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

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

#71

Post by eloeffler »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #38
eloeffler wrote: post #11

Is there a current and well functioning tool that pulls full articles from the links inside most RSS feeds that only publish teasers? When I first discovered RSS for me, I wanted news to read on the road. It was before Smartphones became ubiquitous. Unfortunately most news sites only published a few lines of text per article. Now, I would like to do the same when there is no network coverage. But I still don't know a…

For what it's worth: When I first launched my Wordpress-based website back in 2005, I initially had it set up to post full articles to the RSS feed. Soon, however, a major downside appeared: It became absolutely trivial for other sites to reproduce my content, and they did in droves. My writings appeared all over the web on generic Wordpress sites, usually attributed to other people. After grappling with the problem…

Yes, it totally makes sense.

I hold no grudge against news sites or anyone who chooses to publish teasers either. And be it only because they need statistics on which articles are more or less popular. Or ad revenue...

Unfortunately the negative effect for my end remains. Sometimes there is no ideal solution for everyone, I guess.

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

#72

Post by dredmorbius »

SahAssar wrote: post #42
superkuh wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"like Twitter" != "specifically Twitter".

Put positively: RSS anticipated Twitter and preemptively routed around it.

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

#75

Post by Hard_Space »

sumthinprofound wrote: post #21
afrazkhan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, Inoreader.

Inoreader (paid pro version) will also allow you to create feeds for sites that do not publish via rss.

> Inoreader (paid pro version) will also allow you to create feeds for sites that do not publish via rss.

I am a paid pro subscriber on Inoreader, and use it 2-3 hours a day for my work. I should mention that it provides a very limited number of certain types of feed (custom-created RSS, Twitter feeds, etc.), and you'll run out of them almost immediately if you want to follow a lot of places.

That said, Inoreader lets you plug as many RSS feeds as you like in, far as I can tell, and I've really loaded it up.

But do watch out for the limits, because the next grade up from 'Pro' is 'Call sales'. It's not very granular.

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

#76

Post by zozbot234 »

mdp2021 wrote: post #9

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

ActivityStreams (the foundation of ActivityPub and other fediverse tech) is pretty much RSS on steroids. I wouldn't call the latter 'obsolete' though.

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

#77

Post by zozbot234 »

kevincox wrote: post #55
sp332 wrote: post #48

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.

Do you mean ActivityPub (used by the "fediverse" such as Mastodon) or WebSub (which was formerly known as PubSubHubbub). The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being always online to receive updates which means that you need to use a service or run your own. It isn't as nice as RSS which can fall back to very occasional polling from my own devices. RSS is also way simpler with a polling rather than subscr…

> The former isn't really an equivalent. It requires being always online to receive updates which me/ans that you need to use a service or run your own.

ActivityPub is the "push" counterpart to the more foundational ActivityStreams, which works no different than RSS.

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

#79

Post by DannyBee »

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…

Y'all need to lean into the game a bit. Most of the time, things don't win or stay just because they are good. They win because of good marketing, etc. RSS, the brand, is a loser at this point. It is viewed as old, tired, and obsolete. It doesn't matter if it is the right tech. That's not a state you can grow from.

At this point the right answer (IMHO) is to create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new brand. Market the hell out of it and subsidize the hell out of it.

Trying to prevent the existing brand from dying is a fools errand.

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