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Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

Is RSS still actively developed as a protocol? If not, why not? Are there any viable alternatives on the horizon? I find it really troubling that we seem to have resigned ourselves to web content discovery and distribution belonging to corporations like Google and Meta. Also grateful for any reading recommendations on this subject, both on RSS specifically and on the question of web content discovery/distribution broadly. (I’ve read through most of the stories/posts pronouncing RSS dead or resurrecting it and I’m not convinced either way.)

metadat 4y ago
What about the RSS protocol is lacking and in need of further development? It seems to get the job done. I do agree about discovery in general, it's uncomfortable counting on Google, Microsoft, and Meta / TikTok for content discovery. Thankfully there are some smart folks working on fresh takes on the search engine. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Search%20engine%20&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- emodendroket 4y ago
  In fact changing is a barrier to wide adoption of technology. But as far as people actually using RSS, I don't think it has ever recovered from the consolidation with Google Reader and subsequent killing of the project.
- InvisibleUp 4y ago
  RSS doesn't work all that well across multiple devices, such as a desktop and a mobile phone. You can subscribe to them on both, sure, but they won't be synced with each other. Apps such as Google Reader and such resolve that problem, but the death of Google Reader really shook a lot of people's trust in RSS, I think. Plus now RSS has to compete with social media feeds, which are where a lot of people are looking for updates already.
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    Syncing across devices isn't the job of RSS, or any protocol, and certainly not the role of a data format in the case of RSS. State is an application's job.
    - jayd16 4y ago
      Ok then we can just phrase it as there's no standard way to sync RSS subs across apps. Point is its a clear user frustration with no easy solve.
      - hammyhavoc 4y ago
        Fever API is implemented in many apps.
      - chrisdhal 4y ago
        Cross platform applications and web based readers exist. It is easily solved using one of those.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      Let’s try and read the comment more charitably: most clients do not offer a good solution for this either, making the protocol less appealing than it might otherwise be.
  - baby 4y ago
    I think you are not talking about rss
  - sudobash1 4y ago
    I think that is a good thing. For "syncing across devices" to be a server-side feature of RSS, that would require that the server be keeping track of who I am and what I have read. The way the RSS protocol is, it is stateless and may be completely anonymous. Keeping track of the state is (and should be) the application's job.
- bundleunbundle 4y ago
  100% agree that it does it what it does beautifully but it seems to me like there's little to no stewardship around it, and no one actively making sure that it can work with new types of content and provide a viable channel to professional publishers (in effect looking after both sides of the RSS "marketplace".) Search engines are part of the puzzle for sure, but would love to see more transparent/open source recommender systems integrated with something like RSS to foster discovery without explicit queries.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    New types of content? Like what?
- jayd16 4y ago
  Lets face it, the ideals are great but RSS kinda sucks. Its stable, its sturdy and maybe this is my own ignorance but I can think of a lot of missing features the average user would expect. I don't think there's a standard practice for caching, serving deltas, or anything other than polling the feed. Keep in mind I mean standard as in any generic reader will implement it. There's no cross application protocols to share subscriptions, progress, already-read, or any other kind of state across apps. Privacy is a problem. The feeds are generic and public. OAauth could probably be implemented into clients these days such that a generic feed reader could access private content but there are no standards for it. Monetization is a huge problem. No one wants to scrape pay walls and no one wants to serve free content. DRM sucks but content providers are going to demand it so it should be integrated. I'm fairly surprised I haven't seen a crypto-wallet integrated RSS standard with these features. How did that not make the cut for crypto ideas?
  - snoopy_telex 4y ago
    RSS is s data interchange standard. "subscriptions, progress, already-read, or any other kind of state across apps" is well out of scope of a data interchange format. You may claim that the data interchange format is useless without those features being implemented on the app side, however it doesn't mean the data interchange format is flawed. That said, pretty much any RSS app does what you describe. I use Feedly across many devices, and it's all synced. The other primary RSS powered app I use is Apple Podcasts which also syncs those states between all my devices. Feeds being "public" isn't an issue. I pay for many feeds provided by creators on patreon. These are behind token based auth. I also have a few completely custom feeds that are behind http basic auth and generate on demand completely custom content. Monetization for public feeds also doesn't seem like an issue. I get ads embedded into some feeds, and others like Ars just do snippets and I click though to the main site and see the ads there. Why would crypto help at all here?
  - vidanay 4y ago
    Damn happy none of those "features" exist
- Ferret7446 4y ago
  A clear standard for one. Last I checked, RSS did not have one clear standard, nor do most implementations abide by that standard. Atom on the other hand is great.
jabroni_salad 4y ago
My personal observation is that writers get some kind of intimacy from mailing lists and so prefer that. Whether RSS is happening depends on the platform they publish on rather than any conscious decision. (keep in mind we are both hackernews users before you hit me with the 'um actually' in regards to your own blog. i already know you like rss.)
- shapefrog 4y ago
  Email mailing lists are just rss feeds with extra steps.
kevincox 4y ago
I still get all of my news so I'd say it is still going strong. I think you are right that the big platforms tend to remove RSS as they grow because they would rather have lock-in than providing the ibterfaces that their users want but that is a minor strike against RSS. I think the biggest problem is just that users don't really know about it. The easy-to-discover auto-discovery buttons have been removed from browsers so most users don't even know. Based on my experience a lot of people are very happy with RSS ones you set them up with a feed reader and an extension that adds the RSS discovery back to the browser. So I guess the biggest problem isn't the discovery of RSS feeds but the disicery of RSS itself.
leephillips 4y ago
It was never dying and so didn’t need to come back. It doesn’t require much in the way of development because it serves its simple purpose well. If a website has the proper <link> element in its header some browsers detect that and display an RSS icon for easy subscription. That’s how I follow websites; I don’t subscribe to newsletters.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
baby 4y ago
RSS is either decreasing or increasing. I feel like it’s still working well enough (I use it) but if I’d have to guess I would say it’s decreasing (and thus will die). What it needs is a bunch of volunteers to implement it for all languages (provide libraries) and frameworks (provide rss feeds by default for blogs and cms). For the most part it works quite well, but I think some static blog generators, or centralized blog platforms, are not playing nice with RSS (and I’m guessing this is on purpose).
- bundleunbundle 4y ago
  Thanks! This is (also) what I meant by development -- ensuring there's an ecosystem of connectors, libraries etc. around it to facilitate adoption/usage.
  - snoopy_telex 4y ago
    What do you believe is missing? RSS is xml. It supports xml namespaces for extensions. Did you know that podcast feeds are RSS feeds plus a xml namespace specific for podcasts? https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirements https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirement...
    - baby 4y ago
      reminds of the RSS feed of buzzsprout, the free podcasting hosting, that doesn't include a link to the actual episode.
- snoopy_telex 4y ago
  I’m pretty sure there’s a few dozen to hundreds of rss libraries for any language you could want. Wordpress provides RSS feeds out of the box without doing a thing. Static generators like Jekyll (GitHub uses) support generating RSS feeds as well. It’s not an issue of this being difficult to implement. It’s been around for decades. It’s widely supported.
  - 4y ago
tootie 4y ago
RSS is still the main mode of podcast distribution. It's somewhat hidden behind podcast apps, but that's what distributors are still using to create feeds.
emptyparadise 4y ago
Seems like mailing lists are getting popular. I wish I could have those in my RSS reader.
- AdamGibbins 4y ago
  You can with NewsBlur: https://blog.newsblur.com/2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-newsblur/ https://blog.newsblur.com/2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-new...
  - emptyparadise 4y ago
    That's a beautiful website. Thanks for the suggestion.
    - AdamGibbins 4y ago
      They're great, been paying them since Google Reader shutdown. Can't fault, great service.
- trynewideas 4y ago
  RSS readers that manage mailing lists: Inoreader: https://www.inoreader.com/blog/2020/02/declutter-your-inbox-subscribe-to-email-newsletters-straight-into-inoreader.html https://www.inoreader.com/blog/2020/02/declutter-your-inbox-... Newsblur: https://blog.newsblur.com/2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-newsblur/ https://blog.newsblur.com/2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-new... (open source and self-hostable) Feedly: https://feedly.com/i/pro https://feedly.com/i/pro Also, Kill the Newsletter (https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/) converts newsletters to RSS feeds, and is open source/self-hostable.
  - emptyparadise 4y ago
    I really should get around to self-hosting my RSS reader.
    - 4y ago
simonswords82 4y ago
RSS as it was existed 10+ years ago there were was the little orange RSS icon on most websites and blogs is 100% dead and won't ever come back. Personally I think this is a shame but the majority BigCorps want to know who is consuming their news/information and dislike their information being disseminated anonymously via RSS feeds. They'd prefer be able to track you online (because you visited their website to read said information), or have your email address to spam from time to time etc. There's no commercial imperative to keep RSS, which is why it is dead.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  You can still track people via RSS, it's like having a scheduled check-in as to where you are unless you use a VPN.
pkrumins 4y ago
RSS is holding strong. I run a network of news aggregators (https://TechURLs.com https://TechURLs.com, https://DevURLs.com https://DevURLs.com, and many others) and only two or three news sources out of a hundred have removed their RSS feeds over the last two years.
- cauefcr 4y ago
  It would be nice to have an RSS of your aggregator, but i love it already.
  - pkrumins 4y ago
    That’s the most requested feature and it’s on my todo list. Subscribe to our updates to know when it’s done!
no_wizard 4y ago
Its strongest hold is definitely in Podcasting. Right now, thats basically all a podcast feed is, its an RSS feed. This is largely due to the hands off nature that Apple had with podcasting for so long, though Spotify[0] is trying to wrestle this control over the ecosystem in moving away from publishing an open RSS feed. Its very much alive in this way though, at least for now, and I think its important to recognize the role of RSS in keeping podcast distribution fairly uniform and relatively meritocratic. I think this why it has exploded as a medium, in part. Its also why you get such a fantastic selection of great third party players. Unfortunately, I think RSS for news is already past its prime, though alot of "indie" sites and blogs still do have feeds it seems. [0]: https://singhkays.com/blog/how-spotify-is-killing-the-open-podcast-ecosystem/ https://singhkays.com/blog/how-spotify-is-killing-the-open-p...
- bundleunbundle 4y ago
  Great read thanks!
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Holy shit. I hope Spotify crashes and burns with this.
creeble 4y ago
Hard to say that it’s coming back I think. My my.yahoo.com (yes, I know, Yahoo! Is hardly a worthwhile data point these days) was carefully constructed of a dozen or more RSS feeds, and 80-90% are now dead. I tried resurrecting a few on the assumption that the sources just changed their URI, but all (maybe 3?) that I tried had no RSS feed any more, or none that I could find. I think two were now paywalled sites, which is probably the broader trend - RSS is just a different form of ad-blocking from the content-provider’s perspective.
gordaco 4y ago
The thing about RSS is that big tech companies are not very fond of it because it gives too much control to the user and it's not so easy to flood you with ads when you use it. So, many of those companies either don't offer RSS, or they have it but they don't advertise it much and maybe they just do the bare minimum. Unfortunately, since social media has replaced blogs as the go-to place for discussions and user-generated content in general, this means that a lot of the platforms that people use most frequently don't have an RSS feed, or have it but it's not very useful for whatever reason. However: many, many other webpages out there do offer RSS, and I'm guessing that plenty of people use it, at least on technical circles. I use it mostly for comics and, to a lesser extent, for a few personal blogs and even news. A lot of people use it for podcasts. It has also been used to automatically download new episodes of TV shows in torrent downloaders (I'm guessing that you could mark this particular application as controversial; I won't comment on that. But it is useful at the very least). Also, if used properly, it allows for a lot of user control. You could, for example, pipe a youtube RSS into yt-dlp so that videos from a particular creator are automatically downloaded into a folder in your computer, or use any alert of new content to trigger whatever you want to do (like custom alerts when someone comments in a blog of yours, or whatever). RSS has a lot of potential, and because of that I don't think it's going away soon. Now, you are also worried about the problem of content discovery. There is a problem here, because whenever we as users want a source of curated content, advertisers are going to do whatever they can in order to squeeze their shit into our pipes. So I personally prefer a "dumb" protocol like RSS where I just say "give me new updates from just THIS site", and leave discovery to more organic, less automated (therefore less gameable by advertisers) means. The closest I can think of to solve your problem is the usage of blog rings/networks (they used to exist, ten years ago... I don't know the state of the art right now), but this still means that there is someone doing the aggregation.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  In-feed ads aren't uncommon.
- rambambram 4y ago
  > I use it mostly for comics I recently collected a couple of hundred feeds from various sources and about different subjects, and I was (positively) surprised by the amount of blogs with daily/weekly comics. > the problem of content discovery I agree here. But 'discovery' is something one does, it requires effort. Definitely when compared with a Twitter feed or FB timeline that only requires mindless scrolling. I also think curation and aggregation by humans can help here, by presenting some interesting and honest feeds of different subjects to start with. And thanks for mentioning some more potential applications of RSS!
pdntspa 4y ago
Why does the protocol require active development to be useful?
bomcpherson 4y ago
I really hope it is not dying, as it is my favorite way of following sites around the web. Recently I also started attacking my YouTube dependency by adding YT channels as RSS feeds and avoid the YT homepage. I only store feeds for the most relevant YT channels and I get notified when a new video is posted on those channels. If anyone is interested: view the source of a YT channel, look for "externalId", copy that ID then append it to "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=".
- rambambram 4y ago
  I also do this, except for the notification part. It requires some initial effort, but the rewards come quick. I don't want my mood get ruined by YT's algo. I guess there's a chance YouTube is not going to kill these feeds. Maybe YouTube cares less about one's entrance to a video and more about the ads that will still be seen. I hope.
walterbell 4y ago
It's coming back, thanks to Lire's automagic local caching for offline reading of text and images, https://lireapp.com/ https://lireapp.com/ > unlike other RSS feed readers, that either push you into a browser (in-app or otherwise), or depend on third party text parsing services and require you to be online to fetch the full text of one article at a time (which makes it no different from having to click/tap through to a website), in lire, you get your favorite RSS feeds as they should've been. You don't need to click through to any website (though, you do still have the option to, if you really wanted). It takes your favorite partial feeds, does its magic, and converts them in to full feeds, so you don't have to click/tap on those annoying 'Read more' or 'Continue reading' links. Once they're cached, you don't even need to be connected to read your full-text feeds. It's almost like UUCP-powered Usenet!
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Meh, Apple only. Disappointed.
rcarmo 4y ago
It never died. I have kept reading 200-odd RSS feeds for the past ten to fifteen years, and this myth about it being dead keeps coming up every year on HN. The protocol works and would probably be best cast as "done", which is a concept very little modern technology seems to encompass...
gsich 4y ago
Still the main standard for podcasts.
smm11 4y ago
Not totally on topic, but it's a shame Blogger is/was a Google thing. Blogger with RSS, marketed correctly, could have taken the place of everything social media since.
crazygringo 4y ago
As a utility API it's just... there. Kind of the same way sitemap.xml is there. It's something developers can use. As something consumer-facing, it's long since dead. The vast majority of consumers don't usually want a chronological list of all stories from a predetermined list of sources -- they want things like Google/Apple News which recommends stories from everywhere using ML according to their revealed preferences. They want extended comment threads whether on Facebook, Reddit, or the news site itself. They want share functionality and upvotes and Twitter reactions. RSS was a great first step, but no open protocol can deliver all that. The main problem being that even if you were running your ML models for news preferences locally, everything around upvoting and commenting and mass-sharing can't be decentralized without descending into spam madness and upvote gaming.
someweirdperson 4y ago
It is dead and has been replaced by atom, which at least has a valid media type!!1! I guess the biggest problem with either is that it can be used both to deliver content, best consumed by some news reader, and it can help to just discover updates, without actually providing the content. It seems to aspire to the former, with all added complexity involved, especially for the consumer. However, what would be needed most is the part that helps with discovery. Imagine a browser that automatically picks up all feeds it comes across, and presents the user with a facebook-like timeline of interesting items as references to the original sources. With no activity required, but simple options "show less of this and more of that". Of course, why would a browser want to create that kind of user-engagement.
sacrosanct 4y ago
I curated a huge .OPML file that I've been using for a decade now with no problems. I cherry picked the RSS feeds by first visiting the blog, then hunting for the feed either by using an addon or using Firefox's (now defunct) RSS feed button. Currently there's 500 blogs added. I avoided feeds which were mere summaries of the blog's post, and contained the full post so I could read it entirely. No ADs. No tracking. No sidebar distractions, just pure information.
- rambambram 4y ago
  Nice! Do you have the feeds also categorized? Any chance you have the .OPML file publicly online? With HeyHomepage.com I'm working on an 'internet friendly' website package that utilizes public .OPML files as a kind of blogroll/webring. Together with RSS feeds they form what I call 'Really Social Sites'. ;) The beauty is, it's open, whether one uses my system or some other system. Plus, there are still a lot of interesting websites that offer feeds.
illuminerdy 4y ago
I stopped using Google News once I realized they literally won't even let you add certain sites to your feed for no other reason than politics. So I now use Inoreader to curate my own news feed from RSS feeds as well as many sites that don't have a feed. Instead of spending time blocking or deleting "approved" news sources that are the definition of fake news these days, I just add any sites that I come across that I feel are useful for information gathering.
BenoitP 4y ago
I came here from Feedly. > Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back? Feedly has about 30mn of downtime now and then; I'd say once a year. /s It's not dying, thus it doesn't have to come back. > Is RSS still actively developed as a protocol? I don't think it does, and I like it. > If not, why not? Why should it? Don't break something that works. > Are there any viable alternatives on the horizon? RSS is viable to me. I understand that some may want to add tracking and paid suscriptions; but that's not a bug, that's a feature. I don't want some content pushers to constantly try to ram something down my throat -wasting my precious time- just so that they can make a few cents off my back annually. > I find it really troubling that we seem to have resigned ourselves to web content discovery and distribution belonging to corporations like Google and Meta. ?? I actually went on Feedly because Google EOL'd gReader > Also grateful for any reading recommendations on this subject Here's my advice: take the habit of actually seeking information. You saw a thread on Facebook about Photogrammetry? Then research how it is done. When you stumble on a source that is useful to you, try to identify if new content may be produced; and try to find an RSS feed. Boom, you're now subscribed to a Palaeontologist's articles about macro-Photogrammetry, how he captures details in fossils: https://peterfalkingham.com/category/photogrammetry/ https://peterfalkingham.com/category/photogrammetry/ It's called curating information for your own needs; come back in a few years to thank me. By then you'll have gone a few rabbit-holes of technical specialization, and have an information pipeline way better than the 3-seconds-attention-optimized Facebook's feed.
derekzhouzhen 4y ago
RSS is still the best to get articles in a sane way. On my website https://roastidio.us https://roastidio.us I poll 4500+ feeds and counting. I have amassed 300k+ articles that are higher quality than average web pages. Of cause, the whole corpus is searchable.
kkfx 4y ago
I'm not aware of activity BUT RSS/atom at their current state works very well, they do not JUST because some decide not to, like not putting articles in feeds but just a hyper-short summary, often only a title, and ads. The system do not prevent such behaviors but works. RSS spec are not much nice, but essentially anyone in the world know it, like emails so again while technically they are not a masterpiece they are widespread and supported out-out-the-box almost anywhere. The main reasons for the decline is the push toward third party aggregators for the sake of surveillance capitalism and the little effectiveness for ads. Personally I consume most of my digital information via feeds, recently switched from Miniflux to TT-RSS simply because with many feeds TT-RSS offer a better way to skim. I do not like both though. I've used many other readers including elfeed (too slow to fetch and slow to consume contents), org-feed (too slow to consume, content formatting issues), RSSOwl still slow on big volumes of posts etc unfortunately most RSS clients suffer for limited development, like local MUAs and so far there is no notmuch/mu4e to rescue however like emails most users do not even imaging what they can do with their tools so... In evolutionary trends: some users, the same who feel the need of real desktop operation systems, who are a little minority but keep growing, rediscover and push feeds as much as they can. Most others ignore even that they exists...
evelynsalt 4y ago
The podcasters are improving their RSS by adding new namespaced tags https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/
fithisux 4y ago
I use a free reed reader with RSS and I find it + email my main sources of information. I wouldn't change it.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Shame on you, Google, for killing Reader. How dumb you were. You had a market-leading product, and decided to shrug. How dumb, really. Someone had to say it.
aboutrss 4y ago
Its namespace extensions are still actively developed. For example, source namespace by Dave Winer and podcast RSS namespace by Podcast Index.

metadat 4y ago

What about the RSS protocol is lacking and in need of further development? It seems to get the job done. I do agree about discovery in general, it's uncomfortable counting on Google, Microsoft, and Meta / TikTok for content discovery. Thankfully there are some smart folks working on fresh takes on the search engine. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Search%20engine%20&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

emodendroket 4y ago
In fact changing is a barrier to wide adoption of technology. But as far as people actually using RSS, I don't think it has ever recovered from the consolidation with Google Reader and subsequent killing of the project.
InvisibleUp 4y ago
RSS doesn't work all that well across multiple devices, such as a desktop and a mobile phone. You can subscribe to them on both, sure, but they won't be synced with each other. Apps such as Google Reader and such resolve that problem, but the death of Google Reader really shook a lot of people's trust in RSS, I think. Plus now RSS has to compete with social media feeds, which are where a lot of people are looking for updates already.
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  Syncing across devices isn't the job of RSS, or any protocol, and certainly not the role of a data format in the case of RSS. State is an application's job.
  - jayd16 4y ago
    Ok then we can just phrase it as there's no standard way to sync RSS subs across apps. Point is its a clear user frustration with no easy solve.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      Fever API is implemented in many apps.
    - chrisdhal 4y ago
      Cross platform applications and web based readers exist. It is easily solved using one of those.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    Let’s try and read the comment more charitably: most clients do not offer a good solution for this either, making the protocol less appealing than it might otherwise be.
- baby 4y ago
  I think you are not talking about rss
- sudobash1 4y ago
  I think that is a good thing. For "syncing across devices" to be a server-side feature of RSS, that would require that the server be keeping track of who I am and what I have read. The way the RSS protocol is, it is stateless and may be completely anonymous. Keeping track of the state is (and should be) the application's job.
bundleunbundle 4y ago
100% agree that it does it what it does beautifully but it seems to me like there's little to no stewardship around it, and no one actively making sure that it can work with new types of content and provide a viable channel to professional publishers (in effect looking after both sides of the RSS "marketplace".) Search engines are part of the puzzle for sure, but would love to see more transparent/open source recommender systems integrated with something like RSS to foster discovery without explicit queries.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  New types of content? Like what?
jayd16 4y ago
Lets face it, the ideals are great but RSS kinda sucks. Its stable, its sturdy and maybe this is my own ignorance but I can think of a lot of missing features the average user would expect. I don't think there's a standard practice for caching, serving deltas, or anything other than polling the feed. Keep in mind I mean standard as in any generic reader will implement it. There's no cross application protocols to share subscriptions, progress, already-read, or any other kind of state across apps. Privacy is a problem. The feeds are generic and public. OAauth could probably be implemented into clients these days such that a generic feed reader could access private content but there are no standards for it. Monetization is a huge problem. No one wants to scrape pay walls and no one wants to serve free content. DRM sucks but content providers are going to demand it so it should be integrated. I'm fairly surprised I haven't seen a crypto-wallet integrated RSS standard with these features. How did that not make the cut for crypto ideas?
- snoopy_telex 4y ago
  RSS is s data interchange standard. "subscriptions, progress, already-read, or any other kind of state across apps" is well out of scope of a data interchange format. You may claim that the data interchange format is useless without those features being implemented on the app side, however it doesn't mean the data interchange format is flawed. That said, pretty much any RSS app does what you describe. I use Feedly across many devices, and it's all synced. The other primary RSS powered app I use is Apple Podcasts which also syncs those states between all my devices. Feeds being "public" isn't an issue. I pay for many feeds provided by creators on patreon. These are behind token based auth. I also have a few completely custom feeds that are behind http basic auth and generate on demand completely custom content. Monetization for public feeds also doesn't seem like an issue. I get ads embedded into some feeds, and others like Ars just do snippets and I click though to the main site and see the ads there. Why would crypto help at all here?
- vidanay 4y ago
  Damn happy none of those "features" exist
Ferret7446 4y ago
A clear standard for one. Last I checked, RSS did not have one clear standard, nor do most implementations abide by that standard. Atom on the other hand is great.

jabroni_salad 4y ago

My personal observation is that writers get some kind of intimacy from mailing lists and so prefer that. Whether RSS is happening depends on the platform they publish on rather than any conscious decision. (keep in mind we are both hackernews users before you hit me with the 'um actually' in regards to your own blog. i already know you like rss.)

shapefrog 4y ago
Email mailing lists are just rss feeds with extra steps.

kevincox 4y ago

I still get all of my news so I'd say it is still going strong. I think you are right that the big platforms tend to remove RSS as they grow because they would rather have lock-in than providing the ibterfaces that their users want but that is a minor strike against RSS. I think the biggest problem is just that users don't really know about it. The easy-to-discover auto-discovery buttons have been removed from browsers so most users don't even know. Based on my experience a lot of people are very happy with RSS ones you set them up with a feed reader and an extension that adds the RSS discovery back to the browser. So I guess the biggest problem isn't the discovery of RSS feeds but the disicery of RSS itself.

leephillips 4y ago

It was never dying and so didn’t need to come back. It doesn’t require much in the way of development because it serves its simple purpose well. If a website has the proper <link> element in its header some browsers detect that and display an RSS icon for easy subscription. That’s how I follow websites; I don’t subscribe to newsletters.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

baby 4y ago

RSS is either decreasing or increasing. I feel like it’s still working well enough (I use it) but if I’d have to guess I would say it’s decreasing (and thus will die). What it needs is a bunch of volunteers to implement it for all languages (provide libraries) and frameworks (provide rss feeds by default for blogs and cms). For the most part it works quite well, but I think some static blog generators, or centralized blog platforms, are not playing nice with RSS (and I’m guessing this is on purpose).

bundleunbundle 4y ago
Thanks! This is (also) what I meant by development -- ensuring there's an ecosystem of connectors, libraries etc. around it to facilitate adoption/usage.
- snoopy_telex 4y ago
  What do you believe is missing? RSS is xml. It supports xml namespaces for extensions. Did you know that podcast feeds are RSS feeds plus a xml namespace specific for podcasts? https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirements https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirement...
  - baby 4y ago
    reminds of the RSS feed of buzzsprout, the free podcasting hosting, that doesn't include a link to the actual episode.
snoopy_telex 4y ago
I’m pretty sure there’s a few dozen to hundreds of rss libraries for any language you could want. Wordpress provides RSS feeds out of the box without doing a thing. Static generators like Jekyll (GitHub uses) support generating RSS feeds as well. It’s not an issue of this being difficult to implement. It’s been around for decades. It’s widely supported.
- 4y ago

tootie 4y ago

RSS is still the main mode of podcast distribution. It's somewhat hidden behind podcast apps, but that's what distributors are still using to create feeds.

emptyparadise 4y ago

Seems like mailing lists are getting popular. I wish I could have those in my RSS reader.

AdamGibbins 4y ago
You can with NewsBlur: https://blog.newsblur.com/2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-newsblur/ https://blog.newsblur.com/2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-new...
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  That's a beautiful website. Thanks for the suggestion.
  - AdamGibbins 4y ago
    They're great, been paying them since Google Reader shutdown. Can't fault, great service.
trynewideas 4y ago
RSS readers that manage mailing lists: Inoreader: https://www.inoreader.com/blog/2020/02/declutter-your-inbox-subscribe-to-email-newsletters-straight-into-inoreader.html https://www.inoreader.com/blog/2020/02/declutter-your-inbox-... Newsblur: https://blog.newsblur.com/2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-newsblur/ https://blog.newsblur.com/2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-new... (open source and self-hostable) Feedly: https://feedly.com/i/pro https://feedly.com/i/pro Also, Kill the Newsletter (https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/) converts newsletters to RSS feeds, and is open source/self-hostable.
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  I really should get around to self-hosting my RSS reader.
  - 4y ago

simonswords82 4y ago

RSS as it was existed 10+ years ago there were was the little orange RSS icon on most websites and blogs is 100% dead and won't ever come back. Personally I think this is a shame but the majority BigCorps want to know who is consuming their news/information and dislike their information being disseminated anonymously via RSS feeds. They'd prefer be able to track you online (because you visited their website to read said information), or have your email address to spam from time to time etc. There's no commercial imperative to keep RSS, which is why it is dead.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
You can still track people via RSS, it's like having a scheduled check-in as to where you are unless you use a VPN.

pkrumins 4y ago

RSS is holding strong. I run a network of news aggregators (https://TechURLs.com https://TechURLs.com, https://DevURLs.com https://DevURLs.com, and many others) and only two or three news sources out of a hundred have removed their RSS feeds over the last two years.

cauefcr 4y ago
It would be nice to have an RSS of your aggregator, but i love it already.
- pkrumins 4y ago
  That’s the most requested feature and it’s on my todo list. Subscribe to our updates to know when it’s done!

no_wizard 4y ago

Its strongest hold is definitely in Podcasting. Right now, thats basically all a podcast feed is, its an RSS feed. This is largely due to the hands off nature that Apple had with podcasting for so long, though Spotify[0] is trying to wrestle this control over the ecosystem in moving away from publishing an open RSS feed. Its very much alive in this way though, at least for now, and I think its important to recognize the role of RSS in keeping podcast distribution fairly uniform and relatively meritocratic. I think this why it has exploded as a medium, in part. Its also why you get such a fantastic selection of great third party players. Unfortunately, I think RSS for news is already past its prime, though alot of "indie" sites and blogs still do have feeds it seems. [0]: https://singhkays.com/blog/how-spotify-is-killing-the-open-podcast-ecosystem/ https://singhkays.com/blog/how-spotify-is-killing-the-open-p...

bundleunbundle 4y ago
Great read thanks!
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Holy shit. I hope Spotify crashes and burns with this.

creeble 4y ago

Hard to say that it’s coming back I think. My my.yahoo.com (yes, I know, Yahoo! Is hardly a worthwhile data point these days) was carefully constructed of a dozen or more RSS feeds, and 80-90% are now dead. I tried resurrecting a few on the assumption that the sources just changed their URI, but all (maybe 3?) that I tried had no RSS feed any more, or none that I could find. I think two were now paywalled sites, which is probably the broader trend - RSS is just a different form of ad-blocking from the content-provider’s perspective.

gordaco 4y ago

The thing about RSS is that big tech companies are not very fond of it because it gives too much control to the user and it's not so easy to flood you with ads when you use it. So, many of those companies either don't offer RSS, or they have it but they don't advertise it much and maybe they just do the bare minimum. Unfortunately, since social media has replaced blogs as the go-to place for discussions and user-generated content in general, this means that a lot of the platforms that people use most frequently don't have an RSS feed, or have it but it's not very useful for whatever reason. However: many, many other webpages out there do offer RSS, and I'm guessing that plenty of people use it, at least on technical circles. I use it mostly for comics and, to a lesser extent, for a few personal blogs and even news. A lot of people use it for podcasts. It has also been used to automatically download new episodes of TV shows in torrent downloaders (I'm guessing that you could mark this particular application as controversial; I won't comment on that. But it is useful at the very least). Also, if used properly, it allows for a lot of user control. You could, for example, pipe a youtube RSS into yt-dlp so that videos from a particular creator are automatically downloaded into a folder in your computer, or use any alert of new content to trigger whatever you want to do (like custom alerts when someone comments in a blog of yours, or whatever). RSS has a lot of potential, and because of that I don't think it's going away soon. Now, you are also worried about the problem of content discovery. There is a problem here, because whenever we as users want a source of curated content, advertisers are going to do whatever they can in order to squeeze their shit into our pipes. So I personally prefer a "dumb" protocol like RSS where I just say "give me new updates from just THIS site", and leave discovery to more organic, less automated (therefore less gameable by advertisers) means. The closest I can think of to solve your problem is the usage of blog rings/networks (they used to exist, ten years ago... I don't know the state of the art right now), but this still means that there is someone doing the aggregation.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
In-feed ads aren't uncommon.
rambambram 4y ago
> I use it mostly for comics I recently collected a couple of hundred feeds from various sources and about different subjects, and I was (positively) surprised by the amount of blogs with daily/weekly comics. > the problem of content discovery I agree here. But 'discovery' is something one does, it requires effort. Definitely when compared with a Twitter feed or FB timeline that only requires mindless scrolling. I also think curation and aggregation by humans can help here, by presenting some interesting and honest feeds of different subjects to start with. And thanks for mentioning some more potential applications of RSS!

pdntspa 4y ago

Why does the protocol require active development to be useful?

bomcpherson 4y ago

I really hope it is not dying, as it is my favorite way of following sites around the web. Recently I also started attacking my YouTube dependency by adding YT channels as RSS feeds and avoid the YT homepage. I only store feeds for the most relevant YT channels and I get notified when a new video is posted on those channels. If anyone is interested: view the source of a YT channel, look for "externalId", copy that ID then append it to "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=".

rambambram 4y ago
I also do this, except for the notification part. It requires some initial effort, but the rewards come quick. I don't want my mood get ruined by YT's algo. I guess there's a chance YouTube is not going to kill these feeds. Maybe YouTube cares less about one's entrance to a video and more about the ads that will still be seen. I hope.

walterbell 4y ago

It's coming back, thanks to Lire's automagic local caching for offline reading of text and images, https://lireapp.com/ https://lireapp.com/ > unlike other RSS feed readers, that either push you into a browser (in-app or otherwise), or depend on third party text parsing services and require you to be online to fetch the full text of one article at a time (which makes it no different from having to click/tap through to a website), in lire, you get your favorite RSS feeds as they should've been. You don't need to click through to any website (though, you do still have the option to, if you really wanted). It takes your favorite partial feeds, does its magic, and converts them in to full feeds, so you don't have to click/tap on those annoying 'Read more' or 'Continue reading' links. Once they're cached, you don't even need to be connected to read your full-text feeds. It's almost like UUCP-powered Usenet!

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Meh, Apple only. Disappointed.

rcarmo 4y ago

It never died. I have kept reading 200-odd RSS feeds for the past ten to fifteen years, and this myth about it being dead keeps coming up every year on HN. The protocol works and would probably be best cast as "done", which is a concept very little modern technology seems to encompass...

gsich 4y ago

Still the main standard for podcasts.

smm11 4y ago

Not totally on topic, but it's a shame Blogger is/was a Google thing. Blogger with RSS, marketed correctly, could have taken the place of everything social media since.

crazygringo 4y ago

As a utility API it's just... there. Kind of the same way sitemap.xml is there. It's something developers can use. As something consumer-facing, it's long since dead. The vast majority of consumers don't usually want a chronological list of all stories from a predetermined list of sources -- they want things like Google/Apple News which recommends stories from everywhere using ML according to their revealed preferences. They want extended comment threads whether on Facebook, Reddit, or the news site itself. They want share functionality and upvotes and Twitter reactions. RSS was a great first step, but no open protocol can deliver all that. The main problem being that even if you were running your ML models for news preferences locally, everything around upvoting and commenting and mass-sharing can't be decentralized without descending into spam madness and upvote gaming.

someweirdperson 4y ago

It is dead and has been replaced by atom, which at least has a valid media type!!1! I guess the biggest problem with either is that it can be used both to deliver content, best consumed by some news reader, and it can help to just discover updates, without actually providing the content. It seems to aspire to the former, with all added complexity involved, especially for the consumer. However, what would be needed most is the part that helps with discovery. Imagine a browser that automatically picks up all feeds it comes across, and presents the user with a facebook-like timeline of interesting items as references to the original sources. With no activity required, but simple options "show less of this and more of that". Of course, why would a browser want to create that kind of user-engagement.

sacrosanct 4y ago

I curated a huge .OPML file that I've been using for a decade now with no problems. I cherry picked the RSS feeds by first visiting the blog, then hunting for the feed either by using an addon or using Firefox's (now defunct) RSS feed button. Currently there's 500 blogs added. I avoided feeds which were mere summaries of the blog's post, and contained the full post so I could read it entirely. No ADs. No tracking. No sidebar distractions, just pure information.

rambambram 4y ago
Nice! Do you have the feeds also categorized? Any chance you have the .OPML file publicly online? With HeyHomepage.com I'm working on an 'internet friendly' website package that utilizes public .OPML files as a kind of blogroll/webring. Together with RSS feeds they form what I call 'Really Social Sites'. ;) The beauty is, it's open, whether one uses my system or some other system. Plus, there are still a lot of interesting websites that offer feeds.

illuminerdy 4y ago

I stopped using Google News once I realized they literally won't even let you add certain sites to your feed for no other reason than politics. So I now use Inoreader to curate my own news feed from RSS feeds as well as many sites that don't have a feed. Instead of spending time blocking or deleting "approved" news sources that are the definition of fake news these days, I just add any sites that I come across that I feel are useful for information gathering.

BenoitP 4y ago

I came here from Feedly. > Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back? Feedly has about 30mn of downtime now and then; I'd say once a year. /s It's not dying, thus it doesn't have to come back. > Is RSS still actively developed as a protocol? I don't think it does, and I like it. > If not, why not? Why should it? Don't break something that works. > Are there any viable alternatives on the horizon? RSS is viable to me. I understand that some may want to add tracking and paid suscriptions; but that's not a bug, that's a feature. I don't want some content pushers to constantly try to ram something down my throat -wasting my precious time- just so that they can make a few cents off my back annually. > I find it really troubling that we seem to have resigned ourselves to web content discovery and distribution belonging to corporations like Google and Meta. ?? I actually went on Feedly because Google EOL'd gReader > Also grateful for any reading recommendations on this subject Here's my advice: take the habit of actually seeking information. You saw a thread on Facebook about Photogrammetry? Then research how it is done. When you stumble on a source that is useful to you, try to identify if new content may be produced; and try to find an RSS feed. Boom, you're now subscribed to a Palaeontologist's articles about macro-Photogrammetry, how he captures details in fossils: https://peterfalkingham.com/category/photogrammetry/ https://peterfalkingham.com/category/photogrammetry/ It's called curating information for your own needs; come back in a few years to thank me. By then you'll have gone a few rabbit-holes of technical specialization, and have an information pipeline way better than the 3-seconds-attention-optimized Facebook's feed.

derekzhouzhen 4y ago

RSS is still the best to get articles in a sane way. On my website https://roastidio.us https://roastidio.us I poll 4500+ feeds and counting. I have amassed 300k+ articles that are higher quality than average web pages. Of cause, the whole corpus is searchable.

kkfx 4y ago

I'm not aware of activity BUT RSS/atom at their current state works very well, they do not JUST because some decide not to, like not putting articles in feeds but just a hyper-short summary, often only a title, and ads. The system do not prevent such behaviors but works. RSS spec are not much nice, but essentially anyone in the world know it, like emails so again while technically they are not a masterpiece they are widespread and supported out-out-the-box almost anywhere. The main reasons for the decline is the push toward third party aggregators for the sake of surveillance capitalism and the little effectiveness for ads. Personally I consume most of my digital information via feeds, recently switched from Miniflux to TT-RSS simply because with many feeds TT-RSS offer a better way to skim. I do not like both though. I've used many other readers including elfeed (too slow to fetch and slow to consume contents), org-feed (too slow to consume, content formatting issues), RSSOwl still slow on big volumes of posts etc unfortunately most RSS clients suffer for limited development, like local MUAs and so far there is no notmuch/mu4e to rescue however like emails most users do not even imaging what they can do with their tools so... In evolutionary trends: some users, the same who feel the need of real desktop operation systems, who are a little minority but keep growing, rediscover and push feeds as much as they can. Most others ignore even that they exists...

evelynsalt 4y ago

The podcasters are improving their RSS by adding new namespaced tags https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/

fithisux 4y ago

I use a free reed reader with RSS and I find it + email my main sources of information. I wouldn't change it.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Shame on you, Google, for killing Reader. How dumb you were. You had a market-leading product, and decided to shrug. How dumb, really. Someone had to say it.

aboutrss 4y ago

Its namespace extensions are still actively developed. For example, source namespace by Dave Winer and podcast RSS namespace by Podcast Index.