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I Miss RSS

wilcosky.com

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Re: I Miss RSS

#11

Post by Karrot_Kream »

This topic comes up semi-frequently. I'm personally a fan of RSS but it certainly has issues:

(For the purposes of this comment I'm mostly referring to Atom/

1. RSS is, at the end of the day, a syndication format, _not_ a feedback or posting format.

2. RSS feeds have no real concept of portability between devices or user agents. Kludges like OPML can be used to aggregate feeds for sharing across user agents, but they still don't actually store device-specific metadata that a user would like.

3. If RSS feeds contain both the article and the content, then there's both little incentive for the user to actually visit the site and no analytics for the author to understand which articles are popular. When authors put summaries in their feeds with links to the original article, they degrade the experience for the reader.

Services like Wallabag which scrape and store article contents for later viewing seems, IMO, more Lin line with what users want while being fairly seamless for the author. There's also technologies like WebMentions for server owners to comment on other blogs or things like Usenet to freely discuss articles.

Re: I Miss RSS

#12

Post by mawise »

I've been working on a self-hosted (not federated) model for social media called Haven[1]. RSS (with HTTP basic auth) was the obvious answer for "how do I track all of my friends' different sites?" It has the advantage that building an RSS reader into the system means you can follow other Havens and other websites in one place.

[1]: https://havenweb.org/

Re: I Miss RSS

#13

Post by bisby »

gtsteve wrote: post #7

I still use RSS. I use Feedly to curate various RSS feeds and many website still have them, or at least the tech focussed ones. I used to be subscribed to more but some RSS feeds have such high traffic it's difficult to follow them, such as the BBC news feed. Feedly has a nice new feature [0] that makes an RSS feed out of a standard website, so that might be worth considering if you have some news sources that don't…

When Google reader shut down, I moved to feedly for like a week. Then I started getting anxiety that feedly would shut down too. Because if google could kill off a product i relied on, anyone could. And that got me into self hosting and running my own services.

ttrss was basically my first self hosted thing almost a decade ago. It was great. And then it turned out the guy running it was a bit not pleasant, and I didn't want to support that. So I recently migrated to freshRSS. Both work great, are open source and self hostable.

And feedly hasn't shut down yet (probably just to spite me). So yeah, tons of options for RSS.

Re: I Miss RSS

#16

Post by frizlab »

verifex wrote: post #3

I miss having a standard for uniform syndication that could be read and updated IN-BROWSER. RIP Firefox RSS feeds.

Edge has added in browser support for RSS if I’m not mistaken

Re: I Miss RSS

#18

Post by mcescalante »

I use RSS daily with Miniflux. Tiny Tiny RSS is another popular self hosted option and there are a number of freemium platforms like Feedly & Inoreader. I prefer to self host primarily for cost/no ads or tracking/private data. It's true that social media platforms don't support it but that's never been my personal use case - every news site or discussion group I like to keep up with has a feed and it's worked great for me.

Re: I Miss RSS

#20

Post by qw3rty01 »

bisby wrote: post #13
gtsteve wrote: post #7

I still use RSS. I use Feedly to curate various RSS feeds and many website still have them, or at least the tech focussed ones. I used to be subscribed to more but some RSS feeds have such high traffic it's difficult to follow them, such as the BBC news feed. Feedly has a nice new feature [0] that makes an RSS feed out of a standard website, so that might be worth considering if you have some news sources that don't…

When Google reader shut down, I moved to feedly for like a week. Then I started getting anxiety that feedly would shut down too. Because if google could kill off a product i relied on, anyone could. And that got me into self hosting and running my own services. ttrss was basically my first self hosted thing almost a decade ago. It was great. And then it turned out the guy running it was a bit not pleasant, and I didn…

Google has shut down a bunch of popular services: https://killedbygoogle.com/

I wouldn't use them as a standard for keeping services up.

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