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It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

danielmiessler.com

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Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#101

Post by 6510 »

Books are dead too! Long live books.

When someone has an opinion like this one should wonder if they ever used RSS. Web applications for RSS aggregation is worse than using IRC in a web interface. I cant take strong opinions about IRC seriously either if the person didn't install a client. With RSS the person is merely describing himself.

Please do go install [or make] a client, gather some feeds, do some filtering. When you have your first 10 000 subscriptions I'd love to hear every angle of your story, the topics, the organization, what client you use, what language it was written in, what database it uses, who wrote it. ETC ETC

The walled gardens full of [self] censorship, data mining, adware and bullshit content have useful features too! Aggregation isn't it. HN headlines only vaguely map to our interest but reading the comments is wonderful.

(Reminds me to install thunderbird and backup my gmail. I'm not young enough to trivialize losing my data.)

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#102

Post by niemenmaa »

Zhyl wrote: post #44

Haven't seen newsboat be mentioned so far. I've written a bunch of scripts that help subscribe to feeds (e.g. search YouTube for keyword and add RSS feed for channel of the top hit), scripts to curate (e.g. extract 'topics' from BBC articles that are only available on the page and not in the RSS feed) and consume (watch videos with mpv, open images in feh, add long videos to a backlog). It's one of the best news expe…

Care to share your scripts? Avid newsboat user here also!

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#103

Post by jedberg »

tifadg1 wrote: post #98
jedberg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is not part of the EU anymore.

Thats neither factually nor theoretically correct, as all the EU laws apply until the transition period has expired, which I wouldn't be surprised will be extended given corona has taken so much focus and time away from it.

Officially they are no longer part of the EU. They have agreed to abide by the rules of the EU for now, and the EU has agreed to allow them to trade as though they were part of the EU, but they officially left on Jan 31.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#104

Post by aembleton »

apostacy wrote: post #94
DevX101 wrote: post #53

RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. With HTTP you'd be able to earn money via embedded ads but you'd earn exactly $0 via RSS since the feed was stripped of ads, just content. This forced publishers to put useless blurbs, redirecting to the HTTP version, wh…

> RSS is dying (or dead) because it was incompatible with the dominant business model on the internet -- advertising. This is why Google killed it. This is why lots of professional publishers hated it. > I'd like to see new innovation around protocols and client 'browsers' that were made with monetization built-in as a first-tier specification. I don't think the solution should be to cater to what big platforms want.…

> Firefox, and other browsers, should have advertised when RSS was available, and make it highly discoverable for users.

Firefox did, with a subscribe button in the address bar. https://mariolurig.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/firefox-rs...

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#105

Post by nojito »

znpy wrote: post #47
simonw wrote: post #39

The 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 a…

I wonder if the EU could, in theory, take action about this behavior. Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss readers.

>Apple is basically monopolizing the whole market for rss readers.

You can't be a monopoly with such a small userbase.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#106

Post by MPSimmons »

6510 wrote: post #101

Books are dead too! Long live books. When someone has an opinion like this one should wonder if they ever used RSS. Web applications for RSS aggregation is worse than using IRC in a web interface. I cant take strong opinions about IRC seriously either if the person didn't install a client. With RSS the person is merely describing himself. Please do go install [or make] a client, gather some feeds, do some filtering.…

This comment is needless gatekeeping. Nobody cares how many RSS feeds you subscribed to back in your hayday. Really.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#107

Post by moogly »

Andrex wrote: post #57

I'm moving from Feedly to self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS soon: https://tt-rss.org Would be fun if others did the same and posted about their experiences!

I moved to self-hosted tt-rss when Google Reader shut down and the 50 or so other clients/services I tried were not good enough. Been using tt-rss ever since and very happy with it.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#109

Post by 6510 »

nanna wrote: post #60

RSS seems to me to have use cases far beyond website updates, if it was extended a little. Event syndication. Say that I'd collect the event feeds from a load of cinemas, music venues I like around the world, why not, plus those of musicians. I want my RSS-based events reader to narrow down the date field to be this weekend, location to be my town, and ticket field to be available, and why not price to something I ca…

You can publish an RSS feed for shopping search results.

You can put a future date in RSS for events.

To lazy to search for examples sorry.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#110

Post by apostacy »

pembrook wrote: post #15

The 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…

> The 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.

I think it is a false premise that something is only valid if "mom starts using it". That is the profit-driven mentality. eg. "how can we market this? How can we expand RSS market share into valuable demographics?" etc

Also, I actually did teach my Mom to use RSS a decade ago and she still uses it today.

These concepts are really not that hard. I told my mom it was like she was getting a newsletter from her blogs delivered to a special dedicated inbox, but without cluttering up her email. She was delighted.

I think if someone knows how to use email, and knows how to browse the web, and knows how to sign up for email newsletters, they can handle RSS. I would argue that it is in many ways more useful for less computer literate people.

> Then comes the UX nightmare of actually finding the feed on each website you visit. If the site even has one.

This UX nightmare was solved 15 years ago. Browsers displayed a little icon in the corner when RSS is detected.[1], Firefox later displayed an RSS icon prominently in the address bar[2].

The UX nightmare was then re-introduced as the RSS icon was de-emphasized[3][4] and eventually dropped completely, with a dubious justification.[5]

[1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/FeedAutoDiscovery.aspx

[2]: http://scripting.com/images/2011/01/15/rssicon.gif

[3]: https://decafbad.com/blog/2011/01/15/how-to-use-feed-auto-di...

[4]: http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/15/mozillaPleaseKeepThe...

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17613051

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