I Miss RSS
wilcosky.com
wilcosky.com
I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.
It feels very much like an alive protocol to me, and more in need than ever before given the insane calls on everyone's attention.
And to the guy with "service shutdown fear" - just export your opml and bring it into another service. It's highly portable and imo totally mitigates any risk of getting locked in then locked out.
1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse).
2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites.
3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed.
4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list.
Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read.
Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that way) - but if you treat it as a personally curated source of sporadic content, then it's great. In many respects Moderate post volume (quality over quantity) is something I find more useful in what I choose.
On the aggregator front, I try to avoid anything that's too noisy (low signal to noise) - and I definitely minimise subscribing to news sites as the volume is just too high (I tried rss subscribing to The Verge when it was new, but there were too many articles I don't read). For example, i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.
RSS is still heavily used for information I find really professionally useful (IT) - but I don't know about other industries.
Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed - which makes offline and mobile consumption more difficult / annoying - I suspect that in some cases it's a result of default choices - and in others it's a deliberate decision as a trade off against improved analysis a site gets from a browser hit.
The popular HN RSS feed generator linked elsewhere in this page allows for a ton of customization! You can filter by points and raise the floor until you get a reasonable number of articles per week.
> Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed
My RSS reader (miniflux) has a handy feature for getting around these. It even works for naïve paywalls (like the New Yorker’s, for example). It basically cURL’s the original address of the content and allows you to specify the content with a CSS selector. It’s some trouble to configure initially, but very handy!
I believe a lot of the bigger sites like Feedly will recommend you popular feeds. I would love a service that I can paste a list of feeds into and it could recommend popular related feeds.
I suspect a lot of blogs only have a feed now because it's a default feature of the blog platform they use rather than because they see it as important.
I don't buy any of the arguments not to implement it. I don't think it is too expensive or confusing. I think it is too empowering to users and inconvenient to marketers.
Add websub and few more and you have a social network, duh. Decentral. People owned.
well, that's the unspoken fallacy: becoming active is cumbersome.
But that doesn't have to be, it could be as easy as renting a domain and copying a single file. (Plug: https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo)
But if taking a breath is too much of an effort, one may well remain unheard.
At some point we need to stop trying defend the idea that capitalism is good for tech.
Why would a state-owned social media platform be any better? I can think of numerous ways in which it would be dramatically worse. And if given the choice, do you really think people would choose Fedbook over Facebook?
I think the argument for this is mainly that this would be funded by taxes, so it would not need to rely on advertisements and exhibit the predatory behaviours that Facebook and other social media do.
How about Mastodon/Fediverse options?
Same convenience of platform features - finding friends, social gaming, comments, likes, etc. - nobody trying to monetize your eyeballs or actively surveil you.
You mispelled "the way for me to monetize it is practically non-existent".
I get tons of requests in my web logs for my RSS feed. And I’m not a big site or anything, just have a scrub personal blog.
So that’s lots of demand.
I suspect that every platform owner sees their rss requests and sees it as high. So any claims that there’s no demand without clarifying that they don’t get http gets for RSS feeds seems disingenuous to me.
“I don’t see any demand for RSS when I ignore looking at all the RSS requests I get tiny site.”
But I think successful requests to my RSS feeds are regular users who are routinely checking my feed and have set up some tool to do so. So that’s demand. And it’s pretty regular.
The people trying to ssh are likely doing so automatically on every host in existence.
Even though the water isn't boiling, the heat may still be on.
I saw that they also have some kind of tool that lets you scrape websites that don't have native RSS feeds, but it is only at the "super duper" pricing tier, whatever that one is called.
Turns out, most of the blogs I subscribed to back in the day are now defunct or not updated much. I think that's why I eventually stopped going to my Feedly for RSS aggreggation, and instead for the few moments a day I want to read news/waste time, I just go directly to The Verge, Hacker News, and/or Reddit.
Funny aside, though. My product at work still has a RSS plugin for importing content, and I have it pointed at Reddit RSS feeds for sub-reddits, and it's still working....
However, as a user I'd need to decide: do I want to open the funnel of content like this where I feel obligated to read all the stuff in my feed? I kind of feel like I don't need to be so diligent with these things. And if that's the case, my use case looks more and more like only using RSS for super specific, niche websites that I don't want to remember to visit on a regular basis. Which could be OK, but then I have to remember to visit my RSS reader.
"Using the Publisher Center tool, you can share your content with Google News by listing RSS feeds, website URLs, or videos."
[1] https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9607...
[2] My original link to how it works: https://ppcexpo.com/blog/how-does-google-news-work
EDIT: found the original Google docs instead
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Let's hope it will not go defunct anytime soon.
One of those feeds is how I came across this post.
I tried using Feedly last year. Added feeds and it was HORRIBLE experience. Not Feedly but the actual feeds.
Some of them give you the title and then tell you to go to actual website to read the article.
Others has a virtually non-existent summary.
During RSS's heydays I remember being able to just see the summary and click on it and read the article right there and then. Now these feeds try to push you back to the website hard. Making RSS feeds feel like a broken tool. With the content there mostly an after thought.
I think sites killed off RSS feeds.
Thanks for the tip on weloverss. I'll give it a try.
I am always on the lookout for a simple, decentralized, modern alternative, if anyone knows of any.
Precisley, that's how I got to this post. In this day, keeping a list of interesting sites and being able to consult them all from a single place is ever more useful.
it doesn't seem to be linked anywhere, but I think that's: https://www.wilcosky.com/atom
- Forum activity (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom)
- Forum's new discussions (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom/discussions)
- This discussion (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom/d/20-i-miss-rss)
Of course these days browsers don't indicate that browsers are available. You will need an extension to detect feeds. (Or paste the site in your feed reader and hope it does, most readers will do the auto-discovery for you)
Is it still useful? Yes. Is it also under attack? Yes.
I get RSS for some Twitter accounts via a Nitter instance. Sadly, some institutions and people only spread news via Twitter.
1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
(I too miss RSS)
[1] https://internet.psych.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/532-Maste...
This started happening when I was 14 (~2007) and really started to accelerate after I was 20 (~2013). I don't correlate this with me getting old but more like getting more and more aware of the profiteering, surveillance and bullshit everywhere.
I used to be subscribed to more but some RSS feeds have such high traffic it's difficult to follow them, such as the BBC news feed.
Feedly has a nice new feature [0] that makes an RSS feed out of a standard website, so that might be worth considering if you have some news sources that don't publish a RSS feed. Unfortunately this wouldn't work with anything that requires authentication like private Twitter feeds for example.
[0] https://blog.feedly.com/easily-follow-websites-that-dont-hav...
ttrss was basically my first self hosted thing almost a decade ago. It was great. And then it turned out the guy running it was a bit not pleasant, and I didn't want to support that. So I recently migrated to freshRSS. Both work great, are open source and self hostable.
And feedly hasn't shut down yet (probably just to spite me). So yeah, tons of options for RSS.
I wouldn't use them as a standard for keeping services up.
I'm starting to wonder where "Sandstorm 2.0" is. Sandstorm, for those who don't know, was basically an attempt to make self hosting really viable, but was tragically ahead of its time because it predated Docker. So they burned tons of effort on sandboxing, and wrapping existing applications into their sandbox, and it was just too hard to port things into their world to get very many applications running.
It seems like a project that would do that in terms of docker-compose files could be created for much less effort, and maybe not quite all the pretty-shiny they had. But as I'm struggling right now a bit to bring up a Bitwarden server, there's still pain around setting up the forwards properly and getting the Let's Encrypt certificate. Something that managed all this better wouldn't be too hard, and could just be slammed up on a small AWS instance or something would be easy. (Branching out to other services over time or something.) Plus setting up proper backups would be nice. We're so, so much closer to being able to do this nowadays than we used to be... for instance, S3 has also become a near universal API, so backups using it have gotten to be easy but they can still be done without vendor lockin.
Then it would be really easy to self-host an RSS reader or something.
I'm hoping this will either prompt someone to consider this project, or prompt someone to tell me "It already exists, go here and here and run this docker command to install it."
I think that's the most similar think you will find to a Sandstorm 2.0 running on docker
Nowadays, for me at least, it IS really easy to self-host anything. Get the docker image, add a deployment to my k8s cluster. Ship it. Getting to this point was less simple.
In terms of automating things like handling certs for you, I'd say Caddy or even my own boringproxy.
I'm unaware of other ways to get consistent listings of new content at various sites in a machine readable format.
I can’t deal with most news sites now because I’m usually reading them on my phone. There’s just so much garbage between ads, scroll locked videos and JavaScript breaking the pages. AMP was supposed to help with this stuff but it breaks all the time too.
I know I’d happily pay for plain text content that I can format myself but I’m guessing there’s just no market for that sort of thing.
Premium RSS is possible, with individual links per user, but it's much more complicated than just typing your email address into a field (something you already do when you pay for anything). Also, chances of the link being shared around is high and aggregators often inadvertently leak premium links. In contrast, someone's inbox is about as private as it gets.
In any case, as Netflix’s early history shows, depending on your cost structure, link sharing is likely a net positive. It’s probably only worth prosecuting the feeds that get shared with 100s of people.
It definitely is more complicated, but the tools to make it simple are easy to build! Maybe we’ll see growth in this space. One can dream
It's a good point that some amount of unauthorised sharing can be a positive. The main issue is it's hard to control without also having false positives, where the paying subscriber is annoyed by their service being revoked, having to re-auth, etc.
Therefore, RSS doesn't cause any advertisement loss, as the user needs to go to the website anyway (which, to be clear, is totally fine - RSS still works as filter/preview, which is very helpful).
IMO the big thing that killed RSS ubiquity was Google Chrome not having support for it natively. Before that, Firefox, Opera, Safari all had RSS as well-supported, central thing and I remember finding it super annoying that Chrome didn't have it when it launched. But I kept using Chrome for the same reasons everyone else started switching to Chrome. And the RSS extensions all sucked. And eventually I stopped using them. And here I am, no longer reading RSS.
But as Chrome ate up browser share, I'm sure fewer people went to RSS because it wasn't natively there and so the incentives to implement RSS decreased as fewer people expected it to be there, especially as many more people were coming online only having used Chrome.
Oddly enough, I switched back to Firefox years ago and _could_ get back into RSS at any point (or with any number of RSS reader apps, etc.), but the habit has stuck, and I now stay up-to-date on everything via email newsletters, Twitter and this orange website instead. it's worse and I hate it, but oh well
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pn...
Polling isn't a requirement. If your reader is polling it's strictly because the author wanted to implement such a feature; that's it.
There's also ETag and last-modified which are used when checking and have very little overhead (most especially in the case when the content has not changed).
1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly.
2) Most people then and now would go through an aggregator. So they'd really be talking to that instead of the source feed.
3) There were push notification standards out well over a decade ago, including RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub.
Besides, assuming you're not hideously overcomplicating things, you'll just be serving a static file off disk. If your server is a raspberry pi, you ought to still be able to serve some 1000 requests/second if that is what you are doing.
Assuming most RSS readers poll at most once every 15 minutes (which is a really high rate), you'll need at least a million subscribers before you need to get a second raspberry pi.
Feedly: 7min
Feedbin: 15min
Bloglovin: 30min
Dreamwidth Studios: 30min
Feed Wrangler: 30min
NewsBlur: 30min
BazQux: 40min
inoreader.com: 1hr
theoldreader.com: 2hr
pine.blog: 24hr
No, not having a way to subscribe when stumbling over an RSS feed was the main problem in my eyes, and the existence of a feed not being highlighted in browsers anymore. Firefox dropping support was not only an act of treason against the free web, it was also very effective in making it very hard for new users to understand how to use RSS. Not that chrome is any better. Here lies the problem, and that's where it could be solved.
Add into browsers an icon when a site has an RSS feed, and let that point to a foundation managed site that points to RSS readers, where users can select their favorite. I'm 100% certain that would have a huge effect on adoption numbers.
As this comment thread shows very well RSS is not dead at all, but it's not in the mass market right now and that could be changed easily enough.
As much as HN hates the out of order feeds, that's what the average user wants because most content is boring.
I think you're greatly overestimating this inefficiency. Especially for websites properly implementing the HTTP protocol. 'Push' requires a lot more complexity and it's also outside of the user's control. For fuck's sake, you can just serve a static file. We've been doing this for decades.
Talking about control, my hypothesis is that it was the main driver of the downfall of RSS. It started when Google killed Reader and Facebook took control of what you see in the timeline. Users picking and choosing what/when to read is not compatible with the way the major gatekeepers of information drive engagement.
Sites like Movim (https://movim.eu/) offer an user friendly front-end for this protocol (building upon the ATOM format). You can login using any XMPP account and also self-host Movim instances.
This is a nonsense comparison. RSS is about presentation, not about real time interaction. And it would not be hard to have RSS feeds support push notifications, or other modernization.
RSS is a universal and accessible way of presenting content, that is what is so inconvenient about it to publishers.
The business model of most platforms today has RSS as competition. It completely undermines analytics, and their ability to fine-tune presentation, for the benefit of the end-user.
So of course GM will say that their gas guzzlers make electric trains obsolete.
I'd wager this saves them some unpaid overtime. It seems that a service which provides correct, useful RSS nearly obviates the entire hassle of dealing with bot scrapers and the resource drain and health insurance premiums that come along. You can easily serve any volume of RSS with cloudflare or nginx.
It is quite true that mobile clients scraping a url is inefficient vs pub/sub. Maybe you could just uses mqtt to trigger a GET or something.
I spent about five minutes considering what a world with facebook, instagram, ebay, amazon RSS feeds might look like. The experience felt like goat staring.
I will take the opportunity to ask about two issues I am currently facing.
- Is there a feed for Github discussions?
- Does anyone have some ideas/sources for bookmark scripts? I found [2], but I am not really sure what it does.
[2]:https://github.com/gpakosz/.newsboat/blob/master/bookmark.sh
---
E: To add, in my opinion the killer feature of Newsboat is the fact that all links get appended to the article, similar to how I added the two links below my post. In Newsboat I can just press the corresponding number and open the link!
Most of the big socials dropped RSS feeds a while back for the same reason their APIs became less useful: they monetized with ads being mixed in with content. Allowing users to view their stream outside the UI literally cuts into the ad revenue.
It seems like different niches treat RSS differently - many of the webcomics I've subscribed to still publish via RSS. Even if the actual comic image isn't included in the RSS, there's at least a feed entry with a link to go to the site to view the comic. But my "Cars" category in Vienna is basically empty - I guess the various automotive blogs and magazines I subscribed to were run by folks who didn't care about RSS as they migrated platforms, etc. Or maybe they actively shut their feeds off to try to drive traffic to their homepages.
That said, the UX of RSS was pretty terrible compared to social media. I think it could have been different—podcasts managed to make RSS mainstream and with a bit more tuning and standardization it probably could have worked. I really think the issue was that in the 2009-2015 period huge amounts of industry mindshare went into mobile apps and social media and RSS (or its eventual successor) were left half-baked.
All that is to say that RSS still works. What's missing is the original content creators of the early RSS world. Nowadays, most people create small, easy-to-write, easy-to-consume content in one of the walled gardens since the notifications, interactions, and network are all included for them.
The sensible websites still offer it, and the ones that don't are a toxic dumpster fire anyway. Yes, I too remember the good old days when you could monitor facebook, twitter, etc all in an RSS reader, and then they stopped their RSS feeds. The thing to realize is that they also stopped being useful, user-oriented sites at the same time.
I've started to keep a list of all the websites that I've tried to subscribe but didn't support RSS:
https://angel.co/blog
https://blog.close.com
https://blog.messagebird.com
https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us.html
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us.html
https://bloggingfordevs.com/blog
https://business.instagram.com/blog
https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/announcements
https://discord.com/blog
https://frontapp.com/blog
https://indiehackers.com
https://joelcalifa.com/blog
https://linktr.ee/blog
https://mixpanel.com/blog
https://openai.com/blog/openai-api
https://paystack.com/blog
https://segment.com/blog
https://telegram.org/blog
https://transferwise.com/gb/blog
https://web.dev/blog
https://www.anyscale.com/blog
https://www.binance.com/en/blog
https://www.bugsnag.com/blog
https://www.changeinvest.com/blog
https://www.hackthebox.com/blog
https://www.integromat.com/en/blog
https://www.linode.com/blog
https://www.loom.com/blog
https://www.makerpad.co/blog
https://www.tradingview.com/blog/en
https://zapier.com/engineeringI haven't fed it into my RSS reader, which is on another machine, but, inspecting it with curl, it looks like RSS XML... does it not work for you?
It is a problem that the webpage doesn't give any visible sign that it supports RSS. That is unfortunately common; I don't know why they do that. Anyway, for what it's worth:
# fish shell here, with an alias
~> for x in (P | tr -d ' '); echo $x (curl -sL $x | egrep -c -i 'rss|atom'); end
... omitting the non-matches ...
https://blog.close.com 1
https://bloggingfordevs.com/blog 1
https://discord.com/blog 1
https://linktr.ee/blog 2
https://openai.com/blog/openai-api 1
https://segment.com/blog 2
https://web.dev/blog 1
https://www.linode.com/blog 4
https://www.tradingview.com/blog/en 1However, some of them like (tradingview.com/blog/en) mention words RSS/Atom but they don't have a feed and for some of them (like blog.close.com) it's broken.
Curate your feeds list well, and you won't need another timeline.
These days most things are abstracted away by a web interface or app hosted in the cloud.
Sure this makes a nicer UX, but it has the side-effect of creating walled gardens.
So when you say "not federated", what exactly do you mean? If you're publishing to your own site, and other people are reading it on their own compatible sites, isn't that fundamentally a federated model?
We also use Flarum to power our user feedback site for Orion browser https://orionfeedback.org another example of Flarum's ability to adopt to different use cases.
Twitter lost its native RSS support, but Nitter provides RSS links. Example: https://nitter.net/eff/rss
Reddit provides RSS for most listings, including search results. All you have to do is append .rss to the path part of the URL. Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/hackernews/search.rss?q=web&restric...
GitHub provides Atom feeds in various places. Example: https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh/releases.atom
When I don't know if a site offers a syndication URL, I fall back to viewing the page source, and searching for these telltale strings: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
I am a happy customer as well!
(For the purposes of this comment I'm mostly referring to Atom/
1. RSS is, at the end of the day, a syndication format, _not_ a feedback or posting format.
2. RSS feeds have no real concept of portability between devices or user agents. Kludges like OPML can be used to aggregate feeds for sharing across user agents, but they still don't actually store device-specific metadata that a user would like.
3. If RSS feeds contain both the article and the content, then there's both little incentive for the user to actually visit the site and no analytics for the author to understand which articles are popular. When authors put summaries in their feeds with links to the original article, they degrade the experience for the reader.
Services like Wallabag which scrape and store article contents for later viewing seems, IMO, more Lin line with what users want while being fairly seamless for the author. There's also technologies like WebMentions for server owners to comment on other blogs or things like Usenet to freely discuss articles.
You can encode html in feeds. You just have to mark them as cdata.
Yeah, this is definitely a problem. FWIW, Ars Technica solved that by giving you full-text fees only if you pay for a subscription, which seems like a nice approach that more places could hypothetically use.
Anyway, the people reading your RSS will load every article. They aren't the ones setting the difference in popularity between the articles.
There is one webcomic I enjoy, but can't get an RSS feed, because it's on a service similar to WebToons.
Edit: it wasn't a showHN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772540
I mostly follow Dilbert and Questionable Content. I used to follow Wizard of Id and a few more, but they also lost support for RSS.
I really want to make a scraper that will pull the full comic into the feed but don't want to play the cat-and-mouse game.
Which you can also do—and better—with RSS.
hnrss.org allows you to get a feed with posts over N points. Example: https://hnrss.org/newest?points=300
Adding `top.rss` to a subreddit’s URL gives you a feed you can further manipulate with `t` and `limit`. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallpapers/top.rss?t=month&limit=20 lists the top 20 posts from the past month in `r/wallpapers`.
The only bad thing about RSS I could find was following the news sites, where every news was equal, so "cat lost" and "massive bomb killed everyone in a city next to you" are treated equally.
I think the failing of RSS is that no major browsers have RSS indicators anymore. Defaults are king and if users need to install an extension, view source and search for feeds, paste the URL into a reader and hope that there is a feed or click an RSS link and wonder what this XML is then >90% of users won't use it.
If browsers add a "subscribe to this site" button that opens your reader or redirects to your "app store" to get one then there is a decent chance of non-trivial user adoption.
<shrug>
Yes, google basically killed RSS through embrace, extend, extinguish.
There’s no money in democratizing self-publishing.
Unfortunately, it only includes the title and the submission’s link, no content, which makes it a bit useless if your intension is to read the articles and not just the titles, which you can already do by visiting the home page.
Some people have created complementary RSS feeds like this → https://github.com/cixtor/rssfeed#readme which basically take the submission’s URL, download the web page, and removes the irrelevant HTML tags using Mozilla’s Readability.js library. Although, this project uses a Go (golang) port: https://github.com/go-shiori/go-readability#readme . It seems to work quite well, with minor bugs here and there due to inconsistencies of modern web development.
[0]: https://github.com/39aldo39
[1]: https://github.com/39aldo39/spaRSS-DecSync
Edit: formatting
I pay for software all the time but this offended my sensibilities. Not the paying for it, although I admittedly didn't, but that RSS has fallen so far that there's no free extension. Desktop Safari is a minor browser, but not so tiny that this should matter.
Substack supports RSS, so I'm cautiously optimistic about a revival. But that was a sobering reminder of its moribund state.
So I've resorted to trying the following until the RSS reed comes up:
example.com/feed
example.com/feed.xml
example.com/rss
example.com/rss.xml
example.com/xml
...etc
(I gathered them because I had this idea of maybe polling RSS feeds of high ranked domains to check for changes without having to do a full re-crawl. It's not something I do, it's more of an experiment at this point)
The primary thing I wish was better is a way to handle social commentary. Unfortunately this is an extremely hard problem to solve without allowing spamming and brigading.
Everyone’s like, let’s meta, let’s fediverse. Pft, it’s all just kids re-doing RSS.
I'm sure the driving factor to RSS losing popularity is it just doesn't fit into the modern model of making fat stacks of cash off of content that other people create which you control the publishing of. But it certainly doesn't help that it seems very limited as far as a protocol for retrieving a portable log of activity.
However WebSub requires that you have an "always online" device to receive the notification and very few feeds and readers support pagnation.
My indie game has a RSS feed for the monthly updates:
I do not miss Google Reader, because I don’t think it was the right choice for a privacy point of view.
OP has at least two subscribers on the Innoreader RSS reader according to their little subscriber widget thing (but I'm not signing up for an account to post a comment just to tell them that, so hopefully they read these comments and get a smile today :) )
I think what the author really means is "I wish I could read tweets as RSS." And the answer to that is that there are several different third party ways of doing so, if you wish.
The problem is not that RSS is declining, it is people don't write as much as before.
I still use RSS via Feedly (paid for the one time lifetime subscription) - start it up first thing in the morning but sadly noticed some interesting stuff posted on twitter but it is like finding a gemstone in a fetid swamp.
Feedly and Innoreader are both good and use various apps and or extensions that hook into those two. It’s one of the best ways to quickly scan content from multiple upsteam sources and a decent reader makes for a pleasant reading experience too.
(Not affiliated in any form and not a user of the service, just a random internet find)
Unless you mean how to enable publishing an RSS feed for your own website? In that case I have no idea, and I wouldn't expect an old school unix/C person to know how to configure web things (speaking as one as well).
I don't miss RSS, I use it all the damn time.
it includes a lot of rss links and they are all divided by category.
you can find it at this page https://www.gwern.net/Changelog (ctl+f "rss").
Currently using InoReader, I reported one issue, not once but 3 times, still no light on it.
I'm an old school guy and love my curated list of feeds.
I don't think we should return RSS as it was pretty bad format, but something that would serve like that and have some more wider adoption or approval would be fantastic.
Sorry for the low effort post, y'all.
Tiny Tiny RSS[0] is an addictive RSS reader with tons of options to sort, manipulate, filter in/out, etc. RSS entries. Feed Preview[1] is a must-have Firefox add-on for finding available feeds on websites (and previewing them).
All alternative front-ends to YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. provide feeds to subscribe to people like Invidious[2], nitter[3], Bibliogram[4], etc. (large list of alternative front-ends here [5]).
Fortunately, Github and Reddit, still natively support RSS feeds.
As others have mentioned, WordPress-based websites natively include RSS feeds for the whole website, by category, for comments of a particular post, etc. This is much better than crappy newsletters.
Regarding newsletters, when it's the only option, I use Mailnesia[6] to turn an inbox into an RSS feed.
Speaking of bridges, RSS-Bridge[7] makes feeds available to hundreds of websites through community plugins.
Feed43 [8] is also a great tool to force an ordinary page to be available as an RSS feed.
SearX [9], a metasearch engine, turns into a very powerful tool to watch for something on the whole web with advanced search functions and results available as RSS feeds. This is better than many dedicated tools, imo.
Anyway, I don't think RSS feeds are missing or even dying. But they are definitely a relic of the good old days, when Aaron Swartz was around, and unfortunately reserved for people who are looking for them or are curious enough to dive into that world.
One thing is for sure though: if they disappear, I'm out.
[1] https://code.guido-berhoerster.org/addons/firefox-addons/fee...
[3] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[4] https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
[5] https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends
But the masses browse a locked down web. That is true.
We might have another shot at an open web for the masses via the whole crypto movement.
If content goes on decentralized blockchains in the future, nobody can lock the content down like big tech did for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc.
Projects like Arweave show how it is possible to store huge amounts of data on a blockchain without using much resources.
If we get there, it will be trivial to build blockchain-to-rss bridges. I am ready to build some to get my favorite content into my RSS reader.
My feeling is that there might be a way towards a decentralized web via financial incentives. In a decentralized web, crypto currencies can float around freely. Making it easy for the actors to earn. Old platforms will probably be slow to open up to crypto currencies.
Consider a “decentralised” blockchain system that does the work of The Pirate Bay – providing hashes of particular files, along with their names, so that people can select and request data from the P2P network.
How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in any way?
Additionally, how does this system help with the “censorship” issues that The Pirate Bay has? Even when The Pirate Bay remains up, that doesn't mean anybody's seeding.
And a blockchain-based system has to have this limitation. If all the data is directly on the blockchain, nobody can actually download it all, so the blockchain becomes unverifiable and ceases to have any cryptographic properties at all. (In short, there's no benefit to a blockchain at all.)
How, exactly, does this system
help with RSS in any way?
Even when The Pirate Bay remains up,
that doesn't mean anybody's seeding
If all the data is directly on the
blockchain, nobody can actually
download it all
Well, yeah – but we already have that. It's called the Fediverse. No blockchain in sight. (In fact, it predates Bitcoin.)
> That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised.
The margin for any given piece of content will be low, so there's an economic incentive to honour takedown requests, no matter how fraudulent or unenforceable, if the effort to check whether they're valid is lower than the expected average reward minus the expected average legal cost.
> We have approaches now where participants only need to download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the network as a whole keeps the chain intact.
We had those back in Satoshi's time, too. They work by having n centralised trusted nodes, then asking all your peers to double-check what you got from those trusted nodes. That approach is, surprisingly enough, also vulnerable to censorship!
(Also, I don't really think your proposed scheme is good enough to have Satoshi's name associated with it. The innovation of Bitcoin was the coin melting pot thing, not the blockchain; Satoshi's original blockchain, which Bitcoin still mostly uses, was just a worse version of Git repositories.)
The margin for any given piece of content will
be low
Same with the blockchains that support larger amounts of data. Whoever wants to store data pays for it.
The specifics of how the storage of rare content is incentivized depends on the protocol.
On Filecoin the publisher pays an ongoing fee.
On Arweave it is paid upfront. The current estimate is that $10 will store a GB for 200 years.
So doing a tweet on an Arweave powered social network would cost you something like $0.001 if you want your tweet to survive for 200 years.
Keeping historical blocks around is not a property of Bitcoin. No up-front blockchain payment system can keep data around for any length of time. (There is no mechanism enforcing the storage of the data; such a mechanism cannot exist within a computer system.) “$10/GB for 200 years” are the words of a snake-oil salesperson – or, more charitably, somebody who hasn't properly read the marketing copy.
You are correct that in Bitcoin there is less incentive to store old blocks. But in chains crafted to store data for a long time there is.
I am stopping this discussion here because you are too negative (almost aggressive) for my liking.
But it will be an interesting thread to read again in 20 years when all this has played out.
To give it as much credit as I can: individual peers could do their own content moderation, deciding what they do and don't want to be around, and if enough people decide something shouldn't be there, it'll basically drop out of availability. But that goes against the whole “market forces” philosophy that it's supposedly based on, and also goes against some of the claims that the proponents of these systems keep making.
It's just a bad system, not even taking into account the pointless CPU cycle wastage. Blockchains sort of make sense for something where each block is based on the previous, but for arbitrary pieces of data? Chaining them like that is faddish unless it brings real concrete benefits over just doing the same thing without blockchain.