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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”

#161

Post by ydlr »

sneak wrote: post #145
grozzle wrote: post #92

The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete. Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.

Most of the listeners of podcasts have moved on to technologies that do not rely on RSS. RSS was like podcasting 1.0. Now people consume podcasts on integrated, centralized platforms.

I was under the impression that Apple Podcasts was the most popular podcast platform. It absolutely does rely on RSS. I assume most others do, as well.

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

#163

Post by superkuh »

kevincox wrote: post #88
donatj wrote: post #23

The general upside of Wordpress powering all-the-things is that usually means there is an RSS feed if you poke around hard enough.

I haven't noticed a WordPress blog where the RSS feed wasn't properly advertised. Does it depend on the theme to include the appropriate link tag? Or maybe it is just sampling bias where I don't notice that WordPress sites are actually wordpress if they don't advertise the feed.

It doesn't help that even Firefox have recently removed RSS/Atom feed autodiscovery and no longer display the icon if there's an RSS head entry. You have to manually type it by knowing common URLs or look at the source. Firefox also removed even the ability to even render RSS feed xml. Now it just asks you to download it like a file. These were very unhealthy choices for a community browser but completely sensible for a JS virtual machine and DRM portal to stream media and buy things.

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

#164

Post by kevincox »

superkuh wrote: post #163
kevincox wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't noticed a WordPress blog where the RSS feed wasn't properly advertised. Does it depend on the theme to include the appropriate link tag? Or maybe it is just sampling bias where I don't notice that WordPress sites are actually wordpress if they don't advertise the feed.

It doesn't help that even Firefox have recently removed RSS/Atom feed autodiscovery and no longer display the icon if there's an RSS head entry. You have to manually type it by knowing common URLs or look at the source. Firefox also removed even the ability to even render RSS feed xml. Now it just asks you to download it like a file. These were very unhealthy choices for a community browser but completely sensible fo…

Yeah definitely. Now you need an extension which accesses every site that you visit. And of course few mobile browsers support extensions anyways.

So on mobile half the time I paste the URL into my feed reader to see that RSS isn't supported.

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

#165

Post by oauea »

grozzle wrote: post #92

The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete. Patreon (and to a greater extent, the podcasters I support) keep making real money out of me and millions of others every month for personalised RSS feeds for content. That RSS feed is the delivery vehicle. It's very reliable, I can use it in any app, much good, so benefit, wow.

> The whole (non-Spotify, ugh) podcast ecosystem would like a word about RSS being obsolete

Off topic, but it's insane how Spotify insists on advertising podcasts to paying users. Worse, they advertise podcasts of American right wing extremists, and call it "Something you might like" or similar offensive wording. I'm not even American, and I'm subjected to unwanted foreign political content on my music player's home page.

I contacted their support about this, and apparently they are getting paid to advertise these podcasts to their already paying users.

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

#166

Post by cgriswald »

chrisseaton wrote: post #119
cgriswald wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that follows. People need proper nutrition, but they can get by for an unreasonable time on sugar cereal and microwavable Salisbury steaks. The prevalence of cheap, nutrient poor meals is not an indication that people's need for nutrition doesn't remain. It's only an indication that suppliers would rather make a cheap, highly profitable good with marketing to convince people it fills a need than to go t…

If there was such limited market demand for RSS when it was available that almost everyone's dropped it, then maybe it's not a solution that people actually need or want. I get that people think it's a great idea, but in practice it seems not to be.

That's a big if.

I'm not convinced suppliers genuinely attempted to provide useful RSS feeds. Even during the hay day of RSS, many feeds were simply stubs meant to get me to their website—even for websites to which I was already paying for the content.

Regardless, demand for a particular solution is much different than demand to meet a particular need. To suggest RSS is 'obsolete' suggests its been obviated by a technology which meets the same need. I don't see that as being the case. It is far more likely to me that RSS doesn't meet the needs of the supply side.

Solutions can also be dropped for lack of profitability or other supply side concerns even where demand for that particular solution is high.

You can see this in action today. Ask yourself why Spotify doesn't support RSS for its podcasts despite it being extremely popular for fetching podcasts.

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

#167

Post by mehdix »

I still maintain an Atom feed on my website and any website I operat, and still curate my offline feed list and reader. I also urge you to do so. It's a remnant of the good old Internet.

Moreover, I enjoyed writing an XSL stylesheet for my Atom feed. It has amazing results, and I wonder why people don't do that.

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

#168

Post by davegauer »

KronisLV wrote: post #137

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…

> which is also why i use Thunderbird instead of web mail clients

Thunderbird is a great feed reader! I doubt I would be using RSS/Atom feeds at all if had to check a separate client application. Having them show up when I check my email makes it incredibly easy to see if an author I follow has posted anything.

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

#169

Post by nathcd »

q1w2 wrote: post #152
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…

I'll add another - Chronological ordering within the day isn't very useful. I'm more interested in what other readers (of my type) have found "important/interesting/insightful/etc", so I care about the likes/upvotes/etc... I don't want everything every day. I want to read the X most important articles that day, with X being different each day depending upon how much time I have. RSS cannot really provide that priorit…

> I don't want everything every day.

Yeah! I'm with you. Although I don't use it, I really like some of the features of https://fraidyc.at/. For the majority of feeds I follow, I don't need to keep track of unread status, and high-frequency feeds would be much more bearable if they were grouped together to avoid taking over an aggregated listing. I feel like a lot of client defaults tend to hew too closely to email clients or something.

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

#170

Post by Arnavion »

Somewhat off-topic, but my personal static-site blog has an RSS feed, auto-generated by the same build script that compiles the markdown to HTML via pandoc. I don't particularly care if people read the entire article in their feed reader instead of in a browser, so I want to include the full article content in the feed But it feels silly to have two copies of every article in the output, where one copy of each article is in one giant feed.xml file, so currently I only put the title and URL for each article in the feed.

~15 years ago I had solved this problem on an unrelated website by having the feed be the source of the content and have the feed transformed into (X)HTML by the browser automatically using XSLT. But I don't think that's in favor these days, especially since not all browsers support it.

What do other people with static-site blogs do?

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