16 ms·

I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

464 points by emschwartz 2y ago

program 2y ago
Great initiative. All WordPress sites has multiple RSS feeds enabled by default.
econ 2y ago
I do this too! Reception is wonderful. I also include a short description of rss, which parts to support with an example and a description of how one could make an rss feed: you take whatever code produces the index html, remove everything except the part that outputs for each item the title, introduction text, the link and the publication date. Followed by one more short example rss with $title Not that any developer would really need this but it puts everything they need to know and do on a single page. You don't have to think, just do it.
palata 2y ago
RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it). I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.
- sourcecodeplz 2y ago
  Because RSS is "too old"...
- entuno 2y ago
  Where I have RSS feeds from news sites, I usually skim down the list of titles, read an article (in my feed) if it's interesting, and then move on. I never visit their website, I don't see their adverts, their tracking scripts can't run, and I don't see or interact with their comments. Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.
  - saint_yossarian 2y ago
    Nobody's forcing them to put the full text into the feed, for me the main benefit is not having to check the site manually.
    - entuno 2y ago
      As the consumer, that's a big benefit, and the main reason I use RSS. But for the company running the website, the fact that you're no longer browsing to their site, being served adverts and tracking code, and seeing what's on their homepage is not a benefit
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    > makes it much harder for them to monetise. On the other hand, RSS definitely provides extra opportunities to monitise. Imagine your business provides a customisable "offers" feed so you can tell interested parties when a sale occurs, etc. Businesses should be falling over themselves to get that kind of engagement.
    - entuno 2y ago
      That just sounds like a mailing list, but without the ability to easily identify and track the individuals you're sending to.
      - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        So... a win-win? RSS also avoids all the problems associated with spam.
  - openrisk 2y ago
    Not everyone is out to monetise (e.g public sector). And even if you are after monetisation, sending out a teaser snippet makes sense. The user can decide if they want to visit the site to read more, subscribe etc.
  - galleywest200 2y ago
- mongol 2y ago
  > Podcasts typically use RSS I would even say that a podcast that does not support RSS is not a podcast, it is something else.
  - frde_me 2y ago
    I would be curious why you think the idea of a podcast is coupled to a specific distribution technology
    - rglullis 2y ago
      Because the original idea of what we call "podcasting" is rooted on RSS.
      - lkjdsklf 2y ago
        The idea of what we call “writing” is rooted in stone tablets and chisels, but we still call Shakespeare a writer
        rglullis 2y ago
        There has been a significant longer amount of time between ancient civilizations and Shakespeare compared to today and l the first people who are recording audio content periodically and distributing it via RSS.
    - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      It goes much further than that: as the name suggests, it's coupled to a specific, obsolete brand of device.
    - mongol 2y ago
      Similar to why radio relates to electromagnetical transmissions in the radio spectrum. When it happens over internet, we don't call it radio, but possibly internet radio. RSS was the origin of podcasts, and if it does not involve RSS, it is not podcasts
    - 2y ago
- _heimdall 2y ago
  It comes down to a push versus pull architecture. RSS is pull based, you aren't notified when a feed is updated. Most people today want push based with a feed, with all the bells and whistles of a social feed that is updated instantly. Federation comes in mainly because push based systems require a server managing who follows who, what is posted, and who to notify of updates. That's a lot of information for one central service to be responsible for, leading some to think its better to federate and trust a bunch of servers to host copies of some or all of that same data.
  - palata 2y ago
    Right, those are good points. Still I can't help but to wonder whether those notifications are needed or not. Except for instant messaging, I generally don't want notifications. Like I don't need to be told that a new podcast is available, I'll see it next time I open the app. I would like to at least have the choice to use RSS instead of having to go through a complicated federated system.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      That's actually the main reason I still use RSS, I never found a need for most notifications and the complexity required to manage a push-based system aren't worth it to me. Even if I'm using someone else's system, I just don't like the idea of giving them a reason/need to manage all that for me. RSS works fine 99% of the time.
  - account42 2y ago
    The push-based federated systems could still be built on top of RSS - have a pull-based feed as the source of truth and then optional push-based notifications for those that want more timely updates. Ideally the push-based parts would be optional for both ends so you could host a static feed and still have people see those updates in their fancy fediverse apps, just not immediately when you post them. Instead we have a completely different standard without a simple core that you can easily implement if you don't need all the bells and whistles.
- domysee 2y ago
  > RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. The people creating websites often don't know that they're providing RSS feeds though, and never link to it. To solve that I developed a tool that finds RSS feeds, even if RSS autodiscovery isn't implemented: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
brisky 2y ago
Recently I have posted about RSDS (really simple decentralized syndication) - a protocol that tries to solve RSS content global discovery problem. Here is the link if you are interested to read more about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42654891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42654891
eminco 2y ago
RSS is indeed worth advocating for. One of its greatest strengths is its simplicity.
amitport 2y ago
I'm still waiting for https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ to catch.
- account42 2y ago
  Looks overly complicated.
  - amitport 2y ago
    Do you know of a simpler purposal? It's the correct amount of complicated imho.
picafrost 2y ago
This is a great initiative. Large tech companies, through hijacking our web experience and pursuing maximum scale, have normalized not being able to talk to a human being on the other side of a website/app/business. In many situations you _can_ just send an email. Most often someone will read it and be very happy to help out if they can. Not always, but how much of a time and effort investment is an email really? The best part is that a few kind words can absolutely make someone’s week.
defrost 2y ago
As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video. The form is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5vU7bPBNzyC2nnwmNQ https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v... where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension) "Find Feeds in Current Tab" function. https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
- entuno 2y ago
  It also provides feeds for individual playlists, where `playlist_id` is the `list` URL parameter when you view the full playlist. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id= https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id= It's a really nice way to be able to follow creators/playlists without needing to register an account. I'm surprised that YouTube still allow it, but I hope it stays.
  - latexr 2y ago
    Unfortunately those have a major flaw: they always show the top 15 items in a playlist. This is a problem because many channels have playlists where they put older episodes at the top and add new ones to the bottom. This makes the playlist RSS useless, because it will always show the same 15 videos.
- donatj 2y ago
  That's good to know. The number of times I have subscribed to someone on YouTube only to not see anything from them in years, and then find tens of their videos YouTube never offered is just insane. So many times I can't find anything to watch on YouTube and it just isn't showing me any of my subscriptions, it's ridiculous.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    The opposite problem is also bad: subscribe to a channel, then get frequent notifications of years-old videos.
rmnclmnt 2y ago
Love RSS, been using (and paying for) miniflux for a few years now. Do someone knows a way to retrieve RSS feeds URLs for any podcast that would be hosted on major platforms? (Spotify, Apple Music) I subscribed to podcast having some hosted website (where they are publishing the RSS feed from) but most of them don’t
- dqv 2y ago
  Pocket Casts usually lists the RSS link when you share a podcast from the app. https://pca.st/podcast/170a7610-948e-0135-9d21-5bb073f92b78 https://pca.st/podcast/170a7610-948e-0135-9d21-5bb073f92b78 Under "more ways to listen" it has RSS as an option.
  - rmnclmnt 2y ago
    Thanks!
    - dqv 2y ago
      I just found another one from an HN post https://www.johnwalker.nl/posts/escape-the-walled-garden-with-rss https://www.johnwalker.nl/posts/escape-the-walled-garden-wit... The site is https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/
- trekz 2y ago
  You can try openrss.org. I believe the Spotify and Apple Music feeds will work for you. https://openrss.org/feeds/spotify https://openrss.org/feeds/spotify
palata 2y ago
I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons. I often receive answers, that surprised me! People saying "thank you for your suggestion, we will think about what we can do". None of them has every changed anything (I've been doing that for years). I don't even know if they did anything more than answering to the email.
- rednafi 2y ago
  Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.
  - palata 2y ago
    GMail sends both HTML and plaintext versions by default.
    - account42 2y ago
      It does however do so using an automated HTML to text conversion that you could also just do in your client so it's not really all that helpful.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
  Thus is a pet peeve of mine. Some companies send an multi-part E-Mail, just for the plain text part to be an empty string. Why bother? Pretty often the plain text is just the same html, so you get to read raw ugly html. Do people not test this?
  - rwky 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure they don't test them. I got a good one the other day from a well known institution. It was a bill and the html part said I owed N amount but the plain text said 0.00. By default I read the plain text part but when I saw it says 0.00 I thought it was odd so checked the html and there it was the correct amount!
rook1e_dev 2y ago
RSS is my main source of information. And I've built some RSS-related projects: 1. https://github.com/0x2E/fusion https://github.com/0x2E/fusion - A lightweight, self-hosted friendly RSS aggregator and reader 2. https://rawweb.org/ https://rawweb.org/ - A search engine for indie websites (the crawler collects data from RSS feeds) 3. https://github.com/0x2E/rss-finder https://github.com/0x2E/rss-finder - A tool for finding the RSS link of a website
- freetonik 2y ago
  Rawweb is very cool! Curious, have you implemented your own crawler, RSS parser and search engine?
  - rook1e_dev 2y ago
    Crawler is a simple HTTP requester + RSS parser. Full-text searching uses Elasticsearch.
- emporas 2y ago
  Nice list. I tried at some point to analyze html using a tree-sitter grammar and generate a list of articles, index them, and be on alert every so often for new entries. RSS feed could be generated automatically with some AI code generator (or tree-sitter query generator), and just parsing the elements of the page. Eventually i failed, but also i didn't try hard enough.
- domysee 2y ago
  Same for me, and would like to add my own list 1. https://lighthouseapp.io/ https://lighthouseapp.io/ - feed reader combined with bookmarking 2. https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder - tool to find RSS feeds (https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds) 3. https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/newsletter-to-rss https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/newsletter-to-rss - tool to convert newsletters to RSS feeds
  - bluebarbet 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
> Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with. Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?
- rplnt 2y ago
  Most people also decided it's a good idea to use browser from an advertising company. RSS is not good for business and it won't be provided.
  - beretguy 2y ago
    > Most people also decide Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.
    - rplnt 2y ago
      That's fair. Though if I replaced "people" with "HN users" it would still hold true, and I would consider this group to be very computer literate.
      - beretguy 2y ago
        Unfortunately, yes.
    - _Algernon_ 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - latexr 2y ago
        Not everyone has the time, inclination, patience, or opportunity to “be informed” about all the shit every tech company does. It’s exhausting even for tech-literate people. Have some empathy.
grumbel 2y ago
If RSS could solve the problem it would have done so a decade ago. The core issue is that browsers have completely failed at offering anything to keep track of websites. Why aren't notifications simply build into the bookmark system? I don't need the website to provide that information via yet another special format, my browser should be able to figure that out itself from plain .html. But bookmarks haven't changed one bit in about 30 years, instead we moved that functionality server-side for no reason.
- devmor 2y ago
  God wouldn't that be simple and novel? Check a box when you bookmark a website and your browser polls it every so often for updates and gives you a little badge like a mobile app icon. No need for JS workers or push servers.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    I wouldn't mind if browsers want to offer that feature in addition to RSS. But I also don't want to be forced to use my browser's bookmarking feature - RSS helps to decouple that.
    - cgriswald 2y ago
      I must be misunderstanding you. If this were possible standalone bookmark managers could do what standalone RSS readers do.
    - devmor 2y ago
      The implication is that your bookmarks would read an RSS feed provided by the website for notifications
- rglullis 2y ago
  Poe's Law, or you really don't remember the time where browsers had a huge button in the address bar to announce their feeds or that Firefox used to have a "Smart Bookmarks" feature to show you all the latest updates from all the feeds you subscribed to?
bmacho 2y ago
> I've been advocating for [X], and you should too This seems like what we should do against negative trends. I think complaining is more common, probably more accepted (?) than advocating, but logically, the latter is what we should do.
medhir 2y ago
I recently had a popular post on HN and several people reached out asking if I had an RSS feed implemented. Was surprised that anyone would be interested in keeping up with my writing, but was happy to oblige the request as it had been on my to-do list for a while. Happy I did do as it seems many people are hitting the RSS endpoint now. Cool to see that RSS is relevant in 2025, and will definitely advocate for its usage more moving forward :-)
- 6510 2y ago
  How long did it take you to implement? I never bothered to make a list of the mails I send but now I see it is quite useful to show how well it works. Maybe some data on implementation time would be as useful.
  - medhir 2y ago
    Took me a few hours. I use MDX for formatting so most of the time was spent figuring out how to convert the MDX to plain HTML. Not a very heavy lift overall :)
- rambambram 2y ago
  I might have been one of these people, because I was following your site as a bookmark in my RSS reader already. I didn't see any content in your feed so I checked again for a feed endpoint. I found it eventually on your site, but you might consider making it auto-discoverable (see https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery). People only have to enter your domain name into their RSS reader then.
  - medhir 2y ago
    Ah nice, thanks for the heads up! I’ll look into adding this soon.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    That might be a useful site, but why on earth is it stuffed full of privacy-abusing, invasive advertising? I'm sure there are better sources for the RSS standard.
mg 2y ago
If you have an application that does not support RSS/atom yet, you can easily add support with a few lines of Python. Or use an open source module. Here is a general atom feed generator that I wrote and published under the GPL: https://github.com/no-gravity/atomfeed.py https://github.com/no-gravity/atomfeed.py Just 14 lines of Python. And it has been reliably serving the feed for my own website for quite a while now.
- rednafi 2y ago
  Interesting. Also, almost all static site generators support RSS. But sometimes it’s not turned on by default.
theanonymousone 2y ago
I have some app/service ideas which all involve "informing" the user about something. Implementations of this notification mechanism are either spammy, privacy-problematic, or both: (Web) Push notifications, Email, or Messages. The only solution that doesn't have either of these problems seems to be RSS: Provide the user with (customised) feed link and let them/their RSS client deal with it. I really wish RSS was less niche and more mainstream. I will "advocate" for it regardless.
uzyn 2y ago
RSS was a key protocol in syndication a widely free and open web before the domination of big tech/social media. We now have new internet generation that has never known RSS, relying largely on "the algorithm" of the big tech in content syndication. Thank you for your effort in advocating RSS support. I hope RSS makes a major come back especially with the recent events.
rednafi 2y ago
RSS is a wonderfully simple solution to get notifications for things I care about. I came to the software industry a lot later than the inception of Web 2.0 and rediscovered RSS almost accidentally. I advocate for it too. You’d be surprised how many people still care about this. My static site build broke the RSS[1] once recently, and I immediately got like 5 emails from different people. [1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml https://rednafi.com/index.xml
LAC-Tech 2y ago
how much of a PITA is it to add RSS to your own site?
- rednafi 2y ago
  Not much at all. If you are using a static site generator, they usually support it out of the box. Recently, one of my posts hit the front page here, and a few people emailed me asking for an RSS[1] feed. It turned out that it was just a simple config update to enable this on Hugo. Other SSGs usually support it out of the box too. Plus, it’s not too hard to build the XML from your HTML if you want to build it yourself from scratch. [1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml https://rednafi.com/index.xml
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  It's an open text format. There are some complexities if you dive down the rabbit hole, but at the most basic level, it's pretty simple. I even do it by hand on one site that I rarely update.
rambambram 2y ago
In the vein of: the web is already decentralized and social by it's nature, I built an RSS reader-and-feed-in-one for Hey Homepage (a DIY website pack that I made). So there's one place for reading posts and for publishing your own posts, just like the timelines from big tech. Combine that with a list of shared links which functions as a blog roll and consists of the feeds that you follow, and you have yourself a Really Social Site. You can even download the OPML file that contains all the shared links and start following some feeds from it yourself. So discovery is also possible with RSS feeds and OPML lists, albeit it works slightly different than you're used to from big tech. After that I built a Newspaper module that automatically collects new posts from feeds that I selected. This is my main way to get news without some algorithm deciding for me. The only wish I have is that more of your personal sits/blogs (most websites I follow come from HN) offer more 'photo feeds', just an enclosure-element in your item with a link to a picture or other media.
molticrystal 2y ago
Openrss.org is a non-profit that advocates for RSS adoption in addition to providing RSS feeds for websites that have none and cleainup/improving existing rss feeds. Consider helping them out if this interests you, you might even be using a feed already as they have some custom feeds for github like for discussions and issues. https://openrss.org/about/contributing https://openrss.org/about/contributing
fire_lake 2y ago
Question about the RSS spec: When pulling RSS, how do you know how often to poll? How do you know which items have been seen previously?
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  > how do you know how often to poll? I would guess a combination of frequency from sitemap.xml, last modified http header, and past heuristics. Previously viewed items would, I think, need to be cached in the client (unless the RSS URL uses some kind of token to identify the user, which sounds ripe for abuse).
- octochamp 2y ago
  RSS can be polled as frequently or infrequently as you like, it's just a bit of XML hosted by a site which lists content or links to content. Tracking what's been read or not isn't done by the RSS feed or whoever hosts it, it's performed by the user's feed reader, which be just a local app on your phone or PC, or it might be a cloud service, either hosted (like Feedly) or self-hosted (using ie. FreshRSS).
- 6510 2y ago
  You could examine the time between feed items. Personally I just start my reader then it aggregates and sorts my feeds by date into a single interface. This works well specially for much larger numbers.
- asjo 2y ago
  rachelbythebay has a service and a series of blog posts about the technical side of this, starting at https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/ TL;DR: readers should not poll more often than once and hour, use ETag and If-Modified-Since to determine whether to download the full feed again. Which items you have seen previously is something the feed reader keeps track of.
  - fire_lake 2y ago
    > Which items you have seen previously is something the feed reader keeps track of. Is there a particular field that can be used as an identifier?
gudzpoz 2y ago
Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet: <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="assets/xml/rss.xsl" media="all"?> And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your RSS feeds themselves a dedicated page for advocating RSS, in case an interested reader is browsing through the links on your site. [0] https://getnikola.com/ https://getnikola.com/ [1] https://getnikola.com/rss.xml https://getnikola.com/rss.xml (Open it in your browser!) [2] https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/blob/master/nikola/data/themes/base/assets/xml/rss.xsl https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/blob/master/nikola/data/...
- christkv 2y ago
  Man what a blast from the past. There was a moment in time where xml and xlst was considered the bright future of webapps
  - phh 2y ago
    I remember writing a blog with xml + xslt and thought it was very cool. Retrospectively, writing code in XML, eewwww, but back then I liked writing XHTML by hand
    - christkv 2y ago
      I mean it was fine but debugging it was a pain.
    - fak3r 2y ago
      +1 on XHTML by hand, I'd always have the XHTML 1.0 badge up to brag about it too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Valid_XHTML_1.0.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Valid_XHTML_1.0.svg
- PeterStuer 2y ago
  My suggestion for best practice would be to have a feed endpoint that is as minimal and clean as possible, and provide a separate endpoint (can be the same base url but with a parameter) for human consumption. This ensures maximal compatibility and ease of consumption for both machine and human.
pjmlp 2y ago
Spot on, I keep using it for years, and never understood why the tragedy around Google's RSS reader, there are tons of readers out there. And since this is HN, implementing a RSS reader tutorial is surely more interesting than TODO lists.
nxtbl 2y ago
Been doing that, but especially in the last few years sites have been dropping RSS support and won't bring it back no matter how you reason for it. For example, job seeking sites: https://tyomarkkinatori.fi/ https://tyomarkkinatori.fi/ is the national "job market" for the whole of Finland. Municipal and state employers are obligated to publish their openings there. That site has been in development for years and from 1.1.2025 onwards it replaced the old one - which supplied RSS feeds. Tyomarkkinatori does not and when asked, they will only reply that RSS is not going to be supported and that's the end of it. https://indeed.com https://indeed.com doesn't provide feeds anymore. Neither does (yet another Finnish aggregator) https://laura.fi https://laura.fi
xenodium 2y ago
> in a way that you're completely in control of, without bloat, without ads, without algorithms. If they don’t play nice, they often offer short digests in feeds, driving users to open their sites where you get ads, tracking, bloat, paywalls, and no longer in control… Thank you for advocating RSS. It’s the least we should strive for in our services. We can also strive for services themselves without tracking, ads, bloat… If you have a blog or want to start one, consider supporting platforms that genuinely improve the web experience. I built https://lmno.lol https://lmno.lol after growing tired of the popular blogging platforms. Here’s my blog on it https://lmno.lol/alvaro https://lmno.lol/alvaro If you prefer a different blogging service, there are other folks working on building a more mindful web. By supporting services like these, you prove that like-minded services are not only possible but fully sustainable without deceitful tech. • Bear • Ghost • Glitch • Haven • LMNO.lol • Mataroa • Micro.blog • mmm.page • Montaigne • Nekoweb • omg.lol • pages.casa • Pika • Posthaven • prose.sh • Scribbles • Smol Pub • Write.as • Yay.Boo
ginko 2y ago
How would you even use RSS now that no browser supports it anymore? Do people run a separate RSS reader on the side?
- talideon 2y ago
  Browsers have never really supported feeds. Even Firefox really only supported feed auto-discovery. There are extensions that implement feed readers, but browsers are ill suited to be feed readers. Most people who consume feeds do so via a dedicated feed reader, and there are plenty of online feed readers out there if you don't want a desktop one and plenty of services if you don't want to self-host. I self-host and use Miniflux personally.
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  there are plenty of companies offering RSS like inoreader.
sirolimus 2y ago
RSS is GOAT
ivanstame 2y ago
We all need to advocate for RSS, really important.
openrisk 2y ago
Publishers of content have really no excuse to disable RSS feeds. RSS is also a signal that some new content has arrived, why would one not send it to the world if its essentially free? Even if their business model requires that you visit their website (instead of reading everything on a client app) syndicating a teaser message makes sense. In any case, many actually useful sites that disable RSS are public orgs that do not rely on adtech or subscriptions. Its the sad result of digital illiteracy and outsourcing their web presence to some inane outfit thats up their neck in the SEO and social media shit. Incidentally a Web that makes full use of RSS is also one where more complex protocols like ActivityPub and ATProto can flourish. A client is a client is a client. Now that Mozilla has essentially abdicated their role as a user-centered window to the universe maybe there is room for something else?
pyromaker 2y ago
I absolutely love RSS format. It's one of the easiest ways for devs to get data and do something quickly with it. If you remember, Yahoo Pipies allowed devs & others quickly build something with RSS feeds. I've recently rebuilt and launched my own Yahoo Pipes clone https://www.mashups.io https://www.mashups.io Along the way of building this tool, I came across a plenty of major websites that do not provide RSS feeds and indie devs who maintain niche tools to provide these feeds. Then again, RSS are still plentiful!
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  I'm starting to do this more and more with the command line and actual pipes! You can go a long way with curl, xmllint, and the full Unix toolset.
- ryan-duve 2y ago
  Site feedback: when I drag "Popular sources" into the field, I see the options "YouTube" and "HackerNews". But when I click either I just see a blank modal. I'm using Firefox 135.
tjoff 2y ago
Never got around to use RSS for some reason, what software do people recommend? For me I believe I'd prefer a TUI in the terminal, but probably depends.
yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
So, should we be using RSS? Or Atom? It seems like Atom is better, but RSS as a name is more well known? I'm guessing adding a button on your website which says "Subscribe via RSS" but which actually points to an Atom feed would be confusing and bad?
- atlintots 2y ago
  Like you said, atom is slightly better, and based on RSS (hence why everyone just uses 'RSS'). It should be fine to say "Subscribe via RSS" and point to an atom feed instead, almost any tooling will be able to handle both. You can also say "Subscribe to atom feed" to be more explicit.
adhoc_slime 2y ago
I've almost never cared about learning about rss before but seeing the response it alsways gets, I decided I'd try feedly on my phone and add this blog to it. Feedly asks for a url, this site makes me download a .bin file. It doesn't make sense how this is my first user experience. I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But it is a nav item on the site. Call me nieve or whatever you like but with ux like this I can start to see how this technology has become less popular.
- MortyWaves 2y ago
  I believe browsers, for some conspiratorial reason, actively sabotaged RSS and RSS support in their browsers. Might even be as simple as under the table deals from scumbag ad companies.
- galleywest200 2y ago
  Why don't you use a feed reader that just have you input the URL? I use News Explorer and I just paste in the RSS URL. Heck, some even just let you paste in the root URL of the site and they find the RSS link for you. Feedly is a huge beast besides just an RSS reader. Try something lightweight.
- imadj 2y ago
  > I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But its nav item on the site. In feedly and many readers, you can just enter the website URL and it'll find the feed(s) automatically if present. But in general, how RSS work, you copy the URL to the RSS feed and give it to Reader to subscribe/follow the website. https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/feed/ https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/feed/ When the author publishes a new piece, they update the file located at this URL and your reader will fetch you the new content.
bluebarbet 2y ago
While I use RSS, I think we need to recognize that it's slowly going away. Even a single publisher that's missing a feed will be a deal-breaker for any new adopters. And RSS is an over-complex solution anyway, designed for a time before web standards when sites all had spaghetti table layouts. Today there's no need to create a whole shadow site in fussily-formatted XML for what can usually be found in the page source of the article list page as a bunch of `<li>`s. The more sustainable solution, I believe, is client-based: RSS readers that also parse HTML. There is even an HTML attribute schema, `hfeed`, that makes this easy-peasy and is much easier to implement for publishers. I still don't understand why this solution has not taken off yet. It's clearly optimal.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  At least for me, there is still benefit in being able to load only the list of articles. Attempting to fetch the full HTML and scrape it can be error prone and may not even work depending on how the site is using client-side rendering. Microformsts, which give us things like h-feed, are useful but the author is already thinking about the feed reader use case. Why wouldn't they also hook up an RSS feed?
  - bluebarbet 2y ago
    The scraping issue is resolved by just putting the `h-feed` attributes on the relevant HTML elements. Far easier to implement and maintain than RSS. Maintaining a parallel XML endpoint is itself very error-prone, I know this from unpleasant experience. The only drawback to `h-feed` I can see is that the feed reader must fetch a larger initial payload. Seems like a small price to pay for much easier implementation and maintainability.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Do RSS readers and libraries do a good job of parsing out the feed without all the related microformats tags like h-entry, p-title, etc? I've found microformats to be just as much work to maintain (assuming more than just h-feed is needed these days). Its still easy to break silently, and if I care enough to make it I'll automate a test. Testing an RSS feed shouldn't be any harder than testing the rendered HTML to catch silent regressions.
rrgok 2y ago
What I really want in an RSS Reader is to fetch and show also the comments. Think about this post on HN, I'm more interested in reading the comments. Sadly, RSS only fetch/shows at most the body of the item. It would be really good to have a centralized and unified interface for getting news and comments just in your RSS reader.
domysee 2y ago
There are also a bunch of websites that have RSS feeds but don't link to them and don't make them available via RSS autodiscovery. I created a tool to find such RSS feeds for as many cases as possible: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder And if you're interested in the details: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds
danielktdoranie 2y ago
I love RSS and I actively used it until modern browsers dropped support for it and then websites stopped using it. I always felt RSS being dropped wasn’t the choice of users but more a conspiracy between those browser developers (or rather their managers and company leaders) and marketing/sales departments of pretty much any company that advertises on the internet: Google being the main one. Why? You can’t bombard RSS with advertising like you can on browsers and if people could get the information they need from RSS they won’t see ads. I recall the dropping of RSS happened over 6 months to my recollection. RSS was here and every website of merit used it, then all of a sudden Chrome, FireFox and Safari all dropped RSS support. You could go and install a separate RSS client but few people did that (extra steps and all) and then websites saw no one was using RSS and dropped support. RSS was particularly useful for browsing jobs for IT contractors. I used it daily, using RSS I was able to get job listings fast and apply before other candidates.
- account42 2y ago
  I'm unhappy about browsers dropping RSS support too but did you or anyone else actually use the browser integration for anthing more than discovering that an RSS feed exists?
  - danielktdoranie 2y ago
    Did you read all of my post? I explained one of my uses of RSS pretty thoroughly
hackerbeat 2y ago
The problem with RSS today is that bad actors use it to scrape and rewrite content using AI. Not having it enabled makes life harder for them since many are too lazy/not savvy enough to use other means to steal content.
- account42 2y ago
  FUD! Name a single AI scraper that fetches RSS but not HTML.
  - hackerbeat 2y ago
    WTF?
tyleo 2y ago
I recently added RSS to my personal site (https://www.tyleo.com/ https://www.tyleo.com/) Even with a custom implementation it’s a simple thing to support. You can find the whole spec here: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification I’ll mention that there is a competing Atom specification which is compatible with all notable RSS readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard). The POV I’ve seen on HN favors Atom because it offers more functionality and is a clearer standard. I want to voice my support for RSS though based on its simplicity. To me the feed doesn’t need a bunch of bells and whistles. I get analysis paralysis I get deciding which Atom features to support.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  > You can find the whole spec here There's also this version, which I believe is the original: https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html It's far from perfect, but at least it's not infested with spammy advertising.
  - tyleo 2y ago
    Interesting. I wouldn’t shave advised a site with spammy ads but it looks like they are sufficiently caught in my ad block.
- talideon 2y ago
  Use whatever elements you need from Atom. Atom is a functional superset of RSS 2.0, and if you're hit with analysis paralysis, using only the functionality that exists in RSS 2.0 in your Atom feed. Atom exists because RSS is ambiguous and prone to breakage. The "bells and whistles" exist only because there were a lot of common extensions at the time that made sense to fold into Atom itself. Even if you use none of that and just the bits that overlap with RSS 2.0, your feed will be less likely to break in random feed readers, and that's enough reason to use Atom over RSS. In this day and age, there's no good reason to use RSS over Atom beyond brand recognition. (Yes, I'm still salty from the feed wars of the 2000s, but I still stand by all that I've written above.)
lufte 2y ago
I recently had the need to subscribe to changes to a Github repo and it turns out it provides a feed for them. For rust master branch, for example, subscribe to https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/master.atom https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/master.atom.
- account42 2y ago
  Is that feed linked anywhere? I discovered this before and am subscribed to a couple of those feeds but I add new ones rarely enough that I always need to look up how to build the URL.
talideon 2y ago
One thing though: is you're adding "RSS" support, use Atom for the feed, not actual RSS. Everything supports Atom that supports RSS, it's no harder to implement, less ambiguous, less prone to breaking, and has a richer vocabulary that doesn't require you resort to pulling in additional vocabularies via namespaces. I cringe every time I see a feed that uses RSS and then pulls in Atom for some of elements. If you're going to do that, then just use Atom for the whole thing rather than building a frankenfeed.
mromanuk 2y ago
I used Feedly, tried several RSS clients, I was into RSS but content providers started to only give you a portion of the content, subverting the very idea of RSS (at least what I wanted), even some clients had (or have) the feature to download the content and present it to you with a clean RSS style. So I quit it, because it was a new tech arms race. Not sure how is all that now.
kmfrk 2y ago
I was happy to see Bluesky supporting RSS on all profiles, but less excited to see that there's nothing in the content and title fields: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/3384 https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/3384 https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3nfshkzomgboapasu6amkhui/rss https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3nfshkzomgboapasu6amkhui/rs... Obviously I can see why they don't want to subsidize the entire internet with high-res videos and images, but a blank RSS feed for media isn't the way to go.
xnx 2y ago
Bluesky has RSS feeds.
udev4096 2y ago
It's nice to have a single feed of updates for all the releases of the software I use. Newsflash (https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk) is an awesome, modern RSS reader. Highly recommended!
rwky 2y ago
This is interesting timing. I was asked at work to remove our RSS feed. Turns out no one but me knew what it was for they just saw the link in the site footer clicked it their browser showed a bunch of xml and they thought it was broken. I checked the logs turns out it gets 1000s of requests a day so I think that convinced them to keep it.
- darekkay 2y ago
  > 1000s of requests a day Some RSS readers are quite aggressive with their polling time. At the same time, a single request may serve thousands of users. However, you can check your logs and get the actual number of subscribers, at least for popular RSS readers: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/ https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/
jasoneckert 2y ago
After getting sick of maintaining the JavaScript in iWeb myself after Apple deprecated it, I ended up migrating my personal blog from iWeb to Hugo almost a decade ago. And when getting my Hugo template set up, I considered RSS a 'nice to have but not need to have' thing during the process. After the migration was complete without an RSS feed, I received dozens of emails within the same week from people I never knew read my blog specifically requesting an RSS feed on the new site. So I added it. That quickly reminded me about how important and common RSS is, and I'll continue ensuring that RSS feeds exist on any blog I create as a result.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
renegat0x0 2y ago
I only follow sources that have RSS support. The minute Reddit or YouTube drops such support I drop them.
uncertainquark 2y ago
Most introductions to RSS assume that people want to know about RSS.. and so instead here’s a more people-centric explainer: https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/ https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/
geor9e 2y ago
My favorite RSS reader is Feedbro. I see hackernews front page posts, friends facebook posts, friends nitter (x) posts, friends substack posts, youtube subscriptions, all in one chronological feed. And a browser icon shows how many posts are waiting to be viewed. There are some paid services that scrape other sites to RSS for you too (like zapier).
kschaul 2y ago
I love RSS, but I often want to create a feed from websites that don’t offer RSS support (or the right features). So I built a little web service that, given a URL and a CSS selector, returns an RSS feed of those items. Figured it might be useful for others too. Code -> https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker Hosted version -> https://feedmaker.fly.dev/ https://feedmaker.fly.dev/
drdude 2y ago
I am using an RSS reader to read latest hackernews and other stuff... the more RSS support the merrier
geor9e 2y ago
I want to attribute RSS never taking off in popularity to malice on the part of big tech to catch and kill a threat to their walled garden social media advertising model, because I don't want to face that humanity is just too incompetent to realize how great RSS is.
account42 2y ago
Having an RSS feed is one thing, but without making sure that the feed is retrievable by RSS readers it's pointless. In the modern buttflare web this seems to be the harder part.

464 points by emschwartz 2y ago

Great initiative. All WordPress sites has multiple RSS feeds enabled by default.

econ 2y ago

I do this too! Reception is wonderful. I also include a short description of rss, which parts to support with an example and a description of how one could make an rss feed: you take whatever code produces the index html, remove everything except the part that outputs for each item the title, introduction text, the link and the publication date. Followed by one more short example rss with $title Not that any developer would really need this but it puts everything they need to know and do on a single page. You don't have to think, just do it.

palata 2y ago

RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it). I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.

sourcecodeplz 2y ago
Because RSS is "too old"...
entuno 2y ago
Where I have RSS feeds from news sites, I usually skim down the list of titles, read an article (in my feed) if it's interesting, and then move on. I never visit their website, I don't see their adverts, their tracking scripts can't run, and I don't see or interact with their comments. Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.
- saint_yossarian 2y ago
  Nobody's forcing them to put the full text into the feed, for me the main benefit is not having to check the site manually.
  - entuno 2y ago
    As the consumer, that's a big benefit, and the main reason I use RSS. But for the company running the website, the fact that you're no longer browsing to their site, being served adverts and tracking code, and seeing what's on their homepage is not a benefit
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  > makes it much harder for them to monetise. On the other hand, RSS definitely provides extra opportunities to monitise. Imagine your business provides a customisable "offers" feed so you can tell interested parties when a sale occurs, etc. Businesses should be falling over themselves to get that kind of engagement.
  - entuno 2y ago
    That just sounds like a mailing list, but without the ability to easily identify and track the individuals you're sending to.
    - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      So... a win-win? RSS also avoids all the problems associated with spam.
- openrisk 2y ago
  Not everyone is out to monetise (e.g public sector). And even if you are after monetisation, sending out a teaser snippet makes sense. The user can decide if they want to visit the site to read more, subscribe etc.
- galleywest200 2y ago
mongol 2y ago
> Podcasts typically use RSS I would even say that a podcast that does not support RSS is not a podcast, it is something else.
- frde_me 2y ago
  I would be curious why you think the idea of a podcast is coupled to a specific distribution technology
  - rglullis 2y ago
    Because the original idea of what we call "podcasting" is rooted on RSS.
    - lkjdsklf 2y ago
      The idea of what we call “writing” is rooted in stone tablets and chisels, but we still call Shakespeare a writer
      - rglullis 2y ago
        There has been a significant longer amount of time between ancient civilizations and Shakespeare compared to today and l the first people who are recording audio content periodically and distributing it via RSS.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    It goes much further than that: as the name suggests, it's coupled to a specific, obsolete brand of device.
  - mongol 2y ago
    Similar to why radio relates to electromagnetical transmissions in the radio spectrum. When it happens over internet, we don't call it radio, but possibly internet radio. RSS was the origin of podcasts, and if it does not involve RSS, it is not podcasts
  - 2y ago
_heimdall 2y ago
It comes down to a push versus pull architecture. RSS is pull based, you aren't notified when a feed is updated. Most people today want push based with a feed, with all the bells and whistles of a social feed that is updated instantly. Federation comes in mainly because push based systems require a server managing who follows who, what is posted, and who to notify of updates. That's a lot of information for one central service to be responsible for, leading some to think its better to federate and trust a bunch of servers to host copies of some or all of that same data.
- palata 2y ago
  Right, those are good points. Still I can't help but to wonder whether those notifications are needed or not. Except for instant messaging, I generally don't want notifications. Like I don't need to be told that a new podcast is available, I'll see it next time I open the app. I would like to at least have the choice to use RSS instead of having to go through a complicated federated system.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    That's actually the main reason I still use RSS, I never found a need for most notifications and the complexity required to manage a push-based system aren't worth it to me. Even if I'm using someone else's system, I just don't like the idea of giving them a reason/need to manage all that for me. RSS works fine 99% of the time.
- account42 2y ago
  The push-based federated systems could still be built on top of RSS - have a pull-based feed as the source of truth and then optional push-based notifications for those that want more timely updates. Ideally the push-based parts would be optional for both ends so you could host a static feed and still have people see those updates in their fancy fediverse apps, just not immediately when you post them. Instead we have a completely different standard without a simple core that you can easily implement if you don't need all the bells and whistles.
domysee 2y ago
> RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. The people creating websites often don't know that they're providing RSS feeds though, and never link to it. To solve that I developed a tool that finds RSS feeds, even if RSS autodiscovery isn't implemented: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

brisky 2y ago

Recently I have posted about RSDS (really simple decentralized syndication) - a protocol that tries to solve RSS content global discovery problem. Here is the link if you are interested to read more about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42654891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42654891

eminco 2y ago

RSS is indeed worth advocating for. One of its greatest strengths is its simplicity.

amitport 2y ago

I'm still waiting for https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ to catch.

account42 2y ago
Looks overly complicated.
- amitport 2y ago
  Do you know of a simpler purposal? It's the correct amount of complicated imho.

picafrost 2y ago

This is a great initiative. Large tech companies, through hijacking our web experience and pursuing maximum scale, have normalized not being able to talk to a human being on the other side of a website/app/business. In many situations you _can_ just send an email. Most often someone will read it and be very happy to help out if they can. Not always, but how much of a time and effort investment is an email really? The best part is that a few kind words can absolutely make someone’s week.

defrost 2y ago

As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video. The form is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5vU7bPBNzyC2nnwmNQ https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v... where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension) "Find Feeds in Current Tab" function. https://nodetics.com/feedbro/ https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

entuno 2y ago
It also provides feeds for individual playlists, where `playlist_id` is the `list` URL parameter when you view the full playlist. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id= https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id= It's a really nice way to be able to follow creators/playlists without needing to register an account. I'm surprised that YouTube still allow it, but I hope it stays.
- latexr 2y ago
  Unfortunately those have a major flaw: they always show the top 15 items in a playlist. This is a problem because many channels have playlists where they put older episodes at the top and add new ones to the bottom. This makes the playlist RSS useless, because it will always show the same 15 videos.
donatj 2y ago
That's good to know. The number of times I have subscribed to someone on YouTube only to not see anything from them in years, and then find tens of their videos YouTube never offered is just insane. So many times I can't find anything to watch on YouTube and it just isn't showing me any of my subscriptions, it's ridiculous.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  The opposite problem is also bad: subscribe to a channel, then get frequent notifications of years-old videos.

rmnclmnt 2y ago

Love RSS, been using (and paying for) miniflux for a few years now. Do someone knows a way to retrieve RSS feeds URLs for any podcast that would be hosted on major platforms? (Spotify, Apple Music) I subscribed to podcast having some hosted website (where they are publishing the RSS feed from) but most of them don’t

dqv 2y ago
Pocket Casts usually lists the RSS link when you share a podcast from the app. https://pca.st/podcast/170a7610-948e-0135-9d21-5bb073f92b78 https://pca.st/podcast/170a7610-948e-0135-9d21-5bb073f92b78 Under "more ways to listen" it has RSS as an option.
- rmnclmnt 2y ago
  Thanks!
  - dqv 2y ago
    I just found another one from an HN post https://www.johnwalker.nl/posts/escape-the-walled-garden-with-rss https://www.johnwalker.nl/posts/escape-the-walled-garden-wit... The site is https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/
trekz 2y ago
You can try openrss.org. I believe the Spotify and Apple Music feeds will work for you. https://openrss.org/feeds/spotify https://openrss.org/feeds/spotify

palata 2y ago

I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons. I often receive answers, that surprised me! People saying "thank you for your suggestion, we will think about what we can do". None of them has every changed anything (I've been doing that for years). I don't even know if they did anything more than answering to the email.

rednafi 2y ago
Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.
- palata 2y ago
  GMail sends both HTML and plaintext versions by default.
  - account42 2y ago
    It does however do so using an automated HTML to text conversion that you could also just do in your client so it's not really all that helpful.
n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
Thus is a pet peeve of mine. Some companies send an multi-part E-Mail, just for the plain text part to be an empty string. Why bother? Pretty often the plain text is just the same html, so you get to read raw ugly html. Do people not test this?
- rwky 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure they don't test them. I got a good one the other day from a well known institution. It was a bill and the html part said I owed N amount but the plain text said 0.00. By default I read the plain text part but when I saw it says 0.00 I thought it was odd so checked the html and there it was the correct amount!

rook1e_dev 2y ago

RSS is my main source of information. And I've built some RSS-related projects: 1. https://github.com/0x2E/fusion https://github.com/0x2E/fusion - A lightweight, self-hosted friendly RSS aggregator and reader 2. https://rawweb.org/ https://rawweb.org/ - A search engine for indie websites (the crawler collects data from RSS feeds) 3. https://github.com/0x2E/rss-finder https://github.com/0x2E/rss-finder - A tool for finding the RSS link of a website

freetonik 2y ago
Rawweb is very cool! Curious, have you implemented your own crawler, RSS parser and search engine?
- rook1e_dev 2y ago
  Crawler is a simple HTTP requester + RSS parser. Full-text searching uses Elasticsearch.
emporas 2y ago
Nice list. I tried at some point to analyze html using a tree-sitter grammar and generate a list of articles, index them, and be on alert every so often for new entries. RSS feed could be generated automatically with some AI code generator (or tree-sitter query generator), and just parsing the elements of the page. Eventually i failed, but also i didn't try hard enough.
domysee 2y ago
Same for me, and would like to add my own list 1. https://lighthouseapp.io/ https://lighthouseapp.io/ - feed reader combined with bookmarking 2. https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder - tool to find RSS feeds (https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds) 3. https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/newsletter-to-rss https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/newsletter-to-rss - tool to convert newsletters to RSS feeds
- bluebarbet 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago

> Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with. Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?

rplnt 2y ago
Most people also decided it's a good idea to use browser from an advertising company. RSS is not good for business and it won't be provided.
- beretguy 2y ago
  > Most people also decide Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.
  - rplnt 2y ago
    That's fair. Though if I replaced "people" with "HN users" it would still hold true, and I would consider this group to be very computer literate.
    - beretguy 2y ago
      Unfortunately, yes.
  - _Algernon_ 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - latexr 2y ago
      Not everyone has the time, inclination, patience, or opportunity to “be informed” about all the shit every tech company does. It’s exhausting even for tech-literate people. Have some empathy.

grumbel 2y ago

If RSS could solve the problem it would have done so a decade ago. The core issue is that browsers have completely failed at offering anything to keep track of websites. Why aren't notifications simply build into the bookmark system? I don't need the website to provide that information via yet another special format, my browser should be able to figure that out itself from plain .html. But bookmarks haven't changed one bit in about 30 years, instead we moved that functionality server-side for no reason.

devmor 2y ago
God wouldn't that be simple and novel? Check a box when you bookmark a website and your browser polls it every so often for updates and gives you a little badge like a mobile app icon. No need for JS workers or push servers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  I wouldn't mind if browsers want to offer that feature in addition to RSS. But I also don't want to be forced to use my browser's bookmarking feature - RSS helps to decouple that.
  - cgriswald 2y ago
    I must be misunderstanding you. If this were possible standalone bookmark managers could do what standalone RSS readers do.
  - devmor 2y ago
    The implication is that your bookmarks would read an RSS feed provided by the website for notifications
rglullis 2y ago
Poe's Law, or you really don't remember the time where browsers had a huge button in the address bar to announce their feeds or that Firefox used to have a "Smart Bookmarks" feature to show you all the latest updates from all the feeds you subscribed to?

bmacho 2y ago

> I've been advocating for [X], and you should too This seems like what we should do against negative trends. I think complaining is more common, probably more accepted (?) than advocating, but logically, the latter is what we should do.

medhir 2y ago

I recently had a popular post on HN and several people reached out asking if I had an RSS feed implemented. Was surprised that anyone would be interested in keeping up with my writing, but was happy to oblige the request as it had been on my to-do list for a while. Happy I did do as it seems many people are hitting the RSS endpoint now. Cool to see that RSS is relevant in 2025, and will definitely advocate for its usage more moving forward :-)

6510 2y ago
How long did it take you to implement? I never bothered to make a list of the mails I send but now I see it is quite useful to show how well it works. Maybe some data on implementation time would be as useful.
- medhir 2y ago
  Took me a few hours. I use MDX for formatting so most of the time was spent figuring out how to convert the MDX to plain HTML. Not a very heavy lift overall :)
rambambram 2y ago
I might have been one of these people, because I was following your site as a bookmark in my RSS reader already. I didn't see any content in your feed so I checked again for a feed endpoint. I found it eventually on your site, but you might consider making it auto-discoverable (see https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery). People only have to enter your domain name into their RSS reader then.
- medhir 2y ago
  Ah nice, thanks for the heads up! I’ll look into adding this soon.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  That might be a useful site, but why on earth is it stuffed full of privacy-abusing, invasive advertising? I'm sure there are better sources for the RSS standard.

mg 2y ago

If you have an application that does not support RSS/atom yet, you can easily add support with a few lines of Python. Or use an open source module. Here is a general atom feed generator that I wrote and published under the GPL: https://github.com/no-gravity/atomfeed.py https://github.com/no-gravity/atomfeed.py Just 14 lines of Python. And it has been reliably serving the feed for my own website for quite a while now.

rednafi 2y ago
Interesting. Also, almost all static site generators support RSS. But sometimes it’s not turned on by default.

theanonymousone 2y ago

I have some app/service ideas which all involve "informing" the user about something. Implementations of this notification mechanism are either spammy, privacy-problematic, or both: (Web) Push notifications, Email, or Messages. The only solution that doesn't have either of these problems seems to be RSS: Provide the user with (customised) feed link and let them/their RSS client deal with it. I really wish RSS was less niche and more mainstream. I will "advocate" for it regardless.

uzyn 2y ago

RSS was a key protocol in syndication a widely free and open web before the domination of big tech/social media. We now have new internet generation that has never known RSS, relying largely on "the algorithm" of the big tech in content syndication. Thank you for your effort in advocating RSS support. I hope RSS makes a major come back especially with the recent events.

rednafi 2y ago

RSS is a wonderfully simple solution to get notifications for things I care about. I came to the software industry a lot later than the inception of Web 2.0 and rediscovered RSS almost accidentally. I advocate for it too. You’d be surprised how many people still care about this. My static site build broke the RSS[1] once recently, and I immediately got like 5 emails from different people. [1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml https://rednafi.com/index.xml

LAC-Tech 2y ago

how much of a PITA is it to add RSS to your own site?

rednafi 2y ago
Not much at all. If you are using a static site generator, they usually support it out of the box. Recently, one of my posts hit the front page here, and a few people emailed me asking for an RSS[1] feed. It turned out that it was just a simple config update to enable this on Hugo. Other SSGs usually support it out of the box too. Plus, it’s not too hard to build the XML from your HTML if you want to build it yourself from scratch. [1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml https://rednafi.com/index.xml
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
It's an open text format. There are some complexities if you dive down the rabbit hole, but at the most basic level, it's pretty simple. I even do it by hand on one site that I rarely update.

rambambram 2y ago

In the vein of: the web is already decentralized and social by it's nature, I built an RSS reader-and-feed-in-one for Hey Homepage (a DIY website pack that I made). So there's one place for reading posts and for publishing your own posts, just like the timelines from big tech. Combine that with a list of shared links which functions as a blog roll and consists of the feeds that you follow, and you have yourself a Really Social Site. You can even download the OPML file that contains all the shared links and start following some feeds from it yourself. So discovery is also possible with RSS feeds and OPML lists, albeit it works slightly different than you're used to from big tech. After that I built a Newspaper module that automatically collects new posts from feeds that I selected. This is my main way to get news without some algorithm deciding for me. The only wish I have is that more of your personal sits/blogs (most websites I follow come from HN) offer more 'photo feeds', just an enclosure-element in your item with a link to a picture or other media.

molticrystal 2y ago

Openrss.org is a non-profit that advocates for RSS adoption in addition to providing RSS feeds for websites that have none and cleainup/improving existing rss feeds. Consider helping them out if this interests you, you might even be using a feed already as they have some custom feeds for github like for discussions and issues. https://openrss.org/about/contributing https://openrss.org/about/contributing

fire_lake 2y ago

Question about the RSS spec: When pulling RSS, how do you know how often to poll? How do you know which items have been seen previously?

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
> how do you know how often to poll? I would guess a combination of frequency from sitemap.xml, last modified http header, and past heuristics. Previously viewed items would, I think, need to be cached in the client (unless the RSS URL uses some kind of token to identify the user, which sounds ripe for abuse).
octochamp 2y ago
RSS can be polled as frequently or infrequently as you like, it's just a bit of XML hosted by a site which lists content or links to content. Tracking what's been read or not isn't done by the RSS feed or whoever hosts it, it's performed by the user's feed reader, which be just a local app on your phone or PC, or it might be a cloud service, either hosted (like Feedly) or self-hosted (using ie. FreshRSS).
6510 2y ago
You could examine the time between feed items. Personally I just start my reader then it aggregates and sorts my feeds by date into a single interface. This works well specially for much larger numbers.
asjo 2y ago
rachelbythebay has a service and a series of blog posts about the technical side of this, starting at https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/ TL;DR: readers should not poll more often than once and hour, use ETag and If-Modified-Since to determine whether to download the full feed again. Which items you have seen previously is something the feed reader keeps track of.
- fire_lake 2y ago
  > Which items you have seen previously is something the feed reader keeps track of. Is there a particular field that can be used as an identifier?

gudzpoz 2y ago

Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet: <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="assets/xml/rss.xsl" media="all"?> And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your RSS feeds themselves a dedicated page for advocating RSS, in case an interested reader is browsing through the links on your site. [0] https://getnikola.com/ https://getnikola.com/ [1] https://getnikola.com/rss.xml https://getnikola.com/rss.xml (Open it in your browser!) [2] https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/blob/master/nikola/data/themes/base/assets/xml/rss.xsl https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/blob/master/nikola/data/...

christkv 2y ago
Man what a blast from the past. There was a moment in time where xml and xlst was considered the bright future of webapps
- phh 2y ago
  I remember writing a blog with xml + xslt and thought it was very cool. Retrospectively, writing code in XML, eewwww, but back then I liked writing XHTML by hand
  - christkv 2y ago
    I mean it was fine but debugging it was a pain.
  - fak3r 2y ago
    +1 on XHTML by hand, I'd always have the XHTML 1.0 badge up to brag about it too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Valid_XHTML_1.0.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Valid_XHTML_1.0.svg
PeterStuer 2y ago
My suggestion for best practice would be to have a feed endpoint that is as minimal and clean as possible, and provide a separate endpoint (can be the same base url but with a parameter) for human consumption. This ensures maximal compatibility and ease of consumption for both machine and human.

pjmlp 2y ago

Spot on, I keep using it for years, and never understood why the tragedy around Google's RSS reader, there are tons of readers out there. And since this is HN, implementing a RSS reader tutorial is surely more interesting than TODO lists.

nxtbl 2y ago

Been doing that, but especially in the last few years sites have been dropping RSS support and won't bring it back no matter how you reason for it. For example, job seeking sites: https://tyomarkkinatori.fi/ https://tyomarkkinatori.fi/ is the national "job market" for the whole of Finland. Municipal and state employers are obligated to publish their openings there. That site has been in development for years and from 1.1.2025 onwards it replaced the old one - which supplied RSS feeds. Tyomarkkinatori does not and when asked, they will only reply that RSS is not going to be supported and that's the end of it. https://indeed.com https://indeed.com doesn't provide feeds anymore. Neither does (yet another Finnish aggregator) https://laura.fi https://laura.fi

xenodium 2y ago

> in a way that you're completely in control of, without bloat, without ads, without algorithms. If they don’t play nice, they often offer short digests in feeds, driving users to open their sites where you get ads, tracking, bloat, paywalls, and no longer in control… Thank you for advocating RSS. It’s the least we should strive for in our services. We can also strive for services themselves without tracking, ads, bloat… If you have a blog or want to start one, consider supporting platforms that genuinely improve the web experience. I built https://lmno.lol https://lmno.lol after growing tired of the popular blogging platforms. Here’s my blog on it https://lmno.lol/alvaro https://lmno.lol/alvaro If you prefer a different blogging service, there are other folks working on building a more mindful web. By supporting services like these, you prove that like-minded services are not only possible but fully sustainable without deceitful tech. • Bear • Ghost • Glitch • Haven • LMNO.lol • Mataroa • Micro.blog • mmm.page • Montaigne • Nekoweb • omg.lol • pages.casa • Pika • Posthaven • prose.sh • Scribbles • Smol Pub • Write.as • Yay.Boo

ginko 2y ago

How would you even use RSS now that no browser supports it anymore? Do people run a separate RSS reader on the side?

talideon 2y ago
Browsers have never really supported feeds. Even Firefox really only supported feed auto-discovery. There are extensions that implement feed readers, but browsers are ill suited to be feed readers. Most people who consume feeds do so via a dedicated feed reader, and there are plenty of online feed readers out there if you don't want a desktop one and plenty of services if you don't want to self-host. I self-host and use Miniflux personally.
nickthegreek 2y ago
there are plenty of companies offering RSS like inoreader.

sirolimus 2y ago

RSS is GOAT

ivanstame 2y ago

We all need to advocate for RSS, really important.

openrisk 2y ago

Publishers of content have really no excuse to disable RSS feeds. RSS is also a signal that some new content has arrived, why would one not send it to the world if its essentially free? Even if their business model requires that you visit their website (instead of reading everything on a client app) syndicating a teaser message makes sense. In any case, many actually useful sites that disable RSS are public orgs that do not rely on adtech or subscriptions. Its the sad result of digital illiteracy and outsourcing their web presence to some inane outfit thats up their neck in the SEO and social media shit. Incidentally a Web that makes full use of RSS is also one where more complex protocols like ActivityPub and ATProto can flourish. A client is a client is a client. Now that Mozilla has essentially abdicated their role as a user-centered window to the universe maybe there is room for something else?

pyromaker 2y ago

I absolutely love RSS format. It's one of the easiest ways for devs to get data and do something quickly with it. If you remember, Yahoo Pipies allowed devs & others quickly build something with RSS feeds. I've recently rebuilt and launched my own Yahoo Pipes clone https://www.mashups.io https://www.mashups.io Along the way of building this tool, I came across a plenty of major websites that do not provide RSS feeds and indie devs who maintain niche tools to provide these feeds. Then again, RSS are still plentiful!

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
I'm starting to do this more and more with the command line and actual pipes! You can go a long way with curl, xmllint, and the full Unix toolset.
ryan-duve 2y ago
Site feedback: when I drag "Popular sources" into the field, I see the options "YouTube" and "HackerNews". But when I click either I just see a blank modal. I'm using Firefox 135.

tjoff 2y ago

Never got around to use RSS for some reason, what software do people recommend? For me I believe I'd prefer a TUI in the terminal, but probably depends.

yakshaving_jgt 2y ago

So, should we be using RSS? Or Atom? It seems like Atom is better, but RSS as a name is more well known? I'm guessing adding a button on your website which says "Subscribe via RSS" but which actually points to an Atom feed would be confusing and bad?

atlintots 2y ago
Like you said, atom is slightly better, and based on RSS (hence why everyone just uses 'RSS'). It should be fine to say "Subscribe via RSS" and point to an atom feed instead, almost any tooling will be able to handle both. You can also say "Subscribe to atom feed" to be more explicit.

adhoc_slime 2y ago

I've almost never cared about learning about rss before but seeing the response it alsways gets, I decided I'd try feedly on my phone and add this blog to it. Feedly asks for a url, this site makes me download a .bin file. It doesn't make sense how this is my first user experience. I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But it is a nav item on the site. Call me nieve or whatever you like but with ux like this I can start to see how this technology has become less popular.

MortyWaves 2y ago
I believe browsers, for some conspiratorial reason, actively sabotaged RSS and RSS support in their browsers. Might even be as simple as under the table deals from scumbag ad companies.
galleywest200 2y ago
Why don't you use a feed reader that just have you input the URL? I use News Explorer and I just paste in the RSS URL. Heck, some even just let you paste in the root URL of the site and they find the RSS link for you. Feedly is a huge beast besides just an RSS reader. Try something lightweight.
imadj 2y ago
> I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But its nav item on the site. In feedly and many readers, you can just enter the website URL and it'll find the feed(s) automatically if present. But in general, how RSS work, you copy the URL to the RSS feed and give it to Reader to subscribe/follow the website. https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/feed/ https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/feed/ When the author publishes a new piece, they update the file located at this URL and your reader will fetch you the new content.

bluebarbet 2y ago

While I use RSS, I think we need to recognize that it's slowly going away. Even a single publisher that's missing a feed will be a deal-breaker for any new adopters. And RSS is an over-complex solution anyway, designed for a time before web standards when sites all had spaghetti table layouts. Today there's no need to create a whole shadow site in fussily-formatted XML for what can usually be found in the page source of the article list page as a bunch of `<li>`s. The more sustainable solution, I believe, is client-based: RSS readers that also parse HTML. There is even an HTML attribute schema, `hfeed`, that makes this easy-peasy and is much easier to implement for publishers. I still don't understand why this solution has not taken off yet. It's clearly optimal.

_heimdall 2y ago
At least for me, there is still benefit in being able to load only the list of articles. Attempting to fetch the full HTML and scrape it can be error prone and may not even work depending on how the site is using client-side rendering. Microformsts, which give us things like h-feed, are useful but the author is already thinking about the feed reader use case. Why wouldn't they also hook up an RSS feed?
- bluebarbet 2y ago
  The scraping issue is resolved by just putting the `h-feed` attributes on the relevant HTML elements. Far easier to implement and maintain than RSS. Maintaining a parallel XML endpoint is itself very error-prone, I know this from unpleasant experience. The only drawback to `h-feed` I can see is that the feed reader must fetch a larger initial payload. Seems like a small price to pay for much easier implementation and maintainability.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Do RSS readers and libraries do a good job of parsing out the feed without all the related microformats tags like h-entry, p-title, etc? I've found microformats to be just as much work to maintain (assuming more than just h-feed is needed these days). Its still easy to break silently, and if I care enough to make it I'll automate a test. Testing an RSS feed shouldn't be any harder than testing the rendered HTML to catch silent regressions.

rrgok 2y ago

What I really want in an RSS Reader is to fetch and show also the comments. Think about this post on HN, I'm more interested in reading the comments. Sadly, RSS only fetch/shows at most the body of the item. It would be really good to have a centralized and unified interface for getting news and comments just in your RSS reader.

domysee 2y ago

There are also a bunch of websites that have RSS feeds but don't link to them and don't make them available via RSS autodiscovery. I created a tool to find such RSS feeds for as many cases as possible: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder And if you're interested in the details: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds

danielktdoranie 2y ago

I love RSS and I actively used it until modern browsers dropped support for it and then websites stopped using it. I always felt RSS being dropped wasn’t the choice of users but more a conspiracy between those browser developers (or rather their managers and company leaders) and marketing/sales departments of pretty much any company that advertises on the internet: Google being the main one. Why? You can’t bombard RSS with advertising like you can on browsers and if people could get the information they need from RSS they won’t see ads. I recall the dropping of RSS happened over 6 months to my recollection. RSS was here and every website of merit used it, then all of a sudden Chrome, FireFox and Safari all dropped RSS support. You could go and install a separate RSS client but few people did that (extra steps and all) and then websites saw no one was using RSS and dropped support. RSS was particularly useful for browsing jobs for IT contractors. I used it daily, using RSS I was able to get job listings fast and apply before other candidates.

account42 2y ago
I'm unhappy about browsers dropping RSS support too but did you or anyone else actually use the browser integration for anthing more than discovering that an RSS feed exists?
- danielktdoranie 2y ago
  Did you read all of my post? I explained one of my uses of RSS pretty thoroughly

hackerbeat 2y ago

The problem with RSS today is that bad actors use it to scrape and rewrite content using AI. Not having it enabled makes life harder for them since many are too lazy/not savvy enough to use other means to steal content.

account42 2y ago
FUD! Name a single AI scraper that fetches RSS but not HTML.
- hackerbeat 2y ago
  WTF?

tyleo 2y ago

I recently added RSS to my personal site (https://www.tyleo.com/ https://www.tyleo.com/) Even with a custom implementation it’s a simple thing to support. You can find the whole spec here: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification I’ll mention that there is a competing Atom specification which is compatible with all notable RSS readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard). The POV I’ve seen on HN favors Atom because it offers more functionality and is a clearer standard. I want to voice my support for RSS though based on its simplicity. To me the feed doesn’t need a bunch of bells and whistles. I get analysis paralysis I get deciding which Atom features to support.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
> You can find the whole spec here There's also this version, which I believe is the original: https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html It's far from perfect, but at least it's not infested with spammy advertising.
- tyleo 2y ago
  Interesting. I wouldn’t shave advised a site with spammy ads but it looks like they are sufficiently caught in my ad block.
talideon 2y ago
Use whatever elements you need from Atom. Atom is a functional superset of RSS 2.0, and if you're hit with analysis paralysis, using only the functionality that exists in RSS 2.0 in your Atom feed. Atom exists because RSS is ambiguous and prone to breakage. The "bells and whistles" exist only because there were a lot of common extensions at the time that made sense to fold into Atom itself. Even if you use none of that and just the bits that overlap with RSS 2.0, your feed will be less likely to break in random feed readers, and that's enough reason to use Atom over RSS. In this day and age, there's no good reason to use RSS over Atom beyond brand recognition. (Yes, I'm still salty from the feed wars of the 2000s, but I still stand by all that I've written above.)

lufte 2y ago

I recently had the need to subscribe to changes to a Github repo and it turns out it provides a feed for them. For rust master branch, for example, subscribe to https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/master.atom https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/master.atom.

account42 2y ago
Is that feed linked anywhere? I discovered this before and am subscribed to a couple of those feeds but I add new ones rarely enough that I always need to look up how to build the URL.

talideon 2y ago

One thing though: is you're adding "RSS" support, use Atom for the feed, not actual RSS. Everything supports Atom that supports RSS, it's no harder to implement, less ambiguous, less prone to breaking, and has a richer vocabulary that doesn't require you resort to pulling in additional vocabularies via namespaces. I cringe every time I see a feed that uses RSS and then pulls in Atom for some of elements. If you're going to do that, then just use Atom for the whole thing rather than building a frankenfeed.

mromanuk 2y ago

I used Feedly, tried several RSS clients, I was into RSS but content providers started to only give you a portion of the content, subverting the very idea of RSS (at least what I wanted), even some clients had (or have) the feature to download the content and present it to you with a clean RSS style. So I quit it, because it was a new tech arms race. Not sure how is all that now.

kmfrk 2y ago

I was happy to see Bluesky supporting RSS on all profiles, but less excited to see that there's nothing in the content and title fields: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/3384 https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/3384 https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3nfshkzomgboapasu6amkhui/rss https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3nfshkzomgboapasu6amkhui/rs... Obviously I can see why they don't want to subsidize the entire internet with high-res videos and images, but a blank RSS feed for media isn't the way to go.

xnx 2y ago

Bluesky has RSS feeds.

udev4096 2y ago

It's nice to have a single feed of updates for all the releases of the software I use. Newsflash (https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk) is an awesome, modern RSS reader. Highly recommended!

rwky 2y ago

This is interesting timing. I was asked at work to remove our RSS feed. Turns out no one but me knew what it was for they just saw the link in the site footer clicked it their browser showed a bunch of xml and they thought it was broken. I checked the logs turns out it gets 1000s of requests a day so I think that convinced them to keep it.

darekkay 2y ago
> 1000s of requests a day Some RSS readers are quite aggressive with their polling time. At the same time, a single request may serve thousands of users. However, you can check your logs and get the actual number of subscribers, at least for popular RSS readers: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/ https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

jasoneckert 2y ago

After getting sick of maintaining the JavaScript in iWeb myself after Apple deprecated it, I ended up migrating my personal blog from iWeb to Hugo almost a decade ago. And when getting my Hugo template set up, I considered RSS a 'nice to have but not need to have' thing during the process. After the migration was complete without an RSS feed, I received dozens of emails within the same week from people I never knew read my blog specifically requesting an RSS feed on the new site. So I added it. That quickly reminded me about how important and common RSS is, and I'll continue ensuring that RSS feeds exist on any blog I create as a result.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

renegat0x0 2y ago

I only follow sources that have RSS support. The minute Reddit or YouTube drops such support I drop them.

uncertainquark 2y ago

Most introductions to RSS assume that people want to know about RSS.. and so instead here’s a more people-centric explainer: https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/ https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/

geor9e 2y ago

My favorite RSS reader is Feedbro. I see hackernews front page posts, friends facebook posts, friends nitter (x) posts, friends substack posts, youtube subscriptions, all in one chronological feed. And a browser icon shows how many posts are waiting to be viewed. There are some paid services that scrape other sites to RSS for you too (like zapier).

kschaul 2y ago

I love RSS, but I often want to create a feed from websites that don’t offer RSS support (or the right features). So I built a little web service that, given a URL and a CSS selector, returns an RSS feed of those items. Figured it might be useful for others too. Code -> https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker Hosted version -> https://feedmaker.fly.dev/ https://feedmaker.fly.dev/

drdude 2y ago

I am using an RSS reader to read latest hackernews and other stuff... the more RSS support the merrier

geor9e 2y ago

I want to attribute RSS never taking off in popularity to malice on the part of big tech to catch and kill a threat to their walled garden social media advertising model, because I don't want to face that humanity is just too incompetent to realize how great RSS is.

account42 2y ago

Having an RSS feed is one thing, but without making sure that the feed is retrievable by RSS readers it's pointless. In the modern buttflare web this seems to be the harder part.