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But hey, they work. They fill a purpose - they warn you about updates in a site that you might want to check out. They do one thing, and do it well; and for me that "one thing" can be new manga series to read, new videos to watch, news from my city's site (it has RSS), so goes on. How exactly would be this "bad"?
*"a lot" is not "all".
> So for fun, I wanted to see how many steps it would take to get the information contained in those alerts into a usable RSS feed. The author did it for fun, but if you ever find yourself in this situation and need a solution fast, consider Kill The Newsletter[1]. Free, easy to set up, no accounts needed, open source[2]. [1]: https://kill-the-newsletter.com [2]: https://github.com/leafac/kill-the-newsletter
I’d actually like to have the reverse, an RSS-to-email service.
Begging website operators to implement RSS is a dead end. If it worked, RSS would be ubiquitous and we wouldn't have these kinds of futile submissions that preach to the choir. Instead of hoping every website operator in the world does something, it seems far more scalable to centralize efforts into a youtube-dl style repository so anyone can host their own website-to-RSS gateway.
I think lart of the problem is RSS is sort of orthogonal to hyper targeted marketing and tracking. With email, you can track who reads the mail, how often, what times, etc. You can tailor recommendations and content to the specific person RSS is just a generic feed that's the same for everyone. Great for consumers--less useful for people trying to optimize monetization
Implementing RSS is extra work, thus not everyone is going to implement it. Even if it contributed to the bottom line. It's the same reason every website that publishes information doesn't have an email newsletter.
Since it's a consumption optimization, it makes sense for us, those who may want to consume a given website, to implement it (while we wait around for utopia).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think lart of the problem is RSS is sort of orthogonal to hyper targeted marketing and tracking. With email, you can track who reads the mail, how often, what times, etc. You can tailor recommendations and content to the specific person RSS is just a generic feed that's the same for everyone. Great for consumers--less useful for people trying to optimize monetization
You don't even need to get cynical. Implementing RSS is extra work, thus not everyone is going to implement it. Even if it contributed to the bottom line. It's the same reason every website that publishes information doesn't have an email newsletter. Since it's a consumption optimization, it makes sense for us, those who may want to consume a given website, to implement it (while we wait around for utopia).
A lot* of the criticism against RSS/Atom that I've seen on the internet boils down to appeal to novelty; both are old, so assumed to be "bad". But hey, they work. They fill a purpose - they warn you about updates in a site that you might want to check out. They do one thing, and do it well; and for me that "one thing" can be new manga series to read, new videos to watch, news from my city's site (it has RSS), so goes…
1. Closed platform - Places like Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, etc, are dis-incentivized to help you consume content unless they can get you trapped in their UI with your logged in account.
2. Web as a program - Tonnes of people are trying to replace websites with 'apps' and replace programs with the web, neither of which lend themselves nicely to being RSS friendly.
3. RSS popularity - Very few people (compared to the majority of the web) are consuming RSS. Most users will be using Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Edge only. They get their notifications by keeping tabs open or via push notifications.
I think the way forwards is to normalise RSS by rebuilding it into the web. I've often thought about what and RSS-based social media may look like. It's a shame Open Graph [1] didn't use more RSS functionality.
[1] https://ogp.me/
- I have well designed email readers on all platforms I use (web mail on desktop, app on mobile devices) which I'm used to. Feeds get labeled separately and don't pollute the inbox.
- I can forward emails, archive them, search through them, print them with ease.
- They are backed up as part of my existing backup process.
- Email is here to stay. Dedicated apps are a gamble.
I run my self-made feed forwarder on Github Actions cron schedule [1]. I used existing tools (e.g. rss2email) but each had so many quirks, bugs and outright obnoxious behavior that I decided to just roll my own simple one.
> make sure to include a simple RSS feed and a way for your users to discover it.
There are ways around no RSS. I have a simple rssgen [2] relay which uses CSS selectors to build an RSS from an HTML page. You can then point your feed reader to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does one of you want to give a try to lenns.io? That’s a new type of RSS reader I’m working on. It has import/export so you can try and leave easily. I’m planning for the aforementioned customizations but they are still a few months away.
Count me in. I am using Inoreader at present, and it will be good to have a different "competitor".
Does anyone want to try and "fix" RSS? I'd be keen to jump on a chat/email thread about it. I don't think RSS is a bad thing, I think it's just not sexy anymore and the reading experience sucks - it died for me when I stopped using Opera but I do think there's an app/extension plugin play to bring it back. Most newsletters, alerts would be better as content delivered through a push/RSS model. We don't get news delive…