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Back to the Future with RSS

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Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#11

Post by Havoc »

The tech is great, the feeds are just garbage / 2nd tier citizens. Garbage in, garbage out rule still lives.

e.g. I've got an economist sub - a reputable source of news. Checked out the feed...picked one...week in review. Title on every post is week in review. Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing.i.e. Would need to click through to find out topic on each one.

Might as well not use RSS...

Love the concept but have concluded in practice it is a non-starter. The usefulness of it depends entirely on what providers stick in the feed. And all their focus is on pushing their app/twitter/insta etc. Not hard to monetize RSS.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#12

Post by SimeVidas »

onli wrote: post #10

What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean: 1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI 2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text 3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one. This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a defa…

I use Feed Preview https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feed-preview/

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#14

Post by Jorengarenar »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #4

I recently added an RSS feed to my personal blog, hosted on github pages, and I was astonished at just how easy it is. I wish all of my friends just had blogs and RSS feeds instead of Facebook or Instagram accounts.

To highlight how easy it is to add RSS feed to your Jekyll blog: it's a matter of enabling one plugin

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#15

Post by jamesvandyne »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #4

I recently added an RSS feed to my personal blog, hosted on github pages, and I was astonished at just how easy it is. I wish all of my friends just had blogs and RSS feeds instead of Facebook or Instagram accounts.

You may like micro.blog. It’s a blog/rss based social network. You can create a blog with them or import an existing RSS feed (what I do). It’s all chronological. And since it’s “just rss”, you can use different apps to use it like Instagram or Twitter.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#16

Post by clircle »

I agree with the paragraph at the end:

> Now you know how to escape the attention-draining, empathy-killing, critical-thought-suffocating siren song of the algorithms.

The only way I got my sanity back to cut out everything that's not RSS. I still use HN's algo, but everything else goes to NewsBlur. I'm trying to quit the HN algo, but can't do it yet... mainly because the content is actually interesting.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#17

Post by sys_64738 »

Havoc wrote: post #11

The tech is great, the feeds are just garbage / 2nd tier citizens. Garbage in, garbage out rule still lives. e.g. I've got an economist sub - a reputable source of news. Checked out the feed...picked one...week in review. Title on every post is week in review. Content of post is a link. No context, no summary, no single sentence...nothing.i.e. Would need to click through to find out topic on each one. Might as well n…

I have Economist feeds like this so what are you seeing that's different? It works fine for Economist feeds in my experience.

https://www.economist.com/feeds/print-sections/69/leaders.xm...

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#18

Post by 12ian34 »

onli wrote: post #10

What would it take to get Firefox to support RSS again? With support I mean: 1. To detect RSS feeds and show an icon in the UI 2. Render RSS files, so they look better than raw text 3. Link that UI icon to a subscribe function: Show a configurable list of RSS Readers and send the feed to the subscribe URL of the selected one. This can already be added with extensions, but it would boost RSS adoption if it were a defa…

After a 12 year hiatus I got Thunderbird again and have been enjoying it as both a mail client and RSS reader. Whilst I do miss the Firefox functionality, I'm happy with Thunderbird

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#19

Post by robobro »

I've been writing a decentralized messageboard[0] with some friends lately; the global index and tags have atom feeds, and each thread has an atom feed. There's also an atom feed of recent comments. I've written some simple tools to fake a desktop client for the messageboard and have some of the atom feeds linked to various IRC/matrix rooms. Pretty handy. I wish that all messageboards had RSS feeds for thread lists (or better yet, each thread also has its own) because having to jump from site to site to site is a pain, I'd rather just get notifications in a simple way.

Is JSONfeed actually used by anyone on HN?

[0] - https://0chan.vip

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#20

Post by robobro »

Yaina wrote: post #3

I love RSS, hope it makes a resurgence. But I don't think the only reason for the death of RSS was the discontinuation of Google Reader. RSS can become very messy super quickly, and I think we need clients that don't look like the ones we know from 15 years ago, but ones that help users to keep their subscriptions neat and clean.

Atom > RSS
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