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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

It's not dead, but many things I wish supported RSS don't.

Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. These would be incredibly useful things to have native RSS feeds for, but instead I have to dig around and either use some tool someone built for the purpose - a tool at the mercy of the walled garden whose wall they're peeking over - or build my own nightmare factory.

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> Twitter

It used to; killed off ~2013:

* https://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2013/06/twitter-has-killed...

None of those will because they rely on engagement to make money. They need people logging into their servers so that they can see what they are looking at. That's not how RSS works, so of course they won't support it.

They rely on ads to make money. Twitter could add ads to their RSS feeds, just as they add ads to their app feeds.

And I think this is the main reason Google Killed Google Reader. It was controversial (or illegal or ugly) to put ads over the third party content. And it was way better to have Adsense on the websites directly. Such "spring cleaning" was an alibi, not the reason. It was abandoned after some attempts to build a kind of social network inside, and probably they preferred people to create content on +1 instead of on blogs. But Blogger still exists, and there's a strong contradiction why to kill the reader for the blogs except one: Ads. Google Reader was bad for Ad business. And that's a big business in Google. And terribly sad.

Some places that do offer rss only offer truncated feeds so you actually have to open the website and be monetized and fingerprinted. there are of course workarounds but its an arms race with only a few maintainers.

You can use RSS for twitter via Nitter, it works perfectly for me.

> instead I have to dig around and either use some tool someone built for the purpose - a tool at the mercy of the walled garden whose wall they're peeking over

I know, it sucks, but I'm saying what solution is solid and works.

My dream is being able to get only the events off my Facebook feed. Invitations, events my "friends" are going to that show up on my feed, events people post on their timeline that would show up on my feed, whatever.

If Facebook had any kind of API I could probably build this, and stop using facebook otherwise. Which is probably why they don't?

At the end of the day, leaning into RSS for me lead to me leaning away from these sorts of services that don't support RSS or make it difficult.

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