I wonder why podcasts are thriving while writing-based RSS is declining.
It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
281–290 of 376 posts
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realise what the most successful thing built on top of that open social graph was, right? Cambridge Analytica.
The issue there was collection of massive amounts of public data by Facebook. Open data APIs can be used to build nice things, if the data isn't user information.
No, it was Cambridge Analytica using the old FB social graph API ("Open Graph") to build a network of people that they could make predictions on.
The app "This is your digital life" let people do a psychological profile linked to their FB profile. The Open Graph API then gave Cambridge Analytica to (some of) their friend's data as well,
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica...
https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-th...
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Those services are not whats making a smartphone "smart".
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#284RSS 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…
Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space. I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of posts has decreased over the years. Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers are not very motivated to spa…
I often ponder about the current push towards federation in tech such as Mastodon, and wonder if the issue isn't more around the issue of finding the sites in the first place, rather than being able to access sites via RSS. RSS is usually a default in many web publishing tools (wordpress, hugo etc).
As someone getting into RSS more recently, I've definitely struggled to find decent sites to follow (though trawling hackernews totally helps:)).
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#285Damn I have a draft about RSS languishing in my TODO for weeks. Great stuff though. RSS FTW!
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#286RSS 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 very much alive and aggregators like Feedly are way more powerful than Google Reader. All media website still use them, and even some major ones post full-text, The Verge does that, for example.
Monetization is rather simple, people visit a website if they want to read more about the news. In exchange you get guaranteed access to their attention not intermediated by Facebook, Google or Twitter.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#287RSS 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…
Thing is, RSS didn’t “die”. It only ever filled a couple of niches, and arguably it is more popular than it ever was because not only are people still continuing to use RSS readers, podcasts are arguably more popular than they’ve ever been (this period of time with the coronavirus possibly excepted). I get that when people think of “RSS”, they’re thinking of tech that downloads text and maybe some images into a reade…
While RSS doesn't replace a site like Reddit, it's great that Reddit has RSS support built-in.
Much of my browsing of the site at least starts off in a feed reader, to make it quick to find what I'm interested in. From there, I'll open links to the site proper, with all the comments and such that make the experience what it is.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#288We should go more old-school and resurrect NNTP instead: Have clients that render Markdown, and servers where users can create their own access-controlled groups. Have a group where only the owner may post: That's a feed. Have a group where only the owner may post top-level articles, but anyone may respond: That's a blog.
I had the same ideas about feeds and blogs as you have, and I agree.
I have seen the idea about Markdown before, and have considered that too; it is not a bad idea. However, clients should only render Markdown if the article contains a "Content-type: text/markdown" header, and assume plain text otherwise. Clients that don't understand Markdown you can still read the article, since Markdown is meant as readable even when not rendered, so that is good, too.
I even wrote a simple NNTP server software and NNTP client software. Both programs are based on SQLite.
I have not considered your idea of servers where users can create their own access-controlled groups, although that doesn't seem so bad; some people may wish to run such servers, and may have some way of users controlling them.
Also note, you could have multiple interfaces if wanted: HTML, RSS, email, and NNTP, with NNTP as the primary and preferred interface. (To these, Gopher can also be added for read-only access, if wanted.)
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#289I've been hosting my own instance of Tiny Tiny RSS ever since Google Reader shut down. Highly recommended.
Re: It’s Time to Get Back to RSS
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dislike a lot Feedly, almost like Inoreader and kinda like bazqux. Not sure why though.
I used bazqux for a while and paid for the annual subscription. It just ended and I was looking around for free alternatives, and found CommaFeed, which reminds me a lot of Google Reader.
CommaFeed is great ! thanks for sharing this