RSS is still pretty great
pcloadletter.dev
RSS is still pretty great
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Re: RSS is still pretty great
#2> For example, there is really no way to tell aggregators that you changed an article's path.
Of course there is, just change the URL. Both Atom and RSS have the concept of an "entry ID" which should never change, but anything else in the entry can just be updated (other than the published date I guess).
However this is easy to misunderstand because in RSS it is optional and in Atom people frequently use the URL as the ID and then accidently change that URL which according to the protocol is actually creating a new set of entries unrelated to the old ones.
In fact in the author's case it is very likely if they added items back to their feed with the old ID and new URL Feedly would update it. Although there is no way to undo duplicates and you shouldn't add back an entry that was removed from the feed (as it will appear new to subscribers that didn't know about the entry previously).
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#3RSS is great and I can't imagine what my life would've been if I were to scan the news feeds on each individual site that I have included in my RSS feed. However, the text rendering feature is rather useless for the resources that are greedy for views, clicks and other analytics, as they simply truncate the body of the article, leaving you no choice but to open the original url to read the rest of it. For my use case in particular, a full title is enough, but I was rather bummed initially that the promised "read all articles rendered in the same style with no distractions that existed on the original website" never worked out.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#4RSS is great and I can't imagine what my life would've been if I were to scan the news feeds on each individual site that I have included in my RSS feed. However, the text rendering feature is rather useless for the resources that are greedy for views, clicks and other analytics, as they simply truncate the body of the article, leaving you no choice but to open the original url to read the rest of it. For my use case…
>leaving you no choice but to open the original url
This is auto-unsubscribe territory for me.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#5No matter how much people want to proclaim RSS is "dead" there is actually no way to kill it. It is decentralized. No one owns it. If we keep publishing RSS feeds, it still lives.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#6I have 50 or so RSS feeds, a few went stale, I thought the URL had changed. Turns out they are just not publishing. It's pretty rare to find a site I want without being able to find a RSS feed for it.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#7Twitter addresses a bunch of the downsides of RSS that were listed. The author's criticism of Twitter seems to be that it is too easy for people to use, that it is too helpful in finding you things to read, and that if offers a way to reply to posts. These seem like a net benefit to me and if you don't want to see replies then don't click into a tweet.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#8I’ve used multiple rss readers over the years. I would read them for a few months and then stop because news reading would become a habit. I’ve ended up using bookmark folders in Firefox and visiting the sites I like once every few months when I can focus on them.
Where rss still gets the most use from me is podcasting. It’s open and human readable and it’s great to dump an opml file into a new player or catcher and have episodes download and start listening instantly.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#9I use rss for youtube and it's been great but lately a lot of "shorts" stuff has been junking up the feeds.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#10I use it almost every day, mostly to follow new content.
For a while I used social media (facebook, twitter, etc), but that stopped working well for me when algorithms started deciding what I was supposed to see. On top of this, the "drama" I was seeing and wasting my time on, ads, privacy concerns, etc, made leave social media and go back to RSS. For this use case, it's much better than social media, even when sites decide to only include a paragraph or two to force me to visit the website.