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I Miss RSS

wilcosky.com

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Re: I Miss RSS

#231

Post by vidarh »

night862 wrote: post #205
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've noticed a healthy amount of websites with pretty granular RSS, for example the auto parts outlet rockauto.com has RSS feed for every make, model, and production year that they service. I'd wager this saves them some unpaid overtime. It seems that a service which provides correct, useful RSS nearly obviates the entire hassle of dealing with bot scrapers and the resource drain and health insurance premiums that co…

I was part of a startup that aggregated items for sale years and years ago (we were sold to LookSmart for a pittance in the end) and we did RSS feeds for everything. Every page spat out a list of items, in fact and the website and the RSS and atom feeds were all generated from the same middle layer. A huge part of our inventory came from RSS feeds too.

Re: I Miss RSS

#232

Post by Rerarom »

capybara_2020 wrote: post #194
karaterobot wrote: post #82

When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day. I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.

Active RSS user here till Google killed Reader. I tried using Feedly last year. Added feeds and it was HORRIBLE experience. Not Feedly but the actual feeds. Some of them give you the title and then tell you to go to actual website to read the article. Others has a virtually non-existent summary. During RSS's heydays I remember being able to just see the summary and click on it and read the article right there and the…

Yeah I always opened the website when using RSS, even in 2008, so I don't mind.

Re: I Miss RSS

#233

Post by medstrom »

pizza234 wrote: post #217
zitterbewegung wrote: post #84

Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.

RSS feeds don't replace a website. Most of the websites don't publish their whole articles on the RSS feed, only a summary (or even just a line). Therefore, RSS doesn't cause any advertisement loss, as the user needs to go to the website anyway (which, to be clear, is totally fine - RSS still works as filter/preview, which is very helpful).

This behavior is typical for news sites, but in fact the majority of blogs don't truncate their feed items.

Re: I Miss RSS

#234

Post by agumonkey »

jrue wrote: post #111

Douglas Adams, [how to learn to love the internet]: 1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3. anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we kn…

Does he talks about the fact that vintage stuff that was before my birth are also better ? and how antique people were better ? These feelings are regularly in my head. Mostly because I feel so much waste from all the new things.. I'm not sure if it's a special attribute of the last decades (smartphones etc) or not.

Re: I Miss RSS

#235

Post by bryanrasmussen »

42jd wrote: post #165
karaterobot wrote: post #82

When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day. I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.

I agree wholly with this. I only very recently started using RSS and almost every site/blog has one that produces quality content. For example the St. Louis Fed has a few high quality blog feeds and when I couldn’t find the RSS feed I sent them an email and lo and behold, there was an RSS feed to each one (just on a different page that I missed). It seems to be a rarity that good content feeds don’t have RSS.

huh, maybe if you want to make a crawler that competes with google you want to penalize content that does not have RSS feeds.

Re: I Miss RSS

#236

Post by mro_name »

dpeck wrote: post #171
mro_name wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet it scared the shit out of Zuck and still does today. Add websub and few more and you have a social network, duh. Decentral. People owned.

this is what Reader was and has always made me even more confused as to why Google killed it off. They had the right start for a unique take on content focused/small group discussion based social networking and the tossed it for “circles”

and so did facebook (=> remember friendfeed).

Re: I Miss RSS

#237

Post by dave333 »

capybara_2020 wrote: post #194
karaterobot wrote: post #82

When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day. I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.

Active RSS user here till Google killed Reader. I tried using Feedly last year. Added feeds and it was HORRIBLE experience. Not Feedly but the actual feeds. Some of them give you the title and then tell you to go to actual website to read the article. Others has a virtually non-existent summary. During RSS's heydays I remember being able to just see the summary and click on it and read the article right there and the…

I still read all the same feeds I had on Google Reader first on Digg Reader and now on Inoreader free version. Main way I consume news although I do look at Facebook for family stuff and twitter for very topical stuff and following folks like Elon Musk who mostly tweet.

Re: I Miss RSS

#238

Post by PaulKeeble »

RSS-Proxy can watch sites without RSS and inform on changes. Well worth self hosting it alongside FreshRSS. There are also solutions for watching Twitter, Facebook et el too. In todays technology there is no reason to just visit a website to check for updates and I find most sites I use do have RSS anyway.

Re: I Miss RSS

#239

Post by dave333 »

marban wrote: post #214

News aggregators are my main business since 2001 and all I can say is that reports of the death of RSS have been greatly exaggerated. Recently launched https://biztoc.com where 75% is still RSS, the rest being APIs and custom scraping. Yes, support is not increasing but drops among established sites are very rare — Even all major crypto news sites sport a feed.

Looks interesting but how do you change the styling - the jaggy cyan text really hurts my poor old eyes...

Re: I Miss RSS

#240

Post by c80e74f077 »

RSS feeds have become my one and only way to consume the web and subscribe to people, websites and various things on the web.

Tiny Tiny RSS[0] is an addictive RSS reader with tons of options to sort, manipulate, filter in/out, etc. RSS entries. Feed Preview[1] is a must-have Firefox add-on for finding available feeds on websites (and previewing them).

All alternative front-ends to YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. provide feeds to subscribe to people like Invidious[2], nitter[3], Bibliogram[4], etc. (large list of alternative front-ends here [5]).

Fortunately, Github and Reddit, still natively support RSS feeds.

As others have mentioned, WordPress-based websites natively include RSS feeds for the whole website, by category, for comments of a particular post, etc. This is much better than crappy newsletters.

Regarding newsletters, when it's the only option, I use Mailnesia[6] to turn an inbox into an RSS feed.

Speaking of bridges, RSS-Bridge[7] makes feeds available to hundreds of websites through community plugins.

Feed43 [8] is also a great tool to force an ordinary page to be available as an RSS feed.

SearX [9], a metasearch engine, turns into a very powerful tool to watch for something on the whole web with advanced search functions and results available as RSS feeds. This is better than many dedicated tools, imo.

Anyway, I don't think RSS feeds are missing or even dying. But they are definitely a relic of the good old days, when Aaron Swartz was around, and unfortunately reserved for people who are looking for them or are curious enough to dive into that world.

One thing is for sure though: if they disappear, I'm out.

[0] https://tt-rss.org

[1] https://code.guido-berhoerster.org/addons/firefox-addons/fee...

[2] https://invidious.io

[3] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

[4] https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/

[5] https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

[6] https://mailnesia.com

[7] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

[8] https://feed43.com

[9] https://searx.space

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