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A lot of RSS/Atom is left unexposed for two key reasons: 1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, inclu

A lot of RSS/Atom is left unexposed for two key reasons: 1) Google Reader and friends disappeared, and 2) Browsers stopped supporting RSS feeds natively, including discovery of a feed. Put the functionality back in browsers where it belongs, it could at least be used to find feeds and then you can use newsbeuter or something similar to subscribe with.

ramijames 3y ago
It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. Guess who makes the most widely used browser today.
- dawnerd 3y ago
  It’s weird, our publishing clients don’t seem to care about having an rss feed exposed but Google for sure doesn’t want it. Honestly surprised they haven’t come up with some BS sitespeed reason to remove it from html.
- dugite-code 3y ago
  > It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. I would argue that's only a part of the story. After all RSS quickly morphed into Link with a short blurb and image just like any modern link aggregation site rather than a full page of content. The big issue was RSS was it prevents site lock-in like Facebook ect. Even Reddit pushes people to the comments to try keep you on the site as much as possible in order to have you see the link aggregator's Advertisements and more recently, to provide more robust data collection for later sale.
  - rambambram 3y ago
    I'm willing to advocate in favor of the short blurbs. I follow a lot of 'dev blogs' by RSS and my homegrown feed reader also only shows the short blurbs. I do this because all these people crafted their (personal) sites, made it beautiful and personal, and I'm wanting to visit their site to pay hommage and look at what they made (whether that's a cool logo, a nice color scheme, etc.) exactly in the way they made it. My ad blocker already blocks the ads I don't want to see (if there are any externally loaded ads). It also has the benefit of the site owners now being able to see somebody is subscribed to the feed. I'm visiting their website and they might see my traffic in their visitor statistics. To make this even more clear to the site owner, I add an URL parameter called /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com
    - manuelmoreale 3y ago
      I advocated for the exact opposite[0] There’s no point in serving only excerpts. By serving full content the people like you who like to consume on the original site can still do that. Serving blurbs forces everyone to do that and that’s wrong imo. [0] https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts
      - rambambram 3y ago
        Yeah, there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice, so I'm going to keep this in the back of my head. For my system it feels weird to show the full content. I don't trim the feed description (yet) and sometimes these are very very long, looks awful with the rest of the UI. What I also do is filter out all the markup and even links, I only show some sentences of text basically. It sits wrong with me to make my reader a sort of browser window and display all the markup. Beautifully simple site you have, by the way. And I found I'm already subscribed to your feed. "RSS is not a notification system. It's a distribution system." you say on your site. Was that the purpose of the inventors? I guess I take the freedom to use it slightly different then, we're on Hacker News after all. ;) We can agree to disagree.
        dugite-code 3y ago
        > there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice This is why I took over the maintaince of the Feediron plugin for the TT-RSS feedreader, I really like having the flexibility to define what content I feel is relevant on a feed by feed basis
        manuelmoreale 3y ago
        In not sure if it was intended to be a distribution system but it sure is today. Especially because the web and the browser do have built in notification tools we can leverage if what we want to do is send notifications. But I can see why not all situations allow for sending full content via rss. I still believe that IF you can send the full content you should do so.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- politelemon 3y ago
  Firefox dropped RSS/Atom support too
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    Part of Mozilla's bad decisions with Firefox generally boiled down to "we don't have someone to maintain this", or "our analytics show people don't use this". Shit gets removed, people get upset, and they're told to deal with it. They didn't consider that the people who used the features that were removed also didn't send telemetry data, so they made a dumb decision based on incomplete and inaccurate data instead of something sane like appeal to the community and invite people to maintain or test it.
mdp2021 3y ago
That some corporate services stopped existing does not imply one cannot have an "application/rss+xml" link in the html page source - in fact, it is not normal to depend on perishable services when "unrevokable" desktop software applications can be available, and in the case of RSS readers there still exists a large number (and writing one is pretty trivial). To discover a feed, just check the html source. The problem is when the feed exists but it is not mentioned at all in the website.
orbital-decay 3y ago
Native RSS support never made sense as a core feature for browsers in the first place; extensions are much better suited for this. There are plenty of replacements for Google Reader as well, which also provide much more than just RSS. In the media optimized for engagement/addiction, RSS provides a step off the platform, so of course they don't use it. Even many personal blogs the article mostly talks about might want to keep the reader on the site for clicks. It's a conflict of interest between content providers and consumers (mostly advertisement). It's not an implementation issue.
Aissen 3y ago
I once found that my website's RSS button did not appear. I did not understand why, until I checked the ad blocker. At least two lists still have rules to block RSS icons (AdGuard Widgets, EasyList Social Widgets). They are not enabled by default though.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Kind of ironic for the 'social widgets' one considering RSS is pull-only.

ramijames 3y ago

It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. Guess who makes the most widely used browser today.

dawnerd 3y ago
It’s weird, our publishing clients don’t seem to care about having an rss feed exposed but Google for sure doesn’t want it. Honestly surprised they haven’t come up with some BS sitespeed reason to remove it from html.
dugite-code 3y ago
> It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. I would argue that's only a part of the story. After all RSS quickly morphed into Link with a short blurb and image just like any modern link aggregation site rather than a full page of content. The big issue was RSS was it prevents site lock-in like Facebook ect. Even Reddit pushes people to the comments to try keep you on the site as much as possible in order to have you see the link aggregator's Advertisements and more recently, to provide more robust data collection for later sale.
- rambambram 3y ago
  I'm willing to advocate in favor of the short blurbs. I follow a lot of 'dev blogs' by RSS and my homegrown feed reader also only shows the short blurbs. I do this because all these people crafted their (personal) sites, made it beautiful and personal, and I'm wanting to visit their site to pay hommage and look at what they made (whether that's a cool logo, a nice color scheme, etc.) exactly in the way they made it. My ad blocker already blocks the ads I don't want to see (if there are any externally loaded ads). It also has the benefit of the site owners now being able to see somebody is subscribed to the feed. I'm visiting their website and they might see my traffic in their visitor statistics. To make this even more clear to the site owner, I add an URL parameter called /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com
  - manuelmoreale 3y ago
    I advocated for the exact opposite[0] There’s no point in serving only excerpts. By serving full content the people like you who like to consume on the original site can still do that. Serving blurbs forces everyone to do that and that’s wrong imo. [0] https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts
    - rambambram 3y ago
      Yeah, there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice, so I'm going to keep this in the back of my head. For my system it feels weird to show the full content. I don't trim the feed description (yet) and sometimes these are very very long, looks awful with the rest of the UI. What I also do is filter out all the markup and even links, I only show some sentences of text basically. It sits wrong with me to make my reader a sort of browser window and display all the markup. Beautifully simple site you have, by the way. And I found I'm already subscribed to your feed. "RSS is not a notification system. It's a distribution system." you say on your site. Was that the purpose of the inventors? I guess I take the freedom to use it slightly different then, we're on Hacker News after all. ;) We can agree to disagree.
      - dugite-code 3y ago
        > there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice This is why I took over the maintaince of the Feediron plugin for the TT-RSS feedreader, I really like having the flexibility to define what content I feel is relevant on a feed by feed basis
      - manuelmoreale 3y ago
        In not sure if it was intended to be a distribution system but it sure is today. Especially because the web and the browser do have built in notification tools we can leverage if what we want to do is send notifications. But I can see why not all situations allow for sending full content via rss. I still believe that IF you can send the full content you should do so.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
politelemon 3y ago
Firefox dropped RSS/Atom support too
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Part of Mozilla's bad decisions with Firefox generally boiled down to "we don't have someone to maintain this", or "our analytics show people don't use this". Shit gets removed, people get upset, and they're told to deal with it. They didn't consider that the people who used the features that were removed also didn't send telemetry data, so they made a dumb decision based on incomplete and inaccurate data instead of something sane like appeal to the community and invite people to maintain or test it.

mdp2021 3y ago

That some corporate services stopped existing does not imply one cannot have an "application/rss+xml" link in the html page source - in fact, it is not normal to depend on perishable services when "unrevokable" desktop software applications can be available, and in the case of RSS readers there still exists a large number (and writing one is pretty trivial). To discover a feed, just check the html source. The problem is when the feed exists but it is not mentioned at all in the website.

orbital-decay 3y ago

Native RSS support never made sense as a core feature for browsers in the first place; extensions are much better suited for this. There are plenty of replacements for Google Reader as well, which also provide much more than just RSS. In the media optimized for engagement/addiction, RSS provides a step off the platform, so of course they don't use it. Even many personal blogs the article mostly talks about might want to keep the reader on the site for clicks. It's a conflict of interest between content providers and consumers (mostly advertisement). It's not an implementation issue.

Aissen 3y ago

I once found that my website's RSS button did not appear. I did not understand why, until I checked the ad blocker. At least two lists still have rules to block RSS icons (AdGuard Widgets, EasyList Social Widgets). They are not enabled by default though.

zlg_codes 3y ago
Kind of ironic for the 'social widgets' one considering RSS is pull-only.