We will have a first try for a kickoff meeting in that gitter [0] channel tomorrow at 20 UTC, https://time.is/en/compare/2000_7_Jan_2022_in_UTC/EST/Berlin. Join us! :)
Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
81–90 of 170 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#82I totally support anything that promotes RSS, but I have to wonder if I live in a bubble. I don't use social media except a single, oft-neglected Mastodon account and get all my info from RSS. According to Newsblur I have ~500 feeds subscribed and ~5000 unread items (can't keep up) every week. I don't doubt that RSS is getting less popular, but perhaps due to moving in circles where RSS is popular I really don't feel…
I don't even think RSS is less popular in absolute numbers, there have been interesting articles about the RSS reader user population after Google Reader that suggest otherwise. But it can still be less popular relatively - when newcomers don't learn about it, which is how our internet access technology is set up right now.
Apart from that I'm in a similar bubble as you, RSS never stopped being relevant to me.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#83Can you get substack to start using rss?
They do! https://mockingbird.substack.com/?utm_source=discover (a random substack site from the frontpage) links https://mockingbird.substack.com/feed in their source. If that feed were to break https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ would be a service to workaround that.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#84Is https://aboutfeeds.com/ an answer to #2 and/or #5?
I think it covers 5. Could be extended a bit (especially if in the future there really exists a group with activity that can be presented as well), but it's awesome and very close! Are you the author? 2 was different. I was thinking about what happens when a user clicks on a feed - it's not very user friendly, especially now that browsers just show the XML file content. If we had a mechanism that wraps that request a…
Matt Webb is the author, their contact information (GitHub repo, personal site with email) is at the bottom of the page.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#85Nice initiative. Other than HN, I only use RSS to consume content which I care about (I use theoldreader.com). While I currently don't have the time or technical skills to contribute much, would be happy to support financially if required. I also encourage anyone I know to use Firefox, Duckduckgo and RSS; however, most people (especially the intelligent technical ones) are not willing to change.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#86I would love to be able to filter RSS feeds.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#87You are focusing on the consumption side and your proposed steps seem like a good way to bring back easy consumption of RSS feeds. But the problem lies elsewhere: the blogs I regularly visit still have RSS feeds, but most content now isn’t in blogs anymore. For-profit sites have crippled or completely dropped their feeds to make users see ads. Many people that would have been bloggers a decade ago just publish thread…
A good compromise is to just ship the headline and first paragraph or two, with a link to the full article.
Wholeheartedly agree. And even if a feed ships a lot of text, the reader software can always trim it down and/or present it as it wants. For the website builder I develop and sell, I use the reader side of RSS as a 'social timeline', so there's no room for long articles in the feed anyway. Want to read more, just visit the website. The website is the best place for ads as well, dirtying up your timeline with ads is a no-no for me.
I also want to use the opportunity to propose a new name for RSS, which is 'Really Social Sites' or 'Real Social Sites'. RSS had name changes in the past, so it's only natural it gets a new name when it will revive in the coming years. And since all this web3 sh1t (names without meaning) I really felt the need to put energy in RSS and also it's name. To make it more accessible to everybody, not only devs and nerds, it needs a better name. Nothing else has to change, RSS is rock solid as a technology. Can't wait to use my own software to read the personal blogs/websites of all you guys and gals. Social Media without Big Tech.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#88I almost never find something I want to follow that doesn't have a feed.
As someone pointed out to me, most of the RSS nostalgia is really more Google Reader nostalgia. I found that weird as it wasn't the first or the last RSS reader I used, but it was the reader that made RSS closest to mainstream. And for many people, it was the only reader they ever used, and so they're completely unaware of the ecosystem of web-based readers that sprung back up after it died or of the stand-alone apps that never went away.
And that makes me think trying to get RSS wired into browsers is unnecessary. Just make people aware of the web-based readers. For example, I'd say Feedbin is better than Google Reader was, and it's probably not the only one that is. It solves the Twitter problem, and you can even point email newsletters at it. I use the Hell out of it and cheerfully pay, which has helped cover upgrades as the guy's gotten more customers.
(Also, since it always comes up, people shouldn't obsess with trying to get all content into the RSS feed. It's always been perfectly reasonable to just put a summary or title in the feed.)
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The world is moving past static text content as a medium, which is what RSS/IRC are built for. I want more rich video/media oriented content like what the New York Times is producing, which takes advantage of user interactivity and new Javascript APIs. RSS isn't going to make that happen for me.
RSS is built for notification. You can get notifications of new rich-text content, videos, whatever. But notifications when you choose to get them, rather than push notifications. (If I got a push notification to my phone for every RSS article I read I'd go nuts.)
This is a very important part a lot of people miss, I think.
Re: Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The world is moving past static text content as a medium, which is what RSS/IRC are built for. I want more rich video/media oriented content like what the New York Times is producing, which takes advantage of user interactivity and new Javascript APIs. RSS isn't going to make that happen for me.
RSS is built for notification. You can get notifications of new rich-text content, videos, whatever. But notifications when you choose to get them, rather than push notifications. (If I got a push notification to my phone for every RSS article I read I'd go nuts.)
Some people get obsessed with trying to read everything through RSS and never going to a web page. I've never understood that.
I find invoking the NYT especially funny because they have MANY RSS feeds, letting you filter by sections.