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...
I think the demand is high but doesn’t show up in some dumb ways that people think represents demand. I get tons of requests in my web logs for my RSS feed. And I’m not a big site or anything, just have a scrub personal blog. So that’s lots of demand. I suspect that every platform owner sees their rss requests and sees it as high. So any claims that there’s no demand without clarifying that they don’t get http gets f…
Do you also conclude from your logs that there is a huge demand for regular users to log in to your Web server through ssh?
Yes, most certainly people sure do want to ssh into my servers.
Yes, most certainly people sure do want to ssh into my servers.
Yeah but they're not regular users who are just interested in reading the content. And probably neither are the RSS scrapers.
I don’t think war drivers trying to break into my host aren’t regular users.
But I think successful requests to my RSS feeds are regular users who are routinely checking my feed and have set up some tool to do so. So that’s demand. And it’s pretty regular.
The people trying to ssh are likely doing so automatically on every host in existence.
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/
It's interesting to me that you say "Not federated", because RSS has always seemed to me to be one of the best-adopted federated protocols, after SMTP and HTTP. Indeed, the first generation of federated social media protocols were originally based on souped-up RSS feeds (Atom) with an optional PubSub enhancement (Pubsubhubbub, later renamed to WebSub). So when you say "not federated", what exactly do you mean? If you…
I'm trying to distinguish between Haven and Mastodon-type systems. "Federated" to me generally means you have many multi-user servers. With Haven, the server only hosts a single identity--yours, since you're the administrator/operator. I wouldn't describe a Wordpress blog with RSS as federated either.
It's interesting to me that you say "Not federated", because RSS has always seemed to me to be one of the best-adopted federated protocols, after SMTP and HTTP. Indeed, the first generation of federated social media protocols were originally based on souped-up RSS feeds (Atom) with an optional PubSub enhancement (Pubsubhubbub, later renamed to WebSub). So when you say "not federated", what exactly do you mean? If you…
I'm trying to distinguish between Haven and Mastodon-type systems. "Federated" to me generally means you have many multi-user servers. With Haven, the server only hosts a single identity--yours, since you're the administrator/operator. I wouldn't describe a Wordpress blog with RSS as federated either.
Mastodon runs just fine in single user mode—in fact, it's was one of our most popular options back in the beginning. I personally don't think of single user and multi-user mode as particularly different, and neither is "core" to the functionality of Mastodon—the core functionality is the ability to interface with other users, whether they're hosted on your server or elsewhere. In that sense, whether a server is single- or multi-user is really isomorphic to the way I think about Mastodon's user experience, most of the time.
I use https://weloverss.com/ as my Google Reader alternative. TheOldReader is also nice. I prefer the first due to its ui not being bloated - only thing I miss is timestamps.
I remember the Theoldreader. I quite liked it. I can't remember why I stopped using it and switched to feedly. Thanks for the tip on weloverss. I'll give it a try.
My preference is for inoreader. I’ve tried old reader a couple of times, just seemed to be missing things. For instance I couldn’t seem to get a dark theme. In inoreader it’s easy to switch theme. Inoreader seems to have a nicer ui, I also like the fact you can see what articles are popular during the day/week.
I stand by my comments. Video killed the radio star. And, social media killed RSS. Sure, it still exists. But, you don’t see that RSS logo on every website like you once did. A new-ish web user may not even know what RSS is.
Everyone’s like, let’s meta, let’s fediverse. Pft, it’s all just kids re-doing RSS.
I use a reader that automatically pulls feeds from Twitter and other social media like Reddit. Just need to plop the URL into the feed field and they figure it out. I pay for it, but it's pretty nice for getting back to the old Google Reader feel. ( https://bazcux.com )
Are you still paying for it? That host and domain aren't resolving for me.
Yeah, I am, very happily. And I did get the domain wrong. It's https://bazqux.com