Ironically just told the founder of my company that it was mission critical our blog had RSS. He had never used it before somehow and didn't know why it would be a big deal lol.
> RSS is really simple, so it is still very well supported. Notably, all substack publications automatically have an RSS feed included at https://{{substack-domain}}/feed .
I wonder how long that will last until Substack closes it, I have never seen an RSS feed where the author is able to make it sustainable for them to make money from it.
The only complaint I have about RSS is that it seems antagonistic to edits. It's not usual that, when refreshing my podcast RSS feed, there are multiple versions of the same episodes because they made some edit somewhere in the title or description, etc. I've had five versions of the same episode before. I feel like we should have the technology to fix this by now :P
I think the problem is that there are so many different standards[0] which makes it hard to parse them in a uniform format. The second problem is the most feeds only have 15 items, even if a reader handles updates they are fast lost for ever.
Who old enough to remember when everybody was syndicating all their favorite RSS feeds on their own blogs, and then some joker posted a blog entry to his own RSS feed with a title like "What happens when you put an unbalanced <BLINK> tag into the title?", and the ENTIRE BLOGOSPHERE started blinking?
This is what I use, and I also have Readrops on my phone that syncs back to my FreshRSS instance. Makes it really convenient to have a lightweight reading app where I can submit new feeds to it and have it sync back to the server.
Yes! I've been using RSS (feedbro reader) to de-algorithm social media for a long time now. Twitter (via nitter), Facebook (public posts only), HN, etc. It's all in a chronological RSS feed. No algorithms choosing what I see, no infinite scroll. If it's not a public post from a user I added, I don't see it. Luckily all my close friends are public-only type posters so it works.
My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.
Not just the ads, they can't add recommendations to your RSS feed.
What they optimise for is time spent on the platform "engagement". And usually rage-baiting content gives better engagement metrics than things that make you happy.
I’ve been looking for a way to get RSS feeds from Twitter profiles. tried RSS-Bridge but couldn’t get it working. rss.app works, but it’s paid. nitter feeds look promising but come through as invalid. how did you do it
Is there any RSS reader that is also able to subscribe to newsletters in some way? There are lot of contents that are only provided as newsletters nowadays and I wanted to be able to read my feed and newsletters in the same app, without going into my mail inbox.
After using GUI RSS readers for decades, been trying TUI RSS feed readers recently and quite liking that style. On iOS, Reeder is still my favorite app.
It was greader for me before netnewswire, I still use RSS, I can prioritize what to read myself after a quick glance I don’t need a “recommendation algorithm” to do it for me!
RSS is terrible as a format (Atom is much better), but RSS is awesome as an idea. If your web site were a database, RSS would be like WAL. If your website were differentiable, it would be like its derivative, or rather a Lagrangian, taken at the moment of last update.
(BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)
I'm all in on RSS. Matter of fact, I used an RSS reader (netnewswire) to find this post!
I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices.
Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.
i wish RSS protocols would update to support SSE for pushing new items instead of you polling them. Does anyone know a reliable way to use aiohttp with proxies to load data from RSS so that your requests are not blocked when using the feedparser library in python?
To some degree this is more a knock on the state of UX on the web than a intrinsic advantage for web feeds, but my favourite thing was my ability to compact list view content feeds, categorize them, and flip between them quickly because everything has been pre-acquired. As soon as I found out I could use Youtube that way, it felt like a 10x better experience for browsing my subscriptions.
I love RSS. I am a huge fan of TinyTinyRSS, it's incredibly powerful with its filtering. I subscribe to just masses of RSS feeds, and the filtering bubbles up the stuff I'm interested in, ignores the stuff I'm not, and deletes articles I know to be hot garbage. You'd be amazed at how much crap this regex catches on tech news feeds:
"^\d+ of the (best|worst|cheapest|highest|lowest|most)"
A lot of people get put off because they don't like the dev, he's not a "let me hold your hand while you understand the basics of how to install my app" kinda guy, he's a "Oh you didn't read the docs and are now spamming forums with help requests? Here's a ban" kinda guy which I gotta say, I actually really respect. Why everyone thinks open source ALSO means you get your hand held through every little rough patch I don't know, probably because a lot of open source is backed by companies who can't say the things the probably want to say in public, like "Go away, idiot"
Anyway sorry, I digress. TinyTinyRSS is excellent, the filtering just makes it head and shoulders above anything else I've tried like Miniflux (also nice) and FreshRSS.
Does anyone know if there is a self-hosted rss tool which exposes the data over API? I am interested in processing feeds programmatically but ideally would prefer not to bother with writing the update / subscription / parsing logic myself.
You may be interested in tools that parse XML, I'm sure there are libraries for parsing RSS/Atom specifically. I'm not sure what you're asking exactly. You want a tool that will read RSS feeds then reformat the data to a different (JSON?) format or something and have an API endpoint return that converted format? But then for what purpose of transforming the XML(an already suitable format)?
Pretty much all of them? They usually implement the Ye Olde Google Reader API and a few more so that mobile applications can connect in a standard way.
Love rss, but the upside of not having an algorithm determine your content consumption quickly results in a fire hose of content.
Sadly, filtering features seem to be only available for paid subscriptions of online services, or for self-hosted solutions. Or are there solutions I am not aware of?
- guids are not required, they are not monotonically rising integers, and there is no length limits on them (I've seen 50kb guid in the wild)
- date is not required
- you cannot fetch articles "since guid 123". If you go on vacation and return, if the feed had too much traffic they are gone, you'll never see the articles you missed except last 20 or so.
- whether article will be in full or just a teaser is fully in the hands of the server
53 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] thread[0] https://blogs.hn
Other good directories:
[1] https://ooh.directory/
[2] https://blogroll.org/
I wonder how long that will last until Substack closes it, I have never seen an RSS feed where the author is able to make it sustainable for them to make money from it.
[0] https://ivyreader.com/articles/rss-standart-collection
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
I hope X/Twitter back to this functionality, but that's a low probability.
Which killed all the legitimate fun and useful bots and just left the astroturfing and discord sowing kind state sponsored bots.
As was the plan.
FYI FreshRSS is fairly trivial to self-host, and is a really nice option for an RSS reader app.
My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.
What they optimise for is time spent on the platform "engagement". And usually rage-baiting content gives better engagement metrics than things that make you happy.
Feed entries then become emails which sit in your inbox/folders alongside your existing [emailed] newsletters.
(I prefer this approach myself, I can filter and search via my mail client, and manage state easily.)
(BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)
I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices.
Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.
Using this curbed my Reddit usage quite a lot.
[1] https://rssrdr.com [2] https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics
A lot of people get put off because they don't like the dev, he's not a "let me hold your hand while you understand the basics of how to install my app" kinda guy, he's a "Oh you didn't read the docs and are now spamming forums with help requests? Here's a ban" kinda guy which I gotta say, I actually really respect. Why everyone thinks open source ALSO means you get your hand held through every little rough patch I don't know, probably because a lot of open source is backed by companies who can't say the things the probably want to say in public, like "Go away, idiot"
Anyway sorry, I digress. TinyTinyRSS is excellent, the filtering just makes it head and shoulders above anything else I've tried like Miniflux (also nice) and FreshRSS.
- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_A...
- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR...
FreshRSS implements two APIs
Sadly, filtering features seem to be only available for paid subscriptions of online services, or for self-hosted solutions. Or are there solutions I am not aware of?
I use it also for:
- bookmarks
- web crawling
- simple search engine
I also created simple RSS reader/parser, and web crawling system [1].
Links:
[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive
[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
- There are million different formats.
- guids are not required, they are not monotonically rising integers, and there is no length limits on them (I've seen 50kb guid in the wild)
- date is not required
- you cannot fetch articles "since guid 123". If you go on vacation and return, if the feed had too much traffic they are gone, you'll never see the articles you missed except last 20 or so.
- whether article will be in full or just a teaser is fully in the hands of the server