Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

What about the RSS protocol is lacking and in need of further development? It seems to get the job done.

I do agree about discovery in general, it's uncomfortable counting on Google, Microsoft, and Meta / TikTok for content discovery. Thankfully there are some smart folks working on fresh takes on the search engine.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

My personal observation is that writers get some kind of intimacy from mailing lists and so prefer that. Whether RSS is happening depends on the platform they publish on rather than any conscious decision.

(keep in mind we are both hackernews users before you hit me with the 'um actually' in regards to your own blog. i already know you like rss.)

I still get all of my news so I'd say it is still going strong.

I think you are right that the big platforms tend to remove RSS as they grow because they would rather have lock-in than providing the ibterfaces that their users want but that is a minor strike against RSS.

I think the biggest problem is just that users don't really know about it. The easy-to-discover auto-discovery buttons have been removed from browsers so most users don't even know. Based on my experience a lot of people are very happy with RSS ones you set them up with a feed reader and an extension that adds the RSS discovery back to the browser.

So I guess the biggest problem isn't the discovery of RSS feeds but the disicery of RSS itself.

It was never dying and so didn’t need to come back. It doesn’t require much in the way of development because it serves its simple purpose well.

If a website has the proper <link> element in its header some browsers detect that and display an RSS icon for easy subscription. That’s how I follow websites; I don’t subscribe to newsletters.

RSS is either decreasing or increasing. I feel like it’s still working well enough (I use it) but if I’d have to guess I would say it’s decreasing (and thus will die).

What it needs is a bunch of volunteers to implement it for all languages (provide libraries) and frameworks (provide rss feeds by default for blogs and cms).

For the most part it works quite well, but I think some static blog generators, or centralized blog platforms, are not playing nice with RSS (and I’m guessing this is on purpose).

RSS is still the main mode of podcast distribution. It's somewhat hidden behind podcast apps, but that's what distributors are still using to create feeds.

Seems like mailing lists are getting popular. I wish I could have those in my RSS reader.

RSS as it was existed 10+ years ago there were was the little orange RSS icon on most websites and blogs is 100% dead and won't ever come back.

Personally I think this is a shame but the majority BigCorps want to know who is consuming their news/information and dislike their information being disseminated anonymously via RSS feeds.

They'd prefer be able to track you online (because you visited their website to read said information), or have your email address to spam from time to time etc.

There's no commercial imperative to keep RSS, which is why it is dead.

RSS is holding strong. I run a network of news aggregators (https://TechURLs.com, https://DevURLs.com, and many others) and only two or three news sources out of a hundred have removed their RSS feeds over the last two years.

Its strongest hold is definitely in Podcasting. Right now, thats basically all a podcast feed is, its an RSS feed. This is largely due to the hands off nature that Apple had with podcasting for so long, though Spotify[0] is trying to wrestle this control over the ecosystem in moving away from publishing an open RSS feed.

Its very much alive in this way though, at least for now, and I think its important to recognize the role of RSS in keeping podcast distribution fairly uniform and relatively meritocratic. I think this why it has exploded as a medium, in part. Its also why you get such a fantastic selection of great third party players.

Unfortunately, I think RSS for news is already past its prime, though alot of "indie" sites and blogs still do have feeds it seems.

[0]: https://singhkays.com/blog/how-spotify-is-killing-the-open-p...

Hard to say that it’s coming back I think.

My my.yahoo.com (yes, I know, Yahoo! Is hardly a worthwhile data point these days) was carefully constructed of a dozen or more RSS feeds, and 80-90% are now dead. I tried resurrecting a few on the assumption that the sources just changed their URI, but all (maybe 3?) that I tried had no RSS feed any more, or none that I could find.

I think two were now paywalled sites, which is probably the broader trend - RSS is just a different form of ad-blocking from the content-provider’s perspective.

The thing about RSS is that big tech companies are not very fond of it because it gives too much control to the user and it's not so easy to flood you with ads when you use it. So, many of those companies either don't offer RSS, or they have it but they don't advertise it much and maybe they just do the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, since social media has replaced blogs as the go-to place for discussions and user-generated content in general, this means that a lot of the platforms that people use most frequently don't have an RSS feed, or have it but it's not very useful for whatever reason.

However: many, many other webpages out there do offer RSS, and I'm guessing that plenty of people use it, at least on technical circles. I use it mostly for comics and, to a lesser extent, for a few personal blogs and even news. A lot of people use it for podcasts. It has also been used to automatically download new episodes of TV shows in torrent downloaders (I'm guessing that you could mark this particular application as controversial; I won't comment on that. But it is useful at the very least). Also, if used properly, it allows for a lot of user control. You could, for example, pipe a youtube RSS into yt-dlp so that videos from a particular creator are automatically downloaded into a folder in your computer, or use any alert of new content to trigger whatever you want to do (like custom alerts when someone comments in a blog of yours, or whatever). RSS has a lot of potential, and because of that I don't think it's going away soon.

Now, you are also worried about the problem of content discovery. There is a problem here, because whenever we as users want a source of curated content, advertisers are going to do whatever they can in order to squeeze their shit into our pipes. So I personally prefer a "dumb" protocol like RSS where I just say "give me new updates from just THIS site", and leave discovery to more organic, less automated (therefore less gameable by advertisers) means. The closest I can think of to solve your problem is the usage of blog rings/networks (they used to exist, ten years ago... I don't know the state of the art right now), but this still means that there is someone doing the aggregation.

Why does the protocol require active development to be useful?

I really hope it is not dying, as it is my favorite way of following sites around the web. Recently I also started attacking my YouTube dependency by adding YT channels as RSS feeds and avoid the YT homepage. I only store feeds for the most relevant YT channels and I get notified when a new video is posted on those channels. If anyone is interested: view the source of a YT channel, look for "externalId", copy that ID then append it to "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=".

It's coming back, thanks to Lire's automagic local caching for offline reading of text and images, https://lireapp.com/

> unlike other RSS feed readers, that either push you into a browser (in-app or otherwise), or depend on third party text parsing services and require you to be online to fetch the full text of one article at a time (which makes it no different from having to click/tap through to a website), in lire, you get your favorite RSS feeds as they should've been. You don't need to click through to any website (though, you do still have the option to, if you really wanted). It takes your favorite partial feeds, does its magic, and converts them in to full feeds, so you don't have to click/tap on those annoying 'Read more' or 'Continue reading' links. Once they're cached, you don't even need to be connected to read your full-text feeds.

It's almost like UUCP-powered Usenet!

It never died. I have kept reading 200-odd RSS feeds for the past ten to fifteen years, and this myth about it being dead keeps coming up every year on HN.

The protocol works and would probably be best cast as "done", which is a concept very little modern technology seems to encompass...

Still the main standard for podcasts.

Not totally on topic, but it's a shame Blogger is/was a Google thing.

Blogger with RSS, marketed correctly, could have taken the place of everything social media since.

As a utility API it's just... there. Kind of the same way sitemap.xml is there. It's something developers can use.

As something consumer-facing, it's long since dead. The vast majority of consumers don't usually want a chronological list of all stories from a predetermined list of sources -- they want things like Google/Apple News which recommends stories from everywhere using ML according to their revealed preferences. They want extended comment threads whether on Facebook, Reddit, or the news site itself. They want share functionality and upvotes and Twitter reactions.

RSS was a great first step, but no open protocol can deliver all that. The main problem being that even if you were running your ML models for news preferences locally, everything around upvoting and commenting and mass-sharing can't be decentralized without descending into spam madness and upvote gaming.

It is dead and has been replaced by atom, which at least has a valid media type!!1!

I guess the biggest problem with either is that it can be used both to deliver content, best consumed by some news reader, and it can help to just discover updates, without actually providing the content.

It seems to aspire to the former, with all added complexity involved, especially for the consumer. However, what would be needed most is the part that helps with discovery.

Imagine a browser that automatically picks up all feeds it comes across, and presents the user with a facebook-like timeline of interesting items as references to the original sources. With no activity required, but simple options "show less of this and more of that". Of course, why would a browser want to create that kind of user-engagement.

I curated a huge .OPML file that I've been using for a decade now with no problems. I cherry picked the RSS feeds by first visiting the blog, then hunting for the feed either by using an addon or using Firefox's (now defunct) RSS feed button. Currently there's 500 blogs added. I avoided feeds which were mere summaries of the blog's post, and contained the full post so I could read it entirely. No ADs. No tracking. No sidebar distractions, just pure information.

I stopped using Google News once I realized they literally won't even let you add certain sites to your feed for no other reason than politics.

So I now use Inoreader to curate my own news feed from RSS feeds as well as many sites that don't have a feed. Instead of spending time blocking or deleting "approved" news sources that are the definition of fake news these days, I just add any sites that I come across that I feel are useful for information gathering.

I came here from Feedly.

> Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

Feedly has about 30mn of downtime now and then; I'd say once a year. /s

It's not dying, thus it doesn't have to come back.

> Is RSS still actively developed as a protocol?

I don't think it does, and I like it.

> If not, why not?

Why should it? Don't break something that works.

> Are there any viable alternatives on the horizon?

RSS is viable to me. I understand that some may want to add tracking and paid suscriptions; but that's not a bug, that's a feature. I don't want some content pushers to constantly try to ram something down my throat -wasting my precious time- just so that they can make a few cents off my back annually.

> I find it really troubling that we seem to have resigned ourselves to web content discovery and distribution belonging to corporations like Google and Meta.

?? I actually went on Feedly because Google EOL'd gReader

> Also grateful for any reading recommendations on this subject

Here's my advice: take the habit of actually seeking information. You saw a thread on Facebook about Photogrammetry? Then research how it is done. When you stumble on a source that is useful to you, try to identify if new content may be produced; and try to find an RSS feed. Boom, you're now subscribed to a Palaeontologist's articles about macro-Photogrammetry, how he captures details in fossils:

https://peterfalkingham.com/category/photogrammetry/

It's called curating information for your own needs; come back in a few years to thank me. By then you'll have gone a few rabbit-holes of technical specialization, and have an information pipeline way better than the 3-seconds-attention-optimized Facebook's feed.

RSS is still the best to get articles in a sane way. On my website https://roastidio.us I poll 4500+ feeds and counting. I have amassed 300k+ articles that are higher quality than average web pages. Of cause, the whole corpus is searchable.