The '00s were such a wonderful time, the explosion in open access information, mashups (how I miss mashups!), easy publishing and the reach you could get from your sofa. RSS is the epitome of that, it's such a shame we have ended up with these walled garden social publishing platforms that lock our content down.
This, adding the RSS icon to the address bar, was an inspired move to surface discoverability. Compare that with the fight to get Apple to surface the availability of PWAs!
The big thing that has changed since that time is the monetisation, these walled platforms have had to instigate revenue share with large creators. But still, the wish for a simpler more open web is in the background. There is evidence of a swing back that way (the fediverse, blue sky?), I just hope "big business" doesn't destroy it (the rumour of Facebook embracing the fediverse...).
RSS isn't dead, it's the backbone of podcasts, but it's such a shame our Twitter feed, our Facebook, or even our Twitch isn't available as RSS.
Back in '06, my "mashup" was a social feed aggregator, it gave you a single "homepage" with all your activity from Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Flickr, and many other sites. A lot of that was built on RSS, and you could add any RSS fead to your page. Sadly it went nowhere, but I learnt a lot...
I've been discovering different tools to make the content I consume available via RSS. Some of those tools:
nitter: Alternative Twitter frontend that provides RSS feeds
teddit: Alternative Reddit frontend that provides RSS feeds (Reddit itself still has RSS feeds, we'll see how that plays out though)
rss-bridge: Can generate feeds for a ton of different sites. I use it for Twitch feeds.
invidious: Alternative YouTube frontend that provides RSS feeds
It's been refreshing to subscribe to the feeds I want to see and not have "recommended" content stepping all over what I want to see. Recent trends make me worried some of these services are going to go away in the near future though.
> rss-bridge: Can generate feeds for a ton of different sites. I use it for Twitch feeds.
A bit of a shameless self-promotion plug: rss-bridge is great but I wanted to do the same from a command line program sending the output to stdout and without running a dedicated local web server, so I wrote newslinkrss ( https://github.com/ittner/newslinkrss/ )
It allowed me to replace a bunch of dedicated scripts at the cost of some complex command lines. It works pretty well for people who prefer desktop news readers to web-based ones.
Shout-out to the Livemarks / Foxish plugins which gives you RSS support on your Bookmarks toolbar. Still nothing better IMO for quickly browsing dozens of headlines across dozens of sites.
> Supported by Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 and other browsers
Unfortunately not supported by Mozilla Firefox 114 or Microsoft Edge.
It is still a very useful standard. I use https://github.com/Reeywhaar/want-my-rss to add the icon to my browser. Plus even without browser support this allows you to just paste an article into your Feed Reader and most will use autodiscovery to find the feed for you. However without a browser icon you need to guess and check.
Mozilla removing long standing support for this from Firefox was a clear signal what their browser is for now and what it isn't for. Firefox is for running javascript applications and consuming DRM video and visiting your bank's website, just like chrome. It is not a browser for surfing the web and looking at websites.
Honestly the RSS support in Firefox and friends was just never that great. A long time back I used Sage and loved it, but when Firefox moved to use standardized plugins it wasn't an option anymore.
Mozilla throwing out their entire ecosystem of add-ons (like sage) so they could copy chrome's web extension instead of continuing their own far more powerful extensions was another of the indicators that Firefox is no longer a browser first. It is now a secure JS engine and DRM video first application for commercial transactions. Any ability to be a browser comes after those requirements are met.
Correction, Firefox is controlled opposition for Google to deflect from being accused of having a browser and browser engine monopoly. Mozilla post 2011 is a very different beast; they decided that copying Chrome was the way to go, stripping out all useful features culminating in the removal of the powerful XUL addon system citing security problems (while ironically the amount of malware extensions shot up AFTER they switched to the Chrome originated Web Extensions format, which are far less limited in capability). Meanwhile, the simple minded continue to fall for their claims of respecting privacy and user choice.
Most modern RSS feed-readers still use this `rel=alternate` link to allow users to just paste the URL of the site they want to subscribe to instead of forcing the users to look for and find the RSS link somewhere on the page. It's (surprisingly) very broadly implemented among sites and blogs that publish RSS.
I'm a big fan of FreshRSS (self-hosted) and if I need more powerful feature (such as filtering, dedup, webhooks) I use Inoreader, I have been using at least one rss reader since 2003 and there is no way silo's such as Twitter or others can do better than carefully curating ones own information feed.
Google+ was dead on arrival; Mozilla removed RSS support from Firefox long after Google+ was shut down. But of course, they have to dance to the tune of their biggest funder.
Although I haven't seen an addon that handles SPA well. Ideally it would monitor the DOM for links being added and removed. Although that may be expensive to do in an extension.
I still follow many RSS feeds (about 250). Sometimes it's hard to find the feed on a site, because the feeds aren't always advertised and their URLs can be tricky. Based on the URLs I've seen, I created a simple script to check if a site has a feed:
Readit News
This, adding the RSS icon to the address bar, was an inspired move to surface discoverability. Compare that with the fight to get Apple to surface the availability of PWAs!
The big thing that has changed since that time is the monetisation, these walled platforms have had to instigate revenue share with large creators. But still, the wish for a simpler more open web is in the background. There is evidence of a swing back that way (the fediverse, blue sky?), I just hope "big business" doesn't destroy it (the rumour of Facebook embracing the fediverse...).
RSS isn't dead, it's the backbone of podcasts, but it's such a shame our Twitter feed, our Facebook, or even our Twitch isn't available as RSS.
Back in '06, my "mashup" was a social feed aggregator, it gave you a single "homepage" with all your activity from Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Flickr, and many other sites. A lot of that was built on RSS, and you could add any RSS fead to your page. Sadly it went nowhere, but I learnt a lot...
nitter: Alternative Twitter frontend that provides RSS feeds
teddit: Alternative Reddit frontend that provides RSS feeds (Reddit itself still has RSS feeds, we'll see how that plays out though)
rss-bridge: Can generate feeds for a ton of different sites. I use it for Twitch feeds.
invidious: Alternative YouTube frontend that provides RSS feeds
It's been refreshing to subscribe to the feeds I want to see and not have "recommended" content stepping all over what I want to see. Recent trends make me worried some of these services are going to go away in the near future though.
A bit of a shameless self-promotion plug: rss-bridge is great but I wanted to do the same from a command line program sending the output to stdout and without running a dedicated local web server, so I wrote newslinkrss ( https://github.com/ittner/newslinkrss/ )
It allowed me to replace a bunch of dedicated scripts at the cost of some complex command lines. It works pretty well for people who prefer desktop news readers to web-based ones.
Feedback is welcome.
Youtube natively offers per-channel rss feeds.
Firefox: https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/ Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/nb...
Anyone know a way to pull email lists (eg mailman) via RSS feeds?
Now that sounds handy. Extensible, too.
In case you didn't know - you can append .rss at the end of a Mastodon profile url to get an RSS feed of it!
Unfortunately not supported by Mozilla Firefox 114 or Microsoft Edge.
It is still a very useful standard. I use https://github.com/Reeywhaar/want-my-rss to add the icon to my browser. Plus even without browser support this allows you to just paste an article into your Feed Reader and most will use autodiscovery to find the feed for you. However without a browser icon you need to guess and check.
So I built Brook, it's pretty simple and hangs out in your sidebar on Firefox: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook
See, decentralized content delivery such as RSS was not friendly enough to ads, so RSS had to be removed for better profits.
Needless to say that it was a nail in the coffin of internet information quality.
Firefox used to have this, I used it a lot. Am I that old?
Unfortunately live bookmarks have also gone away in Firefox, luckily I found an add-on for that.
Although I haven't seen an addon that handles SPA well. Ideally it would monitor the DOM for links being added and removed. Although that may be expensive to do in an extension.
https://github.com/begriffs/findrss