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RSS Is Better Than Twitter

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Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#191

Post by ttepasse »

Glench wrote: post #24
abhinai wrote: post #20

I completely understand and respect the author's sentiments. However, it is unfair to compare RSS to Twitter. Twitter is a place where anyone and everyone can express their opinions while RSS is a technology and a mechanism to get an updated feed from services and blogs we care about. Most of these blobs and services will be well written or perhaps professionally written articles. These are two very different systems…

That feels kind of like a historical circumstance. I could easily imagine something based on RSS where people just express small blurbs like on Twitter. Heck, I've even thought about abandoning Twitter's UIs and creating RSS feeds for all the people I follow. At least then I'd be able to get chronological ordering and read/unread markers on tweets that way

That is by the way not alternative history but where RSS started.

Ok, not directly. First it started as a proto semantic web protocol, at Netscape to syndicate links and titles for their portal.

Then Dave Winer used RSS to syndicate his weblog, scripting.com and started the marriage of blogs and feeds. But blogs at that time were more small paragraphs, less big articles. And every paragraph was syndicated. That's still visible in archives of long running blogs:

• http://scripting.com/2001/09/11.html

• https://kottke.org/98/12/

… which seems a lot twitter like. The focus on longer articles in blogging is something which started later, in 2001 or so, in my recollection.

Btw: Following those blurb-like RSS feeds in a traditional RSS reader with read markers is overwhelming, in my experience. I banned all those feeds into a "High Volume" folder where I more often than not mark all as read just to get ahead.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#192

Post by StavrosK »

thekyle wrote: post #176
StavrosK wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm excited about ActivityPub integration in blogs. You can give your site its own Mastodon ("Twitter") account, articles show up as posts and replies show up as comment threads.

The one thing I've been frustrated with using ActivityPub for blogs is that it is push based instead of get based like RSS. Basically it means that the responsibility is on the website owner to send out notifications for new content and maintain a database of subscribers instead of just publishing a feed that people can periodically download to check for new stuff.

While I agree that it's inconvenient on a technical level, I think it's the right choice for a model where publishes are more infrequent. Push-based means you only have to publish N times every time you post something (N is subscribers), and it's instant for subscribers, whereas pull-based means you need to poll every so often M times (M is subscriptions) getting nothing back most of the time, and you get posts with a large delay.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#193

Post by contravariant »

matthewn wrote: post #94
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

> The "rss support" was a folder, filled with links named after the article titles. You're describing the "live bookmarks" feature, which was only one part of the RSS functionality that was removed from Firefox. I never used live bookmarks, but I used the feed discovery and subscription functionality all the time -- only some of which can now be restored with addons.

They also removed the ability to preview RSS feeds, which is annoying because one of the few certain ways to subscribe to a feed was to preview it and then hit subscribe in whatever addon you were using.

In the past it was even possible to subscribe with whatever addon you prefered from the firefox RSS preview directly, but that was already lost after the jump to WebExtensions.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#194

Post by ttepasse »

avian wrote: post #42
vshabanov wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've implemented displaying of blog posts comments in BazQux Reader ( https://bazqux.com ) years ago. But in general it works well only for niche sites with good communities. Popular sites have too many spam/bullshit in comments. BTW: it's possible to read Twitter in RSS reader too and make it a "slow web".

How are you fetching the comments? RSS has no support for that as far as I know.

I had a comment for that further up in the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532614

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#196

Post by gloflo »

burtonator wrote: post #68
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'm considering integrating RSS with Polar: https://getpolarized.io/ Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too. I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds. We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just p…

I am starting to get annoyed seeing you promoting it in every thread of a vaguely relatable topic. Could you please tone it down a bit? :)

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#197

Post by spc476 »

kris-s wrote: post #80

I think part of the issue with RSS is the real pain of dealing with XML. I'm mildly cheering for something like https://jsonfeed.org - which would be a big step towards making a decentralized system more of a reality.

So my blog [1] generates an RSS feed (early 2000s), an Atom feed (2009), a JSON feed (2017) and a Gopher [2] feed (2018). None of these formats were hard to add, and of all four formats, the JSON feed has the least use. Yes, the Gopher feed gets more use than JSON. If I go by "same client picks up feed at least one per day" then the results are:

    RSS: ~20 [3]
    Atom: ~25 [3]
    JSON: 1
    gopher: 7
I don't think using JSON is any help towards a decentralized system of blogs. It's just another format to generate.

[1] http://boston.conman.org/

[2] My blog is also available via gopher, gopher://gopher.conman.org/

[3] Unique user agents---probably not the best metric, but for a quick scan, easy enough to check.

Edit: formatting

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#198

Post by keypusher »

burtonator wrote: post #68
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'm considering integrating RSS with Polar: https://getpolarized.io/ Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too. I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds. We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just p…

Please stop using HN to spam your own site.

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#199

Post by spc476 »

oliwarner wrote: post #90
kris-s wrote: post #80

I think part of the issue with RSS is the real pain of dealing with XML. I'm mildly cheering for something like https://jsonfeed.org - which would be a big step towards making a decentralized system more of a reality.

Eh? It's not like teams of elves are tripping over hand-coding this stuff. And even if they were, JSON parsers tend to be way more strict than RSS readers (which are actuakly very liberal interpretations of XML). But again, nobody in their right mind is manually generating or templating this stuff. And if you are, there are a dozen RSS-gen libraries for every single language. Let one of those handle it for you. Doing…

Of the three formats I support, RSS, Atom, and JSON, the RSS feed is the smallest.

    RSS: 33,228
    Atom: 43,433
    JSON: 36,137

Re: RSS Is Better Than Twitter

#200

Post by oliwarner »

gnomewascool wrote: post #179
oliwarner wrote: post #93

They're very different. RSS only let you listen. And it only works if you already know who you want to listen to. Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline. But RSS is just a format for sharing data. There's no built-in client for having a conversation, for tracking conversations. You ultimately still need a point o…

> Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline. How is that different from the people whom you do "follow" with RSS recommending other feeds or individual articles, or quoting these articles, with their own comments? (Mostly agreed about the point regarding third-party pushed conversations.)

> How is that different

We *could( each publish feeds of what we liked, or re-feed them with annotations. And we could follow other individuals (ie friends, acquaintances) and they us, and we could control access to levels of feed with authentication. We could have feeds of our friends (and their URLs). As well as feeds of our own throwaway commentary on life. Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter (without comments) with RSS.

The "how is that different" is that we don't. There's both a technical networking obstacle as well as an interface. You and I likely know how to host this stuff but our grandmas don't. There's also nothing —there could be— to tie this together in an interface.

Twitter et al do this crap for us, for "free".

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