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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

by 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

by jayd16 4y ago

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