What we lost – a paean, perhaps, to RSS

There's actually quite a few powerful services to do this. I made a service called http://feedsub.com to do this a couple years ago. I'd also recommend http://mailbrew.com which has a nice digest format.

I think there's a lot of value in RSS as an underlying data layer for the web, and I think it's criminally underused on the consumption side nowadays.

For example, I'd very much like to see blogrings make a comeback, and there's probably room for a website community driven entirely by mailing lists and one of these RSS-to-email tools.

Feedbin does this, FWIW. You mentioned you had used Feedbin before, maybe they introduced the feature after you left? It's super useful, and justifies the cost of the subscription all by itself for me. All my newsletter subscriptions go into my Feedbin feed, and my email inbox stays nice and clean (and my real email address stays nice and private).

I've personally just been using Feedly's free tier, and it works fine. Every now and then they find a new way to say "hey, what if you paid for Feedly," but it hasn't bothered me too much.

They don't advertise it, but it's there - I presume because whatever CMS they use supports it (WordPress, etc).

It's not popular, and I do worry that what you state will come to pass, but I remain thankful that nearly a decade later, it hasn't yet.

Looks like TFA’s tool was a way to surface these.

Which is to say: It is a problem to be solved with communication and coordination tools kinda like this (but much lower urgency)

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-tea...

Personally I don't even parse the <content>, I just have headlines sorted by <pubDate> that open the pages in the browser.

It will surprise you how often people just do it. Its a fun thing to implement, 5-20 min and you have results that require little to no further attention, upgrades or maintenance.

>Despite this, I disagree with the assessment that it is a major bottleneck for the RSS ecosystem. I have never used Google Reader, so I don’t have any kind of before and after perspective, but in my humble opinion RSS is a standard that is in quite a good condition overall. Despite social medias’ walled garden approach and greater focus on instant messaging than blogging, I rarely stumble upon a website with content of episodic nature without any kind of RSS feed. The only significant exceptions are YouTube and Twitter.

As I have mentioned in several other comments, there is nothing wrong with RSS2.0 the protocol (at least nothing that wasn't also wrong with it in 2003).

Without being funny about it, perspective is important.

In 2003/4 publishing via RSS was a nascent thing. Blogs did it, but blogging was still in it's infancy. Some corporations were starting to do it, and were being encouraged to share value through RSS feeds.

There were aggregators (we built one, but there were several) that were starting to show what you could do by bringing these disparate content streams together. We were also having a little susccess in persuading companies to encourage their employees at all levels to blog and to create internal aggregators.

But, over time, applications like Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord have taken the momentum. Facebook, to pick one example, has at present 2.85 billion active users, many of them posting content which is not available outside Facebook. Twitter had RSS feeds but discontinued them. (Additionally, many blogs which do provide RSS feeds only provide excerpts of the content intended to draw you to their website & adverts).

You can't aggregate this content. These systems are also closed over creating, you use the tools they provide or you don't play. Want to do an experiment with how you create Facebook content? You can't. Facebook/Twitter reserve that to themselves.

If you try and start a project now you will struggle with the fact that a huge % of your potential userbase are already in Facebook, Twitter, etc… and captured there.

So while RSS still works and, yes, my blog still has an RSS feed, and you can read it in your RSS reader of choice, this is not the same situation as it was back then. And the futures that seemed possible from there do not seem possible from here.

I don't know, perhaps it's only with the perspective of being there that this feels this way.

I have never seen someone under about 20 using RSS (and probably 90% of that age group has never heard of it). They all live in chat apps and algorithmic feeds :(

I couldn't imagine my RSS reader displaying stories that it thinks I'd like (and not all, in chronological order). There's a reason I curate my feeds—I want to see the content in each of them!

I wish more people would join us outside the walled gardens, but I also don't think these tools will die so long as there's people like us that are passionate about staying outside the walled gardens.

With so many new websites being created and so many old ones deleted a static file is not a good solution. If we assume you manage to share your OPML with just the right audience it is almost impossible for a new blog to find its way into this promotional formula. You might find it eventually but it wont show up in the OPML for everyone you've shared it with.

My personal client can do OPML but also loads flat feed lists from an url then keeps additional flat lists of feeds that seem broken or gone, lists of feeds that I assume are gone and lists of feeds I'm no longer interested in. Removing the dead feeds and adding new ones still [shamefully] involves periodic manual labor.

Its great that one can manually categorize feeds in OPML and that one can provide categories, tags and even a rating service in the feed it self but if the data is never shared anyplace else their is [almost] no point in doing so. As a result most feeds have none.

We have: Tags, categories, your own rating system, a shared or public rating service, OPML meta data and the one I forgot: The person (or entity) sharing the feed(s) with you is also meta data.

I have no idea how we can wrap all of those into one discovery medium but the idea sounds awesome to me.

Thanks friend.