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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?

#171

Post by CAT0 »

afterburner wrote: post #130
thinkloop wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also have a nice web interface https://playbeta.pocketcasts.com/web/

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

#172

Post by walshemj »

jon_richards wrote: post #154
princekolt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”,…

An example: My server sends notification emails to the company automatically. Everyone is using gmail to view their emails. When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that. Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hit…

Well you just need to start using a real MUA like outlook or thunderbird and drop gmail

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

#173

Post by insertnickname »

walshemj wrote: post #170
princekolt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”,…

:-) RFC822 mail is fairly simple at its heart - X.400 was a lot more detailed

If you're a new implementor, you'll be shocked at how badly 822 was designed. Extracting even the simplest information from a message---the author's address, for example, or the sending date---is excruciatingly painful. And I see no sign that we'll ever be rid of the horrors of 822 syntax; how can we convince users to convert their old mailboxes to a sensible new format?

https://cr.yp.to/immhf.html

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

#174

Post by keypress »

username223 wrote: post #167
sago wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, R…

Don't most blogging platforms have the option to email replies? In any case, I prefer a bit of friction in the comment process, since it discourages people from "shooting off" without thinking.

Usenet with dial-up was good for this. You'd compose your reply, then look it back up, read over, amend, perhaps delete or send later. It made for more considered responses.

I've noticed with HN it's very swarm-like and transient these days. Comment following is also difficult without some thread control. At a minimum you need collapsible threads. Too much to read, don't bother, say something that's been said already - and add to the noise. Or have a bypassed dangling leaf comment.

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

#175

Post by sametmax »

svalorzen wrote: post #94

One thing I don't understand is people who use all these websites to handle RSS. I've always used Firefox addons in order to handle RSS (before LiveClick which was awesome, now FeedBro or similar). Why would you give control away for something as decentralized as RSS?

Regilar users don't know what a url is. They don't choose their gear. They may, sometime, accept a simple proposal. The HN bubble is strong, you need to pop it.

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

#176

Post by sametmax »

z3t4 wrote: post #122

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.

Firefox does this, albeit in a more subtile and hence less discoverable way.

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

#177

Post by walshemj »

insertnickname wrote: post #173
walshemj wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:-) RFC822 mail is fairly simple at its heart - X.400 was a lot more detailed

If you're a new implementor, you'll be shocked at how badly 822 was designed. Extracting even the simplest information from a message---the author's address, for example, or the sending date---is excruciatingly painful. And I see no sign that we'll ever be rid of the horrors of 822 syntax; how can we convince users to convert their old mailboxes to a sensible new format? https://cr.yp.to/immhf.html

Well as some one who used to work on the UK's x.400 ADMD I would agree.

How ever TCP/IP protocols won the standards war which on balance is better - other wise you'd have what your PTT wanted to have sub :-)

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

#178

Post by Jaruzel »

RSS is the prime way I consume my daily news, and has been for several years now.

I even knocked up a rather lame online reader on a spare domain I had: https://www.weegeeks.com

That way, regardless what machine I'm on, I can still get my fix. It needs a re-write to bring it up to modern standards, but it still does a sterling job.

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

#179

Post by Bromskloss »

modernerd wrote: post #87

Yes. But please not RSS. At least newer initiatives like JSON Feed have maintainers who respond to requests for improvements. RSS feels like an abandoned standard. I tried to submit an improvement to the author directly to explicitly allow HTTPS URLs in light of upcoming iTunes changes to enforce HTTPS; they said by email that of course HTTPS resources are valid in their view, but they weren't prepared to actively up…

How does, in your opinion, JSON Feed compare to Atom?

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

#180

Post by acdha »

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.

The only thing which killed Reader was Google management trying to make Google+ popular. Reader was extremely popular (and well outside of IT circles - I still hear from librarians, scientists, policy wonks, etc. who are bitter about Google taking away their information filter. In DC it was common to see other people on metro in the morning with the popular mobile apps open, just like you now see the Facebook blue) and the social network there was quite active until the day Google shut it down and forced everyone into the alpha-quality Google+.
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