An example of why RSS is useful and important

> Free, easy to set up, no accounts needed, open source

> An error occurred during a connection to kill-the-newsletter.com.

I guess braving the HN flood takes some nontrivial resources. And there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Kill the Newsletter is great. I'm subscribed to a number of Patreons and last week I got fed up with the lack of RSS feed for non-audio posts, and got the idea to do something sort of like Chris Hardie and bash together a web server which would receive emails and post them to an RSS feed.

Very glad I looked around and found Kill the Newsletter before I wasted my weekend!

I’d actually like to have the reverse, an RSS-to-email service.

I've always wondered why emails aren't used as back-bone for more services. In many aspects, facebook is just a mailing list with ads and a fancy front-end. And in some ways, visiting a web page is just emailing the server and receiving the web page in response. And in some ways, the latter would be perfect to keep an archive of important stuff

Ehhhh... I get what you're saying here, but I don't think RSS is worth it for emergency alerts.

I'm willing to bet good money <0.5% of the population even use or are aware of RSS. Supporting it also has a very non-trivial cost. Even if it takes a few hours for an engineer to implement it, it'll need to be added to their testing plan to make sure it's reliable.

Then if it breaks, you'll neen to find another expensive techie ASAP to fix it, as it's an emergency service. If someone is relying on the alerts through RSS, there's potential for catastrophe in an emergency situation if it fails.

So I'd rather the money go towards tech that gets a message out to as many people as possible, be it through facebook or other proprietary service. Human lives are potentially on the line, so whatever system is used needs to be stream lined the same way existing emergency systems are.

> The other nice thing about RSS is that I am in control of my subscription, whereas email I need to ask you nicely to stop, and hope that you haven't sold my email address elsewhere.

Sadly too many places think that subaddresses— username+label_at_example.com —is an invalid address. Can't use it in usernames in many places. (It's been valid in e-mail since RFC 822.)

heh. In 2003-2005 I didn't get why RSS mattered, so I built a mobile photo blog based on pictures+text from a Sony Clié email client, posting pictures + captions to a mailbox, and a .forward file pipe-filter that turned those messages directly into an RSS feed. (About 50 lines of sh - "why do people think this is hard or complicated?" :-)

Turns out (1) UI matters (2) Network Effect matters (3) systems that gamify user engagement basically always win regardless of what they're doing...

The problem is, RSS is not compatible with a few popular models:

1. Closed platform - Places like Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, etc, are dis-incentivized to help you consume content unless they can get you trapped in their UI with your logged in account.

2. Web as a program - Tonnes of people are trying to replace websites with 'apps' and replace programs with the web, neither of which lend themselves nicely to being RSS friendly.

3. RSS popularity - Very few people (compared to the majority of the web) are consuming RSS. Most users will be using Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge only. They get their notifications by keeping tabs open or via push notifications.

I think the way forwards is to normalise RSS by rebuilding it into the web. I've often thought about what and RSS-based social media may look like. It's a shame Open Graph [1] didn't use more RSS functionality.

[1] https://ogp.me/

Time for someone to reinvent RSS in JSON or YAML

I work on a project that lets you use CSS selectors to build RSS feeds from web pages: https://createfeed.fivefilters.org

But for trickier sites, or ones that are popular and need more maintenance, projects like RSS Bridge and RSS Hub are worth a look.

I dunno. When I was still writing publicly someone reached out for me to add RSS to my website and it took me like 3 hours maybe to add it to my hand written static site compiler.

It's a pretty simple protocol, even if I would have done things differently. For example, relative paths should be supported with some sort of top level setting called "root" or something like that. That way I wouldn't have to convert relative paths.

I think lart of the problem is RSS is sort of orthogonal to hyper targeted marketing and tracking.

With email, you can track who reads the mail, how often, what times, etc. You can tailor recommendations and content to the specific person

RSS is just a generic feed that's the same for everyone. Great for consumers--less useful for people trying to optimize monetization

They killed RSS because there was no solid means for data providers to ration, monetize and control individual access to their content. The decline of availability for RSS feeds wasn't based on waning popularity from what I observed. Back then RSS feeds simply went offline in droves, as everyone scrambled to figure out how in the heck to implement OAuth, and most people gave up trying to implement feeds after they came with monthly fees and when OAuth was forced on us by Twitter and Facebook etc... I'd even go as far as to say the requirements introduced for OAuth mainly served the horrible purpose of turning connecting to most (previously free and open) data sources into a fee based and tightly controlled commodity economy that made everyone go closed-data after external data became too janky, costly, and difficult to support.

I don't know a single website that does not implement RSS.

Thanks for specifying what you're looking for. These are the sorts of posts that help guide me in my projects.

I wrote a simple "RSS to Email" utility, which I use for reading feeds.

I can filter either in my mail-client, or in the utility itself, to include/exclude entries from feeds based upon regular expressions, and similar things.

It is pretty flexible - at least for the case when the feed itself contains the complete text of an entry. Often you'll find feeds contain only the "summary" of a blog-post, or article. Those are a bit harder to handle.

I agree, but would add that nailing these features doesn't excuse a reader without sufficient support for customization of the UI (especially content). I might be able to excuse a reader with a polished, clean, and opinionated design (like Apple & Google's eBook readers), but would prefer to have as much freedom as possible, to the point of user-stylesheet support or some such low-level measure. Bonus points for features easing the manipulation of such 'profiles', such as a simple theme selector for easy swapping between an arbitrary number of custom styles and support for per-feed defaults.

Not to mention accessibility features, which readers are well positioned to support.

Not to be too picky, these are my ideals and I wouldn't so blutly demand such feature coverage from a developer. Y'all do what you think is best and I'll find what works best for me, thx to amyone who's contributed to a reader c:

I've been using Inoreader and enjoy it. I'm only using the free plan, but the paid versions seem to offer some of the things you're looking for.

I don't think it gets quite to the level of customization you want, but I find Feedly to be very good and is definitely cross-platform. Give it a try if you haven't. The for-pay Pro model has some extra features, and I have had good luck contacting their support.

Sounds like you want something that uses RSS data to build a more freeform database.

I wouldn’t describe RSS software as bad but they do often prioritize the reading experience, which is in conflict with data management due to the small market keeping developer resources minimal.

There's multiple RSS to Email services (and trivial open source software you can use to convert RSS feeds to E-Mails to yourself).

Isn't that what you're looking for? Then you can use any non-"basic email client" to get all the sorts of advanced filtering etc. you're describing.

I use FreshRSS which is hosted on my home server. What it does is allow you to categorise the feeds and you can also do some further things like hiding them from the main feed if you choose to. Then beyond that it pulls article tags from the original sites which you can search or predefine a filter for and you can also label individual articles you find. What it can't do unfortunately is allow multiple tags for a site to be applied, so its not possible to classify content from a source multiple ways and have it surfaced in multiple places while only having it shown once and read once. You can put a site in multiple categories but reading it in one place wont read it in the other.

It is one of the better systems I have used, its by no means perfect but its fairly quick and easy to use with some decent shortcuts for working through the sites and I manage hundreds with it and it happily works across every platform since its a website.

Try https://www.newsblur.com/ it does a lot of what you're asking for and works well on web and mobile app.

So you want to create regex based filters that:

  - Sort articles into lists

  - Tag articles by category

  - Dim articles that may be uninteresting

  - Highlight articles you are most likely to enjoy

  - Also have various notification preferences

https://netnewswire.com is one of the best apps I use regularly, not just among RSS clients. Good point about tags etc though.

Inoreader. Does everything and more.

I just want the ability to have some sort of intelligent negative filters, i.e. the ability to nuke content I don't care about.

For example, I'm a bit of a sneaker head, and subscribe to a lot of sneaker blogs. But I really don't like Nike shoes, which is the most popular sneaker brand, certainly in the US, and every sneaker blog has several Nike related articles every day. I never read any of them. I'd like to just completely omit them from my feeds.

That's kind of a simple example, and I can actually do that somewhat easily, but there are more complex examples. Let's say for example human rights related blogs, but ignore all propaganda content produced by either Governmental sources or about organizations associated with human rights violators. Or ignore all articles mentioning musicians, if the mention is about celebrity gossip. Or ignore content about Al Franken, if it's about his political activity, but still list content that's about his comedy work. Or vice versa.

I cancelled my feedbin subscription after installing miniflux. Its been a joy to use and is well written software! Thanks for sharing =)

What, exactly, is wrong with RSS in your opinion? I’m curious as someone who runs a news aggregator + RSS reader (https://sumi.news).

Looks nice! You might be interested in related tools to build off of, like rss-bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/

Cool, this looks a bit like: https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io