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Comment by LukeHoersten | Hacker News Reader

I just mean rss is not nearly what it was at it’s peak. Sites are still publishing RSS feeds to be sure though.

I'm not sure that there's any "peak" to compare it to. I mean, my whole wishlist for the RSS ecosystem is basically:

1) people stop inexplicably calling it "dead"

Being "dead" has its fringe benefits, at least, like no one proposing changes for the sake of change - it gets to be happily frozen and useful with no one trying to e.g. update it from the XML-everything mania of its time (embarassing in hindsight) to the JSON-everything mania of our time (I'm worried there won't even be a hindsight for it to be embarassing in).

Well, except when people propose to replace it with something else because it's "dead" (sorry, I have no interest in following anyone on activitypub - if I want updates from your blog, I will poll the RSS feed you have kindly provided).

2 weeks after you posted these comments, your enthusiasm for RSS got me back into it. I set up a self hosted RSS reader and I've been happily re-engaging with long form content. Getting long form content in my fediverse feed is definitely not the same (though it's nice!). Thanks for the comments!

RSS's (and Atom's) problem is not using XML, it's the woeful ly vague, and overly forgiving specification.

As someone who has written a parser library and a RSS reader program, I can tell you that it is an endless battle of users always reporting yet another feed that is "breaking your RSS reader".

When investigating why the feed does not work well, you always end up finding yet another way how a site can implement RSS/Atom badly while still following the letter of the specification.

I love the idea of RSS/Atom and the possibilities they allow, but hate the actual specs.

I don’t feel it’s fair to say that about Atom. RSS, sure; it’s a total disaster. And that’s kinda why Atom was made, and it seems to me to do a good job.

So given that, any chance you could elucidate on fault you find with Atom?

Yes, you are right, most of my grievances were against RSS - either old RDF, or RSS 2.0, or perhaps against Atom 0.3, which was not all that common before much better Atom 1.0 took over.

Still, I vaguely recall that there was at least one vagueness in the Atom 1.0 spec that I found abused in a real world feed, but can't for the life of me remember it - it's been a while.

Now if only podcast players would catch up to 2007 and support Atom.

Yes, they are not very good specs, but frozen bad (cf. Unix) has benefits.

I've never really used rss as a power user, but a long time ago subscribed to some feeds and tracked them in an rss app. I did that because it seemed like at one point I saw the rss logo everywhere and it seemed like everyone was promoting it. I didn't use the actual aggregator to look at the combined feeds, but I did have it all set up.

Now I can't remember the last time I saw a site promoting or even clearly mentioning above the fold that they publish an rss feed. I didn't know HN published one until now.

That's why I haven't argued with anyone claiming it's dead. It seems like it disappeared.

I've seen more than a few sites use the RSS logo to point to a newsletter signup. I'm not sure whether it was deception or ignorance.

JSON you say?

https://jsonfeed.org/

I wish I were a farmer.

As anecdotal as this is, take it with a grain of salt: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss

I personally use Feedly as my RSS reader and I followed my blog to see how many followers I get. Currently, I have 367 Feedly subscribers and it still continues to grow. Also, looking at my analytics, I can see people coming in from Feedly, so it shows that they are definitely active subs[0].

[0] https://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fmicha...

It's easy to convince a growing number of people of RSS's value: "If you listen to podcasts, you probably already use RSS."

Then you just expand on the options and uses to someone who's already favorable toward RSS because it was so painless to use they didn't even realize they used it to follow some of their favorite people.

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