Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

Is RSS still actively developed as a protocol? If not, why not? Are there any viable alternatives on the horizon?

I find it really troubling that we seem to have resigned ourselves to web content discovery and distribution belonging to corporations like Google and Meta.

Also grateful for any reading recommendations on this subject, both on RSS specifically and on the question of web content discovery/distribution broadly. (I’ve read through most of the stories/posts pronouncing RSS dead or resurrecting it and I’m not convinced either way.)

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I still get all of my news so I'd say it is still going strong.

I think you are right that the big platforms tend to remove RSS as they grow because they would rather have lock-in than providing the ibterfaces that their users want but that is a minor strike against RSS.

I think the biggest problem is just that users don't really know about it. The easy-to-discover auto-discovery buttons have been removed from browsers so most users don't even know. Based on my experience a lot of people are very happy with RSS ones you set them up with a feed reader and an extension that adds the RSS discovery back to the browser.

So I guess the biggest problem isn't the discovery of RSS feeds but the disicery of RSS itself.

What about the RSS protocol is lacking and in need of further development? It seems to get the job done.

I do agree about discovery in general, it's uncomfortable counting on Google, Microsoft, and Meta / TikTok for content discovery. Thankfully there are some smart folks working on fresh takes on the search engine.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

In fact changing is a barrier to wide adoption of technology. But as far as people actually using RSS, I don't think it has ever recovered from the consolidation with Google Reader and subsequent killing of the project.

100% agree that it does it what it does beautifully but it seems to me like there's little to no stewardship around it, and no one actively making sure that it can work with new types of content and provide a viable channel to professional publishers (in effect looking after both sides of the RSS "marketplace".)

Search engines are part of the puzzle for sure, but would love to see more transparent/open source recommender systems integrated with something like RSS to foster discovery without explicit queries.

New types of content? Like what?

RSS doesn't work all that well across multiple devices, such as a desktop and a mobile phone. You can subscribe to them on both, sure, but they won't be synced with each other.

Apps such as Google Reader and such resolve that problem, but the death of Google Reader really shook a lot of people's trust in RSS, I think. Plus now RSS has to compete with social media feeds, which are where a lot of people are looking for updates already.

Syncing across devices isn't the job of RSS, or any protocol, and certainly not the role of a data format in the case of RSS.

State is an application's job.

Ok then we can just phrase it as there's no standard way to sync RSS subs across apps. Point is its a clear user frustration with no easy solve.

Fever API is implemented in many apps.

Cross platform applications and web based readers exist. It is easily solved using one of those.

Let’s try and read the comment more charitably: most clients do not offer a good solution for this either, making the protocol less appealing than it might otherwise be.

I think you are not talking about rss

I think that is a good thing. For "syncing across devices" to be a server-side feature of RSS, that would require that the server be keeping track of who I am and what I have read. The way the RSS protocol is, it is stateless and may be completely anonymous. Keeping track of the state is (and should be) the application's job.

Lets face it, the ideals are great but RSS kinda sucks. Its stable, its sturdy and maybe this is my own ignorance but I can think of a lot of missing features the average user would expect.

I don't think there's a standard practice for caching, serving deltas, or anything other than polling the feed. Keep in mind I mean standard as in any generic reader will implement it.

There's no cross application protocols to share subscriptions, progress, already-read, or any other kind of state across apps.

Privacy is a problem. The feeds are generic and public. OAauth could probably be implemented into clients these days such that a generic feed reader could access private content but there are no standards for it.

Monetization is a huge problem. No one wants to scrape pay walls and no one wants to serve free content. DRM sucks but content providers are going to demand it so it should be integrated.

I'm fairly surprised I haven't seen a crypto-wallet integrated RSS standard with these features. How did that not make the cut for crypto ideas?

RSS is s data interchange standard. "subscriptions, progress, already-read, or any other kind of state across apps" is well out of scope of a data interchange format.

You may claim that the data interchange format is useless without those features being implemented on the app side, however it doesn't mean the data interchange format is flawed.

That said, pretty much any RSS app does what you describe. I use Feedly across many devices, and it's all synced. The other primary RSS powered app I use is Apple Podcasts which also syncs those states between all my devices.

Feeds being "public" isn't an issue. I pay for many feeds provided by creators on patreon. These are behind token based auth. I also have a few completely custom feeds that are behind http basic auth and generate on demand completely custom content.

Monetization for public feeds also doesn't seem like an issue. I get ads embedded into some feeds, and others like Ars just do snippets and I click though to the main site and see the ads there.

Why would crypto help at all here?

Damn happy none of those "features" exist

A clear standard for one. Last I checked, RSS did not have one clear standard, nor do most implementations abide by that standard.