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It's time to head back to RSS?

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Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#351

Post by nikbackm »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #326
mandelbulb wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dev has always been really responsive and closely watching the community, while Feedly focuses on premium support and feels more corporate. Several features are free: Unlimited sources and feeds, entire search for your own feeds, unlimited tags, sharing via inoreader email There is also: loading of mobilized content via single click/key, better shortcuts, comprehensive tagging management, more settings, better se…

Now that I'm trying Inoreader, the killer feature for me is being able to open items in background tabs. Too bad that requires a plugin for Firefox.

You mean a web extension, not a plugin.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#352

Post by pmlnr »

modernerd wrote: post #235
pmlnr wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter, really? RSS, Atom, JSON, microformats, whatever; there are libraries that can parse any of these. What matters is the idea behind them, the technical implementation is secondary. Please don't revive the format wars.

I agree with the spirit of, “better to popularise independent syndication than fight over formats” except: > the technical implementation is secondary Until users get a bad experience that can't be solved easily because the spec was set in stone over a decade ago. Or until people want to extend and improve the spec to create new standards that prevent fractured and disparate extensions to it. Technical implementation…

RSS is good enough for what it was made for and most of the parser libraries and software parse both Atom and RSS (all 0.9, 1.0 and 2.0). Atom vs RSS caused enough trouble already ( https://indieweb.org/RSS_Atom_wars ) and the solution is definitely not JSONFeed, just to break all previous feed reader implementation.

Let us accept that any parser lib should be able to deal with RSS and Atom, and move on.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#353

Post by dingaling »

dageshi wrote: post #121
mandelbulb wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true at all. Alternatives were already available when Google Reader(GR) closed, i.e. July 2013. Inoreader, which was feature-complete in regards to GR, was launched a month after the announcement in March. That's why Feedly hogged most of the momentum as it was released in 2008 already. I would say Google Reader's discontinuation actually increased the popularity of RSS. The protocol was big news for a few weeks,…

Op's example is a textbook example of what happened to me. I used to have a lot of RSS feeds in Google Reader, when it closed I never moved anywhere else because at the time there wasn't an obvious alternative.

Why not just an RSS aggregator program / app? Like those which preceded and continued after Google Reader. They're no more difficult to use, you just add feeds and the program does the rest. And no login required.

It seems odd to me to take a federated protocol, centralise it in a proprietary system and then shrug and forget RSS when that goes away.

I was on Akgregator for years, then Bamboo in Firefox, now on QuiteRSS now that Quantum has killed Bamboo. All using the same imported OPML file of feeds.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#354

Post by pmlnr »

gglitch wrote: post #322
yxhuvud wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the same in the media industry, RSS is everywhere. It is just that the end users seldom see it..

Could you elaborate on this, please?

Firefox used to display and RSS icon in the url bar if the site had a feed, allowing you to subscribe you to "live bookmarks" - feeds: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html

This is completely hidden from the UI by now.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#355

Post by lousken »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #311
lousken wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I'm on slow internet I appreciate loading "mobilized content" - it will show you contents of the article right on the site. Also in general it felt a lot faster than feedly (left 2yrs ago though, feedly might've changed).

I've always had Feedly set to display the full article in the reader. It's been a feature since the day I switched from Google Reader. Is "mobilized content" different from that?

Not sure what Full article means since I wasn't on feedly for so long but I guess you mean only what the feed exposes to you (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss there's always only Comments link). But if I say mobilized content in inoreader it downloads the website, parses it and shows it to me https://i.imgur.com/b09hh6Y.png

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#356

Post by drdeadringer »

alexandros wrote: post #301
drdeadringer wrote: post #299

I seem to have missed the "abandon all RSS" movement, which doesn't surprise me. I am missing That One Puzzle Piece which enables me to understand why people ditched RSS in the first place. I'd appreciate enlightenment.

Google reader was introduced, made it look like it would be there forever and cost nothing, which killed any alternatives. Then Google killed reader in favor of Google+. At that point, there was no good reader, and even with not-as-good alternatives like feedly, a lot of people didn't feel like setting things up again. As a result, the whole ecosystem was knocked out of balance and never recovered.

> Google reader was introduced

Ah, a good point. This was a blip on my radar because, oddly, I had RSS and wasn't as plugged into Google at that time as I am now [yet am still 'on' RSS now more than ever].

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#357

Post by eitland »

svalorzen wrote: post #94

One thing I don't understand is people who use all these websites to handle RSS. I've always used Firefox addons in order to handle RSS (before LiveClick which was awesome, now FeedBro or similar). Why would you give control away for something as decentralized as RSS?

Same here:

I tried all those services, then gave up on RSS, then found Feedbro a while ago and now I use that.

(I mainly use it for work purposes: following updates from relevant projects, issues from selected github repos and a couple of people who write useful stuff about tech I use.)

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#358

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

noam87 wrote: post #60

I've been a (paying) user of NewsBlur ( https://newsblur.com/ ) since Google Reader shut down and haven't looked back. p.s: In HN spirit, it also happens to be one developer's side-project-turned-profitable-business, and the "social" features a totally non-intrusive, but there if you want to know what people are sharing and commenting on.

Did their Android app ever get any better? I used it from when Google Reader shut down until a couple of years ago, but always had horrible trouble with Android client (lots of people reported it being fine, but I think the differentiator was number of feeds - I had lots of feeds) getting into weird loops where it would just cycle through the same 10 stories.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#359

Post by reificator »

splitbrain wrote: post #319
theclaw wrote: post #278

I've tried Feedly but my goodness, the corporate language is such a turn off. I just want a feed reader, I don't want to "Fuel your team's success," "Enrich articles with unique insights," "Automate your content workflows," "Reinforce your digital brand". These features may be cool and useful, but the way they're sold makes me gag. I used my ad blocker to remove the "Well done!" that appears when everything is marked…

To me inoreader.com is the perfect Google reader like feed reader. I don't get all the fuzz about feedly, there are better alternatives. just my $0.02

When Google Reader died Feedly was the easiest alternative to switch to.

For a few years I continued to use third party clients for reading, as most of them transparently supported Feedly the same way as Google Reader.

Lately I've just started using Feedly directly, and I don't have too much of an issue with it.

I should note, I rarely use the web interface. Since around 2009 I've used mobile apps for my news feeds.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#360

Post by eitland »

anomie31 wrote: post #35

Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article. But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article. I wa…

I think paying ars technica readers get full articles in their rss.

Edit: and no tracking.

Also, I think it might be tiered and not all benefits apply at the lowest tier but all of them should be reasonably priced for anyone in tech.

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