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Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

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Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#231

Post by Shank »

originalsimba wrote: post #27

Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years? RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer. I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

I'm a big fan of Feedbin, because it lets you subscribe to any Twitter user's profile as a normal feed and browse it too. It means I can subscribe to 10 or so people I really don't want to miss and get their updates exactly like I would a normal feed.

https://feedbin.com/

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#232

Post by jeofken »

pimeys wrote: post #228
jeofken wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat! This will be my first thinkpad since ~2005. I’ve been eyeing the X1Carbon. What made you select T460? Do you feel that it’s portable enough to bike/walk around with and use in cafes etc? I guess what I’m really wondering is, with all different models (7 different choices in the T series, and then X and P) how can you select one? I’m in analysis paralysis.

You should ask more questions in /r/thinkpad[0]. But here's a quick summary for the models that matter for tech people: - T4XX = 14", T5XX = 15", X2XX = 12" - The middle number is the last number of the year (T460/X260: 2016, T470/X270: 2017 etc.). - The T-series has had three models per year, the normal with no ending letters that has an external battery, allows you to replace parts and is mainly meant as a durable…

I wish Lenovo would let me find this out somehow! Thank you - you have made it much clearer, and now I know I will buy a T with replaceable battery.

I wish laptop makers (and ALL other business) would make less cluttered, less designed websites. Danluu.com is the prime example of great design for me. I wish I could have found your great comment without having to bother people on HN. Thank you!

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#233

Post by LoSboccacc »

gkya wrote: post #156
LoSboccacc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but realistically speaking that is why it’s being fought by content providers whether we the techies like it or not

Let it be fought by them all the time. Useful websites will have an RSS feed. It's a nice filter, IMO.

that's kind of an ivory tower argument. "let's people don't have nice thing, we know what's best for them." meanwhile, most normal use don't gives a damn if the site track their behavior and post relevant ads, as long as they get quality content and ads aren't abusive they believe it's a fair bargain.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#234

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

hvidgaard wrote: post #227
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most people use podcasts through an app, not by adding the RSS feed to their RSS reader. When people talk about RSS being dead, they mean the consumer usage, and not about how it powers other things behind the scenes.

When people say "RSS" they really mean articles delivered with RSS. And most people use "RSS" through an app(lication). My point is that the economic model that powers podcasts can power articles through RSS as well.

What is the "economic model" you speak of? It's surely not banner ads, and it's surely not search ads. Also it can't do behavioral targeting. Please educate me

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#235

Post by pferde »

RSS and/or Atom should primarily look at improving the format specification. both formats are woefully underspecified in some parts, leading to a lot of headaches for RSS parser writers, since RSS generators play fast and loose with the rules, and will take any possible and impossible shortcut just to make it a bit easier for themselves.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#236

Post by beagle3 »

paxys wrote: post #30
ravenstine wrote: post #20

Is there anything that can turn your email into a secure personal RSS feed? A feed reader that also includes emails would replace quite a bit of what centralized social media provides.

Have you tried Thunderbird ( https://www.thunderbird.net )? Combines email, RSS and newsgroups.

Is there any addon that for thunderbird that synchronizes RSS read status across devices?

I use thunderbird, I love it, and I would love it more if I could use it on more than one device....

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#237

Post by dalbasal »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #181

Anyone who talks about revival of RSS without talking about how it will be sustainable is just ignorant or naive, because the main reason it became what it became has everything to do with money. Content providers centralized because centralized attention is more valuable than aggregation of decentralized attention in an ad driven economy. Just because you want RSS to make a come back doesn't mean it has any chance o…

Economics certainly was central to the story, past or future, but I wouldn't state it quite so strongly. Hopefully I'm not ignorant or naive.

Let's start from examples: youtube, facebook, twitter. The platforms' ad businesses definitely benefited from being centralised and proprietary. But, all three "won" their respective platform wars before those lucrative ad businesses existed. They won because that is where people put their content and where people looked at that content.

So, who does this economy work for? It just doesn't apply to regular, "personal" users. They don't get paid for content. The profitability of youtube or FB doesn't impact their decisions to post videos there. These decisions collectively determined FB, twitter or youtube becoming major platforms... people's choosing to post. If these users had chosen different platforms, these would have won regardless of how well these platforms lend to advertising^.

Centralizing news on FB (for example) isn't working (money-wise) for most news organisations or other established, professional content producers. Youtube doesn't work well (money-wise) for independent producers. Even if you have enough viewers to make a TV show successful, you probably can't afford 3 full time makers on youtube revenue.

So... the economics are very profitable for the platforms, but not anyone else. All the decisions that made these platforms successful are/were not directly related to ad-money.

Podcasts are the best example. They were the way to distribute certain content. Users adopted podcasts because the content was there, even though the UX was/is clunky. It happened to be decentralized and rss-based. The fact that podcasts work better economically for content makers than youtube... that was incidental.

^Of course, there are bounds of viability/sutainability. FB is at least an order of magnitude above that boundary. It would be possible to make FB with much less than the $25bn in ad revenue it generates.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#238

Post by nunodonato »

Been using rss since the early days, and still growing strong :) Google reader was my go to app for rss needs, but since they killed it I switched to "The Old Reader" and everything continued as usual :)

I do understand why some companies/people would prefer not to use RSS. From a money-standpoint, if you need to bring people to your website to get $$ from ads or other stuff, RSS makes it difficult. Basically, all content is free. Its great, but perhaps many websites with good content would not survive (perhaps many blogs neither)

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#239

Post by kgwgk »

eecc wrote: post #195
walrus01 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while not blog "software", one could say that the contents of an html directory exposed by, for example, http://weirdmachinehostname.university.edu/~username/ were the earliest blogs. Hand crafted HTML homepages and such.

Hmm nah, I remember “blogging” explicitly meant drafting and publishing posts directly from a website form, as opposed to crafting HTML documents and uploading them over FTP (which was what people did at the time and obviously complained about.)

The word "blog" appeared a few months before the infrastructure to draft and publish posts directly from a website form. And the concept of diaries/weblogs that it designated was a few years older.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#240

Post by dewey »

codyogden wrote: post #190
dewey wrote: post #16

I'm always positively surprised how compatible the whole RSS ecosystem mostly is. They either implement the Google Reader API or the Fever API and you can choose between a lot of different apps for your platforms. My current combination that I'm happy with for a few years is: https://miniflux.net + Reeder on iOS and Mac

Curious, did you upgrade to 2.0? I went to check in on my site recently, and found that they nuked the project and rewrote it in Go.

Yep and as someone who works with Go at my day job that's just an additional point to like the project ;)
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