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Back to the Future with RSS

ncase.me

101–105 of 105 posts

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#101
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 Feedly on the backend, Reeder 3 on my Mac and NetNewsWire on my iPad. I did pay for Reeder years ago and I use it on my Mac because it has good keystroke support (j for next article, etc.) whereas NNW does not.

There's a Reeder 5 and the two improvements (for me) that it has over 3 is that Twitter probably won't say "outdated browser" and refuse to show tweets and support for adding newsfeeds directly. I think MacOS added support for this after Reeder 3 was released.

Mixing the two readers is fine because Feedly is keeping track for them. If Feedly were to start charging, I'd probably start using NNW exclusively since they provide the option of using iCloud to sync.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when Google Reader shutdown and I was outraged. Found RSSOwl and migrated all subscriptions tediously. Then YouTube shut down its RSS feeds and all I had left was basically slightly smarter bookmarks to a scattering of blogs. Then Firefox removed RSS. At that point, why bother trying anymore? Entirely replaced by link-voting sites now, like HN.

>YouTube shut down its RSS feeds They had some other RSS feeds than for channels and playlists?

Not that I know of or recall.

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#104
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)

Vivaldi also has an RSS reader FWIW

Re: Back to the Future with RSS

#105
post #45
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…

Mozilla doesn't have an incentive to add RSS since they would prefer larger Pocket adoption.

I quick skim a lot of my rss feed articles and routinely save the longer ones to pocket.
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