloeffler 5y agoIs there a current and well functioning tool that pulls full articles from the links inside most RSS feeds that only publish teasers? When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article. Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a good tool for that...
- kevincox 5y agoI'm not affiliated but I use both of these services and seem to do a good job: - https://morss.it/ https://morss.it/ - http://ftr.fivefilters.org/ http://ftr.fivefilters.org/
- afrazkhan 5y agoYup, Inoreader.
- sumthinprofound 5y agoInoreader (paid pro version) will also allow you to create feeds for sites that do not publish via rss.
- Hard_Space 5y ago> Inoreader (paid pro version) will also allow you to create feeds for sites that do not publish via rss. I am a paid pro subscriber on Inoreader, and use it 2-3 hours a day for my work. I should mention that it provides a very limited number of certain types of feed (custom-created RSS, Twitter feeds, etc.), and you'll run out of them almost immediately if you want to follow a lot of places. That said, Inoreader lets you plug as many RSS feeds as you like in, far as I can tell, and I've really loaded it up. But do watch out for the limits, because the next grade up from 'Pro' is 'Call sales'. It's not very granular.
- sumthinprofound 5y ago
- HamburgerEmoji 5y agoRSS was assassinated for being too powerful, too potent a threat to centralization.
- donatj 5y agoThe general upside of Wordpress powering all-the-things is that usually means there is an RSS feed if you poke around hard enough.
- kevincox 5y agoI haven't noticed a WordPress blog where the RSS feed wasn't properly advertised. Does it depend on the theme to include the appropriate link tag? Or maybe it is just sampling bias where I don't notice that WordPress sites are actually wordpress if they don't advertise the feed.
- TimothyBJacobs 5y agoIt is up to the theme to output a visual link to the RSS feed, but unless disabled, WordPress itself will always output a `<link rel="alternate" ...>` tag with an RSS feed.
- superkuh 5y agoIt doesn't help that even Firefox have recently removed RSS/Atom feed autodiscovery and no longer display the icon if there's an RSS head entry. You have to manually type it by knowing common URLs or look at the source. Firefox also removed even the ability to even render RSS feed xml. Now it just asks you to download it like a file. These were very unhealthy choices for a community browser but completely sensible for a JS virtual machine and DRM portal to stream media and buy things.
- kevincox 5y agoYeah definitely. Now you need an extension which accesses every site that you visit. And of course few mobile browsers support extensions anyways. So on mobile half the time I paste the URL into my feed reader to see that RSS isn't supported.
- account42 5y agoAt this point I'm just waiting for Mozilla to fuck up enough so that there is enough motivation for a hard fork to happen and survive. The only reson I'm using Firefox (without auto updates since Mozilla can't be trusted) is because the chrome monopoly is even worse.
- Zealotux 5y agoNow here's a startup idea: generate a RSS feed for any website. $1 a month, $10 if paid annually :o)
- haunter 5y agoFetchRSS is basically this https://fetchrss.com/prices https://fetchrss.com/prices
- akvadrako 5y agohttps://inoreader.com https://inoreader.com does that for about that price.
- dewey 5y agoThere's a lot of services doing that already, it's a very small market. There are also a bunch of open source projects doing that already. I built one myself (https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge) but there are better and more powerful ones on Github.
- 0x456 5y agoI still miss Yahoo Pipes.
- DarylZero 5y agoThe point of RSS is to not have to scrape the sites.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kgran 5y agoI got the same argument after I asked why there's no more RSS/Atom feed of the news section in my municipality's website. Some positive people tell me that RSS is not dead and it's still everywhere. Unfortunately, especially after modern redesigns, RSS gets dropped as "obsolete technology". The sad thing is that this doesn't only happen to optional websites which I could choose not to follow out of principle like blogs or niche websites on technology and such. Governmental, municipal, local news websites do this, after which I lose easy and convenient access to this relevant information.
- mdp2021 5y agoFor «Governmental [and] municipal» information, you should be vocal as a community and/or individual community members. "Look you could visit n websites per day - and get lost in formatting, though already to visit all potential sources is impossible -, or there is this old simple thing that automatically lets one know that source S has these news..." It could be that already the representatives are unaware of the possibility and of the relevant simple solution.
- saurik 5y agoMost local government websites are maintained by a handful of compliance specialists that provide hosted solutions; if your government even has an IT department (as a nearby city to me does) it is probably more a cause for concern than anything else (they seriously assign unchangeable passwords to people that follow a pattern based on your name so you can guess anyone else's password... it is crazy). https://carcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Sloane-DellOrto-Streamline-Everything-Special-Districts-need-to-know-about-online-compliance.pdf https://carcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Sloane-DellOrto... But so like, if you want to lobby a local government to add some feature to their website, they aren't even effectively going to be able to do it; but if you can convince a company like Streamline to add it to their offering, then you'd suddenly experience like half the local governments in California all getting that feature at once.
- DannyBee 5y agoY'all need to lean into the game a bit. Most of the time, things don't win or stay just because they are good. They win because of good marketing, etc. RSS, the brand, is a loser at this point. It is viewed as old, tired, and obsolete. It doesn't matter if it is the right tech. That's not a state you can grow from. At this point the right answer (IMHO) is to create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new brand. Market the hell out of it and subsidize the hell out of it. Trying to prevent the existing brand from dying is a fools errand.
- b6dybuyv 5y agoI think the world would be a better place if in these cases, instead of tweeting a rant and then submitting it to HackerNews, the OP took the effort to explain to that NGO why he thought RSS was a great tool and why they should keep using it.
- LocalH 5y agoNothing says they didn't do both. Tweeting and getting it on HN both help with public awareness. Edit: In fact they did, the OP commented below: >Hi all, OP here, happily surprised to see this on the front page. Apologies for posting it as a tweet. Text below.* >I've asked the NGO to reconsider their decision, but this isn't about them. It's about a systematic decline in the usage of RSS such that even major human rights organisation don't see it worth the relatively trivial effort to maintain a feed. >I honestly think we need a concerted campaign to advocate for RSS. To educate people about its benefits and how to use it. To lobby platforms and websites to adopt RSS and champion notable one's who do. RSS is the back-to-the-future technology we need to keep up with the world in a private, decentralised and sanity-respecting way. If anyone agrees, get in touch and let's do something?
- dewey 5y agoWhat makes you believe they didn't do that?
- sp332 5y agoActivityHub (formerly known as PubSubHubBub) is also acceptable. No social media intermediary required, and it's actively developed. Edit: I meant WebSub above. ActivityHub is cool too but not quite in the same space.
- kevincox 5y agoDo you mean ActivityPub (used by the "fediverse" such as Mastodon) or WebSub (which was formerly known as PubSubHubbub). The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being always online to receive updates which means that you need to use a service or run your own. It isn't as nice as RSS which can fall back to very occasional polling from my own devices. RSS is also way simpler with a polling rather than subscribing and push. In my opinion the best option for public publishing is Atom (RSS 2 is also ok) with WebSub support. This provides a really solid set of features. The only reason I would really recommend ActivityPub is if you need private posts. Otherwise RSS/Atom will be the simpler solution.
- zozbot234 5y ago> The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being always online to receive updates which me/ans that you need to use a service or run your own. ActivityPub is the "push" counterpart to the more foundational ActivityStreams, which works no different than RSS.
- polote 5y agoIs RSS really a technology or a part of the failed attempt of having a semantic web (the real web 3.0) ? RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website, technologically speaking it doesn't make sense to have everyone making a request to website every minute. We could have a central service responsible for that, but I guess it will centralized and some people don't like that
- mdp2021 5y ago> RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website A custom analysis by the user - maybe tech illiterate -, from every user, for every, supposedly complex, website, instead of some xml-izing wrapping over 'SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY pubdate DESC LIMIT 100'?! > a request to website every minute RSS takes less bandwidth than doing the same operation through direct visit. And of course, one is not supposed to do it that frequently; though again, some browsing agents may load pages more frequently than every minute.
- selfhoster11 5y agoScraping is measurably less efficient and reliable on the client side. Its "API" (page layout) varies without notice, where RSS will remain the same. I can only condone scraping if the official API is so convoluted that scraping the page is literally the easier option to program against.
- RNCTX 5y agoTTL is a thing.
- bluefox 5y agoIt doesn't mean everyone is making a request to a website every minute. I use http://gwene.org/ http://gwene.org/ for example. To me RSS or Atom are a major success, as the blogs I want to read almost always seem to have them. Those that don't, well, I used to scrape, but after a while stopped and forgotten about them. If gwene goes under, it'll suck but I'll have a gwene like on my own server. If RSS goes under, it'll go under here and there, and not wholesale. Good technology is resilient like that.
- artembugara 5y agoYou might find useful this article about how to use google news RSS parameters: https://newscatcherapi.com/blog/google-news-rss-search-parameters-the-missing-documentaiton https://newscatcherapi.com/blog/google-news-rss-search-param... You can replace the original RSS with the "mirror" from Google News
- kevincox 5y agoDoesn't Google News use RSS in the backend? I guess the problem is just that the original RSS URLs are not made public?
- Thristle 5y agoObsolete? RSS is the only way i can get a list of new youtube videos from my subscribed channels. Go over your feed? useless! go over my subscribed feed till i get back to last video i saw? way too much work and that feed was known to fail (just like clicking the bell) the only working solution is RSS feed for every channel i want to follow and automation to add those to my different playlists
- mackrevinack 5y agoi started moving a lot of my youtube subs to rss recently as well. i was subbed to 190 channels on youtube but somehow im supposed to be able to keep up to speed with them all using only a single view where they are all mixed together
- StillBored 5y agoReminds me a bit of OFX, you know that technology that lets you download statements/etc from financial institutions to your own personal financial applications. Thereby avoiding giving random 3rd parties access to all your financial information.
- hammock 5y agoRSS is not dead for the simple reason that pretty much every podcast relies on it to get distributed to all the major podcasting platforms (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc).
- kevincox 5y agoThere is a huge difference between RSS as a backend service such as those podcast providers as opposed to being "consumer facing" such as other podcatchers or feed readers. For the former compatibility isn't a major concern, it just needs to work well enough for those use cases and users can't access the content directly (if they don't know the URL or it is IP locked).
- hammock 5y agoTrue but if we go around telling everyone "RSS is defunct" without being more nuanced someone is going to forget about those backend dependencies and bad things will happen
- nomemory 5y agoThis hurts. RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality. I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants. If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this. PS: I've clicked on this link from a RSS reader (just a simple browser extension... that keeps me posted every morning).
- jolmg 5y ago> RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow I haven't signed up for any so I'm not sure, but don't some places have "newsletters"? I kind of assumed they served the same function but with email. Of course, if it does serve the same function, the bad part about it in comparison to RSS would be that you have to give them an email address.
- FanaHOVA 5y agoThe missing thing is centralized queuing. I can easily create a queue of all articles from RSS feeds, but it's hard to centralize all links posted in a newsletter. I do this for engineering blogs of different companies today, for example.
- mfer 5y ago> If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this. Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content. It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, the tech giants shifted from RSS streams (which empower end users) to high control system that operate differently (social media news feeds that empower corps). This lead to a drop is RSS subscriptions. So, why today is it useful to a publisher to have RSS on their site? This is a question that needs addressing and marketing so that people know why. The business case for them is lacking. I want RSS. I also realize the usefulness and communication around that needs improvement.
- maliker 5y agoI've been working around this "death of RSS" by making my own feeds via scraping (using fetchrss.com/manual). It's more fragile than using supported RSS feeds, but it gets the job done.
- dredmorbius 5y agohttps://nitter.kavin.rocks/DanielNemenyi/status/1470385279383089153 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/DanielNemenyi/status/147038527938...
- neiman 5y agoThis shows ignorance more than anything. "people we know don't use RSS, hence no one uses it, hence it's obsolete".
- comeonseriously 5y agoOh come on. How much maintenance could it actually be to keep it? Honestly, I would not be surprised if some "I want everything to be modern" web dev convinced the powers that be that it was obsolete because he couldn't be bothered with it.
- grozzle 5y agoThe whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete. Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.
- mfer 5y agoThis is a great example of RSS being useful while almost no one realizes is. People have podcast players. There are podcasts. They subscribe to them. RSS is the technology behind the scenes that powers it which almost no one notices. I bet that most podcast listeners don't know what RSS is or how it impacts their ability to listen to podcasts. Podcasts also present a different problem from most news. People want to listen to a podcast and know about episodes. A platform can't easily come in and alter the flow of episodes coming without consumers noticing and being annoyed. This works for RSS. With other news the aggregating platforms want to manipulate the flow of information for their benefit. If I look at my home in Twitter I might see posts from hours or days ago at the top. It's about engagement and they manipulate the order and display of posts to aide that. Their business model doesn't fit well with RSS as a backing technology. Note, I can't stand the manipulation of my news feed. I just understand the business and other factors behind it.
- sneak 5y agoMost of the listeners of podcasts have moved on to technologies that do not rely on RSS. RSS was like podcasting 1.0. Now people consume podcasts on integrated, centralized platforms.
- chrisseaton 5y agoMaybe RSS could become a paid service - then the people who want it could be the ones paying for it.
- smugglerFlynn 5y agoRSS users aren’t seem to be concerned with the single most popular way content creators make money: by displaying ads. While there are RSS-compatible solutions for that (like AdSense in-feed ads), it is obvious that there is not enough financial incentive for content creators and platforms to continue supporting RSS. From consumer perspective, I’m writing this from Safari on iPad, and there is no way to see that RSS is present on the page, neither there is a way to subscribe to RSS without special plugins. Which tells me demand on consumer side also does not justify keeping these features up. The only reason RSS is alive today is because it’s dirt cheap to implement, and is supported out-of-the-box by most web development frameworks.
- betwixthewires 5y agoYou're right, we aren't concerned with ads. We don't want ads. The problem isn't ads though, the problem is targeted advertising. there's absolutely nothing about RSS which prevents a person from sponsoring products, shilling merch, or any other form of advertising in line in their article or in the description of their video or even in their video or podcast. Thinking these features disappear from client applications because of user demand is very naive. These client applications are usually designed by the same companies that want you to see ads because they sell ads to the sites you visit. RSS dying was no accident. > The only reason RSS is alive today is because it’s dirt cheap to implement, and is supported out-of-the-box by most web development frameworks. And thank god for that. Isn't that how it should be? User empowering tools should be frictionlessly available and ubiquitous. If they're used because they're always there, I can't come up with a more frictionless UX than that.
- smugglerFlynn 5y agoProblem with targeted advertising is that it won’t magically go away because end users don’t want ads. This whole business model has at least four more sides: content creators, content platforms (like Facebook/Medium), infrastructure services (like programmatic ad platforms), and advertisers. This whole model is mostly frictionless for everyone except end users, who get abused by targeted ads. (one can argue that even for end users this model provides value: an ability to browse all this content without paying to anyone; if we do not consider attention a form of currency, that is) Maybe in the future we will shift from this ad-driven model, and that would resurrect RSS, semantic web and other good things which are now mostly gone due to advertisement-driven web. One can only hope.
- randmeerkat 5y agoBetween this, paywalls, and a lack of interoperability between messaging services, I feel like the internet has become a bleak place.
- betwixthewires 5y agoThat's because it has, at least the wider "normie" internet has. If you want anything cool online, you're going to be interacting with a bunch of other Cool Thing™ enthusiasts and not much else. Want to use ActivityPub, Gemini, XMPP? That cute girl at the bar is not going to be available to you, you'll be interacting almost exclusively with dorks like me. The modern popular internet that most people use is a 5 store strip mall with UX and design choices that seem like they were designed by Dr Strangelove.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y agoRSS is the only thing that's keeping the web usable for me. I only read this post because it appeared in the hacker news feed from my RSS reader newsblur (highly recommend).
- kevincox 5y agoI hate to say it but they are largely correct. The technology isn't obsolete but it is very unknown outside of podcasting, but even these day most people just get their podcasts relayed through a big service that may not even let you subscribe via URL. I run an RSS-centered service and approximately 0 of my non-tech friends know what RSS is. They get their news from the YouTube, Facebook, Instagram... homepages where the algorithm picks some stuff that they want you to see. When I explain that it is easy to curate what you follow with no ads, no raking and no "algorithm" they are generally on board and are happy to subscribe to some comics, YouTube channels and maybe a web comic or two. But the awareness is basically zero. I think the following things would help get RSS into the spotlight: 1. Highlight that Google News uses RSS. https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9545420 https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9545... 2. We need to get "Subscribe" buttons back into browsers. Right now you need an extension to detect sites that have feeds. Not only is that a huge step for most users but the most popular mobile browsers don't support extensions. (And even Firefox for Android only supports a whitelist on stable right now) IIRC Chrome on Android is experimenting with a very polished-over version, so it will be interesting if this gains traction and helps convince sites to maintain their feeds. 3. We need awareness. A lot of people are being made aware of the downsides of big services recommending them content, but very few are aware of the alternatives. Just helping out a few friends who are interesting in taking more control over their news can be a good start. And remember that it isn't all-or-nothing. I subscribe to a lot of feeds but still browse Hacker News and Reddit. I don't think I need to completely remove the algorithm, but I like to get most of my news "reliably" then when I run out I go into "discovery mode". That being said it is a huge uphill battle and right now it looks like things are going the other way. I'm not hugely active in this "fight" but it is good to support when you can.
- nathcd 5y agoI'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies: - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response. - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled - XML Despite this, I still love RSS. It's what we've got and we should continue to make the most of it. But it also sucks, and it's not any surprise that mostly only technical people use it. I think feeds are pretty much doomed to keep breaking and disappearing. Many of the replacements or pseudo-replacements that people come up with seem fine, but the problem - as always - is getting people to actually use it, which mostly never happens.
- lf-non 5y agoA lot of us are happy to just use RSS for the aggregated listing. I really don't mind going to the original site in a browser to read the article.
- rcxdude 5y agoYup, the only information I need in RSS is a post title and a URL, maybe a date. Literally never read content from my reader (indeed my current custom reader doesn't support it). It's still nice to get blog posts, webcomics, youtube videos and more all through the same reader.
- anonymousiam 5y agoRSS is my preferred way to stay up to date. The only reason to remove it is to force consumers onto a platform that can push more advertisements. So it's not so much obsolete, but it is less profitable.
- oauea 5y ago> - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links > - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article. > - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think any alternatives would make sense. > - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response. Agree that this sucks. > - XML Really?
- hcarvalhoalves 5y agoApparently open standards can “become obsolete technology” now.
- LinkSake 5y agoI've the same issue with some local news webpages and government sites, but I've been using PolitePol[1] to generate the feeds; they're not great but get the job done. Right now I'm looking for projects like RSSHub[2] or RSS Bridge[3] to have a similar service but self-hosted and without the restrictions of the free tier of PolitePol. I think in the future RSS will be a community driven effort, not something that the website themselves care to implement. [1] - https://politepol.com/en/ https://politepol.com/en/ [2] - https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub [3] - https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
- oxplot 5y agoI have all my feeds sent to email with a hand rolled setup which I did in a few hours one day. I also made a youtube and twitter feed to RSS which then gets sent to my email along with the rest. Oh and one HTML to RSS based on CSS query selectors for sites that don't have feeds. TL;DR I have my youtube, twitter, feed, etc sent to my email which I consume linearly and efficiently without having to visit literally 50 websites and also don't miss a thing because I didn't check one day.
- carrja99 5y agoQuick! Someone reinvent rss as blockchain tech!
- NylaTheWolf 5y agoI literally found this thread THROUGH my RSS feed. Hell, I've only been using RSS for few weeks and I actually love it. It's pretty overwhelming at times, but I definitely don't regret giving it a go at all.
- idworks1 5y agoAn advantage of RSS is that most companies that remove it, only remove the link from the website. Even bloggers who somehow feel the need to remove it, remove it from the share options but leave the link tag in the source code intact. The link remains functional. The best technology are silent and boring.
- KronisLV 5y agoRecently added RSS/Atom/JSON feeds to my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/ https://blog.kronis.dev/ Honestly, i largely agree with the claim that RSS is dying. For example, on Windows i wanted to find a decent RSS reader to use, since recently coming to like the technology myself for consumption of news (since all of the sudden everything can just be boring text, as opposed to annoying and attention catching images, styling etc., allowing em to focus on the content), which turned out to be hard. In my search, i found the following readers: - Feedly (https://feedly.com/) not really an option for me, since i want downloadable software, which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web mail clients - Newsblur (https://www.newsblur.com/) same as above - Inoreader (https://www.inoreader.com/) same as above - Feeder (https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/feeder-rss-feed-reader/jlkhefogiiibhgblliimeleiiiijbkjj) not an option, Windows Store app, i avoid that - Omea Reader (https://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/) by JetBrains, but requirements list Windows XP, so not updated in a long time - RSSOwl (http://www.rssowl.org/) based on Eclipse and fails to launch with new JDK versions - QuiteRSS (https://quiterss.org/en/screenshots) the layout absolutely breaks because image dimensions are not constrained, no one wants the header of the news story to fill up the entire screen - RSSGuard (https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard) in the end i stuck with this, because just got tired because of so many bad options out there Apparently Google Reader was also pretty good but was retired. How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software for it out there? Give me something like LibreOffice that you just download, install and it works in surprisingly sane ways most of the time.
- tech234a 5y agoFeedbro (a browser extension) might be another option for you to consider[1]. [1]: https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
- sneak 5y ago> not really an option for me, since i want downloadable software, which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web mail clients > How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software for it out there? There is good software for it out there. Most people don't want to use/run/download/install local software, they'd prefer an API client on their device and a service that does the heavy lifting for them. I don't like that model either, but most people do, and they've chosen it, for better or worse. I don't think that the claim that there's no good software out there is a valid one - it's just software that you personally have disqualified. SaaS is still software, and much of it is very high quality. You just don't get to run or modify it.
- can16358p 5y agoWhat is wrong with saying "we are removing RSS because we're a for-profit company and we can't monetize it"? That would be brutally honest and probably get much more respect.
- glitchdout 5y agoVimeo did the same. I used to subscribe to and watch their Staff Picks. Now I don't.
- nerdjon 5y agoI hate to admit it, but I kinda just... stopped looking at my RSS feeds about a year ago. It wasn't intentional, it just kinda happened? I was (am?) paying for Feedly and then I used a separate app on my phone to consume it (Hated the Feedly UI and I wanted the app I have been using since google reader). But I costantly found myself with a huge number of unread feeds. They became unmanageable. I would look at headlines and only click a small subset of what I was seeing (likely under 1%). I think I ended up replacing it with Reddit, Hacker News, and Apple News. Plus the few sites I actually cared about I just regularly checked on my computer. That being said, I did just open it and scroll a little bit and saw some stuff that I actually would have liked to see. So maybe I should get back into it. It is sad to see the tech basically disappearing, but almost no one outside of tech knows it exists. I can't remember the last time I actually saw an RSS feed button and I used to have to go digging for it. I may just need to curate my list of feeds more, or categorize them. I don't know, but I wish Had a better solution to all of the unread stuff.
- kgran 5y agoThat's why I like websites that offer RSS feeds by tags, author, search queries, threads, etc. Also, there are news readers that offer different types of filtering as well. Personally, I use newsboat, though it's a CLI program, so probably not suitable for everyone.
- mackrevinack 5y agoi find myself in the same situation where theres hundreds of unread articles for a site and after a while i usually mark them as read just so i don't have to look at the counter icon. what i would like is an option to turn off that counter for certain sites where i know im just going to scroll through the top 20 articles and then go onto something else. it would be a lot less work
- betwixthewires 5y agoI've kind of done the same thing a month or so ago. A few things happened: I no longer have the time to spend each day watching an hour or so of video content (most of my subscriptions are video), most of my subscriptions are usually uninteresting with the odd gold nugget buried in, I no longer care one iota about current events (if it's important I'll hear it from someone IRL) and my feed reader (Feeder if anyone's interested) updated to a new version, removed old releases from it's github and f-droid repo, a new release which breaks tons of features I was using and doesn't improve on anything whatsoever and just looks like a needless UI redesign. That said, I love RSS and Atom. So much that I absolutely refuse to subscribe to anything any other way (well, I use ActivityPub for some social whatever). I'm beginning to realize though, I do not need a constant flow of information or content. I don't really think most of us do if we are being honest with ourselves.
- dorianmariefr 5y agoCouldn't there be a proxy that generates an RSS feed, like Twitter to RSS feed or Facebook to RSS Feed
- marban 5y agoNews aggregators are my main business since 2001 and all I can say is that reports of the death of RSS have been greatly exaggerated. Recently launched https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com where 75% is still RSS, the rest being APIs and custom scraping. Yes, support is not increasing but drops among established sites are very rare. (Coindesk most recently)
- npx13 5y agoRSS is by far the best and easiest way to keep up with sources you want to follow. Using RSS to get updates from curated Twitter lists is the only way to just get updates from accounts you want to follow on Twitter and maintain your sanity. I recommend NetNewsWire.
- dialcortez 5y agoReading this form an RSS reader! Any interesting products using RSS? Maybe a monetized feed? gated substack's like feed? Sadly, I don't know of any solution using RSS other than news feeds.
- timbit42 5y agoeBay auctions, YouTube, Torrent searches
- tinus_hn 5y agoRSS is obsolete because it does not enable tracking and advertisements.
- indymike 5y agoRSS feeds are not obsolete. People have pointed out WordPress, but there's another place where RSS is the infrastructure: Podcasts.
- rexreed 5y agoRSS right now is the only viable solution for a particular service I use that aggregates financial news and reporting across a range of sites. I appreciate the simplicity and power in RSS also the built-in capability to process RSS feeds in PHP and other libraries.
- 0x456 5y agoEven more sad when a Tech journal doesn't have an RSS feed, but posts to Facebook and Twitter instead. For example https://www.thenewatlantis.com/ https://www.thenewatlantis.com/
- mehdix 5y agoI still maintain an Atom feed on my website and any website I operat, and still curate my offline feed list and reader. I also urge you to do so. It's a remnant of the good old Internet. Moreover, I enjoyed writing an XSL stylesheet for my Atom feed. It has amazing results, and I wonder why people don't do that.
- winternett 5y agoIt's also a great way to back up bulk content from feed sites I create into intuitive files for migration ETC... It's far more readable than JSon by bare eyes as well. Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone jacks on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make new insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more money. I get weary of how many unreasonable and dreadful turns tech makes to re-invent wheels that are already installed and working fine. RSS was also a great way of sharing content from sources without copying and pasting. It's a real tragedy it's barely used/accessible any more... And it's just a personal opinion, but OAuth is also mostly a engineered and tedious end product of retiring RSS that really was only introduced so that platforms can put an incremental price tag on data access.
- mehdix 5y ago> Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone jacks on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make new insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more money. Not only that, a headphone jack does not support DRM and therefore is a loophole in a closed system fully controlled by manufacturer.
- Arnavion 5y agoSomewhat off-topic, but my personal static-site blog has an RSS feed, auto-generated by the same build script that compiles the markdown to HTML via pandoc. I don't particularly care if people read the entire article in their feed reader instead of in a browser, so I want to include the full article content in the feed But it feels silly to have two copies of every article in the output, where one copy of each article is in one giant feed.xml file, so currently I only put the title and URL for each article in the feed. ~15 years ago I had solved this problem on an unrelated website by having the feed be the source of the content and have the feed transformed into (X)HTML by the browser automatically using XSLT. But I don't think that's in favor these days, especially since not all browsers support it. What do other people with static-site blogs do?
- thaumasiotes 5y agoIs there a problem with the higher-quality feed other than that you feel silly for providing it?
- Arnavion 5y agoI'm fine with doing it if that's what everyone else does, but I'm just checking that there isn't a cleaner way.
- account42 5y agoTypically you don't include all past articles in the RSS/Atom feed document but only "recent" ones where what recent means varies from site to site depending how often they expect their users to query the feed and how big of a deal missing entries is. There is also an extension to provide past articles in separate feed doucments [0] that was linked in this discussion but I have no idea if that is supported in practice. [0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y agoPersonally I hate when articles are in the feed in full. I'd much rather be able to open the articles I want to read in tabs in a browser, and skip past the ones I'm not interested in (marking them as read when I do so). I'd rather have a title, URL, and maybe a short summary in the RSS feed.
- chris_wot 5y agoWhat’s the human rights rig using now? Facebook?
- l0b0 5y ago"X is obsolete" for any X which is not literally marked "obsolete" in the relevant reference is just a convenient lie. The real reason is going to be either "I don't like X" or "I don't understand X".
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago... in another news item brought to me by RSS, RSS is declared to be an obsolete technology. Yawn.
- r00fus 5y agoI always thought Twitter's goal was to Embrace, Extend and Extinguish RSS. The alternative to RSS is Twitter (which is preferable to many orgs as you can "unsend" or manage engagement). Sucks for freedom of access though.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Anthony-G 5y agoI suspect the NGO in question simply has no idea of how many people were using their news-feed. If it’s not in the Google Analytics report, it’s not being used. Many modern website managers (unlike the “webmasters” of two decades ago) are either unaware that web server logs exist and can provide useful information about web requests (in a privacy-respecting manner) – or they might not have access to them.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thirdplace_ 5y agoRelevant: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge It is a feed generator for sites that don't have it.
- cema 5y agoSurveillance capitalism? What does it even mean?
- nreece 5y agoRSS may be obsolete from a marketing perspective (i.e. lack of visible RoI), but its growing in other areas like media monitoring, podcast delivery, RSS-to-newsletter etc. * Shameless plug *: our super-easy feed builder at New Sloth (formerly Feedity) - https://newsloth.com https://newsloth.com, helps create custom feeds for any public webpage. Our API can auto-magically detect relevant articles in most cases. The platform includes an integrated simple feed reader and clusterer/deduplicator, specially aimed for knowledge workers with hundreds and thousands of feeds to monitor daily.
- johnisgood 5y agoI use RSS, but the titles are horrible on many sites.
- bionhoward 5y agoRSS is productive for me…I use Feedly to follow every science journal I can find, then set automated alerts for combinations of keywords
- giuliomagnifico 5y agoDamn is the only way (because I think is the best way) I follow a lot of news/articles, this thing is absurd, and you know who is the guilty?! ...Google, when X years ago dismissed Google Reader, because a lot of people was thinking that RSS is/was G.Reader. I can't imagine if Facebook will close Facebook, that "is internet" for a lot of people, not us obviously.
- taubek 5y agoRSS may seem like some obsolete technology. Yes, it has its quirks and issues, but it also allows you to get the new content without using social media. Not everyone uses them or even likes them.