It’s Time to Get Back to RSS • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#251

Post by zymhan » Mon, May 18, 2020, 2:49 AM UTC

gsich wrote: post #149

yawn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your other choice without lots of friction is Google, an advertising company. I hate that this is the world we live in.

At least with Android (not Google) I have a choice on what software I install. Besides that you can still use a desktop PC. Most people do anyway.

> I have a choice on what software I install

No you don't. Much of the software preinstalled on an Android device is permanent. And you can try stripping out Google Play Services, but good luck having a "smart" phone.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#252

Post by wmeredith » Mon, May 18, 2020, 2:50 AM UTC

akkartik wrote: post #36

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…

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

What kind of reader can I import this into? I'd like to get back into RSS.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#253

Post by ObsoleteNerd » Mon, May 18, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

jjordan wrote: post #97

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…

Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks ( https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/ ) that mostly replicated its functionality. I highly recommend it as I've been on the web a long tim…

Thank you so much for that, I am/was a HUGE fan of that feature in Firefox, and it was actually one of the main features that got me to switch to Firefox in the first place. I was gutted when they removed it, and while I still swear by Firefox over Chrome, I'm finding they're making more and more questionable decisions lately when it comes to their supposed love for a free/open Internet.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#254

Post by smcleod » Mon, May 18, 2020, 2:52 AM UTC

I wasn't aware RSS went anywhere let alone died, I've been using Feedly for years and I couldn't imagine getting blog and product updates any other way. I highly recommend Reeder 4 on macOS/iOS as a client.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#255

Post by cwmartin » Mon, May 18, 2020, 2:59 AM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #86

It would be nice to see RSS come back and replace some of the centralized web. In theory social networks could be replaced by event feeds your friends publish. If you use something like IPFS you could, in theory, have a fully decentralized social network. There's still some business benefit to hosting, scraping, providing search etc. The business models are closer to the open web. I'm sure there's flaws and challenge…

That seems like the idea behind the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon and other similar social media platforms are based around.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#256

Post by akkartik » Mon, May 18, 2020, 3:08 AM UTC

wmeredith wrote: post #252

akkartik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What kind of reader can I import this into? I'd like to get back into RSS.

Most of them, I hope! It's a pretty standard OPML file.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#257

Post by Fiveplus » Mon, May 18, 2020, 3:33 AM UTC

danielrm26 wrote: post #123

Fiveplus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a big fan of RSS feeds but with their demise I started using Feedly. It let's me curate sources into different customizable feeds like news or science. I pay for the pro happily since they let me add specific twitter accounts too. Really saves me time!

Feedly is an RSS reader. It’s not one or the other.

I should've been clearer above, I meant the google RSS reader [feeds]. Either way, your point stands to anyone wondering about the identity of feedly :)

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#258

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Mon, May 18, 2020, 3:35 AM UTC

gsich wrote: post #131

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…

Stop using Apple products. Stop developing for Apple products. Stop treating Apple like they matter.

> Stop using Apple products.

Sure.

> Stop developing for Apple products. Stop treating Apple like they matter.

The market, as it actually exists, disagrees (especially in terms of profit, as opposed to number of devices). I understand hating Apple, but if I write software for profit, I care about where the customers/money are and Apple absolutely qualifies. Should you also support other platforms? Absolutely. But removing support for a platform like you're suggesting is at best prioritizing ideology over profit, and even the ideology argument is... not one-sided.

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#259

Post by 40four » Mon, May 18, 2020, 3:54 AM UTC

Wait, shit. Was all that just an advertisement for Feedly !?

Oh well. Anyway, for some reason, I do usually enjoy reading the 'Why CSS died' debate when it rears it's head from time to time. I have been toying with the idea of dipping my toes back into RSS.

Let's say I don't want to pay for a Feedly subscription. Does anybody know some good places to start, to explore the landscape of available open source RSS readers?

Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

#260

Post by danielrm26 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 3:55 AM UTC

40four wrote: post #259

Wait, shit. Was all that just an advertisement for Feedly !? Oh well. Anyway, for some reason, I do usually enjoy reading the 'Why CSS died' debate when it rears it's head from time to time. I have been toying with the idea of dipping my toes back into RSS. Let's say I don't want to pay for a Feedly subscription. Does anybody know some good places to start, to explore the landscape of available open source RSS reader…

Maybe in the article, where it links to a discussion of the top RSS readers?