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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

So tired of people proclaiming RSS "dead". Some of us have been using RSS all along and never stopped using it. There are still plenty of native RSS clients. Google Reader is not RSS. In fact it's better that Google doesn't control RSS; no company should control it.

You can talk about how Google killed their RSS support. How Twitter killed their RSS support. How Apple added and then removed RSS from Safari. But RSS lives on, it can't be killed.

Many news sites continue to publish RSS feeds, you just need to know how to find them.

How many death proclamations does RSS need? At this point it's become a joke, like the old Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."

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I agree, it is still the most reliable way to aggregate multiple media sources and luckily far from dead.

Does anyone else uses messenger bots to aggregate RSS? I use manybot [1] and it has moved RSS to the modern world for me.

[1] https://manybot.io/

Not to mention that from what I've read it IS more popular than ever because its used to manage podcasts on apple devices.

All podcast apps* on all devices depend on RSS!

(*Proprietary audio platforms like Spotify probably do not use RSS, other than to vacuum standards-based audio content into their platform.)

Interestingly Youtube still provides RSS feeds for all channels (https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel ID>). They're linked in the head element, so just the normal channel URL should work with most RSS readers.

It has become increasingly difficult to find RSS feeds for podcasts. More and more podcasts have moved to the various "platforms" like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and finding a plain old RSS feed has become quite the heroic quest in some cases. :(

Podcasts never moved to iTunes. You submit the URL to your podcast feed to Apple and it scrapes your feed. Once someone subscribe to the feed, iTunes is no longer involved. The directory of podcasts that Apple indexes is available as a free API that anyone can use and has been an open API for over a decade.

Every real podcast player allows you to subscribe directly to a podcast if you know the RSS URL.

When you play a podcast, even through iTunes or the podcast player, the audio is served from your website. None of this is true for either Google or Spotify,

Thanks for clearing that up!

I have noticed a trend, though, for Podcasts to no longer provide a "raw" RSS feed, and point you to "wherever you find your podcasts". It is usually possible to find an RSS URL, but it takes a bit of work sometimes.

Many third party podcast players for both iOS and Android use Apple’s directory as the canonical source of podcast RSS urls and for search. Once they retrieve the RSS feeds, then they poll the RSS feeds directly.

I usually listen to Podcasts on my desktop/laptop, though. I use gPodder, which does not access Apple's directory.

I could switch to another client, ... but I'm a creature of habit. I might try building my own Podcast client, though, I've been looking for a project lately.

If you have an iPhone, Overcast has a web interface.

Reading the rest of the comments, I was wondering if I missed something. I use awesome-rss firefox extension [1] to discover RSS feeds on firefox. I maintain a list of feeds using elfeed-org and follow them using elfeed on Emacs. It's clean and extremely fast - especially while searching. Granted that it isn't really beginner friendly. But there are nice beginner-friendly alternatives like liferea too. Here are somethings that confuse me while reading these sorts of articles and discussions:

1. I don't see why they say browsers killed RSS/atom feeds. The only casualty was the discoverability of those feeds (like the discontinued live bookmarks on Firefox). But it is easy enough to restore it using extensions like awesome-rss, if you care enough. And I find a lot of dedicated feed reader applications catering to all sorts of users.

2. I don't understand how twitter and firefox killed RSS/Atom feeds. I find it extremely tedious to search for meaningful information with them. These sites are full of material designed to hold your attention captive while frustrating your efforts at finding worthwhile material. In contrast, RSS/Atom is information dense, easy to search, narrow and archive.

3. There is no dearth of RSS/Atom feeds on the web. Every good news website news site seems to host one. Almost all the blog engines and static site generators automatically generate them without any configuration or intervention. I find my feedlist growing very large overtime.

4. It also appears like many people associate RSS/Atom feeds with an online service like feedreader or (the dead) Google reader. My understanding is that you don't need an online service to aggregate feeds. An intermittently online desktop/mobile client can do it just the same. I haven't noticed an RSS/Atom client ever failing to aggregate a feed. The only thing I found missing was an automatic way to share and synchronize the feed list itself - though it's easy enough to implement with something like syncthing. Am I missing something here?

For me, twitter, FB etc are inferior to RSS/Atom feeds in every conceivable way - with the exception of lack of a discussion forum. I too find the death proclamation of RSS/Atom a bit of an overstatement.

[1] https://github.com/shgysk8zer0/awesome-rss

[2] https://lzone.de/liferea/

This seems a little pedantic. The contrast I'm trying to draw here is the steep drop off from the golden ages of ~2010 where you couldn't move for RSS symbols, aggregators, browsers that would suggest what to do with a RSS if they noticed one in the head, or loaded one directly.

Like most of HN, I've been using it daily for decades, but it's nowhere near as available as it used to be. Neither Firefox or Chrome seem to treat it as content worth looking at, but they used to. Look at the HN RSS feed in your browser for fun: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

On my website (TFA), I had to add my own XLST. That works well now, for now. But how long until XLST support is removed because "nobody uses it"?

How much more dead do you need something to be before it's worth talking about? Previous conversations haven't accomplished anything, more services ignore RSS, iCal, so maybe it's worth banging on about this stuff until pressure finds the right people, and so that RSS doesn't get further excluded, so that people still think it's worth making feeds for.

I'm sorry you think it's cliché.

> How much more dead do you need something to be before it's worth talking about?

This is a strange question. One normally doesn't talk about dead technologies at all, except perhaps nostalgically. "Hey, remember Netscape Navigator?" Declaring RSS dead doesn't have the rhetorical effect that you intend, as the dead can't be brought back to life.

> I'm sorry you think it's cliché.

It's not just me. A lot of people upvoted and/or agreed with my comment, so I would take that as a sign that the "RSS is dead" rhetoric is counterproductive and distracting to your points.

I feel the same about the old people/kids shtick, by the way. If you're trying to make a serious point and actually change things, don't turn it into a joke.

Hobbyists and scholars still use Latin, despite its death in ~400AD. It quickly fell out of mainstream use through poor education, lost its influence, lost central steering, and only remnants exist through the patchwork of languages over middle-ages Europe.

RSS is still in use, but it's rarely advertised, today's browsers already refuse to speak it without additional stylesheets, and the spec's largely abandoned. Where will it be in another five years?

You're welcome to your views but whether or not RSS has died is immaterial. I was trying to identify what has replaced RSS between the sites that don't provide it, and users who don't know anything about it. The short answer to that seems to be promoting your content on social media.

How even Mozilla tried to make RSS as difficult to use as possible, eventually just removing all but Live bookmarks, and even then pushing that to a separate extension...

In any case, I don't think the problem is lack of clients, but lack of publishers. Most platforms with loginwalls (e.g. Twitter) will never publish RSS feeds...

Corporate persons web applications don't but most web sites run by human persons do. Wordpress, medium, etc, all have easy automatic RSS generation. RSS is only lacking if you live in the megacorp content silos.

Corporations are usually the place where I can most easily find RSS feeds. I can easily find RSS feeds for newspapers, press releases, status of services, etc.

The problem is individuals. Individuals tend to publish on hosts which just are incompatible with RSS (because they are 'platforms' with other goals, like Twitter), or self-host without RSS (yes, happens). Platforms which have automatic RSS generation are a minority in terms of users (and BTW Wordpress and Medium are also 'corporate person silos', save for perhaps self-hosted WP).

An example of this irony is that Twitter itself publishes RSS feeds for their investor news -- https://investor.twitterinc.com/rss-feeds/default.aspx -- yet fails to provide RSS feeds for their actual user content.

Personally I do not assign much value in following the opinions of individuals, so I am still primarily an RSS user. But lately even e.g. political parties tend to publish in these silos and forget about RSS.

Agreed, and some paid plans on dedicated RSS readers(1) can turn the rare twitter/instagram feeds into proto-RSS feeds in a pinch. it's lovely and keeps me far, far away from the dark patterns inherent to those sites.

(1) Inoreader is the one I use with this capability. worth every penny - moved there after Google Reader died.

Reeder recently added this feature, made the purchase entire worth it.

Author make new version update with new purchase but worth it now

Came to write practically the same thing, I feel like when some people decide they don't want to use something anymore and their world view quickly becomes biased to think others have had a similar experience.

RSS never went away, RSS apps never went away, RSS users never went away.

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