Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 170 posts

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#41

Post by chrisofspades »

Skyy93 wrote: post #22
planb wrote: post #14

You are focusing on the consumption side and your proposed steps seem like a good way to bring back easy consumption of RSS feeds. But the problem lies elsewhere: the blogs I regularly visit still have RSS feeds, but most content now isn’t in blogs anymore. For-profit sites have crippled or completely dropped their feeds to make users see ads. Many people that would have been bloggers a decade ago just publish thread…

You would need a monetizing option for RSS Feeds, but is this really something that we want? Enjoy your new RSS Feed about Quantum Mechanics, featured by BIGCOMPANY, we sell the shitty products you like.

That's what FeedBurner [1] was for. Google put that into maintenance mode last July.

[1] https://feedburner.google.com/

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#42

Post by chrisofspades »

Nextgrid wrote: post #29

I was thinking the other day about RSS-based social media. Imagine a service that offers a social media experience comparable with Twitter/Insta/Tumblr with rich clients, but under the hood it's all RSS, so not only can you subscribe to third-party feeds out of the box but your "profile" is also an RSS feed that other people outside of the platform can also subscribe to.

You've just described FriendFeed. RIP. :(

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#43

Post by onli »

vitovito wrote: post #38

Is https://aboutfeeds.com/ an answer to #2 and/or #5?

I think it covers 5. Could be extended a bit (especially if in the future there really exists a group with activity that can be presented as well), but it's awesome and very close! Are you the author?

2 was different. I was thinking about what happens when a user clicks on a feed - it's not very user friendly, especially now that browsers just show the XML file content. If we had a mechanism that wraps that request and gives the user a way to subscribe directly via one of the many available feed reader, that would help a lot.

The idea is not completely novel, https://github.com/superfeedr/subtome goes into the direction but I think it is broken. A website carried by an independent group could be a solution. Maybe even something that could help in case browsers are open for some changes here, but don't want to create the UI part. Or when working on extending a CMS and instead of implementing that UI again, we use that mechanism to wrap the feed. As a web developer making it a website was probably an idea near to me, but there might be better solutions.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#44

Post by marbu »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #23

Most people don’t use RSS because most people don’t prefer to consume the web that way nor that sort of content. They are scrolling social media and aggregators, not pruning their long form content subscriptions. Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using? Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when…

Thanks for referencing https://fraidyc.at/ - I haven't heard about it before.

I agree that the way how RSS clients were designed 10 years ago wouldn't work well today, but that is an a problem with architecture and UX design of rss client. I don't think that it has anything to do with the RSS or ATOM XML data structure standard.

Having machine readable data in open format is useful so that anyone can use it, and create a it's own solution without spending too much time on interpreting the data. While with unstructured, javascript heavy sites one would need to build it's own little search engine to be able to process it and desing/train it's solution for reasonable information extraction, which increases barriers to entry.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#46

Post by symkat »

HeckFeck wrote: post #16
symkat wrote: post #2

I made https://blogdb.org/ to collect blogs from around the Internet, it gets an RSS feed of the blogs. I posted a Show HN about it yesterday that didn't get much traction. The code is all open source, at https://github.com/symkat/BlogDB/ and I wrote an article on my own blog about initially writing the software from design to deployment: https://modfoss.com/building-blogdb.html

Delighted to see that BlogDB is written in Perl! I've submitted my blog to this directory/aggregator. Sites like these are indispensible for strengethening the independent Web.

Thank you! I'm a huge fan of Perl too, looks like your blog is listed now!

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#47

Post by symkat »

ms123 wrote: post #12
symkat wrote: post #2

I made https://blogdb.org/ to collect blogs from around the Internet, it gets an RSS feed of the blogs. I posted a Show HN about it yesterday that didn't get much traction. The code is all open source, at https://github.com/symkat/BlogDB/ and I wrote an article on my own blog about initially writing the software from design to deployment: https://modfoss.com/building-blogdb.html

Very nice! I did something similar with https://nightfall.city

Thanks, that's pretty neat!

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#48

Post by coldpie »

planb wrote: post #14

You are focusing on the consumption side and your proposed steps seem like a good way to bring back easy consumption of RSS feeds. But the problem lies elsewhere: the blogs I regularly visit still have RSS feeds, but most content now isn’t in blogs anymore. For-profit sites have crippled or completely dropped their feeds to make users see ads. Many people that would have been bloggers a decade ago just publish thread…

A good compromise is to just ship the headline and first paragraph or two, with a link to the full article.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#49

Post by tailspin2019 »

onli wrote: post #17
mawise wrote: post #11

I think this is a great idea. I don't have much time to commit right now but I'd love to stay connected with your efforts. Do you want to put up a quick google form or similar to collect emails of people like me who are interested if you have relevant updates?

Joining the chat at https://gitter.im/FosterRSS/community would probably not work as well, as it would not be limited to relevant updates?

Just a bit of feedback, as someone who hasn't used Gitter before, I just clicked that link and was invited to join by logging in with GitLab, GitHub or Twitter.

I don't use my GitHub account for logging in to other sites without a decent amount of consideration (I didn't sign up to GitHub to use it as an SSO system and generally don't like using it for that purpose). And I have neither of the other two accounts.

So I would agree with the parent that removing some of the friction and offering people an email form to drop their email into might get you a higher uptake?

I am however interested in these efforts. For reference, my email is in my profile if that helps.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#50

Post by symkat »

onli wrote: post #6
symkat wrote: post #2

I made https://blogdb.org/ to collect blogs from around the Internet, it gets an RSS feed of the blogs. I posted a Show HN about it yesterday that didn't get much traction. The code is all open source, at https://github.com/symkat/BlogDB/ and I wrote an article on my own blog about initially writing the software from design to deployment: https://modfoss.com/building-blogdb.html

Ah, the discovery angle. I didn't think of that. Looks like a nice project, and it shows what RSS can help build. Fits well I think.

Thank you! I'm thrilled people are finding it useful!
Post reply on HN