[HN Gopher] RSS is wonderful
___________________________________________________________________
RSS is wonderful
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 546 points
Date : 2021-10-23 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (quakkels.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (quakkels.com)
| bertman wrote:
| tl;dr:
|
| * RSS is awesome
|
| * OP wrote an "RSS Discovery Engine"[1] that
|
| "[...]works by taking the URL to a blog, or any site with an RSS
| feed, and examining all the posts in the blog's RSS feed for
| links to other sites. When a link to another site is found, it's
| inspected to see if it also has an RSS feed. If the new site has
| an RSS feed, then it's added to the results list.[...]"
|
| [1]https://rdengine.herokuapp.com/
| 0des wrote:
| I wish RSS discovery were better. I got so angry one time when
| I left my prepaid mobile data on and accidentally downloaded 12
| of the same introductory episode because I had auto-download
| turned on and Wondery podcast network put out a preview on all
| 12 feeds I was subscribed to of theirs.
|
| It frustrated me enough to look at ways I could support RSS and
| introduce a new means of discovery, but as it turns out, RSS is
| a finished spec and the authors requested that any changes to
| the spec happen under a new protocol and a new name. I ended up
| creating a new feed spec I've been cobbling together that
| supports better discovery. Check it out,
| https://readme.loud.so/
|
| the TL;DR is that feeds can be treated as a show feed with a
| singular show, or as a network feed with multiple shows,
| allowing for a feed player consuming the new feed to provide UI
| elements that let a user select which of the network's shows
| they'd like to subscribe to, as well as a means to prompt the
| user when a new show is added to the network feed.
|
| Also big shouts out to the podcast2.0 community who has been
| very welcoming along the way, they are doing great things
| within the confines of RSS as it stands.
| xrd wrote:
| It's cool but if we are going to use a new format (JSON) then
| it feels like there isn't a good reason to consider others
| like TOML. Or graphql-ish queries even.
| tored wrote:
| RSS is a finished specification but it does support
| extensions.
| 0des wrote:
| Indeed! I highly recommend everyone to check out what the
| Podcast2.0 people are doing, it's really impressive.
| xrd wrote:
| It is a little ironic that the first link in DDG is a
| medium article but oh well.
|
| https://medium.com/@everywheretrip/an-introduction-to-
| podcas...
|
| This is, indeed, fascinating. It's cool that they have a
| micro-payment idea with Bitcoin lighting network.
| RNCTX wrote:
| More than a little, and associating with crypto is a way
| to stay irrelevant.
| lngnmn2 wrote:
| It's not, when all you get in the feed is a bunch of links to web
| pages full of ads and crap.
|
| It was supposed to stream full texts.
| k1m wrote:
| I work on a project intended to help people produce full text
| feeds from partial ones. It's essentially a web service that
| produces a new feed URL and handles article extraction when the
| feed gets requested by your feed reader:
| http://ftr.fivefilters.org/
| commoner wrote:
| Clients like Feeder[1] and self-hosted services like Tiny Tiny
| RSS[2] (through its Readability plugin) can extract the full
| text from the source URL.
|
| [1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
|
| [2] https://tt-rss.org
| Daunk wrote:
| I really like RSS as well, but my main problem is always the RSS
| "viewer". I haven't found a single one I like. I'd like to just
| add a bunch of RSS feeds and set "tags" that I'm interested in
| and get a notification about. Let's say I care about "Telegram"
| if any of my RSS feeds mention "Telegram" or use "Telegram" as a
| tag; I want to be notified. And I guess that requires a RSS
| viewer running on the computer and not a website based RSS
| viewer. But yeah, not found a single good RSS viewer yet.
| upofadown wrote:
| I have recently been trying to figure out something like that
| as well. The best idea I have come up with so far is to convert
| the RSS feeds into an email feed with rss2email and then filter
| the email feed.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I wrote a simple rss2email application, which includes the
| ability to only send emails for feed-entries matching/not-
| matching a given term.
|
| I find it useful for simple filtering, but of course it being
| email you can also filter at the receiving side, as well as
| the sending side.
|
| https://github.com/skx/rss2email/
| axby wrote:
| "Newsboat", a command line RSS reader, definitely has keyword
| searches and a ton of other functionality for complex filtering
| and grouping: https://newsboat.org/
|
| I haven't found a good Android based RSS reader that does that,
| though I haven't really looked.
| mvaliente2001 wrote:
| I prefer to use webpages as much as possible. I liked google
| Reader, and once they killed I migrated to
| https://theoldreader.com/
| frouge wrote:
| That's where I think browsers are failing us (slightly). For me
| the best way to use RSS would be directly along bookmarks. The
| browser would should next to the title the number of unread
| posts and that's it! That would be amazingly simple to use and
| efficient.
| berkes wrote:
| Firefox has (had?) that. Called live bookmarks.
| indymike wrote:
| As a reader of written word content RSS was wonderful because it
| allowed you to consume content without distraction, in the format
| you liked it. For written word publishers RSS was problematic,
| especially if you were trying to make a living from writing
| because it stripped out all the paywalls, ads and/or traffic
| tracking you needed to make a living.
|
| For non written content RSS is still huge (it's how podcasts work
| https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirement...).
| Incidentally there are some very good podcast clients, and some
| treat an RSS feed as podcast with a missing media
| download/stream.
| makecheck wrote:
| I would have to assume they could track accesses to the RSS
| feed if they wanted to. And they could embed text-only ad
| messages.
|
| The problem isn't that these things became impossible, the
| "problem" for ad companies is they couldn't do it in their
| preferred obnoxious, overdone, and intrusive style.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Remember when every Facebook page and profile had an RSS feed?
| And FB messenger was XMPP compatible so you could use it with
| bitlbee and your favourite IRC client. And you could email people
| @facebook.com and it would show up in their messages.
|
| Google gets all the "credit" for killing RSS, but there's plenty
| of dismay to be spread around!
| axby wrote:
| It is sad, but some good news for anyone considering trying
| RSS:
|
| * all reddit subreddits can be turned into an rss feed by
| adding ".rss" after the URL, e.g.
| https://reddit.com/r/news/.rss
|
| * YouTube still supports RSS, but it is well hidden and I am
| worried that it will be silently removed at some point.
|
| * HN supports RSS!
|
| * many major news sites still offer RSS, though it's often hard
| to find the feed. Reuters shut it down about 1.5 years ago
| Anthony-G wrote:
| I unsubscribed from Reuters' feeds a couple of years ago but
| it seems they still provide some feeds:
| https://www.reutersagency.com/en/reutersbest/reuters-best-
| rs...
| axby wrote:
| I had no idea this existed. It looks like it's
| "reutersagency.com", which may be different from
| reuters.com?
|
| These are the results that I get in my RSS reader, they
| seem very different from https://www.reuters.com:
| newsboat 2.10.2 - Articles in feed 'Reuters News Agency'
| (10 unread, 10 total) -
| https://www.reutersagency.com/feed/?taxonomy=best-
| regions&post_type=best 1 N 2021-10-20 06:44 1.2K
| Reuters exclusively reports Renault sees bigger production
| hit from chip shortage; market reacts
| 2 N 2021-10-18 06:52 1.3K Reuters exclusively reports
| India presses Qatar for delayed LNG as power crisis mounts
| 3 N 2021-10-18 06:50 1.4K Reuters reports Fortescue's
| Forrest says Australia must commit to carbon cuts to keep
| green energy advantage 4 N 2021-10-18 05:15 1.3K
| Reuters reveals U.S. to lift restrictions Nov 8 for
| vaccinated foreign travelers; market reacts 5 N
| 2021-10-18 04:00 2.5K Reuters impact: U.S. lawmakers say
| Amazon may have lied to Congress, Senator Warren urges
| breakup, India retailers want probe after Reute 6 N
| 2021-10-15 06:56 1.4K Reuters reveals how the illicit
| copper trade is sapping South Africa 7 N
| 2021-10-15 06:46 1.4K Reuters exclusively reports Italy
| considering extending bank merger incentives to mid-2022
| 8 N 2021-10-15 06:43 1.9K Reuters first to report
| Evergrande's $1.7 bln Hong Kong HQ sale flops; CEO in Hong
| Kong for restructuring, asset sale talks 9 N
| 2021-10-14 11:44 1.9K Reuters ahead with key Turkish
| Central Bank news; market reacts 10 N 2021-10-14
| 08:38 1.5K Reuters ahead with news of German economic
| growth downgrade
| soorajsanker wrote:
| Totally!
|
| May be a random thought but I feel like social media is crowded
| and having multiple platform is going to kill the "SHARING"
| part and it has now become "what gets higher ranking" kind of a
| stuff.
|
| Imagine if all social media posts were having RSS feeds and
| with one application we could all scroll through different
| feeds!
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That's a really sad development. If companies like Google or
| Facebook had been as big in the 90s I bet we wouldn't have
| E-mail but a set of proprietary, incompatible E-mail like
| services.
|
| It seems these giants get big with the help of standards and
| then they kill them once they have enough momentum. "Embrace,
| extend, extinguish" is not only a Microsoft thing.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| We _had_ a set of proprietary incompatible email-like
| services.
|
| AOL and Compuserve -- let's use numeric addresses so it's
| kinda like phone numbers, right?!
|
| Also, whatever MSN tried to be when it first escaped from the
| lab.
|
| Didn't Novell have some kind of email-substitute messaging
| product that they tried to jam into their proprietary TCPIP
| competitor, as well?
| tomcooks wrote:
| It's in the nature of capitalism to optimize and eat whatever
| resource is available to promote growth, companies are the
| result of this process and so is the forementioned EEE
| strategy. Noncompliance to said strategies is how you keep
| the sharks uninterested.
|
| This means don't use Facebook, don't promote Facebook, don't
| use Facebook logins in your app, etc.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The original email, from the 70's was a standardization of
| the set of proprietary, incompatible email-like services
| people had at the time.
| gilmore606 wrote:
| anyone else ever have a UUCP bang-path email address? good
| times.
| kazen44 wrote:
| another good example of this is Google's influence in regards
| to web standards.
|
| things like http2/3 and quic for one. and their influence on
| the browser market aswell.
| musingsole wrote:
| It's now extending into the very infrastructure of software
| development with kubernetes.
| spc476 wrote:
| it's just Google externalizing their training costs.
| pjerem wrote:
| Well, I remember. That was when the word << standards >> meant
| something.
| masklinn wrote:
| Mostly it was the usual: large corporations use standards to
| gain a foothold when they're minor players, then either drop
| or proprietarily extend said standards to they can close it
| up when they get a dominant position.
| foepys wrote:
| Don't forget that you need to use OAuth for everything so
| even if they have a simple API, they can shut your whole
| app's access down at any time, not just individual users.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'll give them one pinch of excuse, they probably thought they
| could design a better system. Start all new, from scratch, no
| more rss/mail/irc... It failed.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's all about platform lockin. Although RSS sorta lives on at
| facebook. You can go to "public" groups and get an RSS feed.
| Anything that requires a login though is inaccessible to RSS
| for privacy reasons(?) .
| harshitaneja wrote:
| I was in school back then and had recently discovered email
| spoofing and thought of trying it with facebook email addresses
| and it would send the email message as messenger message from
| spoofed to the spoofee without it being visible on the
| spoofed's chat. It led to so many shenanigans over the holidays
| that winter.
| Torwald wrote:
| The problem with RSS [in the context of the OP] is that you can't
| see other subscribers.
|
| This is what adds a lot to the social feel of SM, everyone can
| see who follows who.
|
| This social feel is part of the reason why non-tech folks use SM
| over traditional Blogs to post online. If the goal is to move
| people back on to the more traditional web, then it is necessary
| to create this social feel.
|
| Now, the anonomity of RSS also has advantages, but similar to how
| the OP added "Webrings" to RSS, social proof could be added to
| RSS with another tool. So that all subscriptions can remain
| anonymous if wanted, while still providing the social feel.
|
| Disqus is a little bit like that for comments. Disqus is also
| proof of concept for the OP that such "organic" additions to the
| standard blog concept.
| lonk11 wrote:
| I am building https://linklonk.com and I think it adds a social
| proof to content discovery while preserving anonymity. Here is
| how it works:
|
| - When you upvote an item, you connect stronger to users that
| also posted that item and to RSS feeds that posted this. For
| example, if you upvote "Post 43: Intentionally Making Close
| Friends -- Neel
| Nanda"(https://linklonk.com/item/827619236936941568) then you
| will get connected to 6 users that upvoted that article and the
| RSS feed https://www.neelnanda.io/blog?format=rss
|
| - The recommendation algorithm shows you other items upvoted by
| users and feeds you are connected to.
|
| - At the top of you recommendations you see content from users
| and feeds that you are most strongly connected to (ie, those
| who have posted more useful content for you).
|
| With this mechanism you discover users and feeds that post
| great content just by rating content, without having to know
| the users personally. Yet, when you see your recommendations
| you know that they are coming not from random people, but from
| people who found useful for you content before. I think, that
| is a more meaningful version of social proof than the aggregate
| counts of likes in the traditional social media.
| nabla9 wrote:
| RSS is good because it removes people and behaviour, not
| because it attracts people.
|
| Benefits of RSS:
|
| + Removing people who only read and discuss titles.
|
| + Removing reactionary first comments.
|
| + Removing posts that try to engage.
|
| + Removing people who come clicking trough Fb and Twitter.
| Torwald wrote:
| RSS is good because it is an open web standard and not owned
| by a single entity.
| pacifika wrote:
| I think you are on to something. But is t that was hn is?
| libertine wrote:
| I think you're right. It doesn't mean it's the _healthier_ way,
| because with social comes the whole social-feedback system
| attached to it (upvotes, dogpilling, etc), but it is indeed the
| mechanic that seems to drive user engagement.
|
| It's also what's leveraged to keep users consuming content and
| to return for more.
|
| You see who follows who, who has many followers that might be
| worth following, etc etc... the closest the web had to that was
| the visitor counter? Or like you said the comments box like
| Disqus?
|
| As an anecdote:
|
| Many years ago I used to visit a "technews site" that used
| spread theories/inside info about the tech industry (mostly
| just copied from forums in the form of "leaks"), very mediocre
| with no basis for 80% of the content, and the whole thing about
| it was fanboyism around AMD vs NVIDIA vs INTEL and PC vs
| CONSOLES, all the engagement happened in Disqus comments -
| spreading memes, making fun of eachother, insults, etc.
|
| I stopped visiting that site because it was trash, sometimes
| they got things right though. A few weeks ago I was watching
| some game trailer, and in the part of the Tech Reviewers
| quotes, there they were - WCCFTech! "I thought, wow, how the
| hell did they get to be side by side with the big boys?" And I
| knew the answer, fanboyism + FUD and a comments section to let
| people vent. Good for them.
| notriddle wrote:
| The other reason is that using RSS involves copying and pasting
| URLs.
|
| Why does everyone overlook this?
| xenomachina wrote:
| With an extension (or native browser support, which used to
| be common) this is not the case.
|
| Sites with feeds can link to them in their metadata using
| <link rel="alternate" href="...">. This would cause a
| subscribe button (usually the orange RSS logo) to light up in
| the user's browser. Clicking it would automatically submit
| the URL to the user's preferred feed reader (or if there were
| multiple linked feeds, let the user choose one).
| 0des wrote:
| Can any of the downvoters on this comment enlighten me about
| what they are seeing in this comment that those like myself
| don't see? It seemed like an otherwise normal comment, it just
| contradicts what some of the rest of us might think. That's not
| something that is wrong or worthy of being silenced.
|
| Can we give this person another chance and maybe, in the spirit
| of the weekend, allow a contradictory opinion to appear in this
| discussion?
| cartesius13 wrote:
| HN downvotes are not different from any other social media
| platform. It doesn't matter what the rules says, people will
| downvote things they disagree and that's it. It always comes
| to this and I personally don't see how it could be any
| different, even if I myself don't do it
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Downvoting should cost _something_. Half a point, say. Or
| you only get a limited number of downvotes per week.
| _Something_.
|
| Also, you should be required to give an actual reason other
| than "I disagree".
|
| I know that's not what "the rules" say. "The rules" are
| wrong.
| 0des wrote:
| I find that more often than not, addressing it the way I
| just did brings the comment back into discussion rather
| than just brushing it aside. No need for leveraging rules
| that may or may not be followed, sometimes an impartial and
| rational third party inquiring buys enough 'hang time' for
| an otherwise okay comment to reach more people before it is
| returned to the gallows.
|
| If I may, for a moment: filter bubbles are a useful but
| also dangerous thing, and if we allow ourselves to silence
| small irritances eventually, like with opiate dependency,
| we will find ourselves in the situation where the smallest
| pains are now grave and world-ending issues that stop
| everything and must be addressed/stopped immediately. I
| often disagree with the downvoted comments as well, however
| still upvote and vouch when they're rational yet
| contradictory.
|
| Two sided discourse is one of the most important things to
| me, and in a way I think that we are losing the ability to
| disagree with each other, and that is a suboptimal outcome
| of our heightened ability to filter our data streams to
| weed out opinions we don't like. It's not enough for some
| people to disagree now, you must pursue the dissenter until
| you've destroyed their will to continue.
|
| Surely it does not need to be spelled out how this can
| result in a chilling effect of outside thought and rational
| debate.
| pvg wrote:
| _I find that more often than not, addressing it the way I
| just did brings the comment back into discussion_
|
| It doesn't, it just starts a pointless offtopic meta
| discussion. The forum guidelines explicitly ask you not
| to do that because it's boring. The votes, on average,
| tend to sort themselves out without such 'interventions'.
| [deleted]
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > The forum guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that
| because it's boring.
|
| Is it not possible that the "forum guidelines" are
| _wrong_?
| 0des wrote:
| Forgive me for challenging you, but if the rules for
| downvotes are not applied evenly, where is the bar for
| which other rules must be applied evenly? It is saturday,
| and presumably with the exception of Dang and a few
| others, none of us are 'on the clock' so to speak when we
| are here, despite what our procrastinations during the
| week may indicate. If a topic on the front page list is
| boring, you pass it up, and all is right with the world.
| Why is this different with comments? (this is a
| rhetorical question, but I'll receive the response if
| you'd like to add one)
| mattcwilson wrote:
| Just a friendly observation from a third party that this
| particular thread has in fact gone meta about HN,
| commenter behavior, and the site rules. Which are pretty
| clear.
|
| I wonder if it may be the case that these rules have good
| reason to exist, and if so, then the discussion you are
| looking for seems to have happened at least once before,
| a long time ago.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| If the point keeps coming up, perhaps it _needs to be
| addressed_ rather than being modded into oblivion.
| pvg wrote:
| It has been addressed many times and there doesn't seem
| to be an obvious way of further addressing it beside
| doing exactly what the receipts-for-downvotes people
| want. Neither the mods nor most HN users want that,
| though and the arguments against it remain compelling.
| pvg wrote:
| Because the goal of the site is things of intellectual
| curiosity and repetitive things are not that. Repeated
| stories are usually duped off the front page and meta
| about votes is far, far more repetitive than the
| occasional story dupe or story that's not interesting to
| some person or another. It would absolutely eat the place
| alive. If you're interested, though, there is years upon
| years of moderator and user commentary on this:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
| krapp wrote:
| The only rule regarding downvoting is to not complain
| about being downvoted. Aside from that, everything is
| fair game, including downvoting for disagreement.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Indeed. I don't actually agree with the original commenter.
|
| But that doesn't mean I want to shut him or her up.
| leemailll wrote:
| I think google tried this and failed
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| Man, this makes me miss StumbleUpon :(
| productiveyogi wrote:
| Super. That was such a good site. Tried looking for it a few
| years back and got redirected to "similar" websites.
| netfl0 wrote:
| This makes me miss Web 1.0.
|
| https://sheldonbrown.com/
| causi wrote:
| Dang, I miss when I could click on a category and read
| everything in that category. Now you just have to punch terms
| into a search box and hope you have the patience to get all
| the way through an endless scroll of pages that may or may
| not fit what you want to see. If you want to, say, make sure
| you read every review of Sony headphones your favorite modern
| review site did, you just can't. You just have to hope you
| found them all.
| rtkaratekid wrote:
| I love that site. I've fixed a few classic bikes with its
| help.
| 14 wrote:
| I have only had one experience with RSS and that was back in the
| day with EZtv. I would subscribe to all my favourite shows and
| when they would air on tv the RSS feed would find it
| automatically and download the show. I remember someone asking me
| how come I didn't have cable and was telling them that I just
| stream my tv. Said look, loaded up my computer and went to my
| downloads. What made it even better was since I am on the west
| coast the show I wanted to show him had already aired on the easy
| coast 3 hours earlier so streamers had already upped it
| commercial free. So I had my show commercial free prior to it
| airing locally. That was my experience with RSS and yes it was
| wonderful.
| krono wrote:
| I'm not going to post links here, but Sonarr, Readarr, and
| other "arr"s are FOSS projects that provide similar automation
| for monitoring and downloading of shows and films.
|
| Illegal, immoral, but can't deny they're interesting projects!
|
| Edit: For any over-eager MPAA agents who might be reading this:
| I'm not actually running these applications :)
| hyproxia wrote:
| >immoral
|
| [citation needed]
| krono wrote:
| There's no accounting for taste.
| cabalamat wrote:
| What's immoral is copyright law, which in practise (if not
| in theory) is largely a way to allow big corporations to
| rent-seek.
|
| The internet was developed under the radar of a lot of
| powerful institutions -- both corporations and governments
| -- and gave unprecedented power and control to individuals.
|
| The whole history of how the internet has developed from
| 2000 onwards is the powerful institutions attempting
| (mostly successfully) to castrate the internet and make it
| a place that doesn't threaten their power any more.
|
| I want the old internet back, though I expect what I'm more
| likely to get is a jackboot stamping on a human face
| forever.
| [deleted]
| ourcat wrote:
| OPML is the tree. RSS are the vines. Items (articles, podcasts
| etc.) are the fruit.
|
| And with OPML's ability of 'inclusion' (to any remote tree or
| branch), it makes creation, curation and 'harvesting' the fruit,
| a joy.
| upofadown wrote:
| >But over the years RSS became synonymous with other protocols,
| like Atom, that are designed to do the same thing.
|
| These days, if you poll a "RSS" feed do you sometimes get an Atom
| feed? You don't see many explicit references to Atom anymore...
| canyon289 wrote:
| Should I take this to mean atom is irrelevant these days? Ive
| been looking into creating an RSS Feed for my blog, but there
| is Atom option as well so wasn't sure what to pick, and many of
| the references I found are quite old
| axby wrote:
| I have seen this, and just now realized that my client
| supported both RSS/Atom feeds and I didn't realize there was a
| difference.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I use twitter as my RSS because it allows chronological sorting.
| It's great, no noise, only what i want, i can like stuff i want
| to keep. Pity that everyone has abandoned RSS but OTOH RSS did
| not evolve to keep up with the social media craze. Liking / or
| some way to register reactions should be part of the spec.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| This discovery engine sounds like something that would be amazing
| to have integrated directly into your RSS reader. I'm not sure
| I'd use it standalone, but I absolutely would appreciate it
| alongside my usual feeds.
| maximedupre wrote:
| That cool, I remember how RSS feeds were the shit even just a
| decade ago.
|
| Then they slowly faded away from mainstream adoption. Once
| Mail.app removed RSS, it seems like RSS were no longer part of my
| life lol
|
| These days, I love Twitter and Reddit, not sure I'd be able to go
| back to RSS.
|
| I really appreciate the transparent nature of RSS, but so long as
| Twitter has a "Latest" feed - a feed that lists all tweets in
| chronological order, I'm good.
| saikatsg wrote:
| RIP Aaron
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| > I think the ideal online community is decentralized
|
| Communities have to be centralized - or at least appear so. Human
| beings simply are shit at cooperating with people outside of
| their in-group. An in-group requires a close-knit simple
| structure identifying with one or more ideas or people. People
| need to put their faith in centralization: central leadership,
| central consensus, a place, a thing, an idea. If you tell people
| "we're going to build a community of loosely-knit people and
| groups", they will not have much faith in the idea and the
| community will be weak. As much as you like the _idea_ of
| decentralization, you have to hide the idea of it from the users,
| and simultaneously provide things to make them feel closer and
| directly connected.
| masswerk wrote:
| I think, everyone who hosts a blog or thinks of hosting one
| should think about RSS - it's not that difficult, even, if you
| run custom software. (It's worth it. Even, if it's just a
| statement about not surrendering to SM.)
| mox111 wrote:
| I used to blog quite a lot, but nowadays I often worry that my
| ideas are far too sporadic and random to deserve a single, self-
| contained blog post of their own, so I end up writing nothing at
| all.
|
| Twitter incentivises this spontaneity, but I do think there
| should be some middle ground here.
| uallo wrote:
| There is. Blog posts can be as long--or as short--as _you_
| want. Microblogging is a thing.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging
| karaterobot wrote:
| Maybe we can just call a mulligan on the last fifteen years of
| internet media. No blame, no finger-pointing.
| chenster wrote:
| Long live RSS!
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| As a regular downloader of BBC Radio podcasts, RSS has been a
| godsend since they redesigned their site around the godawful "BBC
| Sounds" mobile style. After the initial pain of tracking down
| each programme's own site (which contains a link to its RSS feed)
| and sticking them in Thunderbird, I can now easily download all
| the podcasts I want even quicker than before the Sounds redesign.
| [deleted]
| beckman466 wrote:
| i've heard the SSB protocol [1] be described as a "more advanced
| RSS". it's basically a distributed social network built on the
| ideas of RSS.
|
| [1] _SSB: An Identity-Centric Protocol for Subjective and
| Decentralized Applications_ ,
| https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2019/proceedings/icn...
| streamofdigits wrote:
| How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such
| as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications? If you
| have been using RSS readers you'll have noticed that over time
| even quality sites (not ironic) slowly remove their RSS feeds and
| leave only the usual social media links.
|
| This means that they are providing their audience with no option
| but to have a social media account (where their interests can be
| tracked and cross-referenced, data mined etc), not to mention
| that they endorse and promote particular for-profit private
| companies (which is in general not done lightly, unless there is
| a partnership or other disclosed interest)
|
| New open source tools like this engine, especially if they
| integrate more with this other wonderful piece of tech, the email
| client could create a more healthy information retrieval
| environment. The time to think anew about how to evolve a
| positive digital life is now and the pieces of the puzzle are all
| around us.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Easy peasy.
|
| Make RSS provides as much data as publisher/provider/broker
| want, enforce a common set of metadata when (re)sharing content
| so stats can made and funnels be monetized and add a mandatory
| opt-in et voila.
|
| What ?
| cabalamat wrote:
| > mandatory opt-in
|
| What does this mean? To me, "mandatory" implies compulsory,
| while "opt-in" implies optional, i.e. not compulsory.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Mea culpa. I meant mandatory as in "there MUST be an opt-in
| mechanism for users to agree to sharing their metadata". So
| the privacy conscious crowd can still read RSS items and
| share them without automatically sharing metadata.
|
| Without a way for authors/producers/adnetwork to extract
| values from the RSS format there's no incentives for them
| to use it. So give them what they want _if_ we want.
|
| Big words for what is just UTM added to the specs.
|
| I am saying this tongue in cheek because I doubt people
| would opt-in if there's nothing for them in it. They opt-in
| for facebook and google because they get
| gmail/googlesearch/facebookfeed but with RSS they already
| have everything they want.
|
| RSS is hard to monetize without putting it behind a
| paywall.
| ako wrote:
| Problem is that RSS is not in the interest of the publishers,
| but mostly serves the interest of readers:
|
| * Hard to keep users on your site - in an RSS reader you just
| open the next interesting article, most likely from another
| site. So it reduces page views.
|
| * Harder to serve ads - RSS readers show the text of the
| articles, not all the other stuff on the page of the publisher
|
| * Easier to steal content - other sites have an easy way to
| take your content and republish it on another website.
|
| * Harder to track your users - most rss readers just show the
| content, not all the javascript nonsense required to track the
| user.
|
| * Harder to monetize - for profit sites like to keep their
| readers behind a paywall, but how likely is it that you'll pay
| for a new site, if your RSS feed shows content from 20+ news
| sites? You can't pay for all of them, so you'll most likely pay
| for none.
|
| If you want RSS to succeed, it needs to bring value to the
| publishers.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Podcasts have been distributed via RSS forever, and it did
| not stop publishers from growing followers, advertise or
| charge for content. I call BS that RSS doesn't work for
| publishers, it was killed by social media because "the feed"
| turned into the main way to consume content on the web.
| clairity wrote:
| > "If you want RSS to succeed, it needs to bring value to the
| publishers."
|
| rss does bring value to publishers: viewers/listeners. that
| publishers want more than that is a separate issue.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Viewers/listeners are not valuable by themselves. They are
| only valuable if the publisher gets paid for them, and they
| get paid via advertising (or a subscription fee). RSS does
| not provide advertising revenue for publishers. It could
| work with a subscription model, I suppose, but I am not
| sure there is the demand to sustain it.
| clairity wrote:
| you're looking at the situation too narrowly. publishers
| & content creators _also_ want esteem and influence,
| which they can bank to get paid later (perhaps through a
| related but separate effort, like product 'reviews').
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| RSS is definitely a problem for publishers that depend on
| ad revenue and "engagement". In RSS it's difficult to
| develop dark patterns to attract more attention.
| grumbel wrote:
| The biggest issue with RSS in my eyes is that it tries to
| replace the Web instead of just being a better way of viewing
| the Web. The info RSS provides should be extracted out of the
| HTML itself by your Web browser, not a separate document
| provided by the content creator. It should be like a cross
| between Bookmarks and ReaderView on steroids. Leaving it up to
| the content creator just makes adoption much harder than it
| needs to be and is a large part of the reason why the semantic
| web never really went anywhere.
|
| But as long as browser manufacturers don't really care, I don't
| see much chance of anything changing. Bookmarks haven't changed
| one bit in 25 years, despite offering so much potential for
| improvement. And it's not just Google's fault either, even
| Firefox removed that little bit of RSS integration that they
| had some years ago, when they really should have done the
| opposite and made it more useful and flexible.
| RNCTX wrote:
| I agree about the "replacing the web" observation, however I
| think the nostalgia is warranted in that it's people
| splitting hairs between the lesser of two evils.
|
| While RSS replaced web sites (particularly aesthetically),
| they are less nefarious than social media companies and
| search companies whose only goal is to use the content of
| others to sell ads and their own products.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| The one-word answer to "why this keeps happening?" would be
| "advertising". RSS makes it much harder to control ad
| inventory. Obviously the bigger problem here is how content
| creators/publishers are paid for their work.
|
| Both Google and FB are often blamed for the current state of
| things, but the ways in which they impact open standards such
| as RSS differs.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I always blame chrome for demise of RSS. When chrome came, all
| other browser (firefox, opera, even internet explorer) had
| native RSS view support. To this date, chrome opens RSS as XML
| garbage e.g. open this in Chrome https://quakkels.com/index.xml
|
| Chrome came, all other browsers lost, then finally Google
| killed Google Reader and we had nowhere to go. That's how I
| believe it happened.
|
| What's still worse is that Chrome DOES NOT SUPPORT RSS
| natively.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > I always blame chrome for demise of RSS. When chrome came,
| all other browser (firefox, opera, even internet explorer)
| had native RSS view support. To this date, chrome opens RSS
| as XML garbage e.g. open this in Chrome
| https://quakkels.com/index.xml
|
| I tried opening this link in Chrome and Firefox, and it looks
| exactly the same in both.
| julianlam wrote:
| They do both look bad now (raw XML). However at least in
| Firefox, there used to be some basic styling.
|
| Remember the little blurb in the header about how "this RSS
| feed doesn't provide its own styling so we've added our
| own"?
|
| It seems to have gone away now too.
| cabalamat wrote:
| Chrome doesn't care because either Google doesn't care, or
| because Google is actively hostile to open web technologies.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Google killed their very nice (at the time) RSS product,
| Google Reader, so they could push people to Google+, their
| solution to compete with Facebook.
| pphysch wrote:
| I can see the rationale behind Google's (mis)judgment.
| Social media was steamrolling RSS in popular adoption,
| and seemed like the future. Sometimes, new technology
| _does_ replace old technology. But there were a lot of
| issues with planning and execution.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> But there were a lot of issues with planning and
| execution.
|
| That's a very generous understatement:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/10/18134541/google-plus-
| pri...
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/thanks-for-nothing-
| jerkface/
|
| https://mashable.com/archive/google-plus-history
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I absolutely _despise_ Chrome. It nags me into Google 's
| ecosystem and it just feels wrong to use a window to the
| internet owned and controlled by the biggest bully on the
| internet - Google.
|
| Chrome is the reason for many failures of the web experience.
| Support Firefox, it is equally as good IMO.
|
| I'd like us to not see a day where we get "Only supported on
| Chrome" warnings.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > open this in Chrome https://quakkels.com/index.xml
|
| Chrome just displays xml. Edge does the same. And Firefox,
| displays it as if it was mangled html, so no xml tags are
| shown.
| j_koreth wrote:
| It's too bad too. Firefox used to support RSS till recently
| I believe. I wonder if Pocket had anything to do with it.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech
| such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications?
|
| RSS being killed is a part of the commodification/privatization
| of knowledge. RSS simply gives users too much freedom.
|
| _" What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech
| companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and
| thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this
| rent-seeking, and what we're seeing with a lot of tech
| companies is that their telos is little more than "rent-seeking
| as a service". It's basically baked in to their business model.
| Once you've fully developed the technology underpinning your
| service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing
| payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want
| to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated
| to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting
| taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity."_
|
| https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86
| the_snooze wrote:
| You're seeing this in the podcast space, where content is
| normally distributed via RSS. You have big players like
| Spotify buying up podcast productions and making them
| exclusive behind their app. Luckily, right now open RSS
| distribution is still the norm for the overwhelming majority
| of podcasts, but who knows how long that'll last.
|
| That quote is absolutely right with the MO of a lot of tech
| companies these days. They don't actually innovate on tech
| itself---that's too risky and expensive. Instead, they
| innovate on business models to make themselves toll operators
| on everyday life.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Luckily, right now open RSS distribution is still the norm
| for the overwhelming majority of podcasts, but who knows
| how long that'll last.
|
| Presumably it will probably last so long as advertising
| pays the bills for those for whom podcasts are a directly
| commercial endeavor. At which point they'll go behind
| paywalls and/or die.
| wffurr wrote:
| Paywalls and RSS aren't mutually exclusive. Ars Technica
| offers full-text RSS feeds for subscribers. Substack
| sites have RSS for public posts but also some subscriber-
| only posts. Podcasts could work similarly; I'd be
| surprised there weren't some already.
| ghaff wrote:
| Fair enough. Although I suspect that a bunch of new
| subscription services is not what most people campaigning
| for RSS are looking for.
| coldpie wrote:
| Patreon provides RSS feeds for creators, that's how
| paywalls are done for most podcasts these days.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "They don't actually innovate on tech itself---that's too
| risky and expensive. Instead, they innovate on business
| models "
|
| So true. When you look at most of the unicorns most of
| their tech could have been done 10 or 20 years ago.
|
| Considering their size the innovation output of giants like
| MS, Google or Apple is really low.
| pphysch wrote:
| One of the great contradictions of the Californian Ideology:
|
| On one hand, freedom is sacred, especially freedom of speech,
| information, etc.
|
| On the other hand, private property is sacred, whether it is
| physical or intellectual.
|
| Yet intellectual property laws directly impede the free flow
| of speech/information. So what'll it be, private property or
| freedom?
| bavell wrote:
| What makes this specific to California instead of the US as
| a whole?
| beckman466 wrote:
| they most militantly 'defend' their intellectual property
| system and have also monopolized many communications
| networks
| pphysch wrote:
| See here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That's libertarianism, not specific to California. In
| principle everybody has a lot of freedom but in practice
| the powerful accumulate more and more power and freedom for
| themselves at the expense of others.
| [deleted]
| cabalamat wrote:
| > How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech
| such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications?
|
| I'm not sure this is doable without government regulations.
|
| I'm not sure it is doable _with_ government regulations, as to
| do it properly would require politicians who 're both clueful,
| and not captured by vested interests.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| well governments (and the massive number of associated
| government funded sites) could start by always having RSS and
| _not_ sending their citizens towards the social media
| platforms with gratuitous links and endorsements.
|
| that doesn't need much regulation, just an elementary ethical
| / moral code
|
| but you are right about the limited role of governments in
| resolving this. this is not a complex / high risk / long term
| project where you need them. actually just the people in this
| thread could probably solve this from a technical
| perspective.
|
| the elephant in the room is the publishing industry. one
| could excuse an initial decade of them being dazed and
| confused, but its 2021 and they should wake up and smell the
| coffee.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > well governments could start by always having RSS [...]
| that doesn't need much regulation
|
| But it does require them to be clueful.
|
| Does anyone think that Joe Biden or Boris Johnson could
| give a coherent explanation of RSS (or any other piece of
| computing technology)?
| streamofdigits wrote:
| you are giving the massive number of people _below_ the
| figureheads at the very top an easy pass... government IT
| is a major, major, segment and technology, protocol etc
| choices they make can have huge influence.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| I don't think the trend can be reversed. I don't blame social
| media, I think RSS is incapable on the supply side as well.
| Quality content producers are not going to use RSS because
|
| - HTML/CSS/JS allow for much more sophisticated, expressive
| presentations than simple markup, using video/images/canvases
| and whatnot.
|
| - News is much more frequently updated now than in 2005. With
| RSS, the update cycle is not in control of the content creator.
|
| - RSS is largely incompatible with paywalled subscriptions.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > - RSS is largely incompatible with paywalled subscriptions.
|
| But it doesn't have to be. It really comes down to the
| clients having so many different ways to authenticate and
| therefore a complex UI. Consumers and producers also struggle
| with how to manage so many subscriptions.
|
| Full disclosure: just started working for a company trying to
| streamline paid podcasts.
| mawise wrote:
| RSS works great with HTTP Basic Auth. This is the approach
| I'm using with Haven[1] to expose private personal blog
| content via RSS. In this manner, each user gets a dedicated
| RSS link of the form:
| https://name:token@example.com/rss.xml
|
| You can even use the same tools to prevent login sharing
| such as checking how many IPs the URL is fetched from etc.
|
| [1]: https://havenweb.org
| Crespyl wrote:
| I've also seen some private/paid RSS feeds just using
| tokens in query parameters (I think Patreon and Ars
| Technica do this), eg
| 'https://www.patreon.com/rss/foo?auth=...'
|
| I'm not entirely sure what the benefit of one over the
| other is, unless some RSS readers/podcast apps have
| issues with Basic Auth or maybe it's just easier to fit
| into existing code server-side.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| On the first point, you only need to include a summary of the
| resource for notification purposes. The idea is that the user
| still visits the site to consume the actual content
|
| I am not sure what you mean with the second point, the timing
| of updates is under the full control of the content creator
| no?
|
| The third point is quite relevant. Some sites ask that you
| subscribe to get updates (via email). Obviously they want to
| have better visibility of their audience rather than have a
| large set of passive (lurkers). That is a legitimate choice.
| D13Fd wrote:
| You're missing two big ones:
|
| 1. RSS readership can't be effectively tracked, and regular
| readers may transition to RSS, so RSS content becomes a black
| hole of readership.
|
| 2. RSS can't easily be monetized via ads or a paywall
| (although some sites have managed it, like Ars Technica).
|
| It sucks, but most sites have to make money somehow, and RSS
| just isn't very conducive to that.
| ajvs wrote:
| FOSS front ends like Nitter provide a RSS feed for Twitter
| feeds. Invidious for YouTube and Teddit for Reddit also work,
| though the original sites in this case still provide their own
| RSS feeds.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Newpipe for Android is also good and available in the f-droid
| market.
| imglorp wrote:
| How long until momma bird locks out whatever api nitter is
| using?
| RNCTX wrote:
| https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
|
| Not possible as long as the pages are not walled behind a
| login.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The point of Nitter is that it uses the API their official
| web client (which is a JS SPA) is using. They can't lock
| out Nitter without also locking their own frontend out.
| [deleted]
| hazelnut wrote:
| Social media sites offer a simple way to share links with their
| circle which drives back more traffic than just one user
| consuming the content through RSS.
|
| Driving more traffic means more money. It's a self-made problem
| by the content creators.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| thats a very good point, the ease of "propagating" the news
| of an RSS update surely plays a role in decisions publishers
| make
|
| but its more a client-side issue, the degree to which the
| social graph of a person (e.g their list of email or phone
| contacts) is easily accessible / allows forwarding with
| comments etc. maybe the problem is that client app
| functionality has remained stagnant over decades?
|
| also consider that a lot of that easy social media virality
| is actually part of the problem
| sam2426679 wrote:
| RIP, Aaron Swartz
| phgn wrote:
| My personal gripes with RSS:
|
| * No pagination, and in practice it's very inconsistent how many
| recent posts are included. This makes the feeds only useful for
| new things, not as an archive.
|
| * I don't actually want the full post content in the main feed, a
| description for every item would suffice. For a blog like
| WaitButWhy, the RSS XML is huge.
| hwers wrote:
| To play devils advocate, the pagination on e.g. twitter is
| really crappy too (non existent)
| axby wrote:
| I am a big fan of RSS but I strongly agree with both of your
| points. I have only used it for checking out new things. Though
| having the option to fetch the full feed without visiting the
| website would be a great feature. I use an android app that
| seems to do that by scraping the site, I love it.
|
| That being said, for some reason that escapes me, some news
| sites don't make it easy to see a list of articles at all
| (looking at you, https://cbc.ca/news). And when writing this
| comment, I see that if you scroll down far enough you can see
| more articles in this really annoying tile format (the app is
| better but I hate downloading a ~300 MB app when a <10 MB RSS
| reader is all I really want).
|
| TL;DR: somehow it isn't just RSS but even somewhat publicly
| funded news sources seem to prey with the "get you stuck in an
| endless cycle of scrolling while you're trying to find the
| content you want" trap.
| a1371 wrote:
| For your first gripe, I think it wouldn't add anything over
| crawling a website. If you only want to archive the content,
| with semantic HTML you can easily know where the article is. It
| seems like a solved problem when browser reader modes can
| extract the data so well.
|
| For your second gripe, perhaps a separate "excerpts" feed would
| do it. I know some podcasters publish the same content over
| multiple feeds for this kind of customization.
| ttepasse wrote:
| Repeating myself: There is a spec for feed pagination. But it
| depends on opt-in and small work by the feed publisher.
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005
| kgwxd wrote:
| I wish faster moving RSS feeds, like HN and reddit front pages,
| kept anything that makes it there longer, maybe for a full day.
| I'd like to be able to open my reader just once a day and have it
| check all feeds and catch the full days activities but, the way
| they work now, it'll only get what happens to be there at that
| point in time.
| armoredkitten wrote:
| If you are into self-hosting, I've been using Miniflux for the
| past six months or so and it's been great. There are lots of
| options for RSS readers in that space, but the advantage is
| that they can be checking feeds "in the background" without you
| needing a dedicated program open.
| timbit42 wrote:
| This is why I keep my RSS reader open 24/7 on my desktop and
| have it updating my feeds every 30 minutes.
| ttepasse wrote:
| In theory there is a spec which would enable full feeds via
| paging, enabling RSS clients to go back in time until the
| beginning of the feed. In praxis ... well ... specifications in
| RSS-land ...
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005
|
| You best bet is subscribing to a server hosted RSS client like
| Feedbin which being always on can check more often, can
| subscribe via Websub/Pubsubhubub or tailors their schedules for
| refetching via caching, ttl or analysing the posting schedule.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > I'd like to be able to open my reader just once a day and
| have it check all feeds and catch the full days activities but,
| the way they work now, it'll only get what happens to be there
| at that point in time.
|
| the un-user-configurable and un-opt-out-able straightjacketed
| sorting algorithms in these walled gardens are all about
| getting users 'hooked' and creating FOMO
| andrewgleave wrote:
| SnipRSS.com[1] clips web content which may not belong to a feed
| e.g. random web article, into your own RSS feed which you can
| then curate and share etc.
|
| "For all the great content that doesn't have a feed"
|
| [1]https://sniprss.com Disclaimer: I built it :)
| Vinnl wrote:
| There are also many similar tools mentioned in the comments on
| my Show HN for a similar tool: Show HN: RSS feeds for arbitrary
| websites using CSS selectors [1].
|
| Edit: ah OK, it's slightly different: SnipRSS allows you to
| curate arbitrary content from the web into a single RSS feed,
| whereas the tools I referred to periodically check a single
| source and generate an RSS feed from that. Sorry for the
| confusion.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27739568
| andrewgleave wrote:
| The idea behind SnipRSS was to use OG and other metadata to
| extract title, description and an image which can then be
| edited in the app.
|
| Primary users are those curating content who have little
| technical experience and those who don't want to write
| selectors but are happy with a browser extension.
| junon wrote:
| RSS as a concept is wonderful. In practice, getting fulltext is
| rare, and clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of
| functionality, or they're bloated and include a bunch of shit
| I'll never use.
|
| An RSS reader that lets me keep things in my task bar as a small
| popup, and shows notifications, is all I want.
| mrzool wrote:
| > In practice, getting fulltext is rare, and clients for RSS
| are either POC skeletons of functionality, or they're bloated
| and include a bunch of shit I'll never use.
|
| You just need the right tools. Miniflux[1], which I will never
| get tired of recommending at every occasion, has a scraper
| built-in, so you just need to enter one or two css selectors
| and it fetches the text for you, ready to be consumed in its
| excellent, HN-inspired web interface or in your client of
| choice.
|
| If you can't be bothered to self-host there is a hosted option
| which is only 15$/year.
|
| Miniflux is the reason I'm a heavy RSS user today (I follow
| just over 300 feeds at the moment) after years of being
| intrigued by the possibilities of the standard but ultimately
| unable to stick to it due to wrong/inadequate tooling. Miniflux
| was my turning point.
|
| [1]: https://miniflux.app
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| Notifications? I don't wand another distraction. I want to read
| the news when I want to, because 99.9% of the things in the
| world don't need my immediate attention. A half day delay is
| fine.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > clients for RSS are either POC skeletons of functionality, or
| they're bloated and include a bunch of shit I'll never use
|
| There's definitely some good options on the Mac side. I use
| Reeder, which does exactly what I want it to and little more,
| and there's NetNewsWire which feels like it's been around for a
| million years at this point.
|
| > In practice, getting fulltext is rare
|
| This is very true, and unfortunate. The app I use has an option
| to pull the text from the linked page (much like a browser's
| Reader Mode), but it's not perfect and often totally mangles
| things like image galleries. It's a shame, because I find a lot
| of the feeds I follow have content I want to read but their
| websites are unreadable; for every three lines of text there's
| an embedded video or "articles you may be interested in". It
| destroys my ability to take the article in.
| calpaterson wrote:
| It is often cost prohibitive to put the full text in the feed
| because of all the clients that neither handle the inbuilt TTL
| value, nor use http caching correctly. Large (in terms of
| bytes) RSS feeds are one of the key places where etags and
| conditional requests are useful but many clients just ignore
| all that and repeatedly request the whole feed.
|
| This sounds like it couldn't possibly matter but it's actually
| quite easy for a full text RSS feed to be the vast majority of
| bandwidth for a site.
| jhot wrote:
| Miniflux enters the chat.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > In practice, getting fulltext is rare
|
| It depends on the use case.
|
| One may use RSS just as preview, to decide what to read and
| what not, rather than use it as replacement of a website.
|
| Using RSS as preview, actually, while it may seem just an
| irrelevant layer of indirection, can actually prevent excessive
| consumption :)
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Sure, but it'd be ideal if clicking on it would load the
| fulltext rather than jump to my browser and load the source
| in its full, bloated glory, or at the very least with
| formatting I can't control.
| fxj wrote:
| I use inoreader.com for reading my rss feeds but also for
| finding new ones. They have a large RSS directory of all the
| subscribed feeds of their users at their site which you can
| search by keywords and create your own RSS feed or just
| subscribe to them.
| axby wrote:
| I would agree until I found:
|
| * newsboat (command line) for desktop: https://newsboat.org/
|
| * Feeder on android (which also scrapes the full article
| content in most cases):
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
|
| Both are definitely not bloated, though I don't know if there
| is any decent notification functionality in newsboat. It is
| open source though, so maybe it's not that hard to add. You can
| configure it to auto refresh so I've just kept it open when
| I've been following the news obsessively.
| mynameismon wrote:
| Ironically, it doesn't parse Hacker News' RSS page.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| Good eye - send a pull request and help correct the oversight!
| mynameismon wrote:
| Wait, where?
| lewiscollard wrote:
| Playing with the code, I think there's actually three
| problems here:
|
| 1) I don't think doesn't recognise relative paths in the tag,
| which HN uses and is entirely valid, e.g.:
| <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"
| href="rss">
|
| 2) The code does HTTP requests in more than one way (aio,
| `get_response_content`, `get_request`, and whatever
| feedparser uses internally), and only one of those sets the
| User-Agent header properly, which is probably causing it to
| get flagged as a not-nice bot
|
| 3) ...and once you fix those problems you will likely get a
| 503 for requesting the feed too often during testing :)
|
| [Edit: and no, I'm not _just_ complaining; expect some pull
| requests over the next few days.]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Is there a way to "RSS" everything? I want to see a feed of
| Videogamedunkey videos, artist tour pages, @dril's tweets, etc.
| all just sorted chronologically.
|
| The feed should also start empty and only show things I tell it
| to.
| ttepasse wrote:
| Youtube still has feeds; instead of using Youtube's
| subscriptions I simply have a folder in my Feedreader. Some
| Feedreader services also to have a Twitter integration but I
| found that overwhelming. Also some have a Newsletter-to-RSS
| gateway, which is rather practical.
|
| The big things you can get into RSS-land; it's worse with
| smaller stuff like some random artists tour page.
| rakoo wrote:
| There are multiple projects that "RSS-ify" websites with no RSS
| feeds. rss-bridge (https://github.com/rss-bridge/rss-bridge) is
| one of them.
|
| I personnally use fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/), a slightly
| different "news" reader. Contrary to all other readers it
| doesn't give you an infinite flow of all posts, but rather a
| reverse chronological list of who has updates. It's the same
| paradigm as most IM apps, but instead of people it's sources
| and instead of messages it's posts.
|
| Fraidycat can parse a lot of sources and all the ones I care
| about (including youtube channels, twitch channels, facebook
| public pages) are properly handled
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'll look into that. Thanks!
| psdmm wrote:
| ttHrk jsymt lmd@ lSlb@ Hrk@ htzzy@ bstmrr -
| https://mesael.com/25/%D8%AA%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%83-%D8%AC%...
| apatters wrote:
| I am a big fan of RSS one of the reasons (alluded to by this
| article) is the type of content that tends to get exposed via
| RSS.
|
| Frequently the type of content that gets syndicated via RSS is
| long form and non-commercial.
|
| It turns out that these two properties produce a pretty good
| signal to noise ratio which filters out precisely the kind of
| trash that has ruined the web over the last decade or two (long
| form content at least has the possibility of teaching you
| something or presenting an idea with some kind of rigor; and
| since RSS isn't great at monetization, the worst offenders in
| media tend to deprioritize it).
|
| Of course RSS is a very imprecise filter, but it's basically the
| antithesis of a Twitter or Facebook feed, where everything is
| short form and you tend to see whatever serves the platform's
| commercial interests (i.e. their definition of engagement).
|
| This matters to me because at a certain point I realized -- I
| have basically never read anything short form on social media
| which enriched me in a meaningful way.
|
| I have learned a lot from studies, reference works, long form
| analysis, and books -- basically all the quality knowledge I
| possess has come from one of these sources.
|
| At best social media has given me occasional links to these
| things (scattered among an ocean of junk information).
|
| It's mostly because of how RSS originated with blogs I guess, and
| who was involved in designing it. But for whatever reason it has
| been far more valuable to me than any other form of content
| syndication online.
| maximedupre wrote:
| > Of course RSS is a very imprecise filter, but it's basically
| the antithesis of a Twitter or Facebook feed, where everything
| is short form and you tend to see whatever serves the
| platform's commercial interests (i.e. their definition of
| engagement).
|
| At least with Twitter's "Latest" feed, you get everything in
| chronological order, without manipulations from the algo
| (AFAIK).
|
| As far as the signal-to-noise ratio goes on Twitter, depending
| on the quality of people you follow, you will also get exposed
| to many amazing long-form articles.
| runnerup wrote:
| Same with YouTube's "Subscription" tab.
| maximedupre wrote:
| Yep. I used to be an Instagram user. Stopped cold turkey
| when they removed chronological feed.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| One interesting footnote about a specific type of longform
| content; recipes are categorically not under copyright in US
| law, but specific collections of them (like a specific cookbook
| formatting) can be, and recipes are also theoretically
| copyrightable if they contain "substantial literary
| expression." Which is why most food blogs usually have a
| longform essay of some personal anecdote right before the
| actual recipe you're looking for.
| daniel-s wrote:
| https://based.cooking/
|
| Just recipes; no stories, no bloat.
| KronisLV wrote:
| The context behind why and how the site was created should
| be in Luke Smith's videos which are linked at the bottom of
| the page, in case anyone missed it:
|
| > About this site
|
| > Founded to provide a simple online cookbook without ads
| and obese web design. See the story of this site unfold in
| three videos:
|
| > https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/a-demonstration-of-modern-web-
| blo...
|
| > https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/the-war-against-web-bloat-
| continu...
|
| > https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/soydevs-destroyed-epic-style-
| by-b...
|
| I'm not sure i agree with Luke on everything, or even that
| his tone is always conductive to productive discussion, but
| there is definitely a lot of merit in creating small and
| fast websites without any unnecessary bloat nowadays.
|
| The "Website Obesity Crisis" presentation also has stuck
| with me ever since i ran into it:
| https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
| 867-5309 wrote:
| I always thought that was simply for SEO
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Even regular cookbooks these days will have a bit of fluff
| before the recipe for this purpose. Though in a cookbook
| pictures of food also serve this purpose.
|
| Some examples from cookbooks: https://www.maangchi.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2015/01/mul-naen...
|
| https://www.cookbookdivas.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/10/Cel...
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| I always thought it was to push the useful information as
| far down the page as possible so you have to scroll by a
| bunch of ads to get to it.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| It's also a sales tactic. Mary Jo Rose is selling you her
| story so that you will buy the idea that you should
| subscribe and keep reading her posts even if you have
| nothing to cook, and eventually use her Amazon link to
| get 10% off paper towels.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This is worse with web but is old as time.
|
| It used to be common for ingredient sellers to issue
| recipe books that would extoll the value of their goods,
| trash their competitors', and the recipes would usually
| include the ingredient even if it didn't do anything for
| the particular food you were trying to make. (E.g. "our
| flour is pure, unadulterated, and not bleached using
| toxic ingredients unlike our competitors who also eat
| babies", which was a more effective marketing tactic
| before the existence of food regulatory authorities
| curbed the worst excesses.)
|
| The recipe on the side of the box is a much smaller-scale
| version of this.
| dgdosen wrote:
| Good use of "signal to noise ratio"
| graiz wrote:
| RSS is really based on polling and that's not great. It also
| doesn't provide a lot/any analytics back to the content site to
| give attribution of content readership.
|
| I think the idea is super interesting but it's not surprising
| that Google/Facebook and other ad networks made it less relevant.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Can't you track who subscribes to the RSS feed, because of that
| polling you mentioned.
|
| RSS is trivial to monetize, there are other reasons why
| Google/FB killed it such has having to educate people first, or
| not wanting to promote a free standard that would have not
| allowed them to monopolize the market
| leephillips wrote:
| Some readers support pubhubsubbub or whatever, so no polling is
| required, if the site uses it.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| That's exactly the point; I don't want them to know I am
| reading.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| What's your favorite RSS reader?
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| My own, of course. https://airss.roastidio.us
| axby wrote:
| I like https://newsboat.org, though it is command line and
| since I started using an android RSS reader, I've stopped using
| newsboat as much.
|
| I also like Feeder for Android, free, no ads, scrapes full
| articles in a wonderful way:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
| timbit42 wrote:
| QuiteRSS on desktop. Flym on Android. Both are free with no
| ads.
| axby wrote:
| I used Flym for a while and went to download the source one
| day, in fear of it suddenly disappearing, and apparently
| updates are blocked by Google, and the dev gave up? I'm very
| curious to know more about it:
| https://github.com/FredJul/Flym
|
| Since then I've used Feeder, it's similar (also free, no ads,
| can scrape full articles) but is missing a few things that I
| liked about Flym. It was easy to export my list of feeds
| (OMPL file, I think) and import into Feeder: https://play.goo
| gle.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
| beardyw wrote:
| Feedly. Occasional sponsored story. Android and desktop Chrome
| synchronised.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| well Google Reader back then was the best and obliterated any
| single commercial reader's offering. Since Google nonsense
| about Google+ and Reader's demise, well inoreader isn't that
| bad as a RSS client.
| imutemyteam wrote:
| yes, as a member of the RSS, I agree that the Rashtriya
| Swayamsevak Sangh is wonderful :P
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