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The Future of Planet Mozilla

exple.tive.org

74 pointse15ctr0n35 comments

Mozilla Planet! That site was a big part of how I immersed myself in open source and software generally. When I was in high school I would read every post on the web site, and eventually started reading it on Google Reader.

It's where I learned about bug trackers, version control, Javascript, CSS, web browser development (obviously), and lots more. It's interesting to drop into a long-running conversation to see how professionals talk about things, and it's a big part of why I'm an open source contributor today.

> I’m not sure who said it first, but I’ve heard a number of people say that RSS solved too many problems to be allowed to live.

I don't know too, but this is a phrase worth stealing.

The fact that RSS appears to be dying is the best proof I have ever seen that demonstrates a secret cabal of lizard-people who control the world. How did it go from being so pervasive and useful to dying in so short a time? It can't all be laid at the feet of Google Reader and Facebook news.

Because content providers want to lock users into their own proprietary content platforms, and providing an RSS feed is completely counter-productive towards that goal.

RSS was way too open and user-friendly to survive contact with corporate greed.

It wasn't user-friendly for non-tech folks. It was confusing. There were no readers that appealed to regular folks. The open-source world dropped the ball here. This is why it died.

I don't disagree. I didn't mean RSS was user-friendly in the UX sense, although the poor UX of RSS readers in general was also indirectly a result the lack of interest from profit-driven companies, but rather in the sense that it offered users freedom from lock-in and the ability to aggregate content they're interested in and decouple it from the often ad-ridden platforms it was served on.

Flipboard has a ton of users, many of whom are reading rss feeds without knowing it.

I agree that overall, usability is still a huge problem for rss.

Has the open source world EVER produced a UX that was user friendly for non-tech folks? I'm really drawing a blank here.

As a mostly non-tech folk, nope.

VLC Media Player. It's not pretty, but it has a play button and a scrollbar. Its 3629394 power user features are nicely stashed away where they belong: in a menu that most people never even bother to check out.

But the core feature for a video player is that it plays the damn video. That's core UX, and most other players of the last 15 years have dropped plenty balls there. You can have so many skins and library features and preview screenshots but if the movie doesn't play without your nerd cousin first breaking your OS with sleazy half-broken codec packs, the UX is shit.

The most difficult part for non-tech people using VLC is understanding Finder or Explorer to double-click the movie they just torrented.

Firefox?

The free software world created Liferea, which looks good,[1] works very well, is easy to use, and was created 13 years ago. People just don't know about it, because they look for web services that they don't control instead of applications running on their own computers.

RSS is not dead, it is still supported by everything on the web except the large social networks that have corporate interests in not supporting it. This is in large part because all the content management systems support it.

[1]: See for yourself: https://clbin.com/B0v1yt.png.

He's talking about there not being any applications that appeal to normal non-tech users and your example is a linux desktop app that looks like a windows 95 application. I don't think you two agree on what "non-tech" and "appealing" mean.

That being said I'm sure it is very usable in a utilitarian sense.

Liferea is quite buggy on many systems, if you use GNOME and/or it's stable on your system then good for you. QuiteRSS is good, the only problem is that it comes with built in browser and I'm not sure if the browser code is updated properly.

I know a few relatives that used RSS integration in Firefox even though they do know nothing about tech. You just had to click the orange icon to subscribe and you would get the list of news on a dropdown in the bookmarks bar.

That is one of the awesome features in Firefox, its too simple for power users but for the regular user its great. I only wish there was some better interface around it, even if something html based or what not, like Bamboo Feed Reader maybe.

Not saying this is wrong, but I think a less cynical rephrasing which explains a superset of the problem is that RSS failed to win adoption from a critical mass of content producers.

You can go to pretty much any website and assume there will be an index.html equivalent which spits more or less anything the site wants at your browser.

You definitely cannot assume that any website you want to receive updates from has an RSS feed. You could never do this, even at its height commercial content producers regarded it with deep skepticism for totally valid commercial reasons. They would publish excerpts but not full articles, headlines but not excerpts, etc.

Now had the RSS community offered more incentive to the content producers to get on board, it might have seen more adoption. The clearest example of this is that RSS never solved the advertising problem--someone could take your feed, strip out your ads, throw it on a website and introduce their own ads and make money off of your content. Boom there goes your support from anyone whose writing is ad-supported. Why would they embrace RSS when it will de-monetize their audience?

> someone could take your feed, strip out your ads, throw it on a website and introduce their own ads and make money off of your content.

Someone can do that with web scraping too, don't blame RSS for this stuff.

While I loved RSS and the ncurses readers it powered for me, the ad thing was real and many publishers just put a blurb or a headline on their feeds (basically worthless), content scraping requires effort and varies by site, whereas RSS / Atom would be standardized and stupid easy for any old talentless profiteering hack to install as a source for new WordPress articles to feed their content farm.

Having the "barrier" of writing a content scraper for each site you want to scrape and figuring out a way to get that onto your crappy WP link farm blog is a high enough bar that many marketers just can't be bothered, so it "solves" the scraping problem for the majority case at the expense of the users.

Now we have things like Feedly which AFAIK maintain their own scrapers and I can still basically read most articles without looking at ads for this one new trick to get rid of tonsillitis complete with a nasty gif.

> The clearest example of this is that RSS never solved the advertising problem

I'm not sure what you mean by advertising problem, it's not inadequacy of RSS/Atom but the feature that the web is open, you don't wan't your articles to being copied you simply put it behind the login screen. You could even provide the feed for authenticated users only or implement personalized feed(s).

As I've pointed out before, RSS feeds are still widely available for hard news. Reuters, AP, and VOA have them. Even Al Jazeera [1] and China Daily[2] have RSS feeds. The New York Times has an RSS feed.[3] The Hill has RSS feeds with details of what's happening in Congress. The European Union has many RSS feeds.[4] The Hollywood Reporter has RSS feeds.[5] The Times of London has RSS feeds.[6] The South China Morning Post has RSS feeds.[7] The NASDAQ has an RSS feed for every ticker symbol.[8] Platts has RSS feeds for oil industry news.[9]

Those who need to know what's going on choose RSS.

[1] http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/articles.rss [2] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/rss/china_rss.xml [3] http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml [4] http://europa.eu/rapid/rss.htm [5] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rss [6] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/feedindex/ [7] http://www.scmp.com/rss [8] http://www.nasdaq.com/services/rss.aspx [9] http://www.platts.com/rss-feed

It's because Javascript has rendered the whole current generation of web developers deathly allergic to anything XML. JSS will be huge though.

It's because the RSS community never figured out standard, easy ways for users to:

1) Find new feeds

2) Subscribe to feeds

They got close on #2 with the addition of feed autodiscovery (http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm) as a built-in feature of browsers, but the UX never got polished enough to make it a single-click thing, and eventually the browser vendors decided it wasn't being used enough and phased it back out again. #1 is a nut that nobody ever even came close to cracking.

In retrospect, all the energy that went into the war that ended up splitting the community into RSS and Atom camps was energy that was diverted from solving existential problems at a critical moment. It'd be interesting to read a retrospective asking the various players in that war how they feel now about the decisions they made then.

Am I hallucinating because I could have sworn that I remember "RSS" buttons on web pages that automatically did the right thing with your RSS reader via your browser?

Those still exist outside of the Web 2.0 world.

The two problems are solved very well by Mozilla Firefox. You only need to customize the browser to drag the feed button to the toolbar. Whenever it is not grayed out, you know there is a RSS feed available for the current website or page, and you can click on it to view the feed and click "Subscribe Now" to subscribe to it in your default feed reader.

It's a shame that they don't ship it by like that by default. Even if it's "easy" to customize it's still is frustrating trying to explain it to computer illiterate relatives.

A lot of the audience went away because of Google Reader - Reader drove out newsfeed competitors, then when it shut down people went to non-RSS alternatives that they were already using like Facebook. Basically Reader killed all momentum for RSS and Atom.

Or maybe the fact that RSS ever had any semblance of being alive demonstrates that journalism used to be terribly naive about business.

Lizard people or careless journalists, maybe we will never know.

It sounds very much like something Douglas Adams would say, if he were around when RSS died.

I think that Planet feeds are the Right Thing, more right than some official, centralised blog. They may be part of Web 1.0 (or was it 2.0, actually?), but they're part of what was great.

PlanetPlanet Feeds are great but unfortunately people don't always understand that you should subscribe to their feed. Beside Mozilla, there is a number of other good planets to follow, like Python, Jabber, GNOME, Debian, Ubuntu.

Sam Ruby’s Planet Intertwingly is worth a sub too: http://planet.intertwingly.net/

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