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Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

What is up with the people who keep insisting RSS is dead? It never went anywhere. It’s some kind of twisted comedy sketch where someone insists a person is dead when that person is standing right there next to them.

I have used RSS continuously since near the beginning. When Google Reader died I just changed clients. There are many client options now, basically all of which are better than Google Reader ever was. Pretty much every website out there still has feeds. I can even use it for extremely old fashioned local news sites.

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It is not at all relevant any more. It will only be "revived" when top browsers and websites support it. The biggest website that I know that supports RSS is (old) reddit, and the biggest web browser that natively supports it is Internet Explorer which is definitely dead.

RSS is core to how I use the web but I agree that it's now a niche technology.

Note that a plurality of websites use Wordpress which has RSS feeds by default.

Vivaldi, a Chromium browser, has a built-in RSS feed reader. There's also Brave's News feature.

This is a really bad take.

First, almost all big websites support RSS. Just because there's no giant yellow RSS icon doesn't mean it's not supported, autodiscovery is the main way people subscribe to feeds these days. YouTube supports RSS. Nearly every news site supports it. Every blog. Every podcast. Substack supports it despite launching long after RSS supposedly died.

Even when a website has no RSS support, there's often a way to subscribe anyway using a scraper tool.

There's no reason for it to be supported in browsers when third party clients work great. By this standard email would be dead since browsers don't support it anymore. Most people would rather keep their subscriptions in an online service that can synchronize between devices and has native mobile apps.

Same! I use Feedbin (https://feedbin.com/) to aggregate new posts. On desktop, I'll sync Feedbin up with NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/).

Substack and Medium both support RSS. You can just type /feed after the URL. e.g., tk.substack.com/feed and tk.medium.com/feed

For other newsletters, I use Kill the Newsletter (https://kill-the-newsletter.com/) to subscribe via RSS.

IMO some people use RSS as a proxy for the decline of 'blogosphere culture', which was already in decline when Google Reader shut down.

That culture also still exists. People just stopped reading it. The way I see it, that culture has improved.

You see, there are still more blogs than you can shake a stick at. What left isn’t the content, it’s the money. Blogs are for people who are intrinsically motivated. They are publishing on the web because they want to, and for no other reason. They don’t care how many readers there are, if any.

All the extrinsically motivated people who need likes, views, subscribes, dollars, fame, they are the ones who left. If you believe that the presence of those people determines what is alive and dead, then sure, blogs are dead.

My personal view is the opposite. People who have nostalgia for the old web. It’s not the aesthetic. It’s not the technology. It’s that extrinsic motivations hadn’t yet fully taken hold. People made a Geocities website just because they wanted to. That web still exists. You just have to go to it on purpose, and you have to ignore the very loud platforms full of those with extrinsic motivations.

Yeah, there are more great bloggers just on Substack than I can even keep up with, and that's just one corner of the blogosphere. Some of the ones I read use a partial paywall, but all of them publish some free content and some post everything for free. Blogging is far from dead; it's just not the latest thing anymore.

>Pretty much every website out there still has feeds.

Where is the RSS button on Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, twitter, or YouTube? Most websites might have feeds, but not the most used web sites.

Twitter used to have that, haven't kept up with if they still do. Youtube can do it also I think in a limited way.

Twitter does not, they dropped their RSS feeds a long time ago. They still had a free API for a while so you could use a twitter-to-RSS tool but early in the Musk era the free API went away.

Yes, YouTube has RSS feeds for channels (technically I think the feed is per playlist but channels have a default playlist).

The feeds are there. There are apps that use them, even on TVs.

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCtI0Hod...

I don’t use those other sites, but YouTube, here ya go.

https://chuck.is/yt-rss/

Worst case, pretty much every modern client has features that let you subscribe to things that aren’t RSS friendly. For example Feedly (which I don’t use) has the ability to subscribe to Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Facebook, Telegram, Google News search queries, etc.

Looks like Feedly relies on third party websites to create the RSS, like FetchRss, which has limitations. I guess the existence of all these intermediate tools means some people do still care about RSS, even if the big companies are trying to keep us through walled garden.

https://docs.feedly.com/article/660-can-i-follow-facebook-fe...

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