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RSS: there's nothing better

davidyat.es

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Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#151

Post by tzahola »

Ascetik wrote: post #109
KORraN wrote: post #95

I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is hiding some content from me. Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories", from let's say…

>miss Google Reader Feedly

Feedly is a load of crap. They are force-feeding (no pun intended) you their “””curated””” (read: sponsored) news sources while making it intentionally hard to add your own sources. Last time I’ve checked there’s not even a way to enter an RSS URL manually - you have to “search” for the given site, and hope that their magic algorithm picks up the presence of an RSS feed... Absolutely useless.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#153

Post by JoshMnem »

leejo wrote: post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

The thing that caused RSS to fall out of favor is that most people were using Google Reader to consume it, and Google killed off Google Reader.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#154

Post by carlf79 »

ronjouch wrote: post #134
icebraining wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosted TinyTinyRSS on a cheap VPS (alongside my email).

Off-topic: what do you use for self-hosted email? I'm considering abandoning it and going back to gmail/fastmail, for the constant configuration hassle (DKIM/SPF, etc.) causing sent/received emails to be incorrectly marked as spam and/or refused :-/ Any "sane defaults, regular updates, impossible to shoot yourself in the foot" package to recommend?

I self-hosted for a long time but I eventually switched to fastmail mostly because, no matter how much I tweaked, I couldn’t get the spam down to a tolerable level and I got sick of tweaking the weighting on the various filters in spamassassin.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#155

Post by djhworld »

I mostly consume my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where 70% of the time you don't have cellphone or WiFi signal.

While my preferred RSS reader NewsBlur can download everything up front, for offline use, I tend to find a lot of sites truncate their articles (with a 'Click here to continue reading!") or just post a headline and a one sentence summary.

This makes me dislike using RSS, not because of the technology, just the way it's delivered these days. It's fine (if a little irritating) if you are online all the time, but offline it's practically unusable bar the few sites that offer full length articles

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#156

Post by nawtacawp »

ronjouch wrote: post #134
icebraining wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosted TinyTinyRSS on a cheap VPS (alongside my email).

Off-topic: what do you use for self-hosted email? I'm considering abandoning it and going back to gmail/fastmail, for the constant configuration hassle (DKIM/SPF, etc.) causing sent/received emails to be incorrectly marked as spam and/or refused :-/ Any "sane defaults, regular updates, impossible to shoot yourself in the foot" package to recommend?

I use https://mailinabox.email which handles everything you just mentioned.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#158

Post by JoshMnem »

tzahola wrote: post #126
leejo wrote: post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

It has the same limitations as HTML. For HTML, these limitations were circumvented by burying the platform under an ever increasing heap of javascript crap.

What limitations are those? HTML is great for what it's supposed to do (allow anyone to publish and distribute content online). RSS/Atom is great for what it does too.

Re: RSS: there's nothing better

#159

Post by JoshMnem »

matchagaucho wrote: post #54
leejo wrote: post #44

I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforeme…

Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles. The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it. If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.

> The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it.

Google (partly) killed it (by pulling people into Google Reader and then killing Google Reader).

Most (all?) news sites still offer RSS feeds.

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