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> Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization. What kind of organization do you want? Every feed reade

> Subscribing to 50 people is enough to make the feed unusable since there’s little to no organization. What kind of organization do you want? Every feed reader I've ever used let me categorize/organize feeds in whatever way I wanted, but it's a manual process.

rednafi 2y ago
Exactly this, but with some automatic content grouping. Also, the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content; this is why I am not a big fan of the protocol. Too much fragmentation: RSS, RSS2, Atom.
- jasonpbecker 2y ago
  A lot of services, (like Feedbin in my prior reply) and a lot of reader applications will permit different ways of viewing the data to get full content to appear even in truncated feeds. That said, non-full content feeds are pretty rare outside of corporate media.
- netghost 2y ago
  Honestly, I don't think it's a problem with RSS as a format. It's a problem with clients.
- basscomm 2y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'automatic content grouping'. Are you talking about somehow automatically grouping the posts from disparate sites into buckets based on some criteria? Newsboat, for example, lets you do this with tags and queries: https://newsboat.org/releases/2.19/docs/newsboat.html#_query_feeds https://newsboat.org/releases/2.19/docs/newsboat.html#_query... I'm also not sure what fragmentation has to do with anything. I don't think I've used a feed reader that didn't understand all current flavors of RSS and Atom, so it makes absolutely no difference what the webmaster decided to use, my news reader can figure it out. It is a little bit annoying when the webmaster doesn't put the full text of the article in the news feed, and instead wants you to actually visit their site to read their stuff. I'd guess that they do that to make sure that you actually visit the site once in a while and might accidentally view an ad so they can make a few cents or they hope that you might see something else on their site you might be interested in or whatever. It also saves some bandwidth by not downloading the full text of an article if it turns out that I wasn't interested in it.
  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    > I'd guess that they do that to make sure that you actually visit the site once in a while and might accidentally view an ad so they can make a few cents or they hope that you might see something else on their site you might be interested in or whatever. I can't speak for others, but as someone who hand codes my HTML, it is a non-trivial amount of work to convert the entire text of a page into an RSS feed, whereas it is easy to add the headline, datetime, and summary. I get that it is pretty cool to read stuff inside an RSS feed reader, but doesn't fit with my current workflow. My site has no ads, tracking, cookies (aside from the ones imported by the odd embedded youtube video).
    - basscomm 2y ago
      I also hand code my website and rss feed, so my feed is basically a changelog disguised as a blog post masquerading as a news feed. If you want to read the full articles, you have to visit the site.
- darekkay 2y ago
  > the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content; It rather depends on the amount of content the RSS _author_ includes in the RSS feed. There's nothing in the RSS/Atom protocol that prevents you from reading the entire article, but some website creators decide to truncate the feed content. My RSS reader of choice, InoReader, has the option to download the original website which solves the problem. However, I have over 200 feeds and it's rare to find one without the entire content being included.

rednafi 2y ago

Exactly this, but with some automatic content grouping. Also, the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content; this is why I am not a big fan of the protocol. Too much fragmentation: RSS, RSS2, Atom.

jasonpbecker 2y ago
A lot of services, (like Feedbin in my prior reply) and a lot of reader applications will permit different ways of viewing the data to get full content to appear even in truncated feeds. That said, non-full content feeds are pretty rare outside of corporate media.
netghost 2y ago
Honestly, I don't think it's a problem with RSS as a format. It's a problem with clients.
basscomm 2y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'automatic content grouping'. Are you talking about somehow automatically grouping the posts from disparate sites into buckets based on some criteria? Newsboat, for example, lets you do this with tags and queries: https://newsboat.org/releases/2.19/docs/newsboat.html#_query_feeds https://newsboat.org/releases/2.19/docs/newsboat.html#_query... I'm also not sure what fragmentation has to do with anything. I don't think I've used a feed reader that didn't understand all current flavors of RSS and Atom, so it makes absolutely no difference what the webmaster decided to use, my news reader can figure it out. It is a little bit annoying when the webmaster doesn't put the full text of the article in the news feed, and instead wants you to actually visit their site to read their stuff. I'd guess that they do that to make sure that you actually visit the site once in a while and might accidentally view an ad so they can make a few cents or they hope that you might see something else on their site you might be interested in or whatever. It also saves some bandwidth by not downloading the full text of an article if it turns out that I wasn't interested in it.
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  > I'd guess that they do that to make sure that you actually visit the site once in a while and might accidentally view an ad so they can make a few cents or they hope that you might see something else on their site you might be interested in or whatever. I can't speak for others, but as someone who hand codes my HTML, it is a non-trivial amount of work to convert the entire text of a page into an RSS feed, whereas it is easy to add the headline, datetime, and summary. I get that it is pretty cool to read stuff inside an RSS feed reader, but doesn't fit with my current workflow. My site has no ads, tracking, cookies (aside from the ones imported by the odd embedded youtube video).
  - basscomm 2y ago
    I also hand code my website and rss feed, so my feed is basically a changelog disguised as a blog post masquerading as a news feed. If you want to read the full articles, you have to visit the site.
darekkay 2y ago
> the ability to read the whole content in the reader instead of having to go to the site. But that depends on how RSS/Atom exposes the content; It rather depends on the amount of content the RSS _author_ includes in the RSS feed. There's nothing in the RSS/Atom protocol that prevents you from reading the entire article, but some website creators decide to truncate the feed content. My RSS reader of choice, InoReader, has the option to download the original website which solves the problem. However, I have over 200 feeds and it's rare to find one without the entire content being included.