9 ms·

RSS is awesome

316 points by edverma2 1y ago

k2enemy 1y ago
Boy do I feel old if a short, low content PSA about the existence of RSS is considered "hacker news."
- rufus_foreman 1y ago
  You're one of today's unlucky 10,000.
- senectus1 1y ago
  I mean.. it shouldn't be controversial.. but people keep claiming rss is dead. not in my world it aint.
  - nntwozz 1y ago
    Podcasts needs an RSS feed, that about sums it up how not dead it is.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    Definitely not dead, thank goodness. I probably read 4-5 articles a day through RSS and skim through dozens. Even so it's no longer a de facto standard the way it used to be.
    - senectus1 1y ago
      haha, I skim through about 800 a day and read dozens of them. Every year around newyears time I trim it back, but it inevitably grows again.
  - grep_name 1y ago
    I was extremely bummed when setting up RSS for the glance app to find that a bunch of stuff I'd assumed would just have RSS feeds, do not. Mostly local things that post regular updates to pages that already look like feeds. - Three local independent theaters - Every local venue I checked in my city (admittedly only checked a few I was specifically interested in) - The local dvd rental place (we still have one and it's neat. The announce their newer niche additions via an updating page) - My local folk school that hosts events and has an updated news page with no feed There were a few things I can't remember now that I was shocked to see regularly update pages with lists of updates that there is no way to subscribe to. I would have expected most of these sites to be built using some kind of automated tool that would just include rss or atom. I guess most of the offer email lists, which is a crappy way to get updates comparatively imo. I'm probably going to use a combination of changedetection.io and rss-bridge to get updates from these sites, but like, seriously?
    - imafikus 1y ago
      You can give notify-me.rs a try if you want as well. We have a free plan available, and we should be able to track all of the sites you mentioned. If you do give it a try, let me know what you think, since I'm one of the founders. Cheers!
      - sincarne 1y ago
        Something is up with your web page. It stutters when scrolling, and crashes my tab. I’m using Safari on an iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 18.6.2 (22G100). No content blockers or extensions.
- user3939382 1y ago
  RSS is the antidote to algorithm feeds. I’m glad for any mention of it. 90% of the tools users need were built 1970-2000 including RSS.
  - 627467 1y ago
    Having restarted using rss in the past months (after probably 10+ years of not using it) i am now starting to remember why I stopped using it: lack of a personal "algorithm" that made hundreds (if not 1000s) of unread daily items to be manageable. I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work? Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological. More readers should have this
    - al_borland 1y ago
      The thing that made RSS work for me is to really limit my feeds. Instead of following 10 tech news sites that have a bunch of overlap, I follow 1 that has most of what I want. A few blogs are for apps I use and want to be informed of new information, but they post infrequently, which is good. Feed with dozens of posts per day turn into noise, especially if you have a lot of them. By choosing one site I trust, I let the editors edit, instead of the algorithm.
      - sewalsh 1y ago
        Yikes. I read THOUSANDS of RSS headlines on a daily basis. This is exactly why I use RSS. You can easily get a glimpse of headlines and keep browsing.
        al_borland 1y ago
        That's the beauty of RSS, people can tailor it to their needs and wants. If I saw thousands of unread items, I'd shut down and give up. On the flip side, if you had my feed list, you'd probably feel like you were missing a ton of stuff. But we can both make it work for us. I did have a job where I got 10k email per day for a good 10 years, so I probably have some PTSD from that. I'd feel like I was right back there if I had thousands of items per day in my RSS reader. I've been out of that stage of my job for a good 8 years, and I'm just now starting to get a handle on my email again, after feeling like there was no way to control it for so long.
- netule 1y ago
  Not only that, but an ad for their mobile app. Pretty low quality content.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    It’s not their app. NetNewsWire is developed by Brent Simmons and has been around for over 20 years. It’s free and open source. Last I saw, he didn’t even accept donations.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Seen this? https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed
- cm2187 1y ago
  Ask a junior at the office what is that "save"or "new directory" logo, or what "CC" stands for in an email, or what a dialup connection is!
- lylo 1y ago
  Anything that raises awareness of RSS to a new generation is a wonderful thing!
skeptrune 1y ago
Ironically just told the founder of my company that it was mission critical our blog had RSS. He had never used it before somehow and didn't know why it would be a big deal lol.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  How is it mission critical for the company to have an rss feed?
  - skeptrune 1y ago
    Blogs should be written to be read and not just for SEO slop. RSS feed helps a lot with that.
surprisetalk 1y ago
Amen! If you're looking to fill out your RSS reader, I maintain a directory of tech blogs (ctrl+f "feed" for rss links): [0] https://blogs.hn https://blogs.hn Other good directories: [1] https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ [2] https://blogroll.org/ https://blogroll.org/
colesantiago 1y ago
> RSS is really simple, so it is still very well supported. Notably, all substack publications automatically have an RSS feed included at https://{{substack-domain}}/feed . I wonder how long that will last until Substack closes it, I have never seen an RSS feed where the author is able to make it sustainable for them to make money from it.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Substack seems to have done an incredible job allowing people to monetize their blogs. Maybe Substack themselves aren't profitable but the authors certainly seem to be doing well. As someone who's subscribed to a lot of substacks the thing that brought me there was the availability of asynchronous reading (mail, rss newsletters.) I'm sure I'm not alone in disliking the actual site itself.
Defletter 1y ago
The only complaint I have about RSS is that it seems antagonistic to edits. It's not usual that, when refreshing my podcast RSS feed, there are multiple versions of the same episodes because they made some edit somewhere in the title or description, etc. I've had five versions of the same episode before. I feel like we should have the technology to fix this by now :P
- lwhsiao 1y ago
  We do. Atom feeds have an updated field for this. But, it's up to whoever is generating the feed to know how to handle their metadata.
- vhcr 1y ago
  That's what the guid / id field is for.
- _Algernon_ 1y ago
  RSS provides GUID + update timestamp which combined allows the client to integrate changes or replace entries.
- not--felix 1y ago
  I think the problem is that there are so many different standards[0] which makes it hard to parse them in a uniform format. The second problem is the most feeds only have 15 items, even if a reader handles updates they are fast lost for ever. [0] https://ivyreader.com/articles/rss-standart-collection https://ivyreader.com/articles/rss-standart-collection
throw0101a 1y ago
No love for Atom? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
henriquegogo 1y ago
RSS/Atom is great to follow blogs, news and some social network such as hackernews and reddit. I hope X/Twitter back to this functionality, but that's a low probability.
- AndrewDavis 1y ago
  I just restarted using RSS recently. And I discovered I can also use it to track software releases (on github). The url is the release page with .atom appended. Eg https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases.atom https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases.atom
- uz3snolc3t6fnrq 1y ago
  Nitter[0] seems to support it still, although it seems unmaintained - not sure how stable it is by this point. if you self host this, you should probably use burner account tokens, anti-botting measures might decide to shut down your X/twitter account [0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Twitter killed their API and RSS feeds "to fight bots" :D Which killed all the legitimate fun and useful bots and just left the astroturfing and discord sowing kind state sponsored bots. As was the plan.
ropable 1y ago
I'm sad that a basic description of what RSS consists of makes it onto HN. I still upvoted to help educate the kids :/ FYI FreshRSS is fairly trivial to self-host, and is a really nice option for an RSS reader app.
- senectus1 1y ago
  FreshRSS is dabomb! Highly recommend it.
- vanc_cefepime 1y ago
  Preferential to Miniflux myself, but any RSS reader is better than none.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    I tried both, but Miniflux was like 15% _too_ bare-bones for me. FreshRSS hit the sweet spot for me, combined with NetNewsWire as a mobile UI
    - gullevek 1y ago
      Yeah, even as a desktop UI NetNewsWire is great. FreshRSS rocks
      - wyclif 1y ago
        NetNewsWire is beginning to choke for me because I have a large number of feeds. I was using it today and when I pressed Alt-K to "mark all as read", it beachballed on me and I had to force quit. This has been happening more often recently as I've added more feeds.
  - digital_voodoo 1y ago
    Same here, tried both and sticked with Miniflux that seems on the lighter side. I don't really need the web interface or an app, because I channel everything towards a Telegram bot, where I read the feeds: a glance at the title, "Instant View" or long read if needed.
geor9e 1y ago
Yes! I've been using RSS (feedbro reader) to de-algorithm social media for a long time now. Twitter (via nitter), Facebook (public posts only), HN, etc. It's all in a chronological RSS feed. No algorithms choosing what I see, no infinite scroll. If it's not a public post from a user I added, I don't see it. Luckily all my close friends are public-only type posters so it works. My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.
- glenstein 1y ago
  I think your conspiracy theory is quite a natural reading of the incentives for big tech. IIRC, different iterations of Twitter, YouTube, Craigslist, Facebook, Google News, Google blog search, and even the Chrome browser had built in RSS support of various forms that were later removed or scaled back or significantly de-emphasized.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Not just the ads, they can't add recommendations to your RSS feed. What they optimise for is time spent on the platform "engagement". And usually rage-baiting content gives better engagement metrics than things that make you happy.
- drukenemo 1y ago
  How are you using Nitter? I’ve tried, but it’s a headache to host it.
- trippyballs 1y ago
  I’ve been looking for a way to get RSS feeds from Twitter profiles. tried RSS-Bridge but couldn’t get it working. rss.app works, but it’s paid. nitter feeds look promising but come through as invalid. how did you do it
Perizors 1y ago
Is there any RSS reader that is also able to subscribe to newsletters in some way? There are lot of contents that are only provided as newsletters nowadays and I wanted to be able to read my feed and newsletters in the same app, without going into my mail inbox.
- zikzak 1y ago
  Many can accept forwarded emails and some will offer an email address you can use to subscribe to newsletters. I prefer the former because you can cancel the forward rule if you don't want to continue with a given rss app or service.
- 1una 1y ago
  There are projects which generate web feeds for websites that don't have one. https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub
- daydream 1y ago
  You can subscribe to newsletters with any RSS reader nowadays, but it’s a multi step process requiring the use of an external (free) tool. 1. Create a feed on https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. This will also give you a custom email address to send your newsletter to. 2. Subscribe to the newsletter with the custom email address and add the feed you created to your reader. This setup works very well for me with NetNewsWire though there is friction in the multiple steps. No affiliation with either, just a satisfied user.
  - imp0cat 1y ago
    I, too, use kill-the-newsletter to convert newsletters to rss and it works amazingly well.
- nickthegreek 1y ago
  inoreader has that on some of their pay tiers. i use my own self host freshrss instance and https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to accomplish the same.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
After using GUI RSS readers for decades, been trying TUI RSS feed readers recently and quite liking that style. On iOS, Reeder is still my favorite app.
tamimio 1y ago
It was greader for me before netnewswire, I still use RSS, I can prioritize what to read myself after a quick glance I don’t need a “recommendation algorithm” to do it for me!
nine_k 1y ago
RSS is terrible as a format (Atom is much better), but RSS is awesome as an idea. If your web site were a database, RSS would be like WAL. If your website were differentiable, it would be like its derivative, or rather a Lagrangian, taken at the moment of last update. (BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)
- DamnInteresting 1y ago
  We should popularize a JSON-based alternative, we'll call it "Absurdly Simple Syndication."
  - nine_k 1y ago
    How about JSON Enhanced Syndication and Tracking?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - advisedwang 1y ago
    Because the main content of a blog post is an article, markup actually works really nicely. Although I suppose you could embed HTML in a JSON string
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    And instead of "feeds", call them "holes". And instead "subscriptions", they're "heads up". Dave Winer's would be the biggest with the most! https://web.archive.org/web/20070910131413/http://news.com.com/2009-1032_3-5059006.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070910131413/http://news.com.c...
- pentagrama 1y ago
  I like the general term "Web feed" as an umbrella term, I found about that on this article https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-web-feeds https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-web-feeds Also that blog has some other good related articles: - What is RSS: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss - What is Atom: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom - What is JSON feed: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed - What are feed readers: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers - What is OPML: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml
ajdude 1y ago
I'm all in on RSS. Matter of fact, I used an RSS reader (netnewswire) to find this post! I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices. Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.
vivzkestrel 1y ago
i wish RSS protocols would update to support SSE for pushing new items instead of you polling them. Does anyone know a reliable way to use aiohttp with proxies to load data from RSS so that your requests are not blocked when using the feedparser library in python?
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  Pushing instead of polling was done more than fifteen years ago, and various major feed producers and consumers do support it. It was initially known as PubSubHubbub (PuSH), but was renamed to WebSub when adopted by W3C, where it has been a Recommendation for over seven years now <https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/>. (As for SSE, it’s entirely unsuitable as it would require a persistent connection.)
- pacifika 1y ago
  RSScloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Cloud
rifty 1y ago
To some degree this is more a knock on the state of UX on the web than a intrinsic advantage for web feeds, but my favourite thing was my ability to compact list view content feeds, categorize them, and flip between them quickly because everything has been pre-acquired. As soon as I found out I could use Youtube that way, it felt like a 10x better experience for browsing my subscriptions.
due-rr 1y ago
RSS is awesome! That’s why I made the simplest RSS reader[1] and a RSS feed of Hacker News classics that’s updated daily[2]. Using this curbed my Reddit usage quite a lot. [1] https://rssrdr.com https://rssrdr.com [2] https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics
muppetman 1y ago
I love RSS. I am a huge fan of TinyTinyRSS, it's incredibly powerful with its filtering. I subscribe to just masses of RSS feeds, and the filtering bubbles up the stuff I'm interested in, ignores the stuff I'm not, and deletes articles I know to be hot garbage. You'd be amazed at how much crap this regex catches on tech news feeds: "^\d+ of the (best|worst|cheapest|highest|lowest|most)" A lot of people get put off because they don't like the dev, he's not a "let me hold your hand while you understand the basics of how to install my app" kinda guy, he's a "Oh you didn't read the docs and are now spamming forums with help requests? Here's a ban" kinda guy which I gotta say, I actually really respect. Why everyone thinks open source ALSO means you get your hand held through every little rough patch I don't know, probably because a lot of open source is backed by companies who can't say the things the probably want to say in public, like "Go away, idiot" Anyway sorry, I digress. TinyTinyRSS is excellent, the filtering just makes it head and shoulders above anything else I've tried like Miniflux (also nice) and FreshRSS.
blackbear_ 1y ago
Does anybody know if there is a RSS reader with embedded recommendaions based on previous likes and/or user-specified keywords?
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Newsblur has some of this, it shows how popular some feeds are and has a "popular with other users" section.
suslik 1y ago
Does anyone know if there is a self-hosted rss tool which exposes the data over API? I am interested in processing feeds programmatically but ideally would prefer not to bother with writing the update / subscription / parsing logic myself.
- righthand 1y ago
  You may be interested in tools that parse XML, I'm sure there are libraries for parsing RSS/Atom specifically. I'm not sure what you're asking exactly. You want a tool that will read RSS feeds then reformat the data to a different (JSON?) format or something and have an API endpoint return that converted format? But then for what purpose of transforming the XML(an already suitable format)?
  - suslik 1y ago
    Yeah, perhaps I did not explain myself correctly (or, to be precise, explained myself incorrectly - I should not comment right after waking up). I want a tool that would take as input one or more RSS feeds and emits an aggregated RSS which I can then open in an RSS reader. I would then do certain things with the RSS entries (for instance, for some academic journals only the header of the article is emitted, so I can attach the full text or even an AI summary to it).
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Pretty much all of them? They usually implement the Ye Olde Google Reader API and a few more so that mobile applications can connect in a standard way. - https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_API.html https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_A... - https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleReader_API.html https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR... FreshRSS implements two APIs
- stevekemp 1y ago
  Run "rss2email" then your API becomes IMAP/POP3?
pseudo_meta 1y ago
Love rss, but the upside of not having an algorithm determine your content consumption quickly results in a fire hose of content. Sadly, filtering features seem to be only available for paid subscriptions of online services, or for self-hosted solutions. Or are there solutions I am not aware of?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- timbit42 1y ago
  QuiteRSS (Linux, MacOS, Windows, OS/2), Flym (Android)
david90 1y ago
RSS is underrated.
renegat0x0 1y ago
I use my own RSS reader [0]. I found other to be lacking in some areas. I use it also for: - bookmarks - web crawling - simple search engine I also created simple RSS reader/parser, and web crawling system [1]. Links: [0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive [1] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
dvh 1y ago
No it's not. - There are million different formats. - guids are not required, they are not monotonically rising integers, and there is no length limits on them (I've seen 50kb guid in the wild) - date is not required - you cannot fetch articles "since guid 123". If you go on vacation and return, if the feed had too much traffic they are gone, you'll never see the articles you missed except last 20 or so. - whether article will be in full or just a teaser is fully in the hands of the server
instagraham 1y ago
Reading this headline in India and sweating
lylo 1y ago
Yes! I've been lovingly curating a set of RSS feeds for over 20 years. It's a wonderful gift from the internet. I actually built a simple and free RSS reader because my needs are simple and I'm a sucker for punishment. You'd think websites would want bots to read their RSS feeds since that's the whole point of RSS, but apparently not! ツ https://feedgrab.net https://feedgrab.net
john-tells-all 1y ago
I adore RSS! Use it literally every single day. I have many feeds on Feedly.com, and add to it every week or two. Tip: use a service to stream quality content to your RSS feed reader. For Hacker News, http://hnapp.com/ http://hnapp.com/ does the trick for me. I subscribe to a couple dozen authors on Hacker News. Example: in hnapp, search for `author:bob1029`, there's an RSS link, paste that into your RSS feed reader to see that person's Hacker News comments. I have an entire "Hacker News" section in Feedly, just with author's comments. Very useful!
fithisux 1y ago
Innoreader/Feedly load balance my daily feeds
leephillips 1y ago
I’d like to suggest newsboat (https://newsboat.org/index.html https://newsboat.org/index.html). I’ve been happily using it for a few years. It’s fast, runs in the terminal, with a great set of keyboard shortcuts.
azv_ 1y ago
I keep using RSS daily through Feedly classic mobile app and I'm quite happy with it.
sewalsh 1y ago
You can tell OP is a newb as he's using NetNewsWire and not Reeder.
KTallguy 1y ago
I’ve been using Artemis ever since it was posted here earlier this year. I love it because there is very little pressure to read everything and it updates infrequently so I don’t impulsively check it. Great product. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471913 https://artemis.jamesg.blog/ https://artemis.jamesg.blog/
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ompogUe 1y ago
The most useful value of RSS for me was >20 years ago. craigslist let you create rss feeds with params, so I made a script that got me subscribed to feeds for every location they had in north america where someone was looking for a "telecommute lamp developer"

RSS is awesome

316 points by edverma2 1y ago

k2enemy 1y ago

Boy do I feel old if a short, low content PSA about the existence of RSS is considered "hacker news."

rufus_foreman 1y ago
You're one of today's unlucky 10,000.
senectus1 1y ago
I mean.. it shouldn't be controversial.. but people keep claiming rss is dead. not in my world it aint.
- nntwozz 1y ago
  Podcasts needs an RSS feed, that about sums it up how not dead it is.
- glenstein 1y ago
  Definitely not dead, thank goodness. I probably read 4-5 articles a day through RSS and skim through dozens. Even so it's no longer a de facto standard the way it used to be.
  - senectus1 1y ago
    haha, I skim through about 800 a day and read dozens of them. Every year around newyears time I trim it back, but it inevitably grows again.
- grep_name 1y ago
  I was extremely bummed when setting up RSS for the glance app to find that a bunch of stuff I'd assumed would just have RSS feeds, do not. Mostly local things that post regular updates to pages that already look like feeds. - Three local independent theaters - Every local venue I checked in my city (admittedly only checked a few I was specifically interested in) - The local dvd rental place (we still have one and it's neat. The announce their newer niche additions via an updating page) - My local folk school that hosts events and has an updated news page with no feed There were a few things I can't remember now that I was shocked to see regularly update pages with lists of updates that there is no way to subscribe to. I would have expected most of these sites to be built using some kind of automated tool that would just include rss or atom. I guess most of the offer email lists, which is a crappy way to get updates comparatively imo. I'm probably going to use a combination of changedetection.io and rss-bridge to get updates from these sites, but like, seriously?
  - imafikus 1y ago
    You can give notify-me.rs a try if you want as well. We have a free plan available, and we should be able to track all of the sites you mentioned. If you do give it a try, let me know what you think, since I'm one of the founders. Cheers!
    - sincarne 1y ago
      Something is up with your web page. It stutters when scrolling, and crashes my tab. I’m using Safari on an iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 18.6.2 (22G100). No content blockers or extensions.
user3939382 1y ago
RSS is the antidote to algorithm feeds. I’m glad for any mention of it. 90% of the tools users need were built 1970-2000 including RSS.
- 627467 1y ago
  Having restarted using rss in the past months (after probably 10+ years of not using it) i am now starting to remember why I stopped using it: lack of a personal "algorithm" that made hundreds (if not 1000s) of unread daily items to be manageable. I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work? Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological. More readers should have this
  - al_borland 1y ago
    The thing that made RSS work for me is to really limit my feeds. Instead of following 10 tech news sites that have a bunch of overlap, I follow 1 that has most of what I want. A few blogs are for apps I use and want to be informed of new information, but they post infrequently, which is good. Feed with dozens of posts per day turn into noise, especially if you have a lot of them. By choosing one site I trust, I let the editors edit, instead of the algorithm.
    - sewalsh 1y ago
      Yikes. I read THOUSANDS of RSS headlines on a daily basis. This is exactly why I use RSS. You can easily get a glimpse of headlines and keep browsing.
      - al_borland 1y ago
        That's the beauty of RSS, people can tailor it to their needs and wants. If I saw thousands of unread items, I'd shut down and give up. On the flip side, if you had my feed list, you'd probably feel like you were missing a ton of stuff. But we can both make it work for us. I did have a job where I got 10k email per day for a good 10 years, so I probably have some PTSD from that. I'd feel like I was right back there if I had thousands of items per day in my RSS reader. I've been out of that stage of my job for a good 8 years, and I'm just now starting to get a handle on my email again, after feeling like there was no way to control it for so long.
netule 1y ago
Not only that, but an ad for their mobile app. Pretty low quality content.
- al_borland 1y ago
  It’s not their app. NetNewsWire is developed by Brent Simmons and has been around for over 20 years. It’s free and open source. Last I saw, he didn’t even accept donations.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Seen this? https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed
cm2187 1y ago
Ask a junior at the office what is that "save"or "new directory" logo, or what "CC" stands for in an email, or what a dialup connection is!
lylo 1y ago
Anything that raises awareness of RSS to a new generation is a wonderful thing!

skeptrune 1y ago

Ironically just told the founder of my company that it was mission critical our blog had RSS. He had never used it before somehow and didn't know why it would be a big deal lol.

charcircuit 1y ago
How is it mission critical for the company to have an rss feed?
- skeptrune 1y ago
  Blogs should be written to be read and not just for SEO slop. RSS feed helps a lot with that.

surprisetalk 1y ago

Amen! If you're looking to fill out your RSS reader, I maintain a directory of tech blogs (ctrl+f "feed" for rss links): [0] https://blogs.hn https://blogs.hn Other good directories: [1] https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ [2] https://blogroll.org/ https://blogroll.org/

colesantiago 1y ago

> RSS is really simple, so it is still very well supported. Notably, all substack publications automatically have an RSS feed included at https://{{substack-domain}}/feed . I wonder how long that will last until Substack closes it, I have never seen an RSS feed where the author is able to make it sustainable for them to make money from it.

msgodel 1y ago
Substack seems to have done an incredible job allowing people to monetize their blogs. Maybe Substack themselves aren't profitable but the authors certainly seem to be doing well. As someone who's subscribed to a lot of substacks the thing that brought me there was the availability of asynchronous reading (mail, rss newsletters.) I'm sure I'm not alone in disliking the actual site itself.

Defletter 1y ago

The only complaint I have about RSS is that it seems antagonistic to edits. It's not usual that, when refreshing my podcast RSS feed, there are multiple versions of the same episodes because they made some edit somewhere in the title or description, etc. I've had five versions of the same episode before. I feel like we should have the technology to fix this by now :P

lwhsiao 1y ago
We do. Atom feeds have an updated field for this. But, it's up to whoever is generating the feed to know how to handle their metadata.
vhcr 1y ago
That's what the guid / id field is for.
_Algernon_ 1y ago
RSS provides GUID + update timestamp which combined allows the client to integrate changes or replace entries.
not--felix 1y ago
I think the problem is that there are so many different standards[0] which makes it hard to parse them in a uniform format. The second problem is the most feeds only have 15 items, even if a reader handles updates they are fast lost for ever. [0] https://ivyreader.com/articles/rss-standart-collection https://ivyreader.com/articles/rss-standart-collection

throw0101a 1y ago

No love for Atom? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)

henriquegogo 1y ago

RSS/Atom is great to follow blogs, news and some social network such as hackernews and reddit. I hope X/Twitter back to this functionality, but that's a low probability.

AndrewDavis 1y ago
I just restarted using RSS recently. And I discovered I can also use it to track software releases (on github). The url is the release page with .atom appended. Eg https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases.atom https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases.atom
uz3snolc3t6fnrq 1y ago
Nitter[0] seems to support it still, although it seems unmaintained - not sure how stable it is by this point. if you self host this, you should probably use burner account tokens, anti-botting measures might decide to shut down your X/twitter account [0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
theshrike79 1y ago
Twitter killed their API and RSS feeds "to fight bots" :D Which killed all the legitimate fun and useful bots and just left the astroturfing and discord sowing kind state sponsored bots. As was the plan.

ropable 1y ago

I'm sad that a basic description of what RSS consists of makes it onto HN. I still upvoted to help educate the kids :/ FYI FreshRSS is fairly trivial to self-host, and is a really nice option for an RSS reader app.

senectus1 1y ago
FreshRSS is dabomb! Highly recommend it.
vanc_cefepime 1y ago
Preferential to Miniflux myself, but any RSS reader is better than none.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  I tried both, but Miniflux was like 15% _too_ bare-bones for me. FreshRSS hit the sweet spot for me, combined with NetNewsWire as a mobile UI
  - gullevek 1y ago
    Yeah, even as a desktop UI NetNewsWire is great. FreshRSS rocks
    - wyclif 1y ago
      NetNewsWire is beginning to choke for me because I have a large number of feeds. I was using it today and when I pressed Alt-K to "mark all as read", it beachballed on me and I had to force quit. This has been happening more often recently as I've added more feeds.
- digital_voodoo 1y ago
  Same here, tried both and sticked with Miniflux that seems on the lighter side. I don't really need the web interface or an app, because I channel everything towards a Telegram bot, where I read the feeds: a glance at the title, "Instant View" or long read if needed.

geor9e 1y ago

Yes! I've been using RSS (feedbro reader) to de-algorithm social media for a long time now. Twitter (via nitter), Facebook (public posts only), HN, etc. It's all in a chronological RSS feed. No algorithms choosing what I see, no infinite scroll. If it's not a public post from a user I added, I don't see it. Luckily all my close friends are public-only type posters so it works. My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.

glenstein 1y ago
I think your conspiracy theory is quite a natural reading of the incentives for big tech. IIRC, different iterations of Twitter, YouTube, Craigslist, Facebook, Google News, Google blog search, and even the Chrome browser had built in RSS support of various forms that were later removed or scaled back or significantly de-emphasized.
theshrike79 1y ago
Not just the ads, they can't add recommendations to your RSS feed. What they optimise for is time spent on the platform "engagement". And usually rage-baiting content gives better engagement metrics than things that make you happy.
drukenemo 1y ago
How are you using Nitter? I’ve tried, but it’s a headache to host it.
trippyballs 1y ago
I’ve been looking for a way to get RSS feeds from Twitter profiles. tried RSS-Bridge but couldn’t get it working. rss.app works, but it’s paid. nitter feeds look promising but come through as invalid. how did you do it

Perizors 1y ago

Is there any RSS reader that is also able to subscribe to newsletters in some way? There are lot of contents that are only provided as newsletters nowadays and I wanted to be able to read my feed and newsletters in the same app, without going into my mail inbox.

zikzak 1y ago
Many can accept forwarded emails and some will offer an email address you can use to subscribe to newsletters. I prefer the former because you can cancel the forward rule if you don't want to continue with a given rss app or service.
1una 1y ago
There are projects which generate web feeds for websites that don't have one. https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub
daydream 1y ago
You can subscribe to newsletters with any RSS reader nowadays, but it’s a multi step process requiring the use of an external (free) tool. 1. Create a feed on https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. This will also give you a custom email address to send your newsletter to. 2. Subscribe to the newsletter with the custom email address and add the feed you created to your reader. This setup works very well for me with NetNewsWire though there is friction in the multiple steps. No affiliation with either, just a satisfied user.
- imp0cat 1y ago
  I, too, use kill-the-newsletter to convert newsletters to rss and it works amazingly well.
nickthegreek 1y ago
inoreader has that on some of their pay tiers. i use my own self host freshrss instance and https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to accomplish the same.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

After using GUI RSS readers for decades, been trying TUI RSS feed readers recently and quite liking that style. On iOS, Reeder is still my favorite app.

tamimio 1y ago

It was greader for me before netnewswire, I still use RSS, I can prioritize what to read myself after a quick glance I don’t need a “recommendation algorithm” to do it for me!

nine_k 1y ago

RSS is terrible as a format (Atom is much better), but RSS is awesome as an idea. If your web site were a database, RSS would be like WAL. If your website were differentiable, it would be like its derivative, or rather a Lagrangian, taken at the moment of last update. (BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)

DamnInteresting 1y ago
We should popularize a JSON-based alternative, we'll call it "Absurdly Simple Syndication."
- nine_k 1y ago
  How about JSON Enhanced Syndication and Tracking?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- advisedwang 1y ago
  Because the main content of a blog post is an article, markup actually works really nicely. Although I suppose you could embed HTML in a JSON string
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  And instead of "feeds", call them "holes". And instead "subscriptions", they're "heads up". Dave Winer's would be the biggest with the most! https://web.archive.org/web/20070910131413/http://news.com.com/2009-1032_3-5059006.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070910131413/http://news.com.c...
pentagrama 1y ago
I like the general term "Web feed" as an umbrella term, I found about that on this article https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-web-feeds https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-web-feeds Also that blog has some other good related articles: - What is RSS: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss - What is Atom: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom - What is JSON feed: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed - What are feed readers: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers - What is OPML: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml

ajdude 1y ago

I'm all in on RSS. Matter of fact, I used an RSS reader (netnewswire) to find this post! I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices. Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.

vivzkestrel 1y ago

i wish RSS protocols would update to support SSE for pushing new items instead of you polling them. Does anyone know a reliable way to use aiohttp with proxies to load data from RSS so that your requests are not blocked when using the feedparser library in python?

chrismorgan 1y ago
Pushing instead of polling was done more than fifteen years ago, and various major feed producers and consumers do support it. It was initially known as PubSubHubbub (PuSH), but was renamed to WebSub when adopted by W3C, where it has been a Recommendation for over seven years now <https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/>. (As for SSE, it’s entirely unsuitable as it would require a persistent connection.)
pacifika 1y ago
RSScloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Cloud

rifty 1y ago

To some degree this is more a knock on the state of UX on the web than a intrinsic advantage for web feeds, but my favourite thing was my ability to compact list view content feeds, categorize them, and flip between them quickly because everything has been pre-acquired. As soon as I found out I could use Youtube that way, it felt like a 10x better experience for browsing my subscriptions.

due-rr 1y ago

RSS is awesome! That’s why I made the simplest RSS reader[1] and a RSS feed of Hacker News classics that’s updated daily[2]. Using this curbed my Reddit usage quite a lot. [1] https://rssrdr.com https://rssrdr.com [2] https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics

muppetman 1y ago

I love RSS. I am a huge fan of TinyTinyRSS, it's incredibly powerful with its filtering. I subscribe to just masses of RSS feeds, and the filtering bubbles up the stuff I'm interested in, ignores the stuff I'm not, and deletes articles I know to be hot garbage. You'd be amazed at how much crap this regex catches on tech news feeds: "^\d+ of the (best|worst|cheapest|highest|lowest|most)" A lot of people get put off because they don't like the dev, he's not a "let me hold your hand while you understand the basics of how to install my app" kinda guy, he's a "Oh you didn't read the docs and are now spamming forums with help requests? Here's a ban" kinda guy which I gotta say, I actually really respect. Why everyone thinks open source ALSO means you get your hand held through every little rough patch I don't know, probably because a lot of open source is backed by companies who can't say the things the probably want to say in public, like "Go away, idiot" Anyway sorry, I digress. TinyTinyRSS is excellent, the filtering just makes it head and shoulders above anything else I've tried like Miniflux (also nice) and FreshRSS.

blackbear_ 1y ago

Does anybody know if there is a RSS reader with embedded recommendaions based on previous likes and/or user-specified keywords?

theshrike79 1y ago
Newsblur has some of this, it shows how popular some feeds are and has a "popular with other users" section.

suslik 1y ago

Does anyone know if there is a self-hosted rss tool which exposes the data over API? I am interested in processing feeds programmatically but ideally would prefer not to bother with writing the update / subscription / parsing logic myself.

righthand 1y ago
You may be interested in tools that parse XML, I'm sure there are libraries for parsing RSS/Atom specifically. I'm not sure what you're asking exactly. You want a tool that will read RSS feeds then reformat the data to a different (JSON?) format or something and have an API endpoint return that converted format? But then for what purpose of transforming the XML(an already suitable format)?
- suslik 1y ago
  Yeah, perhaps I did not explain myself correctly (or, to be precise, explained myself incorrectly - I should not comment right after waking up). I want a tool that would take as input one or more RSS feeds and emits an aggregated RSS which I can then open in an RSS reader. I would then do certain things with the RSS entries (for instance, for some academic journals only the header of the article is emitted, so I can attach the full text or even an AI summary to it).
theshrike79 1y ago
Pretty much all of them? They usually implement the Ye Olde Google Reader API and a few more so that mobile applications can connect in a standard way. - https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_API.html https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_A... - https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleReader_API.html https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR... FreshRSS implements two APIs
stevekemp 1y ago
Run "rss2email" then your API becomes IMAP/POP3?

pseudo_meta 1y ago

Love rss, but the upside of not having an algorithm determine your content consumption quickly results in a fire hose of content. Sadly, filtering features seem to be only available for paid subscriptions of online services, or for self-hosted solutions. Or are there solutions I am not aware of?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
timbit42 1y ago
QuiteRSS (Linux, MacOS, Windows, OS/2), Flym (Android)

david90 1y ago

RSS is underrated.

renegat0x0 1y ago

I use my own RSS reader [0]. I found other to be lacking in some areas. I use it also for: - bookmarks - web crawling - simple search engine I also created simple RSS reader/parser, and web crawling system [1]. Links: [0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive [1] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

dvh 1y ago

No it's not. - There are million different formats. - guids are not required, they are not monotonically rising integers, and there is no length limits on them (I've seen 50kb guid in the wild) - date is not required - you cannot fetch articles "since guid 123". If you go on vacation and return, if the feed had too much traffic they are gone, you'll never see the articles you missed except last 20 or so. - whether article will be in full or just a teaser is fully in the hands of the server

instagraham 1y ago

Reading this headline in India and sweating

lylo 1y ago

Yes! I've been lovingly curating a set of RSS feeds for over 20 years. It's a wonderful gift from the internet. I actually built a simple and free RSS reader because my needs are simple and I'm a sucker for punishment. You'd think websites would want bots to read their RSS feeds since that's the whole point of RSS, but apparently not! ツ https://feedgrab.net https://feedgrab.net

john-tells-all 1y ago

I adore RSS! Use it literally every single day. I have many feeds on Feedly.com, and add to it every week or two. Tip: use a service to stream quality content to your RSS feed reader. For Hacker News, http://hnapp.com/ http://hnapp.com/ does the trick for me. I subscribe to a couple dozen authors on Hacker News. Example: in hnapp, search for `author:bob1029`, there's an RSS link, paste that into your RSS feed reader to see that person's Hacker News comments. I have an entire "Hacker News" section in Feedly, just with author's comments. Very useful!

fithisux 1y ago

Innoreader/Feedly load balance my daily feeds

leephillips 1y ago

I’d like to suggest newsboat (https://newsboat.org/index.html https://newsboat.org/index.html). I’ve been happily using it for a few years. It’s fast, runs in the terminal, with a great set of keyboard shortcuts.

azv_ 1y ago

I keep using RSS daily through Feedly classic mobile app and I'm quite happy with it.

sewalsh 1y ago

You can tell OP is a newb as he's using NetNewsWire and not Reeder.

KTallguy 1y ago

I’ve been using Artemis ever since it was posted here earlier this year. I love it because there is very little pressure to read everything and it updates infrequently so I don’t impulsively check it. Great product. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471913 https://artemis.jamesg.blog/ https://artemis.jamesg.blog/

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ompogUe 1y ago

The most useful value of RSS for me was >20 years ago. craigslist let you create rss feeds with params, so I made a script that got me subscribed to feeds for every location they had in north america where someone was looking for a "telecommute lamp developer"