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Using RSS to replace social media

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Re: Using RSS to replace social media

#51

Post by ravenstine »

chrismorgan wrote: post #49

Technical correction: YouTube, GitHub and GitLab all produce Atom feeds, not RSS. (Nitter has /rss in its URLs but I can’t confirm they’re actually RSS because the feeds seem to be broken, producing HTML “user not found” error pages.) (If you want to know more of my beef against RSS (both as a technology and as a term for web feeds regardless of actual format): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+atom+rss&type=…

I'm curious, why do you think it should have been killed off in favor of Atom? Do you mean in the sense of the terminology, or is there something inferior about RSS?

Perhaps both should be killed off in favor of a JSON-based format.

Re: Using RSS to replace social media

#52

Post by atatatat »

ravenstine wrote: post #50
debarshri wrote: post #46

Social media tells you what you should see based on some implicit determination. Sure sometimes you can discover new things that did not interest you. You can feel serendipitous. With RSS feed, you can actually gain control, you could actually say when you see items in the feed, alert me. With current social media, I am constantly discovering things, which gives me a short high of finding new things which lasts for f…

YouTube is far better if you can completely bypass their algorithm. Half the time I use YouTube through NewPipe, a FOSS Android alternative to the YouTube app. If you import your subscriptions, it shows you exactly all the videos from your subscribed channels in chronological order, not what it or YouTube thinks you want to see. The search is seemingly less algorithmically influenced and there is no autoplay. There's…

Peep the settings, you can remove the Trending tab altogether.

Re: Using RSS to replace social media

#54

Post by marginalia_nu »

debarshri wrote: post #46

Social media tells you what you should see based on some implicit determination. Sure sometimes you can discover new things that did not interest you. You can feel serendipitous. With RSS feed, you can actually gain control, you could actually say when you see items in the feed, alert me. With current social media, I am constantly discovering things, which gives me a short high of finding new things which lasts for f…

Serendipity is sadly an endangered experience with today's popularity algorithms. If every suggestion you see is based on what you and people with similar behavior as you are most likely to click, then what you get is a rut. The things you discover may be things you haven't seen before, but they can hardly be called new.

The beautiful thing about flipping through a magazine, or browsing a library, is that everyone gets the same options regardless of who they are. It allows me, someone who isn't into a particular thing, to discover that thing. To accidentally read something I wouldn't have thought I agreed with, and discover that they actually made a decent point.

I think these types of popularity algorithms are deeply problematic.

Re: Using RSS to replace social media

#55

Post by Zash »

cxr wrote: post #42
Zash wrote: post #28

Forgotten OStatus have we? That was essentially RSS feeds + optional extras like ActivityStreams and push, all gracefully degrading into plain ol' RSS / Atom feeds.

Along with Atom, RSS is simple enough (it's in the name) that you can add RSS support even for static sites. ActivityPub, the most popular carrier for ActivityStreams, is "designed around the concept of an inbox and outbox" https://lwn.net/Articles/741218/ >, requiring that the server itself provide support. If you know of a realistic demonstration of ActivityStreams-without-ActivityPub that establishes a pattern tha…

ActivityStreams was originally an XML extension for Atom https://activitystrea.ms/specs/atom/1.0/>. It worked just fine with a static site.

https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ formerly PubSubHubbub was used to notify subscribers, but it was optional and subscribers would fall back to polling. WebSub could be a separate service.

The trickiest part is handling replies, which involves some cryptography to prevent spoofing. But this too could be done by polling, only then you only get replies from those you subscribe to. ActivityPub does this with crypto too IIRC.

Re: Using RSS to replace social media

#56

Post by Quillbert182 »

ravenstine wrote: post #50
debarshri wrote: post #46

Social media tells you what you should see based on some implicit determination. Sure sometimes you can discover new things that did not interest you. You can feel serendipitous. With RSS feed, you can actually gain control, you could actually say when you see items in the feed, alert me. With current social media, I am constantly discovering things, which gives me a short high of finding new things which lasts for f…

YouTube is far better if you can completely bypass their algorithm. Half the time I use YouTube through NewPipe, a FOSS Android alternative to the YouTube app. If you import your subscriptions, it shows you exactly all the videos from your subscribed channels in chronological order, not what it or YouTube thinks you want to see. The search is seemingly less algorithmically influenced and there is no autoplay. There's…

YouTube itself does have that same option under the subscriptions tab, it will only show videos from your subscriptions in chronological order.

Re: Using RSS to replace social media

#57

Post by sys_64738 »

throw0101a wrote: post #40
sys_64738 wrote: post #37

Twitter is especially good for RSS as you can see almost all 140 chars in a single line and see all the recents tweets for the twitter account. I've no interest in comments in twitter. With Reddit you can subscribe to RSS feeds of subreddits and see the new topics. Click through to reddit if you want to engage. It has its uses and frankly it's my method for info consumption. If something doesn't have an RSS interface…

> Twitter is especially good for RSS as you can see almost all 140 chars in a single line and see all the recents tweets for the twitter account. Twitter used to have RSS (Atom?) until March 2013.

The RSS service I use has a Twitter gateway which does translation. It works really nice.

Re: Using RSS to replace social media

#58

Post by chrismorgan »

ravenstine wrote: post #51
chrismorgan wrote: post #49

Technical correction: YouTube, GitHub and GitLab all produce Atom feeds, not RSS. (Nitter has /rss in its URLs but I can’t confirm they’re actually RSS because the feeds seem to be broken, producing HTML “user not found” error pages.) (If you want to know more of my beef against RSS (both as a technology and as a term for web feeds regardless of actual format): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+atom+rss&type=…

I'm curious, why do you think it should have been killed off in favor of Atom? Do you mean in the sense of the terminology, or is there something inferior about RSS? Perhaps both should be killed off in favor of a JSON-based format.

Refer to my earlier comments: Atom is technically superior and more sound, and calling them all “RSS” is harmful by encouraging the inferior.

JSON stuff? Eh, I feel that’s largely a solution looking for a problem. It’s too late to get universal support in clients (feeds aren’t popular enough and too much of the software basically on life support), so you’re always going to need to serve Atom or RSS as well, and once you’re implementing one of them, why would you bother with the JSON format at all? As for the one serious attempt, JSON Feed, I have one thing that I really like about it and one thing that I don’t. The don’t: it specifies that titles are plain text, which I think is a shame; Atom lets you put HTML in your titles so you can do things like , , and so forth (and I do, oh yes! I do)—though I wish Atom had let you specify both plain text and HTML (sometimes I want to “degrade” to backticks; refer to the titles of my last few blog posts for examples, with plain text in the and HTML in the body). And that’s the thing I think JSON Feed got right for the content, that you can provide both HTML and text, whereas Atom forces you to choose.

Re: Using RSS to replace social media

#59

Post by spockz »

tofukid wrote: post #48

I think RSS is a way to read social media, it's not a replacement for social media. But that's a good thing! I just want to stay updated with blogs, forums, and social media – in one place. I built and use https://sumi.news to follow Twitter, newsletters, and RSS in a peaceful, chronological feed, and it works well for me. I still comment, reply, and interact, but I only have to check one website for updates.

Why? We could have something federated where I add my response to a particular post/thread to my RSS feed. We then leave it up to the client to generate a proper tree representation of a discussion.

Re: Using RSS to replace social media

#60

Post by ravenstine »

Quillbert182 wrote: post #56
ravenstine wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is far better if you can completely bypass their algorithm. Half the time I use YouTube through NewPipe, a FOSS Android alternative to the YouTube app. If you import your subscriptions, it shows you exactly all the videos from your subscribed channels in chronological order, not what it or YouTube thinks you want to see. The search is seemingly less algorithmically influenced and there is no autoplay. There's…

YouTube itself does have that same option under the subscriptions tab, it will only show videos from your subscriptions in chronological order.

That is true, except YouTube doesn't always show you all your subscription content. In fact it frequently hides subscribed content from me, including live streams, even when I set the bell-icon to "All". The difference between the subscriptions tab on YouTube and NewPipe is that the latter literally scans every subscribed channel for uploaded content, so I have yet to find out that I've ever missed something through it. Whereas on YouTube I often discover that I missed out on either a live stream or an upload that did actually interest me but it never appeared in either my notifications or in the Subscriptions tab. The subscriptions tab is better than anything that's on the home page, but I prefer to not have an algorithm lie to me that I can see "All" new uploads.

EDIT: Also, random semi-related complaint; YouTube on web never honors when I click "Set Reminder". It doesn't matter if I permanently allow notifications in my browser or what. I get no emails either. I have a hard time believing the YT devs have written any tests for it. Then again, I've never tried it in Chrome. ¬‿¬

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