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Comment by sdfjkl | Hacker News Reader

RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There's blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader (theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they realised I don't have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to read someone's 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there's RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. twitrss.me). Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways.

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> Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to even consider going there anyways.

Can't we have RSS scrapers that are operated by people, generating RSS streams of "inaccessible/paywalled/grey area" content in a collaborative effort? Something like bittorrent but for ASCII text.

For any content that's being sold as such (eg, news sites) that's definitely copyright infringement. For user-generated content, I'm not sure. Though I would not be even a little bit surprised if Facebook asserted copyright to anything put into it. In either case, probably violates the TOS as well.

Technically it's achievable, but it would likely be forever relegated to mostly-illegal backwaters.

Yes, it's illegal. But if we don't at least acknowledge that we're in a fight, then we're losing the battle for sure. By the way, Uber and AirBnB also did many illegal things, and so did Google (see e.g. Google Books).

Yahoo pipes did it before, now https://github.com/nblock/feeds was linked in this comment thread today.

I think the problem is that scraping everything except waywalled info may be legal (in Europe, at least) as long as it's for personal use, but may get you/me/whoever in trouble if we start redistributing that content in RSS feeds. Then again, most of the resources won't even bother if you scrape them into RSS unless they make money of ads (haha, find a resource that doesn't) or overload their servers. But IFTTT model might be a nice workaround where users actively need to use some community recipe to scrape and they assume responsibility.

Brother did a holiday blog in wordpress. New posts sent out email pings. That was fine, if you don't mind a torrent of notifications in your inbox.

You choose to sign up for email updates then. WordPress doesn't do it by itself. WordPress also has RSS still.

a lot of pages that use wordpress underneath still have feed-urls; if you know the URL, you can subscribe to them, even it if's not advertised in the head.

if wordpress stops using RSS it will be really dead.

That wasn't my point. Parent said RSS was the only sane way. Wordpress aside - email notifications can also be a 'sane' way.

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