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factorialboy

> Massive tech companies tried to own syndication. They failed.

Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.

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Yet I still use it on all devices and nothing beats it. Moved to Feedly when Google Reader died.

For apple ecosystem best client is https://reederapp.com/classic/

Arguably the best is NetNewsWire, which has been around in various forms for over 20 years and is still developed today https://netnewswire.com

https://theoldreader.com has been my go-to since google reader was killed. It's pretty good at sussing out the rss feed of random blogs if one exists, too.

NetNewsWire doesn’t have an in-app browser, which can be a dealbreaker (it was for me, last I tried it).

Cannot agree more.

I use RSS inside Telegram using a bot (should work with Matrix, Teams, etc as well) Allows syncing read stuff across devices and gives nice previews.

Sorry for the random question, but I’ve been trying to get more into RSS, and figure it’s worth asking someone who has a lot of experience - is there a reliable way to find an RSS feed for a given site, assuming it has one? Or is it a set of heuristics you try?

Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?

I use RSSHub Radar which finds both native feeds and some RSS-ified feeds for websites that don't support it. https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub-Radar

Ah this is great, thanks!

I use Folo which has Rsshub built in. You simply search for a source you want, or add your own with a known URL for everyone to use. Otherwise you can use Rsshub with a reader of your choice.

With decent RSS apps, you can generally just paste in the URL of any page (or the site's homepage) and they will take care of examining the HTML to find the URL of the actual feed.

Check the source code. Looks for "rss". If that returns too many hits then search for "application/rss+xml".

Exactly the approach that I've been using for years. Manual, but works!

That's actually what I've been doing, but sites that very clearly should have an RSS feed (specifically, our local governments' event calendar pages), don't, so I thought there might be some other route/heuristic/whatever that I've been missing :-(.

Google makes an extension for it - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rss-subscription-ex...

You can link it to your reader so you just click the button and it adds the feed into it.

> is there a reliable way to find an RSS feed for a given site, assuming it has one?

Any half-decent feed reader app will do it for you after just pasting the website’s address.

> Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?

https://openrss.org

https://rss-bridge.org

https://createfeed.fivefilters.org

And for newsletters:

https://notifier.in

https://kill-the-newsletter.com

Awesome, thanks! Especially for the pointers to those rssifiers.

For the first question, I should clarify that I'm hoping to just ingest these RSS feeds myself in various scripts. But yeah, makes sense that most of the good feed readers mostly take care of that.

Websites usually link to their RSS feed using a <link> attribute in the head of the page.

Browsers used to detect this and show an RSS icon near the address bar if the website you were viewing had a feed - and you could click the icon to see more details and subscribe.

I use this Firefox addon which replicates that functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feed-preview/

FreshRSS is a good self-hosted RSS feed reader, and you can configure it to scrape non-RSS webpages for updates too: https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/

Great tip on the <link>, thanks a lot! Also the pointer to FreshRSS, I might end up running an instance of that in our basement.

RSSHub radar to detect rss feeds. And you can write handlers for RSSHub to RSSify websites. Both open source.

Depends how you define lost. I still use it every day.

Is it a popular main stream thing? No. Does every since site offer feeds for every reasonable thing you could want to subscribe to? But does it still work quite well for those that want to use it? Yes.

What "war"? RSS is an open standard and still going strong. It doesn't need to win or compete or whatever business words from warfare are hyped nowadays. It just needs to exist. The genie is already out of the bottle, for 20+ years.

Lost it to who or what? What other feed syndication protocols are in widespread use? RSS is everywhere, and I don't see anything else comparable.

Discord. Reddit. Hacker News. WhatsApp. iMessage. Ex-Twitter. Instagram.

Reddit and HN fully support RSS.

Discord, WhatsApp, and iMessage are all messaging applications that aren't directly related to the use case for RSS.

That leaves Twitter and Instagram as the two major sites for which RSS would be applicable, but which don't natively offer RSS feeds. And a cursory web search reveals the large number of solutions people have come up with for subscribing to content from Twitter and Instagram via RSS, indicating that there's significant demand for it.

It's also worth noting that with Twitter in decline, the main competitors gaining traction, BlueSky and Mastodon, do both natively offer RSS feeds.

On top of that, the entire podcasting ecosystem is fundamentally based on RSS, and it's still the primary mechanism for syndicating blog content.

So RSS is not just alive and well, it's thriving.

It’s still alive and making strong steps towards a comeback in recent years.

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