RSS + Dat is a great combo, for what it's worth
It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
31–40 of 376 posts
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#32The business model of RSS is harder than just slapping ads on your homepage and encouraging more page clicks. I think that's the real reason you don't see a strong RSS ecosystem. The content producers don't have a strong financial incentive to support it well.
In my experience RSS is at its best when dealing with infrequent publishers or niche audiences. People who don't expect to be paid for their writing because they want a wider audience, like think tanks or university departments.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#33I love RSS - it's how I found this article :) I've been using The Old Reader every since Google reader shut down...I love it.
Same. Glancing over 1000 headlines on a fresh pull saves so much time and energy.
The 30 minutes it takes to peruse makes for a good breakfast routine versus only making it 10 to 20 stories deep in the same amount of time.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#34RSS has been really great for me over the last year or so (when I got back into it). I tried Feedly, and then Inoreader. I was not willing to pay for either and ended up trying out the two popular self-hosted options: ttrss (tiny tiny rss) and Miniflux. Stuck with Miniflux for its simplicity. Using the Fever API with Reeder on my Mac and Readably on my Android.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is pretty cool. But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all. RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was…
Sure -- not saying it's as good as presenting make-for-rss posts -- may be helpful in some cases though. At least I'll know that content changes, and if I don't like the virtual feed, I can just link out to the source and view it directly.
I appreciate you sharing. I didn't mean to shoot you down or anything.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#36The reason RSS failed to reach mainstream adoption by users is because it is not user friendly at all. While I love RSS myself, no amount of tech nerd nostalgia is going to make it popular enough that your mom starts using it. Most sites still have implemented RSS in a terrible way. For example, many blogs I follow only show excerpts in their feeds. So the feed is worthless to me. Others put every podcast episode the…
High-volume sites are not a good use case for RSS. We already have various social ways to filter. Like the site you're on. I think RSS should be for high-quality niche sites where you care about every single post.
I subscribe to 200+ feeds, but only read a dozen or so stories a week on them: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#37After google reader went dark i used "The Old Reader" and when they moved to pay only (or they closed? i can't remember) i moved to inoreader its the only way i consume news/blogs. there is no way im checking 40+ websites every day for new content and that way i won't miss anything if a site has no RSS or its RSS feed doesn't work right chances are i just won't use that site
I always used rss2email (wrote a simple clone of that application in golang, so I could drop python from my servers), which ensures I don't miss updates and I have a local history I can search along with my email. https://github.com/skx/rss2email
+1, that's my favorite way of consuming rss as well. I love the fact that it takes advantage of all the privacy features of the mail (like not phoning home when you open the content).
I rewrote it as well, but for an other reason: when the app on my server fetches an item, it will issue a http request to get the content of the actual article and put it as attachment of the email - because on many feeds, the rss item content is just an excerpt, sometimes useless.
Although, it works well for me because I use mutt and it displays the attachment with `lynx -dump`, other mail clients may phone home to fetch images/css/js/whatever when you display the mail.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#38If self-hosted is your thing I highly recommend tiny-rss and the iOS app accompanying it. https://tt-rss.org/
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#39The single worst offense against the usability of Atom/RSS right now comes from Apple and iOS.
If you click a link to an Atom feed in Mobile Safari, iOS will launch the Apple News app. Which will then show you an error message saying the content is unavailable.
As far as I can tell there is no way for an installed reader app to take over handling of feed URLs. It just makes the entire feed ecosystem look broken for anyone using an iPhone or iPad.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is pretty cool. But unfortunately that is not really a solution. It is like saying that it is ok that a website removed screen-reader support, because you have a screen reader that can still parse the website anyway. The problem is RSS not being made available at all. RSS being made available less and less, and they have less of an incentive to do so. And I am saddened that a lot of the good work Mozilla did was…
as far as i can see, RSSHub does exactly that, and supports as many as 536 scraped sources (of varying caliber) at https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/tree/master/lib/routes . It's not an outlandish amount of work, if lots of people chip in with their favorite source.
I see what you are saying, but I still think it is a far cry from having content providers simply providing the feeds themselves.
In the same way that I don't think that YouTube allowing users to submit closed caption transcripts, or machine generating them, any substitute for the content creator providing them in the first place. I'm sure in the near future, smart TVs will be able to machine generate closed captions from the audio, but I still don't think we should let television producers off the hook for providing captions.
RSS should be the default. And it is not hard to generate RSS.
I happen to think that big platforms only reluctantly adopted RSS over a decade ago because it was a "standard", and because they felt that it was popular enough to justify the traffic from it. But they do not like RSS. It works against their analytics, their ads, and their control of the presentation.
And while it is cool that people are crowd sourcing scrapers, I think the real solution is to promote RSS itself and encourage more platforms to simply provide it. And organizations like Mozilla taking Facebook's position that RSS is obsolete has been profoundly unhelpful to the web.