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I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

reedybear.bearblog.dev

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Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#81

Post by dqv »

rmnclmnt wrote: post #9

Love RSS, been using (and paying for) miniflux for a few years now. Do someone knows a way to retrieve RSS feeds URLs for any podcast that would be hosted on major platforms? (Spotify, Apple Music) I subscribed to podcast having some hosted website (where they are publishing the RSS feed from) but most of them don’t

Pocket Casts usually lists the RSS link when you share a podcast from the app.

https://pca.st/podcast/170a7610-948e-0135-9d21-5bb073f92b78

Under "more ways to listen" it has RSS as an option.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#82

Post by xenodium »

> in a way that you're completely in control of, without bloat, without ads, without algorithms.

If they don’t play nice, they often offer short digests in feeds, driving users to open their sites where you get ads, tracking, bloat, paywalls, and no longer in control…

Thank you for advocating RSS. It’s the least we should strive for in our services.

We can also strive for services themselves without tracking, ads, bloat…

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I built https://lmno.lol after growing tired of the popular blogging platforms.

Here’s my blog on it https://lmno.lol/alvaro

If you prefer a different blogging service, there are other folks working on building a more mindful web.

By supporting services like these, you prove that like-minded services are not only possible but fully sustainable without deceitful tech.

• Bear

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Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#83

Post by emporas »

rook1e_dev wrote: post #11

RSS is my main source of information. And I've built some RSS-related projects: 1. https://github.com/0x2E/fusion - A lightweight, self-hosted friendly RSS aggregator and reader 2. https://rawweb.org/ - A search engine for indie websites (the crawler collects data from RSS feeds) 3. https://github.com/0x2E/rss-finder - A tool for finding the RSS link of a website

Nice list. I tried at some point to analyze html using a tree-sitter grammar and generate a list of articles, index them, and be on alert every so often for new entries.

RSS feed could be generated automatically with some AI code generator (or tree-sitter query generator), and just parsing the elements of the page.

Eventually i failed, but also i didn't try hard enough.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#84

Post by rglullis »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #50
rglullis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the original idea of what we call "podcasting" is rooted on RSS.

The idea of what we call “writing” is rooted in stone tablets and chisels, but we still call Shakespeare a writer

There has been a significant longer amount of time between ancient civilizations and Shakespeare compared to today and l the first people who are recording audio content periodically and distributing it via RSS.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#85

Post by asjo »

fire_lake wrote: post #52

Question about the RSS spec: When pulling RSS, how do you know how often to poll? How do you know which items have been seen previously?

rachelbythebay has a service and a series of blog posts about the technical side of this, starting at https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

TL;DR: readers should not poll more often than once and hour, use ETag and If-Modified-Since to determine whether to download the full feed again.

Which items you have seen previously is something the feed reader keeps track of.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#86

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

entuno wrote: post #75
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> makes it much harder for them to monetise. On the other hand, RSS definitely provides extra opportunities to monitise. Imagine your business provides a customisable "offers" feed so you can tell interested parties when a sale occurs, etc. Businesses should be falling over themselves to get that kind of engagement.

That just sounds like a mailing list, but without the ability to easily identify and track the individuals you're sending to.

So... a win-win? RSS also avoids all the problems associated with spam.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#88

Post by kevincox »

akvadrako wrote: post #70
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #13

> Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with. Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?

I use RSS heavily and I don't want an RSS button - what would that even do? RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader. Whatever comes with the browser will not be as good as an extension from a company focused on that feature. For example I use https://www.inoreader.com/

Firefox had this and it was great.

- It rendered the feed in a pretty way.

- If provided a little widget to open the feed in your feed reader (in practice it substituted the feed url into a URL template with popular readers by default and the option to add your own). This basically made it a one-click subscribe option.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#89

Post by trollied »

defrost wrote: post #8

As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video. The form is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v... where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension)…

Reddit also has feeds that they don't publicise. eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/.rss

Adding /.rss on to the end of lots of URLs works all over the place on the site.

Re: I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

#90

Post by mongol »

frde_me wrote: post #32
mongol wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Podcasts typically use RSS I would even say that a podcast that does not support RSS is not a podcast, it is something else.

I would be curious why you think the idea of a podcast is coupled to a specific distribution technology

Similar to why radio relates to electromagnetical transmissions in the radio spectrum. When it happens over internet, we don't call it radio, but possibly internet radio. RSS was the origin of podcasts, and if it does not involve RSS, it is not podcasts
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