The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025)
smartlab.at
smartlab.at
And that’s the answer about RSS renaissance. If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
Apparently is is called web feed, although I never have heard this until I searched off the back of your comment[0].
Apparently, web feed also encompasses Atom and JSON feed as well as RSS, which is probably more in the spirit of how people actually say "RSS".
1. How do you subscribe? 2. How do you post your own? 3. Do I need a browser to read feeds? 4. Can I view my feed from any device?
The current status quo for web feeds is very unfriendly to new users. If you click on an rss icon or an rss feed link, it takes you to a white page with a bunch of text that you don't understand. It just makes you think you're not supposed to be here, so you close the tab and leave.
Many feed readers are old and look dated. The UI can often be confused for an email client. And many of these readers don't support synchronizing feeds with different devices.
RSS, has no vowels, no information, and looks like an alphabet term you might see at the doctor’s office or in an HR onboarding form at a corpo.
"I'll ask Chat about x!"
(It's possible I'm entirely missing that this was intended in sarcasm, but it at least seems like it's was intended seriously to me)
You'd click a link on a website that says some iteration of "subscribe" or "feed" and the browser would handle it for you, putting the feed into your bookmarks or whatever.
Users never had to know what RSS is. They just clicked "subscribe" and it worked.
You'd have to do the same explaining of Bluetooth or WiFi, both things that non-technical people are familiar with today, if OSes, for some reason, removed support for them.
Looking how podcasts advertise themselves, those who do use RSS advertise "Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app" here.
You also have people producing "podcasts" that only exist on youtube.
Here's the thing, one should not need to explain it no mire. Devices or applications accessing content with an RSS option should present it to the end user through a convenient interface.
This enters a failure mode very soon, especially because most people using RSS-like technologies would typically subscribe to more sources than they can typically read through. Like it or not, _the algorithm_ does serve the purpose in prioritizing and discovery. The trouble, IMO, is with the objectives for these recommendation and ranking algorithms.
A middleman/aggregator who is paid by subscribers would be incentivized for the users, a marketplace-like aggregator would always have trade-offs.
I do sort of agree with the general premise. The sort of social media that sort of replaced RSS is largely dead.
So yes, having kind of re-ranking _algorithm_ can be a good thing, whether we like it or not.
Given the amount of AI generated content out there, I am increasingly searching for ways to keep track of the sources I DO trust to be human-made.
RSS would completely solve that problem in a way that algorithms just reintroduce, because it forces you to tailor the content yourself.
RSS protects against none of these.
Interest level works far better than category for social-media feeds, if only because few people (as opposed to organisations) tend to stick to a given topic. On Google+, one feature I used for my own outbound content was its own classification system, such that my tech posts went to a tech channel, science to science, news/current events, etc. to their own. Those following me could choose which of those they were interested in or not.
And no, G+ "Circles" were hardly straightforward or convenient to use.
But the notion of restricting your highest priority follow list to a small set (10 -- 50 profiles or feeds, and less is definitely more here) is key.
Over time that list will likely grow, but more because many of the feeds have fallen silent or infrequent. Pruning the departed actually takes some work, and is something I'll do maybe once a year or so.
The way I'd arrived at this though was that I'd gotten desperately sick of G+ (and Google) at one point, and having initially followed many, many profiles with abandon, I pruned off virtually all of them, leaving a small core I particularly cared about. Ironically, as I was trying to make myself less dependent on the network, not more, my stream quality improved immensely. Virtually all of the annoying bullshit, even if only vaguely annoying, vanished. The people I was left with largely knew me and interacted with me regularly, and had things to say I found interesting.
G+ is gone, but I've carried through that strategy to Mastodon (still relatively active, though I've taken a break much of this year) and Diaspora* (dying its slow death, but something I'll still check into a few times a year). A small but interesting curation still proves quite compelling. A key realisation was that the voluble streams which do occasionally produce an interesting insight will almost always have those forwarded by others I do follow directly, allowing me to rely on them (or their own upstreams) for curation.
It's also given me insight into mechanics from the age of print newspapers and magazines: when a local region had its own publication (as with newspapers), syndication or curation would gather content from elsewhere, and major stories tended to get carried locally. It might seem that distant publications produced exemplary content, but in truth what I'd read was creamed off the very top, and digging further into such a source often proved disappointing. I keep that in mind with current social / algorithmic / stream-based media. Economics of print publication mean that that former behaviour is largely lost to us now, but high-quality periodic publications (The Economist, Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and the like) can remain worth picking up and reading even now, should you happen across a physical storefront actually carrying them. Might even choose to subscribe should the desire be strong enough.
To be clear, G+ Circle Management was a tedious, largely unrewarding, PITA, both in general and in the specific mechanisms provided through the G+ interface. Though pruning was quite often quite rewarding.
More problematic is when you're searching for needles in haystacks / nuggets of gold: sparse signal in high-noise environments.
I feel like user generated sorting algorithms would be a great fit for RSS. Power users would get an ability to tweak their feeds to their liking, while other users would have a lot to choose from
And I now use it far more than I ever used Reeder.
There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.
To me that's peak usability, I can use my mail workflow to have cross-device state, I can use my mail clients tagging and spam support to filter, and I have a reasonably good searching facility too.
Some sites only include "teasers" rather than full posts, but they're a minority.
They also have a public instance.
FreshRSS acts first as your central backend to manage your subscriptions, refresh and read status.
You can use its web UI to act on it, or you can use any reader app you want (NNW, Reeder...)
1. It updates the feeds even though I'm not online on any device - this is an issue if your only RSS reader is on a desktop you turn off. You might miss items on feeds that roll over after X entries
2. I can read from multiple devices.
I mainly read on my laptop, big screen for big articles and all that. But sometimes I want to check the feeds on my phone, but don't want to wade through 420 articles I've already read on my actual computer -> syncing with single source is essential.
3. I can easily run feed hydrators on the same machine as FreshRSS.
For example: My HN feed is automatically filtered by the hydrator based on comment count, vote count, key words etc. Stuff that's not in the feed. It also grabs the linked article's OpenGraph data and inserts it to the feed so that I can get a preview of the article without opening the link at all.
Self-hosted is its own can of worms. Google Reader was not self-hosted either.
Then, one by one, Google started killing more services than it was announcing (Wave, News, +, etc), and enshittifying with spyware those that were still up
RSS appears good now only because it’s not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I don’t use RSS, so I don’t really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
I envision that the filtering mechanism CAN use any rules - hand-written, heuristics, old-school machine learning, LLMs. Just with a key difference - you are the one controlling it. No hidden tricks to make you "engaged" (read: addicted) or "sold".
If you feel it is too much politics, you reduce it. If too little - add. If you want less clickbaits and intellectual fast food, you filter it. Etc, etc.
About that, I was sad to see that TDMRep [1] doesn't provide a way to signal reservation for RSS feed, so it has to be done at the HTTP level, otherwise the same content delivered in RSS feed can be legitimately scrapped and mined even if the author opted-out using an HTML meta tag on the website.
RSS allows content and algorithms to remain independent. E.g. I fully take advantage of RSS for my blog recommendation platform that has no relationship with the recommended sites.
So? If plain RSS exists, then you can still consume it the way you want.
I'd like to remind that when RSS was really popular we had "planet" aggregators everywhere, where someone interested in particular topic bundled posts from multiple people.
It's not a technical problem. Less effort will always be more popular and drown out more effort in the mainstream.
Imagine if you could order completely free McDonald's food to your doorstep anytime and could also choose to cook your meals at home. Guess what portion of people would choose which option.
Your whole comment makes no sense to me. Completely confusing.
Who are you arguing with? Why RSS has to compete with anything? Why do you even refer to it as "technology" - it's a text file people used to edit by hand in notepad. And maybe automate that with a script in their html editor.
It was popular, it's a fact. It was and is included in multiple blogging platforms. It was used by techies. It was used by non-techies. Learning curve was non existent and it was trivial to use on both ends.
What created friction was: killing the biggest RSS reader service that was free for all and killing very good support in browsers.
It used to be trivial - every browser was showing an orange button if site had rss. You could click it. You could add the feed to browser bookmark bar. It would display feed as nice bookmarks, downloading it live. This is what we lost - and we lost it because big companies wanted us to be entrenched in their socials. The rest was literally trivial.
You are talking about bookmarks and stuff but that's not how regular people use the internet. They open a handful of social media apps and scroll whatever is shown to them.
They used to. Even Internet Explorer had RSS support. Sites had RSS icons and even instructions for undecided.
In my surroundings both young and old users loved to discover new sites and catalogue them. Bookmarks was one of the most important things to back up.
Del.icio.us was a thing, and a quite popular one.
I think modern Internet will reach a point where users will notice small web is the only thing worth their time, full circle.
We already have platforms like feedly that has optional AI curated feeds.
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
It’s my primary hn reader now.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
This is ideology, not facts. They specifically prioritized the users as shown by the fact their userbase and engagement have only grown. Is this a good thing for the users? Hard to say and we can argue, but the only "hard" metric we have says they indeed prioritize users. It's just that users love the social media so much they are willing to tolerate ads. And for advertisers it is simply the place with the most users and engagements.
I like RSS, I'm even building my own RSS reader right now has an algorithmic feed. But the tech itself is pretty much as good as dead. Some news media websites don't even have it anymore. The ones that do tend to have only one global feed even though nothing prevents them from running multiple ones (per category, per author, etc). Good that Substack and platforms like it have RSS at least.
I have miniflux set up so it integrates with instapaper so I get interesting articles on my kindle. And saving an article will send it to karakeep automatically for permanent storage! (image, video, screen shots and text storage).
Pretty pretty pretty good.
I'll have to check out karakeep. I'm running linkwarden right now but it's not really doing it for me.
In a world where every site with a feed is algorithm-driven makes sense that RSS would eventually come back around.
Didn’t/doesnt have to be RSS, I’m no devotee to it. But some standard that lets you import things into your own “feed”
To really read what you want, there is only one way: to create your own parsers for each source, on top of which there will be various filters, both based on simple words/phrases and contextual. For example, I do this either in the form of plugins or scripts for ViolentMonkey, including here on HN, where the design has been completely changed to tabular. Many topics, domains, and authors are not even displayed. Comments that contain 1-2-3 mentions of a certain word/phrase are also hidden.
For example, I have completely blocked everything related to “AI”: famous people, companies, programs, products. As well as various hot topics: the US military, ICE, age verification (because there are two stupid camps for and against, without an objective approach and assessment). And many other topics (discussions/comments): political, military, or mentions of specific countries or peoples whose bots are numerous here: israel, russia, china, iran, india. And the corresponding users are blocked.
Why do I block so much? Because on these topics, either stupid people or bots write the same thing year after year. Why should I see this spam? For politics and economics, I go to other resources, and there are other filters there.
I digress a little. Overall, RSS won't help here. Someone will mention tagging, and we've all been through that too, when whole paragraphs of tags start to form, where blocking one tag that could have been left out hides a good article. Then someone will say that such filters could be configured in RSS... well, yes, if you take it again and make your own client/wrapper, because all clients are limited in their own way, just like website designs.
e.g. I use Feedly, and set lots of mute filters to screen out topics.
I feel tiktok is slightly more difficult to drop than cigarettes.
it kills SEO advertising. someone writing an article for the purpose of ranking high and making money off of clicks doesnt get clicks anymore because of AI summaries.
direct content-to-ad-revenue is dead. Either you're a hobbyist and write for the heck of it - so your writing will be honest and better quality. Or, you're a product vendor and your writing is documentation meant to be found by AI summaries, again - that's honest.
Once profit is gone, love is all left.
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
I truly do not believe this is the same type of topic. People visit websites and RSS feeds and writers they care about, and don't ask LLMs for this content. They ask LLMs for content that they don't care about those elements for.
If I want to know what Gruber thinks about iPhone whatever, I'm just going to check Daring Fireball. I'm not going to ask Claude what Gruber thinks.
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they don’t. That’s why RSS doesn’t get pushed or used more often.
These evangelists want to make it sound like all we need to do is get everyone on board with RSS and we’ll all just hold hands and share the web.
People don’t browse the web, there’s like 10 websites, that’s the whole internet.
Everything else is just asteroids and abandoned space stations.
Doesn't fix the problem of discovering sources that aren't "AI" slop.
Also wondering if the article is "AI" slop or not. Seems a bit too verbose for me.
But evaluating AI content, SEO content, or affiliate content isn't the problem RSS is meant to solve.
Interesting thing is, much of what AI is now regurgitating is human output, accumulated over the years. Model training dataset. Stuff like Reddit posts, even posts here?
If, say, AI output becomes THE 99% over the next few years, we will enter the era of incestuous inbreeding within AI -when it simply regurgitates its own output.
Wonder what will be the result at that point!
planning to set up 'topics' which can be a feed you can subscribe to that combine different source types, that are tagged and associated to the topic based on previous content.
also, email send outs per topic.
I believe human validation protocols might help, think captcha enabled ping backs, but RSS I believe may have very little impact on its own
Not sure if I'm missing something, but for AI slop to get into your RSS feed, you have to be following something with slop which can easily be unfollowed; this is unlike algorithmically driven recommendations where there is no direct filter from your end.
If you have the key to the paywall, then you can create a feed hydrator to fetch the content to the feed.
We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data.
I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.
An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc)
There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt
The only thing you have to do is ensure it can reliably get the response html. Maybe MCP browser + proxy or mirror to seem more human.
I built this for myself. The idea is that each feed is a url + title + a prompt to tell the LLM how to extract the links you want so that it generalizes over all websites.
And each feed item is a canonicalized url + title + a local copy of the content at that url which is an improvement over RSS since so many RSS feeds don't even contain the content.
Does your kid?
So it's not a problem with the RSS tech, but with its use case.
It's like saying there's going to be a resurgence of IRC.
There won't be.
I may be, but my girlfriend isn't and she's using it to follow the government and job postings. But you're moving the goalposts, RSS is getting new attention and it doesn't matter who that attention is from. It's happening, you don't have to use it we don't care but let us have our feeds.
Also if you've ever worked in the podcast space you'd know they all release with RSS, so many people are using it without knowing. Maybe even you?