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I Still Use RSS

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Re: I Still Use RSS

#81
"Another use-case I was surprised to develop was managing collaborative projects"

This is one of the biggest under appreciated things with RSS I think! I used to have issues with a project having out of date dependencies that included some critical security features. I added the GitHub releases to a folder in my RSS reader and now know almost instantly when there's a new release and whether it's security critical or not. That would have been lost in a disordered social media feed where it might get buried under tons of other contents and I can't mark things as important, filter them out into tags or folders, etc. Right now several of us can just all have that in our feeds and create an issue to upgrade, investigate, etc. when new releases of dependencies come out, but I've thought it might be fun to put that feed directly into an issue tracker at some point too so issues get made for any new dependency update to be investigated.

Email and RSS still manage to do better than anything else at keeping my messages organized and important stuff at the top, after all these years.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#82

I have tried feed readers on and off over the years, and never really stuck with it. It just felt like too much coming in with no rest. (This was largely before social media...now that sentiment feels quaint.) But I've recently gotten back into feed readers, and what I've realized is that I think a lot of my frustration was from news websites, which are just a constant stream of new content. Now I stick to a few blog…

I really liked https://fraidyc.at/ because of how it gave frequent/infrequent posters equal space. I switched to miniflux for reasons, but I wrote a user script to reorder unread entries to simulate that. https://maya.land/userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/

Re: I Still Use RSS

#84
post #14

I still use rss too (switched to using a self-hosted tt-rss after trying out a ton of Google Reader alternatives). I love RSS and mourn the fact that it's not more popular. The main problem with RSS becoming so niche is that lots of blogs/etc. no longer support RSS (I guess I need to look into one of those mailing list -> RSS things).

The most popular newsletter services do make them, though -- blah.substack.com/feed , for instance (don't remember Revue's or Buttondown's off the top of my head)

Re: I Still Use RSS

#85

I've mentioned this on HN before, one pattern I've noticed is a lot of sites tend to truncate their RSS feed so you have to click through to see the full article etc. This is mostly OK but kinda frustrating, as in the before-covid times I used to ride the London Underground a lot where no celluar signal is available in the tunnels - so my offline RSS reader would be useless. So I wrote a little web service accepts an…

Newsblur has a setting per-site which allows you to have it use either the feed body or attempt to pull in the full text. When I was commuting on the subway (prior to ubiquitous underground coverage) here in DC, I used that heavily. One nice thing is that downloading it on your client avoids the site having to get in the middle of the copyright concerns about replicating their servers.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#86
post #76
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on something similar for some years: http://ftr.fivefilters.org An older version available on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss/src/master/

I'm a huge fan. Here's my Docker-ized take: https://github.com/alrs/full-text-rss-docker EDIT: full-text-rss + newsboat + nyt screenshot: https://lsngl.us/@alrs/105652475456016345

Oh that's fantastic! I've been meaning to look into providing a Docker version at some point, will definitely look more at how you've done things here.

Re: I Still Use RSS

#88

This quote is exactly right: "Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I want to see it with the freedom to jump between readers as I please, all with no ads? For me, no other service comes close to the flexibility, robustness, and overall ease-of-use that RSS offers." I always wonder why they aren't as popular now. It takes more work to add site to a reader, and more effort to even use one I suppose.…

As far as I can tell, because RSS requires the cooperation of actors who have no incentive to cooperate. If I use an RSS reader to support content, then it is under my control when I read it, if I read it, and what format to read it under. I can view the content however I'd like, and no tracking is there. All of these are unambiguously good things for me, and are anathema for the advertising industry. I cannot use RS…

> As far as I can tell, because RSS requires the cooperation of actors who have no incentive to cooperate.

Do you mean in the sense that content providers want to dictate more than just information delivery to consumers, or something else?

Re: I Still Use RSS

#89

Is RSS really so obscure as the site suggests? Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed. Apparently YouTube content creators receive more money if they have more subscribers, but I don't subscribe and simply use the RSS feed; it's easier. Perhaps YouTube also factors in the number of RSS requæsts they receive.

IIUC YouTube compensation is based entirely off the number of ads watched/clicked through on your videos. (Saving special one-off contracts that YouTube may offer)

Re: I Still Use RSS

#90

Is RSS really so obscure as the site suggests? Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed. Apparently YouTube content creators receive more money if they have more subscribers, but I don't subscribe and simply use the RSS feed; it's easier. Perhaps YouTube also factors in the number of RSS requæsts they receive.

Yeah, RSS is used pervasively. Despite not being a mainstream technology in the way people expected it to be, it's still alive because there is just no replacement.
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