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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

#101

Post by openrisk »

Publishers of content have really no excuse to disable RSS feeds. RSS is also a signal that some new content has arrived, why would one not send it to the world if its essentially free? Even if their business model requires that you visit their website (instead of reading everything on a client app) syndicating a teaser message makes sense.

In any case, many actually useful sites that disable RSS are public orgs that do not rely on adtech or subscriptions. Its the sad result of digital illiteracy and outsourcing their web presence to some inane outfit thats up their neck in the SEO and social media shit.

Incidentally a Web that makes full use of RSS is also one where more complex protocols like ActivityPub and ATProto can flourish. A client is a client is a client. Now that Mozilla has essentially abdicated their role as a user-centered window to the universe maybe there is room for something else?

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

#102

Post by pyromaker »

I absolutely love RSS format. It's one of the easiest ways for devs to get data and do something quickly with it.

If you remember, Yahoo Pipies allowed devs & others quickly build something with RSS feeds. I've recently rebuilt and launched my own Yahoo Pipes clone

https://www.mashups.io

Along the way of building this tool, I came across a plenty of major websites that do not provide RSS feeds and indie devs who maintain niche tools to provide these feeds.

Then again, RSS are still plentiful!

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

#103

Post by badmonkey101 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #78
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)…

I worry about YouTube RSS feeds getting popular and Google killing them. Every time I see them discussed publicly I have this "Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!" reaction. I browse YouTube anonymously, have an ad blocker setup that pretty much eliminates all ads, and track my "subscriptions" with RSS. It's highly usable. I use a fork of tt-rss and actually embed the YouTube videos in the reader pane so I never see any…

Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!

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

#104

Post by openrisk »

entuno wrote: post #23
palata wrote: post #3

RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it). I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.

Where I have RSS feeds from news sites, I usually skim down the list of titles, read an article (in my feed) if it's interesting, and then move on. I never visit their website, I don't see their adverts, their tracking scripts can't run, and I don't see or interact with their comments. Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.

Not everyone is out to monetise (e.g public sector). And even if you are after monetisation, sending out a teaser snippet makes sense. The user can decide if they want to visit the site to read more, subscribe etc.

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

#105

Post by latexr »

entuno wrote: post #20
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)…

It also provides feeds for individual playlists, where `playlist_id` is the `list` URL parameter when you view the full playlist. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id= It's a really nice way to be able to follow creators/playlists without needing to register an account. I'm surprised that YouTube still allow it, but I hope it stays.

Unfortunately those have a major flaw: they always show the top 15 items in a playlist.

This is a problem because many channels have playlists where they put older episodes at the top and add new ones to the bottom. This makes the playlist RSS useless, because it will always show the same 15 videos.

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

#106

Post by grumbel »

rglullis wrote: post #100
grumbel wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not talking about RSS, I am talking about plain old bookmarks. Browser never would give you notification when something you bookmarked changed. The RSS feature was always kind of useless, since it required that the website provided a RSS feed to begin with, which most don't. The implementation in Firefox was also horrible on top. HTML is a markup language, with header, datetime and article tags, parse that and d…

I guess you are vastly underestimating the complexity of parsing HTML and extracting the relevant information out of it. It might seem trivial nowadays, but it falls well within https://xkcd.com/1425/ territory if you take into account that the majority of web pages are basically producing non-spec conforming (X)HTML. And if you respond with "well, I don't care about the actual content, I just want to receive a notif…

Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared. But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well...

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

#108

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

So, should we be using RSS? Or Atom?

It seems like Atom is better, but RSS as a name is more well known?

I'm guessing adding a button on your website which says "Subscribe via RSS" but which actually points to an Atom feed would be confusing and bad?

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

#109

Post by adhoc_slime »

I've almost never cared about learning about rss before but seeing the response it alsways gets, I decided I'd try feedly on my phone and add this blog to it.

Feedly asks for a url, this site makes me download a .bin file. It doesn't make sense how this is my first user experience. I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But it is a nav item on the site.

Call me nieve or whatever you like but with ux like this I can start to see how this technology has become less popular.

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

#110

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #92
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what would that even do? Open the current page's RSS feed in my configured client. Failing that, copy its URL. Absolute minimum, it's a shortcut for having to view source, cmd-f, "RSS", cmd-c

I thought RSS readers were able to extract the URL themselves?

If you're using one of those kinda of RSS readers, that makes the process a little easier, sure. It doesn't address discover ability, though.
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