Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Miss RSS

wilcosky.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 314 posts

Re: I Miss RSS

#61

Post by onli »

paxys wrote: post #48

The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is…

That's not true, but might be a common misconception. RSS rode the wave of the realtime hype at that time and has multiple standards for push notifications. RSSCloud und Pubsubhubbub are the two immediately in my mind, note that PuSH got turned into WebSub.

Re: I Miss RSS

#63

Post by anthonyshort »

paxys wrote: post #48

The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is…

I think it was the sunsetting of Google Reader that triggered the downfall. I don’t think I ever cared about push notifications for feeds. When you have your morning coffee, open up Reeder, refresh the feeds and read through a few articles.

Re: I Miss RSS

#64

Post by Gigachad »

paxys wrote: post #48

The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is…

I don't think it was even just a technical issue. Linear feeds of all content just died out to be replaced with sites like Hacker News / Reddit where you have ranked ordering and comments.

As much as HN hates the out of order feeds, that's what the average user wants because most content is boring.

Re: I Miss RSS

#65

Post by TekMol »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #23
TekMol wrote: post #2

RSS is still alive and kicking. I came here via RSS. But the masses browse a locked down web. That is true. We might have another shot at an open web for the masses via the whole crypto movement. If content goes on decentralized blockchains in the future, nobody can lock the content down like big tech did for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. Projects like Arweave show how it is possible to store huge amounts…

Alright, I'll bite. Consider a “decentralised” blockchain system that does the work of The Pirate Bay – providing hashes of particular files, along with their names, so that people can select and request data from the P2P network. How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in any way ? Additionally, how does this system help with the “censorship” issues that The Pirate Bay has? Even when The Pirate Bay remains up,…

    How, exactly, does this system
    help with RSS in any way?
You cannot make a Twitter-2-RSS bridge because Twitter block access to the data. In a decentralized system, access to the data is inherent.

    Even when The Pirate Bay remains up,
    that doesn't mean anybody's seeding
That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised.

    If all the data is directly on the
    blockchain, nobody can actually
    download it all
Blockchains have come a long way since Satoshis version in 2009. We have approaches now where participants only need to download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the network as a whole keeps the chain intact.

Re: I Miss RSS

#66

Post by breischl »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #11

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…

>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.

Yeah, this is definitely a problem. FWIW, Ars Technica solved that by giving you full-text fees only if you pay for a subscription, which seems like a nice approach that more places could hypothetically use.

Re: I Miss RSS

#68

Post by marginalia_nu »

breischl wrote: post #59
paxys wrote: post #48

The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is…

>Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today. 1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly. 2) Most people then and now would go through an aggregator. So they'd really be talking…

> 1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly.

Besides, assuming you're not hideously overcomplicating things, you'll just be serving a static file off disk. If your server is a raspberry pi, you ought to still be able to serve some 1000 requests/second if that is what you are doing.

Assuming most RSS readers poll at most once every 15 minutes (which is a really high rate), you'll need at least a million subscribers before you need to get a second raspberry pi.

Re: I Miss RSS

#69

Post by stavros »

jerf wrote: post #22
bisby wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having self-hosted for a long time, I find it's getting easier in a lot of ways what with Docker and all. I'm starting to wonder where "Sandstorm 2.0" is. Sandstorm, for those who don't know, was basically an attempt to make self hosting really viable, but was tragically ahead of its time because it predated Docker. So they burned tons of effort on sandboxing, and wrapping existing applications into their sandbox, an…

I use Dokku for that (I can share my Bitwarden repo if you want, the entire thing is four lines or something). I also made https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster for things that weren't so "web server -> app -> database" and love it.

Re: I Miss RSS

#70

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

paxys wrote: post #48

The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is…

I'd assume that somebody who misses RSS will also be happy with pulling only few times a day and not every few minutes. That's why push became so popular but with a different subset of users. Everybody goes through a push-positive phase but some (like me) come to a conclusion that this is unhealthy and distracting in the long run - hence the fond memories of technology like RSS.
Post reply on HN