A tip for those who love RSS but bemoan the slow death it's suffering. Sometimes it helps to simply send an e-mail to the owner of the website and thell them their RSS feed is broken or missing. I've done that and succeeded three times so far.
Sometimes they break the feed because they changed something but didn't bother to check if it affected their feed. This of course won't be of any effect to the big SV type companies, but it might with your local newspaper, municipality website, favourite blog, etc. Doesn't hurt to try.
I get a few emails a year, every year, asking why I don't have an RSS feed on my blog.
I totally have RSS on my blog, and have for every blog I've had for 20 years. It even has the appropriate HTML headers pointing to /feed.xml, so you can just pop the bare website URL into a feed reader and it will find it.
I maintain a blog site for a rather popular writer, and if something breaks our RSS feed there are some die-hards that will definitely write in to let us know :-)
It's worthwhile, because every time it happens it reinforces to us that having that feature is mandatory for keeping our paying users happy.
The main impediment I have had are magazines I subscribe to who are behind paywalls. Ars Technica and Talking Points Memo have a subscriber feed, but it's basically just an honor system thing for you to not go sharing it but they're the only ones. I'd honestly be okay if they just gave you a stub and had you click through, but they seem resistant to doing even that.
It's pretty basic to implement some kind of token scheme for the feed to bypass the paywall. It happens all the time for paid podcast feeds.
If you see large numbers of geographically dispersed feeds you can then look up who shared their key and have a word...
Skeptically I belive most sites just don't want to supply RSS/atom feeds as it bypasses their ability to track and advertise to you and having something like needing to deal with auth is a convenient excuse.
The biggest blow to RSS was dealt by browsers dropping support for displaying it in human-readable form, not Twitter/whoever ceasing publishing them.
Thanks to that, now when someone, who doesn't know what that is, stumbles upon a website linking to one and follows such a link, they'll be greeted with gibberish. Previously, they could see buttons exposing the functionality of subscribing to such feeds and find out about this wonderful technology. Now, they'll just get the hell out of that page.
Can someone actually explain to me why Mozilla stopped building in an RSS reader into Firefox?
If it also can subscribe to substacks, it's like a Pocket that actually gets updates. Heck, they can just build it on Pocket!
It seems like that could be incredibly valuable for the open web — and a free tool for conveniently reading newsletters built into Firefox might even increase market share? Looks like they removed it in 2018...but I never heard of people switching to Firefox from Google Reader, so I assume it was never very good, or poorly advertised?
Firefox itself never had a real rss-reader. It had rss-parser which was incorperated into the bookmark-ui, making it barely useful for the purpose if consuming feeds. 3rd-party feedreader coming as addons were more useful than this and they were not really good either. So it's no surprise this feature had low usage and was thus removed.
I would love if people would see that their networks they maintain are of incredible value. As a consequence I would like to profit of e.g. information network a person x has. My idea is that every person exposes an aggregated RSS feed of feeds they consume. Every interesting person that tells me their secret RSS link would empower me.
I started a couple of projects in that area, one is a piece of glue code [0] to automatically get a feed of a site, even if there isn't one. It maps html to a feed structure, which works decent, fixing broken feeds after the html changes is now the main concern.
> every person exposes an aggregated RSS feed of feeds they consume
I like this idea, and I think it is something that RSS is missing. The "bubbles" that we decry on social networks is largely caused by our inability to share feeds. Every feed is tailor made to the person seeing it, so everyone is in their own bubble by default. This is unlike Reddit, in which members of a given subreddit can see the same feed.
RSS empowers users with complete control over their own feed, but there is still no mechanism by which we can share our reality. We are still bubbled away by default, and thus will result in the same toxic bubbles as social networks.
Interesting thought. I'm torn because on one hand I agree with you, had incredible value of mining people's twitter likes as a way of truly sampling other people's feeds (often times find them to be better quality and more honest than retweets).
On the other hand - personally subscribe to a very, very wide variety of RSS feeds ... some heterodox enough in opinions that I would be instantly canceled / run out of other social zones. So there's a very real sense of protection in RSS feed privacy that's a huge plus there, and would never want to give up.
This idea vaguely reminds me of Napster back in the day. One of the great things about it was not getting the music you were looking for but finding that user with similar tastes and checking out what else they were sharing. I remember finding several new artists I fell in love with that way.
Recently I noticed more and more podcasts don't provide RSS/Atom feeds directly, they link to iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud etc but no feed, in some cases they link to one of the podcast hosting services that do have feeds for every podcast but not visible by any link or not being in the meta tags. Finding the URL for the feed becomes some sort hunting, in a few cases even though I liked a podcast I still can't subscribe because I don't maintain an account on those services.
I built a custom RSS Reader just to streamline my reading list. If I am bored and want to read something I don't go to social media I read what I marked for reading later. https://reading.ashishb.net
The downside here is that it doesn't support private toots. It would be nice if you can subscribe to anything in the fediverse then mastodon could create a private feed for you.
Been using Feedly for years now, since Google Reader died, one of the most useful tools around. And more sites support it than you think. RSS (and Atom, etc.) are not dead, they are just not fashionable.
RSS is nice as far as it goes, but we should think about enabling more than that. ActivityStreams is essentially RSS on steroids (for use cases beyond simple syndicated content) and is generally more appropriate for the "social" use cases that are quite popular nowadays. For example, it's essentially the underlying data format behind the Fediverse.
And having a hub, like WebSub, is nice for helping mobile users keep up with feeds without polling a ton of websites constantly and running down the battery.
Readit News
Sometimes they break the feed because they changed something but didn't bother to check if it affected their feed. This of course won't be of any effect to the big SV type companies, but it might with your local newspaper, municipality website, favourite blog, etc. Doesn't hurt to try.
I totally have RSS on my blog, and have for every blog I've had for 20 years. It even has the appropriate HTML headers pointing to /feed.xml, so you can just pop the bare website URL into a feed reader and it will find it.
It's worthwhile, because every time it happens it reinforces to us that having that feature is mandatory for keeping our paying users happy.
If you see large numbers of geographically dispersed feeds you can then look up who shared their key and have a word...
Skeptically I belive most sites just don't want to supply RSS/atom feeds as it bypasses their ability to track and advertise to you and having something like needing to deal with auth is a convenient excuse.
Thanks to that, now when someone, who doesn't know what that is, stumbles upon a website linking to one and follows such a link, they'll be greeted with gibberish. Previously, they could see buttons exposing the functionality of subscribing to such feeds and find out about this wonderful technology. Now, they'll just get the hell out of that page.
Mozilla, champion of the free internet, right...
If it also can subscribe to substacks, it's like a Pocket that actually gets updates. Heck, they can just build it on Pocket!
It seems like that could be incredibly valuable for the open web — and a free tool for conveniently reading newsletters built into Firefox might even increase market share? Looks like they removed it in 2018...but I never heard of people switching to Firefox from Google Reader, so I assume it was never very good, or poorly advertised?
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/25/mozilla-plans-to-remove-rs...
In short, updating the feature to competitive UX and security expectations wouldn’t have been worth the effort based on the usage numbers.
P.S.: I prefer atom/RFC4287 for being well-defined and with e.g. sane dates.
I started a couple of projects in that area, one is a piece of glue code [0] to automatically get a feed of a site, even if there isn't one. It maps html to a feed structure, which works decent, fixing broken feeds after the html changes is now the main concern.
[0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
I like this idea, and I think it is something that RSS is missing. The "bubbles" that we decry on social networks is largely caused by our inability to share feeds. Every feed is tailor made to the person seeing it, so everyone is in their own bubble by default. This is unlike Reddit, in which members of a given subreddit can see the same feed.
RSS empowers users with complete control over their own feed, but there is still no mechanism by which we can share our reality. We are still bubbled away by default, and thus will result in the same toxic bubbles as social networks.
On the other hand - personally subscribe to a very, very wide variety of RSS feeds ... some heterodox enough in opinions that I would be instantly canceled / run out of other social zones. So there's a very real sense of protection in RSS feed privacy that's a huge plus there, and would never want to give up.
"Your feed URL is [instance]/users/[username].rss or .atom" [0]
NOTE may vary from instance to instance. E.G. "social.tchncs.de/@[useralias].rss
And (haven't tried it) an RSS-TO-Mastodon method: [1] using 'Feed2toot'
[0] https://mastodon.social/@brownpau/100523448408374430
[1] https://carlchenet.com/get-your-rss-feeds-to-mastodon-with-t...