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RSS Is Better Than Twitter

gizmodo.com

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Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#11

Post by dguo »

knight17 wrote: post #3

I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go althou…

Firefox used to have built-in RSS support, but it was removed in Firefox 64: https://www.zdnet.com/article/end-nears-for-rss-firefox-64-t...

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#12

Post by PavlovsCat »

knight17 wrote: post #3

I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go althou…

Re-introduce, not introduce. Firefox not only used to do a fine job of displaying RSS feeds, it also simply displayed an RSS icon in the URL bar (if the page had the respective link elements HTML header) from which you could subscribe to all the provided feeds. There certainly was room for improvement, but still, they had it, and they canned it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks

Thunderbird is still a mighty fine RSS reader though.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#13

Post by zikzak »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #12
knight17 wrote: post #3

I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go althou…

Re-introduce, not introduce. Firefox not only used to do a fine job of displaying RSS feeds, it also simply displayed an RSS icon in the URL bar (if the page had the respective link elements HTML header) from which you could subscribe to all the provided feeds. There certainly was room for improvement, but still, they had it, and they canned it. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks Thunderbird is still…

I've been wondering if the recent addition of AMP to Gmail as precursor to Gmail having RSS integration. I know I'm delusional but it feels good to think there might be a push back to RSS reading in a Google product.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#14

Post by zikzak »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #7

There are some things I like to follow on twitter, but I wanted them integrated in my RSS feed setup, so a few months ago I wrote a simple app which gates twitter to rss, and which can be deployed as a Google Cloud Function. If anyone is interested: https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Fu...

I think Feedbin let's you subscribe to Twitter as well (RSS reading service).

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#15

Post by mooreds »

I love RSS, and have for years. My first blog post ever was about RSS: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4 . I recently wrote that new developers should use RSS: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss-rea...

But reading through the post and the comments here, I'm sensing an omission. What Twitter (and social media in general) provides that RSS doesn't is interaction. I don't login to twitter all that often, but when I do, I see things like this: https://twitter.com/mikekarnj/status/1106582308235235330 and this: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1106812630985928704

I doubt I'd be privy to the discussions happening on Twitter if they were happening any other way (blogs tried to do it with comments and pingbacks, but that isn't as good as Twitter, and not as open to everyone, since you have to run a blog of your own).

This is the secret sauce for me. In fact, if there were a way to only see conversations in Twitter (and ignore all the posts with no responses) that would have a lot of value for me.

RSS is great for reading, but for conversing, it's not a good fit.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#16

Post by PavlovsCat »

adamnemecek wrote: post #8

Add responses and maybe.

You can usually click the link to the article which opens it in the browser (if the feed reader itself isn't in the browser to begin with), and if you're logged in to that site (or the commenting system or ID provider they use) you can comment right away.

As for displaying comments along with articles, feeds can reference other feeds, and in theory nothing stops an application or website from from making use of that.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#17

Post by ape4 »

dguo wrote: post #11
knight17 wrote: post #3

I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go althou…

Firefox used to have built-in RSS support, but it was removed in Firefox 64: https://www.zdnet.com/article/end-nears-for-rss-firefox-64-t...

Wow I never knew. I would have used it if I knew.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#18

Post by polote »

RSS is just a way to list the last articles of a website in a generic way.

It is very far from what Twitter offers, on Twitter you can exchange with people, reply and discuss content (yeah this is not the best way to do it, but you can do it), you can alert people or organization (how many time, thanks to RSS we alerted a company about a bad practice or contacted their customer support ?)

Maybe Twitter is not the best at what it does, and maybe we need something that allow to us to exchange but RSS doesn't provide that.

PS: I'm not saying RSS is bad

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#19

Post by kuzehanka »

polote wrote: post #18

RSS is just a way to list the last articles of a website in a generic way. It is very far from what Twitter offers, on Twitter you can exchange with people, reply and discuss content (yeah this is not the best way to do it, but you can do it), you can alert people or organization (how many time, thanks to RSS we alerted a company about a bad practice or contacted their customer support ?) Maybe Twitter is not the bes…

Don't forget the main thing twitter offers: spamming your notification feed with impossible-to-disable garbage in order to prop up whatever the hell engagement metrics they decided on.

I have basically stopped using it ever since they started doing that.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#20

Post by abhinai »

I completely understand and respect the author's sentiments. However, it is unfair to compare RSS to Twitter. Twitter is a place where anyone and everyone can express their opinions while RSS is a technology and a mechanism to get an updated feed from services and blogs we care about. Most of these blobs and services will be well written or perhaps professionally written articles. These are two very different systems that tap into fundamentally different types of information sources.

In short, RSS is a feed of (mostly) professionally written articles while Twitter is full of amateurs expressing half baked thoughts in 140 characters. It is unfair to compare the two.

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