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RSS Is Better Than Twitter

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Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#141

Post by k1m »

dewey wrote: post #130
k1m wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a project which creates RSS feeds for sites which don't offer their own: Feed Creator - http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ And one which converts partial feeds into full-text feeds: https://fivefilters.org/content-only/

Cool project, I was searching for something like this a while ago and then tried to build something similar. It's not as cool and full featured as yours though; you have to write your own plugins for each site. It was still fun to build though. https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge

I came across your project a while ago. I was actually trying to search for it today to post a link to it in reply to another comment. I only remembered the 'bridge' part and assumed it was in PHP, so my search didn't bring it up. :)

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#142

Post by skybrian »

whoopdedo wrote: post #137

Can you track trending topics with RSS? Can you carry on a conversation between content creators and subscribers over RSS? Can you discover new content by following a RSS social graph? RSS is better than Twitter in only one aspect and that's the one-to-many subscriber model. And that's the least interesting and least profitable thing that Twitter provides.

I think it's a fairly silly comparison overall, but it doesn't help when you judge by technical features rather than what kind of content the ecosystem encourages, which what actually matters.

Twitter is extremely noisy. It tends to overwhelm actual articles that people put some effort into with shallow, witty zingers. If you're not looking for witty zingers, it doesn't really matter what other features it has.

RSS is just a file format, but it enables a larger ecosystem that works better at showcasing good content.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#144

Post by lazyjones »

blunte wrote: post #128

"the charming pop-ups that everyone uses because fuck you" Between the cookie popups, the GRPD "choice" popups, and the sign-up-for-some-email-crap popups, each of which takes 1-2 seconds to appear - sometimes in parallel and sometimes in sequence - the web is a garbage fire. There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. I also think we have passed "peak information".…

> There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery.

Indeed. The easiest (low-friction) way to implement this would be as browser options/addons. We need to get back control over how content is displayed on our screens, but browser makers' priority is to turn the browser into a TV set.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#145

Post by hirundo »

jayalpha wrote: post #97

I love RSS feeds. You can convert Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me Websites that don't have RSS: https://feedity.com/ Email to RSS: https://zapier.com Hackernews RSS: http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300 You can even use RSS for finding a job: https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=d...

> You can convert Twitter to RSS: http://twitrss.me

From that link:

> 2018-10-17: Twitter are rate limiting requests from TwitRSS.me, meaning it is effectively broken until I can think of a way round it. You can still run your own instance

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#146

Post by pbhjpbhj »

u801e wrote: post #69
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…

> I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. Fortunately, Thunderbird still has this feature.

Huh? In Firefox you'd visit a webpage and if RSS feeds were available you'd be able to subscribe to them, IIRC.

Where in Thunderbird do you find feeds to subscribe to?

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#147

Post by anoncake »

oliwarner wrote: post #90
kris-s wrote: post #80

I think part of the issue with RSS is the real pain of dealing with XML. I'm mildly cheering for something like https://jsonfeed.org - which would be a big step towards making a decentralized system more of a reality.

Eh? It's not like teams of elves are tripping over hand-coding this stuff. And even if they were, JSON parsers tend to be way more strict than RSS readers (which are actuakly very liberal interpretations of XML). But again, nobody in their right mind is manually generating or templating this stuff. And if you are, there are a dozen RSS-gen libraries for every single language. Let one of those handle it for you. Doing…

> which are actuakly very liberal interpretations of XML

This does sound painful, unlike parsing ordinary XML.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#148

Post by l0b0 »

u801e wrote: post #69
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…

> I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. Fortunately, Thunderbird still has this feature.

It does, but! I really want Thunderbird to be good, but the web feed experience is infuriating. If you don't care about open source or you just care plenty about UX, you wouldn't use it for feed reading. (I got started on a list, but it's more like the whole concept needs to be rewritten.)

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#149

Post by guybedo »

Although the title is a little bit provocative, i tend to agree that RSS is a better way to consume news than Twitter or any other social media platform by the way. Social platforms should be used for social, not for news, but i guess Twitter is a special case in that one of its core values is to deliver news in real time. But do we need realtime? Twitter being a social platform, it means you can't easily avoid trolls, offensive/aggressive/idiotic comments...

Off the top of my head, some issues i had with RSS and/or with the tools/RSS readers: - RSS can become en echo chamber if you have a limited number of feeds - Too many feeds and your feeds are flooded with a lot of noise - want to check the top stories of the day, or trending content? need to use a different tool than your RSS reader. - want to follow some social feeds but without the noise of social platforms?

I wrote something about the signal/noise ratio in RSS recently: https://medium.com/@julien.aktu/rss-less-noise-more-informat...

To solve these issues, i'm trying to bring something to the RSS ecosystem, and i built a news platform mixing RSS and traditional news aggregation. It has features to limit the noise and help avoid echo chambers. You can follow Facebook pages, Twitter users, etc... add your newsletters to declutter your mail box, and much more to come.

You can check it out here: https://aktu.io/about

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#150

Post by salutonmundo »

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...

Using debian stable, so I still have 60.6.1esr... not looking forward to this.
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