For people who willingly live in (or visit) Apple's walled garden, I like News Explorer because it syncs (subscribed feeds and read/unread state of each article) via icloud between iphone, ipad and macOS.
They also have feeds for playlists but they are wonky (they only display a limited number of videos so won't contain new items if the new videos are added at the bottom) and not advertised.
Indeed; it doesn't feel as though it be in the interest of the website which is why support is dropping.
Youtube wants people to subscribe, which I don't do, I simply add the RSS feed of channels I want to be updated about which is probably not what either Youtube or those channels want given how much they are begging me to subscribe all the time.
That's still a subscription, it's just not attached to a YouTube account. Not my fault if someone generates statistics based on redefining words to suit their business model.
Yeah, I've cancelled all my subscriptions on YouTube and use a browser extension that hides recommendations and ads. I follow a lot of channels and there comes a point where I had to do something since I was missing videos constantly. When I want to watch YouTube I don't go to Youtube.com but open my RSS reader that links me directly to the videos.
You can also use https://api.invidious.io/ to get the feeds. I keep the Youtube feed since I just share button to Newpipe. From Newpipe I can send to Kodi for the big screen experience.
+1 for RSS, I leaned on RSS as my protocol-of-choice for Haven[1], and even added a built-in RSS feed-reader. It provides a single chronologically-ordered stream of content from all your feeds which I've found makes it much more pleasant to read through.
Thank you so much for sharing! I have considered this exact same idea to break my friends and family free from the chains of Facebook and Instagram, but you've packaged this up so nicely, I should really give this a shot.
Is there a way to update my own blog to play nicely with Haven? I like my own styling and hosting setup, and I already have my own RSS reader, so ideally I would like to continue using those, while also making them available to friends and family on Haven.
The only thing special about Haven is that access is restricted for the content you publish. Anything that publishes and consumes RSS (so long as it supports HTTP Basic Auth) will play nicely with Haven.
I have to add that caveat because support isn't universal. NetNewsWire supports it, Thunderbird supports it, and Inoreader supports it on their paid tier, but Feedly doesn't. (for some examples)
Brilliant! If you ever need help with this, I would love to pitch in. It reminds me of the olden days of social media.
For users who don't know how to self host, and can't stomach the (very reasonable for ad-free social media) $5/mo... have you considered a cloud-hosted option with a sidebar of KTLO ads? Or maybe a "family plan" cloud instance where multiple friends could share a single cloud instance (sharded per person) to save money on the hosted option?
Hi Matt, we've recently emailed about Haven and HeyHomepage because we both are RSS-based, so to speak. Your software is oriented towards private (group) communication and makes a strong case as an alternative for Facebook. I've a lot of respect for your product! With HeyHomepage I'm more publicly oriented, more Twitter-like if you will. On top of a publicly accessible website.
The beauty of RSS is it's interoperability. So I was wondering, can your built-in newsreader also read my RSS feed, for example? Or only other Haven feeds?
And the other way around, can I follow private feeds from Haven users with my built-in newsreader? Or any other separate newsreader software, for that matter? As long as Haven users would share that link with me, of course.
Yup! RSS is RSS! If you want to follow a Haven feed, you just need to make sure your newsreader can handle HTTP Basic Auth credentials. A Haven feed URL embeds the credentials right in the URL to make it easier.
And Haven's feed reader can read every RSS and Atom feed I've been able to find. The feed reading and publishing are both part of the live demo, so you can do some testing over there! https://havenweb.org/demo.html
If you run into any incompatibilities, let me know and I'll get them fixed!
I can confirm HeyHomepage's newsreader can read and display the Haven demo feed that I just made. The other way around works as well. That's the beauty of the Web and RSS.
I recently started using RSS again (self-hosted with miniflux). One difficulty I have is that these kinds of RSS feeds in OP are way too high-volume for me. But it can be hard to find good blogs or RSS feeds without relying on Twitter to find them.
Back in the day, more people used to include a list of blogs they follow on their own blogs, I thought this was a great practice. A few still do, like this very interesting blog on statistics: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/blogs-i-read/
+1 for miniflux! It’s great for low-volume, high-quality blogs. It’s got features to keep track of more frequent updates too, if you can be bothered to categorize them.
I set my page length to something long (n>1000) and have a userscript that round-robin sorts the unread posts by feed, and it works pretty nicely for all but the most high-volume (e.g. Boing Boing)
https://maya.land/userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/
If you go the self-hosted route you can also put RSS-Bridge on the same host to locally generate RSS feeds for a lot of sources that don't have RSS like Twitter https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
> I recently started using RSS again (self-hosted with miniflux). One difficulty I have is that these kinds of RSS feeds in OP are way too high-volume for me. But it can be hard to find good blogs or RSS feeds without relying on Twitter to find them
Filter them. For example I have Tested youtube channel on feed but put a filter on titles that gets most of the content Adam Savage makes (as I kinda don't care about anything else they do).
Also, splitting into groups helps a lot, just putting "low volume but I want to see everything" stuff away from "just basically a news feed of on average mildly interesting stuff" hels
> Back in the day, more people used to include a list of blogs they follow on their own blogs, I thought this was a great practice.
I thought the same, and so I built a sort of webring/blogroll functionality in my website project, together with an accompanying OPML file so these lists are easily shareable. I did the same with a microblog/timeline, that had an RSS counterpart. The web is already 'social media', if you ask me.
I keep HN in its own category and not a part of my normal unreads. So i have to go and see out HN threads and not have them clutter up the main feed. But still able to go through them.
For iOS folks, I can't recommend NetNewsWire more. I pair NNW on my phone and laptop with Fresh.RSS running on my raspberry pi for most of my news and blog feeds these days.
And if you're looking to move off of the Twitter app, NNW has a built-in tool to ingest Twitter timelines and searches (you still need to sign in to use Twitter's API).
Let's not participate in the corruption of the word "algorithm" here on HN, too. We wouldn't tolerate people saying "integral" when they mean "derivative", so we shouldn't tolerate this, either. We can afford to abstain from this sort of quick-and-easy but sloppy use of language as a shorthand for generic memetic outrage.
I tried using a local-only RSS reader after ditching Feedly, but I found myself missing the ability to easily switch between devices.
I ended up setting up a FreshRSS[0] instance which I've been quite happy with so far. It provides the Google Reader API, which is still supported by a lot of FOSS mobile RSS readers (I picked Readrops[1]).
I was a huge fan of RSS for a long time but stopped using it. I found that when I added in multiple feeds of my interests, My feed was littered with the same stories and sometimes even the same content. Also, much of the content had the same ads that were on the sites. So at that point, it was easier to just visit the sites with an ad blocker on.
Some way of grouping things by canonical links would be neat.
Like if HN and lobste.rs (or other link aggregators) both point to a recent news story, then the fact that you've read the url they link to, should be a seperate concept from whether you've 'read' the discussion that points to the link.
And if you seperately have a feed of the originating news site, reading it there would mark it in both places.
This doesn't help if you follow, eg. five different news sites and they all report on the same event with largely the same facts (or even the exact same article copy syndicated)
I've been self hosting TT-RSS since Newsblut raised prices some years ago (which was what I switched to when Google Reader closed). My list simply grew over time. Whenever I see an interesting article (doesn't matter where, here, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) I check if the others are interesting, and if so, I subscribe. Almost everything worth reading has a feed.
I did the same several years back. Mainly because hitting mark as read in a group/ category marked even new articles that came in while you were reading, meaning you never saw them.
Thought I might as well try it again. While it wastes more space than TT-RSS, it’s good enough, and everything else looks nice and works faster, so I switched to FreshRSS as well now ;)
I just don’t understand the obsession with privacy at all cost. What has anyone actually had happen to them as a result of their Reddit or YouTube browsing history?
This just seems like reverse voyeurism, and while that’s fine, it’s odd to assume anyone else shares that fetish with you.
It's a human right to have privacy. If you want to opt in to sharing everything about yourself to Big Tech and everyone else they sell data to then be my guest, but don't try to make it out to be a "fetish" to avoid this totally unnecessary data collection.
Privacy is a self-evident and basic human right, like freedom of expression. The principle of this is already acknowledged in law. For example, reading snail mail is very illegal, and nobody questions what harm would come from someone reading Grandmas "merry christmas" letter to you. It is only on the internet that violations of this right are turned a blind eye to, because of regulatory capture and government inertia. Regulators are slowly catching up (see GDPR) but in the meanwhile users are forced to take matters into their own hands.
The data being collected is valuable, evidenced by the fact that an entire industry exists for it. It is collected without the users' consent (beyond the sham of "by using this website you agree to our terms" - by the way, legally speaking individuals cannot agree to give up their rights). The users are not compensated for the valuable information that is harvested from them.
Lastly, many online service providers are cavalier with the security of this data. It is freely shared with hostile state actors (not necessarily western ones), predatory commercial third parties (spammers), and actual criminals. Due to lax security, criminals often gain access to this data and use it for identity theft, phishing and other fraud. People compile it in "social media background check" databases which exposes individuals, without their consent, to stalkers.
There's not enough space in a comment to go over every single instance of privacy violations leading to serious consequences for users, such as those you claim do not exist, so to anyone interested I would recommend doing a web search on privacy related topics.
So nothing; nothing actually happened, and so now we must invent moral outrage to sustain the hate cycle.
Aren’t you exhausted by all of this? Why continue to participate in the flywheel when you can otherwise simply reap the myriad benefits that come with a more connected society?
It just seems like some folks prefer constantly being upset…
For me, the turning point was when I understood that my fairly inoccuous data like browsing history or post likes can be used to infer information that I would not share publicly.
It’s a matter of principle. If everybody were more concerned about their privacy there’d be less dark patterns from the these giant ad companies. Social media, Google, etc…
There are aspects of my life obvious from my Reddit/YouTube history that people I have heard people they say they think should be worthy of death [0]. Is it so unreasonable to be worried about that?
Why make it easier for this to happen? :
> First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
> Because I was not a socialist.
> Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
> Because I was not a trade unionist.
> Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
> Because I was not a Jew.
> Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Martin Niemöller
[0] Most of them wouldn't want to kill me personally. Just the nameless other that happens to match a lot about me.
What happened to me? All the big social media sites send me to an information prison. It makes using the internet not fun anymore if you can't break out of your information bubble to get a different perspective! There's no "common knowledge" anymore and that development is fueled by people giving away their valuable data willy nilly. I just don't want that, I hate it actually and I think it's very dangerous tribalism and it's not has reached its peak yet, though more and more people get annoyed after noticing all these information prisons.
Incognito mode is a lie. You will see different results based on your IP. At best it's random, or rather some fallback information that is still curated by algorithms. Also who uses incognito mode? A common sense of what happens in the world a common baseline and understanding won't just magically appear when you turn on icognito mode. That's an even larger claim imho.
Is reverse voyeurism when you don't want everybody to look at you naked? Because I'm pretty sure most people suffer from that. It's similar to reverse murder and reverse fraud, when you don't kill people, and you tell them the truth.
I'm a fan of RSS and interoperability in general. That's why I added full-text RSS on Postcard [1] sites.
Metrics-driven OKRs processes are at odds with privacy-first protocols. The sad reality at most companies is "if we can't measure it, we ain't gonna do it" - even if everybody is asking for it. This is why OKRs suck.
So, I blame OKRs for getting rid of RSS and open protocols in general.
PSA: enable CORS[1] so people can make cross-origin requests without having to run a proxy.
PSA #2: set things up so the author field of your feed includes your email address (e.g. "Alice <alice@example.org>") and not just your bare name, so people can more easily get in touch with you without having to click through to the original post and then hunt around for your contact page; otherwise, you might never find out it's broken[2].
I don't understand your remark about "Javascript in my blog posts" or how it relates to CORS.
In theory, it should be trivial to make simple, truly "serverless", web-based feed readers like AirSS[1][2]. In practice, many people are prevented from doing this, because the feeds they're interested in are hosted on servers that don't support CORS, which leads to really annoying workarounds (like needing to use a proxy or a separate browser extension, etc.)
Makes sense. I should disable CORS on my blog, then! I normally use a dedicated feed reader, rather than a browser, but it makes sense to accommodate both use cases.
I make heavy use of https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to convert e-mail newsletters into RSS feeds -- IMO the RSS reader context is way better than an email inbox for consuming newslettery content.
Publications that have a paywall on their website often offer the same articles using RSS, and those RSS feeds don’t have any paywall, full article for free. So it’s a good idea to check if a subscription dependent site also offers RSS. But in many cases the paywall exists in RSS article as well, in that case I use 12ft.io (have a iOS shortcut).
You're not exactly wrong – I don't serve out a json feed myself, even – but RSS/Atom are terribly underused for cases other than "personal organization of feed reading" when they could handle a lot of weirder poll-for-updates automation, and the json format seems like an attempt to encourage that direction. You don't need a bespoke API if what you have makes sense in a feed like this, but people would really rather work with a json than XML.
I'm a structured data maximalist so in addition to RSS and Atom, I implemented Schema.org metadata on my blog for GoogleBot, and I implemented JSON Feed and h-feed/h-entry markup, even though I've never seen anything that actually uses JSON Feed out in the wild. I'd be interested if there's anyone out there that's actually using these sorts of feeds.
Does anyone use (or know of) software that follows RSS feeds and sends you a single daily/weekly/whatever digest with links to all new posts? TinyTinyRSS has this functionality which I am currently using but it's not very pretty or configurable - I'm wondering if there is anything else that I could look into.
Or if course you can filter the messages into a folder to browse when you have some downtime. For example I have a "Not Important" folder in my email client that doesn't notify but it's always synced to my phone so that I can read some news when I have a spare moment.
I am building something like this! It's oriented specifically towards reading the feeds via a pdf digest on eReaders like the reMarkable/Supernote/etc though.
1. configure your feeds (RSS/Atom, but also Twitter/Reddit) in a simple dashboard
2. connect Google Drive (Dropbox/OneDrive to be supported eventually)
3. on a daily schedule, a pdf file with your feeds' content will be sent to your GDrive account, which can be synced on your tablet device.
It basically reads a list of feed URLs, with categories, loads and parses them and writes out a simple HTML page with the headlines. Saves me a lot of trouble - just run it on a web server and publish the created HTML files in a directory.
However, I cannot find proper open-source RSS reader for Windows that fits in 2022. Any recommendations? I especially need customization for appearance of text/feed.
I love RSS/atom feeds. One thing I'm wondering though, RSS is is XML based. Most things are/have moved to JSON (RPC really more than REST). My question is why is XML still good for this use case? Genuinely interested.
It's not better or worse, it was just first. I guess having schemas in standard rather than some kind of addon like for JSON is a benefit but not really that relevant, schema doesn't help all that much if you make bad RSS stream anyway.
You can add an `xml-stylesheet` processing instruction at the top of your XML-based feed format to transform it via XSLT into HTML. When viewed in a Web browser, it will look like an ordinary Web page, but in reality it's actually RSS/Atom consumable by anyone's feed reader. Nobody has to hunt for the URL to the RSS/Atom feed, because the URL of the top-level post index for your blog is the URL to the RSS/Atom feed. You also don't have to set up your static site generator to generate a separate feed file. Neat!
It exists, it's widely supported, and it's good enough. There's no reason it has to be XML, but there's no good enough argument against it to justify fragmenting an already shaky ecosystem.
> I have stopped subscribing/following anything/anyone online.
Same.
I even wrote a program that allows me to follow people on Twitch without being logged in there.
I made a bash alias so I just need to type "f" in the terminal when I want to see who is live.
Otherwise I use newsboat for things that have RSS feeds and w3m bookmarks for everything else.
W3m has a really nice bookmarks page that is just a list of links that you can access with alt+b;
very convenient when you want to quickly go to a page.
Not only bash but some of the more readable shell script I've seen.
OP, if you're reading this, is that an idiomatic style or did you learn the style from some well known source?
I don't know what you refer to when you talk about the style but it's just how I write code; I try to keep it simple.
Some of the simplicity of the code is possible because it's bash, which both means that I can skip parsing the input (since bash already is made for doing that) and use existing programs like curl and nc.
204 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadI'm rusty, though. What's the best Mac desktop RSS client these days?
Youtube wants people to subscribe, which I don't do, I simply add the RSS feed of channels I want to be updated about which is probably not what either Youtube or those channels want given how much they are begging me to subscribe all the time.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
Is there a way to update my own blog to play nicely with Haven? I like my own styling and hosting setup, and I already have my own RSS reader, so ideally I would like to continue using those, while also making them available to friends and family on Haven.
I have to add that caveat because support isn't universal. NetNewsWire supports it, Thunderbird supports it, and Inoreader supports it on their paid tier, but Feedly doesn't. (for some examples)
Happy to chat directly, drop me a note on the Haven contact page! https://havenweb.org/contact.html
For users who don't know how to self host, and can't stomach the (very reasonable for ad-free social media) $5/mo... have you considered a cloud-hosted option with a sidebar of KTLO ads? Or maybe a "family plan" cloud instance where multiple friends could share a single cloud instance (sharded per person) to save money on the hosted option?
The beauty of RSS is it's interoperability. So I was wondering, can your built-in newsreader also read my RSS feed, for example? Or only other Haven feeds?
And the other way around, can I follow private feeds from Haven users with my built-in newsreader? Or any other separate newsreader software, for that matter? As long as Haven users would share that link with me, of course.
And Haven's feed reader can read every RSS and Atom feed I've been able to find. The feed reading and publishing are both part of the live demo, so you can do some testing over there! https://havenweb.org/demo.html
If you run into any incompatibilities, let me know and I'll get them fixed!
Back in the day, more people used to include a list of blogs they follow on their own blogs, I thought this was a great practice. A few still do, like this very interesting blog on statistics: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/blogs-i-read/
Filter them. For example I have Tested youtube channel on feed but put a filter on titles that gets most of the content Adam Savage makes (as I kinda don't care about anything else they do).
Also, splitting into groups helps a lot, just putting "low volume but I want to see everything" stuff away from "just basically a news feed of on average mildly interesting stuff" hels
I thought the same, and so I built a sort of webring/blogroll functionality in my website project, together with an accompanying OPML file so these lists are easily shareable. I did the same with a microblog/timeline, that had an RSS counterpart. The web is already 'social media', if you ask me.
Drew wrote the OG version: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
I also made a little rust version here: https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
HN nerds might remember that NNW is very fast, even by native macOS standards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23286362
If you're feeling fatigued by algorithmic nonsense these days, you should seriously give RSS a try.
Let's not participate in the corruption of the word "algorithm" here on HN, too. We wouldn't tolerate people saying "integral" when they mean "derivative", so we shouldn't tolerate this, either. We can afford to abstain from this sort of quick-and-easy but sloppy use of language as a shorthand for generic memetic outrage.
https://miniflux.app/
I ended up setting up a FreshRSS[0] instance which I've been quite happy with so far. It provides the Google Reader API, which is still supported by a lot of FOSS mobile RSS readers (I picked Readrops[1]).
[0] https://www.freshrss.org/
[1] https://github.com/readrops/Readrops
Like if HN and lobste.rs (or other link aggregators) both point to a recent news story, then the fact that you've read the url they link to, should be a seperate concept from whether you've 'read' the discussion that points to the link.
And if you seperately have a feed of the originating news site, reading it there would mark it in both places.
To be fair, this is a big problem everywhere, not just with RSS. Especially on Twitter, and even here with dupes on HN.
It's more of a problem though if you're following a bunch of "news" feeds, as opposed to, say, technical blogs with original content.
This just seems like reverse voyeurism, and while that’s fine, it’s odd to assume anyone else shares that fetish with you.
The data being collected is valuable, evidenced by the fact that an entire industry exists for it. It is collected without the users' consent (beyond the sham of "by using this website you agree to our terms" - by the way, legally speaking individuals cannot agree to give up their rights). The users are not compensated for the valuable information that is harvested from them.
Lastly, many online service providers are cavalier with the security of this data. It is freely shared with hostile state actors (not necessarily western ones), predatory commercial third parties (spammers), and actual criminals. Due to lax security, criminals often gain access to this data and use it for identity theft, phishing and other fraud. People compile it in "social media background check" databases which exposes individuals, without their consent, to stalkers.
There's not enough space in a comment to go over every single instance of privacy violations leading to serious consequences for users, such as those you claim do not exist, so to anyone interested I would recommend doing a web search on privacy related topics.
Aren’t you exhausted by all of this? Why continue to participate in the flywheel when you can otherwise simply reap the myriad benefits that come with a more connected society?
It just seems like some folks prefer constantly being upset…
Why make it easier for this to happen? :
- Martin Niemöller[0] Most of them wouldn't want to kill me personally. Just the nameless other that happens to match a lot about me.
Metrics-driven OKRs processes are at odds with privacy-first protocols. The sad reality at most companies is "if we can't measure it, we ain't gonna do it" - even if everybody is asking for it. This is why OKRs suck.
So, I blame OKRs for getting rid of RSS and open protocols in general.
[1] https://updates.postcard.page/posts/new-on-postcard-rss-easi...
PSA #2: set things up so the author field of your feed includes your email address (e.g. "Alice <alice@example.org>") and not just your bare name, so people can more easily get in touch with you without having to click through to the original post and then hunt around for your contact page; otherwise, you might never find out it's broken[2].
1. <https://enable-cors.org>
2. <https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel...>
I should really add my email address to my news feed though.
In theory, it should be trivial to make simple, truly "serverless", web-based feed readers like AirSS[1][2]. In practice, many people are prevented from doing this, because the feeds they're interested in are hosted on servers that don't support CORS, which leads to really annoying workarounds (like needing to use a proxy or a separate browser extension, etc.)
1. <https://github.com/derek-zhou/airss>
2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28730630>
I'd love to find a "web2rss" for laggards that don't provide their own feeds :)
[1]: https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/
https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
https://feed43.com/
https://politepol.com/en/
https://github.com/breck7/scroll/commit/0ca22e118e1cc9a79eb9...
I'd also like to shout out
https://www.jsonfeed.org/
https://jsonresume.org/
https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/
https://geojson.org/
It'd be pretty cool to have an ecosystem where you could
```
$ packagemanger init my-site password
$ hostOfChoice deploy
```
Go to the url, auth yourself, then have a list of "plugins" that act as a ~cms for formats like the ones above
Edit: Could you at least tell me why you're downvoting
1. I find it easier to work with JSON using javascript
2. The stupid reason, I find it more aesthetically pleasing
I'd like to bookmark interesting long reads for later to Pocket from newsboat, but also resurface them as an RSS feed, but it seems a little awkward.
https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk
Most of my experience with RSS is just for podcasts.
RSS is a bunch of different "standards" and good practices, its way more difficult to parse and play with.
They both have the same goal, but one is just cleaner and stricter :)
That being said the reader I wrote supports it because why not.
[1] https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email
1. configure your feeds (RSS/Atom, but also Twitter/Reddit) in a simple dashboard 2. connect Google Drive (Dropbox/OneDrive to be supported eventually) 3. on a daily schedule, a pdf file with your feeds' content will be sent to your GDrive account, which can be synced on your tablet device.
If interested, I've got a survey you can fill out to get alpha access: https://forms.gle/qmy6WMgHLxWiEgx4A
Though I'm running into a stubborn issue where FreshRSS doesn't parse the date correctly... so your mileage may vary.
It basically reads a list of feed URLs, with categories, loads and parses them and writes out a simple HTML page with the headlines. Saves me a lot of trouble - just run it on a web server and publish the created HTML files in a directory.
However, I cannot find proper open-source RSS reader for Windows that fits in 2022. Any recommendations? I especially need customization for appearance of text/feed.
Feeder for Android is great.
Is an attempt to move these to json.
You can add an `xml-stylesheet` processing instruction at the top of your XML-based feed format to transform it via XSLT into HTML. When viewed in a Web browser, it will look like an ordinary Web page, but in reality it's actually RSS/Atom consumable by anyone's feed reader. Nobody has to hunt for the URL to the RSS/Atom feed, because the URL of the top-level post index for your blog is the URL to the RSS/Atom feed. You also don't have to set up your static site generator to generate a separate feed file. Neat!
Can't do that with JSON.
Same. I even wrote a program that allows me to follow people on Twitch without being logged in there. I made a bash alias so I just need to type "f" in the terminal when I want to see who is live. Otherwise I use newsboat for things that have RSS feeds and w3m bookmarks for everything else. W3m has a really nice bookmarks page that is just a list of links that you can access with alt+b; very convenient when you want to quickly go to a page.