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It's time to head back to RSS?

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Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#121

Post by dageshi »

mandelbulb wrote: post #104
grayrest wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When did RSS go out of style anyway? It went away when Google killed Reader. Reader had more or less killed off the independent RSS reader market. When it got shuttered, alternatives weren't well developed and people shifted more or less entirely onto Twitter. The Twitter shift had been happening already but the shutdown kind of forced the issue.

Not true at all. Alternatives were already available when Google Reader(GR) closed, i.e. July 2013. Inoreader, which was feature-complete in regards to GR, was launched a month after the announcement in March. That's why Feedly hogged most of the momentum as it was released in 2008 already. I would say Google Reader's discontinuation actually increased the popularity of RSS. The protocol was big news for a few weeks,…

Op's example is a textbook example of what happened to me. I used to have a lot of RSS feeds in Google Reader, when it closed I never moved anywhere else because at the time there wasn't an obvious alternative.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#122

Post by z3t4 »

My phone, an old Nokia, has a built in RSS reader and when I visit a web site that has RSS I get a "follow" button next to favorite. I can even set the RSS reader to show me a notification when there's an update. The same convenience could probably be accomplished with a browser extension or native app.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#123

Post by WA »

awiesenhofer wrote: post #105
grayrest wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When did RSS go out of style anyway? It went away when Google killed Reader. Reader had more or less killed off the independent RSS reader market. When it got shuttered, alternatives weren't well developed and people shifted more or less entirely onto Twitter. The Twitter shift had been happening already but the shutdown kind of forced the issue.

I think you and HN in general vastly overstates the gravitas of the Google Reader shutdown. I loved it too but the demise of RSS happened probably more because of people switching to Twitter, Facebook and others as their "aggregator" than by killing off one RSS-Reader.

I agree. I never used Reader and I think I hardly heard of it before it was shut down.

I wasn’t a heavy RSS user, but had a few bookmarks in Firefox – and the same thing is doable today.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#124

Post by sago »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #99
sago wrote: post #55

RSS is awesome. Bring on its resurgence. But. It is fundamentally not fit as a Facebook or social media replacement because of it's lack of simple commenting support. It suits some curmudgeonly old farts like me, perhaps. But even I want to feedback sometimes or join in the discussion (hence this comment). Are there solutions that a content creator can provide, via RSS, without requiring its readers to install partic…

RSS is, fundamentally, just links to web pages. Why would it need to have built-in commenting? Just go to the linked page and comment there.

We don't need it to have comments. But I think the lack of commenting is the big problem of an RSS focused ecosystem.

Shooting comments off into the ether is fine by clicking the page and commenting there. But, if you have a couple of dozen blogs in your RSS feed, and leave a handful of comments a day, clicking back through the specific place to see if you've been responded to is way too much effort. Sites like HN, Reddit, and Facebook, have a central mechanism by which you can be notified.

In the '10s I had a blog with over 1000 readers, I had fewer comments, and less community than the replacement Facebook group has with a fraction of that number.

That may not be a problem for publishers who are purely interested in eyeballs. But that isn't all of them. If the aim is to free content from the walled garden (which I think is an important goal), then it matters.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#125

Post by some_account »

mosselman wrote: post #76

I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway? The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommendi…

You can't show ads in it. I even asked a few sites to set it up a few years ago but they wouldn't. They wanted the income from the ads to run the site.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#127

Post by geraldbauer »

Remember planets - public online news readers? Why not build your own little news feed with pluto [1] (and SQLite) and the universal feedparser library [2] supporting RSS, JSON Feed, Feed.TXT, HTML Microformat Feeds, and many more formats :-). [1] https://github.com/feedreader [2] https://github.com/feedparser

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#128

Post by jobigoud »

pjmlp wrote: post #13

It never went away, my native client has always worked.

This so much. Never saw the appeal of web based readers. Been using a desktop based newsfeed for more than a decade.

And since we are using it to have a more focused experience, less clutter, etc. it seems logical to have it away from the browser where distractions are just a click away.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#130

Post by afterburner »

thinkloop wrote: post #120
Zhyl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Podcasting feels like an alternate reality where none of the massive players took over and everything stayed federated.

Interesting you say that, I got into podcasts recently (a bit late I know) and found the space very confusing. It's kind'of all on iTunes, but not really, you can get them from their source sites, but also some apps have a subset. Understanding the model is not easy. I didn't know it was powered by rss until this thread. I am really pro federation, and I am not deterred, but I am an engineer on HN. I wonder why email…

Pocket Casts is a nice podcast app.
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