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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

#271

Post by ino »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #59
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.

RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug. I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and tracking. sure it'd be another tool for contro…

That's what feedburner was for and looking back it's so obvious why google bought them.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#272

Post by raldu »

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.

Exactly!

The social media platforms have effectively "devoured" and "engulfed" the very idea behind RSS in order to exploit the political economy of content publication, for monopoly.

When Google Reader has been shut down in 2013, it had left millions of loyal fans behind who had loved and used the platform over the years. There had been a strong disappointment, especially in communities like Reddit, HN and Slashdot. Reader platform still seems to have been missed even today [2].

Judging by the range of Google products that had got shut down along with the Reader [2] that time, it seems that it had been a strategic move to preserve their interests in rising social media and mobile market.

Google had failed to "build products that people love," by betraying what people loved.

With Google killing the Reader, Twitter shutting down support for RSS, AI having had started deciding what is most relevant for you, and feeds having buried behind giant walls of API interfaces,

Legacy of Aaron Swartz had been turned into "social media," the new television!

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/897hr1/i_made_mocku...

2: https://googleblog.blogspot.com.tr/2013/03/a-second-spring-o...

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#273

Post by stevenicr »

aetherspawn wrote: post #89

Would anyone be interested in an RSS social network that allows you to 1. Pull in RSS news streams 2. Automatically generate your own RSS streams from your posts (and re-shares) 3. Provides content curation over the RSS streams amongst your friends that are subscribed on the same streams 4. Presents previews with images and scraped data in a 3/4-column summary layout that is easy to skim

I think this could take off... I've been kicking around thoughts on makings something along these lines with wordress + buddypress + bp my home...

the trick is curation .. adding option for negative keywords per feed or something.. having other people you could follow or pull an opml into your own profile / page..

maybe it needs to become more like pin boards where people can sort in more general groups, and then make it more visual as well.

I personally enjoyed the taptu app for it's visual layouts options with rss.. until it shutdown. RssDemon (premium version - no ads) has been a similar replacement for me with mobile devices.

I do think this kind of thing could create network effects easy. I'd use it like a renaissance of netvibes / myyahoo feed pages that were cool back in the day.

Now that I think of it, I probably stopped using those because they lacked the visuals, which should be easy to add these days.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#274

Post by stevenicr »

dnzm wrote: post #224
stevenicr wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and a slightly bigger ram vps could easily add buddypress with the "BP My Home plugin" and you could give all of your family and friends their own home page profiles with whichever rss feeds they want on their own profile page. This is something I have been kicking around for a while. This past week I've been researching ways to incorporate the blacklisting and such from a different rss aggregator plugin to give peop…

After peeking at that BP My Home Plugin - wouldn't your use case also be covered by Nextcloud with a sprinkling of apps? There's a very capable RSS reader available, notes apps, calendar with CalDAV support, address book with CarDAV support, and so on. Depending on what you're actually trying to set up, that might work better than trying to shoehorn functionality into a blogging platform.

I've been meaning to spin up some nextcloud and experiment with the options. It does sound like it's very close to many things I've been wanting to put together as an option for family, friends, and whoever to spin up their own watercooler making a facebook replacement.

Having some experience with BP, it's really easy to get running, and even easier for other people to create a profile and start using it. Is there options with nextcloud for family and friends to join in any of the modules and have their own slice within it?

I'd love an easy button for people to get hosting and spin up a well defaulted nextcould, or buddypress system, or anything similar. With a BP setup, only one person in a family would need to spin up a server and everyone else could use it.. backing up data is the current weakness for easy button with that system, but I see that changing soon.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#275

Post by zbentley »

acct1771 wrote: post #250
LoSboccacc wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"ads aren't abusive" "believe"

Believe it or not, some people make high-quality content on the internet with the expectation of compensation.

The current state of advertising is ethically and technically questionable in many ways. But the idea of advertising as a revenue model is not.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#276

Post by Angostura »

olau wrote: post #248
na85 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux. Bought my first Macbook pro after being a linux/ThinkPad guy since 2008. I'm probably never going back to Linux on a laptop. I actually have working suspend and resume, plus it's Unix-like under the hood. Trackpad actually works without a bunch of ugly hacks since they deprecated synaptics drivers. no systemd, etc. I spend almost no time fiddling with my system nowadays. I want to use…

"I spend almost no time fiddling with my system nowadays." And this is perhaps the main difference. You stopped tinkering. You can install a Linux distro aimed a people not interested in tinkering and it will likely just work. "... but in my opinion quality ux requires someone to get paid to do the un glamorous work like fixing compatibility issues and corner cases." There are in fact quite of bunch of people getting…

> And this is perhaps the main difference. You stopped tinkering.

Or stopped tinkering with their work machine so that they could spend more time tinkering with things that they actually wanted to tinker with

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#277

Post by PeterStuer »

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 was Google with their most popular Reader client that in practice 'killed' RSS, to get users on their shiny new G+.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#278

Post by snthd »

JoshMnem wrote: post #142
8bitsrule wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just them. After last week's discussion, I noticed this week that, while Rick Steves does podcasts, I had to hunt for the RSS feeds page hosted on his own website. WTF? My usual policy for podcasts is, RSS subscription or else. Ain't got time to visit the damn website. Science Friday tried that for a while and soon went back.

Most podcasts that I've encountered lately don't have RSS feeds listed. You have to view source to find the URLs. The Internet needs to revive that open technology culture. Instead of Facebook/Twitter/G+/etc. subscribe to RSS feeds. Instead of Medium, use WordPress/Hugo/Metalsmith/etc. on Netlify/Surge/Github etc. Instead of Mac, use GNU/Linux. Etc.

>You have to view source to find the URLs.

IME you just open the page in the podcast program - it extracts the rss feeds from the appropriate tags automatically, promoting for ambiguity (this is with antennapod (Android)).

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#279

Post by PeterStuer »

I loved the 'RSS feed' ecosystem but it did have its problems.

Plain old 'everything you can eat' RSS suffered from lack of a decent curation system. You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When the number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much, you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and still might do. Most never got round to this and so stuff piled on.

A good personalized priority/curated feed out of your subscriptions would have been nice, but at the time nobody succeeded.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#280

Post by glaberficken »

QAkICoU7IDNkpFu wrote: post #267
Grumbledour wrote: post #262

Since we are talking RSS: For years I have tried to find a good RSS reader for my android phone and have failed so far. The feature that mostly kills it for me is, much to my surprise, layout. For applications made for reading text, they all seem to hate the idea of letting the user actually decide how he wants that text displayed. If you can even change the font size, often there are only predefined options, only wo…

After years of looking around I found https://www.inoreader.com/ (also available as app). _Finally_ a decent replacement for Google Reader IMO. UI on the site is a bit clunkey IMO, but the app at least has some customization options (font-type, font-size, different layout sizes, open tabs inside the app or direct them to an external browser, etc) No affiliations, other than that I'm a happy user!

I also switched to inoreader recently (after going >GoogleReader>DiggReader) and I'm happy with it. I used to be a firm believer in a simple list of text headers, but with inoreader I found myself opting more and more for the thumbnail grid list.
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