Another article on the front page is about the Amish and carefully evaluating how tech fits into your life and values, and who it serves.
Applying that here -- RSS does serve those who want to get updates from a site, and does not serve advertisers and cookie-traffickers. RSS is peak "good old days" of the Web.
Yeah, there's some sites that have killed their RSS feeds, and feeds can be tough to find (though there's browser extensions that fix that issue), but most major news organizations, blogging platforms, etc, support RSS. And for those that don't (including Twitter, Instagram, Github, etc), RSS Bridge can often fill the gap:
https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
In short: RSS is my frontend to the web, and it's fantastic!
The whole podcasting space is going through a period of massive consolidation as podcast networks get bought up by the likes of Spotify and Apple (e.g. Gimlet). I won't be in the least bit surprised if those existing acquisitions are eventually forced to shut down their RSS feeds and go exclusive, and for new acquisitions to start out that way, as Netflix has proven content is the way to drive more subscribers to their platforms.
Meanwhile, Spotify and Apple have a huge advantage over RSS-based podcasts: data. The simple fact is, thanks to their walled garden, app-centric platforms, they can collect more behavioural data and target advertising more effectively, which means they draw advertisers away and make it a lot harder for everyone else to compete.
Do these headwinds stop the small players from continuing to publish via RSS? No, not at all. But if the bulk of the money and audience shifts to those walled gardens due to their owning the biggest names in the business while enabling the kind of surveillance capitalism that's so in demand, eventually the ecosystem built up around RSS is in danger of drying up.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
For Chrome I can't vouch for anything recently but I came across this a while back:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-rss-feed-url/k...
It sits in the sidebar and automatically updates so you can immediately see when a feed updates, then the feed renders in the main panel. This is very useful for news, status pages, and things like live YouTube events.
Is it a problem in practice (cannot be solved by removing images or similar)? Could it be improved through smarter polling or some "last updated since" header? Or by using an "active" RPC-like protocol where the reader specifically queries for "list of all articles since this timestamp" and can fetch them together or individually, with or without images?
For my extremely minimal site, the RSS feed is still smaller than normal pageloads because it only has graphics by reference. RSS readers scrape surprisingly often, but the file is small and highly cacheable, and most of them do a HEAD request only initially and never ask for the file if it hasn't changed. Despite accounting for a large percentage of requests, RSS clients account for only a small portion of traffic. The cool thing is that a lot of these RSS readers are shared (commercial feed readers, ttrss instances, etc) and so they are caching the feed on their end and actually saving me bandwidth vs an equivalent number of users accessing the site directly - a lot of these put the subscriber account in their UA string so I can see that e.g. Feedly is making regular requests during the day but has 30-some users behind those requests. It's a better deal from a cost-perspective than those 30-some people checking each day.
So a) no, it doesn't contain images, just URLs to images where necessary; an RSS or ATOM feed is just a text XML document adhering to a certain schema, and b) the feed file is only as big as the site decides it needs to be.
For example, a typical blog or news organization could generate a feed containing the last 24 hours worth of new content. Feed readers will poll that and pull in new content while ignoring existing content.
In short: this should be a non-issue unless you're turning out massive amounts of new material on a regular basis, in which case you're probably a major news organization and can afford it.
> As a result, some blogs (like christine.website) stopped serving article contents in the RSS feeds.
This isn't because of bandwidth concerns. This is because they can't advertise in an RSS feed so they want to drive eyeballs to the site.
Personally, I run ttrss and use a plugin that scrapes the content from the source site and embeds it right in my feed. As a result I only have to leave my feed reader if I really want to for some reason (e.g. to read comments on the originating site... like, say, HN!)
[0]: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/270f2011f8ec7265...
[1]: https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/blob/e2044472c202a8368774...
The real reason why sites started switching to partial content is advertising. This is why personal or corporate blogs usually provide full content and some sites like ArsTechnica.com offer it to paid subscribers.
What is that dark pattern called again that Microsoft is so famous for? … join and effort, co-opt/compromise it, and then take it over and make it their own; leaving the original effort totally eviscerated?
Edit: apparently someone else (sthnblllII) smells exactly the same trap but knew the term/phrase; "embrace extend extinguish".
This renders any move the Chrome developers make available and usable to something approaching an actual critical mass of usage, even if it is a less open standard.
And I say this as a Firefox user and someone who wants open standards to win out over whatever corporate lock-in Google decide to roll out.