[HN Gopher] Turn to RSS Feeds to Regain Control of the World Wid...
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Turn to RSS Feeds to Regain Control of the World Wide Web
Author : URfejk
Score : 158 points
Date : 2021-02-06 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techrights.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (techrights.org)
| phailhaus wrote:
| RSS allows us to decentralize aggregation of content, but still
| has some of the same critical pitfalls of social networks. Most
| notably, the "bubble" effect is as strong as ever: my feed is
| entirely unique and non-reproducible. I have complete control
| over it, but I cannot see a feed as another user without
| perfectly replicating their setup.
|
| I think there is a missing component that would allow us to
| create a decentralized social network of RSS feeds. If we cannot
| share our reality with others, we're going to reproduce the same
| toxic patterns that social networks exhibit today, but it's going
| to be completely unmanageable.
| pharke wrote:
| What's the difference between a bubble and personal interests?
| A technology that allows no way of filtering out the things you
| find uninteresting is about as useless as one that doesn't
| provide any means of discovering new interests. Regardless,
| this isn't the issue we should be focusing on, communities turn
| toxic when they feed into the delusions, bad habits, vices, and
| narcissism of their members. That's less of a technological
| problem and more of a moral one. You can't produce moral
| behaviour by creating a new (or changing an existing one into
| a) platform that strictly enforces it, people will either
| subvert your rules by inventing ways to get around them or they
| will simply not use your platform and go elsewhere. The same
| problems exist in the offline world, and it's always more
| effective to address the root causes of the problem than it is
| to legislate and punish.
| phailhaus wrote:
| > That's less of a technological problem and more of a moral
| one.
|
| I ascribe to a "medium is the message" type of mentality,
| where the design of your platform is going to inform the
| nature of the behavior on it. For example, Facebook's
| commenting system is, unfortunately, hot garbage. They don't
| track comment threads, and instead they have this weird
| "mention" system wherein the best you can do is @ someone and
| hope they remember the thread. You can't read a conversation
| in order, it's all jumbled up for some reason.
|
| What kind of conversations arise from such a mess? It ends up
| being a convoluted stew of people just vaguely yelling in
| each other's directions. You can't maintain a thread of
| conversation, and neither can anyone else.
|
| Furthermore, Facebook views all interacts as equal. However,
| users will often use "haha" and "angry" reacts in order to
| mock the more extreme and toxic comments. Facebook doesn't
| notice this, and goes "aha! This is a Good Comment. I will
| promote it." So what happens? The top comments on popular
| posts are often the most toxic, and they get the most
| visibility.
|
| It's design like this that makes the internet a worse place.
| I think RSS is on the right track, but I think the fact that
| we can't see each other's feeds is a problem. Many will end
| up spiraling into a feedback loop of toxic content, with no
| way to see opposing viewpoints and a "way out". On Reddit, I
| can actively peek at r/Conservative and see what a completely
| different group of people are talking about. I can't quite do
| that with RSS.
| type0 wrote:
| > On Reddit, I can actively peek at r/Conservative and see
| what a completely different group of people are talking
| about. I can't quite do that with RSS.
|
| you can, go to old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/.rss
| anthropodie wrote:
| But I think in real life as well people live in their own
| bubbles. We see the world as we are but not for what it is.
| It's just that Internet takes it to whole different level.
|
| I like to see Internet as catalyst. It accelerated speed of
| people becoming more conscious or more stupid. The choice is
| still in the hands of individual like it was before Internet.
| phailhaus wrote:
| There are definitely bubbles in real life, but they are far
| less insular and toxic. I can't "unsubscribe" from a person
| that I work with. Everyone around me shares in a lot of the
| content that I see. Content streams like TV channels give me
| the ability to switch channels and see what others are
| seeing.
|
| Like you said, the internet takes this to a whole different
| level, and then takes control away from me. How do I tell
| Youtube that I'm just interested in researching Qanon, and
| not that I want to be recommended it? How do I tell facebook
| to stop recommending me content related to some topic? I
| can't change the channel anymore, and I'm at their mercy.
| That's a huge problem.
|
| RSS is fantastic in that it gives you complete control over
| your content streams, but there's still something missing to
| let you "change the channel."
| giantrobot wrote:
| Oh man someone should totally invent OPML [0] or XBEL [1] and
| then everyone could easily publish their subscribed feeds. Then
| they could import those and have the same subscriptions! /s
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBEL
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| sp332 wrote:
| 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.
| alangibson wrote:
| RSS's decline was/is due to 2 main factors.
|
| The first is a contagion effect. People just started to assume
| RSS was 'over' because big names like Twitter and Craigslist
| dropped support after they realized supporting it isn't in their
| interest.
|
| The second much more powerful factor is that the vast majority of
| users just want to see new stuff when they scroll. They probably
| never bothered to use RSS (you'd find these people on cat meme
| sites most of the time), and if they did they were happy to give
| it up the first time they saw the Facebook news feed. The fact
| that far greater numbers of people were watching the Fb news feed
| meant that RSS was more or less instantly irrelevant just based
| on sheer numbers of eyeballs available.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| But Facebook or Amazon or FAANG are not _just_ feeds. Facebook
| has also all the other components - discovery for example, also
| basic storage provision (let 's not forget that!).
|
| If RSS did the job we wanted it would be used everywhere. It is a
| great solution to one tiny part of the jigsaw - and as half the
| comments on here are already "I have a great idea to extend RSS
| so that..." we all know this.
|
| Decentralising is a good thing - but boy there is still a lot to
| solve.
| symlinkk wrote:
| Ok so what are some good feeds to follow?
| deathlight wrote:
| This was on hn recently: https://hnrss.github.io/
|
| Any youtube channel you like
|
| Any subreddit you like: https://old.reddit.com/wiki/rss
|
| Nitter allows RSS feeds of twitter accounts, useful for low
| post volume accounts like those of your local government
| functions.
|
| Many (possibly most?) news websites have some RSS
| functionality.
|
| And lets not forget the wide world of podcasting.
|
| Some interesting blogs I follow are
| https://unintendedconsequenc.es/feed/ and
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/feed/
| possiblytom wrote:
| I used QuiteRSS for a long time but ended up switching to self-
| hosted FreshRSS. I like the convenience of syncing my reading
| between devices too much.
| deathlight wrote:
| I switched to QuiteRSS from whatever I was using before awhile
| back. It works great and it has some niche features like auto
| tabbing back to the reader after opening a link.
| estranhosidade wrote:
| The problem I think is that nowadays more and more it's harder to
| find RSS support services and you send up having to resort to
| some third party application or service that will get some
| content and convert them into a RSS format. Like, for instance,
| instagram obviously doesn't offer support to RSS, the same goes
| for facebook and so forth.
| URfejk wrote:
| Another problem is that there are sites out there that have
| RSS, but they are hiding it from the users:
| https://stop.zona-m.net/2021/02/the-snob-rss-hall-of-constru...
| netfl0 wrote:
| How many technologists on this site are responsible for the death
| of RSS.
|
| Shame on you people.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| What death? RSS is as alive as ever.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Twitter removed RSS in 2013. Facebook removed it too. Youtube
| didn't remove it, but you have to go into the page source to
| find the feed link.
| jjulius wrote:
| Three sites out of thousands upon thousands that still use
| it hardly seems like it would be worth calling it "dead".
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| They are large (popular) sites though. They have actively
| decided to not support RSS as they believe it is counter
| to their advantage. It's not like they don't have the
| resources to support RSS.
|
| What this means is that we have a moral obligation to
| support and push RSS in our work/spare time. This is
| something I now recognise I need to do at least.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| "Three sites out of thousands" is disingenuous. Twitter
| alone is enough to make the difference.
|
| For "RSS is as alive as ever" to be true, it would follow
| that you'd expect to find as many people publishing their
| content via RSS as the case before. They're not. There
| are many, many, many derelict blogs, all effectively
| abandoned because their authors migrated to Twitter,
| intentionally/consciously or not.
| maximente wrote:
| fairly strong claims from someone who had no trouble
| calling someone else's disingenuous. care to share the
| data so that we can see what you have seen, ostensibly
| related to blog atrophy over time? should be fairly easy
| to spot when twitter cropped up if, as you've claimed,
| "they're not [publishing their content via RSS as the
| case before.]"
|
| or, it could be - just floating this - that lots of blogs
| are posting on RSS, /and/ twitter has gotten a lot more
| traffic from previous RSS users.
| k4c9x wrote:
| Any decent RSS reader will find that link for you if you
| point it at the url that gets you the html. Twitter and
| Facebook no longer support it because they're predatory, I
| take it as just one more indication the entire platform
| should be avoided.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I use Inoreader for my rss reader. it supports Twitter,
| faceboook (public pages) and YouTube even though they don't
| have RSS feeds. So even though some sites kill there rss,
| the technologists provide.
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| Small nitpick: YouTube does have RSS feeds for every
| channel (and playlist), they just don't have an icon in
| their UI linking to it
| mkup wrote:
| RSS-Bridge can convert twitter feeds to RSS feeds (this is
| a self-hosted solution). I host it on my server along with
| TT-RSS.
| sp332 wrote:
| Twitter is extremely app-hostile. I wouldn't blame
| "technologists" for that, because most of them/us would
| prefer a more accessible Twitter feed.
| FriedrichN wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| naravara wrote:
| 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.
| eisa01 wrote:
| Agree, some times they even have a feed that is just not
| exposed!
| toyg wrote:
| A massive amount of websites built on wordpress have feeds
| that the owners themselves don't know about.
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| I haven't used RSS in a long long while but one problem I had
| with it was filtering. This was especially true where a site had
| frequent updates, say a news site, but there was no way to filter
| on the feed by topic unless the site provided custom feeds for
| each topic/category/tag. Has this gotten better?
|
| From skimming around it looks like this still might be a
| limitation.
| sp332 wrote:
| NewsBlur has a filtering feature, but I don't see a way to
| tweak it beyond mashing thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons and
| hoping it gets the idea. Might be worth a shot, though, it's
| definitely better than nothing.
| type0 wrote:
| 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.
| steveharman wrote:
| Can anyone recommend an RSS app for Mac & Android that allows me
| to sync my feeds and their read/unread statuses between the two
| platforms?
| metasyn wrote:
| Feedly!
| CharlesW wrote:
| Sure, you can use Feedly* as a sync service and then use Mac
| and Android apps that use Feedly as their back-end.
|
| https://feedly.com/apps.html
|
| * I assume there are other ways to skin this cat, but this is
| what I do.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Feedly for the third time :) Been using it for years. Works
| fine on desktop/mobile, synchronizes great, has a bunch of
| useful features (bookmarks, tags, IFTTT integration, etc)
| adrian1973 wrote:
| Newsblur
| drummer wrote:
| I really love the recent resurgence of RSS feeds. It's so simple,
| yet very powerfull way to return to a more decentralized web.
| word8 wrote:
| What decentralized web? Everything is behind some stupid WAF
| that blocks your IP for "being a robot" now unless you want to
| execute code for an unbounded amount of time before being able
| to get access to the paragraph of text you were tricked into
| reading from an SEO'd search reuslt. Even reading an RSS feed
| will probably get you blocked for a scraping attempt if the
| website is behind Cloudflare or some imitator.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| Open source RSS reader aiming to work well for regular users:
| https://github.com/GetStream/winds
|
| Could definitely use some more contributors
| ashishb wrote:
| 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
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| pedro1976 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy
| eikenberry wrote:
| 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.
| phailhaus wrote:
| > 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.
| mycall wrote:
| Isn't the act of friending someone in effect sharing feeds?
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Does it support private websites where you have to login to see
| anything? Like nextdoor.com.
| pk78 wrote:
| Been using it for over a decade now. My only source of info.
|
| It was google reader -> digg -> ino reader -> self hosted TTRSS
| (using now).
|
| Anyone got suggestions for good non-mainstream rss? in area of
| Tech/dev/design/ui/business/finance etc.,
| KirillPanov wrote:
| Yeah, tell that to Craigslist, who nuked their RSS feeds
| recently:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840310
| smsm42 wrote:
| Non-rhetoric question - why would one need a feed on
| craigslist? I've ever used craigslist only in two ways: 1)
| trying to sell something (about 20% success rate) 2) trying to
| buy something for cheap. In both cases, RSS feed serves to
| useful function - as a seller, I only need to publish one post,
| as a buyer, I need to find who sells cheap used bikes,
| call/email them and be done with it, I'm not going to monitor
| cheap used bike market for years to come.
|
| Is there some important craigslist use case I am missing here?
| terinjokes wrote:
| If you're looking to buy something locally, you could
| subscribe to an RSS feed of the search results. If an item
| became available, it would appear in your feed.
| leephillips wrote:
| RSS is great. I think it might have suffered a bit due to its
| associations with the childish behavior of a group of supposed
| adults (one in particular) squabbling over credit and control
| over something as trivial as the RSS spec. Many so-called RSS
| feeds actually use the superior Atom specification, which was
| described early on by at least one of its authors as "RSS without
| the psychopaths".
| refulgentis wrote:
| alas, can't turn up that quote or anything close to that via
| Google :(
|
| I don't think you're being downvoted for your thoughts, but
| rather, it's unclear what you're saying and how to read more
| about it - we appreciate the honesty :)
|
| EDIT: Appears the references are to Dave Winer - this is an
| excellent history, I wish I found a shorter one, but this is
| really great: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-
| and-demise-o...
| leephillips wrote:
| "can't turn up that quote or anything close to that via
| Google"
|
| It's not there. But I have no doubt about its accuracy. It
| didn't survive long enough to be indexed.
| spockz wrote:
| The thing that holds me back from using RSS again is three
| things. First of all my workstations are geared towards content
| creation and I shut down all notifications. My tablet and phone
| are what I use to consume and discover content and these form
| factors or maybe the app implementations don't really lend to RSS
| for me. Secondly, there is so much more content out there
| compared to 10-15 years ago. I used to follow some sites that
| would have posts every so often. But sites like hacker news and
| Twitter have so much content it is hard to keep up. Thirdly, I
| just have too many other responsibilities to keep track of it all
| anymore.
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