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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

#321

Post by daveFNbuck »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #317
daveFNbuck wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop. I learned from Reader's shutdown that a centralized service shutting down is no big deal. I can easily export my feeds from Feedly and move them somewhere else if the need arises. I learned from Google that if I want a nice centralized feed reader I need one that I can support. That's why I pay for Feedly.

> All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop. Care to justify that statement?

Your laptop is not a distributed system. If it is lost or destroyed, you lose your feed reader.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#322

Post by gkya »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #233
gkya wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, more like "instead of trying to tame bad actors making compromises, we refrain from them and tell others to do so too".

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#323

Post by JoshMnem »

Vinnl wrote: post #261
JoshMnem wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't done the right way in the past. Sometimes an implementation is 80% right and you just need to do a few things to get to 100%. It needs a better name than RSS/Atom. It should sound like English: "Subscribe to this website with ." (same icon) "Really Simple Syndication" and acronyms cause non-technical people to shut down. It's a foreign language. (Edit: "Atom" would be a good name, because it's plain English…

"Feed" is pretty common. But you still will only know what it means if you know what it is :)

> you still will only know what it means if you know what it is

That's the problem with RSS/Atom. "Feed reader" doesn't mean anything to most people. "Subscribe to this website" does.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#324

Post by daveFNbuck »

Jaruzel wrote: post #216
daveFNbuck wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop. I learned from Reader's shutdown that a centralized service shutting down is no big deal. I can easily export my feeds from Feedly and move them somewhere else if the need arises. I learned from Google that if I want a nice centralized feed reader I need one that I can support. That's why I pay for Feedly.

> All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop. How so? I'm sure there are plenty of RSS readers on GitHub you could fork and then be safe from the developer abandoning it.

RSS readers are a dime a dozen, and it's trivial to switch between them. I don't really care which one I use, so developer abandonment isn't my concern. The only important things are the list of my feeds and which items I've read. If my laptop goes down, I lose those if I haven't backed them up. If Feedly goes down, I lose those if I haven't backed them up. The difference is that Feedly is more likely than my laptop to give me notice first.

So Feedly is actually better about centralization than using a local reader. As a bonus, everything is synced across all my devices and I can quickly read a few articles on my phone while waiting for my name to be called at the pizza place.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#325

Post by daveFNbuck »

ascepp wrote: post #319
daveFNbuck wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All feed readers are centralized, even one you run on your laptop. I learned from Reader's shutdown that a centralized service shutting down is no big deal. I can easily export my feeds from Feedly and move them somewhere else if the need arises. I learned from Google that if I want a nice centralized feed reader I need one that I can support. That's why I pay for Feedly.

Someone didn't learn.

What didn't I learn? The message couldn't have been to not rely on a centralized service for RSS feeds, because switching to a new service was trivial. I ended up better off than before Reader shut down. My lesson about RSS readers was that it's fine to trust a centralized service because there's basically no risk if it goes away.

I learned a bigger lesson about not trusting Google services in general, but I don't see how that means I shouldn't use Feedly.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#326

Post by dcbadacd »

aetherspawn wrote: post #155
bhhaskin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already protocols out there that do that. Ostatus and Activitypub being two. Some examples of social networks already using them are GNU Social and Mastodon.

I dont think any of the above social sites allow you to directly consume i.e. the hackers news rss stream on your timeline

One of the primary issue with these alternative social networks is the lack of good content, RSS integration should honestly be one of their main priorities.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#327

Post by m-localhost »

Semaphor wrote: post #226
dijit wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be willing to release the code for this? I'd like to run one myself.

Can't remember the name, but there is at least one open source self hosted tool that allows you to subscribe to tweets via RSS. I used it to follow an author who had neither mailing list nor website.

https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge creates rss for many popular services.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#328

Post by m-localhost »

kiliankoe wrote: post #243
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.

How is something that doesn't publish an RSS feed even considered a podcast? I hate how there's "Spotify only" "podcasts" now. If I can't subscribe to a feed in a client of my choice, it's not a podcast.

Drives me crazy too.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#329

Post by pnutjam »

JoshMnem wrote: post #187
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…

When was the last time you bought a ThinkPad? This is my third one and suspend works. The Trackpad is great, with three buttons. 24 Gb of RAM, 11+ hour battery life in Linux, and a 4-year at-home next-day repair plan. It was $1,900 including tax, shipping, and support. Macs are much more expensive for worse specs. This computer "just worked" out of the box, and there is full freedom to tinker with the system. I think…

Dell Latitudes also work great with Linux, in my experience. They are pretty solid since that's the business line. Bonus, you can get cheap used ones or parts for quite awhile.

Re: Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance

#330

Post by pnutjam »

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…

You should also stick to a workstation linux release. I'm a huge fan of OpenSUSE if you just want hardware to work, it has the hands down best hardware support of any release I've used.

The only drawback is every wonky package out there is built for Ubuntu, for example Spotify's linux client.

However, if you want a basic system that works, OpenSUSE is the way to go.

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