18 ms·

RSS can be used to distribute all sorts of information

319 points by walterbell 3y ago

Sami_Lehtinen 3y ago
Outlook and Thunderbird both handle RSS feeds directly and work as reader.
thirdplace_ 3y ago
like it. rss is so simple and cool. problems: * how to make it easier for users to start using feed readers * how to make it easier to subscribe to feeds * how to help users discover new content
- yoz-y 3y ago
  Well, back in the day firefox had a rss reader integrated and would detect feeds and put a nice rss icon in the location bar. That kind of addressed the first two points. As for discovery, I think much like Twitter and other social media, the best discovery is one person you follow just plainly links to some other.
  - pndy 3y ago
    For me RSS reader in Firefox was the best idea hands down because of its simplicity and how well it was integrated with the browser: you'd click on that icon in the address bar and page with summary (originally you'd add feed directly to the bookmarks) and subscribe button would appear and then, modal asking where to put new channel/live bookmarks folder. With bookmarks bar on, you could have a handy folder or folders that changed list of "bookmarks" all day and you could glance thru headlines without actually opening a page. And IIRC, the default RSS channel was customized among all language versions - for British English it was BBC News. I really liked this feature and Mozilla removing it angered me much. For a while I tried using something else - RSSOwl or Feedly, or Nextgen Reader for Windows 10 but nothing could replace it for me. Somehow Mozilla deducted that this feature is no longer needed due to the maintenance, performance and security costs [1] and it will be removed in v64 which was of course done. This reader was known and luckily at that time already ported as an extension to Chromium-based browsers as e.g. Foxish [2], which then was bring back as Firefox extension Livemarks [3]. That's a long way around trip. [1] - https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/ https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod... , https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667 [2] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/nbhdikhnaigcdlamenbgkmllgmfnngoi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/nb... [3] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
  - paradox460 3y ago
    Vivaldi still does that. Has a nice visual formatter of feeds too
  - rambambram 3y ago
    Indeed, it's pretty easy to 'retweet' something from another feed. RSS items can have a <source> element in them, just point this to the original feed. Et voila, you're 'retweeting' with RSS.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  Literally all of these problems (were) solved. Its called browser integration.
- walterbell 3y ago
  > how to make it easier for users to start using feed readers On mobile, RSS readers like NetNewsWire and Lire are available in app stores. Lire can spider images+text for offline reading. Podcast app users probably don't even know they are using RSS. > how to make it easier to subscribe to feeds On iOS, Lire adds a "Subscribe in lire" option to the Safari share menu. Podcast directories seem to work for podcast apps. > how to help users discover new content With the demise of search engines, perhaps directories will resurface?
fifteen1506 3y ago
WhatsApp channels solves the same problems, plus it's by trustworthy ( /s ) Meta. No non-tech people use RSS knowingly.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  My 70+ year-old aunt and father use RSS all the time and are by no means "techy".
Kovah 3y ago
After all those years, I still love RSS. It's great what you can do with it. After struggling to keep up with releases for all the tools, frameworks and packages I use for programming, I built Versionfeeds.com which sends me all those releases directly into my RSS feed. It's absolutely great.
- eviks 3y ago
  This can't differentiate between a nighty github release (to be discarded) and a versioned one (to be retained)?
pvorb 3y ago
With comments like these, I always wonder if they are talking about "RSS" as a standard or about RSS as a common word for feeds in general. Because I think RSS itself is quite complex compared to Atom and the latter has been around for many years as well and is much easier to implement, so its use even might be more widespread these days.
- namdnay 3y ago
  I really like the Atom protocol, especially with the "archived pages" extension. I've used it several times to distribute common data feeds in a really scalable way. Since everything is static, the processing on the server is minimal (either return the current string buffer, or return a string from a map), and all the archived content is infinitely cacheable. it's a really simple and clever idea
- kevincox 3y ago
  I would say that about 99% of the time people just need feeds in general. The most common formats being RSS 2.0 and Atom.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  I detest the use of the term “RSS” for feeds in general, because it grants mindshare to the inferior option—vast numbers of feeds have been implemented in RSS because that was what someone had heard of (and they’d probably have done it in Atom if they knew the full story). Just call them feeds, which has always been the appropriate technology-independent term. What I say is: use Atom, unless you’re making a podcast. Unfortunately, Apple ruined everything there by choosing RSS even though the clearly-superior Atom was (just) published by the time they released their software, and subsequently continuing to not support Atom. Most other podcasting tooling also doesn’t support Atom. But every other application of feeds supports Atom just as well as RSS.
  - account42 3y ago
    There is about zero real world benefit to Atom over RSS. It's just pure spec autism.
Retr0id 3y ago
> Why does it just have to be updates to a website? RSS can be used to distribute all sorts of information. Such as? Maybe I'm just not being imaginative enough but I could really use some examples here.
- dodyg 3y ago
  Podcasts run on RSS
  - vaylian 3y ago
    This was the mainstream killer app for RSS. And it was great. But then some podcasting services (looking at you, Spotify and others...) decided to force us to use our browser or some app instead of giving us the freedom to download files for offline use.
    - toyg 3y ago
      But the gatekeepers kinda failed. Spotify all but admitted that their podcast move failed, effectively writing off their investments in Rogan etc.
    - cxr 3y ago
      > then some podcasting services (looking at you, Spotify and others...) decided to force us to use our browser or some app instead of giving us the freedom to download files for offline use Podcasts are pretty simple, and those services you're talking about aren't podcasts—nor is anything else that keeps you from downloading files like that (say, for transcoding and then dumping into/onto your player to listen to it how you want). It's not even as if insisting that people not say "podcast" when talking about something that clearly isn't one leaves us without a way to talk about them. In the first place, "podcast" is not a genre label. There are tons of (actual) podcasts that don't follow the unscripted-banter-plus-question-and-answer/interview format. And in the second place, all those things that do stop you from downloading them? Yeah, we have a word you can use already: they're just "shows".
- yzydserd 3y ago
account-5 3y ago
If I visit a website and like it the first thing I do is look for an RSS/atom feed. I find more and more site instead want your email to send you emails that could easily be done with a feed. I don't visit those again. RSS/atom give the user control instead of the platform. I doubt they would exist if social media had existed before them.
- domysee 3y ago
  This is so annoying, I don't want to have newsletters in my personal email. I'm happy Substack lets users choose what they want to use, newsletters or RSS feeds. Many feed readers also let users subscribe to newsletters. I'm also working on one, https://looking-glass.app/ https://looking-glass.app/ It has a bunch of extra bells and whistles as well, like automatic summarization.
  - gorbachev 3y ago
    Completely agree. Like the parent poster, I never subscribe to newsletters and the sites that don't offer good ways to be updated of new content (e.g. RSS feeds) lose me as a visitor. There are, however, a few email to rss tools, a quick search brings this one as the top reasult: https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter Might be a good workaround in case the content on the site is worth it.
- kevincox 3y ago
  It's funny because I actually get my news via an RSS-to-email service. But I still typically subscribe to things via RSS when given the choice. This is because it keeps me in control and I know I can subscribe at any time without them holding on to my contact info. (Plus the first-party emails tend to have annoying tracking links and other nonsense. Thankfully those haven't infected the feeds yet)
- eviks 3y ago
  The control still resides with the platform, a lot of those feeds are of the title+first sentence type, so you'd still need to visit the platform to read the content
jamesgeck0 3y ago
> It's almost like people inventing new 'standards' are deliberately trying to make them hard so they can be the de facto gatekeepers of the new tech — all while decrying the web's current gatekeepers. This blog post feels like a subtweet, making accusations of malice about... something? ActivityPub? If it flat out said what it was talking about, we could have a more productive discussion.
qwertox 3y ago
RSS lacks some sort of push messaging. Sure, that's not RSS's fault, but constantly polling a feed is not a solution.
- th0ma5 3y ago
  Quite a lot of push technology is ultimately some kind of pull.
- dvh 3y ago
  Why would you be constantly polling a feed? You only poll once or twice a day when you want to read the news.
  - ibz 3y ago
    If you use it to read news, sure. But, as the post suggests, it can be used for much more!
  - eviks 3y ago
    that's too infrequent for the news
- theanonymousone 3y ago
  RSS delegates that responsibility to your own, local, feed reader software, along with any sort of privacy measures you want in place. This I believe is (at the very least) quite defendable as I trust the software I run on my machine more than some random server on the internet.
- hnbad 3y ago
  The article mentions rssCloud. From a cursory glance it sounds like that's a protocol extension that lets you register a callback URL to be notified about updates (i.e. push messaging).
  - kevincox 3y ago
    Yup. But in shocked to see rssCloud mentioned in 2023! It has been largely superceded by WebSub (https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/). I have yet to see a feed that supports rssCloud but not WebSub, but the reverse is common.
hubraumhugo 3y ago
I'm working on a personalizable RSS feed for HN that classifies all posts based on your preferences. Would you use it? https://kadoa.com/hacksnack https://kadoa.com/hacksnack
- robga 3y ago
  It sounds interesting but I use https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ Unless it had most of the features of hnrss.org I would not be able to use it. A /topic or /category feature on hnrss.org may be nice. They accept some PRs.
WithinReason 3y ago
You can convert newsletters to RSS: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Most newsletter servives provide rss. E.g: you can read https://bitecode.dev https://bitecode.dev from email or rss because substack supports both.
ibz 3y ago
I am a huge fan of RSS (Atom) and was really hoping for a comeback... I feel like it unfairly died out because of Google Reader's sudden demise and was hoping some new equally popular client to show up and take over. I even spent some time creating one. But for the past year or so I have been falling down the Nostr rabbit hole. Nostr is a lot like RSS, but it really is better and without getting much more complicated! You can write a Nostr client that simply does what a RSS reader would do (fetch status updates) in a couple of lines without external libraries. And the Nostr ecosystem has been growing so much over the past months, it is getting hard to keep up! It seems to be really getting the momentum I was hoping RSS to regain. PS: For those that are curious about Nostr and don't know where to start, have a look at the NIPS [1] and of course at the awesome-nostr [2] list on GitHub! [1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips [2]: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
- dugite-code 3y ago
  RSS never really died, most CMS packages still spit out RSS feed that web site owners either don't know exist or don't care to advertise. So you can often find unadvertised feeds all over the internet, but for everything else there are plenty of poling services (hosted or selfhosted) that can generate an RSS feed well enough. If enough people start using RSS again the icons will show back up on websites again, mainly because it wouldn't be much work to add.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Failing RSS readers are still failing with the same failing interfaces that have been failing since 1999 and the strange thing is that there is very little insight about the phenomenon from people who write RSS readers and potential users. Two perennially unpopular but strangely persistent interfaces are (1) the RSS reader that looks like an email or Usenet (dead) reader. The cause of death here is the "mark as read" button that makes every item the system ingests a burden to the reader -- for all this click, click, clicking the system is not gathering any information about the feed items or the user's preferences and (2) the RSS reader that renders 200 separate lists for 200 separate RSS feeds. If your plan is to scan, scan, and scan some more, why not just visit the actual web sites? Contrast that to the successful interface of Twitter where new content displaces old content, where if you walk away for a week you see recent content and don't need to click, click and click to mark a week's worth of content as read (though there hopefully is a button to nuke everything.) And now there is Tik Tok and RSS readers still barrel on as if the last 15 years didn't happen. RSS needs algorithmic feeds to really be superior to "I have a list of 50 blogs I check every morning." That is, you have to be able to ingest more feed items than you can handle and have the important and interesting stuff float to the top. I was involved a bit in text classification research 20 years ago and it was clear to me that an algorithmic feed for RSS was very possible with the caveat that it would take a few 1000 judgements yet even at that time it was clear that you could never underestimate people's laziness when it comes to making training sets. Most people would expect to give five or so judgements. I had thought about the problem for years, a bit about ideas that would improve low-judgement performance, but I did very little other than this project https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ and https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ Last December I started working on YOShInOn, my smart RSS reader and intelligent agent with a primary user interface that looks like "TikTok for text" (no wasted clicks to 'mark as read' because I am always collecting preference information.) I started out with the same model from the article above (applied to the whole RSS snippet as opposed to just the title) and upgraded to a BERT-based model. It shows me the top 5% of about 3000 ingested articles a day. I am still thinking about how to productize it. On an intellectual level I'm interested in the problem with training on fewer examples. Ironically it wouldn't be hard to do experiments because I have a year of data I can sample from, but I couldn't care less on a practical level because I have 50,000 judgements already... And it is all about "pain driven development" where I work on features that I want right now for me. If I were going to make a SaaS version of it would almost certainly fall back on collaborative filtering (pooling preferences from multiple users) because users would perceive it to learn more quickly. See the entirely forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon
maerst 3y ago
Types of feeds I subscribe to: * News/blogs * Commits, e.g https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/commits/master.atom https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/commits/master.atom * Discounts for games on my wishlist: https://isthereanydeal.com/ https://isthereanydeal.com/ * LKML posts mentioning a device I use: https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=GnuBee&x=A https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=GnuBee&x=A * Repology, to be notified when packages I maintain are out-of-date: https://repology.org/ https://repology.org/ * TLS certs issued for my domains, via https://crt.sh/ https://crt.sh/ * Downtime notices, e.g. https://status.mythic-beasts.net.uk/status.rss https://status.mythic-beasts.net.uk/status.rss It's by far the highest SNR and calmest notification channel I have.
- Beijinger 3y ago
  You know what I miss? The twitter to RSS bridge that I had and that does not work anymore. There are 4-6 Twitter accounts I like to follow. This new, Tik Tok inspired Twitter is terrible.
  - maerst 3y ago
    Yeah, that sucks. I've seen Twitter to Mastodon bridges, through which you could get RSS, e.g. https://bird.makeup/users/paulg/remote_follow https://bird.makeup/users/paulg/remote_follow
    - mariusor 3y ago
      Generally people hate those. Despite the fact that I fully subscribe to the precept of if you put it on the internet, then there's no expectation of privacy, I would still like to see some way for the twitter user to signal to stop the mirroring if they so desire.
  - hydrogen7800 3y ago
    The Nitter RSS feeds still work. I follow NASA Webb, among others: https://nitter.poast.org/NASAWebb/rss https://nitter.poast.org/NASAWebb/rss
billpg 3y ago
Also, do we mean ATOM in the same way that people insist on referring to TLS as "SSL", or do we actually mean RSS as in actual RSS? If we could agree that ATOM is RSS 2 (or whatever MAX(version)+1 is) that'd be great.
kqr 3y ago
A simple way to improvise pub/sub messaging in an early prototype when you don't want to pull in a full message queueing system is to publish a timeline of events in an RSS feed. The drawback is that when the system grows, you run the risk of going for the lazy default of keeping RSS publishing of events, and now you need to re-implement large portions of a message queueing system to achieve desired reliability of the RSS feed.
billpg 3y ago
Suppose I have a feed with a million items already on it which I've already handled. I'm about to poll the feed and there's a small number of new items on the feed I don't know about yet. Am I going to have to download a file with references to all one million items again? If the answer is to have a separate feed with only the most recent n items, I'm afraid that's not going to work unless there's additional details. There might have been n+1 items turn up since the last time I polled. Also, someone else might want to start handling those one million records from the start and we should be able to co-ordinate by having a common canonical URL. (I'd also mention pull-vs-push, but that's a thread elsewhere in these comments.)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bhaak 3y ago
  Everything will have problems if you start from scratch and have to import millions of items. But of course there's a standard for paging: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3 Then both ATOM and RSS can leverage HTTP headers. If you include If-Modified-Since into your request the server can decide to only returns items that are newer.
  - billpg 3y ago
    <link rel="next" href="http://example.org/index.atom?page=2"/> http://example.org/index.atom?page=2"/> That's fantastic. Anyone developing ATOM/RSS, please use this mechanism. (I'm looking at you, podcast with over 100 episodes.)
    - kevincox 3y ago
      The problem is that support for this is rare. I know that Podcast Addict supports it but it is rare in podcatchers and even more rare in feed readers. But I definitely agree that it should be a standard feature!
  - account42 3y ago
est 3y ago
RSS seems like usenet these days. Old Internet users kept using it but newer generation seems just focus on ig/tiktok.
cobertos 3y ago
Always thought it was interesting that the Windows .theme file format allows RSS feeds for desktop background images[0] [0]https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/themesfileformat-overview#slideshow-section https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/the... see the RSSUrl parameter
mgd 3y ago
I really enjoy using RSS. One benefit I have noticed is that I spend less time browsing websites, scrolling and generally wasting time online. If I value some content, there will be a way to get or create an RSS feed. Pair this with a read it later service and I have a better curated collection of items to actually look through
- rambambram 3y ago
  I use the RSS feeds from Youtube channels to not get bothered by their algorithm that boosts clickbaity videos on the homepage. I just can't stand looking at these stupid thumbnails anymore, with pictures of outrageous and screaming people and all these in-your-face colors.
- eXpl0it3r 3y ago
  That's why a love Readwise's Reader. I can store stuff to read later, but also get all the RSS/Atom feeds, plus can even funnel newsletters into one place. In addition to having my highlights there as well and being able to easily export them to Obsidian.
  - chrisweekly 3y ago
    Yes, this! Readwise Reader is fantastic! I use it for reading web pages stripped of ads and other cruft -- and for collecting highlights and notes (eg kindle highlights, captured while reading, trivial to "tag" with eg .vocab or .quote) -- and routing all this great content into Obsidian (my PKM / tool for thought / second brain)....
  - moritz 3y ago
    In the spirit of the OP: my gripe with Readwise/Reader is that it… doesn’t output RSS.
rambambram 3y ago
Exactly! Even the use case of adding an image to a feed item - which falls well within the definition - is an extraordinary thing to witness nowadays. Photo feeds are very nice and make the rather dull text-only format more lively. I've also read an article about reverse/random RSS feeds, where the inactive blog author had an automatic feed made up by random items from his archive, which is very nice if you have a big archive but currently no new entries.
xnx 3y ago
RSS/Atom will have a hard time becoming popular as long as developers remain biased against anything to do with XML. If someone reinvents Atom but worse using JSON, there might just be a chance.
- JNRowe 3y ago
  There is JSON Feed¹ already. One of the spec writers is behind https://micro.blog https://micro.blog, which is the first place I saw it(and also one of the few places I've seen it). I don't think it is a bad idea, and it doesn't take all that long to implement it given the sane and quite readable specification. I have long hoped it would pick up steam with the JSON-ify everything crowd, just so I'd never see a non-Atom feed again. We perhaps wouldn't need sooo much of the magic that is wrapped up in packages like feedparser² to deal with all the brokeness of RSS in the wild then. ¹ https://www.jsonfeed.org/ https://www.jsonfeed.org/ ² https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser
bsnnkv 3y ago
I use RSS to distribute my web highlights[1] on specific topics and even my Kindle highights[2] for longer series. It's also nice and easy to reuse these feeds on my website homepage to give a dynamic feel to a static website. Ultimately I had to get with the times a bit and find a way to share my highlights as photos[3] and videos, especially on modern text-hostile social media platforms, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the topic-specific RSS highlight feed, and it's one of my proudest achievements. [1]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development [2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/terra-ignota https://notado.app/feeds/jado/terra-ignota [3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/using-rust-chrome-and-nixos-to-take-headless-screenshots-for-social-sharing/ https://lgug2z.com/articles/using-rust-chrome-and-nixos-to-t...
- walterbell 3y ago
  Nice work! Do you save web highlights with a browser plugin?
  - bsnnkv 3y ago
    These days I mostly read and save on mobile with the Notado iOS shortcuts, but of course everything works pretty much the same way with the browser extension too. All websites/apps that I read comments on (HN, Reddit, Mastodon, Twitter, Lemmy, Tildes, Lobsters, YouTube) have a "Save Comment to Notado" action when sharing permalinks which makes saving interesting comments a breeze. When I'm reading something in Safari, I just highlight the text I want to save with my finger and then use the browser share button (not the text share button) to hit the "Save Selection to Notado" action. If you check back in my comment history here I've written before about how I'm a big believer in RINORIN (read it now or read it never), and for this reason I completely eschew read it later-style reader apps. If it's not immediately interesting enough for me to read when I see it, I just let it ago, trusting that if it's important enough, I'll be exposed to it again sooner or later, and at that point it'll be interesting enough for me to read it when I see it.
janandonly 3y ago
I'm currently trying to read all RSS feeds, and interesting sites I find on HN in https://Omnivore.app https://Omnivore.app. The app has as an added benefit that it allows me to label posts and also make my own highlights. NetNewsWire allows you to "star" an entire post, but not a word/paragraph/sentence.
camgunz 3y ago
I gotta say I don't deeply understand ActivityPub, but one of the first things I thought when trying to grok it was "how does this improve on RSS?". Like another commenter here I think a big part of it is that it's JSON and not XML, but I think another thing people would say is that you aren't storing things locally, that is you don't have an application pulling things onto your local machine (phone, laptop, whatever). But I've evolved lately, and now I strongly feel like we're missing the forest for the trees here. These things aren't just RSS; they're email. They're email lists. ActivityPub even uses the language of email; it has `to` and `cc`, and `replyTo` fields, in/outboxes. There are (media)Types, i.e. MIME types. There are differences. ActivityPub basically exists to be an underlying protocol for Twitter-like social media, so it specs out things like Likes or Undo. But IMO, stuff like this is either superfluous/harmful (chasing likes/views maybe isn't a good idea), or maybe unclear what a lot of people would want out of a conversations platform. I don't really want someone else to irrevocably edit the stuff I've pulled down; sure I'll let you send a diff or something, but I want the history. Or, on the other hand, maybe I don't want someone to store a history of my worst posts, ready to unleash them whenever I dare to do something public. Or, on the other hand, maybe this has been a really useful tool to speak truth to power. Or, maybe we shouldn't create a protocol that seems to guarantee this, only to have rogue servers that store these things as diffs anyway to lull you into a false sense of "posting hot takes is OK I can always undo/edit/blah".
- adql 3y ago
  > I gotta say I don't deeply understand ActivityPub, but one of the first things I thought when trying to grok it was "how does this improve on RSS?". Like another commenter here I think a big part of it is that it's JSON and not XML, but I think another thing people would say is that you aren't storing things locally, that is you don't have an application pulling things onto your local machine (phone, laptop, whatever). Both of those honestly sound like a disadvantage. Like yeah , plenty to hate about XML but at least it has defined schema language, and I want to have an application and not be dependent on some shitty website to act as aggregator for me. All of the "features" ActivityPub has could be pretty easily just added to RSS too
  - 3y ago
7sidedmarble 3y ago
Self advertisement but I'd appreciate anyone trying out my RSS aggregator which is kinda like HN in terms of design (be warned it's really rough right now though) https://catnip.vip https://catnip.vip
rambambram 3y ago
I love RSS, but a big roadbump from the past is that it seems to be not so interactive (although that's not a fault from the protocol, if you ask me). On one hand you have websites with feeds, on the other you have separate feed readers. So every 'node' must use two different pieces of software to make it interactive. A big advantage of big tech social media is that users can produce and consume within the same software interface. I try to put these two RSS functions (consuming and producing, or publish and subscribe if you will) in the same website software, and it sort of works. I'm still trying to figure out how to safely and easily reply to feed elements, but the only viable way I found is a link inside the element to a comments section on the feed's website. Other ways seem to invite spam (an email address in the feed for example), or require webmentions to work on both sides. If any of you have ideas, feel free to brainstorm with me. If you happen to have a website, homepage or blog with a feed and you never posted it here on HN, please feel extra free to send me a message with the link (my website is in bio).
basisword 3y ago
Can anyone recommend an RSS reader that actually fetches the article content? A lot of sites I subscribe to only show the first sentence and then I have to open the website. Are there any good readers that are able to pull the article content and display in the reader?
- moritz 3y ago
  miniflux.app
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  FreshRSS does that. You can self host it or sign up on an existing server. https://www.freshrss.org/ https://www.freshrss.org/
- argulane 3y ago
  miniflux does a pretty good job at fetching the original content, but it does not work well for sites that use a lot of JS
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  NetNewsWire has a button to try to fetch the entire article, it works almost always. It is one of the best made Mac and iOS applications, in my opinion.
- refset 3y ago
  https://yakread.com https://yakread.com
- walterbell 3y ago
  https://lireapp.com https://lireapp.com on iOS includes offline caching of full article.
bitslayer 3y ago
What is artcasting?
- georgesimon 3y ago
  I think it's a term minted by Dave Winer. The principle idea that "wherever you get your podcasts" could apply to any art. Here's a very literal example from him: http://scripting.com/2023/10/26.html http://scripting.com/2023/10/26.html
hypertexthero 3y ago
My favorite Atom/RSS reader: https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/
axegon_ 3y ago
I was always a huge supporter of RSS and my disappointment was immeasurable when it almost completely died. I've kind of abandoned the hope that it would make a comeback though. The way I see it, there are two major problems: * XML sucks. Bloated, unpleasant, annoying, slow. There should be a new standard which is slimmer, faster and more pleasant to work with. * LLM's: they are becoming cheaper and feasible to use AND TRAIN on consumer grade hardware: The type of hardware many of us have at home - a good amount of memory, a large hard drive, a beefy CPU and a beefy GPU(or two). If RSS all of a sudden became widely available across the web, who knows how many people would start using and abusing the feeds and start building some insanely powerful LLM's in their basements. I'm not saying that would be bad, I am all for it. But most people I know would go ballistic if their data was used to build LLMs without their explicit consent. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the WTF license[1] but maybe I'm just weird. [1] http://www.wtfpl.net/ http://www.wtfpl.net/
smusamashah 3y ago
RSS died (kinda) not because of Google Reader but because of Google Chrome. When Chrome came out and everyone jumped ship, all other browsers natively supported reading RSS which chrome still does not do to this date. Chrome still shows RSS as raw XML instead of making it readable.
- advisedwang 3y ago
  IE had ~50% of the market before chrome [1], and I don't believe it supported native RSS. I'm also skeptical that many Firefox users were viewing RSS directly in the browser. Yes, Firefox shows the feed, but without subscriptions and a central place to find updates it was not really a good feed reader. [1] https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/ https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/
  - smusamashah 3y ago
    I was not including IE in those browsers TBH, it was never a good browser anyway. I have been an Opera/Firefox user before chrome came in. Both had native RSS support. Even showing RSS symbol in URL when its available and being able to actually read it humanly is way better than chrome's nothing.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    IE had "native RSS" going back to somewhere around IE4 or IE5. There was some "Active Desktop" nonsense you could do with RSS really early on, which would have been IE4. IE's approach was very similar to Firefox's: clicking an RSS feed would give you a pretty printed XML page by default, which wasn't exactly useful, but might also have side links to some use cases for RSS depending on some combinations of addons installed and configured preferences. Just like Firefox at the time, the most common built-in usecase was that you could subscribe an RSS feed as an auto-updating Bookmarks Folder. But there were addons that did all sorts of things and some feed readers supported various sorts of integrations with IE. IE even shared its feed reading engine as a shared COM control with a built-in Windows service. It was something like BITS [Background Intelligent Transfer Service], Windows' background downloader service, where you could hand it feeds, it would manage feed polling, it tried to be smart about it with things like exponential back-off and downloading feeds during idle bandwidth periods on your machine, and give you back a very simple RSS-like data store of whatever it found. Outside of IE using it, so far as I know the only other major "feed reader" to integrate it was Outlook. I think even fewer people (I did) made use of the RSS features in Outlook than made use of the RSS features in IE and almost no one made use of the fact that IE and Outlook had a shared view of the same feeds, but when IE dropped native RSS is when Outlook dropped RSS support because they didn't want to own the feed reading engine.
walterbell 3y ago
HN RSS (https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/) includes feeds for: - posts above vote/comment threshold - replies to user - posts/comments/favorites by user - posts/comments by keyword - new/best/active threads
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  I love hnrss and nearly all feeds work, but I think "best comments" might not be since it's empty: https://hnrss.org/bestcomments https://hnrss.org/bestcomments Or maybe no recent comments meet the criteria :D
altairprime 3y ago
RSS feeds can contain entries with content-type `message/rfc2822`, and it was simple enough to patch Thunderbird's RSS viewer to process those with the email viewer back in the day, so you could read your email with your feedreader. I don't know if the Thunderbird team upstreamed any of that or not, but the context at the time was rssemail [1], which comes up every few years, most recently ActivityPub. [1] http://mengwong.com/rssemail/ http://mengwong.com/rssemail/
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"Javascript appears to be disabled or not supported, this means that you will not be able to read or leave comments." I'm not using Javascript however I can read some comments.
blazespin 3y ago
The obvious answer to twitter. We need vanity metrics though if it's going to win the optics battle. Some kind of push mechanisms would be great too.
davewiner 3y ago
If it’s JSON you want, here’s my blog’s RSS feed in JSON. http://scripting.com/rss.json http://scripting.com/rss.json I started generating the JSON version in 2011. http://scripting.com/stories/2011/03/17/jsonifiedRss.html http://scripting.com/stories/2011/03/17/jsonifiedRss.html It took a few minutes to write the JSON rendering code, that’s how close the two serialization formats are, so if you want JSON, you can have it.

319 points by walterbell 3y ago

Outlook and Thunderbird both handle RSS feeds directly and work as reader.

like it. rss is so simple and cool. problems: * how to make it easier for users to start using feed readers * how to make it easier to subscribe to feeds * how to help users discover new content

yoz-y 3y ago
Well, back in the day firefox had a rss reader integrated and would detect feeds and put a nice rss icon in the location bar. That kind of addressed the first two points. As for discovery, I think much like Twitter and other social media, the best discovery is one person you follow just plainly links to some other.
- pndy 3y ago
  For me RSS reader in Firefox was the best idea hands down because of its simplicity and how well it was integrated with the browser: you'd click on that icon in the address bar and page with summary (originally you'd add feed directly to the bookmarks) and subscribe button would appear and then, modal asking where to put new channel/live bookmarks folder. With bookmarks bar on, you could have a handy folder or folders that changed list of "bookmarks" all day and you could glance thru headlines without actually opening a page. And IIRC, the default RSS channel was customized among all language versions - for British English it was BBC News. I really liked this feature and Mozilla removing it angered me much. For a while I tried using something else - RSSOwl or Feedly, or Nextgen Reader for Windows 10 but nothing could replace it for me. Somehow Mozilla deducted that this feature is no longer needed due to the maintenance, performance and security costs [1] and it will be removed in v64 which was of course done. This reader was known and luckily at that time already ported as an extension to Chromium-based browsers as e.g. Foxish [2], which then was bring back as Firefox extension Livemarks [3]. That's a long way around trip. [1] - https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-product-support-for-rss-atom-feeds/ https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod... , https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667 [2] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/nbhdikhnaigcdlamenbgkmllgmfnngoi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/nb... [3] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
- paradox460 3y ago
  Vivaldi still does that. Has a nice visual formatter of feeds too
- rambambram 3y ago
  Indeed, it's pretty easy to 'retweet' something from another feed. RSS items can have a <source> element in them, just point this to the original feed. Et voila, you're 'retweeting' with RSS.
jonathankoren 3y ago
Literally all of these problems (were) solved. Its called browser integration.
walterbell 3y ago
> how to make it easier for users to start using feed readers On mobile, RSS readers like NetNewsWire and Lire are available in app stores. Lire can spider images+text for offline reading. Podcast app users probably don't even know they are using RSS. > how to make it easier to subscribe to feeds On iOS, Lire adds a "Subscribe in lire" option to the Safari share menu. Podcast directories seem to work for podcast apps. > how to help users discover new content With the demise of search engines, perhaps directories will resurface?

fifteen1506 3y ago

WhatsApp channels solves the same problems, plus it's by trustworthy ( /s ) Meta. No non-tech people use RSS knowingly.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
My 70+ year-old aunt and father use RSS all the time and are by no means "techy".

Kovah 3y ago

After all those years, I still love RSS. It's great what you can do with it. After struggling to keep up with releases for all the tools, frameworks and packages I use for programming, I built Versionfeeds.com which sends me all those releases directly into my RSS feed. It's absolutely great.

eviks 3y ago
This can't differentiate between a nighty github release (to be discarded) and a versioned one (to be retained)?

pvorb 3y ago

With comments like these, I always wonder if they are talking about "RSS" as a standard or about RSS as a common word for feeds in general. Because I think RSS itself is quite complex compared to Atom and the latter has been around for many years as well and is much easier to implement, so its use even might be more widespread these days.

namdnay 3y ago
I really like the Atom protocol, especially with the "archived pages" extension. I've used it several times to distribute common data feeds in a really scalable way. Since everything is static, the processing on the server is minimal (either return the current string buffer, or return a string from a map), and all the archived content is infinitely cacheable. it's a really simple and clever idea
kevincox 3y ago
I would say that about 99% of the time people just need feeds in general. The most common formats being RSS 2.0 and Atom.
chrismorgan 3y ago
I detest the use of the term “RSS” for feeds in general, because it grants mindshare to the inferior option—vast numbers of feeds have been implemented in RSS because that was what someone had heard of (and they’d probably have done it in Atom if they knew the full story). Just call them feeds, which has always been the appropriate technology-independent term. What I say is: use Atom, unless you’re making a podcast. Unfortunately, Apple ruined everything there by choosing RSS even though the clearly-superior Atom was (just) published by the time they released their software, and subsequently continuing to not support Atom. Most other podcasting tooling also doesn’t support Atom. But every other application of feeds supports Atom just as well as RSS.
- account42 3y ago
  There is about zero real world benefit to Atom over RSS. It's just pure spec autism.

Retr0id 3y ago

> Why does it just have to be updates to a website? RSS can be used to distribute all sorts of information. Such as? Maybe I'm just not being imaginative enough but I could really use some examples here.

dodyg 3y ago
Podcasts run on RSS
- vaylian 3y ago
  This was the mainstream killer app for RSS. And it was great. But then some podcasting services (looking at you, Spotify and others...) decided to force us to use our browser or some app instead of giving us the freedom to download files for offline use.
  - toyg 3y ago
    But the gatekeepers kinda failed. Spotify all but admitted that their podcast move failed, effectively writing off their investments in Rogan etc.
  - cxr 3y ago
    > then some podcasting services (looking at you, Spotify and others...) decided to force us to use our browser or some app instead of giving us the freedom to download files for offline use Podcasts are pretty simple, and those services you're talking about aren't podcasts—nor is anything else that keeps you from downloading files like that (say, for transcoding and then dumping into/onto your player to listen to it how you want). It's not even as if insisting that people not say "podcast" when talking about something that clearly isn't one leaves us without a way to talk about them. In the first place, "podcast" is not a genre label. There are tons of (actual) podcasts that don't follow the unscripted-banter-plus-question-and-answer/interview format. And in the second place, all those things that do stop you from downloading them? Yeah, we have a word you can use already: they're just "shows".
yzydserd 3y ago

account-5 3y ago

If I visit a website and like it the first thing I do is look for an RSS/atom feed. I find more and more site instead want your email to send you emails that could easily be done with a feed. I don't visit those again. RSS/atom give the user control instead of the platform. I doubt they would exist if social media had existed before them.

domysee 3y ago
This is so annoying, I don't want to have newsletters in my personal email. I'm happy Substack lets users choose what they want to use, newsletters or RSS feeds. Many feed readers also let users subscribe to newsletters. I'm also working on one, https://looking-glass.app/ https://looking-glass.app/ It has a bunch of extra bells and whistles as well, like automatic summarization.
- gorbachev 3y ago
  Completely agree. Like the parent poster, I never subscribe to newsletters and the sites that don't offer good ways to be updated of new content (e.g. RSS feeds) lose me as a visitor. There are, however, a few email to rss tools, a quick search brings this one as the top reasult: https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter Might be a good workaround in case the content on the site is worth it.
kevincox 3y ago
It's funny because I actually get my news via an RSS-to-email service. But I still typically subscribe to things via RSS when given the choice. This is because it keeps me in control and I know I can subscribe at any time without them holding on to my contact info. (Plus the first-party emails tend to have annoying tracking links and other nonsense. Thankfully those haven't infected the feeds yet)
eviks 3y ago
The control still resides with the platform, a lot of those feeds are of the title+first sentence type, so you'd still need to visit the platform to read the content

jamesgeck0 3y ago

> It's almost like people inventing new 'standards' are deliberately trying to make them hard so they can be the de facto gatekeepers of the new tech — all while decrying the web's current gatekeepers. This blog post feels like a subtweet, making accusations of malice about... something? ActivityPub? If it flat out said what it was talking about, we could have a more productive discussion.

qwertox 3y ago

RSS lacks some sort of push messaging. Sure, that's not RSS's fault, but constantly polling a feed is not a solution.

th0ma5 3y ago
Quite a lot of push technology is ultimately some kind of pull.
dvh 3y ago
Why would you be constantly polling a feed? You only poll once or twice a day when you want to read the news.
- ibz 3y ago
  If you use it to read news, sure. But, as the post suggests, it can be used for much more!
- eviks 3y ago
  that's too infrequent for the news
theanonymousone 3y ago
RSS delegates that responsibility to your own, local, feed reader software, along with any sort of privacy measures you want in place. This I believe is (at the very least) quite defendable as I trust the software I run on my machine more than some random server on the internet.
hnbad 3y ago
The article mentions rssCloud. From a cursory glance it sounds like that's a protocol extension that lets you register a callback URL to be notified about updates (i.e. push messaging).
- kevincox 3y ago
  Yup. But in shocked to see rssCloud mentioned in 2023! It has been largely superceded by WebSub (https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/). I have yet to see a feed that supports rssCloud but not WebSub, but the reverse is common.

hubraumhugo 3y ago

I'm working on a personalizable RSS feed for HN that classifies all posts based on your preferences. Would you use it? https://kadoa.com/hacksnack https://kadoa.com/hacksnack

robga 3y ago
It sounds interesting but I use https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ Unless it had most of the features of hnrss.org I would not be able to use it. A /topic or /category feature on hnrss.org may be nice. They accept some PRs.

WithinReason 3y ago

You can convert newsletters to RSS: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Most newsletter servives provide rss. E.g: you can read https://bitecode.dev https://bitecode.dev from email or rss because substack supports both.

ibz 3y ago

I am a huge fan of RSS (Atom) and was really hoping for a comeback... I feel like it unfairly died out because of Google Reader's sudden demise and was hoping some new equally popular client to show up and take over. I even spent some time creating one. But for the past year or so I have been falling down the Nostr rabbit hole. Nostr is a lot like RSS, but it really is better and without getting much more complicated! You can write a Nostr client that simply does what a RSS reader would do (fetch status updates) in a couple of lines without external libraries. And the Nostr ecosystem has been growing so much over the past months, it is getting hard to keep up! It seems to be really getting the momentum I was hoping RSS to regain. PS: For those that are curious about Nostr and don't know where to start, have a look at the NIPS [1] and of course at the awesome-nostr [2] list on GitHub! [1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips [2]: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

dugite-code 3y ago
RSS never really died, most CMS packages still spit out RSS feed that web site owners either don't know exist or don't care to advertise. So you can often find unadvertised feeds all over the internet, but for everything else there are plenty of poling services (hosted or selfhosted) that can generate an RSS feed well enough. If enough people start using RSS again the icons will show back up on websites again, mainly because it wouldn't be much work to add.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Failing RSS readers are still failing with the same failing interfaces that have been failing since 1999 and the strange thing is that there is very little insight about the phenomenon from people who write RSS readers and potential users. Two perennially unpopular but strangely persistent interfaces are (1) the RSS reader that looks like an email or Usenet (dead) reader. The cause of death here is the "mark as read" button that makes every item the system ingests a burden to the reader -- for all this click, click, clicking the system is not gathering any information about the feed items or the user's preferences and (2) the RSS reader that renders 200 separate lists for 200 separate RSS feeds. If your plan is to scan, scan, and scan some more, why not just visit the actual web sites? Contrast that to the successful interface of Twitter where new content displaces old content, where if you walk away for a week you see recent content and don't need to click, click and click to mark a week's worth of content as read (though there hopefully is a button to nuke everything.) And now there is Tik Tok and RSS readers still barrel on as if the last 15 years didn't happen. RSS needs algorithmic feeds to really be superior to "I have a list of 50 blogs I check every morning." That is, you have to be able to ingest more feed items than you can handle and have the important and interesting stuff float to the top. I was involved a bit in text classification research 20 years ago and it was clear to me that an algorithmic feed for RSS was very possible with the caveat that it would take a few 1000 judgements yet even at that time it was clear that you could never underestimate people's laziness when it comes to making training sets. Most people would expect to give five or so judgements. I had thought about the problem for years, a bit about ideas that would improve low-judgement performance, but I did very little other than this project https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/ and https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/ Last December I started working on YOShInOn, my smart RSS reader and intelligent agent with a primary user interface that looks like "TikTok for text" (no wasted clicks to 'mark as read' because I am always collecting preference information.) I started out with the same model from the article above (applied to the whole RSS snippet as opposed to just the title) and upgraded to a BERT-based model. It shows me the top 5% of about 3000 ingested articles a day. I am still thinking about how to productize it. On an intellectual level I'm interested in the problem with training on fewer examples. Ironically it wouldn't be hard to do experiments because I have a year of data I can sample from, but I couldn't care less on a practical level because I have 50,000 judgements already... And it is all about "pain driven development" where I work on features that I want right now for me. If I were going to make a SaaS version of it would almost certainly fall back on collaborative filtering (pooling preferences from multiple users) because users would perceive it to learn more quickly. See the entirely forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon

maerst 3y ago

Types of feeds I subscribe to: * News/blogs * Commits, e.g https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/commits/master.atom https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/commits/master.atom * Discounts for games on my wishlist: https://isthereanydeal.com/ https://isthereanydeal.com/ * LKML posts mentioning a device I use: https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=GnuBee&x=A https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=GnuBee&x=A * Repology, to be notified when packages I maintain are out-of-date: https://repology.org/ https://repology.org/ * TLS certs issued for my domains, via https://crt.sh/ https://crt.sh/ * Downtime notices, e.g. https://status.mythic-beasts.net.uk/status.rss https://status.mythic-beasts.net.uk/status.rss It's by far the highest SNR and calmest notification channel I have.

Beijinger 3y ago
You know what I miss? The twitter to RSS bridge that I had and that does not work anymore. There are 4-6 Twitter accounts I like to follow. This new, Tik Tok inspired Twitter is terrible.
- maerst 3y ago
  Yeah, that sucks. I've seen Twitter to Mastodon bridges, through which you could get RSS, e.g. https://bird.makeup/users/paulg/remote_follow https://bird.makeup/users/paulg/remote_follow
  - mariusor 3y ago
    Generally people hate those. Despite the fact that I fully subscribe to the precept of if you put it on the internet, then there's no expectation of privacy, I would still like to see some way for the twitter user to signal to stop the mirroring if they so desire.
- hydrogen7800 3y ago
  The Nitter RSS feeds still work. I follow NASA Webb, among others: https://nitter.poast.org/NASAWebb/rss https://nitter.poast.org/NASAWebb/rss

billpg 3y ago

Also, do we mean ATOM in the same way that people insist on referring to TLS as "SSL", or do we actually mean RSS as in actual RSS? If we could agree that ATOM is RSS 2 (or whatever MAX(version)+1 is) that'd be great.

kqr 3y ago

A simple way to improvise pub/sub messaging in an early prototype when you don't want to pull in a full message queueing system is to publish a timeline of events in an RSS feed. The drawback is that when the system grows, you run the risk of going for the lazy default of keeping RSS publishing of events, and now you need to re-implement large portions of a message queueing system to achieve desired reliability of the RSS feed.

billpg 3y ago

Suppose I have a feed with a million items already on it which I've already handled. I'm about to poll the feed and there's a small number of new items on the feed I don't know about yet. Am I going to have to download a file with references to all one million items again? If the answer is to have a separate feed with only the most recent n items, I'm afraid that's not going to work unless there's additional details. There might have been n+1 items turn up since the last time I polled. Also, someone else might want to start handling those one million records from the start and we should be able to co-ordinate by having a common canonical URL. (I'd also mention pull-vs-push, but that's a thread elsewhere in these comments.)

deleted 3y ago
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bhaak 3y ago
Everything will have problems if you start from scratch and have to import millions of items. But of course there's a standard for paging: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3 Then both ATOM and RSS can leverage HTTP headers. If you include If-Modified-Since into your request the server can decide to only returns items that are newer.
- billpg 3y ago
  <link rel="next" href="http://example.org/index.atom?page=2"/> http://example.org/index.atom?page=2"/> That's fantastic. Anyone developing ATOM/RSS, please use this mechanism. (I'm looking at you, podcast with over 100 episodes.)
  - kevincox 3y ago
    The problem is that support for this is rare. I know that Podcast Addict supports it but it is rare in podcatchers and even more rare in feed readers. But I definitely agree that it should be a standard feature!
- account42 3y ago

est 3y ago

RSS seems like usenet these days. Old Internet users kept using it but newer generation seems just focus on ig/tiktok.

cobertos 3y ago

Always thought it was interesting that the Windows .theme file format allows RSS feeds for desktop background images[0] [0]https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/themesfileformat-overview#slideshow-section https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/the... see the RSSUrl parameter

mgd 3y ago

I really enjoy using RSS. One benefit I have noticed is that I spend less time browsing websites, scrolling and generally wasting time online. If I value some content, there will be a way to get or create an RSS feed. Pair this with a read it later service and I have a better curated collection of items to actually look through

rambambram 3y ago
I use the RSS feeds from Youtube channels to not get bothered by their algorithm that boosts clickbaity videos on the homepage. I just can't stand looking at these stupid thumbnails anymore, with pictures of outrageous and screaming people and all these in-your-face colors.
eXpl0it3r 3y ago
That's why a love Readwise's Reader. I can store stuff to read later, but also get all the RSS/Atom feeds, plus can even funnel newsletters into one place. In addition to having my highlights there as well and being able to easily export them to Obsidian.
- chrisweekly 3y ago
  Yes, this! Readwise Reader is fantastic! I use it for reading web pages stripped of ads and other cruft -- and for collecting highlights and notes (eg kindle highlights, captured while reading, trivial to "tag" with eg .vocab or .quote) -- and routing all this great content into Obsidian (my PKM / tool for thought / second brain)....
- moritz 3y ago
  In the spirit of the OP: my gripe with Readwise/Reader is that it… doesn’t output RSS.

rambambram 3y ago

Exactly! Even the use case of adding an image to a feed item - which falls well within the definition - is an extraordinary thing to witness nowadays. Photo feeds are very nice and make the rather dull text-only format more lively. I've also read an article about reverse/random RSS feeds, where the inactive blog author had an automatic feed made up by random items from his archive, which is very nice if you have a big archive but currently no new entries.

xnx 3y ago

RSS/Atom will have a hard time becoming popular as long as developers remain biased against anything to do with XML. If someone reinvents Atom but worse using JSON, there might just be a chance.

JNRowe 3y ago
There is JSON Feed¹ already. One of the spec writers is behind https://micro.blog https://micro.blog, which is the first place I saw it(and also one of the few places I've seen it). I don't think it is a bad idea, and it doesn't take all that long to implement it given the sane and quite readable specification. I have long hoped it would pick up steam with the JSON-ify everything crowd, just so I'd never see a non-Atom feed again. We perhaps wouldn't need sooo much of the magic that is wrapped up in packages like feedparser² to deal with all the brokeness of RSS in the wild then. ¹ https://www.jsonfeed.org/ https://www.jsonfeed.org/ ² https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser

bsnnkv 3y ago

I use RSS to distribute my web highlights[1] on specific topics and even my Kindle highights[2] for longer series. It's also nice and easy to reuse these feeds on my website homepage to give a dynamic feel to a static website. Ultimately I had to get with the times a bit and find a way to share my highlights as photos[3] and videos, especially on modern text-hostile social media platforms, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the topic-specific RSS highlight feed, and it's one of my proudest achievements. [1]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development [2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/terra-ignota https://notado.app/feeds/jado/terra-ignota [3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/using-rust-chrome-and-nixos-to-take-headless-screenshots-for-social-sharing/ https://lgug2z.com/articles/using-rust-chrome-and-nixos-to-t...

walterbell 3y ago
Nice work! Do you save web highlights with a browser plugin?
- bsnnkv 3y ago
  These days I mostly read and save on mobile with the Notado iOS shortcuts, but of course everything works pretty much the same way with the browser extension too. All websites/apps that I read comments on (HN, Reddit, Mastodon, Twitter, Lemmy, Tildes, Lobsters, YouTube) have a "Save Comment to Notado" action when sharing permalinks which makes saving interesting comments a breeze. When I'm reading something in Safari, I just highlight the text I want to save with my finger and then use the browser share button (not the text share button) to hit the "Save Selection to Notado" action. If you check back in my comment history here I've written before about how I'm a big believer in RINORIN (read it now or read it never), and for this reason I completely eschew read it later-style reader apps. If it's not immediately interesting enough for me to read when I see it, I just let it ago, trusting that if it's important enough, I'll be exposed to it again sooner or later, and at that point it'll be interesting enough for me to read it when I see it.

janandonly 3y ago

I'm currently trying to read all RSS feeds, and interesting sites I find on HN in https://Omnivore.app https://Omnivore.app. The app has as an added benefit that it allows me to label posts and also make my own highlights. NetNewsWire allows you to "star" an entire post, but not a word/paragraph/sentence.

camgunz 3y ago

I gotta say I don't deeply understand ActivityPub, but one of the first things I thought when trying to grok it was "how does this improve on RSS?". Like another commenter here I think a big part of it is that it's JSON and not XML, but I think another thing people would say is that you aren't storing things locally, that is you don't have an application pulling things onto your local machine (phone, laptop, whatever). But I've evolved lately, and now I strongly feel like we're missing the forest for the trees here. These things aren't just RSS; they're email. They're email lists. ActivityPub even uses the language of email; it has `to` and `cc`, and `replyTo` fields, in/outboxes. There are (media)Types, i.e. MIME types. There are differences. ActivityPub basically exists to be an underlying protocol for Twitter-like social media, so it specs out things like Likes or Undo. But IMO, stuff like this is either superfluous/harmful (chasing likes/views maybe isn't a good idea), or maybe unclear what a lot of people would want out of a conversations platform. I don't really want someone else to irrevocably edit the stuff I've pulled down; sure I'll let you send a diff or something, but I want the history. Or, on the other hand, maybe I don't want someone to store a history of my worst posts, ready to unleash them whenever I dare to do something public. Or, on the other hand, maybe this has been a really useful tool to speak truth to power. Or, maybe we shouldn't create a protocol that seems to guarantee this, only to have rogue servers that store these things as diffs anyway to lull you into a false sense of "posting hot takes is OK I can always undo/edit/blah".

adql 3y ago
> I gotta say I don't deeply understand ActivityPub, but one of the first things I thought when trying to grok it was "how does this improve on RSS?". Like another commenter here I think a big part of it is that it's JSON and not XML, but I think another thing people would say is that you aren't storing things locally, that is you don't have an application pulling things onto your local machine (phone, laptop, whatever). Both of those honestly sound like a disadvantage. Like yeah , plenty to hate about XML but at least it has defined schema language, and I want to have an application and not be dependent on some shitty website to act as aggregator for me. All of the "features" ActivityPub has could be pretty easily just added to RSS too
- 3y ago

7sidedmarble 3y ago

Self advertisement but I'd appreciate anyone trying out my RSS aggregator which is kinda like HN in terms of design (be warned it's really rough right now though) https://catnip.vip https://catnip.vip

rambambram 3y ago

I love RSS, but a big roadbump from the past is that it seems to be not so interactive (although that's not a fault from the protocol, if you ask me). On one hand you have websites with feeds, on the other you have separate feed readers. So every 'node' must use two different pieces of software to make it interactive. A big advantage of big tech social media is that users can produce and consume within the same software interface. I try to put these two RSS functions (consuming and producing, or publish and subscribe if you will) in the same website software, and it sort of works. I'm still trying to figure out how to safely and easily reply to feed elements, but the only viable way I found is a link inside the element to a comments section on the feed's website. Other ways seem to invite spam (an email address in the feed for example), or require webmentions to work on both sides. If any of you have ideas, feel free to brainstorm with me. If you happen to have a website, homepage or blog with a feed and you never posted it here on HN, please feel extra free to send me a message with the link (my website is in bio).

basisword 3y ago

Can anyone recommend an RSS reader that actually fetches the article content? A lot of sites I subscribe to only show the first sentence and then I have to open the website. Are there any good readers that are able to pull the article content and display in the reader?

moritz 3y ago
miniflux.app
acidburnNSA 3y ago
FreshRSS does that. You can self host it or sign up on an existing server. https://www.freshrss.org/ https://www.freshrss.org/
argulane 3y ago
miniflux does a pretty good job at fetching the original content, but it does not work well for sites that use a lot of JS
carlosjobim 3y ago
NetNewsWire has a button to try to fetch the entire article, it works almost always. It is one of the best made Mac and iOS applications, in my opinion.
refset 3y ago
https://yakread.com https://yakread.com
walterbell 3y ago
https://lireapp.com https://lireapp.com on iOS includes offline caching of full article.

bitslayer 3y ago

What is artcasting?

georgesimon 3y ago
I think it's a term minted by Dave Winer. The principle idea that "wherever you get your podcasts" could apply to any art. Here's a very literal example from him: http://scripting.com/2023/10/26.html http://scripting.com/2023/10/26.html

hypertexthero 3y ago

My favorite Atom/RSS reader: https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/

axegon_ 3y ago

I was always a huge supporter of RSS and my disappointment was immeasurable when it almost completely died. I've kind of abandoned the hope that it would make a comeback though. The way I see it, there are two major problems: * XML sucks. Bloated, unpleasant, annoying, slow. There should be a new standard which is slimmer, faster and more pleasant to work with. * LLM's: they are becoming cheaper and feasible to use AND TRAIN on consumer grade hardware: The type of hardware many of us have at home - a good amount of memory, a large hard drive, a beefy CPU and a beefy GPU(or two). If RSS all of a sudden became widely available across the web, who knows how many people would start using and abusing the feeds and start building some insanely powerful LLM's in their basements. I'm not saying that would be bad, I am all for it. But most people I know would go ballistic if their data was used to build LLMs without their explicit consent. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the WTF license[1] but maybe I'm just weird. [1] http://www.wtfpl.net/ http://www.wtfpl.net/

smusamashah 3y ago

RSS died (kinda) not because of Google Reader but because of Google Chrome. When Chrome came out and everyone jumped ship, all other browsers natively supported reading RSS which chrome still does not do to this date. Chrome still shows RSS as raw XML instead of making it readable.

advisedwang 3y ago
IE had ~50% of the market before chrome [1], and I don't believe it supported native RSS. I'm also skeptical that many Firefox users were viewing RSS directly in the browser. Yes, Firefox shows the feed, but without subscriptions and a central place to find updates it was not really a good feed reader. [1] https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/ https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/
- smusamashah 3y ago
  I was not including IE in those browsers TBH, it was never a good browser anyway. I have been an Opera/Firefox user before chrome came in. Both had native RSS support. Even showing RSS symbol in URL when its available and being able to actually read it humanly is way better than chrome's nothing.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  IE had "native RSS" going back to somewhere around IE4 or IE5. There was some "Active Desktop" nonsense you could do with RSS really early on, which would have been IE4. IE's approach was very similar to Firefox's: clicking an RSS feed would give you a pretty printed XML page by default, which wasn't exactly useful, but might also have side links to some use cases for RSS depending on some combinations of addons installed and configured preferences. Just like Firefox at the time, the most common built-in usecase was that you could subscribe an RSS feed as an auto-updating Bookmarks Folder. But there were addons that did all sorts of things and some feed readers supported various sorts of integrations with IE. IE even shared its feed reading engine as a shared COM control with a built-in Windows service. It was something like BITS [Background Intelligent Transfer Service], Windows' background downloader service, where you could hand it feeds, it would manage feed polling, it tried to be smart about it with things like exponential back-off and downloading feeds during idle bandwidth periods on your machine, and give you back a very simple RSS-like data store of whatever it found. Outside of IE using it, so far as I know the only other major "feed reader" to integrate it was Outlook. I think even fewer people (I did) made use of the RSS features in Outlook than made use of the RSS features in IE and almost no one made use of the fact that IE and Outlook had a shared view of the same feeds, but when IE dropped native RSS is when Outlook dropped RSS support because they didn't want to own the feed reading engine.

walterbell 3y ago

HN RSS (https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/) includes feeds for: - posts above vote/comment threshold - replies to user - posts/comments/favorites by user - posts/comments by keyword - new/best/active threads

ParetoOptimal 3y ago
I love hnrss and nearly all feeds work, but I think "best comments" might not be since it's empty: https://hnrss.org/bestcomments https://hnrss.org/bestcomments Or maybe no recent comments meet the criteria :D

altairprime 3y ago

RSS feeds can contain entries with content-type `message/rfc2822`, and it was simple enough to patch Thunderbird's RSS viewer to process those with the email viewer back in the day, so you could read your email with your feedreader. I don't know if the Thunderbird team upstreamed any of that or not, but the context at the time was rssemail [1], which comes up every few years, most recently ActivityPub. [1] http://mengwong.com/rssemail/ http://mengwong.com/rssemail/

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"Javascript appears to be disabled or not supported, this means that you will not be able to read or leave comments." I'm not using Javascript however I can read some comments.

blazespin 3y ago

The obvious answer to twitter. We need vanity metrics though if it's going to win the optics battle. Some kind of push mechanisms would be great too.

davewiner 3y ago

If it’s JSON you want, here’s my blog’s RSS feed in JSON. http://scripting.com/rss.json http://scripting.com/rss.json I started generating the JSON version in 2011. http://scripting.com/stories/2011/03/17/jsonifiedRss.html http://scripting.com/stories/2011/03/17/jsonifiedRss.html It took a few minutes to write the JSON rendering code, that’s how close the two serialization formats are, so if you want JSON, you can have it.