13 ms·

RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps

197 points by conoro 4y ago

dewey 4y ago
> You can sign up for emails that go into the black hole of your inbox You could also just get the unique email address of a channel and let the email notifications go there, same result: https://slack.com/help/articles/206819278-Send-emails-to-Slack https://slack.com/help/articles/206819278-Send-emails-to-Sla...
amerine 4y ago
All I see is people claiming RSS is dead, but I never stopped. Moving between various readers and landed on Feedly for iOS a few years ago. Love it.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  Same. It was a major loss when Google killed Reader, but I just found another app and kept on RSSing. NewsBlurr is my current choice (windows).
- tootie 4y ago
  RSS is still the default distribution system for podcasts. It's probably the thin thread that is keeping Spotify from building a walled garden for audio.
  - marcrosoft 4y ago
    I boycott all podcasts that are exclusive to Spotify because I want to do my part in at least slowing down the eventual podcast walled garden future.
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      I also boycott them for a more practical reason: I can’t listen to them in my normal podcatchers! I’d have to switch all my podcast listening to Spotify to change that, and that’s a pain.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    Spotify is in fact intending to move away from RSS, as a means of creating a walled garden: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/08/spotify-hypes-the-revenue-potential-of-podcasts-and-audiobooks-at-its-second-investor-day-event/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/08/spotify-hypes-the-revenue-... > […] The company spent a good portion of its presentation specifically focused on podcasts, which it said had been “largely unchanged” for years before its entry into the market, due to the limitations of RSS. > Spotify cited how unbundling podcasts from RSS technology has paved the way for Spotify to generate revenue through these popular audio programs — a sentiment that’s not universally beloved by those who support an open podcast ecosystem. Spotify has disrupted that market by bringing some podcasts in-house, where they can only be heard on its service, and competitors have followed. This has fractured the ecosystem and left consumers at a disadvantage as some shows are no longer broadly available. > “We’ve been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution, which means that podcasts created on our platform are no longer held back by this outdated technology,” Maya Prohovnik, Spotify’s head of Talk, told investors.
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      Spotify has never used RSS, other than for Roach Motel-style ingest. The plan was to embrace, extend, and extinguish the podcasting medium, and the hard part of that is done. "Podcasting" was a standards-based, open medium. Now it's any audio show, and we've lost the unique name for the open medium. As Spotify incentivizes more and more creators to not publish an RSS feed, standards-based podcasting will become a fond memory.
    - cxr 4y ago
      The entire framing of this (esp. re "unbundling") is pretty gross. Unbundling is associated with disintermediation. What Spotify is doing is the opposite. What organizational dysfunction led to the circumstances here—where the writers and editors of the linked article uncritically publish and more or less legitimize this kind of shameless corporate spin?
      - jrochkind1 4y ago
        > What organizational dysfunction The whole article is pretty much just re-wording Spotify's press release. There seem to be no sources in it except for Spotify's press release. So, a very old form of organizational disfunction in journalism: The cheapest and quickest way to write an article is to use someone's press release as the only source, as it doesn't actually require, well, any journalism.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    Spotify has started and rapidly escalated a program to pay podcast producers for spotify-only podcasts. (with no rss feeds). Several podcasts I used to listen to and enjoy have become spotify-only. When I recently asked friends for podcast suggestions... several were spotify-only, i don't think the suggestors even realized it, cause they just listened on spotify anyway regardless. So I think Spotify agrees with you and is working on it...
- jhot 4y ago
  Same. After Google Reader I went with Feedly for a while, then self-hosted TTRSS, and currently self-hosted Miniflux. Miniflutt is my preferred Android client and ReadKit on Mac. The Miniflux web app is nice and simple but I prefer clients that mark as read on scroll. I occasionally venture onto Reddit or HN to see if I've missed anything big but rarely do.
  - soco 4y ago
    I use HN's RSS feed (plus a few others) with a Firefox extension (Feedbro) and that's all I need.
- pavel_lishin 4y ago
  It's not dead, but many things I wish supported RSS don't. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. These would be incredibly useful things to have native RSS feeds for, but instead I have to dig around and either use some tool someone built for the purpose - a tool at the mercy of the walled garden whose wall they're peeking over - or build my own nightmare factory.
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > Twitter It used to; killed off ~2013: * https://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2013/06/twitter-has-killed-off-rss-feeds-thats.html https://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2013/06/twitter-has-killed...
  - baskethead 4y ago
    None of those will because they rely on engagement to make money. They need people logging into their servers so that they can see what they are looking at. That's not how RSS works, so of course they won't support it.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      They rely on ads to make money. Twitter could add ads to their RSS feeds, just as they add ads to their app feeds.
    - FernandoMax 4y ago
      And I think this is the main reason Google Killed Google Reader. It was controversial (or illegal or ugly) to put ads over the third party content. And it was way better to have Adsense on the websites directly. Such "spring cleaning" was an alibi, not the reason. It was abandoned after some attempts to build a kind of social network inside, and probably they preferred people to create content on +1 instead of on blogs. But Blogger still exists, and there's a strong contradiction why to kill the reader for the blogs except one: Ads. Google Reader was bad for Ad business. And that's a big business in Google. And terribly sad.
    - asdff 4y ago
      Some places that do offer rss only offer truncated feeds so you actually have to open the website and be monetized and fingerprinted. there are of course workarounds but its an arms race with only a few maintainers.
- seltzered_ 4y ago
  One thing that's been corrosive to rss the past couple years have been podcast platforms. I find more podcasts (free ones) that can only be accessed through platforms like Google podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or Anchor, with no rss feed link to use in a platform agnostic podcatcher app.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    My policy is to just ignore these. There's so much content out there it's not hard to find other (proper) podcasts to listen to.
    - seltzered_ 4y ago
      Disagree on 'blaming the creator' argument. Not everyone is aware of these technical philosophies and are focused on getting a good story out there. Feel the same way about social media.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    Unfortunately, to Spotify's great delight, the word "podcast" has been successfully embraced, extended, and extinguished. Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the word "podcast" to mean audio shows on proprietary platforms that require proprietary players.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      The word never made much sense though. A "podcast" is a file that you download from the internet. What's the point of calling it a podcast?
      - jethro_tell 4y ago
        And yet here we are clicking a floppy disk icon to save it. Language and meaning change over time. That's OK.
        4y ago
- iroddis 4y ago
  +1 for Feedly, although I use Feedly Classic on IOS for a more concise, no-frills UI. I really appreciate the header + summary without thumbnails format for quickly going through large-volume sources (like HN).
- AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
  I dropped Feedly because I found that 90%+ of my feeds would only put the article title and the first sentence into the feed, then require I click the URL to pull up the full article. It wasn't very fun constantly having to switch between my RSS app and my browser, so I just stopped using it.
  - distrill 4y ago
    Yeah this really sucks. I think some do this for paywall reasons, but there are definitely models out there to allow in-reader paywall access. Stratechery has an interesting approach - when you subscribe you get a unique feed that can be cancelled when you stop paying.
  - babelfish 4y ago
    This is an issue with the site's RSS feed, not Feedly. Feedly has an option to open any individual feeds posts in an in-app browser directly (and if you're on iOS, even enable Reader mode!) to combat this, so you don't need to switch apps!
    - pepjo26 4y ago
      I use Reeder for iOS + Feedly. What the OP describes started happening to me with all sites at the same time 2 days ago. Interestingly, it does not happen on the main Feedly site. So I do think that Feedly is making the experience worse with third party readers. I would speculate that this is done because third party readers don’t show ads.
  - pinkano 4y ago
    We let publishers decide whether to showcase their content via a full feed (ie. full text and multimedia content can be read through a reader app) or a partial feed (ie. only showing limited text, inviting readers to browse full-content directly on their website). The choice is entirely in their hands. Some publishers offer full RSS feeds as one of the benefits of their subscriptions. It might be something to explore for your favorite must-read sources.
  - ove_halseth 4y ago
- yokoprime 4y ago
  NetNewsWire has been my goto last couple of years. It's fantastic, and you cannot beat the price (free and open source)
rambambram 4y ago
> RSS and advertising never really made good bedfellows. Isn't Feedburner part of Google nowadays? I remember reading somewhere that they inject ads in the feeds.
- mpclark 4y ago
  Feedburner is a zombie product now, and has been for a few years.
  - rambambram 4y ago
    I'm subscribed to some feeds from them. I didn't notice any ads, yet. Do you mean by 'zombie product' that they don't do ads anymore?
    - karaterobot 4y ago
      I think it's that it feels like a dead product, even though it's still running. Not a lot of new features being developed, and some features getting turned off "to support the product's next chapter"[1]. There hasn't been a firm announcement about Feedburner being sunsetted, but given Google's history of killing things off (including Reader, apropos of this thread's topic), it does feel like the walking dead. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/changes-to-feedburner https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/changes-to...
  - Kye 4y ago
    They did at least clean out services that had been dead for 15 years.
baskethead 4y ago
I've been using Blogtrottr to email me my RSS feeds for whatever I'm following. It's run without any hiccups in I think over 10 years. I have tons of feeds just emailing me every day and I skim through them and read whatever I find interesting. It's really awesome, much better for me than anything else.
- stevekemp 4y ago
  Yeah I also use a simple rss2email utility that I hacked together. Having feeds in my mailbox means I can search/filter and tag them appropriately. A lot of these online feed-readers have terrible UIs for managing large numbers of feeds, but I guess they allow the same benefit of keeping track of state (read vs. unread) that email also offers.
- lunaticman 4y ago
  I haven't heard about blogtrottr before, but landed on a similar idea and built RSS-to-email service for myself and opened it for others (https://briefcake.com https://briefcake.com). Mainly, I did it to battle my pointless social network and doom scrolling addictions -- and it worked amazingly. I spend less of my time on internet, more of my time with kid. I'm slowly extending support for other social networks, to my surprise, they are not that "social" and it's quite a pain to scrape anything from them.
zerop 4y ago
Want to start a subthread here on what makes it great and despite many attempts to kill it, it still rocks! My take 1. Widely adopted protocol, clients in all programming languages. 2. Publicly readable without password 3. Get notification for new items in many tools like Slack 4. Easy to produce and consume 5. Many nice Web UI Reader available <Add yours>
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  Not necessary, but nice: can be monetized in a healthy way via things like API tokens. I have a few podcasts whose RSS feed endpoints accept a unique, revocable token and check that server-side -- but the client needs only the ability to pass query params in the URL (which it should have anyways). It's a great way for creators to get paid without imposing on their users.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
Don't call it a comeback! There's still this lurking mess of RSS 0.91 vs 1.0 vs 2.0 vs Atom. As one of the folks involved in creating Atom I'm frustrated with the outcome. These days it'd probably be JSON, right?
- detaro 4y ago
  There is JSONFeed, but that was pretty much a flash in the pan.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    If it was created instead of Atom it would have been nice, but it doesn't have any major advantages so no reason to add yet another format to the mix.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      It was created taking some lessons of Atom into account. It does have a few minor advantages: multiple attachment support, more "branding" images support (author avatars, post "banners"), easier to build JSON than XML in most API backends these days. The one major advantage is that JSONFeed is easier to work with it in tandem with WebSub and other pubsub systems that assume messages are natively JSON, you can use the same JSONFeed item generating code for both pull (HTTP GET) and push (WebSub) scenarios. Certainly even the main advantage isn't a huge reason to switch to JSONFeed if you've already got RSS/Atom feeds, but I believe the hope for JSONFeed was always that it would spark some sites/backends that don't want to support XML, don't have good XML libraries, or don't want to use their template languages to drive RSS/Atom feeds to be able to build something simpler instead resulting in more feeds overall than if things were just left to the XML-ish status quo. I don't know how successful it has been on that front, though, but I appreciate it exists for trying.
  - latexr 4y ago
    > that was pretty much a flash in the pan. I’ll repurpose an older comment[1]. It was in response to “I doubt very much [JSON feeds] will catch on”. > There’s little incentive for websites to change to JSON feeds when their RSS feeds are already implemented, working well, and generated automatically. But several good RSS readers added support for JSON feeds when the format was introduced and that’s all you need for it to be viable; it isn’t important if it “catches on” after that when the flexibility is there. > JSON feeds were great for me because I generate my own feeds for personal consumption and can now do so with simpler code. I understand I’m in a minority—most people consume feeds and never create their own—but the larger point is JSON feeds may have already done their job: they exist and are supported if you need them. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777477
hosh 4y ago
I know XMPP is not as popular these days, but there is an XMPP extension for pushing Atom stanzas as a sort of the push complement to RSS. … and using Slack to consolidate RSS turns RSS from pull to push. (Slack probably has caching mechanisms across all workspaces to reduce pull bandwith).
- zaik 4y ago
  For those who want to try it, movim.eu is a federated social network build on this XMPP extension.
  - hosh 4y ago
    Do you know if there is a name for that XMPP/Atom pubsub service, and if web publishers can put up some kind of icon so people know they can subscribe to that kind of a feed?
    - zaik 4y ago
      I have seen jmp.chat using the XMPP logo for this: https://blog.jmp.chat/ https://blog.jmp.chat/
FernandoMax 4y ago
I loved blogs, I loved the vibe (like newsletters today) and I loved RSS (way better than email for receiving information. IN fact I am creating a project, and It will have updates by RSS. Why? Because I f**ing love it.
powersnail 4y ago
RSS has been alive this whole time. Blogs usually have it by default, the big news organizations have it. The only thing I'm not satisfied with reading news on RSS, is that news organizations push too many articles, to the point that reading the headlines alone takes quite some time. There's nearly 100 articles per day per source sometimes. Unlike a newspaper, which has a natural structure of priority and hierarchy, in an RSS reader, every head line has the same salience, and it's a pain to weed out what's important. I kinda hope news organizations would make a separate "weekly digest feed", 30 or so articles per week.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  I think feedly has features to help filter less popular articles
- ecliptik 4y ago
  Newsblur has a training feature [1], with a thumbs up/down on article tags, author, and keywords in a title that can bubble up more interesting articles or completely hide them. Unfortunately training is per feed, there's a newer Premium Pro tier with global training coming out with it, but it is much more expensive [2]. 1. https://www.newsblur.com/faq https://www.newsblur.com/faq (under Intelligence section) 2. https://forum.newsblur.com/t/global-keyword-training/5419/6 https://forum.newsblur.com/t/global-keyword-training/5419/6
  - mh- 4y ago
    Wow, $299/year. you weren't kidding. I assume this is targeted at professionals that are trying to stay abreast of developments around certain topics/subjects. If you think about it through that lens it's reasonably priced, I suppose.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      lol all these RSS readers really go in on solving problems as broadly as possible - not just ocean boiling, it leaves each user with a subpar experience even if it’s novel (having to laboriously refine results yourself). it would be easy for them to for instance scrape many popular news sources or APIs for ranking/top story info to at least cover these extremely common and extremely noisy feeds
warpeggio 4y ago
If you're already using Slack to consume information asynchronously, this might be an OK fit. I would advise against co-mingling an RSS feed with your team's main communication or coordination channels.
aendruk 4y ago
A timely observation. I’ve just been setting up the /feed command for ops notifications in a local tech group’s Matrix space.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I've been using a little matrix app of my own making that sends notificatins to a specific matrix room when big jobs complete. Its nothing fancy (and conceptually not different than slack notifications), and sysadmins have been leveraging email for the same exact purpose...but i like me some matrix...plus, said same matrix room can be made to receive other/outside notifications too; win-win!
- zja 4y ago
  How have you been doing that? I'm new to using matrix, is that a builtin functionality or an extension to the client you use?
  - aendruk 4y ago
    Just a few days. It’s done by running an external service that joins rooms and listens for commands. We’re using maubot [1] since it’s one of the more popular ones, but it has some rough edges [2] [3] [4]. Our setup for just the “rss” plugin is dockerized and documented here [5]. [1]: https://github.com/maubot/maubot#readme https://github.com/maubot/maubot#readme [2]: https://github.com/maubot/maubot/issues/110 https://github.com/maubot/maubot/issues/110 [3]: https://github.com/maubot/maubot/pull/147#issuecomment-997226916 https://github.com/maubot/maubot/pull/147#issuecomment-99722... [4]: https://github.com/maubot/rss/pull/35 https://github.com/maubot/rss/pull/35 [5]: https://github.com/SeaGL/matrix-feed-notifications https://github.com/SeaGL/matrix-feed-notifications
    - zja 4y ago
      Very cool, thanks!
low_tech_punk 4y ago
Never underestimate the resilience of "low" tech. Rule of least power still holds true. Prior HN discussions: Turn GitHub into an RSS Reader (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010144)
mbesto 4y ago
Is there any way outside of just polling every 1~5 minutes to get realtime updates to RSS? Curious what is standard here? If you do do polling, what interval?
- banana_giraffe 4y ago
  Yes, you need to poll. Ideally with If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers so you can save some resources if the feed hasn't changed.
- timbit42 4y ago
  I usually do 60 minutes. I'm not desperate enough to check every 5 or 10 minutes. I've come across a few websites that block you if you refresh too frequently. I'm not sure whether those ones still do that though.
- qw 4y ago
  I don't know if they are still in use, but there are pub/sub services that can be used for notifications. This was created to avoid unnecessary polling of RSS/Atom feeds: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
- derekzhouzhen 4y ago
  If you need realtime update, then RSS is probably not the right tool. For polling, I currently do the following: * with `HTTP 304: not modified` result, I'll come back in 60 minutes * if there is any update, I'll come back in 4 hours * if there is no cache control header, such as etag or last-modified, I will poll every 12 hours.
- rakoo 4y ago
  Apart from websub, which does require some resources, servers could provide long-polling such that the socket remains open, and give a reply as soon as there is one. Clients don't poll, servers aren't flooded (but do need to keep an open connection )
- Pakdef 4y ago
  I poll every hour... for my need, that is plenty
pbardea 4y ago
Funny seeing this pop-up on my #hacker-news slack channel that periodically polls for the top stories :) I actually prefer the ability to push things like the top stories of the day to me through either Slack on email rather than having the temptation to constantly refresh an RSS feed app. An added bonus is that I frequently add some custom logic to curate the feed to my liking (based on the feed).
jokabrink 4y ago
Maybe of interest: Even Youtube has RSS for channels. If your RSS reader does not pick up the relevant tag, the URL is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$ID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$ID with $ID starting with `UC`, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVogAsASqbceBmQMi1WA39g https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVogAsA... for "ARTE.tv documentaries".
reaperducer 4y ago
Can anyone recommend a good terminal-based RSS reader? Preferably one that plays nice with small screens.
- dewey 4y ago
  You could give https://newsboat.org https://newsboat.org a try, it's a fork of Newsbeuter. I shared my Newsbeuter setup a long time ago here (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-newsbeuter-to-read-your-rss-feeds/ https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-newsbeuter-to-read-y...) but have since moved on to https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app and Reeder (iPad OS, iOS, Mac). They all support the Google Reader API so it makes using any client very easy.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I went in the oppositve direction of @dewey....i had a miniflux instance, then moved to newsboat. It serves my need well enough.
tracker1 4y ago
I think what really and significantly curbed RSS usage what Google reducing effective tooling (allowing you to see/subscribe to RSS in the browser) combined with killing Google Reader. Of course by that time, half my feeds were just links to the full URL (ads and all). Then, they take the next step and introduce AMP, which is really cool in a way, but effectively makes Google the gateway to it all, and Google Ads especially. Google makes ad revenue, cuts out most of the sites themselves and increases google value, while reducing the value of the actual site producing the content.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
RSS never seems to work on Windows. Funny when it is so simple. I did not realize this before. A simple client that fetches a feed, parses it, and searches the content for a keyword took me ~25 minutes to implement.
tbyehl 4y ago
> You can sign up for emails that go into the black hole of your inbox I feel like Slack has already become a black hole equal to my Inbox in all respects and am hopeful that the Interoffice Mail envelope will stage a comeback for the things I really need to see.
dijonman2 4y ago
Fuck Slack.. and interrupt driven workflows.
VectorLock 4y ago
The email filter you never check is now a Slack channel you've muted.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
That reminds me of a project we did years ago for a large Dutch public transit company. We built an app with push notifications, and sometimes they needed to do big announcements to all users. We made our push notification back-end poll an RSS feed from their CMS every minute or so, if there was a new one on there it would get broadcast to all users. It... wasn't ideal though, in hindsight we should've hacked together a UI so that the people sending the message could confirm the message and see how many people would be receiving it first. There have been a few Incidents of accidental test messages sent out. One was my fault, early on, because production and test were the same machine. The other was the operators' fault, but by then the app had two million installations and it caused a bit of a social media storm that day (#hajo). It was funny to see that one play out, and how quickly there are print companies making and advertising merchandise about whatever is trending on twitter that day.
- mongrelion 4y ago
  Oh man I remember this! Seeing the test notification message popping up on my colleague's phone. Damn. That must have hurt!
p5v 4y ago
Honestly, this has been one of the hidden gems that gets so many people to stick with our service Murmel (https://murmel.social https://murmel.social). We support RSS feeds everywhere. It wasn't long before people discovered that and began using our service to deliver relevant stories to their Slack teams and stakeholders. As the author says, RSS is the closest thing to an open MVP-style API that "just works," and hasn't been plagued by a company's closed garden rules. I am wondering, what else could one use RSS for. Long live RSS!

197 points by conoro 4y ago

> You can sign up for emails that go into the black hole of your inbox You could also just get the unique email address of a channel and let the email notifications go there, same result: https://slack.com/help/articles/206819278-Send-emails-to-Slack https://slack.com/help/articles/206819278-Send-emails-to-Sla...

amerine 4y ago

All I see is people claiming RSS is dead, but I never stopped. Moving between various readers and landed on Feedly for iOS a few years ago. Love it.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
Same. It was a major loss when Google killed Reader, but I just found another app and kept on RSSing. NewsBlurr is my current choice (windows).
tootie 4y ago
RSS is still the default distribution system for podcasts. It's probably the thin thread that is keeping Spotify from building a walled garden for audio.
- marcrosoft 4y ago
  I boycott all podcasts that are exclusive to Spotify because I want to do my part in at least slowing down the eventual podcast walled garden future.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    I also boycott them for a more practical reason: I can’t listen to them in my normal podcatchers! I’d have to switch all my podcast listening to Spotify to change that, and that’s a pain.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  Spotify is in fact intending to move away from RSS, as a means of creating a walled garden: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/08/spotify-hypes-the-revenue-potential-of-podcasts-and-audiobooks-at-its-second-investor-day-event/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/08/spotify-hypes-the-revenue-... > […] The company spent a good portion of its presentation specifically focused on podcasts, which it said had been “largely unchanged” for years before its entry into the market, due to the limitations of RSS. > Spotify cited how unbundling podcasts from RSS technology has paved the way for Spotify to generate revenue through these popular audio programs — a sentiment that’s not universally beloved by those who support an open podcast ecosystem. Spotify has disrupted that market by bringing some podcasts in-house, where they can only be heard on its service, and competitors have followed. This has fractured the ecosystem and left consumers at a disadvantage as some shows are no longer broadly available. > “We’ve been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution, which means that podcasts created on our platform are no longer held back by this outdated technology,” Maya Prohovnik, Spotify’s head of Talk, told investors.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    Spotify has never used RSS, other than for Roach Motel-style ingest. The plan was to embrace, extend, and extinguish the podcasting medium, and the hard part of that is done. "Podcasting" was a standards-based, open medium. Now it's any audio show, and we've lost the unique name for the open medium. As Spotify incentivizes more and more creators to not publish an RSS feed, standards-based podcasting will become a fond memory.
  - cxr 4y ago
    The entire framing of this (esp. re "unbundling") is pretty gross. Unbundling is associated with disintermediation. What Spotify is doing is the opposite. What organizational dysfunction led to the circumstances here—where the writers and editors of the linked article uncritically publish and more or less legitimize this kind of shameless corporate spin?
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      > What organizational dysfunction The whole article is pretty much just re-wording Spotify's press release. There seem to be no sources in it except for Spotify's press release. So, a very old form of organizational disfunction in journalism: The cheapest and quickest way to write an article is to use someone's press release as the only source, as it doesn't actually require, well, any journalism.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Spotify has started and rapidly escalated a program to pay podcast producers for spotify-only podcasts. (with no rss feeds). Several podcasts I used to listen to and enjoy have become spotify-only. When I recently asked friends for podcast suggestions... several were spotify-only, i don't think the suggestors even realized it, cause they just listened on spotify anyway regardless. So I think Spotify agrees with you and is working on it...
jhot 4y ago
Same. After Google Reader I went with Feedly for a while, then self-hosted TTRSS, and currently self-hosted Miniflux. Miniflutt is my preferred Android client and ReadKit on Mac. The Miniflux web app is nice and simple but I prefer clients that mark as read on scroll. I occasionally venture onto Reddit or HN to see if I've missed anything big but rarely do.
- soco 4y ago
  I use HN's RSS feed (plus a few others) with a Firefox extension (Feedbro) and that's all I need.
pavel_lishin 4y ago
It's not dead, but many things I wish supported RSS don't. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. These would be incredibly useful things to have native RSS feeds for, but instead I have to dig around and either use some tool someone built for the purpose - a tool at the mercy of the walled garden whose wall they're peeking over - or build my own nightmare factory.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > Twitter It used to; killed off ~2013: * https://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2013/06/twitter-has-killed-off-rss-feeds-thats.html https://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2013/06/twitter-has-killed...
- baskethead 4y ago
  None of those will because they rely on engagement to make money. They need people logging into their servers so that they can see what they are looking at. That's not how RSS works, so of course they won't support it.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    They rely on ads to make money. Twitter could add ads to their RSS feeds, just as they add ads to their app feeds.
  - FernandoMax 4y ago
    And I think this is the main reason Google Killed Google Reader. It was controversial (or illegal or ugly) to put ads over the third party content. And it was way better to have Adsense on the websites directly. Such "spring cleaning" was an alibi, not the reason. It was abandoned after some attempts to build a kind of social network inside, and probably they preferred people to create content on +1 instead of on blogs. But Blogger still exists, and there's a strong contradiction why to kill the reader for the blogs except one: Ads. Google Reader was bad for Ad business. And that's a big business in Google. And terribly sad.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Some places that do offer rss only offer truncated feeds so you actually have to open the website and be monetized and fingerprinted. there are of course workarounds but its an arms race with only a few maintainers.
seltzered_ 4y ago
One thing that's been corrosive to rss the past couple years have been podcast platforms. I find more podcasts (free ones) that can only be accessed through platforms like Google podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or Anchor, with no rss feed link to use in a platform agnostic podcatcher app.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  My policy is to just ignore these. There's so much content out there it's not hard to find other (proper) podcasts to listen to.
  - seltzered_ 4y ago
    Disagree on 'blaming the creator' argument. Not everyone is aware of these technical philosophies and are focused on getting a good story out there. Feel the same way about social media.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Unfortunately, to Spotify's great delight, the word "podcast" has been successfully embraced, extended, and extinguished. Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the word "podcast" to mean audio shows on proprietary platforms that require proprietary players.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    The word never made much sense though. A "podcast" is a file that you download from the internet. What's the point of calling it a podcast?
    - jethro_tell 4y ago
      And yet here we are clicking a floppy disk icon to save it. Language and meaning change over time. That's OK.
      - 4y ago
iroddis 4y ago
+1 for Feedly, although I use Feedly Classic on IOS for a more concise, no-frills UI. I really appreciate the header + summary without thumbnails format for quickly going through large-volume sources (like HN).
AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
I dropped Feedly because I found that 90%+ of my feeds would only put the article title and the first sentence into the feed, then require I click the URL to pull up the full article. It wasn't very fun constantly having to switch between my RSS app and my browser, so I just stopped using it.
- distrill 4y ago
  Yeah this really sucks. I think some do this for paywall reasons, but there are definitely models out there to allow in-reader paywall access. Stratechery has an interesting approach - when you subscribe you get a unique feed that can be cancelled when you stop paying.
- babelfish 4y ago
  This is an issue with the site's RSS feed, not Feedly. Feedly has an option to open any individual feeds posts in an in-app browser directly (and if you're on iOS, even enable Reader mode!) to combat this, so you don't need to switch apps!
  - pepjo26 4y ago
    I use Reeder for iOS + Feedly. What the OP describes started happening to me with all sites at the same time 2 days ago. Interestingly, it does not happen on the main Feedly site. So I do think that Feedly is making the experience worse with third party readers. I would speculate that this is done because third party readers don’t show ads.
- pinkano 4y ago
  We let publishers decide whether to showcase their content via a full feed (ie. full text and multimedia content can be read through a reader app) or a partial feed (ie. only showing limited text, inviting readers to browse full-content directly on their website). The choice is entirely in their hands. Some publishers offer full RSS feeds as one of the benefits of their subscriptions. It might be something to explore for your favorite must-read sources.
- ove_halseth 4y ago
yokoprime 4y ago
NetNewsWire has been my goto last couple of years. It's fantastic, and you cannot beat the price (free and open source)

rambambram 4y ago

> RSS and advertising never really made good bedfellows. Isn't Feedburner part of Google nowadays? I remember reading somewhere that they inject ads in the feeds.

mpclark 4y ago
Feedburner is a zombie product now, and has been for a few years.
- rambambram 4y ago
  I'm subscribed to some feeds from them. I didn't notice any ads, yet. Do you mean by 'zombie product' that they don't do ads anymore?
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    I think it's that it feels like a dead product, even though it's still running. Not a lot of new features being developed, and some features getting turned off "to support the product's next chapter"[1]. There hasn't been a firm announcement about Feedburner being sunsetted, but given Google's history of killing things off (including Reader, apropos of this thread's topic), it does feel like the walking dead. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/changes-to-feedburner https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/changes-to...
- Kye 4y ago
  They did at least clean out services that had been dead for 15 years.

baskethead 4y ago

I've been using Blogtrottr to email me my RSS feeds for whatever I'm following. It's run without any hiccups in I think over 10 years. I have tons of feeds just emailing me every day and I skim through them and read whatever I find interesting. It's really awesome, much better for me than anything else.

stevekemp 4y ago
Yeah I also use a simple rss2email utility that I hacked together. Having feeds in my mailbox means I can search/filter and tag them appropriately. A lot of these online feed-readers have terrible UIs for managing large numbers of feeds, but I guess they allow the same benefit of keeping track of state (read vs. unread) that email also offers.
lunaticman 4y ago
I haven't heard about blogtrottr before, but landed on a similar idea and built RSS-to-email service for myself and opened it for others (https://briefcake.com https://briefcake.com). Mainly, I did it to battle my pointless social network and doom scrolling addictions -- and it worked amazingly. I spend less of my time on internet, more of my time with kid. I'm slowly extending support for other social networks, to my surprise, they are not that "social" and it's quite a pain to scrape anything from them.

zerop 4y ago

Want to start a subthread here on what makes it great and despite many attempts to kill it, it still rocks! My take 1. Widely adopted protocol, clients in all programming languages. 2. Publicly readable without password 3. Get notification for new items in many tools like Slack 4. Easy to produce and consume 5. Many nice Web UI Reader available <Add yours>

ascagnel_ 4y ago
Not necessary, but nice: can be monetized in a healthy way via things like API tokens. I have a few podcasts whose RSS feed endpoints accept a unique, revocable token and check that server-side -- but the client needs only the ability to pass query params in the URL (which it should have anyways). It's a great way for creators to get paid without imposing on their users.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

Don't call it a comeback! There's still this lurking mess of RSS 0.91 vs 1.0 vs 2.0 vs Atom. As one of the folks involved in creating Atom I'm frustrated with the outcome. These days it'd probably be JSON, right?

detaro 4y ago
There is JSONFeed, but that was pretty much a flash in the pan.
- kevincox 4y ago
  If it was created instead of Atom it would have been nice, but it doesn't have any major advantages so no reason to add yet another format to the mix.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    It was created taking some lessons of Atom into account. It does have a few minor advantages: multiple attachment support, more "branding" images support (author avatars, post "banners"), easier to build JSON than XML in most API backends these days. The one major advantage is that JSONFeed is easier to work with it in tandem with WebSub and other pubsub systems that assume messages are natively JSON, you can use the same JSONFeed item generating code for both pull (HTTP GET) and push (WebSub) scenarios. Certainly even the main advantage isn't a huge reason to switch to JSONFeed if you've already got RSS/Atom feeds, but I believe the hope for JSONFeed was always that it would spark some sites/backends that don't want to support XML, don't have good XML libraries, or don't want to use their template languages to drive RSS/Atom feeds to be able to build something simpler instead resulting in more feeds overall than if things were just left to the XML-ish status quo. I don't know how successful it has been on that front, though, but I appreciate it exists for trying.
- latexr 4y ago
  > that was pretty much a flash in the pan. I’ll repurpose an older comment[1]. It was in response to “I doubt very much [JSON feeds] will catch on”. > There’s little incentive for websites to change to JSON feeds when their RSS feeds are already implemented, working well, and generated automatically. But several good RSS readers added support for JSON feeds when the format was introduced and that’s all you need for it to be viable; it isn’t important if it “catches on” after that when the flexibility is there. > JSON feeds were great for me because I generate my own feeds for personal consumption and can now do so with simpler code. I understand I’m in a minority—most people consume feeds and never create their own—but the larger point is JSON feeds may have already done their job: they exist and are supported if you need them. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777477

hosh 4y ago

I know XMPP is not as popular these days, but there is an XMPP extension for pushing Atom stanzas as a sort of the push complement to RSS. … and using Slack to consolidate RSS turns RSS from pull to push. (Slack probably has caching mechanisms across all workspaces to reduce pull bandwith).

zaik 4y ago
For those who want to try it, movim.eu is a federated social network build on this XMPP extension.
- hosh 4y ago
  Do you know if there is a name for that XMPP/Atom pubsub service, and if web publishers can put up some kind of icon so people know they can subscribe to that kind of a feed?
  - zaik 4y ago
    I have seen jmp.chat using the XMPP logo for this: https://blog.jmp.chat/ https://blog.jmp.chat/

FernandoMax 4y ago

I loved blogs, I loved the vibe (like newsletters today) and I loved RSS (way better than email for receiving information. IN fact I am creating a project, and It will have updates by RSS. Why? Because I f**ing love it.

powersnail 4y ago

RSS has been alive this whole time. Blogs usually have it by default, the big news organizations have it. The only thing I'm not satisfied with reading news on RSS, is that news organizations push too many articles, to the point that reading the headlines alone takes quite some time. There's nearly 100 articles per day per source sometimes. Unlike a newspaper, which has a natural structure of priority and hierarchy, in an RSS reader, every head line has the same salience, and it's a pain to weed out what's important. I kinda hope news organizations would make a separate "weekly digest feed", 30 or so articles per week.

shepherdjerred 4y ago
I think feedly has features to help filter less popular articles
ecliptik 4y ago
Newsblur has a training feature [1], with a thumbs up/down on article tags, author, and keywords in a title that can bubble up more interesting articles or completely hide them. Unfortunately training is per feed, there's a newer Premium Pro tier with global training coming out with it, but it is much more expensive [2]. 1. https://www.newsblur.com/faq https://www.newsblur.com/faq (under Intelligence section) 2. https://forum.newsblur.com/t/global-keyword-training/5419/6 https://forum.newsblur.com/t/global-keyword-training/5419/6
- mh- 4y ago
  Wow, $299/year. you weren't kidding. I assume this is targeted at professionals that are trying to stay abreast of developments around certain topics/subjects. If you think about it through that lens it's reasonably priced, I suppose.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    lol all these RSS readers really go in on solving problems as broadly as possible - not just ocean boiling, it leaves each user with a subpar experience even if it’s novel (having to laboriously refine results yourself). it would be easy for them to for instance scrape many popular news sources or APIs for ranking/top story info to at least cover these extremely common and extremely noisy feeds

warpeggio 4y ago

If you're already using Slack to consume information asynchronously, this might be an OK fit. I would advise against co-mingling an RSS feed with your team's main communication or coordination channels.

aendruk 4y ago

A timely observation. I’ve just been setting up the /feed command for ops notifications in a local tech group’s Matrix space.

mxuribe 4y ago
I've been using a little matrix app of my own making that sends notificatins to a specific matrix room when big jobs complete. Its nothing fancy (and conceptually not different than slack notifications), and sysadmins have been leveraging email for the same exact purpose...but i like me some matrix...plus, said same matrix room can be made to receive other/outside notifications too; win-win!
zja 4y ago
How have you been doing that? I'm new to using matrix, is that a builtin functionality or an extension to the client you use?
- aendruk 4y ago
  Just a few days. It’s done by running an external service that joins rooms and listens for commands. We’re using maubot [1] since it’s one of the more popular ones, but it has some rough edges [2] [3] [4]. Our setup for just the “rss” plugin is dockerized and documented here [5]. [1]: https://github.com/maubot/maubot#readme https://github.com/maubot/maubot#readme [2]: https://github.com/maubot/maubot/issues/110 https://github.com/maubot/maubot/issues/110 [3]: https://github.com/maubot/maubot/pull/147#issuecomment-997226916 https://github.com/maubot/maubot/pull/147#issuecomment-99722... [4]: https://github.com/maubot/rss/pull/35 https://github.com/maubot/rss/pull/35 [5]: https://github.com/SeaGL/matrix-feed-notifications https://github.com/SeaGL/matrix-feed-notifications
  - zja 4y ago
    Very cool, thanks!

low_tech_punk 4y ago

Never underestimate the resilience of "low" tech. Rule of least power still holds true. Prior HN discussions: Turn GitHub into an RSS Reader (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010144)

mbesto 4y ago

Is there any way outside of just polling every 1~5 minutes to get realtime updates to RSS? Curious what is standard here? If you do do polling, what interval?

banana_giraffe 4y ago
Yes, you need to poll. Ideally with If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers so you can save some resources if the feed hasn't changed.
timbit42 4y ago
I usually do 60 minutes. I'm not desperate enough to check every 5 or 10 minutes. I've come across a few websites that block you if you refresh too frequently. I'm not sure whether those ones still do that though.
qw 4y ago
I don't know if they are still in use, but there are pub/sub services that can be used for notifications. This was created to avoid unnecessary polling of RSS/Atom feeds: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
derekzhouzhen 4y ago
If you need realtime update, then RSS is probably not the right tool. For polling, I currently do the following: * with `HTTP 304: not modified` result, I'll come back in 60 minutes * if there is any update, I'll come back in 4 hours * if there is no cache control header, such as etag or last-modified, I will poll every 12 hours.
rakoo 4y ago
Apart from websub, which does require some resources, servers could provide long-polling such that the socket remains open, and give a reply as soon as there is one. Clients don't poll, servers aren't flooded (but do need to keep an open connection )
Pakdef 4y ago
I poll every hour... for my need, that is plenty

pbardea 4y ago

Funny seeing this pop-up on my #hacker-news slack channel that periodically polls for the top stories :) I actually prefer the ability to push things like the top stories of the day to me through either Slack on email rather than having the temptation to constantly refresh an RSS feed app. An added bonus is that I frequently add some custom logic to curate the feed to my liking (based on the feed).

jokabrink 4y ago

Maybe of interest: Even Youtube has RSS for channels. If your RSS reader does not pick up the relevant tag, the URL is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$ID https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$ID with $ID starting with `UC`, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVogAsASqbceBmQMi1WA39g https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVogAsA... for "ARTE.tv documentaries".

reaperducer 4y ago

Can anyone recommend a good terminal-based RSS reader? Preferably one that plays nice with small screens.

dewey 4y ago
You could give https://newsboat.org https://newsboat.org a try, it's a fork of Newsbeuter. I shared my Newsbeuter setup a long time ago here (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-newsbeuter-to-read-your-rss-feeds/ https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-newsbeuter-to-read-y...) but have since moved on to https://miniflux.app https://miniflux.app and Reeder (iPad OS, iOS, Mac). They all support the Google Reader API so it makes using any client very easy.
mxuribe 4y ago
I went in the oppositve direction of @dewey....i had a miniflux instance, then moved to newsboat. It serves my need well enough.

tracker1 4y ago

I think what really and significantly curbed RSS usage what Google reducing effective tooling (allowing you to see/subscribe to RSS in the browser) combined with killing Google Reader. Of course by that time, half my feeds were just links to the full URL (ads and all). Then, they take the next step and introduce AMP, which is really cool in a way, but effectively makes Google the gateway to it all, and Google Ads especially. Google makes ad revenue, cuts out most of the sites themselves and increases google value, while reducing the value of the actual site producing the content.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

RSS never seems to work on Windows. Funny when it is so simple. I did not realize this before. A simple client that fetches a feed, parses it, and searches the content for a keyword took me ~25 minutes to implement.

tbyehl 4y ago

> You can sign up for emails that go into the black hole of your inbox I feel like Slack has already become a black hole equal to my Inbox in all respects and am hopeful that the Interoffice Mail envelope will stage a comeback for the things I really need to see.

dijonman2 4y ago

Fuck Slack.. and interrupt driven workflows.

VectorLock 4y ago

The email filter you never check is now a Slack channel you've muted.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

That reminds me of a project we did years ago for a large Dutch public transit company. We built an app with push notifications, and sometimes they needed to do big announcements to all users. We made our push notification back-end poll an RSS feed from their CMS every minute or so, if there was a new one on there it would get broadcast to all users. It... wasn't ideal though, in hindsight we should've hacked together a UI so that the people sending the message could confirm the message and see how many people would be receiving it first. There have been a few Incidents of accidental test messages sent out. One was my fault, early on, because production and test were the same machine. The other was the operators' fault, but by then the app had two million installations and it caused a bit of a social media storm that day (#hajo). It was funny to see that one play out, and how quickly there are print companies making and advertising merchandise about whatever is trending on twitter that day.

mongrelion 4y ago
Oh man I remember this! Seeing the test notification message popping up on my colleague's phone. Damn. That must have hurt!

p5v 4y ago

Honestly, this has been one of the hidden gems that gets so many people to stick with our service Murmel (https://murmel.social https://murmel.social). We support RSS feeds everywhere. It wasn't long before people discovered that and began using our service to deliver relevant stories to their Slack teams and stakeholders. As the author says, RSS is the closest thing to an open MVP-style API that "just works," and hasn't been plagued by a company's closed garden rules. I am wondering, what else could one use RSS for. Long live RSS!