It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

Post by sacado2 » Mon, May 18, 2020, 10:11 AM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #242

xmprt wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a lot of things for free because I have the luxury of a job that pays well. Not everyone has that kind of freedom and if someone wants to put food on the table, then money has to be a factor. Otherwise you'd lock a lot of things to only people who have extra time to take risks on activities that won't get them anything in return. Saying not everything should be about money is a pretty privileged position.

Not every activity needs to be a viable way to make money. If you're struggling to put food on the table, maybe you should explore other avenues for making money besides blogging. If you want to write, there are lots of ways to get paid for writing. Everyone has activities they enjoy that don't produce any income. Just because people enjoy an activity doesn't mean that there has to be a way to make a living from it.…

Post by ddevault » Mon, May 18, 2020, 12:37 PM UTC

pinkano wrote: post #274

ddevault wrote: post #201

Feedly seems nice but it's a total non-starter due to the lack of an email-based signup. I have none of the social media accounts it wants you to log in with and it'll be a cold day in hell before I share that much personal information with an RSS reader anyway. But a brief reading of the privacy policy will tell you that Feedly is a data hoarder and has every intention of selling that information: https://feedly.com…

This is Petr from Feedly, please let us know where in the Privacy Policy you read we're a data hoarder and selling information? We're doing the exact opposite and we can afford it with Feedly Pro, Pro+ and Business as they feed our business so we can stay profitable without the need to sell any customer data.

Post by Kye » Mon, May 18, 2020, 1:14 PM UTC

kinix wrote: post #284

VLM wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the world needs an unmonetizable space. I keep hearing how RSS is dead for many years. My favorite blogs seem to be doing fine, its not like my newsblur stream of posts has decreased over the years. Many people are unhappy about non-monetized readers and authors just being happy off by themselves. The people most able to "fix" that are the happy readers and authors, and the readers are not very motivated to spa…

I often ponder about the current push towards federation in tech such as Mastodon, and wonder if the issue isn't more around the issue of finding the sites in the first place, rather than being able to access sites via RSS. RSS is usually a default in many web publishing tools (wordpress, hugo etc). As someone getting into RSS more recently, I've definitely struggled to find decent sites to follow (though trawling ha…

Post by Kye » Mon, May 18, 2020, 1:25 PM UTC

lordgrenville wrote: post #296

Dotnaught wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The fair market price for content is $0. That's a gross oversimplification. Lots of content isn't worth anything but some is. If you're a stock trader, for example, certain timely information is well-worth paying for. And there's a market for that served by Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, and so on. The term "content" obscures the differences by suggesting its all interchangeable. That's certainly in the interest of the…

Stuff like Bloomberg, Thomson-Reuters, etc is valuable to a specific type of professional and will always have a niche audience. That isn't really what the discussion is about. Reporting on corruption and injustice is critical to a society, but doesn't have any monetary value. The way I see it, we already have a way we choose to fund that kind of thing: non-profits/NGOs. Some media outlets (Vox, The Guardian) are alr…

Post by cygx » Mon, May 18, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

zzo38computer wrote: post #288

cygx wrote: post #51

We should go more old-school and resurrect NNTP instead: Have clients that render Markdown, and servers where users can create their own access-controlled groups. Have a group where only the owner may post: That's a feed. Have a group where only the owner may post top-level articles, but anyone may respond: That's a blog.

I had the same ideas about feeds and blogs as you have, and I agree. I have seen the idea about Markdown before, and have considered that too; it is not a bad idea. However, clients should only render Markdown if the article contains a "Content-type: text/markdown" header, and assume plain text otherwise. Clients that don't understand Markdown you can still read the article, since Markdown is meant as readable even w…