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RSS is undead

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Re: RSS is undead

#191
post #89

I wish we could go back to the old protocols like RSS, email and SMS. They were open and you could use any client you like and they never had problems with walled gardens. Sometime you have to lose your freedom to really value it like RMS said.

While I mostly agree, I'm not sure going back to SMS is going to help solve a whole lot of problems-of-the-2010s. I'd rather break free from mass surveillance than embrace it, and standardizing new federated encrypted messaging protocols will do this. Unfortunately, as EFF points out in their recent series about encrypted texting, a one-size-fits-all solution is difficult.

I totally agree. However, SMS is a protocol that just works on ANY mobile phone.

Re: RSS is undead

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Danny Crighton has a CS degree from Stanford. I'm not entirely convinced by the article either, but your criticism would be a bit more credible if you managed to avoid being factually wrong.

You can have a CS degree and never code.

Certainly not in Portuguese universities, unless you got the degree with some "help", like a few of our politicians.

Re: RSS is undead

#193
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?

I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up. I missed out on the whole RSS craze (prison will do that to you). But I have always wondered -- so many people lament the fact that Google killed it -- why hasn't anyone forked/cloned it's UI and feature-set? You don't want to just straight up copy it and wake the Google lawyers from their nests obviously, but why not make something tha…

>I see Google Reader mentioned a lot when virtually anything RSS-related comes up.

As someone who relied on RSS for years, and did not use Google Reader, this equivalency between RSS and Google Reader annoys me greatly. Google didn't kill RSS. RSS is alive and well - almost all sites have a feed.

I used to have an RSS reader set up on my own server. For people who do not want to do that, just use an RSS software on your machine and update once a day.

Re: RSS is undead

#194
post #25

This whole "RSS died" narrative illustrates a basic problem with how we understand the internet. Since there's no unified unbiased sort of "index", like GDP, to tell us just what proportion of users on the internet uses RSS anymore, we're stuck having to rely on socially propogated ideas about the state. This leads to all the typical problems with socially defined truth, such as drift as a consequence of incentives (…

Surely Google Reader had numbers that influenced the decision to shut it down?

I never understood why use a browser for doing something that should naturally be done in a native app.

Shutting down Reader had zero effect on my RSS reading habits.

Re: RSS is undead

#195
I don't know if this is as much of a comeback for RSS as a comeback for self-hosted services.

I needed RSS enough to self-host Fever (on A Small Orange which is a POS that I need to migrate from, if anyone can recommend me a simple and user-friendly alternative).

Similarly, I've been waiting for Pinry to release version 2, but this seems to have eluded the team for a few years unfortunately.

It physically hurts when I see people purge their tweet history, because I can't imagine giving up all that history, especially when you can at least export your stuff first - which doesn't include your likes and DMs.

I don't think the latest Instagram/Facebook/Twitter brouhaha has been a vindication for RSS per se, but definitely one for self-hosting, especially as services die or get acquired left and right.

You might be cute and argue that for RSS being such a big deal, there sure aren't any overnight successes 15+ years in the making to migrate to at this point. I know Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard fame was working on an RSS reader, but that seems to have stalled. And Digg just shut down theirs, which was really good. Fever is also shut down, but that doesn't matter much when it's self-hosted - except for the crazy fees ASO is charging people like me.

Re: RSS is undead

#196
post #13

No one has mentioned NewsBlur yet. It's fantastic as an RSS reader, and provides intelligence training (filtering) for only subjects you might be interested in, allowing you to tame high-rate RSS feeds quite easily: http://newsblur.com/

NewsBlur is excellent, and a great way to collate all my feeds across categories (quant finance, ML/data science, CS/tech, science, humanities). I have been a happy subscriber since 2013, and I use it on an approximately daily basis.

Re: RSS is undead

#198
RSS (currently via Feedly) is how I use Internet. And some of the drawbacks mentioned in this articles are exactly why I use it.

Re: RSS is undead

#199
post #13

No one has mentioned NewsBlur yet. It's fantastic as an RSS reader, and provides intelligence training (filtering) for only subjects you might be interested in, allowing you to tame high-rate RSS feeds quite easily: http://newsblur.com/

Can this be self-hosted?

It is not really meant for self hosting. Newsblur is build to scale and basicly needs 3 servers/envirements (app, db, task) and also Sentry, Redis, Celery, RabbitMQ, Postresql, MongoDB and Elasticsearch running.
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