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Comment by originalsimba | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years?

RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer.

I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

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Exactly!

The social media platforms have effectively "devoured" and "engulfed" the very idea behind RSS in order to exploit the political economy of content publication, for monopoly.

When Google Reader has been shut down in 2013, it had left millions of loyal fans behind who had loved and used the platform over the years. There had been a strong disappointment, especially in communities like Reddit, HN and Slashdot. Reader platform still seems to have been missed even today [2].

Judging by the range of Google products that had got shut down along with the Reader [2] that time, it seems that it had been a strategic move to preserve their interests in rising social media and mobile market.

Google had failed to "build products that people love," by betraying what people loved.

With Google killing the Reader, Twitter shutting down support for RSS, AI having had started deciding what is most relevant for you, and feeds having buried behind giant walls of API interfaces,

Legacy of Aaron Swartz had been turned into "social media," the new television!

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/897hr1/i_made_mocku...

2: https://googleblog.blogspot.com.tr/2013/03/a-second-spring-o...

Excuse me, but I need to put it out there: how exactly is RSS useful if the sources themselves (websites) are more and more biased? I believe nowadays, people are interested in "content", not in "source". As long as the content is valid and trustworthy, I don't care if it's on social media or an RSS feed.

As a matter of fact, my problem with RSS is that I can't be sure the websites I'm receiving their notifs are going to keep up the good work and are not "deviated" or "biased" after a while. RSS is solid, but it's also rigid, meaning that it relies on websites to deliver you content. Other alternatives (such as news aggregators) do the reverse: they bring you content based on your own interests and regardless of where that news was published in. I think this is way better than "blindly" trusting our favorite websites to tell us the truth.

A website has an editorial perspective and voice of its own. Their biases are known and can be accounted for when you read them.

News aggregators are having editorial decisions made by the vagaries of some opaque voting algorithm and get gamed by motivated actors and bots. If manipulative bias is your concern, aggregators are way worse.

What's never failed me is to remain sceptical of everything you read on the internet and verify sources.

Twitter used to have RSS versions of every profile, accessible through api.twitter.com without credentials. It was awesome. They retired it years ago...

I took the time to make a proxy (Twitter API to RSS), and though I did write a few more, a lot more services still provide feeds (such as YouTube, Reddit, Steam, GitHub) than I thought they would. RSS is still going strong.

YouTube killed it's new subscription videos feed a few years ago, it's no longer possible to get a single combined feed of new videos from all channels you're subscribed to. The only alternative is to export the entire subscription list in OPML format (youtube at least provides this) and import them into a feed reader.

I stopped subscribing to channels on YouTube after this and only subscribe in my RSS reader, because it was too difficult to manage synchronizing subscriptions between the two.

RSS is a(n) (open) secret club these days.

Would you be willing to release the code for this? I'd like to run one myself.

Can't remember the name, but there is at least one open source self hosted tool that allows you to subscribe to tweets via RSS. I used it to follow an author who had neither mailing list nor website.

https://twitrss.me/

https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge creates rss for many popular services.

Not just them. After last week's discussion, I noticed this week that, while Rick Steves does podcasts, I had to hunt for the RSS feeds page hosted on his own website. WTF?

My usual policy for podcasts is, RSS subscription or else. Ain't got time to visit the damn website. Science Friday tried that for a while and soon went back.

Most podcasts that I've encountered lately don't have RSS feeds listed. You have to view source to find the URLs. The Internet needs to revive that open technology culture.

Instead of Facebook/Twitter/G+/etc. subscribe to RSS feeds.

Instead of Medium, use WordPress/Hugo/Metalsmith/etc. on Netlify/Surge/Github etc.

Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux.

Etc.

> You have to view source to find the URLs.

In Firefox, do Right Click->View Page Info. The "Feeds" tabs lists the links.

There are also extensions (e.g. "Awesome RSS") that will put a symbol in your URL bar.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Mozilla should make that more prominent so that users who don't know what RSS/ATOM is could "subscribe to this website" with just a click.

That was funny.

Mozilla used to make that more prominent. Most users didn't care, because they still didn't know what that weird icon meant. That was ultimately the downfall of RSS - the web tech scene never managed to communicate to the average user what RSS was good for, what it did, and how to use it.

The issue isn't "not knowing about RSS/ATOM". You don't need to. The same way e.g. you don't need to know what the octane numbers for gasoline mean. What you do need to know is what it does for you, and that answer has always been "not enough to satisfy the hassle".

(A good chunk of the blame here goes to all the larger, traffic-hungry web sites that only published excerpts via RSS, with a click-through link. It transformed a useful feed into a rather useless list of self-updating bookmarks)

You can add the RSS toolbar button manually, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/795692

It wasn't done the right way in the past. Sometimes an implementation is 80% right and you just need to do a few things to get to 100%.

It needs a better name than RSS/Atom. It should sound like English: "Subscribe to this website with <better name>." (same icon)

"Really Simple Syndication" and acronyms cause non-technical people to shut down. It's a foreign language. (Edit: "Atom" would be a good name, because it's plain English, and probably a better format too.)

RSS/Atom didn't decline because of Mozilla -- it declined when Google killed Google reader.

The information overload could be solved with machine learning algorithms (run locally in the client) that sort posts into a "featured" folder.

There are solutions to all of the current issues with RSS/Atom.

"Feed" is pretty common. But you still will only know what it means if you know what it is :)

> you still will only know what it means if you know what it is

That's the problem with RSS/Atom. "Feed reader" doesn't mean anything to most people. "Subscribe to this website" does.

Interesting. In the original post, I clicked on the RSS "link" towards the bottom. Firefox invited me to subscribe via "Live Bookmarks," a Firefox browser feature that may pre-date Google Reader. It's a good name for non-technical people, but I don't know how many people have used it. I'm not even sure how it works.

You don't even need an extension. Enter Customise mode (in the menu, or right click on a toolbar button), then drag the Subscribe icon to your toolbar.

Syndicate (https://redalemeden.com/syndicate/) works similarly well for Safari.

>You have to view source to find the URLs.

IME you just open the page in the podcast program - it extracts the rss feeds from the appropriate tags automatically, promoting for ambiguity (this is with antennapod (Android)).

It depends on the program.

>Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux.

Bought my first Macbook pro after being a linux/ThinkPad guy since 2008.

I'm probably never going back to Linux on a laptop. I actually have working suspend and resume, plus it's Unix-like under the hood. Trackpad actually works without a bunch of ugly hacks since they deprecated synaptics drivers. no systemd, etc.

I spend almost no time fiddling with my system nowadays. I want to use my lap top, not just configure it every time systemd breaks something and I have to switch distros or window managers to get away from it.

I still like Linux on the server but in my opinion quality ux requires someone to get paid to do the un glamorous work like fixing compatibility issues and corner cases.

When was the last time you bought a ThinkPad? This is my third one and suspend works. The Trackpad is great, with three buttons. 24 Gb of RAM, 11+ hour battery life in Linux, and a 4-year at-home next-day repair plan. It was $1,900 including tax, shipping, and support. Macs are much more expensive for worse specs.

This computer "just worked" out of the box, and there is full freedom to tinker with the system. I think the industry should get away from the idea that everything needs to work out of the box anyway.

Im actually going to make the order for a new thinkpad today, to run NixOs on.

What specs and model do you have? Are there any tips, or something you wish you knew? My config reaches >€2500 quite fast.

I got a T460 with i7-6600U CPU @ 2.60GHz.

I always research the models online before buying: "<make> <model> <distro>". I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 on it at the moment.

The next-day at-home support has been great. They have come to my home and replaced motherboards on the kitchen table with no questions asked.

It has two batteries, which added a little weight, but I rarely think about power outlets any more.

I can't think of anything else, but if you have any specific questions let me know.

Neat! This will be my first thinkpad since ~2005.

I’ve been eyeing the X1Carbon. What made you select T460? Do you feel that it’s portable enough to bike/walk around with and use in cafes etc?

I guess what I’m really wondering is, with all different models (7 different choices in the T series, and then X and P) how can you select one? I’m in analysis paralysis.

You should ask more questions in /r/thinkpad[0]. But here's a quick summary for the models that matter for tech people:

- T4XX = 14", T5XX = 15", X2XX = 12"

- The middle number is the last number of the year (T460/X260: 2016, T470/X270: 2017 etc.).

- The T-series has had three models per year, the normal with no ending letters that has an external battery, allows you to replace parts and is mainly meant as a durable corporate workhorse. The s-version is more for consumers, with usually better choices for panels and building material, but more integrated parts and less amount of maximum available memory; no replaceable external battery. The p-version means performance, so the laptop is bulkier but holds a faster 35W CPU.

- P-series are workstations. The s-model holds a ULV CPU, but the normal P51 and P71 can have Xeon/Quadro level parts. They're either 15" or 17" and for some mysterious reason annoy everybody with an off-center keyboard and a numpad.

- X1 Carbon is a 14" ultralight laptop with usually the best screens and best building materials.

- From the consumer models, the only thing that matters is the Yoga series. Don't have any experience from those, but people seem to like them.

[0] https://reddit.com/r/thinkpad

I wish Lenovo would let me find this out somehow! Thank you - you have made it much clearer, and now I know I will buy a T with replaceable battery.

I wish laptop makers (and ALL other business) would make less cluttered, less designed websites. Danluu.com is the prime example of great design for me. I wish I could have found your great comment without having to bother people on HN. Thank you!

Just one more tip that you should know: it's always a good idea to buy them used after corporations dump them out. Now there's lots of T460 models available with a ridiculously low price tags. They are fast, they last a nuclear war, they have superb keyboards and ebay is just full of them... This is the biggest reason why people love the corporate ThinkPads.

We're happy to help in /r/thinkpad and ##thinkpad @ freenode.

Yeah, Dell and Lenovo sites are an absolute mess

I work with a T460 (my employer only works with Lenovo laptops). Oh my God, I'll never buy one for myself. After a year, the battery last like 2 hours and the touchpad is shit. The only cool thing it is the dock. This is my second Lenovo laptop and no again, thanks.

I'm not familiar with the Carbon series. My other two Thinkpads were T-series, so I think I just started my search with what I knew.

I walk a lot with this computer and work from cafes all the time. It could be lighter, but it's fine.

I want to try NixOs, but haven't had time yet.

I have a 5th gen X1 Carbon. Great machine in every aspect but RAM, and runs Linux flawlessly. It has 8GB RAM, which is more than enough for Linux plus developer containers, but not quite enough for running VMs; and it is soldered to the motherboard and thus non-upgradeable.

My setup cost ~1.5k€ (base setup plus larger NVRAM, better screen) although if you add touch screen, 3G and other bells and whistles you get to 3k€ pretty fast. I wouldn't add any hard requirement over the base machine.

I love my "couple year old" ThinkPad. Relating to suspend, the only problem I have is that there seems to be some kind of window. If I close the lid and then remove the power within a couple of seconds, suspend fails and the machine continues to run in my backpack. If I unplug the power first, then close the lid, it suspends properly.

I have a couple thoughts on how to debug it, but honestly... I haven't had the inclination to invest that much time in it, and the "unplug-then-close" habit has become so ingrained that I'm only burned by this about once every other month or so now.

Dell Latitudes also work great with Linux, in my experience. They are pretty solid since that's the business line. Bonus, you can get cheap used ones or parts for quite awhile.

"I spend almost no time fiddling with my system nowadays."

And this is perhaps the main difference. You stopped tinkering.

You can install a Linux distro aimed a people not interested in tinkering and it will likely just work.

"... but in my opinion quality ux requires someone to get paid to do the un glamorous work like fixing compatibility issues and corner cases."

There are in fact quite of bunch of people getting paid to fix compatibility issues and corner cases.

Try buying hardware from a Linux-based vendor.

> And this is perhaps the main difference. You stopped tinkering.

Or stopped tinkering with their work machine so that they could spend more time tinkering with things that they actually wanted to tinker with

You should also stick to a workstation linux release. I'm a huge fan of OpenSUSE if you just want hardware to work, it has the hands down best hardware support of any release I've used.

The only drawback is every wonky package out there is built for Ubuntu, for example Spotify's linux client.

However, if you want a basic system that works, OpenSUSE is the way to go.

I stopped tinkering with my system configuration and started using it for the things I want to do as opposed to the things that get in my way.

>You can install a Linux distro aimed a people not interested in tinkering and it will likely just work.

Ubuntu didn't "just work". Is it aimed at tinkerers?

> no systemd, etc.

systemd was very much inspired by macOS's launchd, they're very similar in many ways.

Nitpick — it's not Unix-like, it is Unix.

I'm actually surprised you didn't like systemd, since it was modelled (in part) after launchd from macOS. Same for systemd utilities like logind; even the name was taken from macOS logind.

I find systemd to be an over engineered pile of trash that keeps infecting more and more of the Linux ecosystem because nobody wants to stand up to redhat and their push for more poetteringware

I haven't had a laptop that doesn't support suspend and resume in years. It's worth looking at again in 2018. It's gotten a lot better.

I also had many ... But allways mixed results.

Soostly it worked, bu no allways. But I like to rely on it - and no loose da

I'm on my fourth Thinkpad (T42, T420, T440, now X220i) and all of them have worked perfectly with Linux, including suspend and hibernation.

Interesting, I bought $200 Lenovo laptop: touchpad, suspend, and hibernate all work out of the box

How is something that doesn't publish an RSS feed even considered a podcast? I hate how there's "Spotify only" "podcasts" now. If I can't subscribe to a feed in a client of my choice, it's not a podcast.

Drives me crazy too.

Or there was a big trend where they only links were to an itunes page which a) requires itunes to be installed because b) there is no direct link for the rss feed.

I had to write a scraper to find the underlying rss feed for itunes only podcasts.

Do the iTunes only podcast feeds need auth to access? Would you be willing to open source this?

No need really, I found how to extract the rss feed just by searching:

https://superuser.com/questions/78415/get-rss-feed-from-itun...

Maybe Apple will change/throttle the endpoint in the future but for now it's not authenticated.

Yeah you're not losing by syndicating a podcast if you're selling ads on your program you just want as wide a reach as possible.

Don't forget Google. In fact, it's not just RSS; it's other open standards (e.g. XMPP) that they embraced initially, then dropped.

Google’s Reader fiasco did more to kill RSS than any other actor in the community before or since. Cornering the market damaging their AdWords business with a free product subsidized by that very business and then shutting it down was really gross.

FWIW, YouTube still has RSS available:

  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID
  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME
  https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOUR_YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_NUMBER

You used to be able to go into your subscription manager and download an OPML file with the RSS feeds for your subscriptions. I'm unable to find that buton anymore though.

You can still download the OPML file you just click export to RSS reader at the bottom of this page: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager

Youtube used to have an rss feed for a search term, it was very useful.

Now we have to web scrape the results page because their api requires authentication and who wants to use that for results that are public anyways. I sure don't.

Rss worked great and they removed it. Boo.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish is alive and well. This time it's not MS though.

Last weekend I was reading about RCS, Google's effort to update SMS. They have signed on a lot of partners and I wonder why any of them trust Google to follow through? Telecom companies like technology that ages over decades whereas Google seems to evaluate things fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter.

.. and also how they force people to adopt it when it is convenient? ie Facebook making you privately specify RSS feeds for Instant Articles through their system (but not public ones that other people can use)

I think you hit it head on with this. It seems to be a control thing first and foremost. The worst nightmare is that you will grab their content in a text only format with no ads.

Yep, capital has viewed the interwebs main purpose as a massive direct marketing platform.

It's a very blinkered view. There's plenty of RSS feeds with text based adverts at the bottom of each article, and as most RSS reader apps show the article content in HTML, normal image based ads can work as well. So it's totally do-able to include advertising in RSS. A layperson wouldn't know how to strip the advert out either.

Yes, but advertisers (you know, Google's actual customers) don't like it, because they get less control over the appearance of their ads, and way fewer metrics/information about click rates etc.

It might also just be less effective than in-page advertising. Google and its peers probably know the truth of that, but I don't know if there are any reliable comparative studies in that area that don't fall into the "we tried to cram exactly the same strategy/campaign/content we would put in a banner ad into an RSS feed and got no uptick in sales" trap, but I'd love to read up on that area.

Regardless, the bandwagon effect of "traditional" online advertising is such that RSS is at best an (at present) tiny new frontier that would require advertisers to re-learn or change a lot of their content strategy, and at worst an actively advertiser-hostile platform.

Those are just observations; not statements of should/should-not.

I'm a big fan of Feedbin, because it lets you subscribe to any Twitter user's profile as a normal feed and browse it too. It means I can subscribe to 10 or so people I really don't want to miss and get their updates exactly like I would a normal feed.

https://feedbin.com/

Love feedbin. I've been using it since Google Reader died and it's been rock solid. Also nice that they have vim-like commands built in.

>I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging

Didn't blogging start on wordpress/blogger/livejournal?

Links.net and Scripting.com were blogs before the term existed. And Movable Type, Greymatter, and numerous other blogging tools existed long before WordPress, which was relatively late to the game (and technically a fork of a prior project).

Nowadays, we also have more modern tools like Jekyll, Ghost or whatever for blogging.

Movable Type preceded WordPress by a couple of years or so, FWIW.

LiveJournal predated Movable Type by two years.

Finger's got them all beat by a few decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

id Software used finger heavily during the 90s with regular .plan updates.

There's an archive of John Carmack's .plan files here:

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

Static websites with blogs/regular entries predated even livejournal

This.

Blogging predates all blogging services, platforms, and software. Blogging was invented by early web pioneers. The corporations followed in the Gold Rush of the 1990s dot-com bubble, and they've been trying to monetize our social lives ever since.

Nowadays, thanks to marketing machines and television talking heads, nobody has "websites" anymore, we have "blogs".

I think I first blogged in the early 2000's with Blog Spot (which became Blogger). It was great.

But not the others:

1999 LiveJournal

1999 Blogger

2001 Movable Type

2003 WordPress

while not blog "software", one could say that the contents of an html directory exposed by, for example, http://weirdmachinehostname.university.edu/~username/ were the earliest blogs. Hand crafted HTML homepages and such.

Hmm nah, I remember “blogging” explicitly meant drafting and publishing posts directly from a website form, as opposed to crafting HTML documents and uploading them over FTP (which was what people did at the time and obviously complained about.)

The word "blog" appeared a few months before the infrastructure to draft and publish posts directly from a website form. And the concept of diaries/weblogs that it designated was a few years older.

B2/Cafelog (from where Mike/Matt forked to WordPress) was also 2001.

I dumped MT (due to my Perl-aversion) for B2 and then onto the WordPress fork when B@ founder Valdrighi stopped active development of it.

Whilst not an open blog platform, CmdrTaco of Slashdot claims his Slashdot prototype 'Chips and Dips' which he created in 1997, was one of the first 'blogs'.

RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug.

I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for control and manipulation, but we'd at least have back the ability to read our news centralized.

RSS doesn't need analytics. If you want analytics, put them on the links in the feed. If you want to know that people are reading the link at all, either put in an invisible pixel, or just include a paragraph with a [more...] link.

RSS feeds that provide a paragraph (or less) and a "more..." link make me unsubscribe immediately. I'm most often reading my feeds when offline or on the go, and not having the full article makes it worthless.

Readers don’t need/want analytics though, so this is a friction between content accessibility and businesses tracking usage

> RSS has no analytics.

Great! Another selling point.

I agree, but realistically speaking that is why it’s being fought by content providers whether we the techies like it or not

Let it be fought by them all the time. Useful websites will have an RSS feed. It's a nice filter, IMO.

that's kind of an ivory tower argument. "let's people don't have nice thing, we know what's best for them." meanwhile, most normal use don't gives a damn if the site track their behavior and post relevant ads, as long as they get quality content and ads aren't abusive they believe it's a fair bargain.

No, more like "instead of trying to tame bad actors making compromises, we refrain from them and tell others to do so too".

"ads aren't abusive"

"believe"

Believe it or not, some people make high-quality content on the internet with the expectation of compensation.

The current state of advertising is ethically and technically questionable in many ways. But the idea of advertising as a revenue model is not.

Ethical advertising is pretty much a unicorn. I don't deny that it's possible but I would struggle to find even a single example of it in the wild.

I guess Deck Network was an example of that. Most of the 5-6 ads I intentionally clicked ever was theirs. There were also similar networks like Carbon.

As there were quite a few analytics companies for RSS when it was more popular, your comment couldn’t be further from the truth. The founder of one of the most popular RSS analytics firms (FeedBurner) later went on to be the CEO of twitter in fact.

As a frequent RSS user, I don't mind when feeds use links back to the main site. I personally use RSS to notify me when a new article is posted.

As a frequent RSS user, I want to read the content in my preferred environment with my preferred contrast, colors and font. Many years ago I decided to not follow people who only put a crippeled version of their content into my RSS reader. If they don't want to be read, that's ok, they're pleanty others with better content anyway which I gladly read instead.

Any chance you know of a good list of full uncrippled rss feeds?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, aren't list of things to read very personal and dependent on the taste and interests of the person?

My website has full feed: https://jeena.net/all.atom and so have blogs like Kottke http://feeds.kottke.org/main Marco Arment https://marco.org/rss Scott Hanslemann http://feeds.hanselman.com/ScottHanselman and most of the personal blogs you can find out there.

But as I said, I most probably didn't quite get the question.

But otherwise there are plugins like https://tt-rss.org/oldforum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1539 to replace the short content in a RSS feed with the full content from the Website.

Embedded images?

I don't think the big weakness is lack of tracking, really, I think the big weakness is consumer adoption. The average person (outside of the journalist/influencer-types that continue to bemoan the loss of Google Reader) doesn't care to use feeds. Podcasts (based on feeds) are still held back by the idea that you have to figure out how to subscribe to a show.

RSS is a protocol, not a service. Email doesn't have analytics, nor does html or http or any other protocol. Analytics is functionality you connect to services or tools, generating logs of how you use something. It's not on the same level of abstraction as a protocol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

How come it doesn't? I'm a paying subscriber of Ars Technica so I have unique personified URLs to access various of their feeds. You also can include images from the web into the feed and most of the clients will gladly render it. There are myriads of tricks you can use to collect data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

That's what feedburner was for and looking back it's so obvious why google bought them.

I was Google with their most popular Reader client that in practice 'killed' RSS, to get users on their shiny new G+.

WordPress still doesn't support postgres.

Which, to the general public, doesn't matter one iota.

Luckily, there's other platforms that, apart from giving you more options wrt your database backend, embrace newer PHP practices and versions a whole lot quicker.

If you are old enough, you should remember Web Services, a RSS fork by Microsoft, then came REST as a lightweight WS that just works for 99% of the Internet. So RSS never actually died but just evolved into many different forms.

> Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer.

How are FB and Twitter comparable to RSS? And how are they trying to kill it? Like they're not supporting it on their platform? If so, why should I care? Or do you mean "they're conspiring to kill it across the Internet", in which case please elaborate.

EDIT: I'm getting downvoted; I can only assume people are interpreting my comment as vouching for FB/Twitter, which couldn't be further from the truth. I can be (and am) confused by his wording without supporting big social media companies. :)

They are a way to subscribe to notifications of updates from your favorite content providers. But they don't use a standards-conformant protocol when consuming those notifications.

By becoming popular, they reduce content providers' incentive to support RSS. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Both Facebook and Twitter DID support RSS, both, for years.

Each corporation decided to eliminate RSS from their platform around 3 to 5 years ago, because they wanted complete control over the distribution of "their" content (OUR social lives).

It's difficult to discuss this subject without running into this gigantic elephant in the room which is that the behavior of corporate "social media" giants is exploitative, bordering on criminal, and absolutely contradicts the best interest of the public, our nation, the internet, and intelligent life. This has really served to spotlight some of the problems with free market capitalism.

I used to wish I could publish my email correspondence as a RSS feed, to which the "recipients" could more selectively subscribe.

So they're always engaged in seeking the information they need, which is so duplicated between correspondence and emails, I could even avoid copy and paste.

This was when I didn't get funny looks for suggesting that I send a email.

Did anyone else notice how regular people seem to have been killing off email and all forms of communication that require any configuration, lately?

Edit: configuration, not confirmation

Haven't you just described a blog though?

Sounds more like a newsletter to me. Let people subscribe to the newsletter, send out an email blast once a day/week/month.

But then by RSS, which makes it a web thing, which sure sounds like a blog.

Nothing is free. WordPress is also a blogging platform first and foremost.

I think you're being downvoted as there is both wordpress.com (which you correctly state is a blogging platform) and then wordpress.org (the open source PHP application anyone can freely install on anything from shared hosting on up).

At even a cursory glance, independent Wordpress installs vastly outnumber the number of domains hosted on wordpress.com

Well you can get a VPS for $2.50/mo these days with half a gig of ram, more than enough to handle 5-15 simultaneous visitors on your average WordPress blog.

The WordPress software IS free. The WordPress.com service is not, as you pay for it by attaching their domain name to yours thereby providing them free advertising.

Also, there's nothing to stop you from hosting your personal blog on your personal internet connection. Even if you don't have a static IP there's ways to solve that.

and a slightly bigger ram vps could easily add buddypress with the "BP My Home plugin" and you could give all of your family and friends their own home page profiles with whichever rss feeds they want on their own profile page. This is something I have been kicking around for a while.

This past week I've been researching ways to incorporate the blacklisting and such from a different rss aggregator plugin to give people custom weighting options within them.

After peeking at that BP My Home Plugin - wouldn't your use case also be covered by Nextcloud with a sprinkling of apps? There's a very capable RSS reader available, notes apps, calendar with CalDAV support, address book with CarDAV support, and so on. Depending on what you're actually trying to set up, that might work better than trying to shoehorn functionality into a blogging platform.

I've been meaning to spin up some nextcloud and experiment with the options. It does sound like it's very close to many things I've been wanting to put together as an option for family, friends, and whoever to spin up their own watercooler making a facebook replacement.

Having some experience with BP, it's really easy to get running, and even easier for other people to create a profile and start using it. Is there options with nextcloud for family and friends to join in any of the modules and have their own slice within it?

I'd love an easy button for people to get hosting and spin up a well defaulted nextcould, or buddypress system, or anything similar. With a BP setup, only one person in a family would need to spin up a server and everyone else could use it.. backing up data is the current weakness for easy button with that system, but I see that changing soon.

How do you solve around a non static ip?

Dynamic updates. So long as you're not behind carrier NAT you can find your IP number and update a DNS record. Many DNS providers have a specific service for this, e.g. https://dyn.com/dynamic-dns/ (no affiliation, just used them many years ago for this service).

Many ISPs are switching to carrier NAT though and then you can't host as you don't have a routable IP number.

You could host on Tor, or via a vpn. AirVPN provides static port forwarding.

Dynamic DNS :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS

Did Twitter[0] kill RSS or is that mode of expression not conducive for it?

Evan Williams (Blogger Founder, RSS -> Twitter co-founder, No-RSS -> Medium founder, RSS[1]) has explored many of these modalities. He probably decided Twitter didn't need RSS.

Maybe we're all learning about the health of certain forms of discourse?

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed...

[0]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-feed... [1]: I lack faith in Facebook given Zuckerberg's historic lack of an ethical compass.

The original REST API had a quasi-RSS feed[0].

[0]: https://twittercommunity.com/t/can-you-get-your-twitter-feed...

I certainly subscribed to Twitter RSS feeds until Twitter eliminated the feeds.

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