7 ms·

Birb and Fossil: An RSS Revival?

49 points by tkellogg 3y ago

canpolat 3y ago
I always thought, the "correct" way of doing this was the other way around: the RSS reader would implement ActivityPub so you could "toot" from within you RSS client. It would perhaps attempt to collect other "toot"s about the same link, facilitating a discussion (and keeping everything at one place). But I think this is the next best thing, especially for those feeds you tend to share on the social networks (I don't think it's feasible to reproduce the RSS reader following with this).
- jamietanna 3y ago
  That's kinda how we've approached it with some of the IndieWeb tools (https://indieweb.org/reader https://indieweb.org/reader) where you can subscribe to the various feeds you want to, and can directly like/reply/etc
  - zerojames 3y ago
    I am an active user of Monocle (https://monocle.p3k.io https://monocle.p3k.io), a social reader UI (which is connected to a feed polling service, in my case Aperture). I can click "like" or "reply" and the reaction is published on my personal website. A notification is sent to the recipient via Webmention that I liked/commented on their content (if their site supports webmention).
- input_sh 3y ago
  > It would perhaps attempt to collect other "toot"s about the same link, facilitating a discussion (and keeping everything at one place). If you go to Explore → News on Mastodon, there's like a list of 10 trending articles within your network. It also includes "discussed by X people in the past Y days", but annoyingly there's no way to reach those discussions and read what people thought about the article. So I feel like Mastodon's moving in the right path to serve that purpose, it's just unfinished.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  Isn't that effectively Micropub/Microsub? RSS was only ever meant for passive consumption, but similar IndieWeb specs have been layered on to support more social features and two-way engagement.
- jayemar 3y ago
  Many RSS readers implement a "share" button that can be used to post to a mastodon account. Is this different than the workflow you're describing?
  - canpolat 3y ago
    Yes, there is a slight difference in that, I would like the RSS reader to find other social accounts (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.) that shared the same link and bring them in context so that the user can directly interact with those as well. I know it's not trivial to do, but one gets to dream, right?
082349872349872 3y ago
> notorious for sticking with chronologically-ordered timelines, so unless you have time to look at every single post, you’ll likely miss something. The value of RSS to me is getting everything in chronological order, so I (not some algo) can throw 99% of it away, unread. (and if I do want to go back and look at something I'd skipped without reading, it's easily findable, searchable by keyword or at least still there in the "read" list, next to all the things that were temporally close)
- sitharus 3y ago
  I don't understand that reasoning. If something is chronologically ordered I can scroll back to the last thing I saw and catch up, or likely not and just accept that I can't read everything, if it's interesting it'll probably be boosted or involved in ongoing discussions. If it's ordered by algorithm I have no way of knowing what or how much I've missed.
  - lapinot 3y ago
    Depends on the "algorithm"! At this point "algorithm" in the context of social media doesn't mean anything sensible. A very common "algorithm" used to order messages in email inboxes is by "read/unread" status, which very much helps you catch up efficiently. Chronological sorting is very limited, in comparison with the myriad of other ways you could organize such data.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      I use newsboat, so it picks everything up in chronological (modulo feed oddity) order, but displays only "unread" items to me. On top of that is further organisation: non-HN feeds are batched together in a single display, but HN often produces more than a screenful (~70) of unreads, so then I have hotkeys that filter out alphabetic subsets: A-G, H-R, or S-Z. That normally suffices to avoid any scrolling, but when I haven't been following RSS for several days, I also have filters that further limit to a single day, either 1, 2, 3, or 4 days ago. Although the underlying data is kept chronologically indexed by newsboat, and I can always refer to it that way (frex the concrete splits AG/HR/SZ were determined by querying newsboat's SQLite instance) it by no means prevents layering a myriad (well 20, not counting newsboat's ad-hoc command line filter interface) of other ways to organise on top. PS thank you for reminding me to finally look up how to turn off threading (View»Organise by Conversation) in the mac default mail proggy!
0xEF 3y ago
Stop trying to make Mastodon be Twitter. If that's what you want, go use Twitter. I don't get this mentality of "I like X, but I don't want to use X, so imma go turn Y into X" some devs seem to have. Chronological ordering is a fair and balanced choice for media presentation. Playing into people's FOMO is what got the Internet into the rat's nest of algorithmically driven problematic feeds in the first place.
- kuschkufan 3y ago
  eludes me how people think it's ok to tell other people to stop on topics like this. it's not even about making maston be twitter. it's about experimenting with timeline options that are not chronological and it's all open and an invitation for people to contribute if they are interested. you are not interested? cool, then do whatever. because unlike twitter, you have that option - and that option will not go away. stop commenting when your comment tells others to stop doing what they like because you don't like it.
  - 0xEF 3y ago
    Oh, grow up. Dissenting opinions are welcome on line, being probably the most beautiful part of this whole mess we call the Internet. If you don't like my comment, address the content of the comment and explain to me how my warning of the path this treads is unreasonable. Stop virtue signalling and contribute. I'm open to having my mind change and everyone on this site should be as well.
    - kuschkufan 3y ago
      dissenting opinions are not a problem until they start telling people what to do. i'm not interested in changing your mind.
      - 0xEF 3y ago
        Interesting. So you wanting me to stop explaining why someone shouldn't be doing something is you not being interested in changing my mind? You live in an interesting world. What is a dissenting opinion other than an expression of dissatisfaction toward a thing, be that an action of another or not? You say dissent is okay, byt in the same breath say byt only if you do it the way I think it should be done. Hypocrisy is a helluva drug, I guess. Anyway, have a great day. Didn't mean to piss in anyone's cereal quite this early.
countWSS 3y ago
started using RSS feeds a few months ago, they're still widely supported and there are JSON scrapers for those sites that don't. The idea of "reading N accounts" to get some info or some algorithmic soup of "popular stuff i tangentially show interest in" doesn't even compare to curated RSS feeds organized into groups. The unpopular, rare and obscure stuff can't compete with algorithmically optimal SEO-friendly hype-tagged social media junk in the "common prole-feed" of giant websites.
self_awareness 3y ago
Name clash with an already popular open-source project: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
- nmz 3y ago
  Which is also a name clash on plan9's fossil archival file server/system
  - debo_ 3y ago
    Both these projects are fossils at this point. /joke
- hdb2 3y ago
  ha! I just posted a comment saying that very thing...I was confused.
- whateveracct 3y ago
  Me too - I expected hosting an RSS feed via Fossil or something.
- InfiniteRand 3y ago
  I wish people did a search <project name> open source before naming their project
lucideer 3y ago
People like RSS because it's not algorithmic. People like Mastodon because it's not algorithmic. What I'm mainly curious about here is what drew this author to these two technologies in the first place? What's the hook for them? --- Subjective aside: before I read the line on algorithms & the HN comments bemoaning the same, I was already very turned off by the awful AI header image. Until tools like Dall-E, &c. get to the point where they can reliably generate images that aren't blatantly & obviously AI-generated (they seem a surprisingly long way off still), I think this effect is worth keeping in mind: for me the aesthetic is a massive turnoff for any product page.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Some people like Mastodon because it's not algorithmic, some people like it because it's not centralised/has no real single point of failure, some for other reasons. I'd definitely buy that at least some people would quite like an algorithmic view of their Mastodon feed; wouldn't be for me, but one reason that people go for Bluesky over Mastodon is that it is algorithmic.
  - lucideer 3y ago
    > one reason that people go for Bluesky over Mastodon is that it is algorithmic My comment does seem a little dogmatic whereas there's always a broad variety of approaches & preferences with anything. I was somewhat exaggerating, but my goal was to represent the typical user as best as I can glean. As someone who advocated heavily for Mastodon (& continues to), I spend more time on bsky now, but I've found people's reasons for being there over Mastodon to be either my reason: network effect, or for the vast majority of folk: UX. ActivityPub client/server UX remains abysmal in comparison to centralised services (not complaining as I know it's a harder problem for decentralised tech, just stating the fact). Algorithmic feeds haven't come up in the context of bsky prefs mainly because - in my experience - algorithmic feeds in any app/website are broadly hated by all but the most tech-savvy of people.
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  Actually, I wouldn't mind a little bit of algorithm in my feed. "Newest first" is annoying because unless I manage to read everything that's new then I have gaps. If I've only got a couple of minutes now then I want to be able to see a few things without losing track of what I have and haven't read. "Oldest first" is annoying because -- as much as I might want to -- I can't keep up. "Newest unread" is annoying because if someone's posted a series then I want to read them in order. "Prioritised unread" might be OK -- if someone only posts once a month then I probably want to prioritise reading their post over reading absolutely everything by someone who posts multiple times a day. I'm currently reading my RSS with Newsblur, and it's not perfect but it does give me flexibility through the "intelligence trainer" to highlight the stuff I want to prioritise. Aside, RSS and Mastodon definitely are algorithmic. "Chronological ordering" is an algorithm, and it's not always the most appropriate.
hdb2 3y ago
Initially I thought they were referring to fossil SCM: https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki Since fossil SCM has been around awhile, the author might consider a name change to avoid confusion?
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  Fossil watches has existed since the 80s. The Fossil wrist PDA came out three years before Fossil SCM was first released. Why does Fossil SCM get to lay claim to this name? Ten seconds of reading and you'd have avoided any confusion.
hypertexthero 3y ago
See also: https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/
Gormo 3y ago
The whole "death of RSS" idea seems like a strange perspective. RSS/Atom never went away, and nothing has replaced their use case for syndicating content. To the author's point, it's just that a lot of mass-market consumption of web content for the past decade or so has been on walled-garden platforms that never offered syndication in the first place. But even there, I think the article is overstating things -- it implies that Reddit, HN, Medium, and Substack have only recently begun offering RSS feeds, but these have never not offered RSS feeds (and HN has always had a native top-level article feed, even if the 3rd-party solution is more extensive). Even YouTube has always offered RSS feeds (albeit without enclosures, so they can't be used as podcast feeds -- but Odysee, a web frontend to LBRY which is gaining traction against YouTube does offer feeds with enclosures). I guess this application is a good solution for people who want to follow syndicated content via Mastodon, but it should be pointed out that the traditional model of using standalone RSS readers never went away -- when Google Reader was shut down, the void was quickly filled with a variety of solutions like TinyTinyRSS, MiniFlux, Feedly, Inoreader, etc. I personally use TinyTinyRSS, with Liferea as a desktop client, as my primary interface to all of the blogs, podcasts, subreddits, and YouTube channels I read, along with aggregators like HN and Lobsters. I've been using this solution for over 10 years now; nothing has ever stopped working and none of the sites ever pulled back from publishing feeds.
- andrewrust30 3y ago
  Just as an FYI, the Odysee frontend might be on the way out unfortunately [1] [1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/16/lbry-closes-odysee-cryptocurrency-tech-sec-fraud-extremist https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/16/lbry-clos...
  - Gormo 3y ago
    Looks like FUD. The original LBRY shut down, but Odysee was spun off into its own business entity, which appears to be very much in business, and the current home page doesn't seem to contain a trace of "far-right" content. The underlying platform is a decentralized blockchain, and will maintain continuity regardless of what business entity is acting as its front face at the moment.

49 points by tkellogg 3y ago

I always thought, the "correct" way of doing this was the other way around: the RSS reader would implement ActivityPub so you could "toot" from within you RSS client. It would perhaps attempt to collect other "toot"s about the same link, facilitating a discussion (and keeping everything at one place). But I think this is the next best thing, especially for those feeds you tend to share on the social networks (I don't think it's feasible to reproduce the RSS reader following with this).

jamietanna 3y ago
That's kinda how we've approached it with some of the IndieWeb tools (https://indieweb.org/reader https://indieweb.org/reader) where you can subscribe to the various feeds you want to, and can directly like/reply/etc
- zerojames 3y ago
  I am an active user of Monocle (https://monocle.p3k.io https://monocle.p3k.io), a social reader UI (which is connected to a feed polling service, in my case Aperture). I can click "like" or "reply" and the reaction is published on my personal website. A notification is sent to the recipient via Webmention that I liked/commented on their content (if their site supports webmention).
input_sh 3y ago
> It would perhaps attempt to collect other "toot"s about the same link, facilitating a discussion (and keeping everything at one place). If you go to Explore → News on Mastodon, there's like a list of 10 trending articles within your network. It also includes "discussed by X people in the past Y days", but annoyingly there's no way to reach those discussions and read what people thought about the article. So I feel like Mastodon's moving in the right path to serve that purpose, it's just unfinished.
_heimdall 3y ago
Isn't that effectively Micropub/Microsub? RSS was only ever meant for passive consumption, but similar IndieWeb specs have been layered on to support more social features and two-way engagement.
jayemar 3y ago
Many RSS readers implement a "share" button that can be used to post to a mastodon account. Is this different than the workflow you're describing?
- canpolat 3y ago
  Yes, there is a slight difference in that, I would like the RSS reader to find other social accounts (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.) that shared the same link and bring them in context so that the user can directly interact with those as well. I know it's not trivial to do, but one gets to dream, right?

082349872349872 3y ago

> notorious for sticking with chronologically-ordered timelines, so unless you have time to look at every single post, you’ll likely miss something. The value of RSS to me is getting everything in chronological order, so I (not some algo) can throw 99% of it away, unread. (and if I do want to go back and look at something I'd skipped without reading, it's easily findable, searchable by keyword or at least still there in the "read" list, next to all the things that were temporally close)

sitharus 3y ago
I don't understand that reasoning. If something is chronologically ordered I can scroll back to the last thing I saw and catch up, or likely not and just accept that I can't read everything, if it's interesting it'll probably be boosted or involved in ongoing discussions. If it's ordered by algorithm I have no way of knowing what or how much I've missed.
- lapinot 3y ago
  Depends on the "algorithm"! At this point "algorithm" in the context of social media doesn't mean anything sensible. A very common "algorithm" used to order messages in email inboxes is by "read/unread" status, which very much helps you catch up efficiently. Chronological sorting is very limited, in comparison with the myriad of other ways you could organize such data.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    I use newsboat, so it picks everything up in chronological (modulo feed oddity) order, but displays only "unread" items to me. On top of that is further organisation: non-HN feeds are batched together in a single display, but HN often produces more than a screenful (~70) of unreads, so then I have hotkeys that filter out alphabetic subsets: A-G, H-R, or S-Z. That normally suffices to avoid any scrolling, but when I haven't been following RSS for several days, I also have filters that further limit to a single day, either 1, 2, 3, or 4 days ago. Although the underlying data is kept chronologically indexed by newsboat, and I can always refer to it that way (frex the concrete splits AG/HR/SZ were determined by querying newsboat's SQLite instance) it by no means prevents layering a myriad (well 20, not counting newsboat's ad-hoc command line filter interface) of other ways to organise on top. PS thank you for reminding me to finally look up how to turn off threading (View»Organise by Conversation) in the mac default mail proggy!

0xEF 3y ago

Stop trying to make Mastodon be Twitter. If that's what you want, go use Twitter. I don't get this mentality of "I like X, but I don't want to use X, so imma go turn Y into X" some devs seem to have. Chronological ordering is a fair and balanced choice for media presentation. Playing into people's FOMO is what got the Internet into the rat's nest of algorithmically driven problematic feeds in the first place.

kuschkufan 3y ago
eludes me how people think it's ok to tell other people to stop on topics like this. it's not even about making maston be twitter. it's about experimenting with timeline options that are not chronological and it's all open and an invitation for people to contribute if they are interested. you are not interested? cool, then do whatever. because unlike twitter, you have that option - and that option will not go away. stop commenting when your comment tells others to stop doing what they like because you don't like it.
- 0xEF 3y ago
  Oh, grow up. Dissenting opinions are welcome on line, being probably the most beautiful part of this whole mess we call the Internet. If you don't like my comment, address the content of the comment and explain to me how my warning of the path this treads is unreasonable. Stop virtue signalling and contribute. I'm open to having my mind change and everyone on this site should be as well.
  - kuschkufan 3y ago
    dissenting opinions are not a problem until they start telling people what to do. i'm not interested in changing your mind.
    - 0xEF 3y ago
      Interesting. So you wanting me to stop explaining why someone shouldn't be doing something is you not being interested in changing my mind? You live in an interesting world. What is a dissenting opinion other than an expression of dissatisfaction toward a thing, be that an action of another or not? You say dissent is okay, byt in the same breath say byt only if you do it the way I think it should be done. Hypocrisy is a helluva drug, I guess. Anyway, have a great day. Didn't mean to piss in anyone's cereal quite this early.

countWSS 3y ago

started using RSS feeds a few months ago, they're still widely supported and there are JSON scrapers for those sites that don't. The idea of "reading N accounts" to get some info or some algorithmic soup of "popular stuff i tangentially show interest in" doesn't even compare to curated RSS feeds organized into groups. The unpopular, rare and obscure stuff can't compete with algorithmically optimal SEO-friendly hype-tagged social media junk in the "common prole-feed" of giant websites.

self_awareness 3y ago

Name clash with an already popular open-source project: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

nmz 3y ago
Which is also a name clash on plan9's fossil archival file server/system
- debo_ 3y ago
  Both these projects are fossils at this point. /joke
hdb2 3y ago
ha! I just posted a comment saying that very thing...I was confused.
whateveracct 3y ago
Me too - I expected hosting an RSS feed via Fossil or something.
InfiniteRand 3y ago
I wish people did a search <project name> open source before naming their project

lucideer 3y ago

People like RSS because it's not algorithmic. People like Mastodon because it's not algorithmic. What I'm mainly curious about here is what drew this author to these two technologies in the first place? What's the hook for them? --- Subjective aside: before I read the line on algorithms & the HN comments bemoaning the same, I was already very turned off by the awful AI header image. Until tools like Dall-E, &c. get to the point where they can reliably generate images that aren't blatantly & obviously AI-generated (they seem a surprisingly long way off still), I think this effect is worth keeping in mind: for me the aesthetic is a massive turnoff for any product page.

rsynnott 3y ago
Some people like Mastodon because it's not algorithmic, some people like it because it's not centralised/has no real single point of failure, some for other reasons. I'd definitely buy that at least some people would quite like an algorithmic view of their Mastodon feed; wouldn't be for me, but one reason that people go for Bluesky over Mastodon is that it is algorithmic.
- lucideer 3y ago
  > one reason that people go for Bluesky over Mastodon is that it is algorithmic My comment does seem a little dogmatic whereas there's always a broad variety of approaches & preferences with anything. I was somewhat exaggerating, but my goal was to represent the typical user as best as I can glean. As someone who advocated heavily for Mastodon (& continues to), I spend more time on bsky now, but I've found people's reasons for being there over Mastodon to be either my reason: network effect, or for the vast majority of folk: UX. ActivityPub client/server UX remains abysmal in comparison to centralised services (not complaining as I know it's a harder problem for decentralised tech, just stating the fact). Algorithmic feeds haven't come up in the context of bsky prefs mainly because - in my experience - algorithmic feeds in any app/website are broadly hated by all but the most tech-savvy of people.
andrewaylett 3y ago
Actually, I wouldn't mind a little bit of algorithm in my feed. "Newest first" is annoying because unless I manage to read everything that's new then I have gaps. If I've only got a couple of minutes now then I want to be able to see a few things without losing track of what I have and haven't read. "Oldest first" is annoying because -- as much as I might want to -- I can't keep up. "Newest unread" is annoying because if someone's posted a series then I want to read them in order. "Prioritised unread" might be OK -- if someone only posts once a month then I probably want to prioritise reading their post over reading absolutely everything by someone who posts multiple times a day. I'm currently reading my RSS with Newsblur, and it's not perfect but it does give me flexibility through the "intelligence trainer" to highlight the stuff I want to prioritise. Aside, RSS and Mastodon definitely are algorithmic. "Chronological ordering" is an algorithm, and it's not always the most appropriate.

hdb2 3y ago

Initially I thought they were referring to fossil SCM: https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www2.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki Since fossil SCM has been around awhile, the author might consider a name change to avoid confusion?

bastawhiz 3y ago
Fossil watches has existed since the 80s. The Fossil wrist PDA came out three years before Fossil SCM was first released. Why does Fossil SCM get to lay claim to this name? Ten seconds of reading and you'd have avoided any confusion.

hypertexthero 3y ago

See also: https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/

Gormo 3y ago

The whole "death of RSS" idea seems like a strange perspective. RSS/Atom never went away, and nothing has replaced their use case for syndicating content. To the author's point, it's just that a lot of mass-market consumption of web content for the past decade or so has been on walled-garden platforms that never offered syndication in the first place. But even there, I think the article is overstating things -- it implies that Reddit, HN, Medium, and Substack have only recently begun offering RSS feeds, but these have never not offered RSS feeds (and HN has always had a native top-level article feed, even if the 3rd-party solution is more extensive). Even YouTube has always offered RSS feeds (albeit without enclosures, so they can't be used as podcast feeds -- but Odysee, a web frontend to LBRY which is gaining traction against YouTube does offer feeds with enclosures). I guess this application is a good solution for people who want to follow syndicated content via Mastodon, but it should be pointed out that the traditional model of using standalone RSS readers never went away -- when Google Reader was shut down, the void was quickly filled with a variety of solutions like TinyTinyRSS, MiniFlux, Feedly, Inoreader, etc. I personally use TinyTinyRSS, with Liferea as a desktop client, as my primary interface to all of the blogs, podcasts, subreddits, and YouTube channels I read, along with aggregators like HN and Lobsters. I've been using this solution for over 10 years now; nothing has ever stopped working and none of the sites ever pulled back from publishing feeds.

andrewrust30 3y ago
Just as an FYI, the Odysee frontend might be on the way out unfortunately [1] [1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/16/lbry-closes-odysee-cryptocurrency-tech-sec-fraud-extremist https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/16/lbry-clos...
- Gormo 3y ago
  Looks like FUD. The original LBRY shut down, but Odysee was spun off into its own business entity, which appears to be very much in business, and the current home page doesn't seem to contain a trace of "far-right" content. The underlying platform is a decentralized blockchain, and will maintain continuity regardless of what business entity is acting as its front face at the moment.