Is it? The idea of RSS was to escape complicated, centralizing, proprietary platforms like twitter. In order to read the post in this discussion's twitter link I'd have to execute their code on my machine. There's no way to access twitter via text.
I certainly hope that most RSS users are shying away from such a terrible platform.
This highlights, in an interesting way, one of the downsides to RSS as a technology in the era of centralized services. Really, of all decentralized services in the era of centralized services.
When you want to make a pitch to somebody that RSS is valuable, you don't have direct statistics on its global use. You can pull access logs for your own servers, but if you're trying to justify to a boss the investment of setting up an RSS service where you don't have one already, you're going to have to use someone's proxy numbers on how popular it is.
Meanwhile, Twitter's access logs are a direct signal on the popularity of Twitter. Their story for telling potential investors how many users they have is very short.
RSS was first released/specified in 1999, so to say that the idea was to escape platforms like twitter is rewriting history (myspace didn't even launch until 4 years later, friendster three years later). The idea of RSS seems to (originally and still in some ways) to be able to keep track of updates to many different sites from one application.
My point was rather that twitter is a place where brands listen and also a place where a lot of web devs talk. If RSS is to continue being seen as relevant twitter would be a good place to advocate for it.
> RSS was first released/specified in 1999, so to say that the idea was to escape platforms like twitter is rewriting history
But they said "proprietary platforms like Twitter", not Twitter, so they would not be wrong in making that statement. Except, in an unexpected twist, RSS was actually initially developed to be used on Netscape's proprietary portal. It was not until a bit later that the open standards, anti-monopoly group won out.
I wish that government entities used it, or at least released a changelog for certain pages. Following coronavirus guideline updates in Berlin has been very difficult.
This is one of those things where I would have expected the opposite in your country vs the US, my country. Here pretty much everything important has an RSS feed. The Internal Revenue Service, Health and Human Services, even my local news.
The US has a reputation abroad for being cutthroat and business oriented, but in reality US public administration can be remarkably civically minded. For example, look at the wealth of data that the NOAA gives away for anyone to do what they please with. Whereas their European counterparts are mostly just unhelpful, or they gouge you with fees.
The most glaring exception I can think of is not making it easy to file tax returns, for the benefit of companies like Intuit.
I extend to them the same default I extend to every random site maintainer on the internet: an assumption of basic competence until shown evidence to the contrary.
It is, perhaps, giving too much credit. Perhaps the average is lower than I think it is. But if it is, we would arrive at the same situation, because a developer that struggles below the average will struggle to maintain an RSS feed. We could anticipate them cutting whatever corners they can justify cutting to decrease their workload.
Basic sysadmin/tech competency != Basic webmaster competency. Whoever maintains their WordPress site may not even know the logs exist, and if they do know, not have access to them. Server literacy is not widespread.
I wouldn't say I trust them, but I would say it's the most likely explanation.
It could be that they've failed to understand how RSS could help their organization achieve its goals. But it's probably just that RSS isn't worth it to them.
I'd have to know which NGO and what their circumstances are to have a more concrete opinion. With no additional information, I can construct a hypothetical scenario where a reasonable site admin would yank RSS.
We can't really know looking in from the outside. Presumably they know how often their newsletters are sent out and how many social media followers they have and how often the RSS feed is pulled.
I do believe that online feed readers will only pull the feed once per x minutes for all their subscribers, instead of pulling the feed n times per x minutes.
For example, all of Feedly's subscribers will only count for one pull.
I was thinking accidental denial of service attack by badly scripted bot crawling their site every 15 minutes was an adequate replacement, but they didn't agree with that.
I'm not so sure. Take vhs rewinders for example. VHS cassettes and players were obsoleted by DVDs and DVD players respectively but there is no analogous new tech to the rewinder. It was a dead end. Maybe I'm splitting hairs.
Not enough split, not really hair ;) The rewinder became obsolete, replaced by random access. Your need to seek remained. Your need to watch videos remained, relevant technologies got replaced etc. One's need for "informational pull" remains - there is no dead end.
I don't think that follows. People need proper nutrition, but they can get by for an unreasonable time on sugar cereal and microwavable Salisbury steaks. The prevalence of cheap, nutrient poor meals is not an indication that people's need for nutrition doesn't remain. It's only an indication that suppliers would rather make a cheap, highly profitable good with marketing to convince people it fills a need than to go the less profitable route of actually providing for that need.
If there was such limited market demand for RSS when it was available that almost everyone's dropped it, then maybe it's not a solution that people actually need or want.
I get that people think it's a great idea, but in practice it seems not to be.
I'm not convinced suppliers genuinely attempted to provide useful RSS feeds. Even during the hay day of RSS, many feeds were simply stubs meant to get me to their website—even for websites to which I was already paying for the content.
Regardless, demand for a particular solution is much different than demand to meet a particular need. To suggest RSS is 'obsolete' suggests its been obviated by a technology which meets the same need. I don't see that as being the case. It is far more likely to me that RSS doesn't meet the needs of the supply side.
Solutions can also be dropped for lack of profitability or other supply side concerns even where demand for that particular solution is high.
You can see this in action today. Ask yourself why Spotify doesn't support RSS for its podcasts despite it being extremely popular for fetching podcasts.
Well, what it really comes down to is that there are 24 hours in a day and you can only look at one thing at a time.
If you're reading or watching video, you're either using RSS, or using Facebook or using twitter or tiktok or YouTube or whatever. If your screen time is already dedicated to doomscrolling your Facebook feed, it's not that there was a limited market for RSS, its that there's a limited market for content in general, and people moved to where the dopamine pathways get stimulated the most.
What people "need", in the sense I used the term, and what people /want/, are not the same thing, Chris. And what people /do/ is a third thing, because it takes knowledge and notion of an option to take it.
Product optimality and market offer, "efficient" and "available", "need" and "want", do not overlap. People do not "need" palm assistants that work as mirrors (glossy displays): they buy them. One can eat mud for ignorance or for lack of alternatives.
Average Joe, Median Jack, Typical Maude and Random Randall are frequently laymen (layconsumers).
The belt drive of the laser in an optical reader, and to some extent the servo motors actuating hard drive heads, were the direct successors that obsoleted the VHS rewinder. The wide data bus providing random access to persistent solid state memory has already obsoleted one and is nearly done with the other.
RSS is replaced by personalized feeds that people see by logging into specific platforms and participate through the intended user engagement. That is how those companies earn money.
...Getting information through the lens of a virtual secretary which has a sub-animal intellectual size. Apart from all the social and intellectual implications, that is still not a replacement for information update pull.
Yes, but I have seen a pattern in many websites for clubs, non-profits, student projects and other non-commercial places. They follow trends that they see in popular services. The idea that RSS is dead is unlikely to have originated from the NGO.
If the NGO tells you that RSS is rarely used compared to other methods, I would probably believe them. There really isn't any reason for them to lie about it.
Is there a current and well functioning tool that pulls full articles from the links inside most RSS feeds that only publish teasers?
When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article.
Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a good tool for that...
> Inoreader (paid pro version) will also allow you to create feeds for sites that do not publish via rss.
I am a paid pro subscriber on Inoreader, and use it 2-3 hours a day for my work. I should mention that it provides a very limited number of certain types of feed (custom-created RSS, Twitter feeds, etc.), and you'll run out of them almost immediately if you want to follow a lot of places.
That said, Inoreader lets you plug as many RSS feeds as you like in, far as I can tell, and I've really loaded it up.
But do watch out for the limits, because the next grade up from 'Pro' is 'Call sales'. It's not very granular.
Some self hosted RSS readers do that. I use Miniflux and you can set css selectors to fetch original content. It does not work when the article is a link to something (like this thread on HN)
For what it's worth: When I first launched my Wordpress-based website back in 2005, I initially had it set up to post full articles to the RSS feed. Soon, however, a major downside appeared: It became absolutely trivial for other sites to reproduce my content, and they did in droves. My writings appeared all over the web on generic Wordpress sites, usually attributed to other people. After grappling with the problem for a few months I gave up and switched the RSS to only publish intros, and that mostly resolved it.
Sure, it is always possible for a human to copy and paste my articles' text to their CMS, or for someone to write a simple scraper to extract the desired content. But both of those solutions introduce various hassles, and they require a human to fully accept that they are stealing content, which much fewer people are willing to do.
On this day a fartcannon made me feel appreciated. Thanks!
Edit: I hope this didn't come off as flippant; it is refreshing to receive encouraging words without the all-too-common "but I don't like how you do such-and-such".
Not at all flippant! As for 'constructive' compliments, I think the old information superhighway analogy of the internet is applicable because there sure is a lot of roadrage on the net.
I hold no grudge against news sites or anyone who chooses to publish teasers either. And be it only because they need statistics on which articles are more or less popular. Or ad revenue...
Unfortunately the negative effect for my end remains. Sometimes there is no ideal solution for everyone, I guess.
I'm always interested to hear what people think regarding full text feeds versus headline/summary feeds.
I hand-edit my feed, so the brief summary is easiest for me to keep up to implement. I've also always felt that it was a bit wacky to send, like, everything I've ever written as one huge XML document just so people could check for updates...
On the flip side, I have no problem with any automated service that downloads the full article for real human readers/subscribers. I have no advertising or tracking, so arguably they're saving me bandwidth. :-)
I haven't noticed a WordPress blog where the RSS feed wasn't properly advertised. Does it depend on the theme to include the appropriate link tag? Or maybe it is just sampling bias where I don't notice that WordPress sites are actually wordpress if they don't advertise the feed.
It is up to the theme to output a visual link to the RSS feed, but unless disabled, WordPress itself will always output a `<link rel="alternate" ...>` tag with an RSS feed.
It doesn't help that even Firefox have recently removed RSS/Atom feed autodiscovery and no longer display the icon if there's an RSS head entry. You have to manually type it by knowing common URLs or look at the source. Firefox also removed even the ability to even render RSS feed xml. Now it just asks you to download it like a file. These were very unhealthy choices for a community browser but completely sensible for a JS virtual machine and DRM portal to stream media and buy things.
At this point I'm just waiting for Mozilla to fuck up enough so that there is enough motivation for a hard fork to happen and survive. The only reson I'm using Firefox (without auto updates since Mozilla can't be trusted) is because the chrome monopoly is even worse.
There's a lot of services doing that already, it's a very small market. There are also a bunch of open source projects doing that already. I built one myself (https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge) but there are better and more powerful ones on Github.
I got the same argument after I asked why there's no more RSS/Atom feed of the news section in my municipality's website. Some positive people tell me that RSS is not dead and it's still everywhere. Unfortunately, especially after modern redesigns, RSS gets dropped as "obsolete technology". The sad thing is that this doesn't only happen to optional websites which I could choose not to follow out of principle like blogs or niche websites on technology and such. Governmental, municipal, local news websites do this, after which I lose easy and convenient access to this relevant information.
For «Governmental [and] municipal» information, you should be vocal as a community and/or individual community members. "Look you could visit n websites per day - and get lost in formatting, though already to visit all potential sources is impossible -, or there is this old simple thing that automatically lets one know that source S has these news..." It could be that already the representatives are unaware of the possibility and of the relevant simple solution.
Most local government websites are maintained by a handful of compliance specialists that provide hosted solutions; if your government even has an IT department (as a nearby city to me does) it is probably more a cause for concern than anything else (they seriously assign unchangeable passwords to people that follow a pattern based on your name so you can guess anyone else's password... it is crazy).
But so like, if you want to lobby a local government to add some feature to their website, they aren't even effectively going to be able to do it; but if you can convince a company like Streamline to add it to their offering, then you'd suddenly experience like half the local governments in California all getting that feature at once.
Y'all need to lean into the game a bit. Most of the time, things don't win or stay just because they are good. They win because of good marketing, etc.
RSS, the brand, is a loser at this point. It is viewed as old, tired, and obsolete. It doesn't matter if it is the right tech. That's not a state you can grow from.
At this point the right answer (IMHO) is to create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new brand. Market the hell out of it and subsidize the hell out of it.
Trying to prevent the existing brand from dying is a fools errand.
It's serious, the person you replied to is talking about how to revive a dying _thing_. Whether you want to call it a spec or a brand or a product does not really matter in this context, RSS has elements of all three. Their point is that trying to get people to change their minds on RSS is going to result in wasted effort, and that if you want RSS to live you need to market the hell out of a functionally equivalent replacement to the spec that appeals in some way to the relevant decision makers.
All things you are trying to get others to use have a brand, whether implicit or not. Heck, it's usually even valued separately from the technology (good will, etc).
RSS, the spec may be fine. I've implemented RSS readers, heck, i use newsblur every day still.
RSS, the brand, is a goner.
The OP (and twitter post) is complaining that others consider the brand dead, and are arguing that the use case it covers are unmet by other things, and that the spec is still good stuff. Those are all very orthogonal things.
It's great that the spec is still the right thing! But the brand is dead, so you won't get anywhere without fixing that.
If we use the term brand to mean, "reputation," then yes, adoption is a function of reputation. Reputation can be justly granted (due to things like the functional value it provided) but it also can be disparaged regardless of the merit of the argument.
If enough people think that RSS sucks, is too old, died with GReader, has no user-base, or whatever other story, why would they invest their time and effort in supporting it? If the problem isn't technical, then it might need some kind of marketing solution to get over the historical baggage in the zeitgeist.
Okay, I get that "brand" means "reputation", but why should a highly useful technology be worried about it's "brand". Is the "car" brand out of vogue? What about HTML? I mean, that stuff was used in crickety old sites from the 90s! Should we throw away our hammers, because screws are all the rage?
This whole notion of RSS' "brand" being the problem just reeks of a used car salesman trying to convince me that spare tires are for chumps.
This is the realm of perception not reality. The perception is that RSS has been deprecated like java applets or activeX controls. I'm not convinced we need to "rebrand RSS," but we do need to have some activity demonstrating its modern relevance.
Usefulness isn't a high enough bar. When choosing a technology, I might also want an active community, for support, for ecosystem tooling and integration, and more.
Being highly useful is simply not enough. It never has been. OS/2 did not win.
The world is littered with highly useful technologies that nobody adopts, or eventually die to less useful, arguably objectively worse technologies.
Adoption and software life cycles are not a techo-meritocracy.
In short - you are completely and totally ignoring the social aspects of software adoption and use. But they are, in fact, often the most important part. I don't actually particularly like this any more than any other software engineer - it often feels wrong. That does not (and will not) make it any less of a reality.
(as an aside, yes, in fact, as joist hangers and ties and such became more and more required due to code or construction method, structural screws became all the rage - nailing joist hangers/etc with regular framing nail guns was hard and dangerous, but structural screws just require an impact driver or a screw gun to do safely. Now they actually have specialized metal connector nailers, so structural screws are getting ignored again outside of decks)
This is probably the most on point comment in all of these RSS discussions.
Just publicly dropping the "old" XML-based version and introducing the "new" JSON-based version would probably bring a brand new flair and growing adoption to feeds.
(Nevermind json feeds existed for years)
The reality is nobody is ever going to pull it off.
RSS was great. I mean, it is great, but it used to be too. It didn't die in the public eye by accident. It was killed by the big boys who realized they can't make money off of you if they can't decide what content you see in front of you, you don't run their software on your device, and/or you don't have to sign up for an account to get the content.
Try to pitch a new syndication spec to anyone that controls a large portion of the information availability online, they're not stupid, they'll shoot you down because "we tried that already, it wasn't profitable enough."
The era of standardized protocols, freedom of information, ease of communication, interoperability, tools that empower the user, that era is dead. And it was too short lived. The internet we have today looks like something designed by Dr Strangelove. If you want to have sensible tools that work for you you're going to be swimming in a very shallow information environment with almost exclusively other zealous enthusiasts of whatever tool you think is better.
I think the world would be a better place if in these cases, instead of tweeting a rant and then submitting it to HackerNews, the OP took the effort to explain to that NGO why he thought RSS was a great tool and why they should keep using it.
Nothing says they didn't do both. Tweeting and getting it on HN both help with public awareness.
Edit: In fact they did, the OP commented below:
>Hi all, OP here, happily surprised to see this on the front page. Apologies for posting it as a tweet. Text below.*
>I've asked the NGO to reconsider their decision, but this isn't about them. It's about a systematic decline in the usage of RSS such that even major human rights organisation don't see it worth the relatively trivial effort to maintain a feed.
>I honestly think we need a concerted campaign to advocate for RSS. To educate people about its benefits and how to use it. To lobby platforms and websites to adopt RSS and champion notable one's who do. RSS is the back-to-the-future technology we need to keep up with the world in a private, decentralised and sanity-respecting way. If anyone agrees, get in touch and let's do something?
Do you mean ActivityPub (used by the "fediverse" such as Mastodon) or WebSub (which was formerly known as PubSubHubbub).
The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being always online to receive updates which means that you need to use a service or run your own. It isn't as nice as RSS which can fall back to very occasional polling from my own devices. RSS is also way simpler with a polling rather than subscribing and push.
In my opinion the best option for public publishing is Atom (RSS 2 is also ok) with WebSub support. This provides a really solid set of features.
The only reason I would really recommend ActivityPub is if you need private posts. Otherwise RSS/Atom will be the simpler solution.
> The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being always online to receive updates which me/ans that you need to use a service or run your own.
ActivityPub is the "push" counterpart to the more foundational ActivityStreams, which works no different than RSS.
Is RSS really a technology or a part of the failed attempt of having a semantic web (the real web 3.0) ?
RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website, technologically speaking it doesn't make sense to have everyone making a request to website every minute. We could have a central service responsible for that, but I guess it will centralized and some people don't like that
> RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website
A custom analysis by the user - maybe tech illiterate -, from every user, for every, supposedly complex, website, instead of some xml-izing wrapping over 'SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY pubdate DESC LIMIT 100'?!
> a request to website every minute
RSS takes less bandwidth than doing the same operation through direct visit. And of course, one is not supposed to do it that frequently; though again, some browsing agents may load pages more frequently than every minute.
It doesn't mean everyone is making a request to a website every minute. I use http://gwene.org/ for example. To me RSS or Atom are a major success, as the blogs I want to read almost always seem to have them. Those that don't, well, I used to scrape, but after a while stopped and forgotten about them.
If gwene goes under, it'll suck but I'll have a gwene like on my own server. If RSS goes under, it'll go under here and there, and not wholesale. Good technology is resilient like that.
i started moving a lot of my youtube subs to rss recently as well. i was subbed to 190 channels on youtube but somehow im supposed to be able to keep up to speed with them all using only a single view where they are all mixed together
Reminds me a bit of OFX, you know that technology that lets you download statements/etc from financial institutions to your own personal financial applications. Thereby avoiding giving random 3rd parties access to all your financial information.
RSS is not dead for the simple reason that pretty much every podcast relies on it to get distributed to all the major podcasting platforms (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc).
There is a huge difference between RSS as a backend service such as those podcast providers as opposed to being "consumer facing" such as other podcatchers or feed readers. For the former compatibility isn't a major concern, it just needs to work well enough for those use cases and users can't access the content directly (if they don't know the URL or it is IP locked).
True but if we go around telling everyone "RSS is defunct" without being more nuanced someone is going to forget about those backend dependencies and bad things will happen
RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality.
I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants.
If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this.
PS: I've clicked on this link from a RSS reader (just a simple browser extension... that keeps me posted every morning).
> RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow
I haven't signed up for any so I'm not sure, but don't some places have "newsletters"? I kind of assumed they served the same function but with email. Of course, if it does serve the same function, the bad part about it in comparison to RSS would be that you have to give them an email address.
The missing thing is centralized queuing. I can easily create a queue of all articles from RSS feeds, but it's hard to centralize all links posted in a newsletter. I do this for engineering blogs of different companies today, for example.
> If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this.
Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content.
It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, the tech giants shifted from RSS streams (which empower end users) to high control system that operate differently (social media news feeds that empower corps). This lead to a drop is RSS subscriptions.
So, why today is it useful to a publisher to have RSS on their site? This is a question that needs addressing and marketing so that people know why. The business case for them is lacking.
I want RSS. I also realize the usefulness and communication around that needs improvement.
> Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem.
This would be good, but it seems most people are too focused on RSS and not much on the actual usage. The point of RSS is to receive changes in a structured way. RSS is just a tool for this. But there are also other ways and other tools for this.
> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds.
No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.
We don't need to communicate better to the publisher to force our will onto them. Instead, we should find ways to ease their work and help them satisfy our demands. For example, there was a movement for embedding semantic and structural data right into a document. Something came out of this, but maybe we should light up that flame again and move it more into a direction where it could be used for our feedreaders. Or just adapt the feedreader to better support the already existing structures?
This could easily sold with support for accessibility, and everyone would win here. Thinking about, how is the state of accessibility-technologies today? Could it be used for easy and reliable parsing?
> > It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds.
> No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.
True, but that minority included a very influential segment (journalists, podcasters, and bloggers).
The turning point of when the blogosphere lost out to the centralized walled gardens of social media was probably around 2009 (though it wasn't obvious at the time); that was the year of the FriendFeed (an aggregator of your social accounts across multiple sites into one profile/timeline) acquisition by Facebook and of Farmville's explosive growth. After that point, Facebook and Twitter started being treated as infrastructure by startups and media organizations, a trend that accelerated during the 'Arab Spring' of the 2010s.
With podcasts the ads are naturally served as part of the audio content. That model doesn't work with text feeds, and there may even be parents on including ads in line with text.
> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds
Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I looked for what it was, all I could find was something along the lines of « it’s to syndicate content ». Or in French: « c’est de la syndication de contenus ». I don’t know if the term « syndication » is widely used in English but in French it didn’t (and still doesn’t) mean anything to me. Also in French the term happens to be close to our word for worker unions (syndicats) so it confused me even more.
All this to say RSS didn’t make sense to me and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one. Still today almost no one I know uses or used RSS one day.
I like RSS now that I understand what it is and that I have a proper reader but it’s still been perverted with ads, feeds without any content, etc.
The masses may never have consumed RSS feeds directly, but there was a lot of stuff like "Portals" and "Home Pages" that consumed them indirectly that were pretty well consumed by the masses. Companies like Yahoo! relied on RSS feeds well before companies like Google turned news acquisition and scraping into its own business, closer to the search engine arm than not, and mostly divorced from RSS.
I use a desptop RSS reader to this day to keep of numerous podcasts. I wonder if people realize that podcast feeds are RSS. Even Spotify, and some other proprietary networks. Google still maintains Feedburner too, if a bit lazily.
> When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared
Putting a (small) tinfoil hat on, Google intentionally chose to botch the handling of rss links in Chrome because they couldn't collect ad revenue through text-only RSS feeds.
> I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants.
Well, that's the whole point - RSS lets you circumvent all (or most of) the mechanisms that Facebook, Google, Medium etc. etc. have implemented to monetize content. So they are directly interested in killing it off sooner rather than later. And if the big players don't support it, the people/organizations/whatever who still maintain their own blog/news site are also more likely to see it as obsolete (or have web devs who tend to follow the "new shiny" and will advise them that RSS is obsolete).
When Google Reader was still a thing there are at least some consumer knows what that orange button means. ( Now it is only for podcast ) And most browser have RSS support so it has end point for consumer to interact with it. But then for some strange reason most browser vendor decide to kill it.
I still think RSS reader should be a feature on browser. All the modern browser now have sync as well so porting your news feeds isn't even the problem anymore.
Oh come on. How much maintenance could it actually be to keep it?
Honestly, I would not be surprised if some "I want everything to be modern" web dev convinced the powers that be that it was obsolete because he couldn't be bothered with it.
That is a complete nonsense. RSS is one of the most useful tools for those that don't have "social media" accounts.
Don't expect people to keep coming back to your website/blog just to check if there is new content/news. If it doesn't provide a feed (Atom or RSS), the most probable scenario is that I will not remember to comeback any time soon.
> RSS is one of the most useful tools for those that don't have "social media" accounts.
That's why RSS is dying. It doesn't facilitate in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive... err I mean "maximize engagement." RSS is a user-friendly technology not an advertiser-friendly or surveillance-friendly technology and surveillance driven advertising is the business model of the Internet.
I think the original idea of Twitter was basically to allow people to have "personal RSS" feeds without having technical knowledge or having to start up a blog. That plus built-in aggregation. So personal RSS for nontechnical folks + built-in aggregation.
It's a little ironic to me, then, that this concern is being posted on Twitter of all places.
I agree with the concern, I think RSS (or something closely related, like a decentralized version) should be maintained as a communication method, but I think there's a usability issue that's driving it.
I'm OK with not reading websites involved in in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive. They're the poor quality news sources that no one should be reading.
The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete.
Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.
This is a great example of RSS being useful while almost no one realizes is. People have podcast players. There are podcasts. They subscribe to them. RSS is the technology behind the scenes that powers it which almost no one notices.
I bet that most podcast listeners don't know what RSS is or how it impacts their ability to listen to podcasts.
Podcasts also present a different problem from most news. People want to listen to a podcast and know about episodes. A platform can't easily come in and alter the flow of episodes coming without consumers noticing and being annoyed. This works for RSS.
With other news the aggregating platforms want to manipulate the flow of information for their benefit. If I look at my home in Twitter I might see posts from hours or days ago at the top. It's about engagement and they manipulate the order and display of posts to aide that. Their business model doesn't fit well with RSS as a backing technology.
Note, I can't stand the manipulation of my news feed. I just understand the business and other factors behind it.
I read my news (yes including HN) on the Feedbro extension for Firefox, I wouldn't bother to go over most of newssites otherwise. 5/5 highly recommended.
Most of the listeners of podcasts have moved on to technologies that do not rely on RSS. RSS was like podcasting 1.0. Now people consume podcasts on integrated, centralized platforms.
Not true. I wrote my own RSS distribution feed for my podcast, codechefs.dev.
Every major service integration (Spotify, iTunes, google Podcast, pocketcasts)
subscribes to an RSS feed. That's how it knows when a new episode is uploaded. Those MP3 assets are not hosted on Spotify, iTunes, etc, I host them on my own s3 bucket distributed with mp3 links in the RSS. I'm sure if your a really big podcaster like Joe Rogan things may be different, but everyone else uses RSS feeds
"Integrated centralized platforms" like anchor.fm etc just publishes an RSS feed to those same services and hosts the mp3s for you on an S3 bucket
I was under the impression that Apple Podcasts was the most popular podcast platform. It absolutely does rely on RSS. I assume most others do, as well.
> The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete
Off topic, but it's insane how Spotify insists on advertising podcasts to paying users. Worse, they advertise podcasts of American right wing extremists, and call it "Something you might like" or similar offensive wording. I'm not even American, and I'm subjected to unwanted foreign political content on my music player's home page.
I contacted their support about this, and apparently they are getting paid to advertise these podcasts to their already paying users.
Spotify isn't even American...they started in Sweden and operated in the EU for years before coming to the US. It was a big deal when they finally opened up here. Their disgusting partnership with right-wing degenerates is bizarre as well as obnoxious.
247 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 601 ms ] threadI certainly hope that most RSS users are shying away from such a terrible platform.
When you want to make a pitch to somebody that RSS is valuable, you don't have direct statistics on its global use. You can pull access logs for your own servers, but if you're trying to justify to a boss the investment of setting up an RSS service where you don't have one already, you're going to have to use someone's proxy numbers on how popular it is.
Meanwhile, Twitter's access logs are a direct signal on the popularity of Twitter. Their story for telling potential investors how many users they have is very short.
My point was rather that twitter is a place where brands listen and also a place where a lot of web devs talk. If RSS is to continue being seen as relevant twitter would be a good place to advocate for it.
But they said "proprietary platforms like Twitter", not Twitter, so they would not be wrong in making that statement. Except, in an unexpected twist, RSS was actually initially developed to be used on Netscape's proprietary portal. It was not until a bit later that the open standards, anti-monopoly group won out.
Put positively: RSS anticipated Twitter and preemptively routed around it.
For now I use Wachete to achieve this.
It’s time to move towns ;)
The most glaring exception I can think of is not making it easy to file tax returns, for the benefit of companies like Intuit.
Now, if only there were a good way to sync elfeed and an Android feed reader!
Plus "we couldn't figure out how to monetize RSS"
It is, perhaps, giving too much credit. Perhaps the average is lower than I think it is. But if it is, we would arrive at the same situation, because a developer that struggles below the average will struggle to maintain an RSS feed. We could anticipate them cutting whatever corners they can justify cutting to decrease their workload.
Basic sysadmin/tech competency != Basic webmaster competency. Whoever maintains their WordPress site may not even know the logs exist, and if they do know, not have access to them. Server literacy is not widespread.
It could be that they've failed to understand how RSS could help their organization achieve its goals. But it's probably just that RSS isn't worth it to them.
In general, if they were truly seeing no uptake on it, they could just be justified removing it to decrease their security surface (https://www.acunetix.com/vulnerabilities/web/wordpress-plugi...).
I'd have to know which NGO and what their circumstances are to have a more concrete opinion. With no additional information, I can construct a hypothetical scenario where a reasonable site admin would yank RSS.
For example, all of Feedly's subscribers will only count for one pull.
Not enough split, not really hair ;) The rewinder became obsolete, replaced by random access. Your need to seek remained. Your need to watch videos remained, relevant technologies got replaced etc. One's need for "informational pull" remains - there is no dead end.
It clearly doesn't - since so few people are using RSS.
I get that people think it's a great idea, but in practice it seems not to be.
I'm not convinced suppliers genuinely attempted to provide useful RSS feeds. Even during the hay day of RSS, many feeds were simply stubs meant to get me to their website—even for websites to which I was already paying for the content.
Regardless, demand for a particular solution is much different than demand to meet a particular need. To suggest RSS is 'obsolete' suggests its been obviated by a technology which meets the same need. I don't see that as being the case. It is far more likely to me that RSS doesn't meet the needs of the supply side.
Solutions can also be dropped for lack of profitability or other supply side concerns even where demand for that particular solution is high.
You can see this in action today. Ask yourself why Spotify doesn't support RSS for its podcasts despite it being extremely popular for fetching podcasts.
If you're reading or watching video, you're either using RSS, or using Facebook or using twitter or tiktok or YouTube or whatever. If your screen time is already dedicated to doomscrolling your Facebook feed, it's not that there was a limited market for RSS, its that there's a limited market for content in general, and people moved to where the dopamine pathways get stimulated the most.
Product optimality and market offer, "efficient" and "available", "need" and "want", do not overlap. People do not "need" palm assistants that work as mirrors (glossy displays): they buy them. One can eat mud for ignorance or for lack of alternatives.
Average Joe, Median Jack, Typical Maude and Random Randall are frequently laymen (layconsumers).
When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article.
Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a good tool for that...
I am a paid pro subscriber on Inoreader, and use it 2-3 hours a day for my work. I should mention that it provides a very limited number of certain types of feed (custom-created RSS, Twitter feeds, etc.), and you'll run out of them almost immediately if you want to follow a lot of places.
That said, Inoreader lets you plug as many RSS feeds as you like in, far as I can tell, and I've really loaded it up.
But do watch out for the limits, because the next grade up from 'Pro' is 'Call sales'. It's not very granular.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unread-an-rss-reader/id1363637...
Sure, it is always possible for a human to copy and paste my articles' text to their CMS, or for someone to write a simple scraper to extract the desired content. But both of those solutions introduce various hassles, and they require a human to fully accept that they are stealing content, which much fewer people are willing to do.
Edit: I hope this didn't come off as flippant; it is refreshing to receive encouraging words without the all-too-common "but I don't like how you do such-and-such".
I hold no grudge against news sites or anyone who chooses to publish teasers either. And be it only because they need statistics on which articles are more or less popular. Or ad revenue...
Unfortunately the negative effect for my end remains. Sometimes there is no ideal solution for everyone, I guess.
- https://morss.it/
- http://ftr.fivefilters.org/
https://github.com/alrs/full-text-rss-docker
I hand-edit my feed, so the brief summary is easiest for me to keep up to implement. I've also always felt that it was a bit wacky to send, like, everything I've ever written as one huge XML document just so people could check for updates...
On the flip side, I have no problem with any automated service that downloads the full article for real human readers/subscribers. I have no advertising or tracking, so arguably they're saving me bandwidth. :-)
So on mobile half the time I paste the URL into my feed reader to see that RSS isn't supported.
$1 a month, $10 if paid annually :o)
https://carcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Sloane-DellOrto...
But so like, if you want to lobby a local government to add some feature to their website, they aren't even effectively going to be able to do it; but if you can convince a company like Streamline to add it to their offering, then you'd suddenly experience like half the local governments in California all getting that feature at once.
At this point the right answer (IMHO) is to create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new brand. Market the hell out of it and subsidize the hell out of it.
Trying to prevent the existing brand from dying is a fools errand.
All things you are trying to get others to use have a brand, whether implicit or not. Heck, it's usually even valued separately from the technology (good will, etc).
RSS, the spec may be fine. I've implemented RSS readers, heck, i use newsblur every day still.
RSS, the brand, is a goner.
The OP (and twitter post) is complaining that others consider the brand dead, and are arguing that the use case it covers are unmet by other things, and that the spec is still good stuff. Those are all very orthogonal things.
It's great that the spec is still the right thing! But the brand is dead, so you won't get anywhere without fixing that.
If enough people think that RSS sucks, is too old, died with GReader, has no user-base, or whatever other story, why would they invest their time and effort in supporting it? If the problem isn't technical, then it might need some kind of marketing solution to get over the historical baggage in the zeitgeist.
This whole notion of RSS' "brand" being the problem just reeks of a used car salesman trying to convince me that spare tires are for chumps.
Things with a reputation of being dead gains lower interest and support.
Usefulness isn't a high enough bar. When choosing a technology, I might also want an active community, for support, for ecosystem tooling and integration, and more.
The world is littered with highly useful technologies that nobody adopts, or eventually die to less useful, arguably objectively worse technologies. Adoption and software life cycles are not a techo-meritocracy.
In short - you are completely and totally ignoring the social aspects of software adoption and use. But they are, in fact, often the most important part. I don't actually particularly like this any more than any other software engineer - it often feels wrong. That does not (and will not) make it any less of a reality.
(as an aside, yes, in fact, as joist hangers and ties and such became more and more required due to code or construction method, structural screws became all the rage - nailing joist hangers/etc with regular framing nail guns was hard and dangerous, but structural screws just require an impact driver or a screw gun to do safely. Now they actually have specialized metal connector nailers, so structural screws are getting ignored again outside of decks)
Use the blockchain and make it a part of web3
Just publicly dropping the "old" XML-based version and introducing the "new" JSON-based version would probably bring a brand new flair and growing adoption to feeds. (Nevermind json feeds existed for years)
Now we just need someone to pull it off...
RSS was great. I mean, it is great, but it used to be too. It didn't die in the public eye by accident. It was killed by the big boys who realized they can't make money off of you if they can't decide what content you see in front of you, you don't run their software on your device, and/or you don't have to sign up for an account to get the content.
Try to pitch a new syndication spec to anyone that controls a large portion of the information availability online, they're not stupid, they'll shoot you down because "we tried that already, it wasn't profitable enough."
The era of standardized protocols, freedom of information, ease of communication, interoperability, tools that empower the user, that era is dead. And it was too short lived. The internet we have today looks like something designed by Dr Strangelove. If you want to have sensible tools that work for you you're going to be swimming in a very shallow information environment with almost exclusively other zealous enthusiasts of whatever tool you think is better.
Edit: In fact they did, the OP commented below:
>Hi all, OP here, happily surprised to see this on the front page. Apologies for posting it as a tweet. Text below.*
>I've asked the NGO to reconsider their decision, but this isn't about them. It's about a systematic decline in the usage of RSS such that even major human rights organisation don't see it worth the relatively trivial effort to maintain a feed.
>I honestly think we need a concerted campaign to advocate for RSS. To educate people about its benefits and how to use it. To lobby platforms and websites to adopt RSS and champion notable one's who do. RSS is the back-to-the-future technology we need to keep up with the world in a private, decentralised and sanity-respecting way. If anyone agrees, get in touch and let's do something?
Edit: I meant WebSub above. ActivityHub is cool too but not quite in the same space.
The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being always online to receive updates which means that you need to use a service or run your own. It isn't as nice as RSS which can fall back to very occasional polling from my own devices. RSS is also way simpler with a polling rather than subscribing and push.
In my opinion the best option for public publishing is Atom (RSS 2 is also ok) with WebSub support. This provides a really solid set of features.
The only reason I would really recommend ActivityPub is if you need private posts. Otherwise RSS/Atom will be the simpler solution.
ActivityPub is the "push" counterpart to the more foundational ActivityStreams, which works no different than RSS.
RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website, technologically speaking it doesn't make sense to have everyone making a request to website every minute. We could have a central service responsible for that, but I guess it will centralized and some people don't like that
A custom analysis by the user - maybe tech illiterate -, from every user, for every, supposedly complex, website, instead of some xml-izing wrapping over 'SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY pubdate DESC LIMIT 100'?!
> a request to website every minute
RSS takes less bandwidth than doing the same operation through direct visit. And of course, one is not supposed to do it that frequently; though again, some browsing agents may load pages more frequently than every minute.
I can only condone scraping if the official API is so convoluted that scraping the page is literally the easier option to program against.
If gwene goes under, it'll suck but I'll have a gwene like on my own server. If RSS goes under, it'll go under here and there, and not wholesale. Good technology is resilient like that.
https://newscatcherapi.com/blog/google-news-rss-search-param...
You can replace the original RSS with the "mirror" from Google News
Go over your feed? useless!
go over my subscribed feed till i get back to last video i saw? way too much work and that feed was known to fail (just like clicking the bell)
the only working solution is RSS feed for every channel i want to follow and automation to add those to my different playlists
RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality.
I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants.
If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this.
PS: I've clicked on this link from a RSS reader (just a simple browser extension... that keeps me posted every morning).
I haven't signed up for any so I'm not sure, but don't some places have "newsletters"? I kind of assumed they served the same function but with email. Of course, if it does serve the same function, the bad part about it in comparison to RSS would be that you have to give them an email address.
Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content.
It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, the tech giants shifted from RSS streams (which empower end users) to high control system that operate differently (social media news feeds that empower corps). This lead to a drop is RSS subscriptions.
So, why today is it useful to a publisher to have RSS on their site? This is a question that needs addressing and marketing so that people know why. The business case for them is lacking.
I want RSS. I also realize the usefulness and communication around that needs improvement.
This would be good, but it seems most people are too focused on RSS and not much on the actual usage. The point of RSS is to receive changes in a structured way. RSS is just a tool for this. But there are also other ways and other tools for this.
> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds.
No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.
We don't need to communicate better to the publisher to force our will onto them. Instead, we should find ways to ease their work and help them satisfy our demands. For example, there was a movement for embedding semantic and structural data right into a document. Something came out of this, but maybe we should light up that flame again and move it more into a direction where it could be used for our feedreaders. Or just adapt the feedreader to better support the already existing structures?
This could easily sold with support for accessibility, and everyone would win here. Thinking about, how is the state of accessibility-technologies today? Could it be used for easy and reliable parsing?
> No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.
True, but that minority included a very influential segment (journalists, podcasters, and bloggers).
The turning point of when the blogosphere lost out to the centralized walled gardens of social media was probably around 2009 (though it wasn't obvious at the time); that was the year of the FriendFeed (an aggregator of your social accounts across multiple sites into one profile/timeline) acquisition by Facebook and of Farmville's explosive growth. After that point, Facebook and Twitter started being treated as infrastructure by startups and media organizations, a trend that accelerated during the 'Arab Spring' of the 2010s.
Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I looked for what it was, all I could find was something along the lines of « it’s to syndicate content ». Or in French: « c’est de la syndication de contenus ». I don’t know if the term « syndication » is widely used in English but in French it didn’t (and still doesn’t) mean anything to me. Also in French the term happens to be close to our word for worker unions (syndicats) so it confused me even more. All this to say RSS didn’t make sense to me and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one. Still today almost no one I know uses or used RSS one day.
I like RSS now that I understand what it is and that I have a proper reader but it’s still been perverted with ads, feeds without any content, etc.
Putting a (small) tinfoil hat on, Google intentionally chose to botch the handling of rss links in Chrome because they couldn't collect ad revenue through text-only RSS feeds.
thats why its dead.
Well, that's the whole point - RSS lets you circumvent all (or most of) the mechanisms that Facebook, Google, Medium etc. etc. have implemented to monetize content. So they are directly interested in killing it off sooner rather than later. And if the big players don't support it, the people/organizations/whatever who still maintain their own blog/news site are also more likely to see it as obsolete (or have web devs who tend to follow the "new shiny" and will advise them that RSS is obsolete).
For some sites there's also a sitemap for news that includes extra fields, like title, tags and description
imply.io/blog
anyscale.com/blog
blog.twitter.com
I still think RSS reader should be a feature on browser. All the modern browser now have sync as well so porting your news feeds isn't even the problem anymore.
It's more fragile than using supported RSS feeds, but it gets the job done.
Honestly, I would not be surprised if some "I want everything to be modern" web dev convinced the powers that be that it was obsolete because he couldn't be bothered with it.
Don't expect people to keep coming back to your website/blog just to check if there is new content/news. If it doesn't provide a feed (Atom or RSS), the most probable scenario is that I will not remember to comeback any time soon.
That's why RSS is dying. It doesn't facilitate in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive... err I mean "maximize engagement." RSS is a user-friendly technology not an advertiser-friendly or surveillance-friendly technology and surveillance driven advertising is the business model of the Internet.
It's a little ironic to me, then, that this concern is being posted on Twitter of all places.
I agree with the concern, I think RSS (or something closely related, like a decentralized version) should be maintained as a communication method, but I think there's a usability issue that's driving it.
Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.
I bet that most podcast listeners don't know what RSS is or how it impacts their ability to listen to podcasts.
Podcasts also present a different problem from most news. People want to listen to a podcast and know about episodes. A platform can't easily come in and alter the flow of episodes coming without consumers noticing and being annoyed. This works for RSS.
With other news the aggregating platforms want to manipulate the flow of information for their benefit. If I look at my home in Twitter I might see posts from hours or days ago at the top. It's about engagement and they manipulate the order and display of posts to aide that. Their business model doesn't fit well with RSS as a backing technology.
Note, I can't stand the manipulation of my news feed. I just understand the business and other factors behind it.
Every major service integration (Spotify, iTunes, google Podcast, pocketcasts)
subscribes to an RSS feed. That's how it knows when a new episode is uploaded. Those MP3 assets are not hosted on Spotify, iTunes, etc, I host them on my own s3 bucket distributed with mp3 links in the RSS. I'm sure if your a really big podcaster like Joe Rogan things may be different, but everyone else uses RSS feeds
"Integrated centralized platforms" like anchor.fm etc just publishes an RSS feed to those same services and hosts the mp3s for you on an S3 bucket
Moving away from RSS doesn't solve anything
Off topic, but it's insane how Spotify insists on advertising podcasts to paying users. Worse, they advertise podcasts of American right wing extremists, and call it "Something you might like" or similar offensive wording. I'm not even American, and I'm subjected to unwanted foreign political content on my music player's home page.
I contacted their support about this, and apparently they are getting paid to advertise these podcasts to their already paying users.
Do some independent thinking like Mollie does here: https://twitter.com/MZHemingway/status/1470769147676172299