[HN Gopher] I Miss RSS
___________________________________________________________________
I Miss RSS
Author : behnamoh
Score : 214 points
Date : 2022-01-05 21:04 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wilcosky.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wilcosky.com)
| jrue wrote:
| Douglas Adams, [how to learn to love the internet]:
|
| 1. everything that's already in the world when you're born is
| just normal;
|
| 2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn
| 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can
| make a career out of it;
|
| 3. anything that gets invented after you're 30 is against the
| natural order of things and the beginning of the end of
| civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten
| years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
|
| (I too miss RSS)
|
| [1] https://internet.psych.wisc.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/532-Maste...
| sporkland wrote:
| I don't miss RSS. I still get plenty of content via RSS in
| theoldreader. I even get HN > 100pts feed via RSS via Twitter.
| neurotrace wrote:
| I have a private Discord server that acts as an RSS reader via
| MonitoRSS[1]. It works great because Discord has really good
| notification configuration. Some feeds I want to know about
| immediately, others I only want to see when I check the news, and
| because I can mute channels I can let my friends use it as well.
| They set up their own feeds and I don't have to be alerted to it
| but I can go look if I'm interested in what they're reading
| lately.
|
| All that is to say that RSS still works. What's missing is the
| original content creators of the early RSS world. Nowadays, most
| people create small, easy-to-write, easy-to-consume content in
| one of the walled gardens since the notifications, interactions,
| and network are all included for them.
|
| [1]: https://monitorss.xyz/
| smm11 wrote:
| I'll say again, Blogger is all we ever needed.
| mcescalante wrote:
| I use RSS daily with Miniflux. Tiny Tiny RSS is another popular
| self hosted option and there are a number of freemium platforms
| like Feedly & Inoreader. I prefer to self host primarily for
| cost/no ads or tracking/private data. It's true that social media
| platforms don't support it but that's never been my personal use
| case - every news site or discussion group I like to keep up with
| has a feed and it's worked great for me.
| creddit wrote:
| Every few weeks there's a post lamenting the death of RSS and
| here I am still using RSS every day.
| indymike wrote:
| I rediscovered RSS about six months ago when I switched back to
| Linux from MacOS and realized Akregator was still part of KDE.
| Most actual long form content - blogs, news, company websites,
| podcasts all still have RSS feeds, and once you have 10-20 good
| ones loaded into Akregator, it's actually a pretty good
| experience.
|
| Most of the big socials dropped RSS feeds a while back for the
| same reason their APIs became less useful: they monetized with
| ads being mixed in with content. Allowing users to view their
| stream outside the UI literally cuts into the ad revenue.
| axegon_ wrote:
| So do I. There was plenty that needed improving but fundamentally
| the idea was awesome. What's more is that I miss Google reader
| like nothing I've ever missed. I've been pitching the idea to
| rebuild it to multiple people, even started working on it on my
| own when I got no response but fundamentally it's too much work
| for a single person... Truly a shame.
| diordiderot wrote:
| How do you set up an RSS feed?
| wtf77 wrote:
| FreshRSS + NetNewsWire.
|
| I'm an old school guy and love my curated list of feeds.
| [deleted]
| petecooper wrote:
| (2021)
|
| Sorry for the low effort post, y'all.
| verifex wrote:
| I miss having a standard for uniform syndication that could be
| read and updated IN-BROWSER. RIP Firefox RSS feeds.
| frizlab wrote:
| Edge has added in browser support for RSS if I'm not mistaken
| squarefoot wrote:
| Dropping support for RSS feeds was an ill decision from them;
| thankfully there are extensions to restore and extend the
| functionality.
|
| https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
|
| https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/
| breput wrote:
| If you liked Sage or similar extensions in the XUL-based
| Firefox, check out Drop Feeds: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/drop-feeds/
| desireco42 wrote:
| Clearly based on the comments, that tech isn't a problem here,
| but economics.
|
| I don't think we should return RSS as it was pretty bad format,
| but something that would serve like that and have some more wider
| adoption or approval would be fantastic.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Hm. I have so many rss feeds subscribed that I can't even read
| them all. What exactly does this guy miss?!
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Thank you Matt for keeping RSS alive. It's incredible that every
| wordpress site has it effortlessly.
| hintymad wrote:
| My current workaround for not having RSS is to follow twitter
| accounts and subscribe to email updates. Not ideal, but helps me
| get by.
| paxys wrote:
| The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple
| truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications
| became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling
| every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is
| horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and
| devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way
| forward, but it's just sad that there is no accepted standard for
| it.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| I'd assume that somebody who misses RSS will also be happy with
| pulling only few times a day and not every few minutes. That's
| why push became so popular but with a different subset of
| users. Everybody goes through a push-positive phase but some
| (like me) come to a conclusion that this is unhealthy and
| distracting in the long run - hence the fond memories of
| technology like RSS.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| FWIW my RSS reader is set up to only refresh manually when I
| open it and pull to refresh, and I like it that way. It's a
| much nicer way of reading than having everything yelling for my
| attention all the time.
| zaik wrote:
| XMPP is an accepted IETF Internet Standard with PubSub
| functionality: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html
|
| Sites like Movim (https://movim.eu/) offer an user friendly
| front-end for this protocol (building upon the ATOM format).
| You can login using any XMPP account and also self-host Movim
| instances.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Push notifications have a cost too, now you need the server to
| maintain state of all clients and notify them on changes. This
| has huge implications at scale, especially if it's extremely
| cheap or easy for new clients to spin up. Think about every
| single browser tab now requiring a server to maintain some
| state on the backend--that's a nightmare with billions and
| billions of users and tabs. Pull-based architectures have the
| nice effect that less popular content has almost no cost to
| continue serving and just falls into the background forever.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the
| simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push
| notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS
| reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for
| all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on
| most platforms and devices today. Pub/sub is the clear way
| forward, but it's just sad that there is no accepted standard
| for it.
|
| Polling isn't a requirement. If your reader is polling it's
| strictly because the author wanted to implement such a feature;
| that's it.
|
| There's also ETag and last-modified which are used when
| checking and have very little overhead (most especially in the
| case when the content has not changed).
| breischl wrote:
| >Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes
| every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and
| unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today.
|
| 1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate
| your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses
| (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly.
|
| 2) Most people then and now would go through an aggregator. So
| they'd really be talking to that instead of the source feed.
|
| 3) There were push notification standards out well over a
| decade ago, including RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > 1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate
| your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses
| (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly.
|
| Besides, assuming you're not hideously overcomplicating
| things, you'll just be serving a static file off disk. If
| your server is a raspberry pi, you ought to still be able to
| serve some 1000 requests/second if that is what you are
| doing.
|
| Assuming most RSS readers poll at most once every 15 minutes
| (which is a really high rate), you'll need at least a million
| subscribers before you need to get a second raspberry pi.
| jefftk wrote:
| Here is what I found looking at my server logs a few months
| ago: Feedly: 7min Feedbin:
| 15min Bloglovin: 30min Dreamwidth
| Studios: 30min Feed Wrangler: 30min
| NewsBlur: 30min BazQux: 40min
| inoreader.com: 1hr theoldreader.com: 2hr
| pine.blog: 24hr
|
| https://www.jefftk.com/p/looking-at-rss-user-agents
| blitzar wrote:
| Also worth mentioning the obvious, feedly etc is updating
| all the users on their platrom with a single call to your
| site (every 7 minutes in your case). No doubt they scale
| the update frequency by how popular it is on their
| platform / frequently updated / however often the ai
| decides it is needed.
| onli wrote:
| That's not true, but might be a common misconception. RSS rode
| the wave of the realtime hype at that time and has multiple
| standards for push notifications. RSSCloud und Pubsubhubbub are
| the two immediately in my mind, note that PuSH got turned into
| WebSub.
| paxys wrote:
| Multiple standards is the same as no standard. Yes there are
| many ways to do push-based RSS, but there is no single way
| that everyone uses.
| onli wrote:
| Wordpress does support both. You can make a blog on
| wordpress.com right now and you get both standards
| activated by default in the RSS feed. That takes care of
| half the web ;) (well, it would if it's also true for
| standalone Wordpress installations, which I don't know).
| And all relevant readers support at least PuSH. This is
| really not a standard problem, and I doubt the concept
| itself is part of the adoption problem.
|
| No, not having a way to subscribe when stumbling over an
| RSS feed was the main problem in my eyes, and the existence
| of a feed not being highlighted in browsers anymore.
| Firefox dropping support was not only an act of treason
| against the free web, it was also very effective in making
| it very hard for new users to understand how to use RSS.
| Not that chrome is any better. Here lies the problem, and
| that's where it could be solved.
|
| Add into browsers an icon when a site has an RSS feed, and
| let that point to a foundation managed site that points to
| RSS readers, where users can select their favorite. I'm
| 100% certain that would have a huge effect on adoption
| numbers.
|
| As this comment thread shows very well RSS is not dead at
| all, but it's not in the mass market right now and that
| could be changed easily enough.
| anthonyshort wrote:
| I think it was the sunsetting of Google Reader that triggered
| the downfall. I don't think I ever cared about push
| notifications for feeds. When you have your morning coffee,
| open up Reeder, refresh the feeds and read through a few
| articles.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't think it was even just a technical issue. Linear feeds
| of all content just died out to be replaced with sites like
| Hacker News / Reddit where you have ranked ordering and
| comments.
|
| As much as HN hates the out of order feeds, that's what the
| average user wants because most content is boring.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| > Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes
| every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient
|
| I think you're greatly overestimating this inefficiency.
| Especially for websites properly implementing the HTTP
| protocol. 'Push' requires a lot more complexity and it's also
| outside of the user's control. For fuck's sake, you can just
| serve a static file. We've been doing this for decades.
|
| Talking about control, my hypothesis is that it was the main
| driver of the downfall of RSS. It started when Google killed
| Reader and Facebook took control of what you see in the
| timeline. Users picking and choosing what/when to read is not
| compatible with the way the major gatekeepers of information
| drive engagement.
| emptybottle wrote:
| By extension, I miss when protocols were more front and center on
| the internet.
|
| These days most things are abstracted away by a web interface or
| app hosted in the cloud.
|
| Sure this makes a nicer UX, but it has the side-effect of
| creating walled gardens.
| gchokov wrote:
| Still alive and I use it on daily basis...
| acdha wrote:
| I still use RSS on a daily basis, and it's great. I like
| Newsblur.com but there are a fair number of options based on your
| desire to self-host and/or use social features.
|
| The primary thing I wish was better is a way to handle social
| commentary. Unfortunately this is an extremely hard problem to
| solve without allowing spamming and brigading.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| There were many rss to kindle services back than, that I really
| miss..
|
| The only bad thing about RSS I could find was following the news
| sites, where every news was equal, so "cat lost" and "massive
| bomb killed everyone in a city next to you" are treated equally.
| pwenzel wrote:
| I bought ReadKit for Mac a few years ago and still use it today.
| I still like having a nice standalone news reader. It even ties
| into my Instapaper account.
| timw4mail wrote:
| I follow Hacker News through RSS, as well as most webcomics that
| I follow.
|
| There is one webcomic I enjoy, but can't get an RSS feed, because
| it's on a service similar to WebToons.
| alserio wrote:
| Some days ago there was a ShowHN (if I'm not misremembering) of
| a tool to generate RSS for sites that do not support them. I
| haven't tried it but maybe it can be useful to you
|
| Edit: it wasn't a showHN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772540
| k1m wrote:
| If you're familiar with CSS selectors, you could try this that
| I work on to generate a feed from the webcomic site:
| https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| I'm still consuming plenty of stuff via RSS using the Mac app
| Vienna. I honestly don't spend as much time in Vienna as I did in
| Google Reader back in the day though - primarily because over the
| years more and more feeds went dead.
|
| It seems like different niches treat RSS differently - many of
| the webcomics I've subscribed to still publish via RSS. Even if
| the actual comic image isn't included in the RSS, there's at
| least a feed entry with a link to go to the site to view the
| comic. But my "Cars" category in Vienna is basically empty - I
| guess the various automotive blogs and magazines I subscribed to
| were run by folks who didn't care about RSS as they migrated
| platforms, etc. Or maybe they actively shut their feeds off to
| try to drive traffic to their homepages.
| julienpalard wrote:
| I'm still using r2e (rss2email), that's all I need.
| fsckboy wrote:
| it's embarrassing to admit (i mean, I have a CS degree from a
| Famous School(TM) and I'm an old school unix and C programmer),
| and it's been a long time since I've tried, but I could never
| figure out how to get RSS working. the instructions always had
| terms-of-art without explanation, like syndication or something.
| Like, I know what syndication is in terms of newspaper
| publishing, but that doesn't tell me if that's something I want
| to turn on or not. Like I said, it's been a long time so maybe
| that wasn't one of the words, but it just seemed like an insular
| world that I wasn't a part of.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| FWIW I use News Explorer for iOS/Mac (the syncing is great btw)
| and newsboat for Linux, and I've never been asked if I want to
| turn on syndication. I just add feeds and then articles from
| those feeds show up, and I read them.
|
| Unless you mean how to enable publishing an RSS feed for your
| own website? In that case I have no idea, and I wouldn't expect
| an old school unix/C person to know how to configure web things
| (speaking as one as well).
| twsted wrote:
| I use RSS and I am sad that it is not used universally.
|
| I do not miss Google Reader, because I don't think it was the
| right choice for a privacy point of view.
| gtsteve wrote:
| I still use RSS. I use Feedly to curate various RSS feeds and
| many website still have them, or at least the tech focussed ones.
|
| I used to be subscribed to more but some RSS feeds have such high
| traffic it's difficult to follow them, such as the BBC news feed.
|
| Feedly has a nice new feature [0] that makes an RSS feed out of a
| standard website, so that might be worth considering if you have
| some news sources that don't publish a RSS feed. Unfortunately
| this wouldn't work with anything that requires authentication
| like private Twitter feeds for example.
|
| [0] https://blog.feedly.com/easily-follow-websites-that-dont-
| hav...
| majormajor wrote:
| Same here. I still use it. Works fine with me, but then, I'm a
| bit old fashioned in that twitter/facebook/other social media
| isn't my news source.
| bisby wrote:
| When Google reader shut down, I moved to feedly for like a
| week. Then I started getting anxiety that feedly would shut
| down too. Because if google could kill off a product i relied
| on, anyone could. And that got me into self hosting and running
| my own services.
|
| ttrss was basically my first self hosted thing almost a decade
| ago. It was great. And then it turned out the guy running it
| was a bit not pleasant, and I didn't want to support that. So I
| recently migrated to freshRSS. Both work great, are open source
| and self hostable.
|
| And feedly hasn't shut down yet (probably just to spite me). So
| yeah, tons of options for RSS.
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| Google has shut down a bunch of popular services:
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| I wouldn't use them as a standard for keeping services up.
| bisby wrote:
| I'm aware. but also, they aren't the only company to shut
| down services. They do it more often and more flippantly
| than other companies, but other companies still do it from
| time to time. My response to the situation was drastic
| overkill, but now I get to rely on myself and I have a
| hobby I enjoy, rather than having to worry about what other
| companies decide to do with my data.
| jerf wrote:
| Having self-hosted for a long time, I find it's getting
| easier in a lot of ways what with Docker and all.
|
| I'm starting to wonder where "Sandstorm 2.0" is. Sandstorm,
| for those who don't know, was basically an attempt to make
| self hosting really viable, but was tragically ahead of its
| time because it predated Docker. So they burned tons of
| effort on sandboxing, and wrapping existing applications into
| their sandbox, and it was just too hard to port things into
| their world to get very many applications running.
|
| It seems like a project that would do that in terms of
| docker-compose files could be created for much less effort,
| and maybe not quite all the pretty-shiny they had. But as I'm
| struggling right now a bit to bring up a Bitwarden server,
| there's still pain around setting up the forwards properly
| and getting the Let's Encrypt certificate. Something that
| managed all this better wouldn't be too hard, and could just
| be slammed up on a small AWS instance or something would be
| easy. (Branching out to other services over time or
| something.) Plus setting up proper backups would be nice.
| We're so, _so_ much closer to being able to do this nowadays
| than we used to be... for instance, S3 has also become a near
| universal API, so backups using it have gotten to be easy but
| they can still be done without vendor lockin.
|
| Then it would be really easy to self-host an RSS reader or
| something.
|
| I'm hoping this will either prompt someone to consider this
| project, or prompt someone to tell me "It already exists, go
| here and here and run this docker command to install it."
| bisby wrote:
| I've taken the self hosting journey to learn tons about
| docker, and kubernetes. (Disclaimer: Kubernetes is overkill
| for self hosting). Not because it was the easiest, but
| because it was a great way to learn about a technology that
| has benefited me in my job.
|
| Nowadays, for me at least, it IS really easy to self-host
| anything. Get the docker image, add a deployment to my k8s
| cluster. Ship it. Getting to this point was less simple.
| tough wrote:
| Caprover is nice, Dokku and ledokku are OK too although not
| as finished maybe for the latter (GUI)
|
| I think that's the most similar think you will find to a
| Sandstorm 2.0 running on docker
| stavros wrote:
| I use Dokku for that (I can share my Bitwarden repo if you
| want, the entire thing is four lines or something). I also
| made https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster for things
| that weren't so "web server -> app -> database" and love
| it.
| alserio wrote:
| _still_? It 's not like there's something better out there
| _jal wrote:
| Like what?
|
| I'm unaware of other ways to get consistent listings of new
| content at various sites in a machine readable format.
| alserio wrote:
| I agree, I wasn't trying to be sarcastic. There's nothing
| like RSS
| _jal wrote:
| Ah, thanks, couldn't see your grin through the font I'm
| using.
| electric_mayhem wrote:
| This turned up in my RSS feed of hacker news.
|
| <shrug>
|
| Yes, google basically killed RSS through embrace, extend,
| extinguish.
|
| There's no money in democratizing self-publishing.
| eligg wrote:
| how do you have a RSS feed of HN? what links does it include
| out of the thousands that are posted here daily? also, can I
| ask you what service are you currently using for you RSS feed?
| thanks.
| altgans wrote:
| I personally use hnrss [1], and usually just display the
| frontpage [2].
|
| [1]: https://hnrss.github.io/
|
| [2]: https://hnrss.org/frontpage
| simcop2387 wrote:
| There's probably more of them but if you look at the html
| (browsers used to have an icon for this...) there's a <link
| rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"
| href="rss"> tag in there on the home page, so
| https://news.ycombinator.com/rss should be the feed
| [deleted]
| guessmyname wrote:
| As simcop2387 mentioned, Hacker News' RSS feed is here -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
|
| Unfortunately, it only includes the title and the
| submission's link, no content, which makes it a bit useless
| if your intension is to actually read the articles and not
| just the titles, which you can already do by visiting the
| home page.
|
| Some people have created complementary RSS feeds like this -
| https://github.com/cixtor/rssfeed#readme which basically take
| the submission's URL, download each article, and removes the
| irrelevant HTML tags using Mozilla's Readability.js library,
| although, in this case, it is a Go port:
| https://github.com/go-shiori/go-readability#readme . It seems
| to work quite well, with minor bugs here and there due to
| inconsistencies of modern web development.
| afrcnc wrote:
| RSS is still there, it's just that sites don't enable it anymore.
| Have loads of sites that don't do it that I have to follow
| manually through crawlers.
| Apreche wrote:
| RSS hasn't gone anywhere, you just stopped using it.
| FiddlerClamp wrote:
| Blogtrottr (https://blogtrottr.com/) still works for receiving
| emails when RSS feeds are updated, and many sites surprisingly
| still have them.
| u2077 wrote:
| While this topic is still on the front page, does anyone have
| some feed recommendations? Some of my favorites are Hackaday,
| Damn Interesting (including curated links), and hnrss for terms
| like side project.
| eligg wrote:
| gwern posted his rss feed which i think it is very interesting.
|
| it includes a lot of rss links and they are all divided by
| category.
|
| you can find it at this page https://www.gwern.net/Changelog
| (ctl+f "rss").
| karaterobot wrote:
| When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did
| RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I
| have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS
| every day.
|
| I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS
| feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective,
| RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.
| dmje wrote:
| Yeh, came here to say this. I love RSS, it is such a nice
| balance of enabling me to keep up with stuff but under my own
| terms and at my own speed.
|
| It feels very much like an alive protocol to me, and more in
| need than ever before given the insane calls on everyone's
| attention.
|
| And to the guy with "service shutdown fear" - just export your
| opml and bring it into another service. It's highly portable
| and imo totally mitigates any risk of getting locked in then
| locked out.
| jonp888 wrote:
| It's depressingly and irritatingly common to come across
| podcasts now which provide links to a dizzying array of podcast
| aggregation services but not to o their RSS feed, even though
| they definitely have one because it's how you feed data to
| these services in the first place.
|
| I suspect a lot of blogs only have a feed now because it's a
| default feature of the blog platform they use rather than
| because they see it as important.
| anyfactor wrote:
| How did you aggregate so many sources to read articles from?
| What is your discovery process? Do you have any recommendation
| where I can read good stuff from?
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| I started using feedly again this week for monitoring some
| listservs / mailing list archives, and also some craigslist
| searches for things I want to buy, all in one place.
|
| The sensible websites still offer it, and the ones that don't are
| a toxic dumpster fire anyway. Yes, I too remember the good old
| days when you could monitor facebook, twitter, etc all in an RSS
| reader, and then they stopped their RSS feeds. The thing to
| realize is that they also stopped being useful, user-oriented
| sites at the same time.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This topic comes up semi-frequently. I'm personally a fan of RSS
| but it certainly has issues:
|
| (For the purposes of this comment I'm mostly referring to Atom/
|
| 1. RSS is, at the end of the day, a syndication format, _not_ a
| feedback or posting format.
|
| 2. RSS feeds have no real concept of portability between devices
| or user agents. Kludges like OPML can be used to aggregate feeds
| for sharing across user agents, but they still don't actually
| store device-specific metadata that a user would like.
|
| 3. If RSS feeds contain both the article and the content, then
| there's both little incentive for the user to actually visit the
| site and no analytics for the author to understand which articles
| are popular. When authors put summaries in their feeds with links
| to the original article, they degrade the experience for the
| reader.
|
| Services like Wallabag which scrape and store article contents
| for later viewing seems, IMO, more Lin line with what users want
| while being fairly seamless for the author. There's also
| technologies like WebMentions for server owners to comment on
| other blogs or things like Usenet to freely discuss articles.
| [deleted]
| kenniskrag wrote:
| To 3:
|
| You can encode html in feeds. You just have to mark them as
| cdata.
| breischl wrote:
| >If RSS feeds contain both the article and the content, then
| there's both little incentive for the user to actually visit
| the site and no analytics for the author to understand which
| articles are popular. When authors put summaries in their feeds
| with links to the original article, they degrade the experience
| for the reader.
|
| Yeah, this is definitely a problem. FWIW, Ars Technica solved
| that by giving you full-text fees only if you pay for a
| subscription, which seems like a nice approach that more places
| could hypothetically use.
| altgans wrote:
| Haha, I literally just set up Newsboat[1] and this is my second
| article I read from the comfort of my terminal :) So far Newsboat
| is great: Everything configurable with text, fast and effortless.
| The key-binds took a little bit, but now I can even do stuff with
| hjkl!
|
| I will take the opportunity to ask about two issues I am
| currently facing.
|
| - Is there a feed for Github discussions?
|
| - Does anyone have some ideas/sources for bookmark scripts? I
| found [2], but I am not really sure what it does.
|
| [1]:https://newsboat.org/
|
| [2]:https://github.com/gpakosz/.newsboat/blob/master/bookmark.sh
|
| ---
|
| E: To add, in my opinion the killer feature of Newsboat is the
| fact that all links get appended to the article, similar to how I
| added the two links below my post. In Newsboat I can just press
| the corresponding number and open the link!
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| GitHub has per-repo feeds for commits and a private feed for
| all your events[1], but not for issues or discussions,
| apparently[2]. Of course, you can always roll your own using
| the API, a web server, and a cron job, even if it is a bit
| inelegant.
|
| [1] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/q/20535
|
| [2] https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/31
| Vosporos wrote:
| Well I was consulting my RSS feeds this morning so I guess the
| feeling isn't shared
| stillbourne wrote:
| I still use it everyday: https://theoldreader.com/
| didip wrote:
| To be honest, I don't. Websites like Reddit or Hacker News are
| better because they provide popularity scores into the links,
| helping me filtered out junk links.
| alserio wrote:
| I read HN via an RSS feed over the front page. You can filter
| out junks just fine.
| dqv wrote:
| I thought like this until I started missing posts from blogs I
| liked. I remembered why RSS feeds are useful and got back into
| it after a friend recommended a reader he uses. I also picked
| up a good habit from him: subscribing to releases/commits of
| projects I want to stay up-to-date with.
| gnull wrote:
| RSS is like your Facebook feed, not HN or Reddit. It's a
| different application.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| I used RSS to read Hacker News since its beginning or at least
| very close to its beginning.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads
| into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really
| feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started
| removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| It's really no different than email lists, medium, substack,
| etc. which are all working through ways of effectively
| monetizing themselves. RSS feed for your content + a patreon or
| similar place (that potentially gives you access to a premium
| RSS feed with more/expanded content) would totally be feasible.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| As a podcast producer, I wish we would wholesale replace RSS
| soon. It feels like the most paper clip nonsense at this point.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Replace it with what?
| trvr wrote:
| What would you replace it with? Bonus points if your answer
| is somehow de-centralized like RSS already is. ;-)
| caslon wrote:
| Daring Fireball has for years, and Gruber's gotten rich off of
| it.
| mawise wrote:
| I've been working on a self-hosted (not federated) model for
| social media called Haven[1]. RSS (with HTTP basic auth) was the
| obvious answer for "how do I track all of my friends' different
| sites?" It has the advantage that building an RSS reader into the
| system means you can follow other Havens and other websites in
| one place.
|
| [1]: https://havenweb.org/
| nightpool wrote:
| It's interesting to me that you say "Not federated", because
| RSS has always seemed to me to be one of the best-adopted
| federated protocols, after SMTP and HTTP. Indeed, the first
| generation of federated social media protocols were originally
| based on souped-up RSS feeds (Atom) with an optional PubSub
| enhancement (Pubsubhubbub, later renamed to WebSub).
|
| So when you say "not federated", what exactly do you mean? If
| you're publishing to your own site, and other people are
| reading it on their own compatible sites, isn't that
| fundamentally a federated model?
| runjake wrote:
| RSS is alive and well. I use it daily and I can't even keep up
| with the feeds I subscribe to (hundreds). In recent years, it has
| mostly replaced Twitter for me.
|
| I think what the author really means is "I wish I could read
| tweets as RSS." And the answer to that is that there are several
| different third party ways of doing so, if you wish.
| m4xm4n wrote:
| as other's pointed out, RSS is still here if you want to use it.
| It's just not ubiquitous as it once was.
|
| IMO the big thing that killed RSS ubiquity was Google Chrome not
| having support for it natively. Before that, Firefox, Opera,
| Safari all had RSS as well-supported, central thing and I
| remember finding it super annoying that Chrome didn't have it
| when it launched. But I kept using Chrome for the same reasons
| everyone else started switching to Chrome. And the RSS extensions
| all sucked. And eventually I stopped using them. And here I am,
| no longer reading RSS.
|
| But as Chrome ate up browser share, I'm sure fewer people went to
| RSS because it wasn't natively there and so the incentives to
| implement RSS decreased as fewer people expected it to be there,
| especially as many more people were coming online only having
| used Chrome.
|
| Oddly enough, I switched back to Firefox years ago and _could_
| get back into RSS at any point (or with any number of RSS reader
| apps, etc.), but the habit has stuck, and I now stay up-to-date
| on everything via email newsletters, Twitter and this orange
| website instead. it's worse and I hate it, but oh well
| packetlost wrote:
| My solution to this was getting a miniflux.app subscription and
| pinning the tab/setting it as my home page. I got directly to
| this page via an RSS feed.
| TekMol wrote:
| RSS is still alive and kicking. I came here via RSS.
|
| But the masses browse a locked down web. That is true.
|
| We might have another shot at an open web for the masses via the
| whole crypto movement.
|
| If content goes on decentralized blockchains in the future,
| nobody can lock the content down like big tech did for Twitter,
| Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc.
|
| Projects like Arweave show how it is possible to store huge
| amounts of data on a blockchain without using much resources.
|
| If we get there, it will be trivial to build blockchain-to-rss
| bridges. I am ready to build some to get my favorite content into
| my RSS reader.
|
| My feeling is that there might be a way towards a decentralized
| web via financial incentives. In a decentralized web, crypto
| currencies can float around freely. Making it easy for the actors
| to earn. Old platforms will probably be slow to open up to crypto
| currencies.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Oh please go away.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Alright, I'll bite.
|
| Consider a "decentralised" blockchain system that does the work
| of _The Pirate Bay_ - providing hashes of particular files,
| along with their names, so that people can select and request
| data from the P2P network.
|
| How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in _any way_?
|
| Additionally, how does this system help with the "censorship"
| issues that _The Pirate Bay_ has? Even when _The Pirate Bay_
| remains up, that doesn 't mean anybody's seeding.
|
| And a blockchain-based system _has_ to have this limitation. If
| _all_ the data is _directly_ on the blockchain, nobody can
| actually download it all, so the blockchain becomes
| unverifiable and ceases to have any cryptographic properties at
| all. (In short, there 's no benefit to a blockchain at all.)
| TekMol wrote:
| How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in any
| way?
|
| You cannot make a Twitter-2-RSS bridge because Twitter block
| access to the data. In a decentralized system, access to the
| data is inherent. Even when The Pirate Bay
| remains up, that doesn't mean anybody's seeding
|
| That is where the financial incentives come into play.
| Seeding will be economically incentivised.
| If all the data is directly on the blockchain, nobody
| can actually download it all
|
| Blockchains have come a long way since Satoshis version in
| 2009. We have approaches now where participants only need to
| download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the
| network as a whole keeps the chain intact.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _In a decentralized system, access to the data is
| inherent._
|
| Well, yeah - but we already have that. It's called the
| Fediverse. No blockchain in sight. (In fact, it predates
| Bitcoin.)
|
| > * That is where the financial incentives come into play.
| Seeding will be economically incentivised.*
|
| The margin for any given piece of content will be low, so
| there's an economic incentive to honour takedown requests,
| no matter how fraudulent or unenforceable, if the effort to
| check whether they're valid is lower than the expected
| average reward minus the expected average legal cost.
|
| > _We have approaches now where participants only need to
| download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the
| network as a whole keeps the chain intact._
|
| We had those back in Satoshi's time, too. They work by
| having n centralised trusted nodes, then asking all your
| peers to double-check what you got from those trusted
| nodes. That approach is, surprisingly enough, also
| vulnerable to censorship!
|
| (Also, I don't really think your proposed scheme is good
| enough to have Satoshi's name associated with it. The
| innovation of Bitcoin was the coin melting pot thing, not
| the blockchain; Satoshi's original blockchain, which
| Bitcoin still mostly uses, was just a worse version of Git
| repositories.)
| j_koreth wrote:
| I don't want to be a naysayer but how would content
| moderation in regards to spam and illicit things work in
| this scendario?
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| >I came here via RSS.
|
| next time try starting off with a non-lie
| woofcat wrote:
| Isn't https://news.ycombinator.com/rss a thing?
| commoner wrote:
| Yes, and hnrss also has customized RSS feeds for HN:
|
| https://hnrss.github.io
| [deleted]
| ewired wrote:
| Mirror.xyz currently renders HTML from its Arweave backend, but
| not RSS, which is a bit disappointing, as there are a few
| Mirror blogs I'd love to have in my news reader. If it's
| capable of rendering HTML, RSS should be just a few lines of
| code away, but I can't find any repository for the frontend to
| try and implement it myself. More disappointing is the overall
| reactions to this comment including totally unhelpful comments
| that are basically just "OMG GTFO" and likely violating HN
| guidelines.
| frizlab wrote:
| I've come to this post from an RSS feed of hacker news
| freediver wrote:
| Very nice to see the author uses Flarum (https://flarum.org) an
| open-source forum software to power his blog. Very innovative
| use!
|
| We also use Flarum to power our user feedback site for Orion
| browser https://orionfeedback.org another example of Flarum's
| ability to adopt to different use cases.
| beermonster wrote:
| I continue to still use RSS daily.
|
| Feedly and Innoreader are both good and use various apps and or
| extensions that hook into those two. It's one of the best ways to
| quickly scan content from multiple upsteam sources and a decent
| reader makes for a pleasant reading experience too.
| Fnoord wrote:
| I use FreshRSS (because it works in the macOS and Android RSS
| readers I use) behind a Wireguard VPN. So, nobody can access it,
| except myself.
| beambot wrote:
| Still a core staple of my consumption (e.g. Newsblur), but it
| really does feel like Google Reader's sunsetting inadvertently
| killed RSS feeds.
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(page generated 2022-01-05 23:00 UTC)