“We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete” • Hacker News Board

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#41

Post by dewey » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

b6dybuyv wrote: post #37

I think the world would be a better place if in these cases, instead of tweeting a rant and then submitting it to HackerNews, the OP took the effort to explain to that NGO why he thought RSS was a great tool and why they should keep using it.

What makes you believe they didn't do that?

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#42

Post by SahAssar » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #7

SahAssar wrote: post #2

Seems slightly ironic that the hashtag #RSSaintdead hasn't been used since 2015

Is it? The idea of RSS was to escape complicated, centralizing, proprietary platforms like twitter. In order to read the post in this discussion's twitter link I'd have to execute their code on my machine. There's no way to access twitter via text. I certainly hope that most RSS users are shying away from such a terrible platform.

RSS was first released/specified in 1999, so to say that the idea was to escape platforms like twitter is rewriting history (myspace didn't even launch until 4 years later, friendster three years later). The idea of RSS seems to (originally and still in some ways) to be able to keep track of updates to many different sites from one application.

My point was rather that twitter is a place where brands listen and also a place where a lot of web devs talk. If RSS is to continue being seen as relevant twitter would be a good place to advocate for it.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#43

Post by dewey » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

Zealotux wrote: post #25

Now here's a startup idea: generate a RSS feed for any website. $1 a month, $10 if paid annually :o)

There's a lot of services doing that already, it's a very small market. There are also a bunch of open source projects doing that already. I built one myself (https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge) but there are better and more powerful ones on Github.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#44

Post by dqv » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

SahAssar wrote: post #2

Seems slightly ironic that the hashtag #RSSaintdead hasn't been used since 2015

I can’t really trust Twitter to have accurate searches like that. The tag search misses tons of tweets IME.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#45

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #30

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#46

Post by mdp2021 » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

kgran wrote: post #33

I got the same argument after I asked why there's no more RSS/Atom feed of the news section in my municipality's website. Some positive people tell me that RSS is not dead and it's still everywhere. Unfortunately, especially after modern redesigns, RSS gets dropped as "obsolete technology". The sad thing is that this doesn't only happen to optional websites which I could choose not to follow out of principle like blo…

For «Governmental [and] municipal» information, you should be vocal as a community and/or individual community members. "Look you could visit n websites per day - and get lost in formatting, though already to visit all potential sources is impossible -, or there is this old simple thing that automatically lets one know that source S has these news..." It could be that already the representatives are unaware of the possibility and of the relevant simple solution.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#47

Post by bryanrasmussen » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

geerlingguy wrote: post #16

mdp2021 wrote: post #9

Obsolete?! Replaced by what?!?!?!? I think obsolescence implies replacement!

I'm guessing they think that social media and a subscription email newsletter are adequate replacements. But they are not.

I was thinking accidental denial of service attack by badly scripted bot crawling their site every 15 minutes was an adequate replacement, but they didn't agree with that.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#48

Post by sp332 » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

ActivityHub (formerly known as PubSubHubBub) is also acceptable. No social media intermediary required, and it's actively developed.

Edit: I meant WebSub above. ActivityHub is cool too but not quite in the same space.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#49

Post by throwaway1777 » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

mdp2021 wrote: post #9

Obsolete?! Replaced by what?!?!?!? I think obsolescence implies replacement!

Replaced by social media.

Re: “We removed the RSS feed since this technology became obsolete”

#50

Post by polote » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

Is RSS really a technology or a part of the failed attempt of having a semantic web (the real web 3.0) ?

RSS is easily replaceable by just scrapping a website, technologically speaking it doesn't make sense to have everyone making a request to website every minute. We could have a central service responsible for that, but I guess it will centralized and some people don't like that