5 ms·

Stop trying to make RSS happen again. It's not going to happen again.

XenophileJKO 7mo ago
Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- hombre_fatal 7mo ago
  RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago. We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data. I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.
  - pipeline_peak 7mo ago
    LLMs use up tons of energy and water.
    - shevy-java 7mo ago
      That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?
  - mmsc 7mo ago
    > an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc) There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt
    - hombre_fatal 7mo ago
      I mean that your RSS feed can basically be "Go to https://techcrunch.com/latest/ https://techcrunch.com/latest/ and use each non-video item as a feed item" or "Go to x.com/some_user and make each tweet a feed item", and the LLM can do a perfect extraction of links from html response blobs. The only thing you have to do is ensure it can reliably get the response html. Maybe MCP browser + proxy or mirror to seem more human. I built this for myself. The idea is that each feed is a url + title + a prompt to tell the LLM how to extract the links you want so that it generalizes over all websites. And each feed item is a canonicalized url + title + a local copy of the content at that url which is an improvement over RSS since so many RSS feeds don't even contain the content.
  - skybrian 7mo ago
    I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
- shevy-java 7mo ago
  I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.
bananaflag 7mo ago
I've been using RSS daily since 2008 (on feedly since 2013)
- justinator 7mo ago
  Does your Mother use RSS daily? Does your kid?
  - bananaflag 7mo ago
    No, but I use RSS instead of checking every single website compulsively, which people generally don't do (I barely know anyone irl who follows a blog, RSS or not). So it's not a problem with the RSS tech, but with its use case.
Crowberry 7mo ago
I set it up a year or two ago. Now i ready 90 of articles and news through it.
evolve2k 7mo ago
It’s still happening.
waschl 7mo ago
I was never an RSS user until half a year ago. Now that’s my only way of browsing my choice of (tech) news sources and blogs.
worksonmine 7mo ago
I came here via RSS.
- justinator 7mo ago
  Yeah you're kind of a nerd, using it to read nerd things. It's like saying there's going to be a resurgence of IRC. There won't be.
  - worksonmine 7mo ago
    > Yeah you're kind of a nerd, using it to read nerd things. I may be, but my girlfriend isn't and she's using it to follow the government and job postings. But you're moving the goalposts, RSS is getting new attention and it doesn't matter who that attention is from. It's happening, you don't have to use it we don't care but let us have our feeds. Also if you've ever worked in the podcast space you'd know they all release with RSS, so many people are using it without knowing. Maybe even you?
cosmicgadget 7mo ago
Pack it up folks, can't argue with a meme.

Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
hombre_fatal 7mo ago
RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago. We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data. I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.
- pipeline_peak 7mo ago
  LLMs use up tons of energy and water.
  - shevy-java 7mo ago
    That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?
- mmsc 7mo ago
  > an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc) There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt
  - hombre_fatal 7mo ago
    I mean that your RSS feed can basically be "Go to https://techcrunch.com/latest/ https://techcrunch.com/latest/ and use each non-video item as a feed item" or "Go to x.com/some_user and make each tweet a feed item", and the LLM can do a perfect extraction of links from html response blobs. The only thing you have to do is ensure it can reliably get the response html. Maybe MCP browser + proxy or mirror to seem more human. I built this for myself. The idea is that each feed is a url + title + a prompt to tell the LLM how to extract the links you want so that it generalizes over all websites. And each feed item is a canonicalized url + title + a local copy of the content at that url which is an improvement over RSS since so many RSS feeds don't even contain the content.
- skybrian 7mo ago
  I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
shevy-java 7mo ago
I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.

bananaflag 7mo ago

I've been using RSS daily since 2008 (on feedly since 2013)

justinator 7mo ago
Does your Mother use RSS daily? Does your kid?
- bananaflag 7mo ago
  No, but I use RSS instead of checking every single website compulsively, which people generally don't do (I barely know anyone irl who follows a blog, RSS or not). So it's not a problem with the RSS tech, but with its use case.

Crowberry 7mo ago

I set it up a year or two ago. Now i ready 90 of articles and news through it.

evolve2k 7mo ago

It’s still happening.

waschl 7mo ago

I was never an RSS user until half a year ago. Now that’s my only way of browsing my choice of (tech) news sources and blogs.

worksonmine 7mo ago

I came here via RSS.

justinator 7mo ago
Yeah you're kind of a nerd, using it to read nerd things. It's like saying there's going to be a resurgence of IRC. There won't be.
- worksonmine 7mo ago
  > Yeah you're kind of a nerd, using it to read nerd things. I may be, but my girlfriend isn't and she's using it to follow the government and job postings. But you're moving the goalposts, RSS is getting new attention and it doesn't matter who that attention is from. It's happening, you don't have to use it we don't care but let us have our feeds. Also if you've ever worked in the podcast space you'd know they all release with RSS, so many people are using it without knowing. Maybe even you?

cosmicgadget 7mo ago

Pack it up folks, can't argue with a meme.