6 ms·

Meta-comment: I recently got into RSS so I’m pretty biased but I love the format and it seems like there’s a bit of a RSS renaissance going on with a bunch of r

by lovecg 5y ago

Meta-comment: I recently got into RSS so I’m pretty biased but I love the format and it seems like there’s a bit of a RSS renaissance going on with a bunch of recent articles promoting it and people sharing their experiences etc. Is that just wishful thinking on my part?

woodruffw 5y ago
I like RSS and Atom a lot, so I say this with a heavy heart: I don't think there's a real RSS renaissance going on. It's just one of the early-aughts standards that HN pines for and loves promoting think-pieces about, in part because it allows us to all put rose-tinted glasses on and pretend that the Internet isn't a hellscape of our own design. See also: IRC, which I also like, but whose demise is fully complete. RSS isn't quite as dead as IRC, but it's on the way out.
- donio 5y ago
  If you include podcasts then RSS is probably used more today than ever before.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    Is that how most people are currently following podcasts? I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I hate to admit that I do this mainly through YouTube and sometimes Spotify, maybe Podbean. It's been many years since I subscribed to an RSS feed using a podcast app.
    - rendall 5y ago
      I use podcast addict. RSS is how to do it.
    - deadly_syn 5y ago
      Sure you're using a service to abstract yourself away from RSS, But at the end of the day those services are still getting that content via RSS
- JSavageOne 5y ago
  > it's on the way out. I disagree. RSS is still the standard for following podcasts
  - yetanother-1 5y ago
    It used to be the standard format to follow any thing from websites to blogs anew news... etc.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    I can't speak for myself (I don't listen to that many podcasts), but my friends who do seem to do so mostly through Apple's Podcast app, Spotify, or a similar service. RSS might be providing the syndication under the hood to these services, but it's firmly an implementation detail at this point and not a thriving protocol/community in its own right. Which isn't to say that I want it to fail or be replaced with something else, either!
    - rendall 5y ago
      If you want to host a blog or a podcast on your own site, RSS is the only way anyone can subscribe as far as I know. Could do newsletter, I suppose.
      - woodruffw 5y ago
        Yeah, I provide an Atom feed for my blog. It has about ~100 subscribers across a few different RSS subscription services, and I get a few hundred independent RSS client requests a week. Don't get me wrong: it all works really well, and I like providing it! But it's a very small fraction of my overall traffic, and other bloggers I've spoken to have indicated the same.
        rendall 5y ago
        How do you tell, technically speaking, that someone is subscribed to your feed? Is it logging requests of the RSS feed url somehow? Doesnt Feedly, for one, aggregate RSS subscriptions for all of its users? If I were subscribed to your blog through Feedly, would you see me as an individual subscriber, or all of your Feedly subscribers as one subscriber? If so, I imagine this would deflate your numbers.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Many big OSS software projects host chat on IRC, e.g. Linux, NixOS, Neovim, OPNsense, sway
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    I spend a lot of time on IRC, including in some of the chats for some of the largest OSS projects. I even still run my own social channel and maintain a bouncer for myself and friends! Pockets of activity don't mean that IRC as a whole isn't dead, the same way that the Pope doesn't make Latin a living language.
    - 6510 5y ago
      > I spend a lot of time on IRC I pronounce the end of the discussion!
- nsv 5y ago
  IRC has quite a few active users which is not what I'd call "dead". It's true that it's not as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it certainly still fills a certain niche.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    I'm one of those active users. Perhaps "dead-end" is more accurate; I'll be on it until the networks I'm on turn off, but newcomers are a rarity these days.
- vanilla_nut 5y ago
  Hard disagree. As Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram become increasingly ad-laden and non-chronological, the real value of RSS becomes more and more obvious. I may exist on the fringe as someone who doesn't use any non-HN social media, but I know several businesses in my city that have cropped up in the last 2 or 3 years that basically only pushed out information on Facebook and Instagram. Since those services don't guarantee that your posts will ever make it to followers, much less in a timely fashion, those businesses have really struggled when they have to announce things day-of, or even the day before something happens (closing due to snow, or a party; changing their hours; removing something from the menu due to a supply chain problem; etc.). I've seen a lot of these businesses die, and I suspect Facebook and Instagram contribute. It's not that RSS would save these businesses. But it is true that if you build castles on the sand of another company, you have nobody to blame when your castle collapses.
  - Jorengarenar 5y ago
    RSS isn't dying because it's useless. It's dying because it's not profitable for the big players (heck, you could say it's directly against their interest). And it also isn't good at providing statistics, so small players see it as miniscule (thus dropping too).
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    I don't think we actually disagree: there's plenty of "real value" in RSS, real value that I extract both as a user (I use newsboat[1]) and a producer (I maintain an Atom feed for my blog). The problem isn't that RSS isn't good or useful, it's that it doesn't fit into the incentive structures that we've bought into. An Internet in which RSS thrives is not one in which John Q. Programmer makes 250k a year at Facebook or Google. [1]: https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/
moritonal 5y ago
The UK Gov site has an RSS feed for every other countries travel requirements. Its insane how open/easy it is to subscribe to a ordered relevant collection of information. I'd argue that accessible sites are realising its benefits.
Jorengarenar 5y ago
Unfortunately, what you see as "renaissance" is in fact the last battle of RSS. New webpages rarely bother implementing a feed; old ones, when getting new iterations, often drop support too. I've seen too many blogs without a feed... It's a miracle YT still has them!

by lovecg 5y ago

woodruffw 5y ago

I like RSS and Atom a lot, so I say this with a heavy heart: I don't think there's a real RSS renaissance going on. It's just one of the early-aughts standards that HN pines for and loves promoting think-pieces about, in part because it allows us to all put rose-tinted glasses on and pretend that the Internet isn't a hellscape of our own design. See also: IRC, which I also like, but whose demise is fully complete. RSS isn't quite as dead as IRC, but it's on the way out.

donio 5y ago
If you include podcasts then RSS is probably used more today than ever before.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Is that how most people are currently following podcasts? I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I hate to admit that I do this mainly through YouTube and sometimes Spotify, maybe Podbean. It's been many years since I subscribed to an RSS feed using a podcast app.
  - rendall 5y ago
    I use podcast addict. RSS is how to do it.
  - deadly_syn 5y ago
    Sure you're using a service to abstract yourself away from RSS, But at the end of the day those services are still getting that content via RSS
JSavageOne 5y ago
> it's on the way out. I disagree. RSS is still the standard for following podcasts
- yetanother-1 5y ago
  It used to be the standard format to follow any thing from websites to blogs anew news... etc.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I can't speak for myself (I don't listen to that many podcasts), but my friends who do seem to do so mostly through Apple's Podcast app, Spotify, or a similar service. RSS might be providing the syndication under the hood to these services, but it's firmly an implementation detail at this point and not a thriving protocol/community in its own right. Which isn't to say that I want it to fail or be replaced with something else, either!
  - rendall 5y ago
    If you want to host a blog or a podcast on your own site, RSS is the only way anyone can subscribe as far as I know. Could do newsletter, I suppose.
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      Yeah, I provide an Atom feed for my blog. It has about ~100 subscribers across a few different RSS subscription services, and I get a few hundred independent RSS client requests a week. Don't get me wrong: it all works really well, and I like providing it! But it's a very small fraction of my overall traffic, and other bloggers I've spoken to have indicated the same.
      - rendall 5y ago
        How do you tell, technically speaking, that someone is subscribed to your feed? Is it logging requests of the RSS feed url somehow? Doesnt Feedly, for one, aggregate RSS subscriptions for all of its users? If I were subscribed to your blog through Feedly, would you see me as an individual subscriber, or all of your Feedly subscribers as one subscriber? If so, I imagine this would deflate your numbers.
colordrops 5y ago
Many big OSS software projects host chat on IRC, e.g. Linux, NixOS, Neovim, OPNsense, sway
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I spend a lot of time on IRC, including in some of the chats for some of the largest OSS projects. I even still run my own social channel and maintain a bouncer for myself and friends! Pockets of activity don't mean that IRC as a whole isn't dead, the same way that the Pope doesn't make Latin a living language.
  - 6510 5y ago
    > I spend a lot of time on IRC I pronounce the end of the discussion!
nsv 5y ago
IRC has quite a few active users which is not what I'd call "dead". It's true that it's not as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it certainly still fills a certain niche.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I'm one of those active users. Perhaps "dead-end" is more accurate; I'll be on it until the networks I'm on turn off, but newcomers are a rarity these days.
vanilla_nut 5y ago
Hard disagree. As Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram become increasingly ad-laden and non-chronological, the real value of RSS becomes more and more obvious. I may exist on the fringe as someone who doesn't use any non-HN social media, but I know several businesses in my city that have cropped up in the last 2 or 3 years that basically only pushed out information on Facebook and Instagram. Since those services don't guarantee that your posts will ever make it to followers, much less in a timely fashion, those businesses have really struggled when they have to announce things day-of, or even the day before something happens (closing due to snow, or a party; changing their hours; removing something from the menu due to a supply chain problem; etc.). I've seen a lot of these businesses die, and I suspect Facebook and Instagram contribute. It's not that RSS would save these businesses. But it is true that if you build castles on the sand of another company, you have nobody to blame when your castle collapses.
- Jorengarenar 5y ago
  RSS isn't dying because it's useless. It's dying because it's not profitable for the big players (heck, you could say it's directly against their interest). And it also isn't good at providing statistics, so small players see it as miniscule (thus dropping too).
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I don't think we actually disagree: there's plenty of "real value" in RSS, real value that I extract both as a user (I use newsboat[1]) and a producer (I maintain an Atom feed for my blog). The problem isn't that RSS isn't good or useful, it's that it doesn't fit into the incentive structures that we've bought into. An Internet in which RSS thrives is not one in which John Q. Programmer makes 250k a year at Facebook or Google. [1]: https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/

moritonal 5y ago

The UK Gov site has an RSS feed for every other countries travel requirements. Its insane how open/easy it is to subscribe to a ordered relevant collection of information. I'd argue that accessible sites are realising its benefits.

Jorengarenar 5y ago

Unfortunately, what you see as "renaissance" is in fact the last battle of RSS. New webpages rarely bother implementing a feed; old ones, when getting new iterations, often drop support too. I've seen too many blogs without a feed... It's a miracle YT still has them!