7 ms·

Thoughts on RSS

50 points by rckrd 4y ago

scep12 4y ago
Is it possible that Podcasts are the last remaining widespread/mainstream use case of RSS?
- iamryo 4y ago
  No
- cactusmatt 4y ago
  Not at all. Most sites support RSS. There are still people (myself included) that consume most of their web content via RSS.
  - scep12 4y ago
    Is that really "widespread/mainstream" though? Podcasts listening is pretty huge; in the US "38% of those age 12+ in the U.S. are monthly podcast listeners" (ref: https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-infinite-dial-2022/ https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-infinite-dial-2022/)
- almog 4y ago
  For me at least, it's quite on the contrary, there are few viable cases for content I wish not to consume via RSS. Some of my reasons are: 1. Having a central place where I can keep track of my my reading lists. 2. Offline first (download for later use is the default behavior) 3. Deduplication - for advanced use cases such as messy web feeds, where ordering is far from guaranteed, a well defined key can reduce the clutter significantly. 4. Advanced filtering (Newsboat is great at that)
- asdff 4y ago
  No. A lot of things are crawled with RSS. With pubmed for example you can set up search terms as rss feeds.
- Thristle 4y ago
  You can still use RSS for most news sites and some feed type sites youtube,news(papers) and so on have support for RSS or are supported using 3rd party providers
- remorses 4y ago
  RSS is also used a lot as a trigger on no code automation platforms like Zapier
  - xcambar 4y ago
    And there's an article on the front page of HN just about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32139612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32139612
derekzhouzhen 4y ago
> RSS is one-way publishing; there is no way for content creators and their audience to interact I consider this as the main strength of RSS; respecting the privacy of the audience. If the audience want to interact they can still choose to do so. The small amount of friction actually helps to beat down the noises.
- daptaq 4y ago
  Atom even allows specifying an Email address: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287#section-3.2.3 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287#section-3.2.3 So if someone wants to contact you, they can do so directly.
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    RSS too: managingEditor Email address for person responsible for editorial content. geo@herald.com (George Matesky) webMaster Email address for person responsible for technical issues relating to channel. betty@herald.com (Betty Guernsey) https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#requiredChannelElements https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#requiredChannel... (but was also present in 0.91)
- forbiddenvoid 4y ago
  This really only benefits the audience, though, which means there is little to no incentive on the part of the creator to use RSS.
  - derekzhouzhen 4y ago
    Reaching the audience that value their privacy is a good incentive, at least for most personal bloggers. I don't care who is reading my blog but I do want to make the process as hassle free as possible.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    If you don’t have a RSS feed, I won’t see your content. There are only a handful of sites I view direct any more and most likely you are not going to make the cut.
molticrystal 4y ago
>Walled garden content aggregation is significantly more profitable than free syndication (e.g., Reddit, Facebook) Reddit is a poor example(at least for now), considering you can still to this day add ".rss" to just about any search or url and get a feed. Their co-founder Aaron Swartz developed RSS. Before they destroyed modmail, you could use your rss reader to keep track of those as well. Considering the corporate direction they are going, I'm sure the rss feature's days are numbered, as everything else, principles, morals, and ethics infused into reddit from Aaron Swartz are systematically replaced or removed.
- jkmcf 4y ago
  > Their co-founder Aaron Swartz developed RSS "He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
cxr 4y ago
There are several questionable claims and viewpoints in this post. This is one I felt worthy of addressing because information to the contrary is not widely known: > RSS is one-way publishing; there is no way for content creators and their audience to interact Not true. Feeds support a byline for each post item. This typically contains the author's name. You can, though, also include an email address there. For readers that are also mail clients, those readers* can allow the user to "reply to" a given feed item (in the same way that your mail client lets you reply to a message sitting in your mailbox). I know of very few feeds, however, where people actually include a reply-to address. It's a network/ecosystem problem. * or any other reader that wishes to allow invoking the user's default mail client
- pornel 4y ago
  And every entry has a link, so users can follow it if they want more content/interactivity/contact.
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  That's really interesting, though I don't think that private 1:1 messages are what most people have in mind when they think of interaction between content creators and their audience. I think the simplest way of adding a more traditional "replies" feature to RSS would be to have some way of indicating an RSS <item> is a reply to another RSS item in a different feed. Then maybe add some sort of POST endpoint where anyone can request that a reply be linked back to from the author's post, and there you go: a fully decentralized comment system.
  - garrickvanburen 4y ago
    <comments> ?
    - Ajedi32 4y ago
      Pretty much, except the existing spec for that provides no way for people to post or read comments from the RSS reader; you have to go to an external URL.
jesuslop 4y ago
In my case, that I don't think is extraordinary, I scan the titles in the RSS reader and click on them to go their fully rendered pages more often than not. That tacks some of the noted downsides. Content discoverability is no problem either. Content for me is web-first, but if provider exposes RSS, It gets more recurrence from me. User unfriendliness can be fought with browser extensions.
- georgeoliver 4y ago
  I wonder what percentage of RSS users read all their articles in their reader (if possible). I use RSS the same way you do but I've assumed I'm in the minority.
mdp2021 4y ago
> RSS readers act like email clients in how they render content via HTML. Unfortunately, email content isn't as rich as the JavaScript-powered web today Can somebody expand on-behalf on this ludicrous idea and its unspecified details; it seems like somebody has found something better than hypertext¹ - but left the specs inexplicit. If anybody has an idea if that positively meant something... (¹codable text? It reminds me of the self-modifying code we used in the 8-bit times. Surely not the way I want text - which has to be complete and assessable.) By the way, RSS informs you that something exists; what it points to may even include rockets and theatrical performance in the end. And all along the way, if I intend to receive hypertext I want it certain that code will run only in containers I decided.
- ihuman 4y ago
  The HTML in email isn't modern HTML+CSS. IIRC due to Outlook and backwards-compatibility, it's out of date. The author is saying that RSS readers render the content using older HTML standards. I don't know if that's true, but that's how I read their statement.
  - thrashh 4y ago
    Trying to get an up to date web browser embedded in an application is difficult. The people who make web browsers make their components first most for their web browser, not for embedding in other peoples’ projects. Usually you can find some web browser that you can embed in your application but it won’t be up to date because there is no money in maintaining it.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      > Usually you can find some web browser that you can embed in your application but it won’t be up to date If you want an HTML renderer, using a full «web browser» engine may be a bad idea. An HTML rendering may probably need less security updates.
      - thrashh 4y ago
lloydatkinson 4y ago
For some reason this misses out a point that I personally find deeply annoying. I’d like the ability to share an image for the RSS feed for my site. This is usually some horrific mix of nested html or xml cdata and no one can agree on how to put an image in a RSS feed item. Different readers and platforms seem to just make it up on a whim. Podcast RSS has the fortune of being pretty consistent and contains an image for the podcast.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > how to put an image I do not get it: an <img> tag? If you mean "embed it": people in general would not want to receive it!...
- derekzhouzhen 4y ago
  > no one can agree on how to put an image in a RSS feed item There is, if you put a image at the enclosure tag, most feed readers will recognize that. https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltenclosuregtSubelementOfLtitemgt https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltenclosuregtSu...
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    Tried it and it didn't seem to work. I will try it again though. Again most SO answers and articles I saw have some terrible CDATA thing going on.
    - derekzhouzhen 4y ago
      See my blog's feed as an example on how to use enclosure: https://blog.3qin.us/feed.xml https://blog.3qin.us/feed.xml W3C has a RSS validator that you can use to validate the RSS file. I also have a blog linter that cross check the consistency between the metadata from the feed and the metadata from the blog posts https://roastidio.us/lint https://roastidio.us/lint Hint: very few blogs pass without warning.
Zak 4y ago
> RSS readers act like email clients in how they render content via HTML. Unfortunately, email content isn't as rich as the JavaScript-powered web today. Maybe that's OK for email (and podcasts), but not for generic blog content. It's not clear if this is meant to address the needs of publishers or readers. For consumption, I consider refusing to run scripts or render sophisticated layouts a plus. Many browsers include reader modes to produce a similar effect because readers do not usually want auto-playing videos or email subscription overlays. Of course, if I was publishing something and trying to make money from it, I might want to play a video with ads in it regardless of the reader's preference, and I definitely want their email address even though they're already subscribed by RSS so that I have another means of competing for their attention.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
Hm. I am an active RSS user, used it since it came to be, and not once did I want my RSS feed to have more complex text formatting than it already has.
dusted 4y ago
I utterly and etirely fail to see how javascript is evenly remotely required to render a blog.. If your blog requires javascript to simply show content, you're building a browser inside the browser and need to stop.
diegocg 4y ago
RSS is not dead because it covers an use case for which there is no replacement. The attempt to kill RSS didn't consist in creating a better RSS, it consisted in walled gardens. The use case of providing structured updates for a web site has no better replacement than RSS right now. Some walled gardens like twitter feeds are the closest replacement and they are not nearly the same. But the article gets it wrong IMO (except for the last point). The main people to blame about this situation is not the incentives, nor the companies who tried to created the walled gardens. Even if there were incentives, RSS would not improve. As long as web makers don't treat it as a first class citizen, RSS will keep being an "optional" thing that requires separate extensions, programs, etc, it is just not going to be massively used if using it isn't super obvious. It's the browser makers' fault (Mozilla, I'm looking at you). RSS was treated almost like an annoyance. Firefox only provided an icon and "live bookmarks" thing with a really poor UX and then removed it because not many people used it (meanwhile we have Pocket shipped by default...). Google, they never had interest in competing with their own walled garden. And that's how we ended with the current horrible state of the web, where every website asks you to subscribe via email to their wonderful newsletter. If we only had a technology that would allow websites to provide content that users can read asynchronously and doesn't involve filling their mailboxes...something like a newsletter RSS...maybe then we would not need to place a stupid JS popup in every fucking website in the world and we would let people easily subscribe to a newsletter RSS. Unfortunately, browser makers are too busy with things like webassembly, because making the JS popups faster is way more important than fixing the basic interaction with the web.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  ActivityStreams is pretty much RSS on steroids. The whole Fediverse is built on that standard.
JKolios 4y ago
RSS was, to make a slightly cliche paraphrase, a more elegant web for a more civilized age. It was user controlled content consumption. It declined because it conflicts with the "addict them and stuff their eyeballs with intrusive personalized ads" monetization model of the post 2010 internet.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
I’ve had ideas on making a Reddit like RSS reader. Every user would have their own feed list that others can see by clicking on that user and add to their own. The main feed would be ranked by most followed sites in an HN like layout with comments. And of course there would be another section for personal feed. I just don’t know how much server fees would cost, a lot of feeds don’t have pubDates, polling or archive retrieval are expensive. I thought about making a fat client setup so the users machine does that work, whatever it takes to make something clean and simple without an ugly premium package with 100 things no one wants.
- kevincox 4y ago
  > a lot of feeds don’t have pubDates I don't see how this would significantly impact the cost. The main cost is that you need to remember all entry IDs to know which you have seen before. However you should probably do this anyway because published dates aren't very reliable. Plus if you are storing user comments then you probably want to keep the entries around for a long time anyways. > polling or archive retrieval are expensive Polling isn't very expensive. It is just a HTTP get. Many feeds also support conditional requests so you just get a 304. If you have enough feeds that becomes expensive you can play with the update time, poll feeds of active users more often, slow down polling if a feed doesn't post often... I also don't know how archive retrieval is expensive. You only really need to do this when a new feed is added (and even then you only need to do it if you want history). Maybe if the full "first page" of the feed is new you can look back a bit into the archive but this is so rare that it probably isn't worth doing. I guess for pagnated (not archived) feeds you should technically check all pages each time but so few readers even support pagnation at all that I would consider a feed that doesn't put new entries on the first page broken and wouldn't bother support it. TL;DR I don't think this service would be very expensive to run. If you get enough users and feeds to start being concerned about the cost of polling you will have enough resources to deal with it. Source: I run a small RSS reader service.
  - pipeline_peak 4y ago
    How entry id’s serve as an alternative to pubDates? Also by entry id, do you mean RSS item? Most of my concern comes from seeing NewsBlur, Feedly, and The Old Reader resort to premium services. Throttling users unless they pay, now that’s not a game I want to be apart of.
sys_64738 4y ago
RSS is excellent at organizing chaotic websites into readable form. You can glance down the list quickly like reading email subject headers. There's limited opportunity to be distracted by flashy graphics or other time wasters. To try to explain RSS to somebody else who isn't familiar I usually don't bother.
cntrl 4y ago
RSS feeds are in my eyes the best way to follow cross-platform content in a single place without worrying about privacy. It allows you to follow your favorite artists / content creators on instagram (via bibliogram), twitter (via nitter), youtube (via invidious), tiktok (via proxitok) etc. without having an actual account to these services or using obscure apps. You can also follow your favorite news site, subscribe to ebay search terms (if your looking for one specific thing), hacker news, blog posts and much more all following one standard on one platform.

Thoughts on RSS

50 points by rckrd 4y ago

scep12 4y ago

Is it possible that Podcasts are the last remaining widespread/mainstream use case of RSS?

iamryo 4y ago
No
cactusmatt 4y ago
Not at all. Most sites support RSS. There are still people (myself included) that consume most of their web content via RSS.
- scep12 4y ago
  Is that really "widespread/mainstream" though? Podcasts listening is pretty huge; in the US "38% of those age 12+ in the U.S. are monthly podcast listeners" (ref: https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-infinite-dial-2022/ https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-infinite-dial-2022/)
almog 4y ago
For me at least, it's quite on the contrary, there are few viable cases for content I wish not to consume via RSS. Some of my reasons are: 1. Having a central place where I can keep track of my my reading lists. 2. Offline first (download for later use is the default behavior) 3. Deduplication - for advanced use cases such as messy web feeds, where ordering is far from guaranteed, a well defined key can reduce the clutter significantly. 4. Advanced filtering (Newsboat is great at that)
asdff 4y ago
No. A lot of things are crawled with RSS. With pubmed for example you can set up search terms as rss feeds.
Thristle 4y ago
You can still use RSS for most news sites and some feed type sites youtube,news(papers) and so on have support for RSS or are supported using 3rd party providers
remorses 4y ago
RSS is also used a lot as a trigger on no code automation platforms like Zapier
- xcambar 4y ago
  And there's an article on the front page of HN just about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32139612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32139612

derekzhouzhen 4y ago

> RSS is one-way publishing; there is no way for content creators and their audience to interact I consider this as the main strength of RSS; respecting the privacy of the audience. If the audience want to interact they can still choose to do so. The small amount of friction actually helps to beat down the noises.

daptaq 4y ago
Atom even allows specifying an Email address: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287#section-3.2.3 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4287#section-3.2.3 So if someone wants to contact you, they can do so directly.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  RSS too: managingEditor Email address for person responsible for editorial content. geo@herald.com (George Matesky) webMaster Email address for person responsible for technical issues relating to channel. betty@herald.com (Betty Guernsey) https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#requiredChannelElements https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#requiredChannel... (but was also present in 0.91)
forbiddenvoid 4y ago
This really only benefits the audience, though, which means there is little to no incentive on the part of the creator to use RSS.
- derekzhouzhen 4y ago
  Reaching the audience that value their privacy is a good incentive, at least for most personal bloggers. I don't care who is reading my blog but I do want to make the process as hassle free as possible.
- fmajid 4y ago
  If you don’t have a RSS feed, I won’t see your content. There are only a handful of sites I view direct any more and most likely you are not going to make the cut.

molticrystal 4y ago

>Walled garden content aggregation is significantly more profitable than free syndication (e.g., Reddit, Facebook) Reddit is a poor example(at least for now), considering you can still to this day add ".rss" to just about any search or url and get a feed. Their co-founder Aaron Swartz developed RSS. Before they destroyed modmail, you could use your rss reader to keep track of those as well. Considering the corporate direction they are going, I'm sure the rss feature's days are numbered, as everything else, principles, morals, and ethics infused into reddit from Aaron Swartz are systematically replaced or removed.

jkmcf 4y ago
> Their co-founder Aaron Swartz developed RSS "He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

cxr 4y ago

There are several questionable claims and viewpoints in this post. This is one I felt worthy of addressing because information to the contrary is not widely known: > RSS is one-way publishing; there is no way for content creators and their audience to interact Not true. Feeds support a byline for each post item. This typically contains the author's name. You can, though, also include an email address there. For readers that are also mail clients, those readers* can allow the user to "reply to" a given feed item (in the same way that your mail client lets you reply to a message sitting in your mailbox). I know of very few feeds, however, where people actually include a reply-to address. It's a network/ecosystem problem. * or any other reader that wishes to allow invoking the user's default mail client

pornel 4y ago
And every entry has a link, so users can follow it if they want more content/interactivity/contact.
Ajedi32 4y ago
That's really interesting, though I don't think that private 1:1 messages are what most people have in mind when they think of interaction between content creators and their audience. I think the simplest way of adding a more traditional "replies" feature to RSS would be to have some way of indicating an RSS <item> is a reply to another RSS item in a different feed. Then maybe add some sort of POST endpoint where anyone can request that a reply be linked back to from the author's post, and there you go: a fully decentralized comment system.
- garrickvanburen 4y ago
  <comments> ?
  - Ajedi32 4y ago
    Pretty much, except the existing spec for that provides no way for people to post or read comments from the RSS reader; you have to go to an external URL.

jesuslop 4y ago

In my case, that I don't think is extraordinary, I scan the titles in the RSS reader and click on them to go their fully rendered pages more often than not. That tacks some of the noted downsides. Content discoverability is no problem either. Content for me is web-first, but if provider exposes RSS, It gets more recurrence from me. User unfriendliness can be fought with browser extensions.

georgeoliver 4y ago
I wonder what percentage of RSS users read all their articles in their reader (if possible). I use RSS the same way you do but I've assumed I'm in the minority.

mdp2021 4y ago

> RSS readers act like email clients in how they render content via HTML. Unfortunately, email content isn't as rich as the JavaScript-powered web today Can somebody expand on-behalf on this ludicrous idea and its unspecified details; it seems like somebody has found something better than hypertext¹ - but left the specs inexplicit. If anybody has an idea if that positively meant something... (¹codable text? It reminds me of the self-modifying code we used in the 8-bit times. Surely not the way I want text - which has to be complete and assessable.) By the way, RSS informs you that something exists; what it points to may even include rockets and theatrical performance in the end. And all along the way, if I intend to receive hypertext I want it certain that code will run only in containers I decided.

ihuman 4y ago
The HTML in email isn't modern HTML+CSS. IIRC due to Outlook and backwards-compatibility, it's out of date. The author is saying that RSS readers render the content using older HTML standards. I don't know if that's true, but that's how I read their statement.
- thrashh 4y ago
  Trying to get an up to date web browser embedded in an application is difficult. The people who make web browsers make their components first most for their web browser, not for embedding in other peoples’ projects. Usually you can find some web browser that you can embed in your application but it won’t be up to date because there is no money in maintaining it.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > Usually you can find some web browser that you can embed in your application but it won’t be up to date If you want an HTML renderer, using a full «web browser» engine may be a bad idea. An HTML rendering may probably need less security updates.
    - thrashh 4y ago

lloydatkinson 4y ago

For some reason this misses out a point that I personally find deeply annoying. I’d like the ability to share an image for the RSS feed for my site. This is usually some horrific mix of nested html or xml cdata and no one can agree on how to put an image in a RSS feed item. Different readers and platforms seem to just make it up on a whim. Podcast RSS has the fortune of being pretty consistent and contains an image for the podcast.

mdp2021 4y ago
> how to put an image I do not get it: an <img> tag? If you mean "embed it": people in general would not want to receive it!...
derekzhouzhen 4y ago
> no one can agree on how to put an image in a RSS feed item There is, if you put a image at the enclosure tag, most feed readers will recognize that. https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltenclosuregtSubelementOfLtitemgt https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltenclosuregtSu...
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Tried it and it didn't seem to work. I will try it again though. Again most SO answers and articles I saw have some terrible CDATA thing going on.
  - derekzhouzhen 4y ago
    See my blog's feed as an example on how to use enclosure: https://blog.3qin.us/feed.xml https://blog.3qin.us/feed.xml W3C has a RSS validator that you can use to validate the RSS file. I also have a blog linter that cross check the consistency between the metadata from the feed and the metadata from the blog posts https://roastidio.us/lint https://roastidio.us/lint Hint: very few blogs pass without warning.

Zak 4y ago

> RSS readers act like email clients in how they render content via HTML. Unfortunately, email content isn't as rich as the JavaScript-powered web today. Maybe that's OK for email (and podcasts), but not for generic blog content. It's not clear if this is meant to address the needs of publishers or readers. For consumption, I consider refusing to run scripts or render sophisticated layouts a plus. Many browsers include reader modes to produce a similar effect because readers do not usually want auto-playing videos or email subscription overlays. Of course, if I was publishing something and trying to make money from it, I might want to play a video with ads in it regardless of the reader's preference, and I definitely want their email address even though they're already subscribed by RSS so that I have another means of competing for their attention.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

Hm. I am an active RSS user, used it since it came to be, and not once did I want my RSS feed to have more complex text formatting than it already has.

dusted 4y ago

I utterly and etirely fail to see how javascript is evenly remotely required to render a blog.. If your blog requires javascript to simply show content, you're building a browser inside the browser and need to stop.

diegocg 4y ago

RSS is not dead because it covers an use case for which there is no replacement. The attempt to kill RSS didn't consist in creating a better RSS, it consisted in walled gardens. The use case of providing structured updates for a web site has no better replacement than RSS right now. Some walled gardens like twitter feeds are the closest replacement and they are not nearly the same. But the article gets it wrong IMO (except for the last point). The main people to blame about this situation is not the incentives, nor the companies who tried to created the walled gardens. Even if there were incentives, RSS would not improve. As long as web makers don't treat it as a first class citizen, RSS will keep being an "optional" thing that requires separate extensions, programs, etc, it is just not going to be massively used if using it isn't super obvious. It's the browser makers' fault (Mozilla, I'm looking at you). RSS was treated almost like an annoyance. Firefox only provided an icon and "live bookmarks" thing with a really poor UX and then removed it because not many people used it (meanwhile we have Pocket shipped by default...). Google, they never had interest in competing with their own walled garden. And that's how we ended with the current horrible state of the web, where every website asks you to subscribe via email to their wonderful newsletter. If we only had a technology that would allow websites to provide content that users can read asynchronously and doesn't involve filling their mailboxes...something like a newsletter RSS...maybe then we would not need to place a stupid JS popup in every fucking website in the world and we would let people easily subscribe to a newsletter RSS. Unfortunately, browser makers are too busy with things like webassembly, because making the JS popups faster is way more important than fixing the basic interaction with the web.

zozbot234 4y ago
ActivityStreams is pretty much RSS on steroids. The whole Fediverse is built on that standard.

JKolios 4y ago

RSS was, to make a slightly cliche paraphrase, a more elegant web for a more civilized age. It was user controlled content consumption. It declined because it conflicts with the "addict them and stuff their eyeballs with intrusive personalized ads" monetization model of the post 2010 internet.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

I’ve had ideas on making a Reddit like RSS reader. Every user would have their own feed list that others can see by clicking on that user and add to their own. The main feed would be ranked by most followed sites in an HN like layout with comments. And of course there would be another section for personal feed. I just don’t know how much server fees would cost, a lot of feeds don’t have pubDates, polling or archive retrieval are expensive. I thought about making a fat client setup so the users machine does that work, whatever it takes to make something clean and simple without an ugly premium package with 100 things no one wants.

kevincox 4y ago
> a lot of feeds don’t have pubDates I don't see how this would significantly impact the cost. The main cost is that you need to remember all entry IDs to know which you have seen before. However you should probably do this anyway because published dates aren't very reliable. Plus if you are storing user comments then you probably want to keep the entries around for a long time anyways. > polling or archive retrieval are expensive Polling isn't very expensive. It is just a HTTP get. Many feeds also support conditional requests so you just get a 304. If you have enough feeds that becomes expensive you can play with the update time, poll feeds of active users more often, slow down polling if a feed doesn't post often... I also don't know how archive retrieval is expensive. You only really need to do this when a new feed is added (and even then you only need to do it if you want history). Maybe if the full "first page" of the feed is new you can look back a bit into the archive but this is so rare that it probably isn't worth doing. I guess for pagnated (not archived) feeds you should technically check all pages each time but so few readers even support pagnation at all that I would consider a feed that doesn't put new entries on the first page broken and wouldn't bother support it. TL;DR I don't think this service would be very expensive to run. If you get enough users and feeds to start being concerned about the cost of polling you will have enough resources to deal with it. Source: I run a small RSS reader service.
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  How entry id’s serve as an alternative to pubDates? Also by entry id, do you mean RSS item? Most of my concern comes from seeing NewsBlur, Feedly, and The Old Reader resort to premium services. Throttling users unless they pay, now that’s not a game I want to be apart of.

sys_64738 4y ago

RSS is excellent at organizing chaotic websites into readable form. You can glance down the list quickly like reading email subject headers. There's limited opportunity to be distracted by flashy graphics or other time wasters. To try to explain RSS to somebody else who isn't familiar I usually don't bother.

cntrl 4y ago

RSS feeds are in my eyes the best way to follow cross-platform content in a single place without worrying about privacy. It allows you to follow your favorite artists / content creators on instagram (via bibliogram), twitter (via nitter), youtube (via invidious), tiktok (via proxitok) etc. without having an actual account to these services or using obscure apps. You can also follow your favorite news site, subscribe to ebay search terms (if your looking for one specific thing), hacker news, blog posts and much more all following one standard on one platform.