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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

#111

Post by crazygringo »

A newsfeed is an extremely complex and tricky product to get right, even more so when it's an aggregated one.

There are so many competing concerns to handle -- prioritization with a source, prioritization between sources, discoverability, UX flow, preview vs. full content, social content from your friends vs. institutional content, commenting, and last but not least, a business model: what is incentivizing content sources to cooperate in good faith and not ignore it or abuse it?

Fact of the matter is, RSS is just far too simplistic to handle these competing concerns in any kind of balanced or reasonable way. But it's also possible there is no single answer.

Which is why different "newsfeeds" for me (HN, Reddit, NYT, AV Club, Twitter) have drastically different interfaces and interaction models. I don't want my HN to work like Twitter, or my Twitter to work like the NYT. And I can't even imagine of any possible interface that could somehow aggregate them all.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#112

Post by VLM »

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…

From one direction 99% of the world's VCR clocks blinked "12:00" for the entire lifespan of that media format. The proposal is a lot of interactivity and cognitive load to demand from most of humanity. Only a very small segment of society, mostly engineers, can utilize parametric search. Even engineers are lazy or in a hurry sometimes, in theory investing time in a parametric search would benefit me, in practice I needed a USB cable and going to amazon for a generic search of "amazonbasics usb type-c cable" works well enough.

From the other direction there's not much middle ground between the proposal and a REST API. You're asking for developer.ebay.com, I've fooled around with that a little and its fun. Sometimes I think the business people don't understand how much the devs are exposing in their APIs, which makes me worry about the staying power of public APIs. There are businesses where their business model and front-end UI could all be replaced by a very small shell script and I don't think the business people understand that weakness. Of course an API can be shut off with the flick of a switch once it eats into profits.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#113

Post by dna_polymerase »

nojito wrote: post #105
znpy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, you can. The company is the monopoly not the userbase.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#114

Post by z3t4 »

apostacy wrote: post #11

This is why I was so heartbroken when Mozilla removed first party RSS support from Firefox, for what seemed like an extremely flimsy justification.[1] RSS should be ubiquitous, and seen as an essential part of any service that serves structured incremental content. People should be emailing webmasters asking why there is no little orange icon. It also serves as a back door form of accessibility. But I strongly suspec…

RSS and bookmarks bypass Google, meaning less money for the browser. Yes Firefox is funded by ads (Google ads).

It seems to me that Mozilla executives has no fortitude. They prefer revenue rather then invention and what's best for the user. KaiOS is becoming the third biggest mobile OS, guess what it's FirefoxOS, but Mozilla was too afraid to give it a shot. Then there's the Rust programming language that is taking the world with storm. It seems there are great talent, and if they would be allowed to work in the user's best interest people would switch over from Chrome - and Firefox would become big enough to matter. As for revenue, a lot of purchases are initiated from the web, but they leave the browser for a short while and takes a 3-5% cut. Browsers could work with banks and offer a secure wallet. And micro-transactions could become a thing. Publishers are crying for a solution! The web have been funded by ads for over 20 years now, with diminishing returns. And users hate it! The web is ripe for invention!

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#115

Post by apostacy »

aembleton wrote: post #104
apostacy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

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

Is that from Firefox 3.6? I would have to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure they started de-emphasizing RSS around 2011 with Firefox 4.0.

It was many years ago, I was looking at some discussion about it here: https://decafbad.com/blog/2011/01/15/how-to-use-feed-auto-di...

I remember being rustled about it back then, also.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#116

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

I can't get back to RSS: I never left it. After the demise of Google Reader I just switched to Feedly and can happily recommend it to anyone. Feedly rocks!

I'm even thinking to make a gate from RSS to XMPP, that would work just like these 'channels' do in Telegram.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#117

Post by apostacy »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #100
apostacy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The functionality was never polished, and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897 . Then that is a great justification for improving it then. Or at least bundling an RSS add-on. Mozilla felt that bundling Pocket was ok, but not one of the many great RSS add-ons…

Mozilla should be focusing on RSS within Thunderbird, because that was the original location for RSS functionality, and is a much better fit anyways (due to the expected presence of an almost always open left hand sidebar. Unfortunately Mozilla has dropped thunderbird almost completely so that’s not been a real option either.

I completely agree. I never actually used Firefox as an RSS reader, but I did get my mom started on RSS through Firefox, and later she moved on to a dedicated RSS reader. I don't remember, but I think that Firefox would offer to subscribe to a feed via Thunderbird if you didn't already have one set up.

But I think Mozilla's abandonment of Thunderbird is very much in line with their abandonment of RSS, and their loss of commitment to an open web.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#119

Post by syshum »

chrismorgan wrote: post #63
sergiotapia wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why they removed support for it. Isn't RSS a "solved issue" - what possible updates can be made to it? Why couldn't they just keep it available and forget about it.

The functionality was never polished , and there were some fairly serious technical problems with the implementation due to lack of maintenance, seen often in apparently minor things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337897 . I can readily understand why they removed it—it was implemented in what had become the wrong way for such a feature, and fixing it would have taken more effort than they wanted t…

Yea it competed with Pocket, that is the actual reason it was removed
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