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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”

#131

Post by jaredsohn »

DannyBee wrote: post #79
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 bran…

>create a new thing that is very similar, but has a new brand

Use the blockchain and make it a part of web3

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

#132

Post by mantaraygun »

nathcd wrote: post #115

I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies: - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety…

> - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links

I have a restrictive whitelist configuration for uMatrix and in most cases I don't bother to whitelist images when I read articles. I've found that the vast majority of the time, the images are stock images that only tangentially relate to the subject of the text and add no real value. I guess they're included because editors feel images are essential even if they're unrelated.

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

#133

Post by nathcd »

oauea wrote: post #123
nathcd wrote: post #115

I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies: - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links - there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety…

> - every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links > - lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article. > - if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page This…

> These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article.

"Should" indeed. But a standard that isn't followed isn't exactly helpful to me.

> This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think any alternatives would make sense.

Yeah, I agree that an alternative doesn't make sense for RSS in particular, but it's not hard to imagine an only-slightly-more-featureful syndication system where individual feed items are directly addressable.

It's just a shame that I've got this really nice, personalized feed reading interface, and I get pulled out of it every time I follow a link.

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

#136

Post by idworks1 »

An advantage of RSS is that most companies that remove it, only remove the link from the website. Even bloggers who somehow feel the need to remove it, remove it from the share options but leave the link tag in the source code intact. The link remains functional.

The best technology are silent and boring.

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

#137

Post by KronisLV »

Recently added RSS/Atom/JSON feeds to my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/

Honestly, i largely agree with the claim that RSS is dying.

For example, on Windows i wanted to find a decent RSS reader to use, since recently coming to like the technology myself for consumption of news (since all of the sudden everything can just be boring text, as opposed to annoying and attention catching images, styling etc., allowing em to focus on the content), which turned out to be hard.

In my search, i found the following readers:

  - Feedly (https://feedly.com/) not really an option for me, since i want downloadable software, which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web mail clients
  - Newsblur (https://www.newsblur.com/) same as above
  - Inoreader (https://www.inoreader.com/) same as above
  - Feeder (https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/feeder-rss-feed-reader/jlkhefogiiibhgblliimeleiiiijbkjj) not an option, Windows Store app, i avoid that
  - Omea Reader (https://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/) by JetBrains, but requirements list Windows XP, so not updated in a long time
  - RSSOwl (http://www.rssowl.org/) based on Eclipse and fails to launch with new JDK versions
  - QuiteRSS (https://quiterss.org/en/screenshots) the layout absolutely breaks because image dimensions are not constrained, no one wants the header of the news story to fill up the entire screen
  - RSSGuard (https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard) in the end i stuck with this, because just got tired because of so many bad options out there
Apparently Google Reader was also pretty good but was retired.

How is RSS supposed to survive if there is no good software for it out there? Give me something like LibreOffice that you just download, install and it works in surprisingly sane ways most of the time.

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

#140

Post by nerdjon »

I hate to admit it, but I kinda just... stopped looking at my RSS feeds about a year ago. It wasn't intentional, it just kinda happened?

I was (am?) paying for Feedly and then I used a separate app on my phone to consume it (Hated the Feedly UI and I wanted the app I have been using since google reader).

But I costantly found myself with a huge number of unread feeds. They became unmanageable. I would look at headlines and only click a small subset of what I was seeing (likely under 1%).

I think I ended up replacing it with Reddit, Hacker News, and Apple News. Plus the few sites I actually cared about I just regularly checked on my computer.

That being said, I did just open it and scroll a little bit and saw some stuff that I actually would have liked to see. So maybe I should get back into it.

It is sad to see the tech basically disappearing, but almost no one outside of tech knows it exists. I can't remember the last time I actually saw an RSS feed button and I used to have to go digging for it.

I may just need to curate my list of feeds more, or categorize them. I don't know, but I wish Had a better solution to all of the unread stuff.

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