When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day.
I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.
It's depressingly and irritatingly common to come across podcasts now which provide links to a dizzying array of podcast aggregation services but not to
o their RSS feed, even though they definitely have one because it's how you feed data to these services in the first place.
I suspect a lot of blogs only have a feed now because it's a default feature of the blog platform they use rather than because they see it as important.
I believe that there was an agenda to kill RSS, very much like how the auto makers in the United States conspired to kill public transit.
I don't buy any of the arguments not to implement it. I don't think it is too expensive or confusing. I think it is too empowering to users and inconvenient to marketers.
One offender is buzzsprout, which has an RSS feed but no link to the actual episode... So you know when there's a new episode, but you have to google it to find it.
Yeh, came here to say this. I love RSS, it is such a nice balance of enabling me to keep up with stuff but under my own terms and at my own speed.
It feels very much like an alive protocol to me, and more in need than ever before given the insane calls on everyone's attention.
And to the guy with "service shutdown fear" - just export your opml and bring it into another service. It's highly portable and imo totally mitigates any risk of getting locked in then locked out.
I just logged into my Feedly for the first time in a couple years (maybe longer). I had moved all my RSS from Google Reader to Feedly back when all that went down.
Turns out, most of the blogs I subscribed to back in the day are now defunct or not updated much. I think that's why I eventually stopped going to my Feedly for RSS aggreggation, and instead for the few moments a day I want to read news/waste time, I just go directly to The Verge, Hacker News, and/or Reddit.
Funny aside, though. My product at work still has a RSS plugin for importing content, and I have it pointed at Reddit RSS feeds for sub-reddits, and it's still working....
BTW, I just also realized, that I get a lot of my articles/news from my Google News widget on my Android phone (and in the Google News app on my iPad), and the AI on that has curated a pretty decent list of topics that I like to follow.
Exactly. I've never stopped using RSS. And if I look at follower counts on Feedly (which is just one RSS aggregator our of multiple options) I see tens of thousands of followers to many popular feeds. So there are many people who use RSS - probably millions. It didn't go away, some people chasing new shiny things like twitter did - they are always welcome to come back, it still works quite fine.
I tried using Feedly last year. Added feeds and it was HORRIBLE experience. Not Feedly but the actual feeds.
Some of them give you the title and then tell you to go to actual website to read the article.
Others has a virtually non-existent summary.
During RSS's heydays I remember being able to just see the summary and click on it and read the article right there and then. Now these feeds try to push you back to the website hard. Making RSS feeds feel like a broken tool. With the content there mostly an after thought.
Those sites existed back during the Google Reader era already. I don’t even avoid those, and currently have only one title only, and 2 or 3 title + short summary sites in my TT-RSS list, everything else is full text.
Simple RSS for Android is still available at F-droid. It's 14 years out of maintenance & it still loads(with warning) & works for my feeds. Some give just a summary, some the 1st paragraph and a few still supply the whole article.
I am always on the lookout for a simple, decentralized, modern alternative, if anyone knows of any.
I use https://weloverss.com/ as my Google Reader alternative. TheOldReader is also nice. I prefer the first due to its ui not being bloated - only thing I miss is timestamps.
I still read all the same feeds I had on Google Reader first on Digg Reader and now on Inoreader free version. Main way I consume news although I do look at Facebook for family stuff and twitter for very topical stuff and following folks like Elon Musk who mostly tweet.
>"The trend has crept into new software and new web building technologies. Sometimes depending on what you are building your website with it is harder than ever to add RSS feeds."
Even though the water isn't boiling, the heat may still be on.
I agree wholly with this. I only very recently started using RSS and almost every site/blog has one that produces quality content. For example the St. Louis Fed has a few high quality blog feeds and when I couldn’t find the RSS feed I sent them an email and lo and behold, there was an RSS feed to each one (just on a different page that I missed). It seems to be a rarity that good content feeds don’t have RSS.
I also still use RSS and have several hundred subscriptions, but the OP isn't wrong and it's far more pervasive than just Twitter. One of the biggest ones for me is that Spotify is buying up podcasts that previously did have an RSS feed and then removing the feed, for example. Other services are doing the same. For another example, when Bloomberg bought City Lab recently they removed the RSS feed. I've had this happen all the time, so my feeds list and podcast lists would be dwindling if I weren't actively seeking out things to replace those with.
Is it still useful? Yes. Is it also under attack? Yes.
I think you are missing the point here. It is not about if the technology exists or not. But when the community rely on it as the main way for following updates, it changes a lot of things. The quantity and quality of the articles. What does it feel to get a new update. I remember I was getting excited every time I get something new in Google Reader, Twitter doesn't feel like this at all.
How did you aggregate so many sources to read articles from? What is your discovery process? Do you have any recommendation where I can read good stuff from?
Pretty much what gavanm said with his #1. The process is usually that I see some interesting article on a site like HN, then say "hmm, I'd like to read more by this person, but I will probably never remember the website address, so I'll just add it to Feedly."
Whenever I'm looking at content I like I just go and see what else that author has posted. If it sounds vaguely interesting I add it to my reader. If after a couple of posts it's not too interesting I remove it.
I believe a lot of the bigger sites like Feedly will recommend you popular feeds. I would love a service that I can paste a list of feeds into and it could recommend popular related feeds.
Not the OP, but these days I find new things (mostly blogs) through four different mechanisms:
1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse).
2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites.
3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed.
4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list.
Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read.
Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that way) - but if you treat it as a personally curated source of sporadic content, then it's great. In many respects Moderate post volume (quality over quantity) is something I find more useful in what I choose.
On the aggregator front, I try to avoid anything that's too noisy (low signal to noise) - and I definitely minimise subscribing to news sites as the volume is just too high (I tried rss subscribing to The Verge when it was new, but there were too many articles I don't read). For example, i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.
RSS is still heavily used for information I find really professionally useful (IT) - but I don't know about other industries.
Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed - which makes offline and mobile consumption more difficult / annoying - I suspect that in some cases it's a result of default choices - and in others it's a deliberate decision as a trade off against improved analysis a site gets from a browser hit.
I think it’s mostly a question of developer mindshare around RSS and syndication technologies. The early 2000s were a golden age in this sense but we all just let the centralized social media platforms decide that all innovation was moving there.
I missed getting everything from RSS. A couple years ago I built my own engine that could bring in twitter, reddit, here and a few other services that didn't have RSS feeds and published the results to river of news style flow with a few topic specific tributaries. Haven't used it in years but have been thinking about restarting it.
I saw that they also have some kind of tool that lets you scrape websites that don't have native RSS feeds, but it is only at the "super duper" pricing tier, whatever that one is called.
> RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago
Precisley, that's how I got to this post. In this day, keeping a list of interesting sites and being able to consult them all from a single place is ever more useful.
I'm also surprised no one has pointed out the irony that the author's blog doesn't have an RSS feed. That would be the least you could do to keep it around.
Of course these days browsers don't indicate that browsers are available. You will need an extension to detect feeds. (Or paste the site in your feed reader and hope it does, most readers will do the auto-discovery for you)
Douglas Adams, [how to learn to love the internet]:
1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
>3. anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
This started happening when I was 14 (~2007) and really started to accelerate after I was 20 (~2013). I don't correlate this with me getting old but more like getting more and more aware of the profiteering, surveillance and bullshit everywhere.
And from the other side of the coin: I'm in my late thirties now and there also has been plenty of new tech (or improvements on existing tech) from the last decade that has me really excited. Unsurprisingly, almost all of it can be used outside of the aforementioned bubble of "profiteering, surveillance and bullshit".
Does he talks about the fact that vintage stuff that was before my birth are also better ? and how antique people were better ? These feelings are regularly in my head. Mostly because I feel so much waste from all the new things.. I'm not sure if it's a special attribute of the last decades (smartphones etc) or not.
I still use RSS. I use Feedly to curate various RSS feeds and many website still have them, or at least the tech focussed ones.
I used to be subscribed to more but some RSS feeds have such high traffic it's difficult to follow them, such as the BBC news feed.
Feedly has a nice new feature [0] that makes an RSS feed out of a standard website, so that might be worth considering if you have some news sources that don't publish a RSS feed. Unfortunately this wouldn't work with anything that requires authentication like private Twitter feeds for example.
When Google reader shut down, I moved to feedly for like a week. Then I started getting anxiety that feedly would shut down too. Because if google could kill off a product i relied on, anyone could. And that got me into self hosting and running my own services.
ttrss was basically my first self hosted thing almost a decade ago. It was great. And then it turned out the guy running it was a bit not pleasant, and I didn't want to support that. So I recently migrated to freshRSS. Both work great, are open source and self hostable.
And feedly hasn't shut down yet (probably just to spite me). So yeah, tons of options for RSS.
Having self-hosted for a long time, I find it's getting easier in a lot of ways what with Docker and all.
I'm starting to wonder where "Sandstorm 2.0" is. Sandstorm, for those who don't know, was basically an attempt to make self hosting really viable, but was tragically ahead of its time because it predated Docker. So they burned tons of effort on sandboxing, and wrapping existing applications into their sandbox, and it was just too hard to port things into their world to get very many applications running.
It seems like a project that would do that in terms of docker-compose files could be created for much less effort, and maybe not quite all the pretty-shiny they had. But as I'm struggling right now a bit to bring up a Bitwarden server, there's still pain around setting up the forwards properly and getting the Let's Encrypt certificate. Something that managed all this better wouldn't be too hard, and could just be slammed up on a small AWS instance or something would be easy. (Branching out to other services over time or something.) Plus setting up proper backups would be nice. We're so, so much closer to being able to do this nowadays than we used to be... for instance, S3 has also become a near universal API, so backups using it have gotten to be easy but they can still be done without vendor lockin.
Then it would be really easy to self-host an RSS reader or something.
I'm hoping this will either prompt someone to consider this project, or prompt someone to tell me "It already exists, go here and here and run this docker command to install it."
I’m using NetNewsWire which works great but is iOS and Mac only. I’ve considered Feedly, but I would have to do the pro plan because of the cap on number of feeds. I haven’t switched because I have a hard time justifying the cost. I would rather that money go to the people creating the content.
Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.
RSS feeds don't replace a website. Most of the websites don't publish their whole articles on the RSS feed, only a summary (or even just a line).
Therefore, RSS doesn't cause any advertisement loss, as the user needs to go to the website anyway (which, to be clear, is totally fine - RSS still works as filter/preview, which is very helpful).
It's really no different than email lists, medium, substack, etc. which are all working through ways of effectively monetizing themselves. RSS feed for your content + a patreon or similar place (that potentially gives you access to a premium RSS feed with more/expanded content) would totally be feasible.
Email ads are more effective than RSS. The reader's email address is known (obviously!) and the content can be targeted individually. RSS is typically a single feed for everyone.
Premium RSS is possible, with individual links per user, but it's much more complicated than just typing your email address into a field (something you already do when you pay for anything). Also, chances of the link being shared around is high and aggregators often inadvertently leak premium links. In contrast, someone's inbox is about as private as it gets.
You can mitigate link sharing by counting the feed reader hits per link (anything more than two standard deviations is probably a shared link, which you can set a revocation policy for). You can reject requests to content that don’t have a non-revoked referrer. This way, they can only get your content by copy-pasting content and rehosting the feed, which is an unavoidable risk.
In any case, as Netflix’s early history shows, depending on your cost structure, link sharing is likely a net positive. It’s probably only worth prosecuting the feeds that get shared with 100s of people.
It definitely is more complicated, but the tools to make it simple are easy to build! Maybe we’ll see growth in this space. One can dream
I can’t deal with most news sites now because I’m usually reading them on my phone. There’s just so much garbage between ads, scroll locked videos and JavaScript breaking the pages. AMP was supposed to help with this stuff but it breaks all the time too.
I know I’d happily pay for plain text content that I can format myself but I’m guessing there’s just no market for that sort of thing.
Successful blogs I follow do sponsored RSS feeds. It’s perfectly feasible to work ads into RSS content. What’s not doable is targeted ads, but I’d rather those all go away anyway.
as other's pointed out, RSS is still here if you want to use it. It's just not ubiquitous as it once was.
IMO the big thing that killed RSS ubiquity was Google Chrome not having support for it natively. Before that, Firefox, Opera, Safari all had RSS as well-supported, central thing and I remember finding it super annoying that Chrome didn't have it when it launched. But I kept using Chrome for the same reasons everyone else started switching to Chrome. And the RSS extensions all sucked. And eventually I stopped using them. And here I am, no longer reading RSS.
But as Chrome ate up browser share, I'm sure fewer people went to RSS because it wasn't natively there and so the incentives to implement RSS decreased as fewer people expected it to be there, especially as many more people were coming online only having used Chrome.
Oddly enough, I switched back to Firefox years ago and _could_ get back into RSS at any point (or with any number of RSS reader apps, etc.), but the habit has stuck, and I now stay up-to-date on everything via email newsletters, Twitter and this orange website instead. it's worse and I hate it, but oh well
My solution to this was getting a miniflux.app subscription and pinning the tab/setting it as my home page. I got directly to this page via an RSS feed.
I remember using this! I liked it and used it for a while! But not having it in the bookmarks bar, I kept forgetting about my feeds :/ and then I stopped installing it. I'm sorry :( Glad to hear it's still going strong though. Maybe I'll give it another shot!
Vivaldi has support for RSS feeds now. Vivaldi has been getting better and better. I urge anyone who hasn't tried it in the last year or two to check it out. It's the new Opera.
The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is no accepted standard for it.
>Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today.
1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly.
2) Most people then and now would go through an aggregator. So they'd really be talking to that instead of the source feed.
3) There were push notification standards out well over a decade ago, including RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub.
> 1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly.
Besides, assuming you're not hideously overcomplicating things, you'll just be serving a static file off disk. If your server is a raspberry pi, you ought to still be able to serve some 1000 requests/second if that is what you are doing.
Assuming most RSS readers poll at most once every 15 minutes (which is a really high rate), you'll need at least a million subscribers before you need to get a second raspberry pi.
I'd assume that somebody who misses RSS will also be happy with pulling only few times a day and not every few minutes. That's why push became so popular but with a different subset of users. Everybody goes through a push-positive phase but some (like me) come to a conclusion that this is unhealthy and distracting in the long run - hence the fond memories of technology like RSS.
Switching back to Linux after ten years on Mac, I had completely forgotten how much I love it when my computer does _not_ notify me about anything. I have no notification system installed. It’s been a few months and I haven’t missed anything, but I feel more relaxed and focused while using the computer. Notification are mind pollution.
>The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today. Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is no accepted standard for it.
Polling isn't a requirement. If your reader is polling it's strictly because the author wanted to implement such a feature; that's it.
There's also ETag and last-modified which are used when checking and have very little overhead (most especially in the case when the content has not changed).
I think it was the sunsetting of Google Reader that triggered the downfall. I don’t think I ever cared about push notifications for feeds. When you have your morning coffee, open up Reeder, refresh the feeds and read through a few articles.
Push notifications have a cost too, now you need the server to maintain state of all clients and notify them on changes. This has huge implications at scale, especially if it's extremely cheap or easy for new clients to spin up. Think about every single browser tab now requiring a server to maintain some state on the backend--that's a nightmare with billions and billions of users and tabs. Pull-based architectures have the nice effect that less popular content has almost no cost to continue serving and just falls into the background forever.
I don't think it was even just a technical issue. Linear feeds of all content just died out to be replaced with sites like Hacker News / Reddit where you have ranked ordering and comments.
As much as HN hates the out of order feeds, that's what the average user wants because most content is boring.
> Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient
I think you're greatly overestimating this inefficiency. Especially for websites properly implementing the HTTP protocol. 'Push' requires a lot more complexity and it's also outside of the user's control. For fuck's sake, you can just serve a static file. We've been doing this for decades.
Talking about control, my hypothesis is that it was the main driver of the downfall of RSS. It started when Google killed Reader and Facebook took control of what you see in the timeline. Users picking and choosing what/when to read is not compatible with the way the major gatekeepers of information drive engagement.
FWIW my RSS reader is set up to only refresh manually when I open it and pull to refresh, and I like it that way. It's a much nicer way of reading than having everything yelling for my attention all the time.
I've noticed a healthy amount of websites with pretty granular RSS, for example the auto parts outlet rockauto.com has RSS feed for every make, model, and production year that they service.
I'd wager this saves them some unpaid overtime. It seems that a service which provides correct, useful RSS nearly obviates the entire hassle of dealing with bot scrapers and the resource drain and health insurance premiums that come along. You can easily serve any volume of RSS with cloudflare or nginx.
It is quite true that mobile clients scraping a url is inefficient vs pub/sub. Maybe you could just uses mqtt to trigger a GET or something.
I spent about five minutes considering what a world with facebook, instagram, ebay, amazon RSS feeds might look like. The experience felt like goat staring.
I was part of a startup that aggregated items for sale years and years ago (we were sold to LookSmart for a pittance in the end) and we did RSS feeds for everything. Every page spat out a list of items, in fact and the website and the RSS and atom feeds were all generated from the same middle layer. A huge part of our inventory came from RSS feeds too.
That's not true, but might be a common misconception. RSS rode the wave of the realtime hype at that time and has multiple standards for push notifications. RSSCloud und Pubsubhubbub are the two immediately in my mind, note that PuSH got turned into WebSub.
Push notifications are a replacement for RSS in the same way that cars are a replacement for public transit.
This is a nonsense comparison. RSS is about presentation, not about real time interaction. And it would not be hard to have RSS feeds support push notifications, or other modernization.
RSS is a universal and accessible way of presenting content, that is what is so inconvenient about it to publishers.
The business model of most platforms today has RSS as competition. It completely undermines analytics, and their ability to fine-tune presentation, for the benefit of the end-user.
So of course GM will say that their gas guzzlers make electric trains obsolete.
Sites like Movim (https://movim.eu/) offer an user friendly front-end for this protocol (building upon the ATOM format). You can login using any XMPP account and also self-host Movim instances.
I don't agree with your premise or conclusion. Its far easier for a website to just publish a dead XML file that any client can read at their own pace, as frequently as they would like. Also, anyone can create a pub/sub 'middle man' that can implement a push system for clients who want that. You can have the best of both.
Haha, I literally just set up Newsboat[1] and this is my second article I read from the comfort of my terminal :) So far Newsboat is great: Everything configurable with text, fast and effortless. The key-binds took a little bit, but now I can even do stuff with hjkl!
I will take the opportunity to ask about two issues I am currently facing.
- Is there a feed for Github discussions?
- Does anyone have some ideas/sources for bookmark scripts? I found [2], but I am not really sure what it does.
E: To add, in my opinion the killer feature of Newsboat is the fact that all links get appended to the article, similar to how I added the two links below my post. In Newsboat I can just press the corresponding number and open the link!
GitHub has per-repo feeds for commits and a private feed for all your events[1], but not for issues or discussions, apparently[2]. Of course, you can always roll your own using the API, a web server, and a cron job, even if it is a bit inelegant.
I rediscovered RSS about six months ago when I switched back to Linux from MacOS and realized Akregator was still part of KDE. Most actual long form content - blogs, news, company websites, podcasts all still have RSS feeds, and once you have 10-20 good ones loaded into Akregator, it's actually a pretty good experience.
Most of the big socials dropped RSS feeds a while back for the same reason their APIs became less useful: they monetized with ads being mixed in with content. Allowing users to view their stream outside the UI literally cuts into the ad revenue.
Readit News
I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.
I suspect a lot of blogs only have a feed now because it's a default feature of the blog platform they use rather than because they see it as important.
I don't buy any of the arguments not to implement it. I don't think it is too expensive or confusing. I think it is too empowering to users and inconvenient to marketers.
It feels very much like an alive protocol to me, and more in need than ever before given the insane calls on everyone's attention.
And to the guy with "service shutdown fear" - just export your opml and bring it into another service. It's highly portable and imo totally mitigates any risk of getting locked in then locked out.
Turns out, most of the blogs I subscribed to back in the day are now defunct or not updated much. I think that's why I eventually stopped going to my Feedly for RSS aggreggation, and instead for the few moments a day I want to read news/waste time, I just go directly to The Verge, Hacker News, and/or Reddit.
Funny aside, though. My product at work still has a RSS plugin for importing content, and I have it pointed at Reddit RSS feeds for sub-reddits, and it's still working....
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Let's hope it will not go defunct anytime soon.
I tried using Feedly last year. Added feeds and it was HORRIBLE experience. Not Feedly but the actual feeds.
Some of them give you the title and then tell you to go to actual website to read the article.
Others has a virtually non-existent summary.
During RSS's heydays I remember being able to just see the summary and click on it and read the article right there and then. Now these feeds try to push you back to the website hard. Making RSS feeds feel like a broken tool. With the content there mostly an after thought.
I think sites killed off RSS feeds.
I am always on the lookout for a simple, decentralized, modern alternative, if anyone knows of any.
Even though the water isn't boiling, the heat may still be on.
Is it still useful? Yes. Is it also under attack? Yes.
I believe a lot of the bigger sites like Feedly will recommend you popular feeds. I would love a service that I can paste a list of feeds into and it could recommend popular related feeds.
1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse).
2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites.
3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed.
4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list.
Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read.
Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that way) - but if you treat it as a personally curated source of sporadic content, then it's great. In many respects Moderate post volume (quality over quantity) is something I find more useful in what I choose.
On the aggregator front, I try to avoid anything that's too noisy (low signal to noise) - and I definitely minimise subscribing to news sites as the volume is just too high (I tried rss subscribing to The Verge when it was new, but there were too many articles I don't read). For example, i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.
RSS is still heavily used for information I find really professionally useful (IT) - but I don't know about other industries.
Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed - which makes offline and mobile consumption more difficult / annoying - I suspect that in some cases it's a result of default choices - and in others it's a deliberate decision as a trade off against improved analysis a site gets from a browser hit.
I saw that they also have some kind of tool that lets you scrape websites that don't have native RSS feeds, but it is only at the "super duper" pricing tier, whatever that one is called.
Precisley, that's how I got to this post. In this day, keeping a list of interesting sites and being able to consult them all from a single place is ever more useful.
I get RSS for some Twitter accounts via a Nitter instance. Sadly, some institutions and people only spread news via Twitter.
- Forum activity (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom)
- Forum's new discussions (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom/discussions)
- This discussion (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom/d/20-i-miss-rss)
Of course these days browsers don't indicate that browsers are available. You will need an extension to detect feeds. (Or paste the site in your feed reader and hope it does, most readers will do the auto-discovery for you)
it doesn't seem to be linked anywhere, but I think that's: https://www.wilcosky.com/atom
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1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
(I too miss RSS)
[1] https://internet.psych.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/532-Maste...
This started happening when I was 14 (~2007) and really started to accelerate after I was 20 (~2013). I don't correlate this with me getting old but more like getting more and more aware of the profiteering, surveillance and bullshit everywhere.
I used to be subscribed to more but some RSS feeds have such high traffic it's difficult to follow them, such as the BBC news feed.
Feedly has a nice new feature [0] that makes an RSS feed out of a standard website, so that might be worth considering if you have some news sources that don't publish a RSS feed. Unfortunately this wouldn't work with anything that requires authentication like private Twitter feeds for example.
[0] https://blog.feedly.com/easily-follow-websites-that-dont-hav...
ttrss was basically my first self hosted thing almost a decade ago. It was great. And then it turned out the guy running it was a bit not pleasant, and I didn't want to support that. So I recently migrated to freshRSS. Both work great, are open source and self hostable.
And feedly hasn't shut down yet (probably just to spite me). So yeah, tons of options for RSS.
I'm starting to wonder where "Sandstorm 2.0" is. Sandstorm, for those who don't know, was basically an attempt to make self hosting really viable, but was tragically ahead of its time because it predated Docker. So they burned tons of effort on sandboxing, and wrapping existing applications into their sandbox, and it was just too hard to port things into their world to get very many applications running.
It seems like a project that would do that in terms of docker-compose files could be created for much less effort, and maybe not quite all the pretty-shiny they had. But as I'm struggling right now a bit to bring up a Bitwarden server, there's still pain around setting up the forwards properly and getting the Let's Encrypt certificate. Something that managed all this better wouldn't be too hard, and could just be slammed up on a small AWS instance or something would be easy. (Branching out to other services over time or something.) Plus setting up proper backups would be nice. We're so, so much closer to being able to do this nowadays than we used to be... for instance, S3 has also become a near universal API, so backups using it have gotten to be easy but they can still be done without vendor lockin.
Then it would be really easy to self-host an RSS reader or something.
I'm hoping this will either prompt someone to consider this project, or prompt someone to tell me "It already exists, go here and here and run this docker command to install it."
I wouldn't use them as a standard for keeping services up.
I'm unaware of other ways to get consistent listings of new content at various sites in a machine readable format.
Therefore, RSS doesn't cause any advertisement loss, as the user needs to go to the website anyway (which, to be clear, is totally fine - RSS still works as filter/preview, which is very helpful).
Premium RSS is possible, with individual links per user, but it's much more complicated than just typing your email address into a field (something you already do when you pay for anything). Also, chances of the link being shared around is high and aggregators often inadvertently leak premium links. In contrast, someone's inbox is about as private as it gets.
In any case, as Netflix’s early history shows, depending on your cost structure, link sharing is likely a net positive. It’s probably only worth prosecuting the feeds that get shared with 100s of people.
It definitely is more complicated, but the tools to make it simple are easy to build! Maybe we’ll see growth in this space. One can dream
I can’t deal with most news sites now because I’m usually reading them on my phone. There’s just so much garbage between ads, scroll locked videos and JavaScript breaking the pages. AMP was supposed to help with this stuff but it breaks all the time too.
I know I’d happily pay for plain text content that I can format myself but I’m guessing there’s just no market for that sort of thing.
Dead Comment
IMO the big thing that killed RSS ubiquity was Google Chrome not having support for it natively. Before that, Firefox, Opera, Safari all had RSS as well-supported, central thing and I remember finding it super annoying that Chrome didn't have it when it launched. But I kept using Chrome for the same reasons everyone else started switching to Chrome. And the RSS extensions all sucked. And eventually I stopped using them. And here I am, no longer reading RSS.
But as Chrome ate up browser share, I'm sure fewer people went to RSS because it wasn't natively there and so the incentives to implement RSS decreased as fewer people expected it to be there, especially as many more people were coming online only having used Chrome.
Oddly enough, I switched back to Firefox years ago and _could_ get back into RSS at any point (or with any number of RSS reader apps, etc.), but the habit has stuck, and I now stay up-to-date on everything via email newsletters, Twitter and this orange website instead. it's worse and I hate it, but oh well
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pn...
1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly.
2) Most people then and now would go through an aggregator. So they'd really be talking to that instead of the source feed.
3) There were push notification standards out well over a decade ago, including RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub.
Besides, assuming you're not hideously overcomplicating things, you'll just be serving a static file off disk. If your server is a raspberry pi, you ought to still be able to serve some 1000 requests/second if that is what you are doing.
Assuming most RSS readers poll at most once every 15 minutes (which is a really high rate), you'll need at least a million subscribers before you need to get a second raspberry pi.
Polling isn't a requirement. If your reader is polling it's strictly because the author wanted to implement such a feature; that's it.
There's also ETag and last-modified which are used when checking and have very little overhead (most especially in the case when the content has not changed).
Dead Comment
As much as HN hates the out of order feeds, that's what the average user wants because most content is boring.
I think you're greatly overestimating this inefficiency. Especially for websites properly implementing the HTTP protocol. 'Push' requires a lot more complexity and it's also outside of the user's control. For fuck's sake, you can just serve a static file. We've been doing this for decades.
Talking about control, my hypothesis is that it was the main driver of the downfall of RSS. It started when Google killed Reader and Facebook took control of what you see in the timeline. Users picking and choosing what/when to read is not compatible with the way the major gatekeepers of information drive engagement.
I'd wager this saves them some unpaid overtime. It seems that a service which provides correct, useful RSS nearly obviates the entire hassle of dealing with bot scrapers and the resource drain and health insurance premiums that come along. You can easily serve any volume of RSS with cloudflare or nginx.
It is quite true that mobile clients scraping a url is inefficient vs pub/sub. Maybe you could just uses mqtt to trigger a GET or something.
I spent about five minutes considering what a world with facebook, instagram, ebay, amazon RSS feeds might look like. The experience felt like goat staring.
This is a nonsense comparison. RSS is about presentation, not about real time interaction. And it would not be hard to have RSS feeds support push notifications, or other modernization.
RSS is a universal and accessible way of presenting content, that is what is so inconvenient about it to publishers.
The business model of most platforms today has RSS as competition. It completely undermines analytics, and their ability to fine-tune presentation, for the benefit of the end-user.
So of course GM will say that their gas guzzlers make electric trains obsolete.
Sites like Movim (https://movim.eu/) offer an user friendly front-end for this protocol (building upon the ATOM format). You can login using any XMPP account and also self-host Movim instances.
I will take the opportunity to ask about two issues I am currently facing.
- Is there a feed for Github discussions?
- Does anyone have some ideas/sources for bookmark scripts? I found [2], but I am not really sure what it does.
[1]:https://newsboat.org/
[2]:https://github.com/gpakosz/.newsboat/blob/master/bookmark.sh
---
E: To add, in my opinion the killer feature of Newsboat is the fact that all links get appended to the article, similar to how I added the two links below my post. In Newsboat I can just press the corresponding number and open the link!
[1] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/q/20535
[2] https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/31
Most of the big socials dropped RSS feeds a while back for the same reason their APIs became less useful: they monetized with ads being mixed in with content. Allowing users to view their stream outside the UI literally cuts into the ad revenue.