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RSS Is Better Than Twitter

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Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#181

Post by MuffinFlavored »

JasonFruit wrote: post #180
knight17 wrote: post #3

I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go althou…

I was not disappointed to see RSS removed from Firefox, because I want my already too-complex browser to have as limited a set of functions as possible. The more first-class features they remove, the more secure and usable their product will be.

If cars didn't have air conditioners... they'd be more reliable overall!!!!!

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#182

Post by OrgNet »

dguo wrote: post #11
knight17 wrote: post #3

I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go althou…

Firefox used to have built-in RSS support, but it was removed in Firefox 64: https://www.zdnet.com/article/end-nears-for-rss-firefox-64-t...

The decisions that Mozilla comes to when it comes to Firefox sometime puzzles me... but overall, Firefox is still my #1. It was probably more work to remove RSS then to keep it... but either way, it used to be my favorite way to find a page's RSS link (but I disabled Firefox' telemetry and similar reporting tools, so i blame myself a bit too)

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#183

Post by JasonFruit »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #181
JasonFruit wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not disappointed to see RSS removed from Firefox, because I want my already too-complex browser to have as limited a set of functions as possible. The more first-class features they remove, the more secure and usable their product will be.

If cars didn't have air conditioners... they'd be more reliable overall!!!!!

I wouldn't disagree.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#184

Post by rwz »

phasnox wrote: post #114

> On the surface, Twitter’s main value proposition is that it delivers up-to-the-second news. Not really. Most of the people I know , including me, go there for just one reason: To know the public opinion.

Twitter is actually very bad at this. It's designed to amplify the most fringe, outrageous, and reaction-provoking hot takes, and trending stuff. A lot of sensible people either don't comment on twitter, or their voices get drowned in a sea of outrage and more engageable reactions.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#185

Post by kgwxd »

packet_nerd wrote: post #66

I've tried to use RSS before, but the big hangup for me is most sites don't put the full article in the feed, just a title and summary. To me having to go back and forth just kills the whole thing.

How many times a day do you visually rescan over the same stuff? The minimal time spent going back and forth (alt+tab) is nothing compared to the time saved never having to reconsider the same headline more than once.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#186

Post by kyle-rb »

tamal wrote: post #116
khendron wrote: post #108

Although I am a big fan of RSS, I find this article very disingenuous. The author complains about the chaos, vulgarity, and hostility of Twitter, but those complaints would apply to almost any social media platform. Then he suggests replacing it with RSS feeds from curated, professional RSS sources, which is not social media. You could achieve the same things on Twitter if you just followed the same curated, professi…

The solution to “too much RSS” is the same for Twitter. Unsubscribe/unfollow. Twitter does not require you to follow someone to interact with them. I follow relatively few people directly yet I have themed lists following other accounts. If I want local news I check my local list. Twitter works quite well in this regard vs. Facebook where you need to be “friends” to interact.

100% this. I checked the author's Twitter, and he's following well over a thousand people. Surely there's some fat that could be trimmed?

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#187

Post by h1d »

imartin2k wrote: post #40

Lots of things changed between when I started to heavily and systematically consume content online (in about 2006), and today. But one thing didn't: RSS is still the crucial cornerstone of my online content consumption. For me, RSS never was dead or less relevant than in the past. On the contrary: Since I keep adding feeds on a very regular basis, it's still growing in importance. Fortunately, 95 % of blogs and media…

Calling RSS dead only sounded like marketing from media sites as they got scared of being consumed outside of their platform but it was never dead from consumers' perspective.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#188

Post by ttepasse »

Digory wrote: post #74
mooreds wrote: post #15

I love RSS, and have for years. My first blog post ever was about RSS: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4 . I recently wrote that new developers should use RSS: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss-rea... But reading through the post and the comments here, I'm sensing an omission. What Twitter (and social media in general) provides that RSS doesn't is interaction . I don't login to twitte…

Has anyone tried to build conversation into RSS? An RSS item that is related or responsive to another RSS item? (Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)

The classic relation is a link. Atom has the Atom Threading Extensions, to document conversation in feeds.

One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an API of Google Buzz. But that started with a privacy scandal and shortly thereafter Google decided they needed their own closed social network. Salmon was later used in OStatus 1, I think.

There was a lot of activity in the 2000s transforming the RSS/Atom ecosystem into something of a decentralized social network. Extensions like Activity Stream for richer data, AtomPub, Salmon, OpenID, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) to turbocharge feeds with a Publish/Subscribe thingy and a lot more, that I'm now forgetting. The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.

And yes, if you squint the right way stuff like ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the Indiewebcamp Microformats are practically feeds.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#189

Post by war1025 »

iamphilrae wrote: post #76
y4mi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "rss support" was a folder, filled with links named after the article titles. It was good that it was removed, as it was useless to put it mildly

I actually used it considerably for my news site bookmarks on my bookmarks bar. It was great for just catching up on the day’s headline. It’s a feature I sorely miss.

The Livemarks extension duplicates the feature pretty acceptably.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#190

Post by dmit »

Arkanosis wrote: post #102
SkyPuncher wrote: post #46

Lately, I've been getting back into RSS to stay up to date with industry news. I've noticed a lot of industry blogs still support RSS. On Mac, I've been using Leaf with no real complaints. I've found many blogs happily serve rss content, even if a button isn't explicitly advertised. Some of the url's I'll try: * example.com/rss.xml * example.com/index.rss * example.com/?feed=rss * example.com/feed/ * exmample.com/fee…

I usually find RSS feeds by looking at the page source code: - ctrl+u - ctrl+f rss - ctrl+f atom (only if “rss” was not found at step 2). I can't remember of any site providing RSS on which this hasn't worked. Actually, even for sites that advertise their RSS feed, this approach is the fastest for me (because of the lack of consistency of such advertisements).

Same, except I favor the Atom protocol because from previous research (performed a long time ago, to be fair) it was strictly an improvement over RSS in every regard.

There is a highly-rated extension to automate this, but I've grown to distrust extensions that require "Access your data for all websites", and scouring the page source for the relevant tag is not particularly cumbersome.

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