RSS Is Better Than Twitter
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
I just wish some consortium of like minded companies like NYT/WaPo/Guardian/BBCs/Other national dailies, Reddit, Mozilla, and even Microsoft can huddle together and come up with a new name/identity and spread it and popularise it. One can always wish.
As one commentator said in the linked article: protocols are better than platforms.
Edit: The issue here is not about obtaining the feature with add-ons and extensions, which there are many. When the focus of the organisation is on something idealistic (open web), is it too much to expect them to add it to the core of the product?
It was good that it was removed, as it was useless to put it mildly
You're describing the "live bookmarks" feature, which was only one part of the RSS functionality that was removed from Firefox. I never used live bookmarks, but I used the feed discovery and subscription functionality all the time -- only some of which can now be restored with addons.
In the past it was even possible to subscribe with whatever addon you prefered from the firefox RSS preview directly, but that was already lost after the jump to WebExtensions.
So what's your point?
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
[2] - https://newsboat.org/
Another great new extension is Want My RSS because it's compatible with 10 RSS readers for direct subscribtion (you can add your own when you have a self-hosted reader for example). Feed detection and feed display is also great! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/
I use Thunderbird as well, and that has RSS support but to me that seems counter to my workflow. Typically I'll be on some site and want to subscribe, and then view in my browser. Doesn't really make sense to be in an email client.
On my phone I use Flym[2]
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...
1) There also doesn't seem to be a way to sort them by date or alphabetical order or domain.[0][1]
2) It seems like it should be possible to 'group' feeds, but I couldn't figure out how.
3) When Firefox updates certain things break
I think as a result of this I will try out newsboat. I found this tutorial[2] that seems to explain it nicely.
[0]: https://github.com/brief-rss/brief/issues/208
Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too.
I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds.
We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just people who are annotating content on Polar.
Also, copy-pasting is broken:
Bigtableis a distributedstoragesystemformanagingstructureddatathatisdesignedtoscaletoa verylargesize:petabytesofdataacrossthousandsofcommodityservers.
Also, expected keyboard shortcuts (eg hitting delete to delete a document) don't work.
Fortunately, Thunderbird still has this feature.
http://andregarzia.com/2018/11/reading-blogs-with-thunderbir...
I think a similar setup would be good for many people here who wish to read RSS but doesn't want to add another SaaS to their life.
The other in-sync option would be setting up an rss/imap gateway, which is not even available as a SaaS afaik, so would cost about as much in hosting (unless you already have a server you can use) and about 20 times in labor.
Happy paying NewsBlur customer - even though the iOS app is a battery hog.
Where in Thunderbird do you find feeds to subscribe to?
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-are-rss-feeds-...
You're right! For users this is absolutely true.
Yet, almost all the companies that you might think of as potentially interested in RSS are platforms. You cannot sell ads in a protocol.
This is the core of why Twitter has replaced RSS. RSS is better for users, but Twitter is better for publishers and platforms. So users wind up following content.
Is it perhaps possible that in this particular case, the difference you so wisely point to between a format and a protocol is possessed of a great and bountiful opportunity to be relevant? The discussion at hand is between "protocols" and "platforms", which might otherwise be cast as "standards" and "products".
Again, you're completely correct. It might just be worth considering that in some cases, a distinction without difference can be of limited value to a discussion where it is at best tangential.
The flexible answer, of course, would be to have a relatively basic core browser and an extension system powerful enough to allow the features to be implemented that way. Like Firefox used to be. Unfortunately, Mozilla decided to neuter the extensions instead.
That said, I would love if Firefox had an excellent RSS experience, but frankly it was always a confusing afterthought.
It used to be called Poche (French word for pocket) but they had to change it becuase of a legal threat from Pocket.
Thunderbird is still a mighty fine RSS reader though.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rsspreview/
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feed-preview/
(It's a shame I couldn't have found this on my own. addons.mozilla.org is unbelievably bad for discovering useful addons. It takes a thread like this to turn you on to the good stuff.)
That worked for a short time until Firefox removed that API. Now I need to install this addon to be able to do it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
It's basically impossible for people to find out how to subscribe to a RSS feed nowadays.
Google failed to gain traction in the social network space with G+. If you can't beat them commoditize them!
Why not make interoperable networks based on open standards first class citizens in chrome/chromium? Not just by adding support but also by helping move the RSS standard forward.
And I'm not only talking about people that produce readers, but also about content creators. I'm making a site and hoping to turn a profit through ads and my interesting content - why would I want to provide a convenient stripped down version of my website for you to consume - something that is a net negative for my revenue (hosting and transferring data costs money)? Sure, I can provide "excerpts" in RSS, but I'd rather prefer you go to my homepage to see what is new - it is thoroughly AB tested to lure you in, spend some time and see some ads - maybe click one.
You can convert Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me
Websites that don't have RSS: https://feedity.com/
Email to RSS: https://zapier.com
Hackernews RSS:http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300
You can even use RSS for finding a job: https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=d...
And one which converts partial feeds into full-text feeds: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/
https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/
For HN, you can run that very same codebase from https://hnrss.org: https://github.com/edavis/go-hnrss
From that link:
> 2018-10-17: Twitter are rate limiting requests from TwitRSS.me, meaning it is effectively broken until I can think of a way round it. You can still run your own instance
I used this before, but its delay is just too much for anything that requires timeliness.
The free tier of feed43 is a little bit better I think (still have hours delay sometimes..)
But yes, wish TinyTinyRSS would offer all this functionality. Other RSS readers might be better, but I always return to TinyTinyRSS.
For me, RSS never was dead or less relevant than in the past. On the contrary: Since I keep adding feeds on a very regular basis, it's still growing in importance.
Fortunately, 95 % of blogs and media sites still provide RSS feeds. As long as this is the case, RSS will remain crucial to me.
Mine too, 100%.
But reading through the post and the comments here, I'm sensing an omission. What Twitter (and social media in general) provides that RSS doesn't is interaction. I don't login to twitter all that often, but when I do, I see things like this: https://twitter.com/mikekarnj/status/1106582308235235330 and this: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1106812630985928704
I doubt I'd be privy to the discussions happening on Twitter if they were happening any other way (blogs tried to do it with comments and pingbacks, but that isn't as good as Twitter, and not as open to everyone, since you have to run a blog of your own).
This is the secret sauce for me. In fact, if there were a way to only see conversations in Twitter (and ignore all the posts with no responses) that would have a lot of value for me.
RSS is great for reading, but for conversing, it's not a good fit.
There is also AP relays which could further reduce the overhead if you simply deliver the content to the relay.
(Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)
One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an API of Google Buzz. But that started with a privacy scandal and shortly thereafter Google decided they needed their own closed social network. Salmon was later used in OStatus 1, I think.
There was a lot of activity in the 2000s transforming the RSS/Atom ecosystem into something of a decentralized social network. Extensions like Activity Stream for richer data, AtomPub, Salmon, OpenID, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) to turbocharge feeds with a Publish/Subscribe thingy and a lot more, that I'm now forgetting. The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.
And yes, if you squint the right way stuff like ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the Indiewebcamp Microformats are practically feeds.
> But that started with a privacy scandal
What was the privacy scandal?
> The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.
What problems are? I suspect that there should be problems with spam as anybody could add their comments (although protocols seems to contain some countermeasures) and maybe some kind of DoS of anybody "posting" too many comments. But what other problems are?
But blog post comments is completely another medium from Twitter. It requires you to sign in and, since comment will be there forever, you usually put more effort in it. So comments are more rare and of higher quality. But at the same time you could sign in as anonymous and put your spam link or some ego bullshit -- which frequently happen on popular sites. So it's very dependent from community.
And if you comment on some blog post only readers of this post will see (and they will know the context). When you comment on Twitter -- anybody could see. Together with 280 character limit this leads to completely different kind of discussion.
Let RSS be good at one-way consumption and ActivityPub be good at bi-directional communication.
The author complains about the chaos, vulgarity, and hostility of Twitter, but those complaints would apply to almost any social media platform.
Then he suggests replacing it with RSS feeds from curated, professional RSS sources, which is not social media. You could achieve the same things on Twitter if you just followed the same curated, profession Twitter feeds.
This is really just a roundabout argument that can be summarized as "don't read the comments."
Twitter works quite well in this regard vs. Facebook where you need to be “friends” to interact.
What do you mean? I just see a chronological list of tweets, not a randomly-ordered list like facebook
You can turn twitter into an RSS feed with various other apps (I like Feedbin), and it greatly improves the experience.
RSS is very, very nice. Especially for keeping track of all the journals I have to keep an eye on.
The other halfs are webhooks.
I also want to get notified right away for articles that use a specific keyword, so I have other applets that will send an IFTTT rich notification to my phone with the link to the article.
Or you know, I have some other RSS feed I use with a torrent client to automatically fetch "stuff", and once the download is completed, I configured the torrent client to send an HTTP POST request with the torrent title to IFTTT, which in turn send me a push notification to let me know a download was completed.
In short, RSS is a feed of (mostly) professionally written articles while Twitter is full of amateurs expressing half baked thoughts in 140 characters. It is unfair to compare the two.
One problem is that there is too much emphasis on short, witty quips in widely shared tweets. It has everyone going for the witty zinger and that makes conversation shallow and obnoxious. Occasionally there are decent tweetstorms, though.
Complete with all the problems of spam, overwhelm, etc. You gotta find your people, foster a community, and stay there. I owe a lot of my career to twitter I’d say. It’s an amazing place.
Ok, not directly. First it started as a proto semantic web protocol, at Netscape to syndicate links and titles for their portal.
Then Dave Winer used RSS to syndicate his weblog, scripting.com and started the marriage of blogs and feeds. But blogs at that time were more small paragraphs, less big articles. And every paragraph was syndicated. That's still visible in archives of long running blogs:
• http://scripting.com/2001/09/11.html
… which seems a lot twitter like. The focus on longer articles in blogging is something which started later, in 2001 or so, in my recollection.
Btw: Following those blurb-like RSS feeds in a traditional RSS reader with read markers is overwhelming, in my experience. I banned all those feeds into a "High Volume" folder where I more often than not mark all as read just to get ahead.
It's like a web page, itemized into a very regular syntax.
If you want to "tweet" using RSS, you need a URL somewhere where you can upload updates to XML content; then give people that URL.
Either you have to join some website where content (like blogs) you create are exported as RSS feeds, or else run your own domain.
I’m saying that it’s easily possible to imagine a world where the uses of RSS vary from what they’re used for today — different from the parent commentor.
Given that is true, isn't it "funny" that RSS is now non-existent compared to Twitter? ... I despair at the direction of the web.
By what measure? More people listen to podcasts (powered by RSS) every month than use Twitter.
On Mac, I've been using Leaf with no real complaints.
I've found many blogs happily serve rss content, even if a button isn't explicitly advertised. Some of the url's I'll try:
* example.com/rss.xml
* example.com/index.rss
* example.com/?feed=rss
* example.com/feed/
* exmample.com/feed/rss
- ctrl+u
- ctrl+f rss
- ctrl+f atom (only if “rss” was not found at step 2).
There is a highly-rated extension to automate this, but I've grown to distrust extensions that require "Access your data for all websites", and scouring the page source for the relevant <link> tag is not particularly cumbersome.
WordPress? Add /feed/ For more tips: go to https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-feeds/
Drupal? Try rss.xml ?feed=rss /feed/
Joomla? You can try ?format=feed&type=rss or /itemlist/?format=feed
Blogger? Add /feeds/posts/default
*Spip ? Try /spip.php?page=backend
Try just the domain in Leaf; it might autodetect the feed URL. I use Reeder[1], and that method never failed me.
https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Fu...
Off the top of my head, some issues i had with RSS and/or with the tools/RSS readers: - RSS can become en echo chamber if you have a limited number of feeds - Too many feeds and your feeds are flooded with a lot of noise - want to check the top stories of the day, or trending content? need to use a different tool than your RSS reader. - want to follow some social feeds but without the noise of social platforms?
I wrote something about the signal/noise ratio in RSS recently: https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-informat...
To solve these issues, i'm trying to bring something to the RSS ecosystem, and i built a news platform mixing RSS and traditional news aggregation. It has features to limit the noise and help avoid echo chambers. You can follow Facebook pages, Twitter users, etc... add your newsletters to declutter your mail box, and much more to come.
You can check it out here: https://aktu.io/about
Between the cookie popups, the GRPD "choice" popups, and the sign-up-for-some-email-crap popups, each of which takes 1-2 seconds to appear - sometimes in parallel and sometimes in sequence - the web is a garbage fire.
There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. I also think we have passed "peak information". On the internet, everyone has a voice. At first that was good, but now the signal to noise ratio is so bad that good, accurate, useful content is just rounding error. The same is also true for television/film as well as the commercial music industry.
That's not to say there are not still great people creating great content, but there are mass numbers of people polluting the mediums and making it increasingly difficult to find the good stuff.
The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!)
Books.
That's what I've retreated to as the internet has been ruined. It's all about low barrier to entry that ruins anything with the shiftless/idle masses becoming involved. No one wants to pickup a book and read, they want to offer smart ass one-liners or harass people on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. That's most people's entire life, same behavior in the workplace, then they die. That's why I'm a developer, the barrier to entry is high enough that I enjoy and appreciate most people that I work with. Same concept as with media.
Books are proof-read, edited and vetted for reasonably accurate sources in most cases. In general, publishing them is hard enough that as a consumer I can rely on them being one of the better mediums.
Indeed. The easiest (low-friction) way to implement this would be as browser options/addons. We need to get back control over how content is displayed on our screens, but browser makers' priority is to turn the browser into a TV set.
Doing this in JSON does not suddenly mean you don't need a convention (aka standard) for fields and types. It's data exchange. The reader needs to know what your data means. You still have pubdates, links, titles, descriptions and you still need to label them in a semi-strict way somehow.
All in all, JSON will save you a few bytes but it would just be another standard on the pile, just with no libraries around to write the RSSJSON format.
JSON doesn't fix XML.
RSS: 33,228
Atom: 43,433
JSON: 36,137Can I see?
(To be clear to anybody reading this out of context: I'm not claiming that JSON is best —far from it— just that I would expect it to be a few bytes lighter in transit.)
http://boston.conman.org/index.atom
http://boston.conman.org/index.json
http://boston.conman.org/bostondiaries.rss
Each item has a id, date_published and tags field which do not feature in the RSS. Together these account for around 250chars per item or 3750chars per 15 item feed. Cut out those fields and the JSON would be 850chars shorter.
Also, you're preserving tab and newline characters around HTML. This affects JSON more because a newline is valid between RSS tags. In JSON a newline becomes two characters "\n", as a tab becomes "\t". Going "spaceless" on output would save you 1372chars from your JSON feed (and half as much from RSS/ATOM).
I will confess, my sniff test didn't account for using quite as many HTML attributes as you do :) Escaping double-quotes costs you 334 in JSON.
The overall difference is much slighter than I had expected.
This does sound painful, unlike parsing ordinary XML.
Beyond that, you can use powerful tools like namespacing, schemas, XSL, etc if you want them, and they are also ubiquitous across most major programming language ecosystems. They add complexity, but so do their JSON analogues.
It seems that people often reinvent aspects of the XML ecosystem using JSON. For example, JSON Schema is like XML schema, OpenAPI is like WSDL, JSONPath is like XPath. That's not to say I don't support these efforts - I think it is great that people are developing powerful tools for JSON. However, I think there is a misconception that the XML ecosystem is less "à la carte" than the JSON ecosystem when it comes to these added complexities. You don't need to deal with them unless you need/want to, and then it is nice to have standardised, battle-tested implementations.
RSS: ~20 [3]
Atom: ~25 [3]
JSON: 1
gopher: 7
[2] My blog is also available via gopher, gopher://gopher.conman.org/
[3] Unique user agents---probably not the best metric, but for a quick scan, easy enough to check.
Edit: formatting
I didn’t get the headline until I saw that apparently the author think Twitter is for getting news. I’m sure some people do, but this is strange to me. I use it to keep up with friends and acquaintances, and with the goings-on at certain local organizations. Other people use it to get better customer service. There are many ways to use it. RSS isn’t even in the same species as most of them.
Not really.
Most of the people I know , including me, go there for just one reason: To know the public opinion.
But always remember that you're only getting to know the opinion of the twitterverse. That may or may not track public opinion overall.
RSS is still there on the publishing side for major publishers and all popular blog platforms. So why is it not as popular as email? Maybe individually visiting websites is good enough and maybe that itch is scratched by Twitter.
Can you carry on a conversation between content creators and subscribers over RSS?
Can you discover new content by following a RSS social graph?
RSS is better than Twitter in only one aspect and that's the one-to-many subscriber model. And that's the least interesting and least profitable thing that Twitter provides.
Twitter is extremely noisy. It tends to overwhelm actual articles that people put some effort into with shallow, witty zingers. If you're not looking for witty zingers, it doesn't really matter what other features it has.
RSS is just a file format, but it enables a larger ecosystem that works better at showcasing good content.
2. No.
3. See 1.
I wrote about this, oh, 9 years ago [1]. And then a few years later as well [2]. I did an analysis of the quantity of news items, posts and tweets coming through my custom feed reader and realized it was - and always will be - impossible to keep up, no matter how I organized, grouped, condensed, summarized and displayed it all.
The basic, undeniable fact is that most RSS sources are filled with repetitive information which are nearly impossible to group or update properly. And if you follow any more than a few dozen accounts on Twitter, you are going to miss most of their posts on a daily basis (regardless of their quality, there's just too many). Most of Twitter, in fact, is simply people talking to themselves. (And Facebook is basically useless in terms of gaining any actual knowledge.)
All news feeds - whether they are from RSS, Twitter, FB, Insta, SnapChat, WeChat, TikTok or anything else - are simply not scalable. So pick which you enjoy most, limit the number of sources to only those most important or useful to you, and get on with your life. Until AI gets to the point where it can sort through all the information out there for you - a la Apple's Knowledge Navigator - the only difference between any stream of data is superficial at best.
1. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-fireho...
2. https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-trac...
I’d probably pay large amount of money now for a news reader w/ these 4 features * Extract stories from my feed/lists on Twitter & Reddit and aggregate comments on these from people I follow * Learn from my ‘more/less like this’ on individual stories * Allow me to tag sources and create auto-tagging filters * Clean/intuitive Web UI & mobile client
You can check out the main features here: - https://aktu.io/about - and here https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-informat...
RSS only let you listen. And it only works if you already know who you want to listen to.
Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline.
But RSS is just a format for sharing data. There's no built-in client for having a conversation, for tracking conversations. You ultimately still need a point of centralisation (like HN) to talkk shit about the stuff you're reading.
All in, article is silly nonsense. Apples are way better than oranges.
How is that different from the people whom you do "follow" with RSS recommending other feeds or individual articles, or quoting these articles, with their own comments?
(Mostly agreed about the point regarding third-party pushed conversations.)
We *could( each publish feeds of what we liked, or re-feed them with annotations. And we could follow other individuals (ie friends, acquaintances) and they us, and we could control access to levels of feed with authentication. We could have feeds of our friends (and their URLs). As well as feeds of our own throwaway commentary on life. Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter (without comments) with RSS.
The "how is that different" is that we don't. There's both a technical networking obstacle as well as an interface. You and I likely know how to host this stuff but our grandmas don't. There's also nothing —there could be— to tie this together in an interface.
Twitter et al do this crap for us, for "free".
People already have!
I'm going to use the example of Wordpress, as I know for sure that it does offer RSS out-of-the-box, but there are alternatives.
If your grandma, say, has a wordpress blog, then RSS comes for free. If she knows what a hyperlink is (even if she doesn't know what it's called) then she can paste links to individual articles or blogs or news-sites. The reader can read whatever is recommended in their web browser and if it was (part of) an RSS feed, they can subscribe. In principle, you could even have an RSS feed reader that checks all links for whether they are associated with RSS feeds, to avoid the "web browser" step.
I don't think that a non-self-hosted wordpress blog is significantly more difficult to use than Twitter. There will probably be people who can use the latter, but not the former; however, I think that it'll be a tiny minority.
With Wordpress you could even have an RSS feed of comments and pingbacks, partially (but not globally) solving the third-party comments problem.
It is very far from what Twitter offers, on Twitter you can exchange with people, reply and discuss content (yeah this is not the best way to do it, but you can do it), you can alert people or organization (how many time, thanks to RSS we alerted a company about a bad practice or contacted their customer support ?)
Maybe Twitter is not the best at what it does, and maybe we need something that allow to us to exchange but RSS doesn't provide that.
PS: I'm not saying RSS is bad
I have basically stopped using it ever since they started doing that.
As much as the Twitterati May argue they need to be on Twitter to be informed, the reality is that the need Twitter fills is the need to broadcast your own views all over the world.
A blog post, which requires a lot more effort, since it’s expected to be a little more substantial, may get 0 views, while a silly comment in response to a controversial topic on Twitter could easily get a few hundred likes, which makes people feel important.
And RSS does not replace that aspect of Twitter.
Periodically, I start following more people, then the pruning cycle repeats.
I feel sometimes that I spend too much time on twitter and HN, and so I go on cycles for time spent per week there also. Really good to use a monitoring tool to let you know cumulatively how much time you spend a week on different media.
It really helps to limit it to a finite amount of content for you to consume as well as making it so you don't have the almost non-existent barrier of instantly being able to react to the news.
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...
In some ways my twitter feed is almost like RSS, and the people I follow tend to be interesting people who post interesting content or links to other content they've found.
Private Account, no followers, only selected accounts I follow to keep my feed clean of clickbait, useless discussions and the usual twitter outrage. It's a great tool, but I think I'm not using it as it's supposed to be ;) I'm just not interested in participating in useless discussions with trolls and people who try to sell me their product.
I never stopped using RSS, and trying to get syndication from Twitter would cause my head (and my Twitter feed for things I actually care about) to explode.
I'm sad that we still have to remind people of these things.
1. RSS-Bridge[0] - RSS Feeds for websites that don't give you one. Supports instagram/facebook/Google Search and many more (150+) websites. Very easy to contribute, and there are open requests for lots of providers. (I added a Amazon Price Tracker Bridge in <150 loc). Yes, I get a RSS notification when there is a price change on something I follow[1].
2. MiniFlux - Golang+Postgres based self-hosted RSS feed reader. Minimal/responsive design with keyboard shortcuts https://miniflux.app
3. 3. tt-rss - A highly configurable PHP based RSS feed reader. Supports plugins and has tons of options. UI is similar to Google Reader. https://tt-rss.org
4. Winds - A Beautiful Open Source RSS & Podcast App powered by @getstream_io. I haven't tried self-hosting it yet, but it looks really great. Also, under very active development. https://github.com/GetStream/Winds
5. FreshRSS - Lightweight PHP/SQlite self-hosted feed reader. Looks great as well. https://freshrss.org
6. Kill the Newsletter - Subscribe to a newsletter with a one-time generated email address, it generates a RSS feed for you. Your inbox stays clean. https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com
7. OPML Generator - Generates OPML Files using subscriptions on other sites. Supports GitHub stars (generates a file you can import to follow releases from all your starred repos on GitHub) https://opml.bb8.fun/ (Personal project, so count this as a shameless self plug)
8. RSS never really died, so revival is a misnomer in that sense. All major news publications still support RSS. The entire Podcast ecosytem works on RSS. You should also look at WebSub and ActivityPub (both W3C recommendations) if you're interested in this.
9. And finally a cool new idea - build a Telegram Channel to RSS Feed generator. Will open up so much hidden content to the open web.
10. Bonus: https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ Info site that you should share with your friends to help them get started with RSS.
[0]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
[1]: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/741
[3]: https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1018850458675408902
If you're using Android, check out gReader Pro. You can have it automatically download and store the full articles for later reading.
I also run my own RSS aggregator, tt-rss (this is how I replaced Google News after Google ruined it). tt-rss has a plugin that will also download and store the full articles for later reading. It provides its own RSS feed as well as a web interface.
I still miss Google Reader, I think it was a serious mistake to kill it off, and doing so largely killed RSS too.
1 page of blocked items on my NoScript 23 blocked items on my Adblock Plus
And now I can read the article..
RSS is a different network of users, so it really can't be compared to Twitter. But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to be tracked and edited separately.
Then comes the blogs out there which pretty much use Twitter as a glorified RSS feed. They just post announcements whenever they post a blog post. This is necessary because of the network effect, but I would argue that RSS is a superior technology for this use case.
In line with blog articles and TV. At least on Twitter, it's easy to block someone forever.
>The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than 280 words
That's simply not true. You can often deliver important information in 140 characters.
> But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to be tracked and edited separately.
That's not a huge problem compared to the issue of content quality and it's even less important when you accept that your previous statement is simply not true.
That's a questionable conclusion from your little project and the feedback of a (non-representative) few users. The counter-argument would be the success of Twitter and FB, where most of the "junk" comments are. Readers want to decide themselves what is junk and what isn't and 1 useful comment easily trumps 20 junk comments. Ask all the newspapers that added comments to their articles despite all the moderation problems that brought with it.
Imagine formatting your feed however you want, without distracting side content. A use case is using RSS for YouTube subscriptions instead of the horrible subscription page experience.
Many publications do not post full articles, but instead summaries or excerpts.
The HN RSS feed is simply a link to the original article and comments.
What these older services failed to capture that made Twitter and other "social" media sites so popular is the "social" aspect. The automated synchronized posting structure that RSS provides may be more efficient than user-driven Twitter. But with Twitters' intuition, popularity, and ability to communicate within that vast user space is enough to outweigh any of RSS's technological advancements. RSS always seemed like a technology for techies, Twitter brought the feed to laymen.
Twitter? any old Joe can just post some bullsh!t that marinated in their minds for -0.5 seconds and that just gets added to Twitter and potentially my timeline.
Yes, RSS is far better than Twitter for some uses. Uses that are actually of value.
Exactly this! I really miss the time of the internet before social media, when it was more about quality content then clickbait articles. I was a heavy user of Google Reader until it got shut down, but couldn't find any worthy alternative, so I used Twitter as a news feed reader from then on. It's ok, but it's hard to ignore the noise sometimes.
Internet 1.5 was pretty nice, in hindsight.
As for displaying comments along with articles, feeds can reference other feeds, and in theory nothing stops an application or website from from making use of that.
BTW: it's possible to read Twitter in RSS reader too and make it a "slow web".
The future of the blogosphere remains bright.
And I'm visiting blog post pages first to check whether they have Disqus comments (which processed separately via Disqus API) and <blog_post_URL>/feed feeds.