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RSS Is Better Than Twitter

gizmodo.com

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Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#211

Post by jammygit »

burtonator wrote: post #68
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'm considering integrating RSS with Polar: https://getpolarized.io/ Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too. I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds. We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just p…

I think polar needs a heuristic evaluation, it takes too many clicks to do certain things. Also, I couldn't figure out how to export a card to anki. Exciting project though, I check back every few months.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#212

Post by mikeash »

Twitter is like an internet Rorschach test. It’s a very general platform that offers little guidance, so people use it in fundamentally different ways.

I didn’t get the headline until I saw that apparently the author think Twitter is for getting news. I’m sure some people do, but this is strange to me. I use it to keep up with friends and acquaintances, and with the goings-on at certain local organizations. Other people use it to get better customer service. There are many ways to use it. RSS isn’t even in the same species as most of them.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#213

Post by netghost »

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…

The silver lining is that no built in support is better than poor builtin support as it opens the doors to interesting add-ons filling that need.

That said, I would love if Firefox had an excellent RSS experience, but frankly it was always a confusing afterthought.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#214

Post by O_H_E »

kgwxd wrote: post #185
packet_nerd wrote: post #66

I've tried to use RSS before, but the big hangup for me is most sites don't put the full article in the feed, just a title and summary. To me having to go back and forth just kills the whole thing.

How many times a day do you visually rescan over the same stuff? The minimal time spent going back and forth (alt+tab) is nothing compared to the time saved never having to reconsider the same headline more than once.

I don't get your point. If two sources post an article about the same event, I am going to get the "similar" title twice.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#217

Post by u801e »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #146
u801e wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I always found the feed url in a web browser, copied it, and then added it manually to Thunderbird. Granted, it's not the exact same thing as how Firefox used to do it, but it works well enough once you have all the feeds you want set up.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#218

Post by vshabanov »

ttepasse wrote: post #188
Digory wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried to build conversation into RSS? An RSS item that is related or responsive to another RSS item? (Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)

The classic relation is a link. Atom has the Atom Threading Extensions, to document conversation in feeds. One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an API of…

Thank you for information. It seems that Salmon is used in Diaspora so it somehow could work.

> But that started with a privacy scandal

What was the privacy scandal?

> The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.

What problems are? I suspect that there should be problems with spam as anybody could add their comments (although protocols seems to contain some countermeasures) and maybe some kind of DoS of anybody "posting" too many comments. But what other problems are?

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#219

Post by binoyxj »

For once, I thought this was something related to the political scene in India. Now that it's election season and the right-wing (BJP/RSS) actually protested against Twitter on roads alleging them to be left aligned or supporting the opposition.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#220

Post by zaarn »

contravariant wrote: post #193
matthewn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "rss support" was a folder, filled with links named after the article titles. You're describing the "live bookmarks" feature, which was only one part of the RSS functionality that was removed from Firefox. I never used live bookmarks, but I used the feed discovery and subscription functionality all the time -- only some of which can now be restored with addons.

They also removed the ability to preview RSS feeds, which is annoying because one of the few certain ways to subscribe to a feed was to preview it and then hit subscribe in whatever addon you were using. In the past it was even possible to subscribe with whatever addon you prefered from the firefox RSS preview directly, but that was already lost after the jump to WebExtensions.

There are addons that restore RSS previews and improve on firefox' old feature.
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