[HN Gopher] RSS can be used to distribute all sorts of information
___________________________________________________________________
RSS can be used to distribute all sorts of information
Author : walterbell
Score : 284 points
Date : 2023-11-20 06:29 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (colinwalker.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (colinwalker.blog)
| thirdplace_ wrote:
| like it. rss is so simple and cool. problems:
|
| * how to make it easier for users to start using feed readers
|
| * how to make it easier to subscribe to feeds
|
| * how to help users discover new content
| yoz-y wrote:
| Well, back in the day firefox had a rss reader integrated and
| would detect feeds and put a nice rss icon in the location bar.
| That kind of addressed the first two points.
|
| As for discovery, I think much like Twitter and other social
| media, the best discovery is one person you follow just plainly
| links to some other.
| pndy wrote:
| For me RSS reader in Firefox was the best idea hands down
| because of its simplicity and how well it was integrated with
| the browser: you'd click on that icon in the address bar and
| page with summary (originally you'd add feed directly to the
| bookmarks) and subscribe button would appear and then, modal
| asking where to put new channel/live bookmarks folder. With
| bookmarks bar on, you could have a handy folder or folders
| that changed list of "bookmarks" all day and you could glance
| thru headlines without actually opening a page. And IIRC, the
| default RSS channel was customized among all language
| versions - for British English it was BBC News. I really
| liked this feature and Mozilla removing it angered me much.
| For a while I tried using something else - RSSOwl or Feedly,
| or Nextgen Reader for Windows 10 but nothing could replace it
| for me.
|
| Somehow Mozilla deducted that this feature is no longer
| needed due to _the maintenance, performance and security
| costs_ [1] and it will be removed in v64 which was of course
| done. This reader was known and luckily at that time already
| ported as an extension to Chromium-based browsers as e.g.
| Foxish [2], which then was bring back as Firefox extension
| Livemarks [3]. That 's a long way around trip.
|
| [1] - https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-
| core-prod... ,
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1477667
|
| [2] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-
| rss/nb...
|
| [3] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
| paradox460 wrote:
| Vivaldi still does that. Has a nice visual formatter of feeds
| too
| rambambram wrote:
| Indeed, it's pretty easy to 'retweet' something from another
| feed. RSS items can have a <source> element in them, just
| point this to the original feed. Et voila, you're
| 'retweeting' with RSS.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Literally all of these problems (were) solved.
|
| Its called browser integration.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> how to make it easier for users to start using feed readers_
|
| On mobile, RSS readers like NetNewsWire and Lire are available
| in app stores. Lire can spider images+text for offline reading.
|
| Podcast app users probably don't even know they are using RSS.
|
| _> how to make it easier to subscribe to feeds_
|
| On iOS, Lire adds a "Subscribe in lire" option to the Safari
| share menu. Podcast directories seem to work for podcast apps.
|
| _> how to help users discover new content_
|
| With the demise of search engines, perhaps directories will
| resurface?
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| WhatsApp channels solves the same problems, plus it's by
| trustworthy ( /s ) Meta.
|
| No non-tech people use RSS knowingly.
| Kovah wrote:
| After all those years, I still love RSS. It's great what you can
| do with it. After struggling to keep up with releases for all the
| tools, frameworks and packages I use for programming, I built
| Versionfeeds.com which sends me all those releases directly into
| my RSS feed. It's absolutely great.
| eviks wrote:
| This can't differentiate between a nighty github release (to be
| discarded) and a versioned one (to be retained)?
| pvorb wrote:
| With comments like these, I always wonder if they are talking
| about "RSS" as a standard or about RSS as a common word for feeds
| in general. Because I think RSS itself is quite complex compared
| to Atom and the latter has been around for many years as well and
| is much easier to implement, so its use even might be more
| widespread these days.
| namdnay wrote:
| I really like the Atom protocol, especially with the "archived
| pages" extension. I've used it several times to distribute
| common data feeds in a really scalable way. Since everything is
| static, the processing on the server is minimal (either return
| the current string buffer, or return a string from a map), and
| all the archived content is infinitely cacheable. it's a really
| simple and clever idea
| kevincox wrote:
| I would say that about 99% of the time people just need feeds
| in general. The most common formats being RSS 2.0 and Atom.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I detest the use of the term "RSS" for feeds in general,
| because it grants mindshare to the inferior option--vast
| numbers of feeds have been implemented in RSS because that was
| what someone had heard of (and they'd probably have done it in
| Atom if they knew the full story). Just call them _feeds_ ,
| which has always been the appropriate technology-independent
| term.
|
| What I say is: use Atom, unless you're making a podcast.
| Unfortunately, Apple ruined everything there by choosing RSS
| even though the clearly-superior Atom was (just) published by
| the time they released their software, and subsequently
| continuing to not support Atom. Most other podcasting tooling
| also doesn't support Atom. But every _other_ application of
| feeds supports Atom just as well as RSS.
| account42 wrote:
| There is about zero real world benefit to Atom over RSS. It's
| just pure spec autism.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| You want to know how many times I've encountered titles in
| real-world RSS feeds being damaged or obliterated due to
| including characters like < (most commonly from including
| HTML tag names in a title)? More than a few, because RSS is
| awful and way too much is based on inconsistent unwritten
| customs rather than consistent or defined behaviour. You
| end up with wishy-washy consensus, and clients that don't
| want to change what they do because content is written
| using mutually incompatible conventions, so fixing one will
| break another. (And _probably_ there aren't any clients out
| there subject to injection attacks of this sort any more,
| but there have been.)
|
| How about Atom? Only once, in a brand new client, and that
| was promptly fixed when I reported it, because it was
| clearly and unambiguously a bug, and you were guaranteed
| there would be no negative side-effects, because the
| behaviour is actually _defined_ , and consistently
| implemented.
|
| As for functionality, I certainly see articles from time to
| time that are courageous enough to use basic inline
| formatting in their titles (bold, italics, code), and you
| can't do this in RSS (there's a small chance it'll work--
| probably a bug; a fair chance the markup will be presented
| verbatim--probably the most reasonable choice; and a fair
| chance the markup will be stripped--kinda problematic); but
| you can in Atom (because the title is a text construct like
| the content and you can specify the type), and it should
| then either work properly, or (unfortunately more common)
| be safely stripped by unimaginative clients.
| velcrovan wrote:
| I'm guessing you never had to parse a lot of real world RSS
| feeds
| Retr0id wrote:
| > Why does it just have to be updates to a website? RSS can be
| used to distribute all sorts of information.
|
| Such as? Maybe I'm just not being imaginative enough but I could
| really use some examples here.
| dodyg wrote:
| Podcasts run on RSS
| vaylian wrote:
| This was the mainstream killer app for RSS. And it was great.
| But then some podcasting services (looking at you, Spotify
| and others...) decided to force us to use our browser or some
| app instead of giving us the freedom to download files for
| offline use.
| toyg wrote:
| But the gatekeepers kinda failed. Spotify all but admitted
| that their podcast move failed, effectively writing off
| their investments in Rogan etc.
| robga wrote:
| Mastodon has inbuilt rss feeds for every user, for any given
| hashtag on an instance, etc.
|
| Eg https://mastodon.social/@gargron.rss
| Retr0id wrote:
| This still feels like "updates to a website" to me. Each
| entry is ultimately a link to a webpage.
|
| To me, the "default" use case for RSS is blog feeds, and this
| is just micro-blog feeds.
| bhaak wrote:
| Everything is a website these days.
|
| Even code commits.
| https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits.atom
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Why do you need to insist, when you got a good answer? Or
| what do you want sent with RSS that can't be sent?
| bhaak wrote:
| Anything that has updates and doesn't need to be an instant
| notification.
|
| It's rather the other way around. Nowadays everything is a
| website.
|
| News is a website. GitHub commits, pull requests, issues, etc.
| are websites, too. Social media posts or replies are websites.
|
| Some of those use cases used to be handled by mail, some of
| them are now done with browser notifications. I would consider
| a persistent standard log a need that is not handled by
| anything else than RSS though.
| rollcat wrote:
| > Anything that has updates and doesn't need to be an instant
| notification.
|
| I wonder if there's an easy/obvious way to enhance RSS with
| instant (or near-instant) notification capability. Perhaps
| HTTP long polling/Websocket? For small setups, it wouldn't
| scale/cache as easily as "check this URL every hour, and
| remember to include ETag/If-Modified-Since", so perhaps for
| public feeds it could be done via a specialized aggregator /
| caching proxy network? Maybe model the API after Pushover?
| <https://pushover.net/api/client#websocket>
|
| Use cases is any kind of feed that can update in very short
| intervals (minutes), or benefits from quick round-trip times,
| but the exact update frequency can be extremely irregular.
| For example status alerts, social media posts, blog/forum
| comments, security updates.
| moritz wrote:
| "websub" is what you are looking for:
| https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/
| Minor49er wrote:
| It's a little funny to me that the response to "these
| notifications don't need to be realtime" is "let's make RSS
| realtime"
| ttepasse wrote:
| Back in the experimental 2000s my RSS reader* could subscribe
| to a shell script. I remember I used that funktionality for
| monitoring the success of some long running downloads or
| something like that. More a proof of concept. Oh, and that was
| a very lightweight functionality for rewriting feeds with a
| shell script or `curl | sed`.
|
| * NetNewsWire 3.2
| ponderings wrote:
| Any updates would work, when/who you last fed the dog. The
| pubdate can be in the future. You can share upcoming events.
| reyqn wrote:
| I use a cron job to update a to-do RSS feed of different
| recurring tasks for example.
| rambambram wrote:
| Simple example: I have a Twitter-like timeline on my website,
| with short texts, images and sometimes a link. I also can
| 'retweet' feed items from other people on my own timeline. In a
| sense the accompanying RSS feed shows updates to this timeline
| and thus my website, but it makes more sense to see this
| timeline as the webview of my RSS feed. In my use case the feed
| feels more stand-alone.
| gumby wrote:
| I don't know why updates to things like Adblock filters aren't
| distributed over RSS
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I presume you have in mind framing each item as a diff, and
| storing, say, the last week's worth of diffs (beyond which
| point you'll need to download the full thing separately)?
| gumby wrote:
| The criteria aren't usually that large so could be inline,
| or, as you say, could be a diff with a link to the full
| thing if the current version installed is too old.
| l72 wrote:
| Here is what I use RSS for beside tracking blogs, news sites,
| review sites, and so on:
|
| - Notifications from Bandcamp artists/labels -- These come as
| emails as bandcamp doesn't have personalized RSS feeds, but I
| use imapfilter to generate an RSS feed [1]
|
| - Tracking release of various software projects I run in my
| homelab (nextcloud, home assistant, vaultwarden, ...)
|
| - Following creators on youtube -- I HATE HATE HATE youtube's
| interface. I'd rather just subscribe to a specific creator and
| be able to clearly see all their videos IN ORDER.
|
| - Home Lab -- All my cron jobs in my homelab send their output
| to RSS feeds hosted locally. Much better than email reports.
|
| - Sub-reddits -- There are a few subreddits that only Mods can
| create topics in (like r/Keep_Track). Reading through RSS is
| great.
|
| [1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-
| email...
| account-5 wrote:
| If I visit a website and like it the first thing I do is look for
| an RSS/atom feed. I find more and more site instead want your
| email to send you emails that could easily be done with a feed. I
| don't visit those again. RSS/atom give the user control instead
| of the platform. I doubt they would exist if social media had
| existed before them.
| domysee wrote:
| This is so annoying, I don't want to have newsletters in my
| personal email. I'm happy Substack lets users choose what they
| want to use, newsletters or RSS feeds.
|
| Many feed readers also let users subscribe to newsletters. I'm
| also working on one, https://looking-glass.app/
|
| It has a bunch of extra bells and whistles as well, like
| automatic summarization.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Completely agree. Like the parent poster, I never subscribe
| to newsletters and the sites that don't offer good ways to be
| updated of new content (e.g. RSS feeds) lose me as a visitor.
|
| There are, however, a few email to rss tools, a quick search
| brings this one as the top reasult:
| https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter
|
| Might be a good workaround in case the content on the site is
| worth it.
| kevincox wrote:
| It's funny because I actually get my news via an RSS-to-email
| service. But I still typically subscribe to things via RSS when
| given the choice. This is because it keeps me in control and I
| know I can subscribe at any time without them holding on to my
| contact info. (Plus the first-party emails tend to have
| annoying tracking links and other nonsense. Thankfully those
| haven't infected the feeds yet)
| eviks wrote:
| The control still resides with the platform, a lot of those
| feeds are of the title+first sentence type, so you'd still need
| to visit the platform to read the content
| walterbell wrote:
| Lire on iOS will spider the source and pull the content
| locally, https://lireapp.com It takes your
| favorite partial feeds, does its magic, and converts them in
| to full feeds, so you don't have to click/tap on those
| annoying 'Read more' or 'Continue reading' links. Once
| they're cached, you don't even need to be connected to read
| your full-text feeds.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| > It's almost like people inventing new 'standards' are
| deliberately trying to make them hard so they can be the de facto
| gatekeepers of the new tech -- all while decrying the web's
| current gatekeepers.
|
| This blog post feels like a subtweet, making accusations of
| malice about... something? ActivityPub? If it flat out said what
| it was talking about, we could have a more productive discussion.
| qwertox wrote:
| RSS lacks some sort of push messaging. Sure, that's not RSS's
| fault, but constantly polling a feed is not a solution.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Quite a lot of push technology is ultimately some kind of pull.
| dvh wrote:
| Why would you be constantly polling a feed? You only poll once
| or twice a day when you want to read the news.
| ibz wrote:
| If you use it to read news, sure. But, as the post suggests,
| it can be used for much more!
| eviks wrote:
| that's too infrequent for the news
| theanonymousone wrote:
| RSS delegates that responsibility to your own, local, feed
| reader software, along with any sort of privacy measures you
| want in place. This I believe is (at the very least) quite
| defendable as I trust the software I run on my machine more
| than some random server on the internet.
| hnbad wrote:
| The article mentions rssCloud. From a cursory glance it sounds
| like that's a protocol extension that lets you register a
| callback URL to be notified about updates (i.e. push
| messaging).
| kevincox wrote:
| Yup. But in shocked to see rssCloud mentioned in 2023! It has
| been largely superceded by WebSub
| (https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/).
|
| I have yet to see a feed that supports rssCloud but not
| WebSub, but the reverse is common.
| hnbad wrote:
| Based on my reading of rssCloud it seemed to lack a
| verification step so I'm glad to see the WebSub spec
| explicitly mention that. Without verification this seemed
| like an easy way to trick a server into sending random HTTP
| requests to third party services.
| ttepasse wrote:
| Atom/RSS can and did use WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub) as a
| Push mechanism:
|
| https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/
|
| And Userlands's RSS specified an <cloud> Element back in RSS
| 2.0, but the RSS Cloud API only was implemented outside
| Userland's products first in 2009, in Wordpress, afair, when
| PSHB already had mindshare.
|
| https://www.rssboard.org/rsscloud-interface
| account42 wrote:
| On the contrary, the best thing about RSS is that it works on a
| completely static HTTP host. All these "modern" syndication
| protocols require you to run some kind of specialized
| software/script on your server which makes things needlesly
| complex, resource hungry, hard to scale not to mention a
| potential secruity issue. RSS keeps it simple, that's a good
| thing.
| sowbug wrote:
| Setting aside the technical point you're making, the pull-based
| architecture is the main disadvantage from the content-producer
| side. Suppose there is a hierarchy of customer acquisition:
|
| 1. You have the customer's billing information, ideally with a
| subscription revenue agreement.
|
| 2. Your app is installed on the customer's phone, ideally with
| notification permissions.
|
| 3. You have the customer's email address, and ideally you're
| not marked as a spammy sender.
|
| 4. Your SEO is good enough to get sufficient organic traffic.
|
| 5. Someone aggregates your content and puts it in front of
| enough customers for you to be profitable.
|
| 6. You publish an RSS feed, or any other fully opt-in
| technology where the customer normally pulls content from you,
| but might disappear at any point, and you have no way to re-
| establish contact with them.
|
| 7. Late-night infomercials, classified ads, etc.
|
| I've probably missed a few categories, and maybe the ranking
| isn't perfect, but you get the idea. Why would a merchant or
| content producer bet on RSS when its main selling point is that
| the customer retains full control over the ongoing
| relationship?
|
| Much as I personally love RSS, I don't see why today's internet
| would embrace it. Even the little guys dream of making it big,
| and that's why at a minimum everyone will spam you with a pop-
| up ad asking for your email address before they place a bet on
| a pull-based technology like RSS.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| I'm working on a personalizable RSS feed for HN that classifies
| all posts based on your preferences.
|
| Would you use it? https://kadoa.com/hacksnack
| robga wrote:
| It sounds interesting but I use https://hnrss.github.io/
|
| Unless it had most of the features of hnrss.org I would not be
| able to use it.
|
| A /topic or /category feature on hnrss.org may be nice. They
| accept some PRs.
| WithinReason wrote:
| You can convert newsletters to RSS:
|
| https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Most newsletter servives provide rss.
|
| E.g: you can read https://bitecode.dev from email or rss
| because substack supports both.
| ibz wrote:
| I am a huge fan of RSS (Atom) and was really hoping for a
| comeback... I feel like it unfairly died out because of Google
| Reader's sudden demise and was hoping some new equally popular
| client to show up and take over. I even spent some time creating
| one.
|
| But for the past year or so I have been falling down the Nostr
| rabbit hole. Nostr is a lot like RSS, but it really is better and
| without getting much more complicated! You can write a Nostr
| client that simply does what a RSS reader would do (fetch status
| updates) in a couple of lines without external libraries. And the
| Nostr ecosystem has been growing so much over the past months, it
| is getting hard to keep up! It seems to be really getting the
| momentum I was hoping RSS to regain.
|
| PS: For those that are curious about Nostr and don't know where
| to start, have a look at the NIPS [1] and of course at the
| awesome-nostr [2] list on GitHub!
|
| [1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips [2]:
| https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
| dugite-code wrote:
| RSS never really died, most CMS packages still spit out RSS
| feed that web site owners either don't know exist or don't care
| to advertise. So you can often find unadvertised feeds all over
| the internet, but for everything else there are plenty of
| poling services (hosted or selfhosted) that can generate an RSS
| feed well enough.
|
| If enough people start using RSS again the icons will show back
| up on websites again, mainly because it wouldn't be much work
| to add.
| ibz wrote:
| I know. I have built my own RSS reader just so I can follow
| blogs I like and listen to podcasts. You can certainly find
| RSS feeds all around the web!
|
| But I still consider it a dying protocol for the simple fact
| that average people don't seem to care about it anymore and
| not much seems to be built on it anymore.
|
| The main exception being of course podcasts, which work over
| RSS!
| j-bos wrote:
| And Spotify is trying to kill that too, bring it into the
| cable/paid subscription model.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Failing RSS readers are still failing with the same failing
| interfaces that have been failing since 1999 and the strange
| thing is that there is very little insight about the
| phenomenon from people who write RSS readers and potential
| users.
|
| Two perennially unpopular but strangely persistent interfaces
| are (1) the RSS reader that looks like an email or Usenet
| (dead) reader. The cause of death here is the "mark as read"
| button that makes every item the system ingests a burden to
| the reader -- for all this click, click, clicking the system
| is not gathering _any_ information about the feed items or
| the user 's preferences and (2) the RSS reader that renders
| 200 separate lists for 200 separate RSS feeds. If your plan
| is to scan, scan, and scan some more, why not just visit the
| actual web sites?
|
| Contrast that to the _successful_ interface of Twitter where
| new content displaces old content, where if you walk away for
| a week you see recent content and don 't need to click, click
| and click to mark a week's worth of content as read (though
| there hopefully is a button to nuke everything.) And now
| there is Tik Tok and RSS readers still barrel on as if the
| last 15 years didn't happen.
|
| RSS _needs_ algorithmic feeds to really be superior to "I
| have a list of 50 blogs I check every morning." That is, you
| have to be able to ingest more feed items than you can handle
| and have the important and interesting stuff float to the
| top.
|
| I was involved a bit in text classification research 20 years
| ago and it was clear to me that an algorithmic feed for RSS
| was very possible with the caveat that it would take a few
| 1000 judgements yet even at that time it was clear that you
| could never underestimate people's laziness when it comes to
| making training sets. Most people would expect to give five
| or so judgements.
|
| I had thought about the problem for years, a bit about ideas
| that would improve low-judgement performance, but I did very
| little other than this project
|
| https://ontology2.com/essays/HackerNewsForHackers/
|
| and
|
| https://ontology2.com/essays/ClassifyingHackerNewsArticles/
|
| Last December I started working on YOShInOn, my smart RSS
| reader and intelligent agent with a primary user interface
| that looks like "TikTok for text" (no wasted clicks to 'mark
| as read' because I am always collecting preference
| information.) I started out with the same model from the
| article above (applied to the whole RSS snippet as opposed to
| just the title) and upgraded to a BERT-based model.
|
| It shows me the top 5% of about 3000 ingested articles a day.
|
| I am still thinking about how to productize it. On an
| intellectual level I'm interested in the problem with
| training on fewer examples. Ironically it wouldn't be hard to
| do experiments because I have a year of data I can sample
| from, but I couldn't care less on a practical level because I
| have 50,000 judgements already... And it is all about "pain
| driven development" where I work on features that I want
| right now for me.
|
| If I were going to make a SaaS version of it would almost
| certainly fall back on collaborative filtering (pooling
| preferences from multiple users) because users would perceive
| it to learn more quickly.
|
| See the entirely forgotten
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon
| coldpie wrote:
| Have you tried Feedly? One of the sort options is "most
| popular", although I'm not sure how that works. Older
| unread stuff ages out automatically after about a month.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Popularity is a useful metric for ranking (if A is more
| popular than B it is more likely I'll like A better than
| B than if it is the other way around.) but combining it
| with a relevance score can be tricky. (e.g. it is not so
| straightforward to incorporate PageRank into a web search
| engine and really get better results.)
|
| The interesting thing I see in Feedly is it seems to have
| a broad categorization: you might get some topic like
| "American Football". I think users will certainly feel
| more in control if they can pick topics like that.
|
| YOShInOn does ingest categories that are supplied by the
| feeds. I've also thought about adding a query language
| inspired by OWL (contains word X or word Y and is not a
| member of category Z) but now when I want to do a query I
| hand code it. If there is ever a "YOshInOn Enterprise
| Edition" it will have some system for maintaining
| multiple categorizations so it will be able to put labels
| like "American Football" on.
| SuperHeavy256 wrote:
| What do you use nostr for? Forgive my ignorance but, does it
| have uses beyond being a twitter replacement?
| ibz wrote:
| I am currently building 2 things on Nostr:
|
| * a marketplace (sort of like eEay) where you can buy/sell
| items for a fixed price or as auctions
|
| * a CMS you can use to host your own website (sort of like
| Jekyll, but without the build step, and with an admin
| interface)
|
| People build all sorts of things though!
|
| The most notable things that people are trying to build (it
| didn't happen yet though) is a GutHub replacement, because
| Jack Dorsey famously said he will give 10 BTC to whoever does
| it first.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I dipped my toes into nostr recently, and I was struck by
| the fact that content on nostr does not have a canonical
| location. IIUC, you have to know which relay(s) have what
| you're looking for, and if you don't, you just have to
| guess. Ostensibly this is a win for censorship-resistance,
| but it doesn't seem very practical to me.
|
| Has this caused you any issues with your projects?
| treyd wrote:
| That's in-line with my general criticism of Nostr. It's a
| very simple protocol that imposes too little structure on
| downstream software so you get a kind of impedance
| mismatch (so to speak) at the messaging layer. There's
| not a lot provided for ensuring reliable delivery so the
| strategy will evolve to just broadcast to as many relays
| as possible and accept the duplicated effort (which will
| have to be paid for by somebody). It also doesn't have a
| good story with regard to identity management and key
| compromise. It's neat and useful for some applications
| but people think it's some amazing new advancement when
| it's not. Its something very simple that we could have
| easily invented in the 90s, but we didn't because it's
| kinda a shaky architecture to build applications on top
| of. It's _too_ simple.
| ibz wrote:
| Indeed, too many people think Nostr will somehow
| magically solve everything... I think of it just like RSS
| on steroids - which is why I even mentioned it in this
| thread.
| ibz wrote:
| This is indeed one of the issues I still didn't fully
| wrap my head around!
|
| Currently clients just use the same bunch of relays as
| defaults, and let you (maybe) customize the relays you
| want to connect to.
|
| I think this is sub-optimal for another reason, besides
| the one you mentioned (discoverability?): you don't
| necessarily control where your data is stored, and these
| relays might disappear without notice. It is a great way
| to broadcast status updates, but not great for having an
| archive of your own data, that you can trust.
|
| I assume this will change eventually, with paid relays,
| which will have the incentive to keep your data around,
| OR personal relays - which is what I am building as part
| of my CMS - basically I want all _my_ data to have one
| "canonical" location (my domain) and be hosted on my VPS,
| which also serves my data as a web page with RSS... this
| helps me wrap my head around where my data is stored, and
| know that I always have a copy of it... but doesn't solve
| the discoverability issue, I guess, which ... IDK, it
| seems to be solved using just a "shotgun" approach:
| mostly publishing to well know relays.
| janandonly wrote:
| I would love to read/hear more about this NOSTR based
| CMS. Do you have a website or nostr channel I can follow
| to hear about a alpha/beta launch date?
| ibz wrote:
| Just a GitHub. [1]
|
| It's very early days still, but I use it myself.
|
| The marketplace [2] is much more advanced! You can
| already use it to buy and sell stuff over Nostr!
|
| [1] https://github.com/servuscms/servus [2]
| https://github.com/PlebeianTech/plebeian-market
| KoftaBob wrote:
| See my comment here explaining how Nostr aims to solve
| this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346741
| KoftaBob wrote:
| > IIUC, you have to know which relay(s) have what you're
| looking for, and if you don't, you just have to guess.
|
| This problem is tackled by an improvement to the protocol
| that was recently introduced called "NIP-65":
| https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/65.md
|
| The TLDR is that when a Nostr client supports NIP-65, it
| broadcasts to _all known relays_ (which is continually
| updated /expanded) the list of relays that User A posts
| their stuff to.
|
| This means that as long as User B is connected to at
| least one of those "all known relays", their client now
| knows what relays User A posts their stuff to, and will
| specifically fetch things from those relays when it needs
| to load User A's things.
|
| It's essentially the Nostr take on the Gossip protocol:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol
| mro_name wrote:
| https://seppo.social/demo is a microblog server (I am building)
| combining ActivityPub and Atom.
|
| I agree Atom is here to stay.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Ah, I was hoping to find a drop in replacement for RSS, but
| Nostr looks more like some kind of Twitter clone in protocol
| form.
| ibz wrote:
| Not really. Twitter clones are one application indeed, but I
| see it more like RSS on steroids.
| pbronez wrote:
| Does the Nostr community have an opinion on key management? The
| FAQ says:
|
| "How do I find people to follow? First, you must know them and
| get their public key somehow, either by asking or by seeing it
| referenced somewhere."
|
| You can do a lot of cool things if you start by assuming
| everyone has a strong identity communicated via key pairs. The
| trick is managing those keys... discovery, validation,
| revocation, etc.
|
| Keybase was (is?) amazing for this. They couldn't figure out
| the business model though, and it's a zombie since the Zoom
| acquisition. Keys.pub tried a more open implementation, but has
| been discontinued.
| rglullis wrote:
| https://keyoxide.org/ seems to be successor to keybase.
| withinboredom wrote:
| https://github.com/withinboredom.gpg and replace the
| username. If they have commit signing configured, they have
| keys, and then they (probably) can decrypt with that key.
| callalex wrote:
| It wasn't just the death of Google Reader. It was also the
| death of the creator and top promoter of RSS who was unjustly
| killed by the copyright mafia. RIP Aaron Schwartz.
| maerst wrote:
| Types of feeds I subscribe to:
|
| * News/blogs
|
| * Commits, e.g https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/commits/master.atom
|
| * Discounts for games on my wishlist: https://isthereanydeal.com/
|
| * LKML posts mentioning a device I use:
| https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=GnuBee&x=A
|
| * Repology, to be notified when packages I maintain are out-of-
| date: https://repology.org/
|
| * TLS certs issued for my domains, via https://crt.sh/
|
| * Downtime notices, e.g. https://status.mythic-
| beasts.net.uk/status.rss
|
| It's by far the highest SNR and calmest notification channel I
| have.
| Beijinger wrote:
| You know what I miss? The twitter to RSS bridge that I had and
| that does not work anymore.
|
| There are 4-6 Twitter accounts I like to follow. This new, Tik
| Tok inspired Twitter is terrible.
| maerst wrote:
| Yeah, that sucks.
|
| I've seen Twitter to Mastodon bridges, through which you
| could get RSS, e.g.
| https://bird.makeup/users/paulg/remote_follow
| mariusor wrote:
| Generally people hate those.
|
| Despite the fact that I fully subscribe to the precept of
| if you put it on the internet, then there's no expectation
| of privacy, I would still like to see some way for the
| twitter user to signal to stop the mirroring if they so
| desire.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| The Nitter RSS feeds still work. I follow NASA Webb, among
| others:
|
| https://nitter.poast.org/NASAWebb/rss
| billpg wrote:
| Also, do we mean ATOM in the same way that people insist on
| referring to TLS as "SSL", or do we actually mean RSS as in
| actual RSS?
|
| If we could agree that ATOM is RSS 2 (or whatever MAX(version)+1
| is) that'd be great.
| kqr wrote:
| A simple way to improvise pub/sub messaging in an early prototype
| when you don't want to pull in a full message queueing system is
| to publish a timeline of events in an RSS feed.
|
| The drawback is that when the system grows, you run the risk of
| going for the lazy default of _keeping_ RSS publishing of events,
| and now you need to re-implement large portions of a message
| queueing system to achieve desired reliability of the RSS feed.
| billpg wrote:
| Suppose I have a feed with a million items already on it which
| I've already handled. I'm about to poll the feed and there's a
| small number of new items on the feed I don't know about yet.
|
| Am I going to have to download a file with references to all one
| million items again?
|
| If the answer is to have a separate feed with only the most
| recent n items, I'm afraid that's not going to work unless
| there's additional details. There might have been n+1 items turn
| up since the last time I polled. Also, someone else might want to
| start handling those one million records from the start and we
| should be able to co-ordinate by having a common canonical URL.
|
| (I'd also mention pull-vs-push, but that's a thread elsewhere in
| these comments.)
| bhaak wrote:
| Everything will have problems if you start from scratch and
| have to import millions of items.
|
| But of course there's a standard for paging: https://www.rfc-
| editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3
|
| Then both ATOM and RSS can leverage HTTP headers. If you
| include If-Modified-Since into your request the server can
| decide to only returns items that are newer.
| billpg wrote:
| <link rel="next"
| href="http://example.org/index.atom?page=2"/>
|
| That's fantastic. Anyone developing ATOM/RSS, please use this
| mechanism.
|
| (I'm looking at you, podcast with over 100 episodes.)
| kevincox wrote:
| The problem is that support for this is rare. I know that
| Podcast Addict supports it but it is rare in podcatchers
| and even more rare in feed readers.
|
| But I definitely agree that it should be a standard
| feature!
| account42 wrote:
| > Then both ATOM and RSS can leverage HTTP headers. If you
| include If-Modified-Since into your request the server can
| decide to only returns items that are newer.
|
| That might work ... most of the time. But its a really ugly
| layer violation not to mention incompatible with any kind of
| caching proxy. Don't do this, please.
| est wrote:
| RSS seems like usenet these days. Old Internet users kept using
| it but newer generation seems just focus on ig/tiktok.
| cobertos wrote:
| Always thought it was interesting that the Windows .theme file
| format allows RSS feeds for desktop background images[0]
|
| [0]https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/win32/controls/the... see the RSSUrl parameter
| mgd wrote:
| I really enjoy using RSS. One benefit I have noticed is that I
| spend less time browsing websites, scrolling and generally
| wasting time online.
|
| If I value some content, there will be a way to get or create an
| RSS feed. Pair this with a read it later service and I have a
| better curated collection of items to actually look through
| rambambram wrote:
| I use the RSS feeds from Youtube channels to not get bothered
| by their algorithm that boosts clickbaity videos on the
| homepage. I just can't stand looking at these stupid thumbnails
| anymore, with pictures of outrageous and screaming people and
| all these in-your-face colors.
| eXpl0it3r wrote:
| That's why a love Readwise's Reader. I can store stuff to read
| later, but also get all the RSS/Atom feeds, plus can even
| funnel newsletters into one place. In addition to having my
| highlights there as well and being able to easily export them
| to Obsidian.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yes, this! Readwise Reader is fantastic! I use it for reading
| web pages stripped of ads and other cruft -- and for
| collecting highlights and notes (eg kindle highlights,
| captured while reading, trivial to "tag" with eg .vocab or
| .quote) -- and routing all this great content into Obsidian
| (my PKM / tool for thought / second brain)....
| moritz wrote:
| In the spirit of the OP: my gripe with Readwise/Reader is
| that it... doesn't _output_ RSS.
| rambambram wrote:
| Exactly! Even the use case of adding an image to a feed item -
| which falls well within the definition - is an extraordinary
| thing to witness nowadays. Photo feeds are very nice and make the
| rather dull text-only format more lively.
|
| I've also read an article about reverse/random RSS feeds, where
| the inactive blog author had an automatic feed made up by random
| items from his archive, which is very nice if you have a big
| archive but currently no new entries.
| xnx wrote:
| RSS/Atom will have a hard time becoming popular as long as
| developers remain biased against anything to do with XML. If
| someone reinvents Atom but worse using JSON, there might just be
| a chance.
| JNRowe wrote:
| There is JSON Feed1 already. One of the spec writers is behind
| https://micro.blog, which is the first place I saw it(and also
| one of the few places I've seen it). I don't think it is a bad
| idea, and it doesn't take all that long to implement it given
| the sane and quite readable specification.
|
| I have long hoped it would pick up steam with the JSON-ify
| everything crowd, just so I'd never see a non-Atom feed again.
| We _perhaps_ wouldn 't need _sooo_ much of the magic that is
| wrapped up in packages like feedparser2 to deal with all the
| brokeness of RSS in the wild then.
|
| 1 https://www.jsonfeed.org/
|
| 2 https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser
| Sami_Lehtinen wrote:
| Outlook and Thunderbird both handle RSS feeds directly and work
| as reader.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I use RSS to distribute my web highlights[1] on specific topics
| and even my Kindle highights[2] for longer series. It's also nice
| and easy to reuse these feeds on my website homepage to give a
| dynamic feel to a static website.
|
| Ultimately I had to get with the times a bit and find a way to
| share my highlights as photos[3] and videos, especially on modern
| text-hostile social media platforms, but I have a soft spot in my
| heart for the topic-specific RSS highlight feed, and it's one of
| my proudest achievements.
|
| [1]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development
|
| [2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/terra-ignota
|
| [3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/using-rust-chrome-and-nixos-
| to-t...
| walterbell wrote:
| Nice work! Do you save web highlights with a browser plugin?
| bsnnkv wrote:
| These days I mostly read and save on mobile with the Notado
| iOS shortcuts, but of course everything works pretty much the
| same way with the browser extension too.
|
| All websites/apps that I read comments on (HN, Reddit,
| Mastodon, Twitter, Lemmy, Tildes, Lobsters, YouTube) have a
| "Save Comment to Notado" action when sharing permalinks which
| makes saving interesting comments a breeze.
|
| When I'm reading something in Safari, I just highlight the
| text I want to save with my finger and then use the browser
| share button (not the text share button) to hit the "Save
| Selection to Notado" action.
|
| If you check back in my comment history here I've written
| before about how I'm a big believer in RINORIN (read it now
| or read it never), and for this reason I completely eschew
| read it later-style reader apps. If it's not immediately
| interesting enough for me to read when I see it, I just let
| it ago, trusting that if it's important enough, I'll be
| exposed to it again sooner or later, and at that point it'll
| be interesting enough for me to read it when I see it.
| janandonly wrote:
| I'm currently trying to read all RSS feeds, and interesting sites
| I find on HN in https://Omnivore.app.
|
| The app has as an added benefit that it allows me to label posts
| and also make my own highlights.
|
| NetNewsWire allows you to "star" an entire post, but not a
| word/paragraph/sentence.
| camgunz wrote:
| I gotta say I don't deeply understand ActivityPub, but one of the
| first things I thought when trying to grok it was "how does this
| improve on RSS?". Like another commenter here I think a big part
| of it is that it's JSON and not XML, but I think another thing
| people would say is that you aren't storing things locally, that
| is you don't have an application pulling things onto your local
| machine (phone, laptop, whatever).
|
| But I've evolved lately, and now I strongly feel like we're
| missing the forest for the trees here. These things aren't just
| RSS; they're email. They're email lists. ActivityPub even uses
| the language of email; it has `to` and `cc`, and `replyTo`
| fields, in/outboxes. There are (media)Types, i.e. MIME types.
|
| There are differences. ActivityPub basically exists to be an
| underlying protocol for Twitter-like social media, so it specs
| out things like Likes or Undo. But IMO, stuff like this is either
| superfluous/harmful (chasing likes/views maybe isn't a good
| idea), or maybe unclear what a lot of people would want out of a
| conversations platform. I don't really want someone else to
| irrevocably edit the stuff I've pulled down; sure I'll let you
| send a diff or something, but I want the history. Or, on the
| other hand, maybe I don't want someone to store a history of my
| worst posts, ready to unleash them whenever I dare to do
| something public. Or, on the other hand, maybe this has been a
| really useful tool to speak truth to power. Or, maybe we
| shouldn't create a protocol that seems to guarantee this, only to
| have rogue servers that store these things as diffs anyway to
| lull you into a false sense of "posting hot takes is OK I can
| always undo/edit/blah".
| adql wrote:
| > I gotta say I don't deeply understand ActivityPub, but one of
| the first things I thought when trying to grok it was "how does
| this improve on RSS?". Like another commenter here I think a
| big part of it is that it's JSON and not XML, but I think
| another thing people would say is that you aren't storing
| things locally, that is you don't have an application pulling
| things onto your local machine (phone, laptop, whatever).
|
| Both of those _honestly_ sound like a disadvantage. Like yeah ,
| plenty to hate about XML but at least it has defined schema
| language, and I _want_ to have an application and not be
| dependent on some shitty website to act as aggregator for me.
|
| All of the "features" ActivityPub has could be pretty easily
| just added to RSS too
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There are the superficial features and then there are the
| super features built so deeply in the architecture they can
| be game-changing and invisible at the same time. (e.g going
| from XML to JSON is trivial in comparison, it wouldn't matter
| if it went to ASN.1 and EBCDIC)
|
| ActivityPub puts timestamps on things so you can ask your
| Mastodon server for everything that's been updated since the
| last time you polled. RSS makes you poll over and over again
| and download everything. so instead of downloading X kb of
| content you could be downloading 20X kb if you are polling
| too fast, alternately you could be losing content if you poll
| to slow.
|
| It is routine for ActivityPub servers to work in an
| aggregating mode so I can subscribe to 2000 Mastodon users
| who are spread across 300 servers and still be able to update
| my feed by making _one_ request.
|
| To be fair, RSS aggregation is a thing, or at least used to
| be a thing see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
|
| There are numerous reasons why "RSS died" but one of them is
| surely that phones became more popular than desktops and it
| is absolutely unthinkable that a phone would be polling and
| polling and polling hundreds of severs all day... It would
| kill your battery!
|
| My smart RSS reader YOShInOn uses
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfeedr
|
| for the ingestion front end which provides an ideal API from
| my point of view. When a new feed item comes in Superfeedr
| sends an https request to an AWS lambda function, that stores
| the feed items into an SQS queue, and YOShInOn's ingest
| script fetches items from its queue at its convenience. The
| one trouble with it is that it costs 10 cents/feed/month...
| It's quite affordable if I want to subscribe to 100 feeds
| (which I do currently) but subscribing to 2000 independent
| blogs that get one post a week is getting pricey.
|
| On the flip side is the effect this all has on servers: I
| think people are often looking at Google Analytics now and
| not looking at their http logs, if they did they might find
| there is a huge amount of polling going on and not a lot of
| clarity on how this connects to users. There's the strange
| story of Feedburner, which offered some analytics for feeds
| and then got bought by Google. I think the best kept secret
| of black hat SEO in the early 2010s was that anything you put
| in a "burned" RSS feed was certain to get indexed in Google's
| web search index almost immediately. (I'd hear other people
| on forums complaining about pages they put up that were
| perfectly fine and not spammy but would go unindexed for 2-3
| months.) If you wanted to get 200,000 slightly spammy pages
| indexed your best bet was to set up WordPress and roll the
| content over the course of a few weeks.*
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > When a new feed item comes in Superfeedr sends an https
| request to an AWS lambda function, that stores the feed
| items into an SQS queue, and YOShInOn's ingest script
| fetches items from its queue at its convenience. The one
| trouble with it is that it costs 10 cents/feed/month...
| It's quite affordable if I want to subscribe to 100 feeds
| (which I do currently) but subscribing to 2000 independent
| blogs that get one post a week is getting pricey.
|
| Wow, that seems overengineered to me. I use a cron job on
| my phone, and taskspooler as a queue. It has no operating
| costs, doesn't rely on any third-party infrastructure, can
| be edited/audited/executed locally, etc.
|
| > it is absolutely unthinkable that a phone would be
| polling and polling and polling hundreds of severs all
| day... It would kill your battery!
|
| How often are you polling? I usually set several hours
| between cron runs; any more frequent and I find myself
| mindlessly refreshing for updates. I have a few Bash
| commands to check if we're on WiFi/Ethernet, if we're
| plugged into a charger, etc. which also control some
| systemd targets. That makes it easier to avoid using any
| mobile data or battery power.
|
| PS: Planet is alive and well (at least, the FOSS project
| ones I read, like Planet Haskell) :)
| cxr wrote:
| > ActivityPub puts timestamps on things so you can ask your
| Mastodon server for everything that's been updated since
| the last time you polled. RSS makes you poll over and over
| again and download everything. so instead of downloading X
| kb of content you could be downloading 20X kb if you are
| polling too fast, alternately you could be losing content
| if you poll to slow.
|
| This is a pretty obvious consequence of trying to misuse
| HTTP (i.e. debased REST) to get it to do something it's
| just not very well-suited for.
|
| A client-to-server protocol like XMPP that's tailor made
| for this application would be a better fit, but what
| captures public attention rarely involves coming up with
| answers to questions like, "First, which is the superior
| technology?"
| madeofpalk wrote:
| ActivityPub is basically RSS but more complicated (necessarily,
| to support its goals). It's "Less Simple Syndication".
| superkuh wrote:
| Activitypub is far too heavy. It literally requires a
| cryptographic exchange which makes a static setup for
| Activitypub infeasible. All activitypub based communication
| requires a big complex, fragile, exploitable dynamic backend on
| both sides that require ongoing mantainence.
|
| RSS/Atom + Indieweb MF2/webmention is the way to go. It can be
| implemented by a static site with no moving parts to break.
| dingnuts wrote:
| >but one of the first things I thought when trying to grok it
| was "how does this improve on RSS?".
|
| there's a lot of discussion that doesn't answer this question
| so let me do it quickly:
|
| a homeserver can POST updates to other homeservers that have
| followers on them, instead of relying those remote servers
| polling the one that originates the content.
|
| This is the main thing that ActivityPub brings over RSS, making
| it a different type of protocol entirely: updates can be pushed
| between servers
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Storage can be decoupled from location/host using protocols
| like BitTorrent or IPFS. Many years ago I pushed my site to
| IPFS, including its RSS and ATOM feeds. That worked great for
| static content, but I never found a decent mechanism for
| pointing a URL to the latest version. I tried IPNS, and added
| a "DNS link", but it was super flaky.
|
| I'm currently pondering whether the GNU Name System would be
| better suited...
| camgunz wrote:
| > there's a lot of discussion that doesn't answer this
| question so let me do it quickly:
|
| Yes, love it, OK
|
| > a homeserver can POST updates to other homeservers that
| have followers on them, instead of relying those remote
| servers polling the one that originates the content.
|
| This is definitely a difference but there are a couple of
| reasons I'm not sure I'd call it strictly an improvement.
|
| The first is that it feels like it would have been pretty
| easy to have ActivityPub allow everything to filter by a
| (created and/or updated) date. People don't like pull
| protocols, but hey guess what any Mastodon client (JavaScript
| or otherwise) is doing. Pulling isn't as bad as its
| reputation would suggest, plus we're great at serving/caching
| this stuff now. Like, one of the main benefits of HTTP is
| that it basically has encryption and caching built in.
| Pulling would have been fine for probably everything--and you
| can imagine designing the protocol to make it even more
| efficient than something like POSTing every new update to
| every federated server w/ a follower (batching would be a big
| win here).
|
| Second, the ActivityPub spec is pretty cagey on retries
| ("[federated servers] SHOULD additionally retry delivery to
| recipients if it fails due to network error"). Who knows if
| the existing servers implement some strategy, but the spec
| has no guidance AFAIK. Also, is a recipient server being
| down/erroring a network error? Also, nothing says POSTs have
| to be sent immediately. These aren't niche concerns; you can
| imagine a server being under heavy load or experiencing some
| network problems and reacting by limiting the number of
| update POSTs it sends.
|
| SMTP [0] on the other hand says you should wait 30 minutes
| and try over 4-5 days. We can quibble about the values or
| w/e, but a federated sync protocol should have more to say
| about sync than "POST updates, retry if it fails".
|
| Anyway, all of that is to say that I think ActivityPub
| probably would have been a lot simpler, faster, consistent
| (clients basically have to be pull because phones) and robust
| if server-to-server interactions were pull and not push.
|
| [0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321#section-4.
| 5.4....
| cxr wrote:
| > one of the first things I thought when trying to grok it was
| "how does this improve on RSS?"
|
| Well it certainly ups the ante for a participant to add a node
| to the network with their own handrolled software, which can
| improve interoperability SNR from a certain Postelian
| perspective.
|
| Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862781>
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| Self advertisement but I'd appreciate anyone trying out my RSS
| aggregator which is kinda like HN in terms of design (be warned
| it's really rough right now though) https://catnip.vip
| rambambram wrote:
| I love RSS, but a big roadbump from the past is that it seems to
| be not so interactive (although that's not a fault from the
| protocol, if you ask me). On one hand you have websites with
| feeds, on the other you have separate feed readers. So every
| 'node' must use two different pieces of software to make it
| interactive. A big advantage of big tech social media is that
| users can produce and consume within the same software interface.
|
| I try to put these two RSS functions (consuming and producing, or
| publish and subscribe if you will) in the same website software,
| and it sort of works. I'm still trying to figure out how to
| safely and easily reply to feed elements, but the only viable way
| I found is a link inside the element to a comments section on the
| feed's website. Other ways seem to invite spam (an email address
| in the feed for example), or require webmentions to work on both
| sides.
|
| If any of you have ideas, feel free to brainstorm with me. If you
| happen to have a website, homepage or blog with a feed and you
| never posted it here on HN, please feel extra free to send me a
| message with the link (my website is in bio).
| basisword wrote:
| Can anyone recommend an RSS reader that actually fetches the
| article content? A lot of sites I subscribe to only show the
| first sentence and then I have to open the website. Are there any
| good readers that are able to pull the article content and
| display in the reader?
| moritz wrote:
| miniflux.app
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| FreshRSS does that. You can self host it or sign up on an
| existing server. https://www.freshrss.org/
| argulane wrote:
| miniflux does a pretty good job at fetching the original
| content, but it does not work well for sites that use a lot of
| JS
| carlosjobim wrote:
| NetNewsWire has a button to try to fetch the entire article, it
| works almost always. It is one of the best made Mac and iOS
| applications, in my opinion.
| refset wrote:
| https://yakread.com
| bitslayer wrote:
| What is artcasting?
| georgesimon wrote:
| I _think_ it 's a term minted by Dave Winer. The principle idea
| that "wherever you get your podcasts" could apply to any art.
|
| Here's a very literal example from him:
| http://scripting.com/2023/10/26.html
| hypertexthero wrote:
| My favorite Atom/RSS reader: https://fraidyc.at/
| axegon_ wrote:
| I was always a huge supporter of RSS and my disappointment was
| immeasurable when it almost completely died. I've kind of
| abandoned the hope that it would make a comeback though. The way
| I see it, there are two major problems:
|
| * XML sucks. Bloated, unpleasant, annoying, slow. There should be
| a new standard which is slimmer, faster and more pleasant to work
| with.
|
| * LLM's: they are becoming cheaper and feasible to use AND TRAIN
| on consumer grade hardware: The type of hardware many of us have
| at home - a good amount of memory, a large hard drive, a beefy
| CPU and a beefy GPU(or two). If RSS all of a sudden became widely
| available across the web, who knows how many people would start
| using and abusing the feeds and start building some insanely
| powerful LLM's in their basements. I'm not saying that would be
| bad, I am all for it. But most people I know would go ballistic
| if their data was used to build LLMs without their explicit
| consent. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the WTF license[1] but
| maybe I'm just weird.
|
| [1] http://www.wtfpl.net/
| smusamashah wrote:
| RSS died (kinda) not because of Google Reader but because of
| Google Chrome. When Chrome came out and everyone jumped ship, all
| other browsers natively supported reading RSS which chrome still
| does not do to this date. Chrome still shows RSS as raw XML
| instead of making it readable.
| advisedwang wrote:
| IE had ~50% of the market before chrome [1], and I don't
| believe it supported native RSS. I'm also skeptical that many
| Firefox users were viewing RSS directly in the browser. Yes,
| Firefox shows the feed, but without subscriptions and a central
| place to find updates it was not really a good feed reader.
|
| [1] https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/
| smusamashah wrote:
| I was not including IE in those browsers TBH, it was never a
| good browser anyway. I have been an Opera/Firefox user before
| chrome came in. Both had native RSS support. Even showing RSS
| symbol in URL when its available and being able to actually
| read it humanly is way better than chrome's nothing.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| IE had "native RSS" going back to somewhere around IE4 or
| IE5. There was some "Active Desktop" nonsense you could do
| with RSS really early on, which would have been IE4. IE's
| approach was very similar to Firefox's: clicking an RSS feed
| would give you a pretty printed XML page by default, which
| wasn't exactly useful, but might also have side links to
| _some_ use cases for RSS depending on some combinations of
| addons installed and configured preferences.
|
| Just like Firefox at the time, the most common _built-in_
| usecase was that you could subscribe an RSS feed as an auto-
| updating Bookmarks Folder. But there were addons that did all
| sorts of things and some feed readers supported various sorts
| of integrations with IE.
|
| IE even _shared_ its feed reading engine as a shared COM
| control with a built-in Windows service. It was something
| like BITS [Background Intelligent Transfer Service], Windows
| ' background downloader service, where you could hand it
| feeds, it would manage feed polling, it tried to be smart
| about it with things like exponential back-off and
| downloading feeds during idle bandwidth periods on your
| machine, and give you back a very simple RSS-like data store
| of whatever it found. Outside of IE using it, so far as I
| know the only other major "feed reader" to integrate it was
| Outlook. I think even fewer people (I did) made use of the
| RSS features in Outlook than made use of the RSS features in
| IE and almost no one made use of the fact that IE and Outlook
| had a shared view of the same feeds, but when IE dropped
| native RSS is when Outlook dropped RSS support because they
| didn't want to own the feed reading engine.
| walterbell wrote:
| HN RSS (https://hnrss.github.io/) includes feeds for:
| - posts above vote/comment threshold - replies to user
| - posts/comments/favorites by user - posts/comments by
| keyword - new/best/active threads
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| I love hnrss and nearly all feeds work, but I think "best
| comments" might not be since it's empty:
|
| https://hnrss.org/bestcomments
|
| Or maybe no recent comments meet the criteria :D
| altairprime wrote:
| RSS feeds can contain entries with content-type
| `message/rfc2822`, and it was simple enough to patch
| Thunderbird's RSS viewer to process those with the email viewer
| back in the day, so you could read your email with your
| feedreader. I don't know if the Thunderbird team upstreamed any
| of that or not, but the context at the time was rssemail [1],
| which comes up every few years, most recently ActivityPub.
|
| [1] http://mengwong.com/rssemail/
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Javascript appears to be disabled or not supported, this means
| that you will not be able to read or leave comments."
|
| I'm not using Javascript however I can read some comments.
| blazespin wrote:
| The obvious answer to twitter. We need vanity metrics though if
| it's going to win the optics battle.
|
| Some kind of push mechanisms would be great too.
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