* Yes, I know the article talks about the RSS icon, i'm just soapboxing.
RSS is great but it has one great flaw in that it doesn't scale that well by itself. If 2 million people subscribe to your feed and try to update it once an hour, that is 48 million requests a day just for RSS.
What does work well (and how things have evolved) is to have a service that polls RSS on behalf of its users. This was the beauty of Google Reader but plenty of replacements exist.
Vivaldi browser still does that.
The readers often cache the result for all users of the same feed. The only exception are readers that are running 100% locally. In that case using Etag or Last-Modified will make each request cheap and manageble.
Who's updating their RSS feeds once an hour 24 hours a day?
Anyway, a very popular site with that many millions of visitors already has to handle extreme traffic, regardless of RSS.
By default, security rules are on, but I can disable security rules programmatically for a hostname too.
fwiw, I once got a ddos on a host running their pages product, and got no charge for it. it also stayed up and didn't give captcha pages
RSS is a pull-type system, no?. So the end-user is causing the overload problem by hitting the publisher’s RSS feed every hour? The problem is out of the hands of the publisher…
Yes.
The web in general is also a pull-type system.
> So the end-user is causing the overload problem by hitting the publisher’s RSS feed every hour?
There is no overload problem.
And again, this math is off, because an end user is not even awake 24 hours a day: "If 2 million people subscribe to your feed and try to update it once an hour, that is 48 million requests a day just for RSS."
Is that wasteful? Does that make me a poor Internet citizen?
I'd never considered using RSS feeds from an app and pulling it directly. I have too many devices for that to be a great workflow.
Normally I'd say I was an outlier, but my gut feeling on this is that the people still using RSS and people self-hosting would overlap in a big way.
I personally don't think it's a problem. As I said, "a very popular site with that many millions of visitors already has to handle extreme traffic, regardless of RSS."
> I'd never considered using RSS feeds from an app and pulling it directly. I have too many devices for that to be a great workflow.
A lot of apps have sync to handle that workflow.
> my gut feeling on this is that the people still using RSS and people self-hosting would overlap in a big way.
My gut feeling is that most RSS users, including myself, simply use client apps.
Sorry, I wasn't thinking about the end user literally pushing a button. I was reading into the discussion here what I imagined to be a gap in the overall design philosophy of RSS where the end-user, using their own app or preferred methods, poll all of their favorite websites selecting among common defaults (Select the frequency you like to poll this RSS feed: weekly? daily? hourly? hehe minutely? secondly?).
In this scenario the user doesn't need to be awake 24 hours a day. They just need to use software which stupidly hits someone's server like they're doing a denial of service attack. As your comment alludes no one needs to be that up-to-date.
In contrast, there was another solution: "...service that polls RSS on behalf of its users."
Again, reading the discussion I imagined the wild west of the internet has inexpert users choosing unsane defaults and overloading small self-hosting content providers. Compared to third-party aggregators who are trying to make money by solving a "Tragedy of the Commons" problem.
But the user's computer would need to be awake 24 hours a day, which is usually not the case.
And once per hour is not a DoS attack.
I use the Awesome RSS add-on for that in Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/
How long after Google Reader was canceled did FF remove RSS?
Firefox removed RSS support in version 64 on December 11, 2018, approximately 5 years and 5 months later.
And there are always CDNs if you really have a large, global audience.
I'm still continually astounded that the tech community appeared to absolutely swallow Google's utter bullshit answers about why they shut down Reader; that really marked a turning point.