Do people still use RSS feeds?
I work on a similar product[0], conceptually at least, to Pipes, and many of our users have asked for RSS feeds as output.
Until now I’ve rationalized that as low priority, but maybe I’m wrong?
If your users are asking for it then it's locally popular regardless of how much use it gets on the general internet, and therefore it should be important to you. Local popularity (eg the market for your app) is significantly more important to product design than general popularity.
It's not a complicated thing to get setup! There's a bunch of details you can flub but at the end of the day it's a big thing of markup. The "good enough" thing is easy.
Another data point from me: I recently started unsubscribing from as many newsletters as possible, and have organized them into hierarchical tree structures in my RSS feed reader instead, according to priority and topics. With many hundred sources by now, some of them extremely prolific posters, I rarely make it past the top priority ones, but for the rest, there is the occasional browse, and a full-text search that I can use on specific topics.
This setup allows me to consume newsletters and blogposts much more efficiently, and the mailbox gets mainly used for correspondence, not general stuff. Suits me just fine, and as an added bonus: I now more seldom have the feeling my every move-move is monitored and stored by who knows who, who knows where, for who knows what purpose.
> move-move
= mouse-move
Or you just send your users to Pipes, they could use a download and "build feed" block to create a feed on their own ;)
Edit: Though I noticed that the endpoint of your loops can be specific actions, like a text message, that wouldn't translate of course. More a "put it into the feed" target action then.
It’s not perfect and has a display limit of 50 for a feed’s most recent items, and you can’t sort feeds (unless you pay). But it works well enough. What’s nice is that it actually renders YT links in the reader, with the option to view them in “reader mode”, which conveniently prevents ads from showing.
Daily. For me RSS feed is the only option to pick what I want to read instead of reading what promoter wants me to read.
If there are other ways - I would be happy to know.