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Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

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Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#101

Post by hammyhavoc »

MarioT wrote: post #72

Food for thought, RSS is dead because it does not provide an incentive for the author. If you do not collect a mailing list/email list you do not have a known audience. If you dont have a known audience there is no way to measure growth and monetize it. You also would struggle to monitor popular articles over time without your own web real estate and analytics. I am an RSS noob.. so maybe some of the above IS possibl…

Your newbie is showing. Authentication on RSS feeds is a thing. Plenty of major publications offer RSS feeds to paying customers. Been a thing for many, many years.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#102

Post by hammyhavoc »

nicbou wrote: post #9

I added RSS to my websites, because my timeline thing ( https://github.com/nicbou/timeline ) uses them to retrieve posts from my websites. However, I see the death of RSS as the symptom of a larger problem: when platforms get big enough, they restrict access to their data. RSS feeds disappear, but so do other machine-readable endpoints. If it wasn't for GDPR, there would be no way to export that data. GDPR gave us cl…

This is why people use scrapers that turn this information into an RSS feed. So no, even without GDPR, this information would still be available.

You say that the industry has incentive to kill RSS, and yet Google has just added a Follow button to Chrome for RSS feeds. Go figure.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#103

Post by peppermint_tea »

I am 100% in on this, I use rss notification on my website (temporary.chat) to notify users of new messages, the code is open source, perhaps it can be used as an easy platform to diffuse content via rss (works for images too)

https://github.com/ba9f11ecc3497d9993b933fdc2bd61e5/temporar...

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#104

Post by rambambram »

scrollaway wrote: post #76
MarioT wrote: post #72

Food for thought, RSS is dead because it does not provide an incentive for the author. If you do not collect a mailing list/email list you do not have a known audience. If you dont have a known audience there is no way to measure growth and monetize it. You also would struggle to monitor popular articles over time without your own web real estate and analytics. I am an RSS noob.. so maybe some of the above IS possibl…

I agree that rss as a protocol doesn’t have clear incentives but I don’t think the right people have given a serious attempt at building said incentives (via examples). One such example could be building a rss based content publisher that gives money, spotify-style, to the authors via view on their own rss clients. The publisher would have to have a good value add for a premium, too, so it’s not just an easy business…

> But using rss means most blogs will already have compatibility with you ready to go so it’s a huge get for lowering the barrier of entry to your service.

This is a very important characteristic, making it possible for any new software to immediately deal with real content. Without paying a cent for that content.

Besides, the OP might conflate a thing or two, just like you point out. RSS is an open protocol, not a closed source app with guarded walls (there's not even a garden behind these walls anymore). RSS is so simple and open, one might even type their XML feed by hand.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#105

Post by rambambram »

zozbot234 wrote: post #58
riffic wrote: post #51

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). 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.

Thanks for explaining, both of you.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#106

Post by rambambram »

torstenvl wrote: post #56
Nextgrid wrote: post #29

I 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 mobi…

I also thought about RSS as a basis for social media (I call it 'Really Social Sites'), but I think trying to make certain stuff private is against the whole idea of pub/sub and therefor RSS. I'm not saying you're wrong though, I just think mixing private and public (that's where the word 'publish' is coming from, right?) makes it more confusing.

I do think there's a gap to fill in RSS based social media, because users of current social media would like to send a private message (or at least not public) from time to time. I basically cover this with a contact form and email, at the moment. Sounds crude and not very techy, but it works like a charm.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#108

Post by rambambram »

onli wrote: post #43
vitovito wrote: post #38

Is https://aboutfeeds.com/ an answer to #2 and/or #5?

I think it covers 5. Could be extended a bit (especially if in the future there really exists a group with activity that can be presented as well), but it's awesome and very close! Are you the author? 2 was different. I was thinking about what happens when a user clicks on a feed - it's not very user friendly, especially now that browsers just show the XML file content. If we had a mechanism that wraps that request a…

> I was thinking about what happens when a user clicks on a feed - it's not very user friendly, especially now that browsers just show the XML file content. If we had a mechanism that wraps that request and gives the user a way to subscribe directly via one of the many available feed reader, that would help a lot.

I agree. But I'm also willing to think that a simple button to copy the feed URL would suffice. Since feed URLs can be read by all kinds of reader software (and you don't know upfront which ones, definitely way too many possibilities) there's no way as a subscriber to go from a website with a feed link to your reader app without just copying that link somehow. It's too much baked in to the protocol to do it otherwise, I guess.

Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?

#110

Post by onli »

dethos wrote: post #71

I've never stopped using RSS, since it is so useful for many use cases. I've even recently built a tool, as an experiment, using it ( https://github.com/dethos/worker-planet ). Who remembers what a "planet" software is? Fortunately we can still find many websites and services that provide RSS feeds (probably because the tool/framework they are built with, automatically provides that feature). Implementing it is not h…

> Who remembers what a "planet" software is?

The planets you link in the description are kind of popular in my blogging niche :) Nice project!

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