“We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”
twitter.com
twitter.com
RSS is the only way I know, without having to scrap things by hand, to get an aggregate of "news/articles" from the sites and blogs I follow, and I consider to be of good quality.
I prefer to filter my information like this, instead of having to rely on some algorithm, or endlessly scrolling in a "social medial wall" full or clickbait articles, immortal/vintage memes or exuberant rants.
If RSS dies, what is the alternative then? I understand that technically speaking it's not a good solution, but let's have something else before killing this.
PS: I've clicked on this link from a RSS reader (just a simple browser extension... that keeps me posted every morning).
I haven't signed up for any so I'm not sure, but don't some places have "newsletters"? I kind of assumed they served the same function but with email. Of course, if it does serve the same function, the bad part about it in comparison to RSS would be that you have to give them an email address.
Instead of focusing on a technology, let's focus on a problem. This is where users and potential users of RSS have a communication problem with publishers of content.
It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds. So, you could have metrics on that. But, the tech giants shifted from RSS streams (which empower end users) to high control system that operate differently (social media news feeds that empower corps). This lead to a drop is RSS subscriptions.
So, why today is it useful to a publisher to have RSS on their site? This is a question that needs addressing and marketing so that people know why. The business case for them is lacking.
I want RSS. I also realize the usefulness and communication around that needs improvement.
This would be good, but it seems most people are too focused on RSS and not much on the actual usage. The point of RSS is to receive changes in a structured way. RSS is just a tool for this. But there are also other ways and other tools for this.
> It used to be that the masses consumed RSS feeds.
No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.
We don't need to communicate better to the publisher to force our will onto them. Instead, we should find ways to ease their work and help them satisfy our demands. For example, there was a movement for embedding semantic and structural data right into a document. Something came out of this, but maybe we should light up that flame again and move it more into a direction where it could be used for our feedreaders. Or just adapt the feedreader to better support the already existing structures?
This could easily sold with support for accessibility, and everyone would win here. Thinking about, how is the state of accessibility-technologies today? Could it be used for easy and reliable parsing?
> No, this was never the case. Newsfeeds were always a minority-feature. The mass of user used to be bigger, but not to the level where it could be called a mass medium.
True, but that minority included a very influential segment (journalists, podcasters, and bloggers).
The turning point of when the blogosphere lost out to the centralized walled gardens of social media was probably around 2009 (though it wasn't obvious at the time); that was the year of the FriendFeed (an aggregator of your social accounts across multiple sites into one profile/timeline) acquisition by Facebook and of Farmville's explosive growth. After that point, Facebook and Twitter started being treated as infrastructure by startups and media organizations, a trend that accelerated during the 'Arab Spring' of the 2010s.
Uh, really? When I was younger I came across RSS a few times but could never figure what it was or how it worked. When I clicked RSS links, big walls of XML appeared. And when I looked for what it was, all I could find was something along the lines of « it’s to syndicate content ». Or in French: « c’est de la syndication de contenus ». I don’t know if the term « syndication » is widely used in English but in French it didn’t (and still doesn’t) mean anything to me. Also in French the term happens to be close to our word for worker unions (syndicats) so it confused me even more. All this to say RSS didn’t make sense to me and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one. Still today almost no one I know uses or used RSS one day.
I like RSS now that I understand what it is and that I have a proper reader but it’s still been perverted with ads, feeds without any content, etc.
Putting a (small) tinfoil hat on, Google intentionally chose to botch the handling of rss links in Chrome because they couldn't collect ad revenue through text-only RSS feeds.
thats why its dead.
Well, that's the whole point - RSS lets you circumvent all (or most of) the mechanisms that Facebook, Google, Medium etc. etc. have implemented to monetize content. So they are directly interested in killing it off sooner rather than later. And if the big players don't support it, the people/organizations/whatever who still maintain their own blog/news site are also more likely to see it as obsolete (or have web devs who tend to follow the "new shiny" and will advise them that RSS is obsolete).
For some sites there's also a sitemap for news that includes extra fields, like title, tags and description
imply.io/blog
anyscale.com/blog
blog.twitter.com
I still think RSS reader should be a feature on browser. All the modern browser now have sync as well so porting your news feeds isn't even the problem anymore.
- every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links
- there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.
- if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page
- lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
- XML
Despite this, I still love RSS. It's what we've got and we should continue to make the most of it. But it also sucks, and it's not any surprise that mostly only technical people use it. I think feeds are pretty much doomed to keep breaking and disappearing. Many of the replacements or pseudo-replacements that people come up with seem fine, but the problem - as always - is getting people to actually use it, which mostly never happens.
> - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article.
> - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page
This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think any alternatives would make sense.
> - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.
Agree that this sucks.
> - XML
Really?
"Should" indeed. But a standard that isn't followed isn't exactly helpful to me.
> This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think any alternatives would make sense.
Yeah, I agree that an alternative doesn't make sense for RSS in particular, but it's not hard to imagine an only-slightly-more-featureful syndication system where individual feed items are directly addressable.
It's just a shame that I've got this really nice, personalized feed reading interface, and I get pulled out of it every time I follow a link.
> These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article.
Footnote relative links are quite common in blog posts, and my RSS reader punts me out to a browser to view them. Given that most blogs I follow provide full-text feeds, it's a bit disappointing I can't easily navigate that last (textual) portion of content.
I have a restrictive whitelist configuration for uMatrix and in most cases I don't bother to whitelist images when I read articles. I've found that the vast majority of the time, the images are stock images that only tangentially relate to the subject of the text and add no real value. I guess they're included because editors feel images are essential even if they're unrelated.
I don't want everything every day. I want to read the X most important articles that day, with X being different each day depending upon how much time I have.
RSS cannot really provide that prioritization.
Yeah! I'm with you. Although I don't use it, I really like some of the features of https://fraidyc.at/. For the majority of feeds I follow, I don't need to keep track of unread status, and high-frequency feeds would be much more bearable if they were grouped together to avoid taking over an aggregated listing. I feel like a lot of client defaults tend to hew too closely to email clients or something.
Exists: mynews.com/rss ; mynews.com/world/rss ; mynews.com/economy/financial_commentaries/rss ...
> I'm more interested in what other readers (of my type) have found
Could be done: mynews.com/rss?u=q1w2 (upon cookie authentication)
But does a service properly clusterizing users exist? I do not know any... (I know about extremely badly implemented, clumsy attempts to automatically corner registered users into some sketchy profile.)
Atom has this:
<link rel="next" href="http://example.org/index.atom?page=2"/>
In fact, for a standard, I like XML despite its verbosity because it supports schemas, essentially a machine readable specification. Also, the entire web runs on HTML, which is poorly defined XML, so why not?
It was probably a mistake to resurrect this flame war about serialization formats. XML works, it's just a bummer.
The thing that requires the most bookkeeping is also the thing that nobody uses and not a lot of people even know about: a full textual macro system by the name of <!ENTITY ...> (the “internal DTD subset”), which a conformant XML processor is required to implement. (Not coincidentally, this is the part that the XML profile mandated by XMPP excludes.) There was a proposal to define something that excludes this part by the name of MicroXML[3], but it threw out compatibility by also excluding namespaces, and it doesn’t seem it actually went anywhere.
I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader?
> there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.
Agreed that this would be nice to have, but for its primary purpose - to syndicate new content - this does not matter in practice. Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at. It should of course be possible to host support retrieval of past posts with a static-hosting-compatible protocol, in theory at least.
> if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page
If that page has a linked RSS feed and a permalink mathing the URL or embedded in the page metadata then in theory your reader could show you the corresponding RSS post. I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense.
> lots of posts include iframes
Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads.
> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency. Most articles don't need JS. For those that do RSS can still link to a webpage just like podcasts don't embed the audio in the RSS feed. There is also nothing stopping an RSS reader from showing link-only posts as an embedded web view - personally I prefer a link that opens in a new browser tab though.
> XML
Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON?
I mean, it's hard to say whether it's a bug in my reader, given that the RSS spec makes no mention of how relative links should work. I've variously used Newsbeuter, Newsboat, Newsblur, and The Old Reader and have never not had this problem.
(Edit: an example from this morning: Newsblur didn't know what to do with the footnote links in Dan Luu's blog [https://danluu.com/atom.xml]. Aside: Newsblur seems to be responding with 500s for about every other request today. sigh isn't technology wonderful?)
> Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at.
Pagination would work fine with static hosting. And "updates-since" requests wouldn't preclude static hosts from ignoring them and working exactly how they work now.
I agree with you about federated web protocols though - I'm pretty bummed ActivityPub requires an inbox, otherwise I think it would pretty much work with static hosting.
> I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense.
You're right, it doesn't really make sense. I think the crux of my frustration there is that we've got a syndication system that's bolted on top of the web, rather than properly integrated. It's probably the best that can be done though, without an entire separate hypertext system.
> Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads.
Youtube and Vimeo embeds are mostly where I see them.
>> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled
> Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency.
I'm not complaining that feed items can't execute Javascript; I'm annoyed that sometimes the (textual) content of the post refers directly to other content that's only there after JS adds it. (I'm not blaming authors, this is just a problem of the content being written for a webpage and then being included in a different context. Again, an issue of the syndication system having been bolted onto the web.)
> Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON?
No, I don't particularly love JSON either. XML does indeed work okay, but I pretty regularly (a couple times a year, maybe?) see broken feeds because of mis-escaped content. I think one of the feed generators of someone I follow produces bad CDATA tags too. Pretty hard to mess up JSON escaping (as much as HTML-in-JSON makes me shudder).
Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.
I bet that most podcast listeners don't know what RSS is or how it impacts their ability to listen to podcasts.
Podcasts also present a different problem from most news. People want to listen to a podcast and know about episodes. A platform can't easily come in and alter the flow of episodes coming without consumers noticing and being annoyed. This works for RSS.
With other news the aggregating platforms want to manipulate the flow of information for their benefit. If I look at my home in Twitter I might see posts from hours or days ago at the top. It's about engagement and they manipulate the order and display of posts to aide that. Their business model doesn't fit well with RSS as a backing technology.
Note, I can't stand the manipulation of my news feed. I just understand the business and other factors behind it.
Every major service integration (Spotify, iTunes, google Podcast, pocketcasts)
subscribes to an RSS feed. That's how it knows when a new episode is uploaded. Those MP3 assets are not hosted on Spotify, iTunes, etc, I host them on my own s3 bucket distributed with mp3 links in the RSS. I'm sure if your a really big podcaster like Joe Rogan things may be different, but everyone else uses RSS feeds
"Integrated centralized platforms" like anchor.fm etc just publishes an RSS feed to those same services and hosts the mp3s for you on an S3 bucket
Moving away from RSS doesn't solve anything
Off topic, but it's insane how Spotify insists on advertising podcasts to paying users. Worse, they advertise podcasts of American right wing extremists, and call it "Something you might like" or similar offensive wording. I'm not even American, and I'm subjected to unwanted foreign political content on my music player's home page.
I contacted their support about this, and apparently they are getting paid to advertise these podcasts to their already paying users.
https://carcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Sloane-DellOrto...
But so like, if you want to lobby a local government to add some feature to their website, they aren't even effectively going to be able to do it; but if you can convince a company like Streamline to add it to their offering, then you'd suddenly experience like half the local governments in California all getting that feature at once.
At this point the right answer (IMHO) is to create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new brand. Market the hell out of it and subsidize the hell out of it.
Trying to prevent the existing brand from dying is a fools errand.
All things you are trying to get others to use have a brand, whether implicit or not. Heck, it's usually even valued separately from the technology (good will, etc).
RSS, the spec may be fine. I've implemented RSS readers, heck, i use newsblur every day still.
RSS, the brand, is a goner.
The OP (and twitter post) is complaining that others consider the brand dead, and are arguing that the use case it covers are unmet by other things, and that the spec is still good stuff. Those are all very orthogonal things.
It's great that the spec is still the right thing! But the brand is dead, so you won't get anywhere without fixing that.
If enough people think that RSS sucks, is too old, died with GReader, has no user-base, or whatever other story, why would they invest their time and effort in supporting it? If the problem isn't technical, then it might need some kind of marketing solution to get over the historical baggage in the zeitgeist.
This whole notion of RSS' "brand" being the problem just reeks of a used car salesman trying to convince me that spare tires are for chumps.
Things with a reputation of being dead gains lower interest and support.
Usefulness isn't a high enough bar. When choosing a technology, I might also want an active community, for support, for ecosystem tooling and integration, and more.
The world is littered with highly useful technologies that nobody adopts, or eventually die to less useful, arguably objectively worse technologies. Adoption and software life cycles are not a techo-meritocracy.
In short - you are completely and totally ignoring the social aspects of software adoption and use. But they are, in fact, often the most important part. I don't actually particularly like this any more than any other software engineer - it often feels wrong. That does not (and will not) make it any less of a reality.
(as an aside, yes, in fact, as joist hangers and ties and such became more and more required due to code or construction method, structural screws became all the rage - nailing joist hangers/etc with regular framing nail guns was hard and dangerous, but structural screws just require an impact driver or a screw gun to do safely. Now they actually have specialized metal connector nailers, so structural screws are getting ignored again outside of decks)
Use the blockchain and make it a part of web3
Just publicly dropping the "old" XML-based version and introducing the "new" JSON-based version would probably bring a brand new flair and growing adoption to feeds. (Nevermind json feeds existed for years)
Now we just need someone to pull it off...
RSS was great. I mean, it is great, but it used to be too. It didn't die in the public eye by accident. It was killed by the big boys who realized they can't make money off of you if they can't decide what content you see in front of you, you don't run their software on your device, and/or you don't have to sign up for an account to get the content.
Try to pitch a new syndication spec to anyone that controls a large portion of the information availability online, they're not stupid, they'll shoot you down because "we tried that already, it wasn't profitable enough."
The era of standardized protocols, freedom of information, ease of communication, interoperability, tools that empower the user, that era is dead. And it was too short lived. The internet we have today looks like something designed by Dr Strangelove. If you want to have sensible tools that work for you you're going to be swimming in a very shallow information environment with almost exclusively other zealous enthusiasts of whatever tool you think is better.
I run an RSS-centered service and approximately 0 of my non-tech friends know what RSS is. They get their news from the YouTube, Facebook, Instagram... homepages where the algorithm picks some stuff that they want you to see. When I explain that it is easy to curate what you follow with no ads, no raking and no "algorithm" they are generally on board and are happy to subscribe to some comics, YouTube channels and maybe a web comic or two. But the awareness is basically zero.
I think the following things would help get RSS into the spotlight:
1. Highlight that Google News uses RSS. https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9545...
2. We need to get "Subscribe" buttons back into browsers. Right now you need an extension to detect sites that have feeds. Not only is that a huge step for most users but the most popular mobile browsers don't support extensions. (And even Firefox for Android only supports a whitelist on stable right now) IIRC Chrome on Android is experimenting with a very polished-over version, so it will be interesting if this gains traction and helps convince sites to maintain their feeds.
3. We need awareness. A lot of people are being made aware of the downsides of big services recommending them content, but very few are aware of the alternatives. Just helping out a few friends who are interesting in taking more control over their news can be a good start. And remember that it isn't all-or-nothing. I subscribe to a lot of feeds but still browse Hacker News and Reddit. I don't think I need to completely remove the algorithm, but I like to get most of my news "reliably" then when I run out I go into "discovery mode".
That being said it is a huge uphill battle and right now it looks like things are going the other way. I'm not hugely active in this "fight" but it is good to support when you can.
So on mobile half the time I paste the URL into my feed reader to see that RSS isn't supported.
Don't expect people to keep coming back to your website/blog just to check if there is new content/news. If it doesn't provide a feed (Atom or RSS), the most probable scenario is that I will not remember to comeback any time soon.
That's why RSS is dying. It doesn't facilitate in-depth surveillance or algorithmic timelines designed to be addictive... err I mean "maximize engagement." RSS is a user-friendly technology not an advertiser-friendly or surveillance-friendly technology and surveillance driven advertising is the business model of the Internet.
It's a little ironic to me, then, that this concern is being posted on Twitter of all places.
I agree with the concern, I think RSS (or something closely related, like a decentralized version) should be maintained as a communication method, but I think there's a usability issue that's driving it.
For example, all of Feedly's subscribers will only count for one pull.
Not enough split, not really hair ;) The rewinder became obsolete, replaced by random access. Your need to seek remained. Your need to watch videos remained, relevant technologies got replaced etc. One's need for "informational pull" remains - there is no dead end.
It clearly doesn't - since so few people are using RSS.
I get that people think it's a great idea, but in practice it seems not to be.
I'm not convinced suppliers genuinely attempted to provide useful RSS feeds. Even during the hay day of RSS, many feeds were simply stubs meant to get me to their website—even for websites to which I was already paying for the content.
Regardless, demand for a particular solution is much different than demand to meet a particular need. To suggest RSS is 'obsolete' suggests its been obviated by a technology which meets the same need. I don't see that as being the case. It is far more likely to me that RSS doesn't meet the needs of the supply side.
Solutions can also be dropped for lack of profitability or other supply side concerns even where demand for that particular solution is high.
You can see this in action today. Ask yourself why Spotify doesn't support RSS for its podcasts despite it being extremely popular for fetching podcasts.
If you're reading or watching video, you're either using RSS, or using Facebook or using twitter or tiktok or YouTube or whatever. If your screen time is already dedicated to doomscrolling your Facebook feed, it's not that there was a limited market for RSS, its that there's a limited market for content in general, and people moved to where the dopamine pathways get stimulated the most.
Product optimality and market offer, "efficient" and "available", "need" and "want", do not overlap. People do not "need" palm assistants that work as mirrors (glossy displays): they buy them. One can eat mud for ignorance or for lack of alternatives.
Average Joe, Median Jack, Typical Maude and Random Randall are frequently laymen (layconsumers).
When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article.
Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a good tool for that...
I am a paid pro subscriber on Inoreader, and use it 2-3 hours a day for my work. I should mention that it provides a very limited number of certain types of feed (custom-created RSS, Twitter feeds, etc.), and you'll run out of them almost immediately if you want to follow a lot of places.
That said, Inoreader lets you plug as many RSS feeds as you like in, far as I can tell, and I've really loaded it up.
But do watch out for the limits, because the next grade up from 'Pro' is 'Call sales'. It's not very granular.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unread-an-rss-reader/id1363637...
Sure, it is always possible for a human to copy and paste my articles' text to their CMS, or for someone to write a simple scraper to extract the desired content. But both of those solutions introduce various hassles, and they require a human to fully accept that they are stealing content, which much fewer people are willing to do.
Edit: I hope this didn't come off as flippant; it is refreshing to receive encouraging words without the all-too-common "but I don't like how you do such-and-such".
I hold no grudge against news sites or anyone who chooses to publish teasers either. And be it only because they need statistics on which articles are more or less popular. Or ad revenue...
Unfortunately the negative effect for my end remains. Sometimes there is no ideal solution for everyone, I guess.
I hand-edit my feed, so the brief summary is easiest for me to keep up to implement. I've also always felt that it was a bit wacky to send, like, everything I've ever written as one huge XML document just so people could check for updates...
On the flip side, I have no problem with any automated service that downloads the full article for real human readers/subscribers. I have no advertising or tracking, so arguably they're saving me bandwidth. :-)
For now I use Wachete to achieve this.
It’s time to move towns ;)
The most glaring exception I can think of is not making it easy to file tax returns, for the benefit of companies like Intuit.
Moreover, I enjoyed writing an XSL stylesheet for my Atom feed. It has amazing results, and I wonder why people don't do that.
Retiring RSS was a scheme, just like removing headphone jacks on modern cell phones, which was really a ply to make new insecure bluetooth and wireless headphone sales more money.
I get weary of how many unreasonable and dreadful turns tech makes to re-invent wheels that are already installed and working fine.
RSS was also a great way of sharing content from sources without copying and pasting. It's a real tragedy it's barely used/accessible any more... And it's just a personal opinion, but OAuth is also mostly a engineered and tedious end product of retiring RSS that really was only introduced so that platforms can put an incremental price tag on data access.
Not only that, a headphone jack does not support DRM and therefore is a loophole in a closed system fully controlled by manufacturer.
~15 years ago I had solved this problem on an unrelated website by having the feed be the source of the content and have the feed transformed into (X)HTML by the browser automatically using XSLT. But I don't think that's in favor these days, especially since not all browsers support it.
What do other people with static-site blogs do?
I was (am?) paying for Feedly and then I used a separate app on my phone to consume it (Hated the Feedly UI and I wanted the app I have been using since google reader).
But I costantly found myself with a huge number of unread feeds. They became unmanageable. I would look at headlines and only click a small subset of what I was seeing (likely under 1%).
I think I ended up replacing it with Reddit, Hacker News, and Apple News. Plus the few sites I actually cared about I just regularly checked on my computer.
That being said, I did just open it and scroll a little bit and saw some stuff that I actually would have liked to see. So maybe I should get back into it.
It is sad to see the tech basically disappearing, but almost no one outside of tech knows it exists. I can't remember the last time I actually saw an RSS feed button and I used to have to go digging for it.
I may just need to curate my list of feeds more, or categorize them. I don't know, but I wish Had a better solution to all of the unread stuff.
A few things happened: I no longer have the time to spend each day watching an hour or so of video content (most of my subscriptions are video), most of my subscriptions are usually uninteresting with the odd gold nugget buried in, I no longer care one iota about current events (if it's important I'll hear it from someone IRL) and my feed reader (Feeder if anyone's interested) updated to a new version, removed old releases from it's github and f-droid repo, a new release which breaks tons of features I was using and doesn't improve on anything whatsoever and just looks like a needless UI redesign.
That said, I love RSS and Atom. So much that I absolutely refuse to subscribe to anything any other way (well, I use ActivityPub for some social whatever). I'm beginning to realize though, I do not need a constant flow of information or content. I don't really think most of us do if we are being honest with ourselves.
Edit: In fact they did, the OP commented below:
>Hi all, OP here, happily surprised to see this on the front page. Apologies for posting it as a tweet. Text below.*
>I've asked the NGO to reconsider their decision, but this isn't about them. It's about a systematic decline in the usage of RSS such that even major human rights organisation don't see it worth the relatively trivial effort to maintain a feed.
>I honestly think we need a concerted campaign to advocate for RSS. To educate people about its benefits and how to use it. To lobby platforms and websites to adopt RSS and champion notable one's who do. RSS is the back-to-the-future technology we need to keep up with the world in a private, decentralised and sanity-respecting way. If anyone agrees, get in touch and let's do something?
Honestly, i largely agree with the claim that RSS is dying.
For example, on Windows i wanted to find a decent RSS reader to use, since recently coming to like the technology myself for consumption of news (since all of the sudden everything can just be boring text, as opposed to annoying and attention catching images, styling etc., allowing em to focus on the content), which turned out to be hard.
In my search, i found the following readers:
- Feedly (https://feedly.com/) not really an option for me, since i want downloadable software, which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web mail clients
- Newsblur (https://www.newsblur.com/) same as above
- Inoreader (https://www.inoreader.com/) same as above
- Feeder (https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/feeder-rss-feed-reader/jlkhefogiiibhgblliimeleiiiijbkjj) not an option, Windows Store app, i avoid that
- Omea Reader (https://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/) by JetBrains, but requirements list Windows XP, so not updated in a long time
- RSSOwl (http://www.rssowl.org/) based on Eclipse and fails to launch with new JDK versions
- QuiteRSS (https://quiterss.org/en/screenshots) the layout absolutely breaks because image dimensions are not constrained, no one wants the header of the news story to fill up the entire screen
- RSSGuard (https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard) in the end i stuck with this, because just got tired because of so many bad options out there
How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software for it out there? Give me something like LibreOffice that you just download, install and it works in surprisingly sane ways most of the time.
> How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software for it out there?
There is good software for it out there. Most people don't want to use/run/download/install local software, they'd prefer an API client on their device and a service that does the heavy lifting for them.
I don't like that model either, but most people do, and they've chosen it, for better or worse. I don't think that the claim that there's no good software out there is a valid one - it's just software that you personally have disqualified. SaaS is still software, and much of it is very high quality. You just don't get to run or modify it.
I'm perfectly fine with most of the industry moving along to other forms of content consumption, i'll simply stick to what works for me, or choose not to consume the content if that's not possible and there's no real need for me to do so.
Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird [1] support RSS feeds.
In the mail folders pane, there is a folder named "RSS Subscriptions". Right-clicking on the folder shows "Add a New RSS Feed" option that lets you paste in an RSS URL.
After you have subscribed to an RSS feed, each feed shows as a folder under "RSS Subscriptions". Clicking on the feed folder shows the feed's content.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...
The trick was to go to File > New > Feed Account, as described in the linked page. Seems like the discoverability of the feature could be slightly improved, such as Thunderbird creating one such account by default.
That said, the reader functionality itself seems excellent! It displays the items like it would any other e-mail which is nice from a consistency standpoint, but also not only resizes the images to a reasonable size, but also displays them at the bottom of the actual text!
That alone puts it at the top of my short RSS reader list.
Edit: It seems that it's a bit buggy. I just added a feed account and added a feed to it, retrieved the items and browsed some of them. Then i removed the feed account, which i later re-added, the feed still being there. Not only was that a bit odd, but attempting to open this feed hanged the entire program. Oh well, these things happen. The feed could not be removed while the program was running, but disappeared after the next restart, as expected.
Seems like the format support is also decent, both RSS and Atom feeds work, but not the less common JSON feed format. Also, there are some problems with ordering feeds, since Thunderbird won't let me drag and drop feeds to re-order them for a particular account. The only way seems to be to use sub-folders which isn't necessarily what you might always want. But hey, it works otherwise.
Thunderbird is a great feed reader! I doubt I would be using RSS/Atom feeds at all if had to check a separate client application. Having them show up when I check my email makes it incredibly easy to see if an author I follow has posted anything.
Now, in my eyes, having separate applications for separate types of information consumption (e.g. reading news vs communicating with others) isn't a bad thing, quite on the contrary, but that depends on each person.
The best technology are silent and boring.
Go over your feed? useless!
go over my subscribed feed till i get back to last video i saw? way too much work and that feed was known to fail (just like clicking the bell)
the only working solution is RSS feed for every channel i want to follow and automation to add those to my different playlists
While there are RSS-compatible solutions for that (like AdSense in-feed ads), it is obvious that there is not enough financial incentive for content creators and platforms to continue supporting RSS. From consumer perspective, I’m writing this from Safari on iPad, and there is no way to see that RSS is present on the page, neither there is a way to subscribe to RSS without special plugins. Which tells me demand on consumer side also does not justify keeping these features up.
The only reason RSS is alive today is because it’s dirt cheap to implement, and is supported out-of-the-box by most web development frameworks.
The problem isn't ads though, the problem is targeted advertising. there's absolutely nothing about RSS which prevents a person from sponsoring products, shilling merch, or any other form of advertising in line in their article or in the description of their video or even in their video or podcast.
Thinking these features disappear from client applications because of user demand is very naive. These client applications are usually designed by the same companies that want you to see ads because they sell ads to the sites you visit. RSS dying was no accident.
> The only reason RSS is alive today is because it’s dirt cheap to implement, and is supported out-of-the-box by most web development frameworks.
And thank god for that. Isn't that how it should be? User empowering tools should be frictionlessly available and ubiquitous. If they're used because they're always there, I can't come up with a more frictionless UX than that.
This whole model is mostly frictionless for everyone except end users, who get abused by targeted ads.
(one can argue that even for end users this model provides value: an ability to browse all this content without paying to anyone; if we do not consider attention a form of currency, that is)
Maybe in the future we will shift from this ad-driven model, and that would resurrect RSS, semantic web and other good things which are now mostly gone due to advertisement-driven web. One can only hope.
I certainly hope that most RSS users are shying away from such a terrible platform.
When you want to make a pitch to somebody that RSS is valuable, you don't have direct statistics on its global use. You can pull access logs for your own servers, but if you're trying to justify to a boss the investment of setting up an RSS service where you don't have one already, you're going to have to use someone's proxy numbers on how popular it is.
Meanwhile, Twitter's access logs are a direct signal on the popularity of Twitter. Their story for telling potential investors how many users they have is very short.
My point was rather that twitter is a place where brands listen and also a place where a lot of web devs talk. If RSS is to continue being seen as relevant twitter would be a good place to advocate for it.
But they said "proprietary platforms like Twitter", not Twitter, so they would not be wrong in making that statement. Except, in an unexpected twist, RSS was actually initially developed to be used on Netscape's proprietary portal. It was not until a bit later that the open standards, anti-monopoly group won out.
Put positively: RSS anticipated Twitter and preemptively routed around it.
Edit: I meant WebSub above. ActivityHub is cool too but not quite in the same space.
The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being always online to receive updates which means that you need to use a service or run your own. It isn't as nice as RSS which can fall back to very occasional polling from my own devices. RSS is also way simpler with a polling rather than subscribing and push.
In my opinion the best option for public publishing is Atom (RSS 2 is also ok) with WebSub support. This provides a really solid set of features.
The only reason I would really recommend ActivityPub is if you need private posts. Otherwise RSS/Atom will be the simpler solution.
ActivityPub is the "push" counterpart to the more foundational ActivityStreams, which works no different than RSS.
It's more fragile than using supported RSS feeds, but it gets the job done.
https://newscatcherapi.com/blog/google-news-rss-search-param...
You can replace the original RSS with the "mirror" from Google News
I think in the future RSS will be a community driven effort, not something that the website themselves care to implement.
[1] - https://politepol.com/en/ [2] - https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub [3] - https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
I think the big problem with RSS is that non-technical users didn’t use it. I see this as a marketing failure - browser support was never great and it was too hidden / non-obvious as a feature.
Honestly, I would not be surprised if some "I want everything to be modern" web dev convinced the powers that be that it was obsolete because he couldn't be bothered with it.
* Shameless plug *: our super-easy feed builder at New Sloth (formerly Feedity) - https://newsloth.com, helps create custom feeds for any public webpage. Our API can auto-magically detect relevant articles in most cases. The platform includes an integrated simple feed reader and clusterer/deduplicator, specially aimed for knowledge workers with hundreds and thousands of feeds to monitor daily.
$1 a month, $10 if paid annually :o)
Now, if only there were a good way to sync elfeed and an Android feed reader!
Many modern website managers (unlike the “webmasters” of two decades ago) are either unaware that web server logs exist and can provide useful information about web requests (in a privacy-respecting manner) – or they might not have access to them.
Plus "we couldn't figure out how to monetize RSS"
It is, perhaps, giving too much credit. Perhaps the average is lower than I think it is. But if it is, we would arrive at the same situation, because a developer that struggles below the average will struggle to maintain an RSS feed. We could anticipate them cutting whatever corners they can justify cutting to decrease their workload.
Basic sysadmin/tech competency != Basic webmaster competency. Whoever maintains their WordPress site may not even know the logs exist, and if they do know, not have access to them. Server literacy is not widespread.
It could be that they've failed to understand how RSS could help their organization achieve its goals. But it's probably just that RSS isn't worth it to them.
In general, if they were truly seeing no uptake on it, they could just be justified removing it to decrease their security surface (https://www.acunetix.com/vulnerabilities/web/wordpress-plugi...).
I'd have to know which NGO and what their circumstances are to have a more concrete opinion. With no additional information, I can construct a hypothetical scenario where a reasonable site admin would yank RSS.
I can't imagine if Facebook will close Facebook, that "is internet" for a lot of people, not us obviously.
RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website, technologically speaking it doesn't make sense to have everyone making a request to website every minute. We could have a central service responsible for that, but I guess it will centralized and some people don't like that
A custom analysis by the user - maybe tech illiterate -, from every user, for every, supposedly complex, website, instead of some xml-izing wrapping over 'SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY pubdate DESC LIMIT 100'?!
> a request to website every minute
RSS takes less bandwidth than doing the same operation through direct visit. And of course, one is not supposed to do it that frequently; though again, some browsing agents may load pages more frequently than every minute.
I can only condone scraping if the official API is so convoluted that scraping the page is literally the easier option to program against.
If gwene goes under, it'll suck but I'll have a gwene like on my own server. If RSS goes under, it'll go under here and there, and not wholesale. Good technology is resilient like that.
Yawn.
Hell, I've only been using RSS for few weeks and I actually love it. It's pretty overwhelming at times, but I definitely don't regret giving it a go at all.
The modern popular internet that most people use is a 5 store strip mall with UX and design choices that seem like they were designed by Dr Strangelove.
It is a feed generator for sites that don't have it.
The alternative to RSS is Twitter (which is preferable to many orgs as you can "unsend" or manage engagement).
Sucks for freedom of access though.
That would be brutally honest and probably get much more respect.
TL;DR I have my youtube, twitter, feed, etc sent to my email which I consume linearly and efficiently without having to visit literally 50 websites and also don't miss a thing because I didn't check one day.