8 ms·

I'm not sure how I feel about the content of this entire post. RSS feeds are a more or less stagnant technology, mostly adopted "for fun" or by a niche of peopl

I'm not sure how I feel about the content of this entire post. RSS feeds are a more or less stagnant technology, mostly adopted "for fun" or by a niche of people who find them useful. The only way I can see to move forward is to make them as easy and painless to use as possible, the onus falls on both the creator and consumer of feeds (the websites and the clients... the user is completely out of the equation here in my opinion). This kind of attitude reeks of the "you're using it wrong!" of the Linux world. Are you really telling me you are getting enough RSS feed requests to put a dent on your tech stack? Is your bandwidth overhead suffering that much (are you not caching?)? Make it painless and let's be thankful it isn't all web scrapers masquerading as users. Mind-boggling problem to be angry about.

cess11 2y ago
It's like pissing in the street. No one gets hurt and the street isn't going to break, but there will be a smell and it's perceived as a rather rude behavior except in the case of animals and small children.
- cess11 2y ago
  The downvotes remind me of a thing at a job. We had an API for programmatic access to our customer's data, and one customer had bought some expensive BI-solution that they wanted to feed with data from the system we provided. For months they came to us and complained that the API was broken and asked us to fix it. When I looked in the logs I could see that they hit the API with a lot of requests in short succession that generated 403 responses, so we said that they need to look at how they authorise. After a while they returned and claimed our API was broken. Eventually I offered to look at their code and they were like 'yeah sure but your silly little PHP dev won't understand our perfect C# application'. So I looked at it and it was a mess of auto-concurrent, nested, for-loops. If they had gotten any data out it would have been an explosion of tens of thousands of requests within a few seconds. They also didn't understand the Bearer-scheme and just threw the string they got from the auth-endpoint straight into the Authorization-header without any prefix. Maybe we should have answered with 400 instead of 403, but yeah, that would have been a breaking change and we didn't want or have time to do a new API version because of this. Anyway, their tech-manager got really mad that I found the issue within an hour that they had struggled with for months, and also had mentioned that the API-adapter was designed for DoS rather than a polite API-consumer and maybe they should rewrite it to be less greedy and maybe also use ranges instead of crapping out a new request per row in in a response and stitching it together again on their end. A few weeks later they got it running and it was brutal, but our machines could take the load so we didn't think more about it. Later I heard they got performance issues on their end and had to do as I had suggested anyway. Be polite and pay attention to detail when you integrate with protocols and API:s. At best you'll be a nuisance if you don't, but many will just block you permanently.
  - eviks 2y ago
    Thank you! this is a more interesting comment than the pissing example
    - cess11 2y ago
      I'm happy you liked it. Didn't think of it as hypothetical, since it happens a lot. I'm a simple person, I often prefer the succinct, crude analogy over telling a story until asked or provoked into telling one.
      - 0x445442 2y ago
        I liked your story AND your analogy.
troupo 2y ago
It's a bigger issue than RSS, really. Fetching RSS is a simple GET request. It requires the most basic understanding of HTTP, and people still can't do it right: they don't know how to deal with standard headers, how to deal with standard response codes, how to send proper requests etc. Do you think regular REST API calls to any other service are any different?
- vallode 2y ago
  Very valid point, the frustrations here do share commonalities with the overall HTTP ecosystem.
- mimischi 2y ago
  Any pointers for good resources to grok best practices?
  - vaylian 2y ago
    Cache-Control goes a long way in the right direction: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...
  - troupo 2y ago
    Not sure about best practices, but these two resources are a good reference point: - Know Your HTTP Well: https://github.com/for-GET/know-your-http-well https://github.com/for-GET/know-your-http-well - HTTP Decision Diagram: https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram
hennell 2y ago
So you could be angry at web scrapers, but not at RSS readers making badly formed requests every 5 minutes? Making it painless is letting readers use the options available, supporting the commonly used standards and maybe fixing small problems (I'd probably space trim that URL for example). It doesn't mean supporting systems that are sending poorly formed or badly controlled requests, regardless of the impact it has on your tech stack.
michaelt 2y ago
> Are you really telling me you are getting enough RSS feed requests to put a dent on your tech stack? Both RSS feed providers and reader maintainers believe that RSS isn't dead, it's just pining for the fjords. They've got to keep their readers efficient ready for RSS to rise again - much like Christians have to resist the temptation of sin ready for the second coming of Christ. /s
boricj 2y ago
Some of us are not serving our blogs through Cloudfare. In fact, I'm using a 5 year old entry-level Synology NAS located in my apartment to serve mine. I do that because it's already always-on by policy and therefore doesn't cost me anything extra to serve my blog from there, besides the DNS domain name. Badly behaved RSS readers that download feeds uncached are wasting orders of magnitude more of bandwidth and CPU (gotta encrypt it for HTTPS) on my end than well-behaved clients that get served 304s. Some of them don't even set "Accept-Encoding: gzip" and download it uncompressed. That's hundreds of kilobytes per request wasted for nothing. My blog doesn't see enough traffic to make this an issue for me, but I can see why this could be a real problem for popular blogs with loads of traffic.
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  I think it's generally a poor idea to serve a blog, especially a popular one with loads of traffic, from an entry-level Synology NAS.
  - boricj 2y ago
    It's kept up-to-date automatically. It is appropriately firewalled to only expose ports 80 and 443, the administration panel and the rest of the services hosted on it are only reachable from my LAN. It only serves static content, no scripting language is enabled. A determined attacker might be able to get in despite all of these precautions, but it's at least administered in a somewhat responsible manner. I highly doubt most servers exposed on the internet are.
    - oliwarner 2y ago
      Right, and if you stuck that behind (eg) Cloudflare via cloudflared, it'd be faster for your readers, more secure for you (no direct access) and have no impact on your network or NAS's resources. Right tools for the job. It's not a failing to use a cache.
      - madeofpalk 2y ago
mdp2021 2y ago
> RSS feeds [would be] a more or less stagnant technology, mostly adopted "for fun" or by a niche of people who find them useful Pray tell, what would be the good alternative, for this «niche of people» who collect the news? We use RSS because news are collected through RSS. And clients have to be properly, wisely configured: some publish monthly some much more than hourly; some are a feed per domain, others are thousands of feeds per domain... This constitutes a set-up problem.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  RSS is the best option if you are looking to avoid walled gardens. It's a great way to find content without search ads or social media ads. RSS readers put you in control, instead of algorithmic social network feeds that manipulate you into doom scrolling. I think RSS has been growing as the social networks enshittify.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  This is delusional. Are you not able to identify when a thing that you do isn’t very widely done?
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    Delusional over what? Why should "wide adoption" be relevant? We are already very well informed (much too well informed) that "people" are """odd""". What are your assumptions? If you need to drive a screw, and few people used screwdrivers - who cares? You'd still use screwdrivers even when people tried to use cakes or monkeys or simply stopped driving screws, would you not? You already expect "people" to use cakes or monkeys for something when they would normally be expected to drive screws - actually, you expect to be surprised with much worse ideas becoming realities. So? Screwdrivers remain relevant, and using them properly remains equally relevant. And especially so, when you note that people are there with loose parts stuck together because the cake smudged monkey was not precise!
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    > An odd interpretation of "democracy" is lurking according to which "my ignorance is worth as much as your knowledge" ~~ Isaac Asimov > An odd interpretation of "democracy" is lurking according to which we should look at masses to take example, instead of warning ~~ mdp2021
mariusor 2y ago
I see very little in the article that's actually targeted at people that hold it wrong. My interpretation is that the rant is targeted at RSS service developers who should know better, and for whom you are inventing excuses to justify laziness or incompetence.
geor9e 2y ago
Conspiracy theory (that I genuinely believe): Consumers don't know what they want, and in reality they would love RSS if it was allowed to blossom. But, RSS readers make the web unmonetizable, so they've been actively destroyed from every angle, in favor of the enshittified feeds the world is now addicted to. There are so many ways to quietly bury a certain technology if the market incentives are stong enough. You can't algorithmically manipulate and addict someone who just follows accounts chronologically without ads. So silicon valley market forces tend to discourage RSS. Google killed their RSS reader once they realized browser-based feed browsing generated way more adsense profits. Other readers get VC investment and mysteriously their free version becomes unusable garbage and adoption plateaus. Not every controlling interest in a VCs portfolio is benevolent. Facebook, twitter, etc all make it against their terms of service to "scrape" your own friends privately shared posts - you can only see them via the walled garden of ads. Apples app store fees would drop if consumers understood the utopia an RSS based web has the potential of being, instead of a dozen addictive apps. But it was too free. RSS derails trillion dollar roadmaps. The incentives are clear, and silicon valley knows it.

cess11 2y ago

It's like pissing in the street. No one gets hurt and the street isn't going to break, but there will be a smell and it's perceived as a rather rude behavior except in the case of animals and small children.

cess11 2y ago
The downvotes remind me of a thing at a job. We had an API for programmatic access to our customer's data, and one customer had bought some expensive BI-solution that they wanted to feed with data from the system we provided. For months they came to us and complained that the API was broken and asked us to fix it. When I looked in the logs I could see that they hit the API with a lot of requests in short succession that generated 403 responses, so we said that they need to look at how they authorise. After a while they returned and claimed our API was broken. Eventually I offered to look at their code and they were like 'yeah sure but your silly little PHP dev won't understand our perfect C# application'. So I looked at it and it was a mess of auto-concurrent, nested, for-loops. If they had gotten any data out it would have been an explosion of tens of thousands of requests within a few seconds. They also didn't understand the Bearer-scheme and just threw the string they got from the auth-endpoint straight into the Authorization-header without any prefix. Maybe we should have answered with 400 instead of 403, but yeah, that would have been a breaking change and we didn't want or have time to do a new API version because of this. Anyway, their tech-manager got really mad that I found the issue within an hour that they had struggled with for months, and also had mentioned that the API-adapter was designed for DoS rather than a polite API-consumer and maybe they should rewrite it to be less greedy and maybe also use ranges instead of crapping out a new request per row in in a response and stitching it together again on their end. A few weeks later they got it running and it was brutal, but our machines could take the load so we didn't think more about it. Later I heard they got performance issues on their end and had to do as I had suggested anyway. Be polite and pay attention to detail when you integrate with protocols and API:s. At best you'll be a nuisance if you don't, but many will just block you permanently.
- eviks 2y ago
  Thank you! this is a more interesting comment than the pissing example
  - cess11 2y ago
    I'm happy you liked it. Didn't think of it as hypothetical, since it happens a lot. I'm a simple person, I often prefer the succinct, crude analogy over telling a story until asked or provoked into telling one.
    - 0x445442 2y ago
      I liked your story AND your analogy.

troupo 2y ago

It's a bigger issue than RSS, really. Fetching RSS is a simple GET request. It requires the most basic understanding of HTTP, and people still can't do it right: they don't know how to deal with standard headers, how to deal with standard response codes, how to send proper requests etc. Do you think regular REST API calls to any other service are any different?

vallode 2y ago
Very valid point, the frustrations here do share commonalities with the overall HTTP ecosystem.
mimischi 2y ago
Any pointers for good resources to grok best practices?
- vaylian 2y ago
  Cache-Control goes a long way in the right direction: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...
- troupo 2y ago
  Not sure about best practices, but these two resources are a good reference point: - Know Your HTTP Well: https://github.com/for-GET/know-your-http-well https://github.com/for-GET/know-your-http-well - HTTP Decision Diagram: https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram

hennell 2y ago

So you could be angry at web scrapers, but not at RSS readers making badly formed requests every 5 minutes? Making it painless is letting readers use the options available, supporting the commonly used standards and maybe fixing small problems (I'd probably space trim that URL for example). It doesn't mean supporting systems that are sending poorly formed or badly controlled requests, regardless of the impact it has on your tech stack.

michaelt 2y ago

> Are you really telling me you are getting enough RSS feed requests to put a dent on your tech stack? Both RSS feed providers and reader maintainers believe that RSS isn't dead, it's just pining for the fjords. They've got to keep their readers efficient ready for RSS to rise again - much like Christians have to resist the temptation of sin ready for the second coming of Christ. /s

boricj 2y ago

Some of us are not serving our blogs through Cloudfare. In fact, I'm using a 5 year old entry-level Synology NAS located in my apartment to serve mine. I do that because it's already always-on by policy and therefore doesn't cost me anything extra to serve my blog from there, besides the DNS domain name. Badly behaved RSS readers that download feeds uncached are wasting orders of magnitude more of bandwidth and CPU (gotta encrypt it for HTTPS) on my end than well-behaved clients that get served 304s. Some of them don't even set "Accept-Encoding: gzip" and download it uncompressed. That's hundreds of kilobytes per request wasted for nothing. My blog doesn't see enough traffic to make this an issue for me, but I can see why this could be a real problem for popular blogs with loads of traffic.

madeofpalk 2y ago
I think it's generally a poor idea to serve a blog, especially a popular one with loads of traffic, from an entry-level Synology NAS.
- boricj 2y ago
  It's kept up-to-date automatically. It is appropriately firewalled to only expose ports 80 and 443, the administration panel and the rest of the services hosted on it are only reachable from my LAN. It only serves static content, no scripting language is enabled. A determined attacker might be able to get in despite all of these precautions, but it's at least administered in a somewhat responsible manner. I highly doubt most servers exposed on the internet are.
  - oliwarner 2y ago
    Right, and if you stuck that behind (eg) Cloudflare via cloudflared, it'd be faster for your readers, more secure for you (no direct access) and have no impact on your network or NAS's resources. Right tools for the job. It's not a failing to use a cache.
    - madeofpalk 2y ago

mdp2021 2y ago

> RSS feeds [would be] a more or less stagnant technology, mostly adopted "for fun" or by a niche of people who find them useful Pray tell, what would be the good alternative, for this «niche of people» who collect the news? We use RSS because news are collected through RSS. And clients have to be properly, wisely configured: some publish monthly some much more than hourly; some are a feed per domain, others are thousands of feeds per domain... This constitutes a set-up problem.

8organicbits 2y ago
RSS is the best option if you are looking to avoid walled gardens. It's a great way to find content without search ads or social media ads. RSS readers put you in control, instead of algorithmic social network feeds that manipulate you into doom scrolling. I think RSS has been growing as the social networks enshittify.
cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
This is delusional. Are you not able to identify when a thing that you do isn’t very widely done?
- mdp2021 2y ago
  Delusional over what? Why should "wide adoption" be relevant? We are already very well informed (much too well informed) that "people" are """odd""". What are your assumptions? If you need to drive a screw, and few people used screwdrivers - who cares? You'd still use screwdrivers even when people tried to use cakes or monkeys or simply stopped driving screws, would you not? You already expect "people" to use cakes or monkeys for something when they would normally be expected to drive screws - actually, you expect to be surprised with much worse ideas becoming realities. So? Screwdrivers remain relevant, and using them properly remains equally relevant. And especially so, when you note that people are there with loose parts stuck together because the cake smudged monkey was not precise!
- mdp2021 2y ago
  > An odd interpretation of "democracy" is lurking according to which "my ignorance is worth as much as your knowledge" ~~ Isaac Asimov > An odd interpretation of "democracy" is lurking according to which we should look at masses to take example, instead of warning ~~ mdp2021

mariusor 2y ago

I see very little in the article that's actually targeted at people that hold it wrong. My interpretation is that the rant is targeted at RSS service developers who should know better, and for whom you are inventing excuses to justify laziness or incompetence.

geor9e 2y ago

Conspiracy theory (that I genuinely believe): Consumers don't know what they want, and in reality they would love RSS if it was allowed to blossom. But, RSS readers make the web unmonetizable, so they've been actively destroyed from every angle, in favor of the enshittified feeds the world is now addicted to. There are so many ways to quietly bury a certain technology if the market incentives are stong enough. You can't algorithmically manipulate and addict someone who just follows accounts chronologically without ads. So silicon valley market forces tend to discourage RSS. Google killed their RSS reader once they realized browser-based feed browsing generated way more adsense profits. Other readers get VC investment and mysteriously their free version becomes unusable garbage and adoption plateaus. Not every controlling interest in a VCs portfolio is benevolent. Facebook, twitter, etc all make it against their terms of service to "scrape" your own friends privately shared posts - you can only see them via the walled garden of ads. Apples app store fees would drop if consumers understood the utopia an RSS based web has the potential of being, instead of a dozen addictive apps. But it was too free. RSS derails trillion dollar roadmaps. The incentives are clear, and silicon valley knows it.