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RSS and AT Proto have been on my mind all week. Even though RSS is my main source of news, it’s impossible to get around the fact that the (incredibly, unfatho

RSS and AT Proto have been on my mind all week. Even though RSS is my main source of news, it’s impossible to get around the fact that the (incredibly, unfathomably stupid) shutdown of Google Reader kneecapped it. AT Protocol is more than “let’s make Twitter more open” — it’s an open protocol for anything that’s real-time and shareable. I was never a big Google Reader guy, I liked traditional clients like NetNewsWire, but the sociability of Google Reader cannot be dismissed. I’m not sure that just bridging RSS to Bluesky is the future… a distinct AT Proto lexicon seems like the actual way forward IMHO Exciting times!

simonw 2y ago
Google Reader shut down nearly 12 years ago. Its legacy now is that there are still people who are pissed off about that, and I get the impression that a surprising amount of them are now in positions where they get to make purchasing decisions over whether or not to buy Google Cloud. (Being a Mac+iPhone person I've settled in quite happily with NetNewsWire now, but it took me a few years to get there.)
- blakesterz 2y ago
  My distrust of Google certainly started with the shutdown of Reader. Everything they've done since has made it worse. I was in the position to choose a cloud provider several years ago and would not even consider GCP. I seriously doubt they'll kill GCP, but I see no reason to take a chance on anything Google does outside of search, docs, mail and the core things.
  - foolswisdom 2y ago
    The fact that they shut down Google domains (and cloud domains now uses squarespace, who bought Google domains) shows that you can't necessarily trust they won't shut down critical GCP services either.
  - cuu508 2y ago
    It is unlikely Google will shut down GMail, but at an individual level you can lose access to it without any warning. I no longer trust it as my primary email.
  - mikae1 2y ago
    My self hosted FreshRSS instance is better than Google Reader ever was. Just about every website and service I use has feeds. People/geeks are rediscovering RSS. I think this might be the golden age of RSS.
    - wiether 2y ago
      I recently discovered that FreshRSS has a built-in xPath parser/webscrapper[1] so you can actually subscribe to any website, even if it doesn't have an actual feed. It's not straightforward to use because of the lack of a test/debug interface, but its worth the effort to set it up! [1]: https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/users/11_website_scraping.html https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/users/11_website_scra...
    - olex 2y ago
      Self-hosted FreshRSS + NetNewsWire on Mac and iOS/iPadOS is my combo of choice, works great. After Reader died I migrated to Feedly for a while, but self-hosting the backend and not having ads injected + being able to debug and properly manage feeds is way nicer.
  - mfld 2y ago
    We chose GCP, and the work to accommodate restructuring of services (currently container registry to artifacts) is indeed an annoying.
- oigursh 2y ago
  They tried to force the free GSuite editions into paid a year or two ago.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
Bluesky has launched RSS feeds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 - Jan 2024 https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds How would you extend this ("a distinct AT Proto lexicon seems like the actual way forward IMHO") beyond the RSS feed you can get from a Bluesky profile?
- theshrike79 2y ago
  RSS feed is a pull type thing, AT Proto is push if I understand it correctly. So instead of you polling an RSS feed on Bluesky, they would send you a stream of messages
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Certainly, I asked because I am building on AT Proto for fun and wanted to hear more on the idea for building purposes. I love RSS, but am excited what potential open standard successors could be built on AT Proto.
    - Eric_WVGG 2y ago
      Yeah, exactly. Just in terms of software models and consumer uptake, I think it’s abundantly clear that the way Twitter and Instagram work “won” and RSS “failed.” Like, just forget about "push/pull" for a minute, what about feed discoverability? A couple years ago my father asked me how I read news, and I told him to install Reeder on his iPad, then he could just start filling in feeds from The Atlantic or whatever. “Okay how do I find those?” “Well, you could install a browser extension — wait you're not going to do that — or view the web page source and look for an RSS link — wait what am I saying —” RSS depends on website designers making their feeds discoverable, and as a career web dev I can assure you that’s simply not on their radar. Only alpha geeks care. The only reason RSS is still around is that it’s built into enough CMS's so most web devs don't have to do any work, and they still can't be bothered to put a little radar icon in the footer. Discoverability is intrinsic to social though. No, I don't know how someone on Bluesky will search accounts on other networks in "the atmosphere," but I’m positive this will get solved. RSS fans deny that discoverability is a problem to this day, because the only people who use it are the same alpha geeks who don’t care about UX at all.
skybrian 2y ago
I don’t know what you mean by “kneecapped.” I’ve using Newsblur for at least a decade and it works fine.
- Eric_WVGG 2y ago
  I mean that it kneecapped the idea of RSS in the social consciousness. Most people believe that when Google Reader shut down RSS stopped existing, if they even knew what RSS was in the first place. A friend of mine — in tech — asked me the other day where I was hearing a bunch of stuff and I said “my RSS feeds” and he laughed at me. That”s what I mean.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > if they even knew what RSS was in the first place This is the point. Even when it existed, almost no-one knew what RSS was.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    Lots of stuff shared on Hacker News is far from mainstream. Is it really so bad to use a tool that other people aren’t aware of? Your friend sounds rather ignorant.
- TheCowboy 2y ago
  It's complicated, and I think it's less malicious in a way that "kneecapped" implies. Sure, RSS still exists in some form, but I think the utility of it has been in decline, and a lot of 'content' simply isn't accessible by RSS feed anymore. An argument can be made that they provided an RSS reader service no one could come close to matching and basically dominated the area. Google's deep support also helped it proliferate. It is maybe underrated that RSS was likely one defense the web had against the dominance of walled gardens and social media. It allowed a lot of sites to flourish that I think would not get any traction today.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    I haven’t noticed a decline in support for RSS. Essentially all blogs support it, even relatively new ones like Substack that are more email-centric.
mhitza 2y ago
> an open protocol for anything that’s real-time and shareable Does that mean that at the protocol level one can share content of larger sizes than what Bluesky does by default? Even though not standard at least via the ActivityPub protocol one can set more reasonable character lengths, though unsure how most Mastodon clients handle that in practice. Bluesky devs seem set, from some past HN interaction, on keeping the restriction in place for the app. In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits. As to what HN would be in such a future: a stream (or whatever term their use) of content curated/moderated by dang.
- pferde 2y ago
  There already is a Reddit-like application that uses ActivityPub. It's called Lemmy (https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/).
  - mhitza 2y ago
    Thanks. I'm aware of most, if not all, these alternatives as I've spent some time a few years ago researching them before sending a proposal @ NLnet for funding in this space. I should have said P2P in my comment instead of decentralized, as the broader term captures the concept of federated as well.
- emaro 2y ago
  In my experience, Mastodon clients handle large posts (say 5000 chars instead of 500) very well. > In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits. Not sure if you're saying that Bluesky is decentralized and Mastodon not, which if anything would be the other way around. The other interpretation is that you can see Bluesky as a replacement for HN/Reddit, but not Mastodon. My take is that both are unfit for that, since they're heavily embracing the micro-blogging format. I'm not sure if there are any ATProto applications like this already, but Lemmy and MBin are both examples of decentralized link aggregators using ActivityPub.
ghfhghg 2y ago
How did Google Reader dying kneecap RSS? I still use it to this day
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  I can't remember the exact history, but Google's dropping of Reader may have encouraged browser manufacturers to drop their support of RSS.
  - ghfhghg 2y ago
    Ah that tracks. I never used a browser and initially used the Google reader app and then switched to an alternate app afterwards

simonw 2y ago

Google Reader shut down nearly 12 years ago. Its legacy now is that there are still people who are pissed off about that, and I get the impression that a surprising amount of them are now in positions where they get to make purchasing decisions over whether or not to buy Google Cloud. (Being a Mac+iPhone person I've settled in quite happily with NetNewsWire now, but it took me a few years to get there.)

blakesterz 2y ago
My distrust of Google certainly started with the shutdown of Reader. Everything they've done since has made it worse. I was in the position to choose a cloud provider several years ago and would not even consider GCP. I seriously doubt they'll kill GCP, but I see no reason to take a chance on anything Google does outside of search, docs, mail and the core things.
- foolswisdom 2y ago
  The fact that they shut down Google domains (and cloud domains now uses squarespace, who bought Google domains) shows that you can't necessarily trust they won't shut down critical GCP services either.
- cuu508 2y ago
  It is unlikely Google will shut down GMail, but at an individual level you can lose access to it without any warning. I no longer trust it as my primary email.
- mikae1 2y ago
  My self hosted FreshRSS instance is better than Google Reader ever was. Just about every website and service I use has feeds. People/geeks are rediscovering RSS. I think this might be the golden age of RSS.
  - wiether 2y ago
    I recently discovered that FreshRSS has a built-in xPath parser/webscrapper[1] so you can actually subscribe to any website, even if it doesn't have an actual feed. It's not straightforward to use because of the lack of a test/debug interface, but its worth the effort to set it up! [1]: https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/users/11_website_scraping.html https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/users/11_website_scra...
  - olex 2y ago
    Self-hosted FreshRSS + NetNewsWire on Mac and iOS/iPadOS is my combo of choice, works great. After Reader died I migrated to Feedly for a while, but self-hosting the backend and not having ads injected + being able to debug and properly manage feeds is way nicer.
- mfld 2y ago
  We chose GCP, and the work to accommodate restructuring of services (currently container registry to artifacts) is indeed an annoying.
oigursh 2y ago
They tried to force the free GSuite editions into paid a year or two ago.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Bluesky has launched RSS feeds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 - Jan 2024 https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds How would you extend this ("a distinct AT Proto lexicon seems like the actual way forward IMHO") beyond the RSS feed you can get from a Bluesky profile?

theshrike79 2y ago
RSS feed is a pull type thing, AT Proto is push if I understand it correctly. So instead of you polling an RSS feed on Bluesky, they would send you a stream of messages
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Certainly, I asked because I am building on AT Proto for fun and wanted to hear more on the idea for building purposes. I love RSS, but am excited what potential open standard successors could be built on AT Proto.
  - Eric_WVGG 2y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Just in terms of software models and consumer uptake, I think it’s abundantly clear that the way Twitter and Instagram work “won” and RSS “failed.” Like, just forget about "push/pull" for a minute, what about feed discoverability? A couple years ago my father asked me how I read news, and I told him to install Reeder on his iPad, then he could just start filling in feeds from The Atlantic or whatever. “Okay how do I find those?” “Well, you could install a browser extension — wait you're not going to do that — or view the web page source and look for an RSS link — wait what am I saying —” RSS depends on website designers making their feeds discoverable, and as a career web dev I can assure you that’s simply not on their radar. Only alpha geeks care. The only reason RSS is still around is that it’s built into enough CMS's so most web devs don't have to do any work, and they still can't be bothered to put a little radar icon in the footer. Discoverability is intrinsic to social though. No, I don't know how someone on Bluesky will search accounts on other networks in "the atmosphere," but I’m positive this will get solved. RSS fans deny that discoverability is a problem to this day, because the only people who use it are the same alpha geeks who don’t care about UX at all.

skybrian 2y ago

I don’t know what you mean by “kneecapped.” I’ve using Newsblur for at least a decade and it works fine.

Eric_WVGG 2y ago
I mean that it kneecapped the idea of RSS in the social consciousness. Most people believe that when Google Reader shut down RSS stopped existing, if they even knew what RSS was in the first place. A friend of mine — in tech — asked me the other day where I was hearing a bunch of stuff and I said “my RSS feeds” and he laughed at me. That”s what I mean.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > if they even knew what RSS was in the first place This is the point. Even when it existed, almost no-one knew what RSS was.
- skybrian 2y ago
  Lots of stuff shared on Hacker News is far from mainstream. Is it really so bad to use a tool that other people aren’t aware of? Your friend sounds rather ignorant.
TheCowboy 2y ago
It's complicated, and I think it's less malicious in a way that "kneecapped" implies. Sure, RSS still exists in some form, but I think the utility of it has been in decline, and a lot of 'content' simply isn't accessible by RSS feed anymore. An argument can be made that they provided an RSS reader service no one could come close to matching and basically dominated the area. Google's deep support also helped it proliferate. It is maybe underrated that RSS was likely one defense the web had against the dominance of walled gardens and social media. It allowed a lot of sites to flourish that I think would not get any traction today.
- skybrian 2y ago
  I haven’t noticed a decline in support for RSS. Essentially all blogs support it, even relatively new ones like Substack that are more email-centric.

mhitza 2y ago

> an open protocol for anything that’s real-time and shareable Does that mean that at the protocol level one can share content of larger sizes than what Bluesky does by default? Even though not standard at least via the ActivityPub protocol one can set more reasonable character lengths, though unsure how most Mastodon clients handle that in practice. Bluesky devs seem set, from some past HN interaction, on keeping the restriction in place for the app. In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits. As to what HN would be in such a future: a stream (or whatever term their use) of content curated/moderated by dang.

pferde 2y ago
There already is a Reddit-like application that uses ActivityPub. It's called Lemmy (https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/).
- mhitza 2y ago
  Thanks. I'm aware of most, if not all, these alternatives as I've spent some time a few years ago researching them before sending a proposal @ NLnet for funding in this space. I should have said P2P in my comment instead of decentralized, as the broader term captures the concept of federated as well.
emaro 2y ago
In my experience, Mastodon clients handle large posts (say 5000 chars instead of 500) very well. > In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits. Not sure if you're saying that Bluesky is decentralized and Mastodon not, which if anything would be the other way around. The other interpretation is that you can see Bluesky as a replacement for HN/Reddit, but not Mastodon. My take is that both are unfit for that, since they're heavily embracing the micro-blogging format. I'm not sure if there are any ATProto applications like this already, but Lemmy and MBin are both examples of decentralized link aggregators using ActivityPub.

ghfhghg 2y ago

How did Google Reader dying kneecap RSS? I still use it to this day

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
I can't remember the exact history, but Google's dropping of Reader may have encouraged browser manufacturers to drop their support of RSS.
- ghfhghg 2y ago
  Ah that tracks. I never used a browser and initially used the Google reader app and then switched to an alternate app afterwards