Not only will this reduce your anxiety
and churn from constantly opening and
closing various sites, but RSS also
shows the content in a standard format,
with less to distract you.
Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you should probably go offline for a while.
I dunno -- bookmarking, checking up on sites, tab-management, etc., is all-in-all a pretty poor experience IMHO. There are plug-ins, but none are great and they are not interoperable.
>Hmm, if you get anxiety from closing and opening tabs, you should probably go offline for a while.
You'll be able to go offline for a while thanks to RSS feeds.
You can click one button to check for feed updates and know you're up to date on things or what's new.
vs.
1) Open browser
2) Load folder of bookmarks for favorite sites
3) Look through each tab to see if there's new content.
To me given those two scenarios RSS feeds seem much more efficient and I do get anxiety when I'm repeating menial tasks potentially multiple times a day for no perceivable benefit.
RSS is another victim of the manipulation of social media companies trying to steal everyone's attention and time.
RSS is the only way I consume content regularly -- if Innoreader can't see a feed at a site that I may come across, I won't be visiting regularly. Too much of a PITA otherwise. No Twitter account either -- I don't want a "push" model, and the S/N ratio is way too low...
Totally agree. If I can't add an RSS feed for a site to Inoreader then I simply don't visit the site. RSS is the single thing that makes sites like CNN usable to me.
Also if you don't want to sign up for another service there's also a bunch of self hosted RSS readers like https://miniflux.app which I'll never get tired of recommending in threads like this.
This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1]
RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon.
It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspect that RSS goes against the interests of big tech who don't like RSS, because companies like Facebook go through so much trouble to make it difficult to scrape or modify their content.
I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate underwriters. Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same tier gopher (no offense to gopher).
Innoreader can make a virtual feed from changes that appear in any site -- a new feature I haven't tried yet. Used to use Google Reader, but now I pay for Inno, which I'm happy to do.
But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all.
RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web is regressing.
Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high maintenance, and can easily break with updates.
Sure -- not saying it's as good as presenting make-for-rss posts -- may be helpful in some cases though.
At least I'll know that content changes, and if I don't like the virtual feed, I can just link out to the source and view it directly.
I see what you are saying, but I still think it is a far cry from having content providers simply providing the feeds themselves.
In the same way that I don't think that YouTube allowing users to submit closed caption transcripts, or machine generating them, any substitute for the content creator
providing them in the first place. I'm sure in the near future, smart TVs will be able to machine generate closed captions from the audio, but I still don't think we should let television producers off the hook for providing captions.
RSS should be the default. And it is not hard to generate RSS.
I happen to think that big platforms only reluctantly adopted RSS over a decade ago because it was a "standard", and because they felt that it was popular enough to justify the traffic from it. But they do not like RSS. It works against their analytics, their ads, and their control of the presentation.
And while it is cool that people are crowd sourcing scrapers, I think the real solution is to promote RSS itself and encourage more platforms to simply provide it. And organizations like Mozilla taking Facebook's position that RSS is obsolete has been profoundly unhelpful to the web.
Maybe what we need is an accessibility equivalent to the SSL Server Test. Input your domain and it gives you a letter grade on how accessible your site is. RSS access should be heavily weighted, of course.
When I look for an RSS feed, it's usually to see if it's updating, not because of any accessibility concerns. A lot of times, I'll find broken feeds. However, if a site is really giving me trouble with navigation, I'll rely on the RSS feed for reading purposes.
I used to be a big fan of RSS feeds but with their demise I started using Feedly.
It let's me curate sources into different customizable feeds like news or science. I pay for the pro happily since they let me add specific twitter accounts too. Really saves me time!
I should've been clearer above, I meant the google RSS reader [feeds]. Either way, your point stands to anyone wondering about the identity of feedly :)
I don't understand why they removed support for it. Isn't RSS a "solved issue" - what possible updates can be made to it? Why couldn't they just keep it available and forget about it.
The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897.
I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
> The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897.
Then that is a great justification for improving it then. Or at least bundling an RSS add-on. Mozilla felt that bundling Pocket was ok, but not one of the many great RSS add-ons?
> I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements.
The truth is, they did not see it as an essential part of the web, worth implementing. If you look at the other stuff that Mozilla is allocating resources for, it becomes clear that maintaining RSS support would be a drop in the bucket.
RSS could have been fixed for a fraction of the cost of one of their many dead-end research projects, or they could have swapped out the canapés for a cheaper finger food at one of their events.
The fact that anyone would call RSS "niche" is part of the problem; something can still be important even if not a lot of people use it at the moment. But that kind of nuance is something lost with this toxic market-driven mentality. Accessibility features are also "niche", should they be removed? Many people consider RSS to be a type accessibility feature. Should all accessibility features be relegated to add-ons that must be manually sought out and installed?
I don't know the details of the high level decisions at Mozilla, but I also can't help but notice that all of the decisions made by Mozilla seem to align perfectly with the interests of companies Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon.
Sending alerts to users and getting them to navigate to your platform is what big content wants. Mozilla agrees that that is the future and that RSS is obsolete and apparently holding them back. Mozilla has no problem implementing whatever Google wants and always being behind Chrome. Mozilla also decided to legitimize web DRM with its embrace of EME.
> (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
Honestly this is a whole other discussion, but I would dispute that they made the right decision. If browser extensions are just toys to you, then I'm sure you appreciate how streamlined and simple they are now.
Mozilla should be focusing on RSS within Thunderbird, because that was the original location for RSS functionality, and is a much better fit anyways (due to the expected presence of an almost always open left hand sidebar.
Unfortunately Mozilla has dropped thunderbird almost completely so that’s not been a real option either.
I completely agree. I never actually used Firefox as an RSS reader, but I did get my mom started on RSS through Firefox, and later she moved on to a dedicated RSS reader. I don't remember, but I think that Firefox would offer to subscribe to a feed via Thunderbird if you didn't already have one set up.
But I think Mozilla's abandonment of Thunderbird is very much in line with their abandonment of RSS, and their loss of commitment to an open web.
Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality. I highly recommend it as I've been on the web a long time and have yet to come across a faster way to check all my favorite sites at once.
Thank you so much for that, I am/was a HUGE fan of that feature in Firefox, and it was actually one of the main features that got me to switch to Firefox in the first place. I was gutted when they removed it, and while I still swear by Firefox over Chrome, I'm finding they're making more and more questionable decisions lately when it comes to their supposed love for a free/open Internet.
RSS and bookmarks bypass Google, meaning less money for the browser. Yes Firefox is funded by ads (Google ads).
It seems to me that Mozilla executives has no fortitude. They prefer revenue rather then invention and what's best for the user. KaiOS is becoming the third biggest mobile OS, guess what it's FirefoxOS, but Mozilla was too afraid to give it a shot. Then there's the Rust programming language that is taking the world with storm. It seems there are great talent, and if they would be allowed to work in the user's best interest people would switch over from Chrome - and Firefox would become big enough to matter.
As for revenue, a lot of purchases are initiated from the web, but they leave the browser for a short while and takes a 3-5% cut. Browsers could work with banks and offer a secure wallet. And micro-transactions could become a thing. Publishers are crying for a solution! The web have been funded by ads for over 20 years now, with diminishing returns. And users hate it! The web is ripe for invention!
Google - and any search engine - cannot help you find an exact web-page you found after hours of researching while web-surfing earlier.
And RSS feeds are for when you’re already interested in a content source. Google searches help you find something new: they won’t help you automatically be informed of new posts. They just save you the time of having to manually sort-out new content from the old when you visit an article website.
Google isn’t to blame for the drop in popularity of RSS (Google Reader’s closing was a symptom, not a cause), it’s the content websites’ webmasters who saw that by allowing machine-readable access to their content index means that users wanting to get to their new content can bypass the advertising on their home-page, effectively halving the pageviews and thus halving their revenue - or if they included their whole article content in the RSS feed then they’re missing out on potentially all of the advertising revenue - that’s why some content authors, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as an example, only provide their full RSS feed to paying subscribers.
RSS still works for podcasts though - as podcasts wouldn’t be popular at all if people had to navigate through a webpage to download each audio file each time a new release is made - so the halving of web banner ad revenue is compensated-for by having a much larger audience for the in-audio advertising baked into the podcast content.
Twitter - and centralised content platforms like Facebook also was/is a major part for the reasons I described above: allowing direct access to content means less pageviews. Somewhat concerningly, we’re seeing people use Twitter to do things that RSS was originally designed for: such as posting links to new articles posted to a blog or for things like live service uptime status updates.
Finally, there’s the usability issue: it’s difficult to describe what RSS is or why it’s good to a layperson. Ssure, today we can just say “an RSS feed is just like a podcast, but for normal web content, or anything at all” - but back in the early 2000s when RSS awareness (or hype...) peaked, I had difficulty understanding what a “syndication feed” was - the terminology “feed” implied to me it was a unidirectional continuous push-style connection (like a HTML/HTTP EventSource) - not a pull-style index file. Don’t forget the format-war with Atom too.
> that’s why some content authors, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as an example, only provide their full RSS feed to paying subscribers
This is false. I am not a paying subscriber, but I still get the full content of Daring Fireball articles in my RSS reader. In fact, the RSS feed is one of the links on the site’s sidebar. https://daringfireball.net/feeds/
> However, paying supporters do get access to a few members-only perquisites, including separate full-content RSS feeds for articles and the Linked List (my daily list of links and blurbs related to Mac, web, and design nerdery).
Mozilla have been very clear that they don’t have the resources to win every battle. They’re slipping in the browser wars. I too would love them to fight every battle, but I understand the importance of them managing their limited resources and fighting those battles that can help them towards ‘winning the bigger war’ and staying alive.
I agree with this OP/authors thesis...long live RSS!
But don't tell me the answer to anything is found in signing up for / purchasing a specific product, then it becomes a commercial :/
"It’s unclear what exactly destroyed RSS"
The driving force (well before Google decided to close reader) is that many professional publishers (those who made a living/ran a pubco, notsomuch indie bloggers) stopped supporting RSS because it was harder to monetize RSS content consumers for obvious reasons.
Even mid-late 2000s, I remember literally hacking constantly breaking RSS feeds from major sites or going back n forth with pubco support/webmaster requesting (at times even paying) for a custom feed because the format was so efficient.
The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it.
Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode they do every day in between their posts. Annoying and worthless.
Then, if you want to follow a site that publishes a lot of content, often you have to subscribe to everything or nothing. Sorry all mainstream tech news sites. I don’t want to read 1,000 low quality articles every day.
Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you visit. If the site even has one.
Other than the issue of posting abridged content, it seem like all the other issues can be handled with a capable client. It's better to post more (inlc. the podcasts, etc.) and then filter as you desire, no?
Whenever you put the burden on the end user to endlessly customize everything you’ve just lost 95% of the mainstream public and [insert thing] remains a niche tool used by people on HackerNews.
...and then mom still ends up getting her news from Facebook.
5% of users is fine -- nobody is saying that RSS should be the only interface to the internet-at-large.
We just want to enable the 5% (or less) of users that are invested enough in the process that it's worth it for them to get their specialized content efficiently, but not lose out on valuable content.
High-volume sites are not a good use case for RSS. We already have various social ways to filter. Like the site you're on. I think RSS should be for high-quality niche sites where you care about every single post.
Oh, I have to disagree, I think high volume sites are a great thing for RSS. In fact, I tend to think the more items in a feed, the better. No, I usually don't go through all of them at once, I'll go through several hundred at a time.
> The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it.
I think it is a false premise that something is only valid if "mom starts using it". That is the profit-driven mentality. eg. "how can we market this? How can we expand RSS market share into valuable demographics?" etc
Also, I actually did teach my Mom to use RSS a decade ago and she still uses it today.
These concepts are really not that hard. I told my mom it was like she was getting a newsletter from her blogs delivered to a special dedicated inbox, but without cluttering up her email. She was delighted.
I think if someone knows how to use email, and knows how to browse the web, and knows how to sign up for email newsletters, they can handle RSS. I would argue that it is in many ways more useful for less computer literate people.
> Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you visit. If the site even has one.
This UX nightmare was solved 15 years ago. Browsers displayed a little icon in the corner when RSS is detected.[1], Firefox later displayed an RSS icon prominently in the address bar[2].
The UX nightmare was then re-introduced as the RSS icon was de-emphasized[3][4] and eventually dropped completely, with a dubious justification.[5]
Most things are not that hard. The problem isn't the difficulty level. It's friction.
I mean, cooking healthy food for yourself and vacuuming your floors are both cognitively easy things to do. But most people don't have enough motivation to do these things all the time. It's why meal kits and the roomba exist.
The minute you introduce the slightest bit of friction, you lose people. RSS contains enough friction to remove a 95%+ of potential users before they even get started.
The reason why people prefer social media newsfeeds is because they have zero friction.
I'm not arguing that the problem with RSS is that it should be driven by a profit mentality. I'm arguing the problem is 95%+ of people will never benefit from what it can potentially offer the world: a better way to consume the internet.
I personally love RSS. Alongside email, it's my preferred method for reading the internet. However, I think the world would benefit more if the RSS ecosystem could be made viable for the average person. Whether that's a better protocol or a better client, I don't know.
Not all sites that offer feeds actually put the appropriate link tag (things that come to mind: youtube channels, reddit, a lot of wordpress blogs, ...), which is extra annoying. It actually takes a lot of heuristics to be able to say with some sort of certainty whether a site offers a feed or not.
I have an accessibility issue with The Old Reader, I contacted them about it and they never fixed it. In list view, there are no links to articles at all, if you're using a screen reader like I am. That makes me have to use the reader in expanded view. While I love the use of headings, it's one of the features on my wishlist for my absolute most epic RSS reader ever, (and it was a design feature of Google Reader,) I don't want to navigate passed the heading with the title, and 15 additional headings, because people seem to think that using headings is good for SEO.
Also, limiting the amount of feeds is a big nono in my book!! IF they didn't do that, and charged $10 monthly, I'd pay.
I always used rss2email (wrote a simple clone of that application in golang, so I could drop python from my servers), which ensures I don't miss updates and I have a local history I can search along with my email.
+1, that's my favorite way of consuming rss as well. I love the fact that it takes advantage of all the privacy features of the mail (like not phoning home when you open the content).
I rewrote it as well, but for an other reason: when the app on my server fetches an item, it will issue a http request to get the content of the actual article and put it as attachment of the email - because on many feeds, the rss item content is just an excerpt, sometimes useless.
Although, it works well for me because I use mutt and it displays the attachment with `lynx -dump`, other mail clients may phone home to fetch images/css/js/whatever when you display the mail.
> and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember)
The incident you are thinking about, would be when they said they were going to close the service entirely, because of the volume of signups they had in the aftermath of Google Reader closing. https://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-tim...
In the end they did not do that, but realising any service I sign up for might close just as readily as Google Reader put me off RSS for years. (I am a paid The Old Reader user now.)
If we get back to RSS, can we at least all stick to Atom 1.0 :) ? It's way stricter, simpler and easier to use, and I never found a parser that was not accepting it.
When people don't use extra namespaces and everything is consistent, Atom 1.0 works great. And I understand why namespaces exist, but they create this system where each site speaks its own language and that fundamentally undermines the whole point of RSS as this shared way of communicating.
I strongly agree: Atom is technically substantially superior to RSS, and in regular feed readers is supported universally (with fewer issues, e.g. fields like title and description are definitely plain text or HTML, as specified, rather than the RSS approach which leads to clients guessing all sorts of different things so that you can’t safely use things like angle brackets in titles).
However, the podcasting industry seems to have ignored Atom, which is stupid. Podcast feeds are exclusively RSS, and from information found, most major clients probably don’t support Atom. But the area is a mess with no good documentation anywhere on what works or doesn’t (and all of the even-halfway-decent content of this sort is from 2006–2010).
————
People colloquially refer to feeds as RSS, even when they’re mostly Atom. Reminds me a bit of the SSL/TLS situation (where I think the name “TLS” is finally more popular than the name “SSL”).
Atom has one annoying characteristic: It requires a self link to be valid. For static website generators it means you configure the domain for no reason except Atom validity.
RSS are great and there are plenty of good RSS aggregators. Been using NetNewsWire (free and open source), again since it returned to its original creator.
It works quite well, has vibrant community, and support for ripping twitter and instagram feeds among dozens of other sites.
It also has a browser extension to help discover available feeds on sites that it can digest - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsshub-radar-...
There's also a Chrome extension, but that one is not translated from Chinese yet.
The business model of RSS is harder than just slapping ads on your homepage and encouraging more page clicks. I think that's the real reason you don't see a strong RSS ecosystem. The content producers don't have a strong financial incentive to support it well.
In my experience RSS is at its best when dealing with infrequent publishers or niche audiences. People who don't expect to be paid for their writing because they want a wider audience, like think tanks or university departments.
That's definitely where it shines for me. I follow hundreds of infrequently-updated sites using Newsblur. It's sort of the same value proposition for me as Twitter. I'd never follow the New York Times in either place; what I want is to get beyond what's commercially viable to publish.
I love RSS, but do think it needs to be developed.
For a start, clients aren't great. Most have poor UX and are clunky, and I've used very few which don't choke on large numbers of feeds.
Second, having lots of subscriptions really shows the value of an editor. I don't often want to scroll through everything that has been published by a recently hyperactive feed in order to see things with a lower cadence. There is no filter for relevance, which is perhaps something that could be added through an external service or added to a hosted reader. Maybe someone has already done this.
Third, search and recommendations is pretty poor. I'd be very much in the market for "if you liked this then you'll like this" for RSS feeds. Perhaps this already exists, but I'm not aware of it.
What I've always liked about RSS is the fact it can keep me in touch with more sources than I can track myself. It highlights the blogs that only publish once a month, and if I only check in weekly, it turns the internet into a handy snapshot of who has updated and who hasn't. The part I like less is filtering between relevance and irrelevance.
Google reader used to do the recommendations thing. I loved that!! Also not having to scroll through everything at once is the beauty of the feeds list format. In other words, you have a list of feeds, that should be the only thing on the page. When you open a single feed, the content is displayed.
I won't use a reader that doesn't do things that way. They might have articles on the bottom, after the list of feeds OK fine I guess. I never use that part of the page willingly. The problem is that too many feed readers are being developed to look like HN. No, that isn't how readers should be.
RSS has been really great for me over the last year or so (when I got back into it). I tried Feedly, and then Inoreader. I was not willing to pay for either and ended up trying out the two popular self-hosted options: ttrss (tiny tiny rss) and Miniflux. Stuck with Miniflux for its simplicity. Using the Fever API with Reeder on my Mac and Readably on my Android.
My thing with self hosting is that I'm using a shared plan. I currently have over 500 feeds, and I don't think they'd be all that happy about it if well... um... I decided to use RSS on their servers.
I came here via ttRSS, with the Android app. I host it via the hosting service I've used for years, it only requires PHP and a Cron job. The Android app lets me keep ttRSS and its authentication behind a separate HTTP basic auth, which I think keeps the attack surface low and security high-ish.
The single worst offense against the usability of Atom/RSS right now comes from Apple and iOS.
If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content is unavailable.
As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for anyone using an iPhone or iPad.
Thats neither factually nor theoretically correct, as all the EU laws apply until the transition period has expired, which I wouldn't be surprised will be extended given corona has taken so much focus and time away from it.
Officially they are no longer part of the EU. They have agreed to abide by the rules of the EU for now, and the EU has agreed to allow them to trade as though they were part of the EU, but they officially left on Jan 31.
i don't know about you how you use your iOS device if you do but after installing an RSS reader (NetNewsWire is an excellent open source app) you can share the webpage/website/blog using the share menu and it will be added to your RSS reader
> At least with Android (not Google) I have a choice on what software I install.
I'm have very negative outlook on Apple with their vendor lock-in and walled garden, but how long do you think Google will let you make this choice if they gonna have no competition at all?
Google was slowly making Android less and less open with every release. Now "security" features like SafetyNet decide whatever you're allowed to use software or not.
Think on it! Just look at what Google doing with web because of their monopoly on search and browser markets.
F-Droid exists as an alternative app store or you can distribute APKs. Also running Android from a vendor is a horrible experience. I recommend installing LineageOS or any other alternative ROM.
Google might have a monopoly on the web, but at least they have given us tools to work around it, unlike Apple.
No you don't. Much of the software preinstalled on an Android device is permanent. And you can try stripping out Google Play Services, but good luck having a "smart" phone.
> Stop developing for Apple products. Stop treating Apple like they matter.
The market, as it actually exists, disagrees (especially in terms of profit, as opposed to number of devices). I understand hating Apple, but if I write software for profit, I care about where the customers/money are and Apple absolutely qualifies. Should you also support other platforms? Absolutely. But removing support for a platform like you're suggesting is at best prioritizing ideology over profit, and even the ideology argument is... not one-sided.
I used bazqux for a while and paid for the annual subscription. It just ended and I was looking around for free alternatives, and found CommaFeed, which reminds me a lot of Google Reader.
Inoreader (at least their paid version) supports private rss feeds--that is feeds with HTTP Basic Auth headers for non-public content. Private blogs and private RSS are a space where monetizing your content just isn't important. This is where people can write personal, vulnerable things to share with friends and family without creating a burden of "now I need to visit 50 different friends' websites"
I'm with the author in needing better reading tools, but the 'firehose' of RSS isn't by itself the answer
aggregators solve a different variety problem vs RSS -- RSS gives you access to random sources that you curate yourself, whereas HN or link-heavy blogs give you access to a meaningful amount of high-impact articles from high-diversity sources (i.e. more different websites than you subscribe to in feedly) that everyone else is reading
at minimum, I need a tool that lets me tame the RSS firehose with some kind of ranking or priority queue, plus mix in some aggregator reading so I don't miss things
That was why the friend-of-a-friend social features of Google Reader were such a big deal for me — I got curation and aggregation from a person I trusted, and the people they trusted.
I didn't have to subscribe to anything to get content, I just had to follow people I knew, and even if they weren't sharing a lot, their first-level connections collectively shared plenty. The interface let me subscribe to whatever feeds they were sharing from, which is how I discovered a lot of content I never would've on my own, and in a lot of cases likely not through other aggregation methods either.
Add the content they were clipping content with the bookmarklet and even sites that weren't syndicating their content were getting my regular traffic via shares.
Devil's advocate: A public trust network is great for advertisers. They would know exactly who the influencers are and how to cover the population with a minimum of influencers.
If influencers choose to work with advertisers, then jeopardize their circle's trust due to advertiser affiliation, they would lose that trust. It self-corrects; as long as the system doesn't reinforce the network effect.
Haven't seen newsboat be mentioned so far. I've written a bunch of scripts that help subscribe to feeds (e.g. search YouTube for keyword and add RSS feed for channel of the top hit), scripts to curate (e.g. extract 'topics' from BBC articles that are only available on the page and not in the RSS feed) and consume (watch videos with mpv, open images in feh, add long videos to a backlog).
It's one of the best news experiences I've had and is an improvement over what I was used to with Google Reader and Feedly. I feel much more in control of my content consumption.
I used commafeed with various categories and have a mixture of websites and YouTube channels. It was a game-changer for me when I discovered that you can “subscribe” to a YouTube channel’s videos as an RSS feed by pasting the channel URL into a feed reader. All of a sudden YT became usable again.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] threadI self host an rssreader and use it for new YouTube videos or release on github or hackernews and my favourite blogs.
You'll be able to go offline for a while thanks to RSS feeds.
You can click one button to check for feed updates and know you're up to date on things or what's new.
vs.
1) Open browser
2) Load folder of bookmarks for favorite sites
3) Look through each tab to see if there's new content.
To me given those two scenarios RSS feeds seem much more efficient and I do get anxiety when I'm repeating menial tasks potentially multiple times a day for no perceivable benefit.
RSS is another victim of the manipulation of social media companies trying to steal everyone's attention and time.
The 30 minutes it takes to peruse makes for a good breakfast routine versus only making it 10 to 20 stories deep in the same amount of time.
https://theoldreader.com/
RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon.
It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspect that RSS goes against the interests of big tech who don't like RSS, because companies like Facebook go through so much trouble to make it difficult to scrape or modify their content.
I just wish that Mozilla would stand up more to their corporate underwriters. Now RSS is relegated to add-ons, and is on the same tier gopher (no offense to gopher).
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051
But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all.
RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was abandoned by them and that the web is regressing.
Additionally, having to make your own scraper is really not a solution to RSS not being available. Scrapers are very high maintenance, and can easily break with updates.
It's not an outlandish amount of work, if lots of people chip in with their favorite source.
In the same way that I don't think that YouTube allowing users to submit closed caption transcripts, or machine generating them, any substitute for the content creator providing them in the first place. I'm sure in the near future, smart TVs will be able to machine generate closed captions from the audio, but I still don't think we should let television producers off the hook for providing captions.
RSS should be the default. And it is not hard to generate RSS.
I happen to think that big platforms only reluctantly adopted RSS over a decade ago because it was a "standard", and because they felt that it was popular enough to justify the traffic from it. But they do not like RSS. It works against their analytics, their ads, and their control of the presentation.
And while it is cool that people are crowd sourcing scrapers, I think the real solution is to promote RSS itself and encourage more platforms to simply provide it. And organizations like Mozilla taking Facebook's position that RSS is obsolete has been profoundly unhelpful to the web.
It let's me curate sources into different customizable feeds like news or science. I pay for the pro happily since they let me add specific twitter accounts too. Really saves me time!
I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements. (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
Then that is a great justification for improving it then. Or at least bundling an RSS add-on. Mozilla felt that bundling Pocket was ok, but not one of the many great RSS add-ons?
> I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted to expend on such a niche feature, and it was starting to hold back other improvements.
The truth is, they did not see it as an essential part of the web, worth implementing. If you look at the other stuff that Mozilla is allocating resources for, it becomes clear that maintaining RSS support would be a drop in the bucket.
RSS could have been fixed for a fraction of the cost of one of their many dead-end research projects, or they could have swapped out the canapés for a cheaper finger food at one of their events.
The fact that anyone would call RSS "niche" is part of the problem; something can still be important even if not a lot of people use it at the moment. But that kind of nuance is something lost with this toxic market-driven mentality. Accessibility features are also "niche", should they be removed? Many people consider RSS to be a type accessibility feature. Should all accessibility features be relegated to add-ons that must be manually sought out and installed?
I don't know the details of the high level decisions at Mozilla, but I also can't help but notice that all of the decisions made by Mozilla seem to align perfectly with the interests of companies Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon.
Sending alerts to users and getting them to navigate to your platform is what big content wants. Mozilla agrees that that is the future and that RSS is obsolete and apparently holding them back. Mozilla has no problem implementing whatever Google wants and always being behind Chrome. Mozilla also decided to legitimize web DRM with its embrace of EME.
> (Similar deal to why they broke old extensions: they were holding the browser back technically, and a couple of years later I think it was fairly clearly the right decision, painful though it was.)
Honestly this is a whole other discussion, but I would dispute that they made the right decision. If browser extensions are just toys to you, then I'm sure you appreciate how streamlined and simple they are now.
Unfortunately Mozilla has dropped thunderbird almost completely so that’s not been a real option either.
But I think Mozilla's abandonment of Thunderbird is very much in line with their abandonment of RSS, and their loss of commitment to an open web.
It seems to me that Mozilla executives has no fortitude. They prefer revenue rather then invention and what's best for the user. KaiOS is becoming the third biggest mobile OS, guess what it's FirefoxOS, but Mozilla was too afraid to give it a shot. Then there's the Rust programming language that is taking the world with storm. It seems there are great talent, and if they would be allowed to work in the user's best interest people would switch over from Chrome - and Firefox would become big enough to matter. As for revenue, a lot of purchases are initiated from the web, but they leave the browser for a short while and takes a 3-5% cut. Browsers could work with banks and offer a secure wallet. And micro-transactions could become a thing. Publishers are crying for a solution! The web have been funded by ads for over 20 years now, with diminishing returns. And users hate it! The web is ripe for invention!
Bollocks!
Google - and any search engine - cannot help you find an exact web-page you found after hours of researching while web-surfing earlier.
And RSS feeds are for when you’re already interested in a content source. Google searches help you find something new: they won’t help you automatically be informed of new posts. They just save you the time of having to manually sort-out new content from the old when you visit an article website.
Google isn’t to blame for the drop in popularity of RSS (Google Reader’s closing was a symptom, not a cause), it’s the content websites’ webmasters who saw that by allowing machine-readable access to their content index means that users wanting to get to their new content can bypass the advertising on their home-page, effectively halving the pageviews and thus halving their revenue - or if they included their whole article content in the RSS feed then they’re missing out on potentially all of the advertising revenue - that’s why some content authors, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, as an example, only provide their full RSS feed to paying subscribers.
RSS still works for podcasts though - as podcasts wouldn’t be popular at all if people had to navigate through a webpage to download each audio file each time a new release is made - so the halving of web banner ad revenue is compensated-for by having a much larger audience for the in-audio advertising baked into the podcast content.
Twitter - and centralised content platforms like Facebook also was/is a major part for the reasons I described above: allowing direct access to content means less pageviews. Somewhat concerningly, we’re seeing people use Twitter to do things that RSS was originally designed for: such as posting links to new articles posted to a blog or for things like live service uptime status updates.
Finally, there’s the usability issue: it’s difficult to describe what RSS is or why it’s good to a layperson. Ssure, today we can just say “an RSS feed is just like a podcast, but for normal web content, or anything at all” - but back in the early 2000s when RSS awareness (or hype...) peaked, I had difficulty understanding what a “syndication feed” was - the terminology “feed” implied to me it was a unidirectional continuous push-style connection (like a HTML/HTTP EventSource) - not a pull-style index file. Don’t forget the format-war with Atom too.
This is false. I am not a paying subscriber, but I still get the full content of Daring Fireball articles in my RSS reader. In fact, the RSS feed is one of the links on the site’s sidebar. https://daringfireball.net/feeds/
> However, paying supporters do get access to a few members-only perquisites, including separate full-content RSS feeds for articles and the Linked List (my daily list of links and blurbs related to Mac, web, and design nerdery).
The data services which provided content-without-markup were abandoned, and the fluff and garbage were embraced.
It was supposed to be that Mozilla would be a beacon of light in a murky web, but it has lost itself in the void.
But don't tell me the answer to anything is found in signing up for / purchasing a specific product, then it becomes a commercial :/
"It’s unclear what exactly destroyed RSS"
The driving force (well before Google decided to close reader) is that many professional publishers (those who made a living/ran a pubco, notsomuch indie bloggers) stopped supporting RSS because it was harder to monetize RSS content consumers for obvious reasons.
Even mid-late 2000s, I remember literally hacking constantly breaking RSS feeds from major sites or going back n forth with pubco support/webmaster requesting (at times even paying) for a custom feed because the format was so efficient.
Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode they do every day in between their posts. Annoying and worthless.
Then, if you want to follow a site that publishes a lot of content, often you have to subscribe to everything or nothing. Sorry all mainstream tech news sites. I don’t want to read 1,000 low quality articles every day.
Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you visit. If the site even has one.
...and then mom still ends up getting her news from Facebook.
I subscribe to 200+ feeds, but only read a dozen or so stories a week on them: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml
I think it is a false premise that something is only valid if "mom starts using it". That is the profit-driven mentality. eg. "how can we market this? How can we expand RSS market share into valuable demographics?" etc
Also, I actually did teach my Mom to use RSS a decade ago and she still uses it today.
These concepts are really not that hard. I told my mom it was like she was getting a newsletter from her blogs delivered to a special dedicated inbox, but without cluttering up her email. She was delighted.
I think if someone knows how to use email, and knows how to browse the web, and knows how to sign up for email newsletters, they can handle RSS. I would argue that it is in many ways more useful for less computer literate people.
> Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you visit. If the site even has one.
This UX nightmare was solved 15 years ago. Browsers displayed a little icon in the corner when RSS is detected.[1], Firefox later displayed an RSS icon prominently in the address bar[2].
The UX nightmare was then re-introduced as the RSS icon was de-emphasized[3][4] and eventually dropped completely, with a dubious justification.[5]
[1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/FeedAutoDiscovery.aspx
[2]: http://scripting.com/images/2011/01/15/rssicon.gif
[3]: https://decafbad.com/blog/2011/01/15/how-to-use-feed-auto-di...
[4]: http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/15/mozillaPleaseKeepThe...
[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051
Most things are not that hard. The problem isn't the difficulty level. It's friction.
I mean, cooking healthy food for yourself and vacuuming your floors are both cognitively easy things to do. But most people don't have enough motivation to do these things all the time. It's why meal kits and the roomba exist.
The minute you introduce the slightest bit of friction, you lose people. RSS contains enough friction to remove a 95%+ of potential users before they even get started.
The reason why people prefer social media newsfeeds is because they have zero friction.
I'm not arguing that the problem with RSS is that it should be driven by a profit mentality. I'm arguing the problem is 95%+ of people will never benefit from what it can potentially offer the world: a better way to consume the internet.
I personally love RSS. Alongside email, it's my preferred method for reading the internet. However, I think the world would benefit more if the RSS ecosystem could be made viable for the average person. Whether that's a better protocol or a better client, I don't know.
The site should just have
Does that not work anymore? Or sites don't include it? I haven't used RSS in a few years.Back when the address bar had an RSS icon in it, this is how it got the info.
its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im checking 40+ websites every day for new content and that way i won't miss anything
if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances are i just won't use that site
I went the same route as you did, and have the same attitude towards sites that do not provide a RSS feed: they drop of my radar.
https://github.com/skx/rss2email
I rewrote it as well, but for an other reason: when the app on my server fetches an item, it will issue a http request to get the content of the actual article and put it as attachment of the email - because on many feeds, the rss item content is just an excerpt, sometimes useless.
Although, it works well for me because I use mutt and it displays the attachment with `lynx -dump`, other mail clients may phone home to fetch images/css/js/whatever when you display the mail.
There are some limitations for the free accounts but to be honest I have never run into them.
The incident you are thinking about, would be when they said they were going to close the service entirely, because of the volume of signups they had in the aftermath of Google Reader closing. https://blog.theoldreader.com/post/56798895350/desperate-tim...
In the end they did not do that, but realising any service I sign up for might close just as readily as Google Reader put me off RSS for years. (I am a paid The Old Reader user now.)
However, the podcasting industry seems to have ignored Atom, which is stupid. Podcast feeds are exclusively RSS, and from information found, most major clients probably don’t support Atom. But the area is a mess with no good documentation anywhere on what works or doesn’t (and all of the even-halfway-decent content of this sort is from 2006–2010).
————
People colloquially refer to feeds as RSS, even when they’re mostly Atom. Reminds me a bit of the SSL/TLS situation (where I think the name “TLS” is finally more popular than the name “SSL”).
It works quite well, has vibrant community, and support for ripping twitter and instagram feeds among dozens of other sites. It also has a browser extension to help discover available feeds on sites that it can digest - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsshub-radar-...
There's also a Chrome extension, but that one is not translated from Chinese yet.
For a start, clients aren't great. Most have poor UX and are clunky, and I've used very few which don't choke on large numbers of feeds.
Second, having lots of subscriptions really shows the value of an editor. I don't often want to scroll through everything that has been published by a recently hyperactive feed in order to see things with a lower cadence. There is no filter for relevance, which is perhaps something that could be added through an external service or added to a hosted reader. Maybe someone has already done this.
Third, search and recommendations is pretty poor. I'd be very much in the market for "if you liked this then you'll like this" for RSS feeds. Perhaps this already exists, but I'm not aware of it.
What I've always liked about RSS is the fact it can keep me in touch with more sources than I can track myself. It highlights the blogs that only publish once a month, and if I only check in weekly, it turns the internet into a handy snapshot of who has updated and who hasn't. The part I like less is filtering between relevance and irrelevance.
I think it's fantastic.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tiny-reader-rss/id689519762
If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content is unavailable.
As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for anyone using an iPhone or iPad.
Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss readers.
Note the absence of the UK in the below sources:
https://www.gov.uk/eu-eea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_U...
Did the UK MEPs serve their last day already?
If a nation state doesn't recognise itself being in the EU, and the EU doesn't recognise the nation state being in the EU, It's not in the EU.
https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/countries_en#28mem...
Apple News is available in a whopping 4 countries, 4 years after its introduction.
You can't be a monopoly with such a small userbase.
Besides that you can still use a desktop PC. Most people do anyway.
I'm have very negative outlook on Apple with their vendor lock-in and walled garden, but how long do you think Google will let you make this choice if they gonna have no competition at all?
Google was slowly making Android less and less open with every release. Now "security" features like SafetyNet decide whatever you're allowed to use software or not.
Think on it! Just look at what Google doing with web because of their monopoly on search and browser markets.
Google might have a monopoly on the web, but at least they have given us tools to work around it, unlike Apple.
No you don't. Much of the software preinstalled on an Android device is permanent. And you can try stripping out Google Play Services, but good luck having a "smart" phone.
Sure.
> Stop developing for Apple products. Stop treating Apple like they matter.
The market, as it actually exists, disagrees (especially in terms of profit, as opposed to number of devices). I understand hating Apple, but if I write software for profit, I care about where the customers/money are and Apple absolutely qualifies. Should you also support other platforms? Absolutely. But removing support for a platform like you're suggesting is at best prioritizing ideology over profit, and even the ideology argument is... not one-sided.
Not sure why though.
aggregators solve a different variety problem vs RSS -- RSS gives you access to random sources that you curate yourself, whereas HN or link-heavy blogs give you access to a meaningful amount of high-impact articles from high-diversity sources (i.e. more different websites than you subscribe to in feedly) that everyone else is reading
at minimum, I need a tool that lets me tame the RSS firehose with some kind of ranking or priority queue, plus mix in some aggregator reading so I don't miss things
I didn't have to subscribe to anything to get content, I just had to follow people I knew, and even if they weren't sharing a lot, their first-level connections collectively shared plenty. The interface let me subscribe to whatever feeds they were sharing from, which is how I discovered a lot of content I never would've on my own, and in a lot of cases likely not through other aggregation methods either.
Add the content they were clipping content with the bookmarklet and even sites that weren't syndicating their content were getting my regular traffic via shares.
all kinds of trust networks are good
the accidental trust networks that dwell in existing social networks (fb, twtr, IG) are gameable
a trust network where real-life experts gain and lose reputation based on their behavior should (in theory) punish corruption
It's one of the best news experiences I've had and is an improvement over what I was used to with Google Reader and Feedly. I feel much more in control of my content consumption.
https://github.com/daharka/newsboat_scripts