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Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

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Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

#61

Post by kkfx »

I'm not aware of activity BUT RSS/atom at their current state works very well, they do not JUST because some decide not to, like not putting articles in feeds but just a hyper-short summary, often only a title, and ads. The system do not prevent such behaviors but works. RSS spec are not much nice, but essentially anyone in the world know it, like emails so again while technically they are not a masterpiece they are widespread and supported out-out-the-box almost anywhere. The main reasons for the decline is the push toward third party aggregators for the sake of surveillance capitalism and the little effectiveness for ads.

Personally I consume most of my digital information via feeds, recently switched from Miniflux to TT-RSS simply because with many feeds TT-RSS offer a better way to skim. I do not like both though. I've used many other readers including elfeed (too slow to fetch and slow to consume contents), org-feed (too slow to consume, content formatting issues), RSSOwl still slow on big volumes of posts etc unfortunately most RSS clients suffer for limited development, like local MUAs and so far there is no notmuch/mu4e to rescue however like emails most users do not even imaging what they can do with their tools so...

In evolutionary trends: some users, the same who feel the need of real desktop operation systems, who are a little minority but keep growing, rediscover and push feeds as much as they can. Most others ignore even that they exists...

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

#62

Post by rambambram »

gordaco wrote: post #26

The thing about RSS is that big tech companies are not very fond of it because it gives too much control to the user and it's not so easy to flood you with ads when you use it. So, many of those companies either don't offer RSS, or they have it but they don't advertise it much and maybe they just do the bare minimum. Unfortunately, since social media has replaced blogs as the go-to place for discussions and user-gene…

> I use it mostly for comics

I recently collected a couple of hundred feeds from various sources and about different subjects, and I was (positively) surprised by the amount of blogs with daily/weekly comics.

> the problem of content discovery

I agree here. But 'discovery' is something one does, it requires effort. Definitely when compared with a Twitter feed or FB timeline that only requires mindless scrolling. I also think curation and aggregation by humans can help here, by presenting some interesting and honest feeds of different subjects to start with.

And thanks for mentioning some more potential applications of RSS!

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

#63

Post by emodendroket »

jonathankoren wrote: post #9
InvisibleUp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS doesn't work all that well across multiple devices, such as a desktop and a mobile phone. You can subscribe to them on both, sure, but they won't be synced with each other. Apps such as Google Reader and such resolve that problem, but the death of Google Reader really shook a lot of people's trust in RSS, I think. Plus now RSS has to compete with social media feeds, which are where a lot of people are looking for…

Syncing across devices isn't the job of RSS, or any protocol, and certainly not the role of a data format in the case of RSS. State is an application's job.

Let’s try and read the comment more charitably: most clients do not offer a good solution for this either, making the protocol less appealing than it might otherwise be.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

#64

Post by Ferret7446 »

metadat wrote: post #2

What about the RSS protocol is lacking and in need of further development? It seems to get the job done. I do agree about discovery in general, it's uncomfortable counting on Google, Microsoft, and Meta / TikTok for content discovery. Thankfully there are some smart folks working on fresh takes on the search engine. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

A clear standard for one. Last I checked, RSS did not have one clear standard, nor do most implementations abide by that standard.

Atom on the other hand is great.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

#65

Post by baby »

snoopy_telex wrote: post #23
bundleunbundle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! This is (also) what I meant by development -- ensuring there's an ecosystem of connectors, libraries etc. around it to facilitate adoption/usage.

What do you believe is missing? RSS is xml. It supports xml namespaces for extensions. Did you know that podcast feeds are RSS feeds plus a xml namespace specific for podcasts? https://podcasters.apple.com/support/823-podcast-requirement...

reminds of the RSS feed of buzzsprout, the free podcasting hosting, that doesn't include a link to the actual episode.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS dying? Or coming back?

#66

Post by baby »

snoopy_telex wrote: post #21
baby wrote: post #12

RSS is either decreasing or increasing. I feel like it’s still working well enough (I use it) but if I’d have to guess I would say it’s decreasing (and thus will die). What it needs is a bunch of volunteers to implement it for all languages (provide libraries) and frameworks (provide rss feeds by default for blogs and cms). For the most part it works quite well, but I think some static blog generators, or centralized…

I’m pretty sure there’s a few dozen to hundreds of rss libraries for any language you could want. Wordpress provides RSS feeds out of the box without doing a thing. Static generators like Jekyll (GitHub uses) support generating RSS feeds as well. It’s not an issue of this being difficult to implement. It’s been around for decades. It’s widely supported.

It's been a while but I remember having trouble integrating RSS in websites I was doing, and being surprised that there weren't better libraries available
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