I don’t know about the “year of…” but RSS readers are definitely the best option to consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control, while being exposed to a broad range of thinking. And consuming content from a broad range of media.
I do hope 2023 becomes the year of the comeback of RSS.
For me the biggest selling point of RSS is never having to rescan over feed items I've already read, or decided to skip, to find the new stuff. Another big one is that there's an end to the list. Neither of those are a huge deal for low-volume feeds but for HN and Reddit, they're priceless to me.
>consume information in a manner that leaves the individual with control
This is both the main feature, and the biggest obstacle. The people with the money do no want the individual to have control. Thus it has always been and shall always be.
Folks are banging on Elon because they feel he's using Twitter to manipulate, but it's not like Twitter was different pre-Elon. Elon simply gave The Man a face, voice and smell.
Back in the blogosphere (I hate that word) days, a lot of RSS was floating around. It wasn't very good, as RSS implementations varied a lot. But when it was working well, it was so good. If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines.
> we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines
We entered those days and have yet to leave. If anything, the rise of social media (at RSS's expense) turbo-charged clickbait headlines, since now it's easy to measure engagement around those stories, both in terms of views and in terms of comments/likes/shares/etc.
Fair enough, "return" is not the correct word here. Maybe "we will solidify the importance of clickbaity headlines"?
I first noticed the up-tick of clickbait headlines in the salad days of RSS. Due to this, I tend to ignore headlines these days, because I was trained to assume the headline was complete nonsense. So my internal metrics are a bit wonky.
I don't understand the love of RSS readers. The basic concept is trivial; you could write one in five minutes. It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.
I read upthread that Google Reader had a social mechanism for recommending feeds to friends. That's great for discovery, but it still hardly seems earth-shaking.
It feels an awful lot like a rose-colored-glasses situation, where something existed that wasn't horrible but doesn't reappear because it wasn't all that great, either. What is it I'm missing?
It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.
It allows you to tailor your aggregation, and create you own aggregation of topics if there isn't another aggregator out there.
Are you into kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks? You're not going to find a web aggregator for that. But you can put together several RSS feeds into your own aggregation.
Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook? Yeah, I know "the algorithm" means that I'd miss some things and have other things injected into my feed, but it doesn't sound like the total content is radically different.
I understand the idea of wanting to feel more control by seeing precisely and exactly the groups you asked for, but I feel like it's not really a radical change in terms of content.
Facebook shoves content I don't care about in my face, and frequently hides content from pages and people that I do care about (who don'y pay Zuck's troll toll or play visibility optimization games like emphasizing useless Story content).
My RSS reader (FreshRSS, self-hosted, and NetNewsWire on macOS/iOS) shows me all posts from all feeds I've chosen to subscribe to. Nothing more, nothing less. No ads, no murky VC cloud funding -- I self host on my own raspberry pi -- and no privacy concerns.
Social media is kind of like a flaky RSS feed with comments from people I don't know or care about that sometimes doesn't show me content I DO want to see but also constantly shows me ads, tries to manipulate me into spending more time browsing, and hoovers up as much data as humanly possible. Oh, and it changes the UI every 6-8 months in seemingly random UX a/b tests in the name of "optimization." And it radicalizes my older relatives politically.
Most of the sites that I follow do not have a presence on Facebook. Plus it's nice to have the info sent to you unencumbered by the nonsense/ads/privacy concerns on social media sites.
Couldn't I just subscribe to kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks groups on Facebook?
Sure, you could. I can't. I'm locked out of Facebook. And in spite of sending a photo of my government ID into Facebook's customer service black hole, nothing has changed.
RSS gives me the freedom to aggregate information without relying on some faceless tech company to decide when I can have it, and when I should be cut off.
I'm not sure what you're missing. I think aggregators are great for a lot of things, but I primarily use it for discovery. I infrequently contribute (like this, I guess?). After discovery, RSS is really convenient to continue consuming that source's content, regardless of its appearance on an aggregator a second time.
Its not about discovery or aggregation or being social. Its a way to keep up to date with things you explicitly subscribe to. You have a bunch of sites that you like, which puts out periodic updates. Like a weekly webcomic, or a news site, or local weather alerts. Then you subscribe to those feeds. Then whenever they make a new post, it shows as an update in your reader. Think Twitter, but instead of 280 character posts, they're previews of other webpages.
It's about the locus of control. HN, or other aggregators, are about the crowd curating your feed; RSS is about you curating your feed. The unit of attention, namely some headline, is either presented to you by The Algorithm (whether human-powered or otherwise) if on a modern aggregator, or your own previous choices if using RSS.
In modernity, we might call that latter a "filter bubble", but in the parlance of the 00s, we thought of it as a "personal newspaper".
Isn't your source of RSS feeds the curation? Is that very different from Facebook or Twitter showing you the people you subscribe to?
I know Facebook and Twitter play stupid games with "the algorithm", injecting stuff you didn't ask for and hiding stuff from your friends, but in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in.
So wouldn't an RSS feed be just as much of a filter bubble, based on who you choose to subscribe to? You might feel better knowing that you were seeing it in a simple chronological order without the algorithmic opinion, but it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles.
I don't think anyone is claiming that RSS a solution to the filter bubble problem. But the benefit of RSS is that you create your own filter bubble, rather than relying on someone else's (often malicious) algorithm to do it for you.
With Facebook and Twitter you subscribe to people and brands. It is trivially easy to make a social media post so they tend to be more numerous and less useful/informative. RSS is usually used to subscribe to blog posts/articles which tend to be more in depth. Someone upthread mentioned a magazine and I think that is a good comparison. Curated long form writing about subjects that interest you makes it quite a bit different than social media.
RSS is also handy for following blogs or websites that only post intermittently.
RSS and filter bubbles could go either way. Nothing stopping you from filling your feeds with folks that don't think the way you do. Most of us don't have the patience to wade through thoughts contrary to our own. That's the real issue when it comes to popping your filter bubble, not which tool you use to get the info.
Like I said, RSS is about you curating your feed. Using RSS, you don't see headlines from anything you didn't choose to see.
>in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in
That's trivially true. That said, if the choice, regarding seeing shit I'm not interested in/calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc, is between seeing it "never" and seeing it "sometimes, when someone else wants me to see it", the choice seems obvious.
>it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles
I don't think it is either; that said, I still think it's better. Part of the conceptual transition from "personal newspaper" to "filter bubble" was the increasing prevalence of calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc on aggregators -- the pressures present in aggregators, and the inevitable comment sections, help shape content to be more ragey or spammy, to get that all-important engagement. That shaping happens everywhere on the aggregator -- here on HN, for instance, dang goes around silencing non-HNish comments with impunity and without appeals. This isn't a bad thing, but it is a shaping of the aggregator's content by shaping the aggregator's culture. If one spends all one's time on an aggregator, consuming that shaped culture, one's perspective can easily start to skew. With a "personal newspaper", one is more aware of the artificiality -- it's not a site itself, it's just the sum total of the RSS feeds of blogs X, Y, and Z. A "filter bubble"'s ostensibly organic culture, and ostensibly broader curation, helps one convince oneself that it's a community with justified beliefs.
RSS doesn't really afford that kind of escalation. If HN were dang's blog, the pressure he exerts would only affect the comments section of that blog. Sure, audience pressure can help make an RSS'd source more extreme, but if that pressure happens it's got to be occurring on the site's own commenting infrastructure, which means local moderation can sort it out. At a minimum, there's no chance of the contamination hopping RSS feed sources (at least, via RSS itself).
> It doesn't seem radically different from any of thousands of news aggregator type web sites, including HN.
RSS lets me subscribe to everything jfengel (say) posts, not just the minority of jfengel posts that make it onto HN. That matters for those who are jfengel fans.
Edit: of course, it's also useful if jfengel only posts about once a month. You don't want to miss anything, but neither do you want to visit the blog every day to see if there's something new. Facebook is terrible at this -- I regularly find that I've missed something that a friend who is an occasional FB user has posed.
>of course, it's also useful if jfengel only posts about once a month.
I think that's the point a number of people on this thread are missing. Newsletters, for example, are fine if there are a handful of people who publish regularly/frequently who you want to follow. They're less useful if you want to follow what 50 people who may only publish something once a month are writing.
I don’t think the tech is the interesting part. Most websites I want to read don’t even post the whole article on an RSS feed, and you’re at the mercy of every website offering a feed.
The better solution is a post-RSS smart reader where you can drop links into it and it figures out how to turn the website into a feed and it caches all the content so the origin never needs to be available.
We over cling to RSS the same way we over cling to IRC instead of looking for ways to build on the good parts. Then we’re always stuck reminiscing and over glamorizing a past that wasn’t as good as we remember.
The best thing about rss is that after i read my 30 unread articles, i can just close my laptop and walk away. Who ever said that twitter was going to make rss obsolete has never experienced this digital freedom.
Funny timing - I just switched all my email newsletter subscriptions that I used to read on Gmail Web to Inoreader.
The reason was fairly simple - I wanted a better way to organize my newsletters and make it feel more “reading list” like than “task list” like. On email, unopened newsletters always felt like tasks.
Agreed—I love RSS, but don’t really see “organizing newsletters” as its killer app, or experience “newsletters come via email” as a pain point. Filters seem to serve basically the same purpose.
And then let grandpa here hitch up his britches even higher: people still lament the end of Google Reader for a reason.
In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff. Was that perfect? Of course not—you were still in a filter bubble, and what bleeds, leads. But, it surfaced interesting stories, it let you follow news sources you wanted to see, and it did so without the screaming madness of Twitter and Facebook.
Be humble grandpa! There were people who used to use Google Reader without any of its social network shenanigans. And of course, there were people who have been using RSS readers before Google Reader was even born. But, no RSS reader has ever reached the ceiling of common usage, which is not a bad deal.
In my circles, which admittedly may not be representative, RSS is/was a tool for people whose job it was in part to proactively ferret out a wide range of information and insights from obscure corners of the internet--so journalists, analysts, and the like. Which just doesn't describe a mainstream audience.
While it's satisfying to blame Google, the killing of Reader always seemed like a natural effect of RSS not being popular than its cause. It's not like there aren't other RSS alternatives. And, of course, social media does a pretty good job--for all its faults--of surfacing those various tidbits with or without RSS.
It was successful enough that a much smaller business than Google would have tried to keep it going, probably as a subscription service. But for Google it was a rounding error, and the code base needed a rewrite.
It seems hard to argue that it would have become more successful, given that its successors are pretty good but they’re small businesses.
Right. And the problem with rounding error businesses at large companies is that:
1. They're a distraction and
2. It's probably very career limiting to work on them.
Someone at IBM told me years ago that if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business they weren't interested. And Google walked away years ago from organizing the world's knowledge if advertising wasn't attached.
There is an argument to be made that these… micro services were a part of a bigger offering from Google. Maybe by itself Reader wasn’t a billion dollar business, but together with other niche features Reader attracted an influential and wealthy audience.
I don't think OP was referring to any social features beyond what RSS specified:
> In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff.
This is just "subscribe to people's blogs". That's still the ideal social media for me.
No, Google Reader had a social layer where you could add friends, see items that they recommended, and comment on them. It was really great, but it was ruined by the migration to Google+ before Reader was actually killed.
My friends and I loved Buzz and lamented its loss. We tried Google+, but it couldn't even really do what Buzz could do, and it certainly didn't have any other killer features, so it didn't take.
Google killing of Reader was the symbolic point where the business plan of the internet moved from "Let's sell stuff to users!" to "Let's sell users to advertisers!".
Google Reader was a service that brought in good will, subsidized by people trusting Google to "not be evil" and provide useful services. This subsequently turned into people using Google's money-making products, like ads.
At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.
> At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.
You can add me to that informal poll. I moved to Feedly, but Google Reader was my go to for a whole lot of years. My opinion of Google changed the day they announced its demise. I am probably an outlier but the only way I want to consume content on the web is via RSS feeds. Allows me to curate what I see and if subscribed sites start delivering me poor content, I drop them from the feed list.
Right, but it was an early step in Google’s now-classic playbook of undercutting existing paid solutions by subsidizing a free, shiny alternative, driving the paid versions out of business, then either turning their product into a surveillance nightmare or shutting it down.
Indeed, spot on. And given the internet is the computer this is (as good as any) a representation of the fatal bifurcation that has essentially destroyed the potential of digitization for at least a generation (and maybe forever)
Agreed. And that while I am not claiming Apple as a savior here or anything, imagine how bad it could be if we didn’t have at least 1 company still in the business of selling computers. At least to SOME degree. Things could be a lot worse
Apple does some amazing things with network protocols, but they are a leading force in pushing walled gardens, locked down devices, and such.
Other companies give you less privacy, but more functionality exposed to the user.
Of course, without Apple's walled gardens, google might lock down their stuff too, no longer needing to have a bit of openness to differentiate themselves.
There are a variety of motivations. These include...
The biggest is that they are trying to maximize revenue/profits. In controlling the flow of information to people they are in better control of that. A lot has been studied about this.
I didn't realize there were other motivations until FB started to publish studies they carried out on people. Some of those (which they published awhile ago) were around the manipulation of users emotions and their ability to target voting groups (to increase people going to vote in target groups) around elections.
Yeah I can think of a few. That sort of influence is one, benefiting advertisers is another, positioning themselves to get a cut of all transactions is another. Is there an alternate universe where in order to get your content in front of users, it has to be AMP and in order to be AMP, it has to meet a new requirement that all payments must be done through a payment framework that lets google control the user experience (“purely for the end users’ benefit” of course)? Probably.
I hear what you guys are saying, but "maximize revenue/profits" means "benefit advertisers so they come to us instead of anybody else." "Getting a cut of all transactions" means benefitting advertisers who sell anything through the site.
What? Getting a cut of transactions has nothing to do with advertisers. Are you saying apple forcing app payments through the App Store is about advertisers? Seems like you are trying to fit all scenarios to a predetermined narrative here.
This is exactly what users want. Tiktok is so successful because you don’t have to pick the content you consume. RSS on the other hand is far too manual and too much bad content gets mixed in with the good.
Instead, you create a link with a comment in Signal to a group of friends, copy that to a few other Signal groups who are mutually exclusive of those other groups, then paste into a few Discord groups...
This is where that gab project from a couple years ago was amazing (although the most generous thing I can say about the user content created by it was that it was not amazing lol). it had an extension you would install and it would overlay a comments section on any webpage on the internet.I would love to see something like that but with properly threaded comments and an easy way to subscribe to specific communities commenting, or ideally, federated but you could choose the communities you wanted to overlay moderation from. even better if it has support for easy account switching so you could bin your comment into the proper group for the level of moderation it would pass.
activity pub almost does this but comment threading has been universally garbage on every instance I have tried (how hard is it to thread stuff like comments on hacker news are threaded????) but the method is wrong in that you scroll activity pub feeds instead of surfing the net and finding the rich and interesting comment sections for what you are seeing.
Still a fan of NNTP... thinking of doing something similar with HTTP and Cloudflare workers (and adjacent service). Durable Objects for incrementing counters per group, and R2 for header/body storage. Not inherently distributed to separate servers, but an open enough API that it would be similar and allow for other implementations. Only thinking CF, in that I wouldn't have the issues of trying to self-scale in the same way something that could be simple if it gained wider usage.
With "nntp//rss" you could get the best of both worlds. It contained both an NNTP server and an RSS aggregator, with a web interface for administration.
It's no longer maintained, but it was a great concept
I don't mind so long as there is a summary/abstract for me to assess if it's worth my time, and their site is accessible. Press a button from the feed reader and now elinks opens up for me to read it. Some site's this is better. But with malice or carelessness others don't cater to a TUI (no skip link, navigation is duplicated for mobile for no reason, etc.) well or on the GUI they'll pile in targeted ads/trackers (though blocked) but will also hide a bunch of useful stuff carelessly behind JavaScript, like image loading or the entire article (which if your primary site purpose is content, you should be obligated to make sure at least the noscript situation is covered as folks don't want to trust code execution for what is likely a one-off read).
If you're on a Mac or iOS, NetNewsWire can fetch and extract the whole article for an individual item, or you can set it to automatically do it for an entire feed: https://netnewswire.com/help/mac/5.1/en/reader-view
On Apple devices Reeder 5, NetNewsWire and Feedbin all use the Mercury parser API (hosted by Feedbin) to extract the full article text. I believe Fiery Feeds also includes this functionality (with a subscription) although I am uncertain of the process used. Lire is yet another reader that includes this functionality by default.
Of those above I recommend Reeder 5 if you don’t care about web accessibility and Feedbin if you do.
The bit I find fascinating about Reader, and its impact (I’m convinced that its death resulted in an immediate strong surge towards social media centralisation), is that it was entirely contingent; it didn’t have to happen. There are many parallel universes where Google (a) didn’t make an rss reader so dominant that it became The RSS Reader and then (b) kill it. In a healthier market with a bunch of widely used readers, things would have been very different.
(Reader’s impact was particularly dramatic because a lot of ostensibly separate products like NNW started using it as a backend…)
And, if, as seems at least plausible, over the next year or so Twitter crumbles and decentralised social media (whether in the form of Mastodon et al, blogs or something else) comes back, again, totally contingent! An idiot buying Twitter and breaking it wasn’t some sort of historical inevitability, just a weird high-impact thing that happened.
Yeah, the RSS ecosystem was never the leading ‘social network’ by number of users, but it used to be systemically important, in a way that it isn’t today. Keeping track of what was happening in many fields (particularly tech, but also others) used to be primarily via RSS, now Twitter (and in some cases moving to Mastodon, now).
I never used Reader but I did use another one that also folded, a year or two before Reader went away. Then it got bought and came back, changed, and that stutter interrupted my process and I never really recovered. I set up Feedly and then don’t use it.
I think I’m from the generation(s) that expect to spend a lot of time in a browser window instead of hopping between applications triggered by notifications. So the moment I put something into an app, if it’s not situation dependent like Apple Fitness, or team chat for work, it’s just too much friction to make it a habit.
The most fascinating bit for me is that people actually used any of the social features of Google Reader. I just read my feeds and interacted with nobody, and that wasn't too uncommon in my circles.
Oh, I’m not sure how many people ever used Google Reader’s _own_ social features. But RSS facilitated social networking via blog (remember, for a while ~every blog had comments and trackbacks, on which twitter quote-retweets are based), and, unfortunately, Reader became so synonymous with RSS that its death largely killed that ecosystem. It was really noticeable at the time; blog activity really fell off, and even if you switched to an alternative RSS reader which stayed working (a lot of readers used Reader as a backend!) you had to switch to Twitter to keep up with what was going on.
For me RSS worked very well at a time when mobile data connection/wifi was not ubiquitous yet. For a year or two, every morning when I came to school I went directly to that one place where there was the one Wi-Fi router. I downloaded all the new articles in my NetNewsWire feed and then read them over the day.
The tech is nice, but I have no desire to use it anymore. I no longer follow specific blogs. Now I just open hacker news or reddit any time I want to read something.
The way I mitigated this problem was to periodically check places like Reddit or Slashdot, noting which sources were cropping up for things I found interesting, and then adding those to my feed reader, skipping the middle man.
Once a week or when I ran out of feed I’d go hunting for more. The friends aspect diminished greatly but I had plenty to read.
If technology was at the service of the individual rather than the other way aroud, RSS would have been a centerpiece of our information universe, with something like ActivityPub the path to enhance information exchange in a bidirectional way when that is applicable...
I use Newsblur, mostly. It feels a bit dated at times, but does what I want it to do and has an email address that you can send newsletters to to read like feeds. I've been meaning to switch over to miniflux for a while, but can never really get up the momentum. It seems nice.
NewsBlur - I'm on a paid plan since I'm a packrat with almost 700 feeds. It is a pretty busy interface but has tons of functionality. Their mobile app is also pretty good.
I moved all my stuff to Thunderbird a while ago, and unless you have more specific demands, having a basic self-run RSS reader beats just about all fancy hosted solutions out there. Old-school e-mail works well a lot of the time too.
I use an RSS-to-email service to email them to me. Then most feeds get sorted into folders for reading later. A few got to my inbox for more urgent response.
I currently use an RSS-to-email service that I operate but I used other services for almost a decade before that. There are a handful available ad supported and paid or you can self-host.
I know NetNewsWire and NewsBlur have already been mentioned, but I use both of them together. I use NewsBlur on Windows, and NetNewsWire with my NewsBlur account on Mac/iOS. NetNewsWire also supports iCloud, Feedbin, Feedly, and other services (and locally without syncing).
The main problem I found with RSS in these days is the lack of access to they. I want access the RSS of NYT, where I find it? I want X blog, where? After the web migrated from RSS to paywalls, I have no option to just choice some news webs/blogs and focus on that.
If you paste https://www.nytimes.com/ into your feed reader it will likely discover https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml automatically. This tends to work very well for most blogs and many sites. I often just assume that there is a feed available and past article URLs into my feed reader, most of the time the feed is automatically discovered.
Back in the day browsers had icons that would light up when a feed was available, however all of the most popular browsers have removed this feature. You can add it back with an extension easily if you are so inclined.
Sure, NYT is an easy one, but if you try some more "expensive" (they really do not enjoy your free read) like Bloomberg the your RSS feed will keep small.
Newsletters and RSS feeds are not the same thing. If I send a newsletter to a list of subscribers then, as long as their email server receives the email, they can retrieve it and read it whenever they want. But most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be able to read it.
On the other hand it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness with RSS. You either publish the feed for a limited amount of time (and the subscribers have to get lucky and synchronize their feeds during this time window), or you publish the feed indefinitely (which maybe you wouldn't want to do)
This is a very niche difference. In general once you send something "to the public" you can't expect that it stays private. So if you need to keep items on your feed for a few weeks after publishing it will have a near-zero difference to the availability of that piece and be picked up by almost all subscribers.
> it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness with RSS.
No it's not (not that I can really think of why you'd want that). Generate user-bound rss feed urls with GUIDs or a signed "start date" that provides only entries since that date. That can also allow you to track how many times that url gets retrieved and eventually block it if it's too many.
Or have the rss reader only send an excerpt and have people auth before they access the content on your website.
>most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be able to read it.
On the other end once the email left your box, you don't control it anymore, and I can give you a well hidden hack that allows someone not subscribed to read it if they know someone subscribed.
I tried to set this up earlier this year, but what I realized I really wanted was RSS + change detection for some discussion forums and other sites that didn't offer RSS.
That companies like feedly didn't seem to offer this functionality but were trying to emphasize social networking and tagging my articles (for who?) made it easy to walk away after the trial.
What we need to revive RSS is have a true integration into browsers. Your bookmarks would display the numbers of unread posts and there is probably more great stuff to do.
Honestly just returning the icon that appeared when the site had a feed would be a huge win. Browser integrated feed-readers and bookmark notifications were nice but dedicated RSS readers are probably going to be better. You can click the feed icon and the browser can redirect you to your preferred feed reader.
There are extensions that do this but having it built-in would make it widely available and easier to set up.
One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere reader to content creator. Said another way, RSS doesn't have a reply function and that makes it harder to iterate around user feedback. Some of which can be very valuable.
I don't want content creators to shape their content according to feedback and popularity. I want content creators who shape their content according to their interests and desires and experiences.
I feel like there's been an extremely strong push in our current culture against actual artistic visionairies that's being driven by toxic and infantile "fan communities" that screech endlessly on the internet about anything they don't like.
Art apparently isn't about a creative realizing their unique vision, its about doing things mouthbreathers like. People seem to be viscerally offended when someone unapologetically makes something that isn't for them.
> One of the problems with RSS is lack of a feedback loop from mere reader to content creator. Said another way, RSS doesn't have a reply function and that makes it harder to iterate around user feedback. Some of which can be very valuable.
Did any RSS readers build commenting into them - or even the viewing of comments? I remember subscribing to a blog, and then having to visit the site to view the comments or post a comment. And then subscribing to a separate RSS feed to subscribe to the comments for any post that I wanted updates on.
Most RSS readers will only show whatever the author wants to share via RSS. Often times you need to click through to the actual blog to read the rest. That's where you can comment.
Unread is the RSS reader I use on iOS and iPadOS. It does scrape the site and give the entire article. I love it but now I wonder if it's a good idea to circumvent the wishes of the blogger. I use Newsblur as the aggregator and tie Unread to it. The Newsblur portal to my RSS feeds works well enough in the browser on computers.
I think the biggest thing holding back the development of the next generation of social networks is this pernicious belief that it is mandatory to put some sort of public comment section on everything, where anybody with a pulse (or the technical wherewithal to fake it adequately enough) can slap anything they want down next to your content. Context matters, and this has a certain inevitable effect even on the original content.
It is a tool. It has times and places. It is not mandatory, nor is it always a good thing. It is quite often a really, really bad thing. It can always be adjoined to a piece of content, like we're doing right now. It is not mandatory for the original poster to host it.
If you want a social network that works that way, you are spoiled for choice. If you are unhappy with those social networks, consider the possibility that much of your unhappiness may in fact stem from this very idea. If it seems like everywhere you go is kind of a cacophony of regression-to-the-mean discussion, insults, lowest-common-denominator... this is the root cause.
It is not a bad thing that "replying" to the creator of an RSS-based blog is exactly as hard as they choose to make it, up to and including making it impossible.
I completely agree. I used to have a Wordpress blog with comments enabled, and that brought me a few headaches at some point.
Later on, I moved to Pelican, which is a static generator, and below every article there's an info box that indicates that no, there's no commenting system, and lists a couple of ways someone can reach me if they wish to discuss that particular article. So far, it's working.
Suppose all those people causing you headaches got together and started a subreddit and wrote all the same comments there. Everyone who reads you either hears about your new posts that way, or they follow otherwise but still jump over to the subreddit to see what's going on. Does this state of affairs make you as unhappy as the comment section? Is it possible that your issue is really with critiques and criticism?
No, there were legal issues involved, due in part to me not running a tight a moderation as I should have, and in part due to one person completely losing his mind and suing a bunch of people, me included.
It'd actually be great if this would have happened on Reddit. I learned my lesson: do you want to comment about anything I've written? Please, do so. But not on my piece of land.
Why does user feedback need to happen on the same channel as new content notifications? In my mind keeping a distinction is a huge advantage because it puts the creator in charge of how they interact with their audience.
They could add a comment section to their WordPress blog. They could cross-post to Reddit. They could have an email dedicated to comments and feedback. They could do none of those things because they really don't care what the audience thinks.
Because RSS/Atom doesn't integrate two-way interaction, there are no preconceived notions of how the second direction ought to work.
>They could have an email dedicated to comments and feedback.
Some technical blogs I follow use this. They create a public mailing list that they treat as their “public inbox”. Anyone can send an email to it, and all messages are publicly viewable. No signup or account required either since it’s all just email.
On a similar note, however, how many sites have explicitly removed comments at this point?
I know there was a Gab browser extension that would effectively make all sites have comment sections, and there are other similar attempts, but none seemed to gain any significant traction.
Chrome in Android has a built in RSS reader in chrome now labeled the 'following' tab in your new tab page. I've been using this with great success lately. The key for me was to pick only a few really high quality sources instead of 99999 sources. https://9to5google.com/2021/10/08/chrome-rss-web-feed/
There's a flag for desktop too. You can enable 'Feed' in the sidebar, but it doesn't work for me on any platform at the moment.
The longevity of Chrome features generally seems to be much better than that of Google products in general. I can only think of a few major removals: FTP, NSAPI and the ongoing MV2 debacle, Chrome apps, Gears; I don’t remember if any variant of NaCl ever shipped as non-beta, and I’m sure Dart-in-<script> never did.
I don't know. For a "few" high quality sources you can just check the sources directly. For me, the big win for RSS in the blogosphere world was you could follow a lot of sources that published pretty sporadically but sometimes had interesting things when they did publish.
Yeah, I still have quiterss setup like that, but this is my alternative to doom scrolling Reddit/pop news sites. I use this Chrome extension and the feed mode to be more selective about my news. https://archive.is/
That's an interesting point of view. I tend to find that the high quality sources I tend to follow are very low volume. So I've subscribed to hundreds of personal blogs, YouTube channels and similar to produce a steady (but not high volume) flow of good content.
Most of the higher-volume sources that I have considered following are either low quality or most of the content isn't within my interests.
Basically I tend to prefer 100 good sources that post a few times a year than 2 sources that post daily. Of course this isn't a hard rule, it is just the collaboration that I have seen. There are obviously some teams that put out high-quality content on a regular schedule.
I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and gives you a little icon in the titlebar. Some webmasters don't even bother to put the link in their page visibly.
Back in the day all major browser provided their own "feed available" icon so including an extra icon on your site was pointless. The browser's icon was consistent across sites instead of the user needing to look around for a feed link on your site.
Of course now most popular browsers don't show this icon so it is more important to advertise it yourself. (Although there are extensions to bring this icon back)
I got a Firefox extension that looks for rss in a page and gives you a little icon in the titlebar.
This used to be the default condition for all web browsers. Even Safari did it.
I forget which browser dropped that feature first. My guess is that it was Google Chrome, and everyone else just did the same thing because following is easier than leading.
I have built my list up over time. Generally I will discover new stuff from hacker news or other aggregators (which I browse once I am caught up on my feeds). I add things to my list very often, but also am quick to unsubscribe if I'm not enjoying the content.
The types of content I tend to follow are:
- Videos. YouTube, Nebula, PeerTube and a few other sources.
- Blogs. These are mostly personal blogs that I have found interesting articles on. A few company blogs too.
- Social media searches. This is more for productivity but I follow a bunch of searches across various social media sites to stay up to date on specific topics.
- Comics
- Software releases.
I have very few high-volume sources. I much prefer quality content from hundreds of sources instead of frequent content from a few big sources like news sites.
I realize I didn't answer your question but that is sort of intended. Each person's favourite feeds will be different and depend on your interests. The best way to get stared is just to start subscribing to the things that you are enjoying today. Then over time you will build up a list of things that interest you. Especially when getting started it makes sense to over-subscribe, you can always prune down if you had a "false positive".
Ah, your approach makes a lot of sense. Me, I've put together a number of Twitter lists over the years, to serve as faux-newsfeeds.
Well, it doesn't work very well and right now it leads more often to aggravation than discovery.
So, here come 2023 and RSS. Thanks for the hints!
Note that you can use third-party services to create feeds for Twitter users. (example https://nitter.net/) This can provide a good way to get some content into your reader, then you can add/remove feeds based on how you are enjoying them.
You like more content => you get subscribed to more feeds automatically.
Your feed reader can also take care of unsubscribing you from feeds that are posting too often or are not posting interesting to you content. If you don't like the content of a feed for awhile then your connection to that feed becomes weaker and the content from that feed is ranked less prominently. The content from feeds with a high signal-to-noise ratio (ie, how often you like content from that feed) is ranked higher for you.
Through this mechanism I am currently subscribed to 201 RSS feeds and I know that I won't miss content from high "signal-to-noise ratio" feeds. Here is a sample of my top feeds:
I have over 200 feeds that generate over 5,000 articles per day. You probably don't want it.
90% of websites have RSS, including news media, Mastodon, YouTube, Blogs, Torrent sites, and sub-reddits. eBay used to but disabled it earlier this year.
The panic about right wing intrusion of social media ownership keeps getting to new highs, now even predicts a come back of RSS because woke people don't want to be seen using Twitter any more... #fail #them
Is managing email really an unsolved problem? I mean, every email client has already way too many "organizing thingies": folders, filters, bookmarks, categories, labels, stars, flags, and archives. What value RSS brings alone except from being different and therefore having its separate tab in a client?
No, I don't think there is much fundamental difference. Some RSS readers support inbound emails as a feed source and I get my RSS feeds delivered via email. I think the main reason newsletters are "winning" over RSS right now is that everyone has an email address but not everyone has a feed reader configured. It provides an easy onboarding where you can start getting it in your inbox available on all of your devices and once that becomes annoying you can easily set up filters to organize.
I thought email was dead. I treat email like I treat voice messages, they are just out there waiting to be deleted without ever being read/listened to. Do people actually use email still outside of a work situation?
A federated near-instant messenger, not being controlled by a single corporate entity, designed on top of a well-defined Internet standard, with both commercial and open-source clients existing for every platform?
RSS is alive and kicking. I created a little Web 2.0 phenomenon named Popurls and recently launched https://biztoc.com — ~65% of the site is still RSS driven.
1) Newsblur has been a nice lifestyle business for Sam Clay. I suppose it won't ever be a billion dollar unicorn, but it works beautifully for consumers of content.
332 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadI do hope 2023 becomes the year of the comeback of RSS.
This is both the main feature, and the biggest obstacle. The people with the money do no want the individual to have control. Thus it has always been and shall always be.
Folks are banging on Elon because they feel he's using Twitter to manipulate, but it's not like Twitter was different pre-Elon. Elon simply gave The Man a face, voice and smell.
Back in the blogosphere (I hate that word) days, a lot of RSS was floating around. It wasn't very good, as RSS implementations varied a lot. But when it was working well, it was so good. If I have a complaint about returning to RSS it would be that we will return to the days of clickbaity headlines.
We entered those days and have yet to leave. If anything, the rise of social media (at RSS's expense) turbo-charged clickbait headlines, since now it's easy to measure engagement around those stories, both in terms of views and in terms of comments/likes/shares/etc.
Wait, what do you mean? Clickbaiting (and borderline misinformation) has been getting only worse ever since
I first noticed the up-tick of clickbait headlines in the salad days of RSS. Due to this, I tend to ignore headlines these days, because I was trained to assume the headline was complete nonsense. So my internal metrics are a bit wonky.
I read upthread that Google Reader had a social mechanism for recommending feeds to friends. That's great for discovery, but it still hardly seems earth-shaking.
It feels an awful lot like a rose-colored-glasses situation, where something existed that wasn't horrible but doesn't reappear because it wasn't all that great, either. What is it I'm missing?
It allows you to tailor your aggregation, and create you own aggregation of topics if there isn't another aggregator out there.
Are you into kumquats, ancient Mesopotamia, and The Buzzcocks? You're not going to find a web aggregator for that. But you can put together several RSS feeds into your own aggregation.
I understand the idea of wanting to feel more control by seeing precisely and exactly the groups you asked for, but I feel like it's not really a radical change in terms of content.
My RSS reader (FreshRSS, self-hosted, and NetNewsWire on macOS/iOS) shows me all posts from all feeds I've chosen to subscribe to. Nothing more, nothing less. No ads, no murky VC cloud funding -- I self host on my own raspberry pi -- and no privacy concerns.
Social media is kind of like a flaky RSS feed with comments from people I don't know or care about that sometimes doesn't show me content I DO want to see but also constantly shows me ads, tries to manipulate me into spending more time browsing, and hoovers up as much data as humanly possible. Oh, and it changes the UI every 6-8 months in seemingly random UX a/b tests in the name of "optimization." And it radicalizes my older relatives politically.
That seems like a pretty shitty RSS feed to me.
Sure, you could. I can't. I'm locked out of Facebook. And in spite of sending a photo of my government ID into Facebook's customer service black hole, nothing has changed.
RSS gives me the freedom to aggregate information without relying on some faceless tech company to decide when I can have it, and when I should be cut off.
In modernity, we might call that latter a "filter bubble", but in the parlance of the 00s, we thought of it as a "personal newspaper".
I know Facebook and Twitter play stupid games with "the algorithm", injecting stuff you didn't ask for and hiding stuff from your friends, but in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in.
So wouldn't an RSS feed be just as much of a filter bubble, based on who you choose to subscribe to? You might feel better knowing that you were seeing it in a simple chronological order without the algorithmic opinion, but it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles.
RSS is also handy for following blogs or websites that only post intermittently.
RSS and filter bubbles could go either way. Nothing stopping you from filling your feeds with folks that don't think the way you do. Most of us don't have the patience to wade through thoughts contrary to our own. That's the real issue when it comes to popping your filter bubble, not which tool you use to get the info.
Like I said, RSS is about you curating your feed. Using RSS, you don't see headlines from anything you didn't choose to see.
>in the end it's not as if you were just being force-fed solely stuff you had no interest in
That's trivially true. That said, if the choice, regarding seeing shit I'm not interested in/calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc, is between seeing it "never" and seeing it "sometimes, when someone else wants me to see it", the choice seems obvious.
>it doesn't seem like a solution to filter bubbles
I don't think it is either; that said, I still think it's better. Part of the conceptual transition from "personal newspaper" to "filter bubble" was the increasing prevalence of calculated ragebait/for-profit spam/etc on aggregators -- the pressures present in aggregators, and the inevitable comment sections, help shape content to be more ragey or spammy, to get that all-important engagement. That shaping happens everywhere on the aggregator -- here on HN, for instance, dang goes around silencing non-HNish comments with impunity and without appeals. This isn't a bad thing, but it is a shaping of the aggregator's content by shaping the aggregator's culture. If one spends all one's time on an aggregator, consuming that shaped culture, one's perspective can easily start to skew. With a "personal newspaper", one is more aware of the artificiality -- it's not a site itself, it's just the sum total of the RSS feeds of blogs X, Y, and Z. A "filter bubble"'s ostensibly organic culture, and ostensibly broader curation, helps one convince oneself that it's a community with justified beliefs.
RSS doesn't really afford that kind of escalation. If HN were dang's blog, the pressure he exerts would only affect the comments section of that blog. Sure, audience pressure can help make an RSS'd source more extreme, but if that pressure happens it's got to be occurring on the site's own commenting infrastructure, which means local moderation can sort it out. At a minimum, there's no chance of the contamination hopping RSS feed sources (at least, via RSS itself).
RSS lets me subscribe to everything jfengel (say) posts, not just the minority of jfengel posts that make it onto HN. That matters for those who are jfengel fans.
Edit: of course, it's also useful if jfengel only posts about once a month. You don't want to miss anything, but neither do you want to visit the blog every day to see if there's something new. Facebook is terrible at this -- I regularly find that I've missed something that a friend who is an occasional FB user has posed.
I think that's the point a number of people on this thread are missing. Newsletters, for example, are fine if there are a handful of people who publish regularly/frequently who you want to follow. They're less useful if you want to follow what 50 people who may only publish something once a month are writing.
The better solution is a post-RSS smart reader where you can drop links into it and it figures out how to turn the website into a feed and it caches all the content so the origin never needs to be available.
We over cling to RSS the same way we over cling to IRC instead of looking for ways to build on the good parts. Then we’re always stuck reminiscing and over glamorizing a past that wasn’t as good as we remember.
The reason was fairly simple - I wanted a better way to organize my newsletters and make it feel more “reading list” like than “task list” like. On email, unopened newsletters always felt like tasks.
Pro Feeds:
1. Once you subscribe the publisher has no way to contact you. Email relies on the publisher being honest.
2. Provides some history (or full history with archiving/pagination atom extensions)
Pro Newsletter:
3. Push based system by default (Feeds can use WebSub but it isn't that common).
4. ~everyone already has it set up.
At the end of the day they both transmit blobs of HTML to you with some minimal metadata.
https://ranchero.com/images/nnw2/nnwtoolbarhidden.png
…get off my lawn, kids.
And then let grandpa here hitch up his britches even higher: people still lament the end of Google Reader for a reason.
In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff. Was that perfect? Of course not—you were still in a filter bubble, and what bleeds, leads. But, it surfaced interesting stories, it let you follow news sources you wanted to see, and it did so without the screaming madness of Twitter and Facebook.
While it's satisfying to blame Google, the killing of Reader always seemed like a natural effect of RSS not being popular than its cause. It's not like there aren't other RSS alternatives. And, of course, social media does a pretty good job--for all its faults--of surfacing those various tidbits with or without RSS.
It seems hard to argue that it would have become more successful, given that its successors are pretty good but they’re small businesses.
1. They're a distraction and
2. It's probably very career limiting to work on them.
Someone at IBM told me years ago that if something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business they weren't interested. And Google walked away years ago from organizing the world's knowledge if advertising wasn't attached.
I was even blissfully ignorant to the existence of these social features in Google Reader until this moment.
> In retrospect, it was the least toxic social network. You added your friends, their recommendations bubbled up in the interface, so you saw cool new stuff.
This is just "subscribe to people's blogs". That's still the ideal social media for me.
My friends and I loved Buzz and lamented its loss. We tried Google+, but it couldn't even really do what Buzz could do, and it certainly didn't have any other killer features, so it didn't take.
At least to most I've spoken with on the subject (a few dozen, so informal straw poll), killing Google Reader turned people's opinion of Google from scrappy startup to untrustworthy behemoth.
You can add me to that informal poll. I moved to Feedly, but Google Reader was my go to for a whole lot of years. My opinion of Google changed the day they announced its demise. I am probably an outlier but the only way I want to consume content on the web is via RSS feeds. Allows me to curate what I see and if subscribed sites start delivering me poor content, I drop them from the feed list.
What’s your point?
Other companies give you less privacy, but more functionality exposed to the user.
Of course, without Apple's walled gardens, google might lock down their stuff too, no longer needing to have a bit of openness to differentiate themselves.
It was when business plans from moved from letting users control what they consume to being in control of what users consume.
The biggest is that they are trying to maximize revenue/profits. In controlling the flow of information to people they are in better control of that. A lot has been studied about this.
I didn't realize there were other motivations until FB started to publish studies they carried out on people. Some of those (which they published awhile ago) were around the manipulation of users emotions and their ability to target voting groups (to increase people going to vote in target groups) around elections.
It's all advertising all the time.
Generally speaking when Google prevents and limits what end users can control -- the offending product gets worse and eventually dropped.
Instead, you create a link with a comment in Signal to a group of friends, copy that to a few other Signal groups who are mutually exclusive of those other groups, then paste into a few Discord groups...
Literally a manual social network.
activity pub almost does this but comment threading has been universally garbage on every instance I have tried (how hard is it to thread stuff like comments on hacker news are threaded????) but the method is wrong in that you scroll activity pub feeds instead of surfing the net and finding the rich and interesting comment sections for what you are seeing.
It's no longer maintained, but it was a great concept
It was when the Internet died. We have been basking in the glory of a dead innovation ever since.
Feedly does not do this (at least, not by default?), and I consider the experience substandard.
Of those above I recommend Reeder 5 if you don’t care about web accessibility and Feedbin if you do.
(Reader’s impact was particularly dramatic because a lot of ostensibly separate products like NNW started using it as a backend…)
And, if, as seems at least plausible, over the next year or so Twitter crumbles and decentralised social media (whether in the form of Mastodon et al, blogs or something else) comes back, again, totally contingent! An idiot buying Twitter and breaking it wasn’t some sort of historical inevitability, just a weird high-impact thing that happened.
Google Reader was shut down in 2013.
At that time Facebook was THE hugely dominant social network, with Twitter solidly established, and Instagram rapidly becoming popular.
Google Reader was well past it's prime, most "regular" users had already moved to those platform, outside of the more hardcore Tech circles.
Google Plus was also really struggling,so they probably wanted to push the user base on to their "real" social network.
I think I’m from the generation(s) that expect to spend a lot of time in a browser window instead of hopping between applications triggered by notifications. So the moment I put something into an app, if it’s not situation dependent like Apple Fitness, or team chat for work, it’s just too much friction to make it a habit.
The tech is nice, but I have no desire to use it anymore. I no longer follow specific blogs. Now I just open hacker news or reddit any time I want to read something.
Once a week or when I ran out of feed I’d go hunting for more. The friends aspect diminished greatly but I had plenty to read.
2. No-one used the social features.
In retrospect, the end of Google Reader was nothing compared to the neolithic revolution.
It's largely a reimplementation of the Google Reader experience.
For 25 dollars a year you get 500 feeds and one year retention (up to 1000 posts per feed) and you can pay more for a larger number of feeds.
https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire
https://newsblur.com/
It's got a simple and clean user interface, and it stores the feed in iCloud, so no need for a third-party server application.
https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
It generates markdown locally but Obsidian is also on my phone so its also mobile.
I currently use an RSS-to-email service that I operate but I used other services for almost a decade before that. There are a handful available ad supported and paid or you can self-host.
https://github.com/skx/rss2email/
Having the feeds in your mail client makes sorting, and searching trivial. Plus you get the content archived for future reference.
Flym on Android.
https://www.nytimes.com/rss
Back in the day browsers had icons that would light up when a feed was available, however all of the most popular browsers have removed this feature. You can add it back with an extension easily if you are so inclined.
Most modern client manage to discover them anyhow though
On the other hand it's impossible to achieve the same level of one-timeness with RSS. You either publish the feed for a limited amount of time (and the subscribers have to get lucky and synchronize their feeds during this time window), or you publish the feed indefinitely (which maybe you wouldn't want to do)
No it's not (not that I can really think of why you'd want that). Generate user-bound rss feed urls with GUIDs or a signed "start date" that provides only entries since that date. That can also allow you to track how many times that url gets retrieved and eventually block it if it's too many.
Or have the rss reader only send an excerpt and have people auth before they access the content on your website.
>most importantly, if I don't set up an archive of all the newsletters, then only the people who subscribed will ever be able to read it.
On the other end once the email left your box, you don't control it anymore, and I can give you a well hidden hack that allows someone not subscribed to read it if they know someone subscribed.
That companies like feedly didn't seem to offer this functionality but were trying to emphasize social networking and tagging my articles (for who?) made it easy to walk away after the trial.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks
There are extensions that do this but having it built-in would make it widely available and easier to set up.
Edit: link since I notice they have a page about it. https://vivaldi.com/features/feed-reader/
Art apparently isn't about a creative realizing their unique vision, its about doing things mouthbreathers like. People seem to be viscerally offended when someone unapologetically makes something that isn't for them.
Bring back gatekeeping.
That's a feature, not a bug.
It's the difference between publish/subscribe and social chat.
When people unsubscribe, there's your feedback. Just like with newspapers.
Did any RSS readers build commenting into them - or even the viewing of comments? I remember subscribing to a blog, and then having to visit the site to view the comments or post a comment. And then subscribing to a separate RSS feed to subscribe to the comments for any post that I wanted updates on.
For me that was where RSS fell short.
Unread is the RSS reader I use on iOS and iPadOS. It does scrape the site and give the entire article. I love it but now I wonder if it's a good idea to circumvent the wishes of the blogger. I use Newsblur as the aggregator and tie Unread to it. The Newsblur portal to my RSS feeds works well enough in the browser on computers.
It is a tool. It has times and places. It is not mandatory, nor is it always a good thing. It is quite often a really, really bad thing. It can always be adjoined to a piece of content, like we're doing right now. It is not mandatory for the original poster to host it.
If you want a social network that works that way, you are spoiled for choice. If you are unhappy with those social networks, consider the possibility that much of your unhappiness may in fact stem from this very idea. If it seems like everywhere you go is kind of a cacophony of regression-to-the-mean discussion, insults, lowest-common-denominator... this is the root cause.
It is not a bad thing that "replying" to the creator of an RSS-based blog is exactly as hard as they choose to make it, up to and including making it impossible.
Later on, I moved to Pelican, which is a static generator, and below every article there's an info box that indicates that no, there's no commenting system, and lists a couple of ways someone can reach me if they wish to discuss that particular article. So far, it's working.
It's not always just for the benefit of the writer, I mean.
It'd actually be great if this would have happened on Reddit. I learned my lesson: do you want to comment about anything I've written? Please, do so. But not on my piece of land.
They could add a comment section to their WordPress blog. They could cross-post to Reddit. They could have an email dedicated to comments and feedback. They could do none of those things because they really don't care what the audience thinks.
Because RSS/Atom doesn't integrate two-way interaction, there are no preconceived notions of how the second direction ought to work.
Some technical blogs I follow use this. They create a public mailing list that they treat as their “public inbox”. Anyone can send an email to it, and all messages are publicly viewable. No signup or account required either since it’s all just email.
I’m a fan of this solution personally.
I know there was a Gab browser extension that would effectively make all sites have comment sections, and there are other similar attempts, but none seemed to gain any significant traction.
I think with a little bit of creativity it's still possible to innovate quite a bit with/on top of RSS.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978500
There's a flag for desktop too. You can enable 'Feed' in the sidebar, but it doesn't work for me on any platform at the moment.
That's an interesting point of view. I tend to find that the high quality sources I tend to follow are very low volume. So I've subscribed to hundreds of personal blogs, YouTube channels and similar to produce a steady (but not high volume) flow of good content.
Most of the higher-volume sources that I have considered following are either low quality or most of the content isn't within my interests.
Basically I tend to prefer 100 good sources that post a few times a year than 2 sources that post daily. Of course this isn't a hard rule, it is just the collaboration that I have seen. There are obviously some teams that put out high-quality content on a regular schedule.
https://podcastindex.org/
Of course now most popular browsers don't show this icon so it is more important to advertise it yourself. (Although there are extensions to bring this icon back)
This used to be the default condition for all web browsers. Even Safari did it.
I forget which browser dropped that feature first. My guess is that it was Google Chrome, and everyone else just did the same thing because following is easier than leading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/
https://www.wowhead.com/news/rss/wotlk-classic
https://alerts.weather.gov/ (chose your region)
https://www.pine64.org/feed/
https://www.factorio.com/blog/rss
The types of content I tend to follow are:
- Videos. YouTube, Nebula, PeerTube and a few other sources.
- Blogs. These are mostly personal blogs that I have found interesting articles on. A few company blogs too.
- Social media searches. This is more for productivity but I follow a bunch of searches across various social media sites to stay up to date on specific topics.
- Comics
- Software releases.
I have very few high-volume sources. I much prefer quality content from hundreds of sources instead of frequent content from a few big sources like news sites.
I realize I didn't answer your question but that is sort of intended. Each person's favourite feeds will be different and depend on your interests. The best way to get stared is just to start subscribing to the things that you are enjoying today. Then over time you will build up a list of things that interest you. Especially when getting started it makes sense to over-subscribe, you can always prune down if you had a "false positive".
Imagine your feed reader automatically subscribes you to feeds of articles you liked (star/thumbs up/favorite). Let's say you start subscribed to an HN feed of items that got more than 100 upvotes: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=100&count=100 Then you find the OP link and like it in your feed reader: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/this-is-the-year-of-the-rs... Your reader automatically subscribes you to the source feed of this article: https://feeds.feedburner.com/NiemanJournalismLab
You like more content => you get subscribed to more feeds automatically.
Your feed reader can also take care of unsubscribing you from feeds that are posting too often or are not posting interesting to you content. If you don't like the content of a feed for awhile then your connection to that feed becomes weaker and the content from that feed is ranked less prominently. The content from feeds with a high signal-to-noise ratio (ie, how often you like content from that feed) is ranked higher for you.
This is how my little project https://linklonk.com works. If you'd like to give it a try: "thumb up" a few items from the above HN feed: https://linklonk.com/feed?url=https:%2F%2Fhnrss.org%2Fnewest... and then check your recommendations on the home page.
Through this mechanism I am currently subscribed to 201 RSS feeds and I know that I won't miss content from high "signal-to-noise ratio" feeds. Here is a sample of my top feeds:
https://blog.piekniewski.info/feed/ https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/rss/ https://karpathy.github.io/feed.xml https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/feed/ https://www.inference.vc/rss/ https://openai.com/blog/rss/ https://stratechery.com/feed/ https://medium.com/feed/@yonatanzunger https://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml https://openai.com/blog/rss/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/feed/ https://computer.rip/rss.xml https://timharford.com/feed/ https://idlewords.com/index.xml superkuh ↗ Here are the ~thousand feeds I subscribe to formatted in HTML with links to the site and the RSS feed: http://superkuh.com/feeds9.html BruceEel ↗ Ah, I didn't know about OPML. I like that it's readable and editable so you can make adjustments before importing. Thanks! timbit42 ↗ I have over 200 feeds that generate over 5,000 articles per day. You probably don't want it.
Here are the ~thousand feeds I subscribe to formatted in opml for direct import into feed readers: http://superkuh.com/2022-11-04-feedlist.opml
90% of websites have RSS, including news media, Mastodon, YouTube, Blogs, Torrent sites, and sub-reddits. eBay used to but disabled it earlier this year.
Is this consuming other RSS feeds? Is it publishing a feed and 65% of its traffic comes from feed consumers?
That would be nice, since I don’t want to be at the whim of search engines anymore (for blog type content).
1) It's great for consumers of content, but not so great for content producers or RSS reader vendors, in terms of monetization or even analytics.
2) It's great for tech-savvy folks, but not so great for mass market reach, and the incentives to make mass market reach feasible are low.
3) It worked better back when most content was free. Paywalls are a more sustainable business model, but aren't very compatible with RSS.
It's FOSS and has an http json api.
Self hosting services via docker has been a game changer for me.