It's time for an RSS revival (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#61

Post by agiacalone » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 6:46 PM UTC

snird wrote: post #30

RSS fails miserably on 2 things: 1. Discoverability 2. Monetization Consider YouTube - it provides discoverability through the algorithmic feed. Giving creators a distribution platform they can't find anywhere else. It also provides monetization through ads, sponsorships and direct support to creators. Consider Newsletters - no discoverability built in, but it does support monetization. Pay to subscribe, and only you…

Some of us who never left RSS think those two things are features

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#62

Post by agiacalone » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

c3poa wrote: post #10

deafpolygon wrote: post #6

I have been using RSS for the last 10+ years and have not been on social media for almost at least that long.

Wow, that is my goal now. I'm curious, what RSS readers do use on mobile?

Reeder on iOS is pretty good. Been using it for years across multiple versions

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#63

Post by cebert » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

snird wrote: post #41

beej71 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong. But I do wish more people were happy with those "failures", which basically describe the Internet of yore.

I'm a creator myself. Why would I want to build an audience on a platform with no monetization possibility, ever? Even sponsorships are not possible, since I can't reliably count reads (which I can even in email). It's nice to think of the "classic" internet, but it's a naivety that will keep RSS on the edges. And I love RSS idea! I want it back! I hate subscribing to email newsletters in a way that makes it hard to…

When counting email reads, how do you account for individuals who configure their mail client to not download images by default? I do this in Gmail to avoid tracking pixels from being loaded. I imagine there’s a sizable subset of more technical users who do this?

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#64

Post by lonk11 » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

butz wrote: post #60

Are Fediverse services compatible with RSS?

You can get an RSS feed of posts of any Mastodon user. Just add ".rss" to the profile url. For example, mstdn.social/@feditips -> mstdn.social/@feditips.rss

Details: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456

The conceptual difference between RSS and Fediverse is that RSS is read-only while federated protocols are read-write. For example, you can add comments through ActivityPub, but not through RSS.

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#65

Post by franky47 » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

kevinfiol wrote: post #56

I do love me some RSS. I started using RSS seriously 2 years ago, and last year, I forked Bubo RSS[1] to have my own RSS reader[2]. It's just a static site that is built every hour using Github Actions (although you can easily turn this into a cron job on your Raspberry Pi or whatever). I liked the result so much, I ended up doing something similar using RSS feeds to a build page with all my of Youtube subscriptions[…

That's awesome! I'm tempted to try this approach on my website, but using Next.js' ISR to regenerate the feed pages periodically.

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#66

Post by Metricon » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 7:03 PM UTC

hobo_mark wrote: post #43

yunruse wrote: post #22

I’m becoming a real fan of using RSS for anything that fits it – websites, YouTube [0], email newsletters [1]; even books [2]! Honestly I’m tempted to start putting summaries (hacker news, stack exchange, reddit) in my feeds, just to keep me from endless scrolling. [0] I think Feedly can handle this, but YouTube may have disabled this natively, which is a shame. [1] I’m a fan of https://kill-the-newsletter.com [2] Dr…

Feeds are definitely still enabled on YouTube at " rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC The only complicated part is finding the channel id, which is not always presented directly (sometimes you have a username, sometimes a channel "shortname", now you also have handles... even the YouTube data API itself can only resolve some of them).

To get the YouTube channel Id: on the channel home page (you may need to reload the page or open it in private mode to avoid caching), open the developer console and enter:

ytInitialData.metadata.channelMetadataRenderer.externalId

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#67

Post by zagrebian » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

Feedbro is by far the best feed reader.

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#68

Post by deafpolygon » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 7:18 PM UTC

jjulius wrote: post #8

deafpolygon wrote: post #6

I have been using RSS for the last 10+ years and have not been on social media for almost at least that long.

HN is social media.

If you want to call it that - it's more of a forum, than modern social media. I meant Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, et. al.

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#69

Post by deafpolygon » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 7:20 PM UTC

c3poa wrote: post #10

deafpolygon wrote: post #6

I have been using RSS for the last 10+ years and have not been on social media for almost at least that long.

Wow, that is my goal now. I'm curious, what RSS readers do use on mobile?

I don't read RSS on mobile. Only at a desktop when I'm ready to read.. otherwise I just end up mindlessly scrolling.

Re: It's time for an RSS revival (2018)

#70

Post by puzzlingcaptcha » Fri, Dec 23, 2022, 7:21 PM UTC

Last week I tried to find all of the Odd Lots podcast episodes with Matt Levine as a guest. This turned out to be impossible in the Google Podcasts app that I normally use - you cannot search a podcast for keywords, and searching all podcasts gives you the wrong results. Incredible for a company that built their business on searching.

So instead I imported the Odd Lots feed into my tt-rss instance and immediately had the answer.