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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

#121

Post by galleywest200 »

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.

Le Monde will tell you that you only got 70% or so of the article in your feed and you need to go to the site to get the full article. Why don't more feeds do that? Actually, I am unsure if this is the feed itself or the fact that my RSS reader scrapes the sites too.

Some sites even have different RSS links for subscribers only that give a full feed.

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

#122

Post by imadj »

adhoc_slime wrote: post #109

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 l…

> I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But its nav item on the site.

In feedly and many readers, you can just enter the website URL and it'll find the feed(s) automatically if present.

But in general, how RSS work, you copy the URL to the RSS feed and give it to Reader to subscribe/follow the website. https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/feed/

When the author publishes a new piece, they update the file located at this URL and your reader will fetch you the new content.

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

#123

Post by latexr »

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)…

Any half-decent RSS reader will detect the right feed if you give it the channel URL.

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

#124

Post by rrgok »

What I really want in an RSS Reader is to fetch and show also the comments. Think about this post on HN, I'm more interested in reading the comments. Sadly, RSS only fetch/shows at most the body of the item. It would be really good to have a centralized and unified interface for getting news and comments just in your RSS reader.

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

#125

Post by _heimdall »

bluebarbet wrote: post #116

While I use RSS, I think we need to recognize that it's slowly going away. Even a single publisher that's missing a feed will be a deal-breaker for any new adopters. And RSS is an over-complex solution anyway, designed for a time before web standards when sites all had spaghetti table layouts. Today there's no need to create a whole shadow site in fussily-formatted XML for what can usually be found in the page source…

At least for me, there is still benefit in being able to load only the list of articles. Attempting to fetch the full HTML and scrape it can be error prone and may not even work depending on how the site is using client-side rendering.

Microformsts, which give us things like h-feed, are useful but the author is already thinking about the feed reader use case. Why wouldn't they also hook up an RSS feed?

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

#126

Post by _heimdall »

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.

It comes down to a push versus pull architecture. RSS is pull based, you aren't notified when a feed is updated. Most people today want push based with a feed, with all the bells and whistles of a social feed that is updated instantly.

Federation comes in mainly because push based systems require a server managing who follows who, what is posted, and who to notify of updates. That's a lot of information for one central service to be responsible for, leading some to think its better to federate and trust a bunch of servers to host copies of some or all of that same data.

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

#127

Post by domysee »

There are also a bunch of websites that have RSS feeds but don't link to them and don't make them available via RSS autodiscovery.

I created a tool to find such RSS feeds for as many cases as possible: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

And if you're interested in the details: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds

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

#128

Post by _heimdall »

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

I'd be curious how you define podcasts and radio shows if you don't consider the distribution method. I don't see much light between the two other than the fact that a podcast show list is distributed via RSS.

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

#129

Post by freetanga »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #76
beretguy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people also decide Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.

[flagged]

Just for reference:

- 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.

- 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).

I would argue than everyone who is stuck a below 6th grade understanding of a language they use everyday can hardly be tech literate ( which in itself requires good reading and abstraction capabilities)

Is it their fault because they choose to be like this? Their parents? Their goverment? Nature gave them the wrong genes? Society shun them for their skin color? A bearded white guy in a cloud chose to ruin their lives?

Don’t know, don’t care, but demanding agency to all adults feels a bit narrow minded, selfish, and not too thankful for avoiding a few external barriers that other humans have to endure…

most of us here skipped those challenges, and ignoring how much headstart we got by sheer luck and no own merit is a bit inmature, IMHO.

Opinions are like noses: everyone has one, and almost all of them are unremarkable and irrelevant to other people. This is my nose.

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

#130

Post by danielktdoranie »

I love RSS and I actively used it until modern browsers dropped support for it and then websites stopped using it. I always felt RSS being dropped wasn’t the choice of users but more a conspiracy between those browser developers (or rather their managers and company leaders) and marketing/sales departments of pretty much any company that advertises on the internet: Google being the main one.

Why? You can’t bombard RSS with advertising like you can on browsers and if people could get the information they need from RSS they won’t see ads.

I recall the dropping of RSS happened over 6 months to my recollection. RSS was here and every website of merit used it, then all of a sudden Chrome, FireFox and Safari all dropped RSS support. You could go and install a separate RSS client but few people did that (extra steps and all) and then websites saw no one was using RSS and dropped support.

RSS was particularly useful for browsing jobs for IT contractors. I used it daily, using RSS I was able to get job listings fast and apply before other candidates.

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