[HN Gopher] It's time for an RSS revival (2018)
___________________________________________________________________
It's time for an RSS revival (2018)
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 200 points
Date : 2022-12-23 13:31 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I have been using RSS for the last 10+ years and have not been on
| social media for almost at least that long.
| jjulius wrote:
| HN is social media.
| jraph wrote:
| HN has an RSS feed by the way:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
| deafpolygon wrote:
| If you want to call it that - it's more of a forum, than
| modern social media. I meant Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, et.
| al.
| c3poa wrote:
| Wow, that is my goal now. I'm curious, what RSS readers do use
| on mobile?
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Feedly is the best thing I've found for iOS.
| themadturk wrote:
| NetNewsWire on iOS and Mac.
| agiacalone wrote:
| Reeder on iOS is pretty good. Been using it for years across
| multiple versions
| saturn_vk wrote:
| I still have `Press` - an old android rss reader app for
| android - installed and hooked to my self-hosted aggregator.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I don't read RSS on mobile. Only at a desktop when I'm ready
| to read.. otherwise I just end up mindlessly scrolling.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| RSS is too lean, it's a format, the majority of people don't know
| what it is or how to use it. A lot of sites don't even support
| RSS anymore. Like IRC, its userbase is tech people. Sorry guys,
| you don't make up the rest of the world...
|
| It's an outdated concept, we all know people don't surf the web
| anymore. And the larger it will get, the less likely people will.
| Have you tried using RSS, just measly collecting your favorite
| sites with the off chance that they support it? It's a mess and
| no surprise it died as everyone flocked to Facebook, Twitter,
| etc.
|
| People need some sort of platform and that's why ActivityPub /
| Fediverse is a lot more promising. Social networks aren't the
| problem, just the one's we've been using.
| pdimitar wrote:
| It's time for this, it's time for that...
|
| Imagine how much further away humanity would be if these critics
| actually sat down and produced what they think is missing.
|
| I have a family to support and I'm slowly and painstakingly
| crawling out of a huge hole both in physical and mental health.
| And my job is fairly demanding.
|
| I don't have the bandwidth. Many others don't have it as well. So
| whoever feels so strongly about stuff -- by all means, please
| create the thing! You'll be celebrated.
|
| Historically it's been pretty evident that "raising awareness" is
| a very frail strategy that doesn't achieve anything short-term.
| edem wrote:
| I'm in an unique position that I have half a year now to
| produce...well whatever I choose to produce. What is the thing
| that you're missing most?
| pdimitar wrote:
| Distributed chain-of-trust RSS would be nice as a start.
|
| Above everything else though, I am missing a decentralized,
| globally automatically replicated, blockchain-like storage
| network.
|
| Think software releases. Package X releases version 1.3.11.
| We should have that in an IPFS-like storage network + several
| hashes (SHA-2, SHA-3 and what have you) so it can _never_ be
| tampered with. We should also have that version linked to the
| previous one -- 1.3.10 (a la Bitcoin transactions I guess).
|
| That's only one application. Another one would be: a network
| of friends and families all sharing e.g. huge photo travel
| albums. Or, if they are into it, torrented movies or music.
| Game hacks even. Whatever, it should not matter.
|
| Wanna dive deep into a rabbit hole? Here:
|
| - http://www.nncpgo.org/ (pay no attention to bad site, the
| idea of the project and what has been coded so far is solid)
|
| - https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/nncp
|
| - https://www.complete.org/nncp/
|
| That's what we're missing. Everyone constantly acts like
| hosting 10GB somewhere is a huge deal and I am honestly sick
| of it.
|
| Were I to retire financially tomorrow I'd work tirelessly on
| all this until my brain can no longer do programming.
|
| We need a new internet. Badly. We need it 10 years ago.
|
| BONUS POINTS: ability to automatically exchange keys in a
| neat UI e.g. I send a special message to a friend: "Join my
| inner circle of shared storage" or some such, they click it
| and the software does authentication and checking if both
| parties are who they claim to be, issue new keys (so them
| being compromised has a minimal impact). Think ZeroTier
| and/or Tailscale but even more self-hosted and even more
| reliable.
| [deleted]
| zagrebian wrote:
| Feedbro is by far the best feed reader.
| yunruse wrote:
| I'm becoming a real fan of using RSS for anything that fits it -
| websites, YouTube [0], email newsletters [1]; even books [2]!
| Honestly I'm tempted to start putting summaries (hacker news,
| stack exchange, reddit) in my feeds, just to keep me from endless
| scrolling.
|
| [0] I think Feedly can handle this, but YouTube may have disabled
| this natively, which is a shame.
|
| [1] I'm a fan of https://kill-the-newsletter.com
|
| [2] Dracula Daily (https://draculadaily.substack.com/about) and
| Letters from Watson
| (https://lettersfromwatson.substack.com/about) are quite fun!
| hobo_mark wrote:
| Feeds are definitely still enabled on YouTube at
|
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC<xyz>
|
| The only complicated part is finding the channel id, which is
| not always presented directly (sometimes you have a username,
| sometimes a channel "shortname", now you also have handles...
| even the YouTube data API itself can only resolve some of
| them).
| fab23 wrote:
| I am using the RSSPreview [1] Addon in Firefox, which works
| for me also on Youtube. The addon brings back the nice RSS
| Icon in the URL Bar. You can also change to color back to
| orange so you can spot it easily when a site has an RSS feed.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/rsspreview/
| philistine wrote:
| If you give a channel URL to NetNewsWire, it will figure it
| out for you. I definitely recommend it, it's the golden
| standard of RSS readers.
| Metricon wrote:
| To get the YouTube channel Id: on the channel home page (you
| may need to reload the page or open it in private mode to
| avoid caching), open the developer console and enter:
|
| ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId
| philistine wrote:
| My best idea was to subscribe to the RSS feed of my
| getpocket.com account. That way I can save any page anywhere to
| read it later in my RSS reader.
| vhcr wrote:
| I created a bookmark to watch YouTube videos from Feedly, it
| basically creates a playlist from the YouTube videos you're
| following (20 at a time): javascript:!functio
| n(){const%20e=document.getElementsByClassName(%22entry%20entry
| --unread%22),t=[];Array.from(e).forEach(function(e){const%20n=e
| .getElementsByTagName%28%27a%27%29%5B0%5D,o=/https:\/\/www\.you
| tube\.com\/watch\%3Fv=(.+)$/.exec(n);o%26%26t.length%3C20%26%26
| (e.getElementsByClassName(%22EntryMarkAsReadButton%22)[0].click
| (),t.push(o[1]))}),window.open(%22https://www.youtube.com/watch
| _videos%3Fvideo_ids=%22+t.join(),%22_blank%22,%22noopener%22,%2
| 2noreferrer%22)}();void(0);
| butz wrote:
| Are Fediverse services compatible with RSS?
| lonk11 wrote:
| You can get an RSS feed of posts of any Mastodon user. Just add
| ".rss" to the profile url. For example, mstdn.social/@feditips
| -> mstdn.social/@feditips.rss
|
| Details: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
|
| The conceptual difference between RSS and Fediverse is that RSS
| is read-only while federated protocols are read-write. For
| example, you can add comments through ActivityPub, but not
| through RSS.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _It 's time to head back to RSS?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16721690 - March 2018 (491
| comments)
|
| Also, related ongoing threads right now:
|
| _Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108413
|
| _This is the year of the RSS reader_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105572
| kevincox wrote:
| Interestingly pasting the article URL into my reader doesn't
| discover a feed for this site.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I can't even read the full article without subscribing so I
| wasn't surprised. But I found this list of feeds
| https://www.wired.com/about/rss-feeds/. I think there's some
| value in just getting the headlines but I'm sure HN already
| catches the worthwhile ones from Wired.
|
| There's another RSS related post on the front page without a
| paywall https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105572
| 40four wrote:
| This should have (2018) in the title please :)
| dang wrote:
| Added. Thanks!
| rolenthedeep wrote:
| I recently got a remarkable 2 tablet. If you install Koreader, it
| has a neat little function that generates ebooks from an rss
| feed!
|
| Calibre has a similar feature I'm playing with. I'd like to just
| plonk it on my homelab and have it automatically scrape my rss
| feeds and throw the resulting ebooks at my tablet over the
| network. Doing it on-device is a bit slow due to the low power
| processor, but it's liveable
| lamontcg wrote:
| i've been a customer of newsblur.com ever since google reader
| died.
|
| i get the hacker news 100 feed there.
| shmoe wrote:
| Still haven't forgiven Google for killing reader. RIP.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think there are more people who are just looking for the next
| Twitter than who are going to switch to RSS. That's not what I'd
| _like_ to see happen, but it 's the sense I get. Whatever people
| get from those platforms, it is not available in an equivalent
| dose through content syndication. Most likely they'll go back to
| Twitter, or one of these other platforms will win out, but the
| least likely outcome is that we return to a pre-social media
| world.
| lolive wrote:
| RSS, at the time of Google Reader, was, imho, really buffed up by
| the addition of Google Buzz for commenting contents with your
| social network. I can only speak for myself but it was really a
| very effective duo. (that Twitter or Facebook could barely
| reproduce, given their egotrip orientation).
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I am working on a smart RSS reader that I can make a demo of
| myself using.
|
| I am ingesting articles w/ superfeedr, sending them to a webhook
| answered by a lambda function, putting the items into SQS, and
| then picking them up and putting them in an arangodb database.
|
| It will show a single item at a time, Tik-Tok style, and you can
| thumb up or thumb down. 2004 vintage text classification was able
| to do this well with 1000 judgements which a moderately avid user
| could supply in 10 days looking at 100 articles a day.
|
| It won't be easy to sell unless it can learn on many fewer
| judgements than that so it needs some semi-supervised classifier
| that does better with fewer judgements. A real product also needs
| some kind of clustering to deal with the reality that an event
| radiates stories gets echoed many times by different sources in
| the media and blog industry and whether you are interested or not
| interested in the event there is some limit (usually) of your
| tolerance of the event dominating the stream.
| lexoj wrote:
| I think having a daily digest RSS reader truly helped me with my
| productivity as now I check it only one time per day instead of
| infinite scrolling.
|
| Initially I used Mailbrew, but for the last 5 months I've been
| using my own open-sorce tool: https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
| strict9 wrote:
| I still use it on a daily basis like many others.
|
| But a revival isn't dependent on the technology or the type of
| apps that can consume RSS. It is the lack of outlets publishing
| on a regular basis. Social media's grip on attention has only
| grown stronger since RSS readers were more popular.
|
| Blogs are mostly gone comparatively speaking to 10-15 years ago.
| Many authors do an email newsletter.
|
| RSS is still around but it's a content supply problem and not a
| technology issue.
| stanislavb wrote:
| Have you considered an RSS reader that "reads" non-RSS
| publications?
|
| That's what I've tried to do with Lenns.io. You can subscribe
| to any blog/website, regardless of their RSS support. Then, if
| they don't expose an RSS feed - the website's titles are
| followed. That works with about 90% success.
|
| I'd be happy if you give it a go https://lenns.io. Bonus - you
| can set priorities to feeds and the number of items per source
| to be listed on your dashboard (so not a single subscription
| can overrun it)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Many trade publications and media outlets have RSS feeds but
| not all of them.
| ghaff wrote:
| Right. RSS still has some value today.
|
| But it had far more value in a world with a lot of individual
| blogs, many of which were only updated occasionally, and
| without other reliable discovery mechanisms for those blogs--
| other than going to a site every few weeks to see if there was
| something new.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I tend to agree. I've said multiple times how much I miss google
| reader. HOWEVER... We need an RSS 3.0. Let's face it, parsing XML
| is an extremely tedious and slow task, even if you are using a
| fast compiled language. There are a million ways to do it now and
| optimize it by magnitudes. Speed and size-wise.
| Sidneys1 wrote:
| Two RSS submissions today, from different sources. Interesting.
|
| Haven't seen this in the comments for either:
| https://miniflux.app/
|
| A very lightweight self-hosted web client for managing RSS feeds.
| I very much like it.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| > It's time to head back to RSS.
|
| Some of us never left.
| re9 wrote:
| My sentiments exactly.
| snird wrote:
| RSS fails miserably on 2 things:
|
| 1. Discoverability 2. Monetization
|
| Consider YouTube - it provides discoverability through the
| algorithmic feed. Giving creators a distribution platform they
| can't find anywhere else. It also provides monetization through
| ads, sponsorships and direct support to creators.
|
| Consider Newsletters - no discoverability built in, but it does
| support monetization. Pay to subscribe, and only you will get the
| newsletter. RSS feed can't limit only to subscribers.
| ihuman wrote:
| > Pay to subscribe, and only you will get the newsletter. RSS
| feed can't limit only to subscribers.
|
| Patreon has this feature with their podcast RSS feeds.[1] When
| you subscribe, you get a URL with a personal, unique parameter.
| This feed has all the episodes that you pay for. Your version
| of the feed stops updating after you cancel your subscription.
|
| [1] They probably also have it for normal RSS feeds, but I've
| only used their podcast RSS feeds
| agiacalone wrote:
| Some of us who never left RSS think those two things are
| _features_
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >RSS feed can't limit only to subscribers.
|
| Authenticated rss feeds are a thing. I have subscribed to some
| premium podcasts which have a auth token in the feed url for
| authentication.
|
| This allows paid content, and most importantly revocation of
| access at a later date (if e.g. the subscription is cancelled).
| beej71 wrote:
| You're not wrong. But I do wish more people were happy with
| those "failures", which basically describe the Internet of
| yore.
| snird wrote:
| I'm a creator myself.
|
| Why would I want to build an audience on a platform with no
| monetization possibility, ever?
|
| Even sponsorships are not possible, since I can't reliably
| count reads (which I can even in email).
|
| It's nice to think of the "classic" internet, but it's a
| naivety that will keep RSS on the edges. And I love RSS idea!
| I want it back! I hate subscribing to email newsletters in a
| way that makes it hard to manage and organize.
| themadturk wrote:
| You can subscribe to newsletters via FeedBin, which costs
| $5 a month, and will act as a source to many feed readers
| (as well as being a web-based feed/newsletter/twitter feed
| reader itself).
| cebert wrote:
| When counting email reads, how do you account for
| individuals who configure their mail client to not download
| images by default? I do this in Gmail to avoid tracking
| pixels from being loaded. I imagine there's a sizable
| subset of more technical users who do this?
| ghaff wrote:
| Plenty of creators create without the expectation of direct
| payment. Of course, many are not in a position to do so as
| well. But I expect that, for the most part, the platforms
| make a lot more money off the creators attempting to
| monetize than the creators themselves do. And, in so doing,
| they make the overall experience worse.
|
| But, yes, RSS was always pretty fringe. And today there's
| enough hope being dangled that a newsletter or YouTube
| channel will make it big that it's even more fringe.
| weberer wrote:
| >RSS feed can't limit only to subscribers
|
| The feed doesn't give you the whole article. Only the first
| paragraph or two. If you've ever seen someone write "after the
| jump" they're referring to the content that you can only see
| when accessing the page directly.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Authenticated or unique feed URLs are "a thing", but overall
| the difficulty in "monetization" is a feature to me.
|
| I've been a heavy RSS user since 2005. It has served my
| purposes well and I'd just as soon it not be "disrupted",
| personally.
| strict9 wrote:
| > _RSS feed can 't limit only to subscribers._
|
| This practice was common when RSS was popular and is still used
| today by newspapers and other media outlets.
|
| An individual feed provides only a snippet view of the article
| which encourages you to visit the site where a subscription was
| required.
| lpss wrote:
| What rss readers for linux can you recommend?
| lexoj wrote:
| My own tool which creates a daily digest, easy to setup, just
| run it: https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
|
| It will generate RSS in markdown which can be read by something
| like Obsidian. It supports also Terminal mode.
| rodric wrote:
| NewsFlash: https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk
| bertman wrote:
| Self-hosted Miniflux, dead-easy, just works.
|
| https://miniflux.app/
| lpss wrote:
| what rss reader can you recommend for linux?
| kkfx wrote:
| Feeds are NOT just a way to craft a personal selection of news in
| a personal LOCAL UI, with optional full-text-search, local
| storage for articles, tagging etc BUT also a simple form of
| asynchronous/lazy push-pull notifications.
|
| For instance we can have feeds for:
|
| - all software project we use/follow, to get info about a new
| release without having to go to a site/read an ML etc and perhaps
| finding the Changelog directly in the feed;
|
| - be advised of a new invoice from some company, a simple way no
| enterprise I know offer, but on par with emails to give an
| invoice, perhaps with the attached pdf and an easy to auto-parse
| data fields to munge easily relevant infos in a personal system,
| like match the invoice with a banking transaction, adding it to a
| personal agenda etc ALL with few lines of code from ALL parties
| instead of utterly complicated crapware monsters;
|
| - follow some books authors or special offers as a form of self-
| chose, not invasive ads
|
| - automation as machine-to-machine, using the XML in automated
| (and eventually authenticated) fashion.
|
| The real issues are:
|
| - all modern IT is designed for CONSUMING contents in
| eterodirected ways, users MUST BE powerless dumb sheep;
|
| - most users actually ARE CL from Simon's BOFH memories with
| systems force them in such sorry state.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yes, some kind of asynchronous personal agent is a great idea.
| It is the ultimate anti-social media, your very own "super app"
| that handles your digital life for you.
|
| I want it
| kkfx wrote:
| The issue here is that you can only in part, the other part
| are the others who offer good feeds or not... Like journals
| who do not offer feeds, some that offer them but not with
| full contents making them of little use, projects who do not
| offer release feeds and so on...
|
| Even most banks, at least in EU do not offer decent AUTOMATIC
| export of transactions, most offer some kind of limited and
| limiting manual export but nothing more.
|
| That's the real damn issue... We can have a super-simpler IT
| infra for the humanity instead of the immense gazillion of
| crappy crap we have, but we miss it because someone for a
| personal corporate/political interest want a limited and
| crappy state of thing to have some short-term power...
| cpsns wrote:
| Truthfully I have never used RSS, beyond having to support it in
| a piece of software. I've never really understood the appeal and
| I've never been able to make it fit into my life.
|
| Maybe I'm missing the point, I never read news or other such
| things, so perhaps there's just no use case for me.
| notadev wrote:
| In simplest terms, do you want to remember to visit 20
| different sites each day or just remember to visit your RSS
| reader which aggregates all those sites?
| ghaff wrote:
| There are other things you can use it for--including being
| the behind the schemes technology for podcasts. But, yeah,
| that was the primary not behind the scenes use case.
|
| There's been a decline in low volume individual sites and a
| lot of people find sites like this one, Twitter, etc. provide
| sufficient discoverability for their needs in any case.
| type0 wrote:
| You can use it to check for software updates in Github releases
|
| edit: technically in Atom format but functionally it's the
| same, just add _/ releases.atom_
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| Last week I tried to find all of the Odd Lots podcast episodes
| with Matt Levine as a guest. This turned out to be impossible in
| the Google Podcasts app that I normally use - you cannot search a
| podcast for keywords, and searching all podcasts gives you the
| wrong results. Incredible for a company that built their business
| on searching.
|
| So instead I imported the Odd Lots feed into my tt-rss instance
| and immediately had the answer.
| kevinfiol wrote:
| I do love me some RSS. I started using RSS seriously 2 years ago,
| and last year, I forked Bubo RSS[1] to have my own RSS reader[2].
| It's just a static site that is built every hour using Github
| Actions (although you can easily turn this into a cron job on
| your Raspberry Pi or whatever).
|
| I liked the result so much, I ended up doing something similar
| using RSS feeds to a build page with all my of Youtube
| subscriptions[3].
|
| [1] https://github.com/georgemandis/bubo-rss
|
| [2] https://kevinfiol.com/reader/#dailies
|
| [3] https://kevinfiol.com/youtube/
|
| EDIT: The Github repos if anyone is interested:
| https://github.com/kevinfiol/reader +
| https://github.com/kevinfiol/youtube
| franky47 wrote:
| That's awesome! I'm tempted to try this approach on my website,
| but using Next.js' ISR to regenerate the feed pages
| periodically.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Does anybody know why Randall Munroe (XKCD) has made a mockery of
| RSS on his site? I thought his joke was funny at first, but he
| has left it there and now the RSS feed from his site is worse
| than useless. Here's the content I get from his RSS feed on both
| my Android phone and my iPad:
|
| "xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on
| a Pentium 3+-1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS at a
| screen resolution of 1024x1. Please enable your ad blockers,
| disable high-heat drying, and remove your device from Airplane
| Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave
| caps lock on while browsing."
|
| This behavior began several months ago. Previously I could access
| his content on the same devices.
| tshell wrote:
| I'm really not sure what mean. You can literally take a look at
| the feed and see the most recent 4 entries:
| https://xkcd.com/atom.xml
| themadturk wrote:
| Works fine for me in NetNewsWire. I have never seen this
| behavior.
| ihuman wrote:
| Is it still doing that? Whenever I tap the "RSS FEED" link,
| Safari asks to open my RSS feed. Even when I uninstall my RSS
| app, Safari asks to look up feed readers in the app store. I
| can't find anything like that quote when I view the feed's
| source on desktop.
|
| Edit: Maybe that was a bug? I see that exact same quote in a
| tiny font at the bottom of every page.
| Group_B wrote:
| lmao
| sudo_navendu wrote:
| I love using RSS to subscribe to blogs. Many of my favorite
| personal developer blogs have RSS feeds, and I have them on my
| blog. I'm currently using Readwise to get all my feeds in one
| place. This filters out a lot of noise prevalent in social media
| like Twitter.
| electric_mayhem wrote:
| Yes, please.
|
| Google took a number from Microsoft's embrace, extend, extinguish
| playbook with its google reader.
|
| NetNewsWire is my preferred rss since it's rebirth a few years
| back.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-23 23:02 UTC)