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Ask HN: How to promote RSS subscriptions in 2022?

24 points by oliwarner ↗ HN
I've run my blog for 21 years. I took an accidental 10 year hiatus and I've been polishing it up recently to get back into it.

It used to be really popular to promote your RSS feed. Might have just been the circles I swam in, but people knew what to do with it. I've maintained this big orange RSS symbol in my main navigation and I wonder: Does anybody actually know what to do with this now?

Firefox used to offer subscription options but I don't see anything in the navbar any more. If you click the symbol on my page, you just see an ugly page of XML.

In the vain hope that somebody might want to see what I'm writing and be notified about it, how do I enable this? Do I have to post updates on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and etc, etc?

I've been consuming RSS for all this time but the rest of the world seems to have moved on. Feeling pretty old right now.

My blog, just in case, https://thepcspy.com

21 comments

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pamoroso
My impression is many new bloggers are among the ones who have never heard about RSS.
oliwarner
I suspect that's right... But what have they replaced it with?

And I mean that in both directions. I've always consumed more RSS than I've generated and it's still my primary source for tech news. Do they just rely on service-level federation? Seems pretty sad.

y2bd
I imagine they use Twitter as RSS.
kevincox
This is my impression as well. Social media and newsletters.
pamoroso
Those bloggers most likely use social feeds.
greenyoda
> I've been consuming RSS for all this time but the rest of the world seems to have moved on. Feeling pretty old right now.

If it makes you feel better, I consume all my blog content through RSS. I use the Newsblur.com aggregator to follow roughly 200 RSS feeds.

I find it sad that a lot of blogs that support RSS (like all the blogs on Substack) don't even post their RSS URLs. You just have to know they're there. (For Substack, append "/feed" to the site's URL to get the RSS feed. Appending "/feed" or "/rss" works for many other sites too.)

Maybe, in addition to displaying an RSS icon, you can add a link underneath such as "How to subscribe to this blog with RSS".

kevincox
Substack supports auto-discovery which is the "best" way to do it. You can just paste article URLs into your feed reader and it will find the feed for you.

Of course this was a lot better when browsers had built-in indicators that a feed was available. But for those "in the know" there are extensions which restore this functionality.

stop50
my biggest problem is that many sites don't publish rss urls. so it (on comic sites) an problem to find the correct url.
teledyn
I still use an rss reader, mostly for journals. As The Platforms took over, many notification services like city council, weather, road conditions, even school bus cancelations feed into these, and over time my opml file got smaller and smaller.

Having rss in emacs gnus works for me, but for wide use, it needs to be browser based, one click, you don't even need to know it is rss (but maybe a toggle for full text vs blurb) which is what I get with Flym on android. Flym can also detect if a page has the link metadata, but you have to copy paste the url into it.

RSS can be relayed into mastodon, but this requires a hosting an app, so it might as well just be an app.

For the new bloggers, it's like including semantic web structured data, it is something a writer should never need to know, at most an option button in their composing software, clicked, done!

cyanbane
I do most of my content reading via Feedbin - a ton of that is on Twitter but I read through Feedbin. The rest is pure RSS. It has become second nature for me to just view source -> ctrl-f -> and keep fingers cross "rss" gets a hit. Wrote about it some here https://cyanbane.com/2018-08-10/Twitter-RSS
WorldMaker
Most RSS readers still know how to find RSS feeds (through the autodiscovery headers that used to power things like Firefox' old navbar support). So people still using RSS feeds in 2022 (such as myself) generally still know how to find them, icon or not.

But yeah, bringing new users to RSS in 2022 is a hard advertising/teaching experience. Instead of your RSS icon pointing directly to your feed in 2022 (because just about no browser today does anything nicer than wall of XML) you might try a more curated approach and link to an RSS reader you prefer and trust such as The Old Reader or Newsblur or something as.

altantiprocrast
> because just about no browser today does anything nicer than wall of XML

The browser doesn't, but you can use an XSLT stylesheet like this to make it look a little bit nicer: https://karmanyaah.malhotra.cc/feed.xml

An XSLT stylesheet allows formatting XML content as HTML/CSS. Of course, I haven't solved linking people to feed readers (maybe just feedly), but it could be done with this.

Source code: https://github.com/karmanyaahm/karmanyaahm.github.io/blob/d6...

oliwarner
This is great!

I could use XLST to tell people what my feed is, how to use it, etc, all without interrupting those who already knew.

peanutbox
Would it be useful to have a site https://use-rss.example.com/?feed=https://thepcspy.com/feeds... which explained what RSS/Atom is, and suggested decent feed readers with instructions on how to set them up?

The idea would be that blog authors could link to that next to (or instead of) their RSS icon.

Such blogs could still include a link HTML tag for extension autodiscovery.

kevincox
It would be fantastic. Unfortunately all of the better ones I have found are reader-dependant.
rsscircus
To recover the ability - in Firefox - to detect and subscribe to RSS feed in your online RSS reader, consider installing the Want My RSS extension https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/
oliwarner
I've personally no problem in consuming RSS.

It's more about the visitors to my websites. It used to be enough to embed a feed and people would subscribe. These days there's so little in-browser glue that you either have to know what to do with it, or... or what?

The point here is to try to work out how people stay up to date with individual websites.

I wrote this after posting here, might explain better than this little comment. https://thepcspy.com/read/what-happened-to-rss/

darekkay
> Does anybody actually know what to do with this now? > If you click the symbol on my page, you just see an ugly page of XML.

There's a solution for both issues: apply styling and add explanation to your RSS feed. Here's mine:

https://darekkay.com/atom.xml

It's based on this solution (adjusted for Atom feeds):

https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds/blob/main/tools/pretty-...

krm01
RSS is a strange beast. It’s one of the more useful things on the internet, but it seems to never really have caught on. Any thoughts on why?