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Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?

34 points by vfulco ↗ HN
I am considering offering some microservices for my job seeking clients whoh hire me for English resume editing, LinkedIn Profile enhancement and interview coaching. Doing a decent search, seems the term is much more in the mainstream than in years past. TIA.

22 comments

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clintonb
I don't think RSS ever truly went away. Sure, Google ditched Reader, but (for me, at least) Feedly and other services took its place. The millions of sites running on WordPress have RSS enabled by default. Podcasts are distributed via RSS.

Social media sites and smart news aggregators (e.g. Apple News) have failed to replace RSS for me.

Sevrene
When I used to use Google reader (RIP) almost every site that posted content weekly had RSS. I personally haven't experienced any indication of a resurgence of using RSS besides some obviously niche technical communities or applications that are using it. Hardly a resurgence from my perspective, though.

RSS is great when people need it and use it, but most 'normal' people don't use it these days from what I can tell. Prove me wrong :)

clintonb
"Normal" people may not know it, but they use RSS when they download/subscribe to podcasts.
sbmassey
I doubt normal people even used RSS directly during its heyday. Even so, all sites that regularly publish content still seem to have RSS, and very useful it is too.
SyneRyder
I feel I've noticed an upswing in RSS recently, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm looking for it.

A lot of people I follow on Twitter (and myself) seemed to quit Twitter around November last year. Some of them went back to blogging instead, and some others went to micro.blog, both of which use RSS as the syndication method.

Feedly also added keyword mute filters to their RSS readers late last year, which I think might be helping adoption. (Lots of personal and news feeds become more tolerable when you add a few political keywords to the mute list.)

But that said, most of the people I follow via RSS only have double digit RSS subscribers. Those same people have/had 10x - 100x the followers on Twitter and Medium.

t3h2mas
Thanks for sharing micro.blog. Recently I keep finding myself drawn to simple, content first social network alternatives. I hope RSS stays strong. I also hope scuttlebutt takes off, and gopher (protocol) makes a comeback.
Hedja
RSS/Atom is still used by most syndications. The average user may be unaware of its existence but that same audience is similarly unaware of most technologies that drive the web.

Other than the death of Google Reader, there hasn't been much of a change.

The only alternative to RSS right now (afaik) seems to be bespoke APIs and <meta> which is a pain for publishers to maintain and for software to syndicate.

troylinn
Yeah I was myself surprised when recently I needed RSS feeds of a few parameters and was pleasantly surprised to see them still inplemented even with API’s on most of the sites.
clintonb
We created an API at edX that is much more robust than our RSS feed. People still use the RSS feed because it is much easier than (a) registering for API credentials, (b) figuring out how OAuth works, and (c) learning what JSON is and how to parse it. The simpler solution was good enough for many clients.
mnzaki
Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience! A Feedly with Friends! (does this already exist?)

Basically a follow-based social graph on top of the excellent feedly experience. So there's a "Social" tab, a timeline of sorts, with things like:

"Your friend just read 'Some Cool Article Title' from 'That publication'"

"X commented on Y: ... "

"X1, X2, X3 subscribed to 'Some Publication Making The Rounds'"

Call it Socialfeeds or Feedbook or something. Bootstrap over twitter/fb social graphs.

Back in the day of google reader I remember there were some basic social features (hope these are not false memories...) and I actually really enjoyed them because of course I want to discuss all the cool shit I'm reading with my friends!

frumiousirc
> Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience! A Feedly with Friends! (does this already exist?)

NewsBlur resembles that description.

JamesLeonis
NewsBlur is my browser's home page. I was a refugee from Google Reader years ago. It supports many of the former's features, is open source, and a SaaS pro if you don't want to deal with self hosting.

But man, that's just a handful of it's features.

mnzaki
And it has a social feature, "blurblogs" on which you share articles. It's quite great, just signed up :)

And it's open source!

Thanks for the tip frumiousirc!

baltimorehacker
Even though Google ditched Reader, Google Alerts still offer a RSS delivery option, which is extremely powerful when the alert is configured properly.
upofadown
I think it is more a matter of; what else is there?

You want to follow an infrequently updated blog? You pretty much have to use Atom/RSS. The fact that, say, Facebook has gotten super popular doesn't really help. Facebook is the worst for infrequently updated stuff. It's mostly noise.

Tomte
Is there even a local RSS reader anymore (except Thunderbird and Emacs maybe)?

All the readers I found when I was last looking were cloud-based.

Something1234
Firefox has a built in reader of sorts. I forget the exact name but I think it's called live bookmarks or something. I never really used it, but I know it prompts me about it when I go to look at some rss url, because I'm trying to scrape it.
bmpafa
I evaluated using RSS for aggregating blogs for my graduate-school-aspirant users / clients.

The challenges I faced were mostly b/c of poorly formed RSS feeds on blogs I wanted to aggregate, but as someone who does a lot of web scraping, working with RSS for this use case is a boon.

It sounds like we're in adjacent businesses & would love to learn more about your use case, so feel free to shoot me a msg (brandon at admitbrain c0m).

JamesLeonis
I'm an active RSS consumer. I use NewsBlur after Google Reader closed down. I highly recommend it.

I found that RSS became an assumed protocol. It's so rare that RSS is missing that it's absence makes me startlingly grumpy. Beyond content RSS is embedded in many machine announcement services. I use Github's release feed for Ethereum[1] to monitor updates, for example. One stellar feature of NewsBlur is it's ability to find the feed address from a given URL, which makes discovering feeds far easier.

For what it's worth, RSS and feeds have graduated from the Hype Curve into widespread unobserved use.

EDIT: I forgot to mention my favorite Meta-Feed[2] for Clojure! It's all RSS all the way down.

[1]: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases.atom

[2]: http://planet.clojure.in/

dchuk
I think because it's enabled by default with most publishing platforms/cms it will naturally just stay alive into the future. It's a great medium in my opinion, and I prefer to use my feed reader to keep up with sites I would never normally visit on a whim.