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RSS Is Better Than Twitter

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Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#221

Post by zaarn »

thekyle wrote: post #176
StavrosK wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm excited about ActivityPub integration in blogs. You can give your site its own Mastodon ("Twitter") account, articles show up as posts and replies show up as comment threads.

The one thing I've been frustrated with using ActivityPub for blogs is that it is push based instead of get based like RSS. Basically it means that the responsibility is on the website owner to send out notifications for new content and maintain a database of subscribers instead of just publishing a feed that people can periodically download to check for new stuff.

AP also handles everything in hubs. So while you do need to know your subscribes, you don't need to send out 100 notifications for 100 subscribes, you probably only need to send out 10 notifications to 10 servers who will handle the delivery to the recipients.

There is also AP relays which could further reduce the overhead if you simply deliver the content to the relay.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#222

Post by grey_earthling »

1337shadow wrote: post #162
dguo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Why did Mozilla not propose a new version of RSS then ?

Perhaps it would harm the business model of their proprietary software, Pocket.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#223

Post by gnomewascool »

oliwarner wrote: post #200
gnomewascool wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline. How is that different from the people whom you do "follow" with RSS recommending other feeds or individual articles, or quoting these articles, with their own comments? (Mostly agreed about the point regarding third-party pushed conversations.)

> How is that different We *could( each publish feeds of what we liked, or re-feed them with annotations. And we could follow other individuals (ie friends, acquaintances) and they us, and we could control access to levels of feed with authentication. We could have feeds of our friends (and their URLs). As well as feeds of our own throwaway commentary on life. Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Faceboo…

> Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter (without comments) with RSS.

People already have!

I'm going to use the example of Wordpress, as I know for sure that it does offer RSS out-of-the-box, but there are alternatives.

If your grandma, say, has a wordpress blog, then RSS comes for free. If she knows what a hyperlink is (even if she doesn't know what it's called) then she can paste links to individual articles or blogs or news-sites. The reader can read whatever is recommended in their web browser and if it was (part of) an RSS feed, they can subscribe. In principle, you could even have an RSS feed reader that checks all links for whether they are associated with RSS feeds, to avoid the "web browser" step.

I don't think that a non-self-hosted wordpress blog is significantly more difficult to use than Twitter. There will probably be people who can use the latter, but not the former; however, I think that it'll be a tiny minority.

With Wordpress you could even have an RSS feed of comments and pingbacks, partially (but not globally) solving the third-party comments problem.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#224

Post by nikivi »

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…

Does anyone know if it’s possible to block users on HN due to spam?

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#225

Post by casualmr »

mchmarny wrote: post #202

Every couple of months I search for a better news reader… cycle through Flipper, Feedly, NewsBlur, & 4-8 others… once more acknowledge how good Google Reader really was, and go back to scrolling through Twitter/Reddit I’d probably pay large amount of money now for a news reader w/ these 4 features * Extract stories from my feed/lists on Twitter & Reddit and aggregate comments on these from people I follow * Learn fro…

Have you tried https://bazqux.com ? It was built right after Google shut down Reader and very much resembles and improved upon it in multiple ways. Super fast too.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#226

Post by oliwarner »

spc476 wrote: post #208
oliwarner wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be honest —and it'll make me sound like an arrogant dbag— but that doesn't pass my sniff test. "jsonfeed" is lighter than equivalent RSS for several small reasons. Can I see? (To be clear to anybody reading this out of context: I'm not claiming that JSON is best —far from it— just that I would expect it to be a few bytes lighter in transit.)

Sure. http://boston.conman.org/index.atom http://boston.conman.org/index.json http://boston.conman.org/bostondiaries.rss Each one contains the full text of the past 15 entries.

Thank you for sharing that. It took me a little while before I noticed it, but your JSON files have more data.

Each item has a id, date_published and tags field which do not feature in the RSS. Together these account for around 250chars per item or 3750chars per 15 item feed. Cut out those fields and the JSON would be 850chars shorter.

Also, you're preserving tab and newline characters around HTML. This affects JSON more because a newline is valid between RSS tags. In JSON a newline becomes two characters "\n", as a tab becomes "\t". Going "spaceless" on output would save you 1372chars from your JSON feed (and half as much from RSS/ATOM).

I will confess, my sniff test didn't account for using quite as many HTML attributes as you do :) Escaping double-quotes costs you 334 in JSON.

The overall difference is much slighter than I had expected.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#227

Post by kgwxd »

O_H_E wrote: post #214
kgwxd wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they go to the same url, any decent reader will recognize it as already marked read. But that's not what I meant. Most news sites have much of the same stuff on the front page for hours, sometimes days. How many times do you skim over that looking for new stuff?

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#228

Post by JohnFen »

JasonFruit wrote: post #180
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 was not disappointed to see RSS removed from Firefox, because I want my already too-complex browser to have as limited a set of functions as possible. The more first-class features they remove, the more secure and usable their product will be.

The problem, of course, is that for some people, the removal of those features makes the browser no longer meet their needs. Worse, which features are "critical" varies from person to person.

The flexible answer, of course, would be to have a relatively basic core browser and an extension system powerful enough to allow the features to be implemented that way. Like Firefox used to be. Unfortunately, Mozilla decided to neuter the extensions instead.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#229

Post by JohnFen »

imartin2k wrote: post #40

Lots of things changed between when I started to heavily and systematically consume content online (in about 2006), and today. But one thing didn't: RSS is still the crucial cornerstone of my online content consumption. For me, RSS never was dead or less relevant than in the past. On the contrary: Since I keep adding feeds on a very regular basis, it's still growing in importance. Fortunately, 95 % of blogs and media…

> RSS is still the crucial cornerstone of my online content consumption.

Mine too, 100%.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#230

Post by dngray »

pera wrote: post #120
ape4 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is an add-on called Awesome RSS [1] that brings back the web feed icon to the address bar. It doesn't implement the "live bookmarks" feature though, but you can use some external reader such as Newsboat [2] which will also let you read the content of the articles. [1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ [2] - https://newsboat.org/

I was looking at this the other day[0] I actually think Brief[1] might even be better than the RSS support that was in Firefox. I haven't tried it yet but I intend to.

I use Thunderbird as well, and that has RSS support but to me that seems counter to my workflow. Typically I'll be on some site and want to subscribe, and then view in my browser. Doesn't really make sense to be in an email client.

On my phone I use Flym[2]

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/

[2] https://github.com/FredJul/Flym

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