Activity Streams / Activity Pub has been referred to as "RSS on steroids". It's where the web is going. It'd probably be a good idea to target for it in your promotion plans (being W3C recommendations and all).
Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
51–60 of 170 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#52Perhaps the most important thing we can do is fund a scraper that creates an RSS feed for sites that don't have one.
I'm pretty sure Feedly does this (about as well as it can be done).
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#53One thing I've noticed with podcasts, is that my reader will download the full RSS every day, listing hundreds of episodes, just to see if there's a new one. I get why they do this as a new listener will want to start off with a full list of episodes and may want to pick up a show from the start. It would be useful if an RSS could specify a separate URL to query that will only list new episodes, returning an empty RS…
Some podcast clients support rfc5005: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005
When I was writing my comment, it felt like my idea was too obvious for no-one to have already written it up as a formal specification.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Joining the chat at https://gitter.im/FosterRSS/community would probably not work as well, as it would not be limited to relevant updates?
Just a bit of feedback, as someone who hasn't used Gitter before, I just clicked that link and was invited to join by logging in with GitLab, GitHub or Twitter. I don't use my GitHub account for logging in to other sites without a decent amount of consideration (I didn't sign up to GitHub to use it as an SSO system and generally don't like using it for that purpose). And I have neither of the other two accounts. So I…
Okay, sure! I created a form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc9lWrieLAn9azMI_88... . Does it work for you?
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#55I think this is a great idea. I don't have much time to commit right now but I'd love to stay connected with your efforts. Do you want to put up a quick google form or similar to collect emails of people like me who are interested if you have relevant updates?
(In case you get reply notifications)
I created a form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc9lWrieLAn9azMI_88... . Does it work for you?
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#56I was thinking the other day about RSS-based social media. Imagine a service that offers a social media experience comparable with Twitter/Insta/Tumblr with rich clients, but under the hood it's all RSS, so not only can you subscribe to third-party feeds out of the box but your "profile" is also an RSS feed that other people outside of the platform can also subscribe to.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this too.
I think a way to do this and still allow private or restricted feeds is to take advantage of the fact that URLs are encrypted under HTTPS. Have the RSS served via FastCGI or a dedicated handler that verifies read permissions for a URL token against a permissions database.[1]
I think you'd want the permissions database to affiliate auth tokens with email addresses or mobile numbers.
When you request to follow someone, you input your email address or mobile number. If they approve your request, you'll receive a link to generate a feed URL with your auth token included. You can then easily input that into your feed reader of choice.[2]
If you lose the feed URL/auth token, you can request a new one using the same email or mobile number. When and only when the resulting link is activated will the old auth token mapping be replaced.
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[1] This design is inspired by Slashdot's old auth system, which allowed you to log in via a saved URL. While that was probably horribly insecure over HTTP, you could restrict it to an IP/subnet. In any case, now that HTTPS is widespread the security concerns are substantially mitigated.
[2] An issue I haven't figured out is how to prevent feedly, inoreeder, etc. from caching private feeds.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#57https://podcastindex.org is building a lot of infrastructure for "Podcasting 2.0" and it all centers around RSS. I've been following this and if you find RSS interesting this will be great to check out.
This is their podcast where they talk about what they are doing; https://podcastindex.org/podcast/920666 That podcast RSS feed; http://mp3s.nashownotes.com/pc20rss.xml
They also have their own mastadon where all the developers working on Podcasting 2.0 hang out. https://podcastindex.social/web/home
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#58Activity Streams / Activity Pub has been referred to as "RSS on steroids". It's where the web is going. It'd probably be a good idea to target for it in your promotion plans (being W3C recommendations and all). https://indieweb.org/ActivityStreams https://indieweb.org/ActivityPub
ActivityStreams specifically is the RSS-like part. ActivityPub is more of a "push" standard that builds on the former. You need it, e.g. to federate across servers with instant delivery of content (no need for polling with its added latency), or to have a standard "post content" workflow for an app to support an arbitrary choice of server. But ActivityStreams is the more basic standard.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#59Most people don’t use RSS because most people don’t prefer to consume the web that way nor that sort of content. They are scrolling social media and aggregators, not pruning their long form content subscriptions. Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using? Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when…
Agreed. The world is moving past static text content as a medium, which is what RSS/IRC are built for. I want more rich video/media oriented content like what the New York Times is producing, which takes advantage of user interactivity and new Javascript APIs. RSS isn't going to make that happen for me.
RSS is built for notification. You can get notifications of new rich-text content, videos, whatever. But notifications when you choose to get them, rather than push notifications. (If I got a push notification to my phone for every RSS article I read I'd go nuts.)
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#60A bit tangential, but something I really like about RSS feeds on blogs and the like is that they're relatively easy to parse, and as a result relatively easy to do programmatic stuff with them.
For example, when I had a blog a million years ago, I wanted to add a "search" engine to it (just a really dumb string comparison). It was pretty easy to do it client-side, in JavaScript, by reading the RSS feed generated by Jekyll and then just plopping the results on the screen.
Was it elegant? Nah, but it was easy and "good enough", and it would not have been nearly as easy if I hadn't had RSS.