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Back to the Future with RSS

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Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#51

Post by allenleee »

msurdi wrote: post #44

Shameless plug of my own RSS reader side project: https://github.com/msurdi/feedo . It's not great nor complete, but is very simple and does the basic thing, it has no ads and there is no risk somebody will turn it off or push it in commercial ways. I built it about a month ago over the weekend and haven't looked back to other popular services. If you're a developer, making an RSS reader you like seems like a very ni…

Thanks for sharing! One small suggestion: add an UI screenshot in the repos would be nicer

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#52

Post by CyberRabbi »

Great article. Necessary now more than ever.

Those of us in the FOSS community now need to also move away from GitHub. They are taking our code and putting it into their ML-based copilot product to allow proprietary developers to use FOSS code without having to conform to a FOSS license. This practice makes GitHub is hostile to the FOSS community. Decentralization is key to preserving our software rights.

https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410037309848752128

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#53

Post by ocdtrekkie »

chrismorgan wrote: post #49

It never ceases to frustrate me that these sorts of articles invariably focus on RSS, and say little to nothing about Atom. This article mentions Atom once: > (Note: there's something very similar to RSS called "Atom", but all modern apps work equally with both.) Here’s what I say about it: If you’re doing podcasts, use RSS, because almost nothing supports Atom there, because for all practical purposes Apple took ove…

I think arguing RSS versus Atom is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic: It's a stupid waste of discussion points, because they are so interchangeable. Let's focus on the general concept of getting feed readers back in to vogue, then push our preferred format.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#54

Post by chrismorgan »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #53
chrismorgan wrote: post #49

It never ceases to frustrate me that these sorts of articles invariably focus on RSS, and say little to nothing about Atom. This article mentions Atom once: > (Note: there's something very similar to RSS called "Atom", but all modern apps work equally with both.) Here’s what I say about it: If you’re doing podcasts, use RSS, because almost nothing supports Atom there, because for all practical purposes Apple took ove…

I think arguing RSS versus Atom is like reorganizing deck chairs on the Titanic: It's a stupid waste of discussion points, because they are so interchangeable. Let's focus on the general concept of getting feed readers back in to vogue, then push our preferred format.

It’s not terribly common in general, but in content about HTML, if you put things like HTML tag names in titles, it will get mangled by some (most?) feed readers if the feed is RSS. I’ve seen such titles that are broken because the publishers didn’t use Atom more than a few times, and written a couple of titles myself that show up fine because I produce Atom rather than RSS. (I also put things like and in my titles for italics and monospacing, though most feed readers will strip that out and reduce HTML titles to plain text. The almost universal convention that titles are plain text with no formatting is silly.)

RSS is worse than Atom in real, practical ways. Unless there’s a concrete reason for you to use RSS (which largely means “it’s a podcast”), you should use Atom, because it will protect your content against being mangled when you have things like less than signs and ampersands in it.

Returning back to the matter of the naming: I think there are two sound reasons to stop calling it “RSS” and start calling it “feeds”:

① Using one specific, inferior technology to describe it is factually wrong, and perpetuates the wrongness and inferiority, because people hear of RSS and so implement RSS, rather than Atom.

② When someone isn’t familiar with the stuff, “RSS” is just a meaningless name (or could remind you of other organisations that use the acronym, e.g. in India it means commonly-extremist Hindu nationalism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh), but “feeds” invokes a concept that is more likely to be familiar and immediately understood.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#55

Post by menotyou »

smolyeet wrote: post #35
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.

I know this is subjective, but it's so hard to find a good rss reader with a modern UI and isn't inexpensive/free

I use http://www.netvibes.com

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#56

Post by mackrevinack »

Animats wrote: post #50

So what's a good general news feed? The Associated Press shut theirs down. The New York Times doesn't update much throughout the day. I'd like a good news feed that only has really important stories. No filler, no press release stuff.

> I'd like a good news feed that only has really important stories. No filler, no press release stuff

newsblur has a 'trainer' feature where you can train it to hide certain topics or authors and highlight others. it doesn't work with every feed though so you'll have to try it out yourself or maybe there are other readers that do something similar

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#57

Post by beagle3 »

12ian34 wrote: post #18
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

After more than 20 years with Thunderbird as my reader (first NNTP, then RSS), I switched to NewsBlur and am much happier.

While thunderbird is a good reader, it doesn’t synchroniZe “already seen” across machines, and many feeds only have the latest 10 items in their XML feed, so unless you poll continuously, you are likely to miss updates.

I like to occasionally take a week off the world (without the laptop), and many of my feeds have more than 10 updates a week (some more than 10 a day).

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#58

Post by beagle3 »

Black101 wrote: post #38
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…

Firefox dropping RSS is one of their many stupid decisions (it's not like RSS changes a lot and takes a lot of maintenance)... I'm seriously thinking about switching to Otter (installed it today)

Dropping RSS likely didn’t change their declining popularity for better or worse - and that’s the only thing they are worried about right now (and rightly so)

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#59

Post by NiceWayToDoIT »

hutattedonmyarm wrote: post #47
NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #42

There is on issue, RSS is advert and cookie free. Meaning it creates a clean web, but as such prevents monetization, so I guess it was not suitable technology. But on the other hand there are many blogs that do not care about Google Ads or similar, so it would be interesting to revamp RSS again.

I follow a few monetized feeds. They’re usually one of: - One post per week, showcasing the sponsor - Embedding a static image into every feed entry for their current sponsor - Adding a text-based „this post is sponsored by“ sentence/paragraph to every post For me personally they’re fair tradeoffs

That is interesting, so I guess tracking engagement would be only through RSS feed access statistic?
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