Hacker News Reader

Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

With the EU parliament's recent voting in favour of requiring consent/royalties for "rich linking" (eg. previewing content without sending the user to the original site), I can see a renaissance for RSS as an accepted and practical means for federated personal news aggregation. But then for me and many others, RSS has never gone away.

While we are at it, we should also bring back Usenet/nntp (though obviously I have nothing against news aggregators with discussion boards such as hn). But long term, only a new distributed p2p web will be able to escape the ever-increasing shilling and censorship. You can start this process right now and be prepared for the future by separating content strictly from web apps and avoiding JavaScript-heavy approaches for content.

View on HN

> With the EU parliament's recent voting in favour of requiring consent/royalties for "rich linking" (eg. previewing content without sending the user to the original site), I can see a renaissance for RSS as an accepted and practical means for federated personal news aggregation.

That's funny, I see the same legislation as the death of all unauthorized RSS aggregation. The "link tax" provision isn't about links, it's about excerpts of content.

But with RSS you're receiving content directly from the publisher's site. There's no third-party involved, and the publisher can provide as many text bites as desired. There is no problem there as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman.

> as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman.

That would imply people will go back to installing things, hunting for feeds, copypasting urls... As much as I like desktop tech, that boat has likely sailed, at least for the mass-consumer market. You might maybe get away with a mobile app, but you'd still need help from browsers to "subscribe" to feeds - something that was pretty awful the first time it was tried, and has been basically abandoned or removed since.

We can invent new, mobile-friendly protocols for discovery, especially if existing methods become difficult under new laws.

I was going to say "you can invent anything you want, but good luck convincing "Appoogle" to help you", but in truth, they've actually let the door open on mobile with their support for custom urls, so you are right there.

On the desktop it would be harder though.

> That would imply people will go back to installing things, hunting for feeds, copypasting urls...

Nope. We could have a simple list of feeds, with a simple 'add' button next to the site name, even embedded in the app itself, as preferred/most read feeds list. Since this list contains no excerpts, and actual excerpts and feeds would be coming from publisher themselves, it shouldn't be an issue.

Of course, then we have questions like order of this list, how many and which feeds it lists and all, but it offers enough convenience that if made avoidable, we shouldn't have a problem with it.

Or since IANAL, this _may not_ be how the links and excerpts are considered, and I'm wrong, in which case, I'd like to know so I can correct myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com