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Please, expose your RSS

rknight.me

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Re: Please, expose your RSS

#91

Post by manuelmoreale »

rambambram wrote: post #63
dugite-code wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. I would argue that's only a part of the story. After all RSS quickly morphed into Link with a short blurb and image just like any modern link aggregation site rather than a full page of content. The big issue was RSS was it prevents site lock-in like Facebook ect. Even Reddit pushes people to the comments to try keep you on the site as much as possible in or…

I'm willing to advocate in favor of the short blurbs. I follow a lot of 'dev blogs' by RSS and my homegrown feed reader also only shows the short blurbs. I do this because all these people crafted their (personal) sites, made it beautiful and personal, and I'm wanting to visit their site to pay hommage and look at what they made (whether that's a cool logo, a nice color scheme, etc.) exactly in the way they made it.…

I advocated for the exact opposite[0]

There’s no point in serving only excerpts. By serving full content the people like you who like to consume on the original site can still do that.

Serving blurbs forces everyone to do that and that’s wrong imo.

[0] https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#92

Post by manuelmoreale »

darekkay wrote: post #71
rambambram wrote: post #68

Please, also expose that you're subscribed to a blog's feed. I sometimes sent an email to site owners to compliment them with a nice article I just read. Sometimes I leave a short comment here on HN to let somebody know I subscribed to their feed. I hope it encourages people that put energy and heart into quality content to keep making that content. I try to not overdo that here on HN, because it adds little to the g…

> Site owners get my traffic and they can easily see where it comes from if they happen to look at their visitor statistics. I suggest to also put the name of your reader and the total number of subscribers into the HTTP request (as user agent), if possible. https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

My understanding is that because of the way the various aggregators work is basically impossible to quantify the audience of RSS feeds, and that’s a good thing.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#93

Post by renegat0x0 »

Problems with exposing RSS feeds:

- People do not feel the need to expose it as more and more RSS clients are killed, it is not often used feature

- I think that RSS client are not killed because it is a faulty standard. It is a problem with deliverability. There is no state of the art RSS client. Most of RSS clients are not feature-rich, even thunderbird. People also do not know how to manage RSS feeds, how to obtain them

- I think that people use social media, link aggregators to see 'what's new', not RSS feeds

- People that self host do not focus on details, often even not properly configure their pages. OG:fields are not set, page title is not explanatory, weird redirects are used with invalid HTTP statuses, javascript page loading. If it is a problem with these basics, then other things are treated even worse, RSS included

- RSS feeds are often even not named properly. Naming "Blog", or "Title", or "Home" your RSS feed, or page is erroneous, in the same manner that you would not entitle a Book you wrote "My Book"

RSS readers I am aware of:

- https://newsboat.org/

- https://www.rssbrain.com/

- https://theoldreader.com/

- https://www.freshrss.org/

- https://readwise.io/read

- thunderbird

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - RSS reader, web scraper, which I wrote

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#94

Post by darekkay »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #92
darekkay wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Site owners get my traffic and they can easily see where it comes from if they happen to look at their visitor statistics. I suggest to also put the name of your reader and the total number of subscribers into the HTTP request (as user agent), if possible. https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

My understanding is that because of the way the various aggregators work is basically impossible to quantify the audience of RSS feeds, and that’s a good thing.

Getting an exact number is impossible, that's what I wrote in the linked blog post as well. But every RSS reader that requires user accounts knows the exact numbers, and 4 of the main readers expose those numbers via HTTP requests.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#95

Post by manuelmoreale »

darekkay wrote: post #94
manuelmoreale wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that because of the way the various aggregators work is basically impossible to quantify the audience of RSS feeds, and that’s a good thing.

Getting an exact number is impossible, that's what I wrote in the linked blog post as well. But every RSS reader that requires user accounts knows the exact numbers, and 4 of the main readers expose those numbers via HTTP requests.

From my personal digging [0] RSS is way too noisy. Just a wild guess but the 4 main readers are not where the majority of the RSS users are.

[0] https://manuelmoreale.com/poking-around-my-server-logs

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#96

Post by rambambram »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #91
rambambram wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to advocate in favor of the short blurbs. I follow a lot of 'dev blogs' by RSS and my homegrown feed reader also only shows the short blurbs. I do this because all these people crafted their (personal) sites, made it beautiful and personal, and I'm wanting to visit their site to pay hommage and look at what they made (whether that's a cool logo, a nice color scheme, etc.) exactly in the way they made it.…

I advocated for the exact opposite[0] There’s no point in serving only excerpts. By serving full content the people like you who like to consume on the original site can still do that. Serving blurbs forces everyone to do that and that’s wrong imo. [0] https://manuelmoreale.com/rss-excerpts

Yeah, there's definitely something to say for giving people a choice, so I'm going to keep this in the back of my head. For my system it feels weird to show the full content. I don't trim the feed description (yet) and sometimes these are very very long, looks awful with the rest of the UI.

What I also do is filter out all the markup and even links, I only show some sentences of text basically. It sits wrong with me to make my reader a sort of browser window and display all the markup.

Beautifully simple site you have, by the way. And I found I'm already subscribed to your feed.

"RSS is not a notification system. It's a distribution system." you say on your site. Was that the purpose of the inventors? I guess I take the freedom to use it slightly different then, we're on Hacker News after all. ;) We can agree to disagree.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#97

Post by rambambram »

darekkay wrote: post #71
rambambram wrote: post #68

Please, also expose that you're subscribed to a blog's feed. I sometimes sent an email to site owners to compliment them with a nice article I just read. Sometimes I leave a short comment here on HN to let somebody know I subscribed to their feed. I hope it encourages people that put energy and heart into quality content to keep making that content. I try to not overdo that here on HN, because it adds little to the g…

> Site owners get my traffic and they can easily see where it comes from if they happen to look at their visitor statistics. I suggest to also put the name of your reader and the total number of subscribers into the HTTP request (as user agent), if possible. https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/

If I have more users than just a couple, I would definitely look into doing that. But my feed reader is part of a website system (together with it's own feed) that sits nicely separated on a different domain for each client. I have to centralize things to even get this number.

Somewhere in this same thread I said: "Exposing the number of subscribers from large RSS readers is a nice addition, but it also slightly nudges one to centralization." After second thought, I think it's better to just show this number if possible. It's better for RSS as a whole, it shows it's still alive.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#98

Post by phyzome »

charcircuit wrote: post #73
equinoxnemesis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good idea to limit it somewhere so you don't end up sending 10 MB every time it's fetched. The feed will be re-fetched to check for updates so the cost isn't paid just once.

It is paid only once since that 10 MiB gets cached by the reader. In future fetches the reader asks for entries newer than the date it last checked which means that the items already requested won't be sent again.

My understanding was that most feed endpoints just sent the whole thing back each time, or nothing (304 Not Modified, when conditional headers are included). This allows server and CDN caching of the response.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#99

Post by worksonmine »

jmduke wrote: post #4

One hackneyed reason that some folks give for not wanting to expose their RSS is wanting some level of legibility into their subscribers. I recently learned that many large RSS readers actually expose high-level analytics numbers [^1] so you can get an estimate of RSS readership that way, too. Would love for more readers to support this functionality: as far as I can tell across all of the RSS feeds my product expose…

The easiest solution for this would be to just check the server requests. My reader is terminal based and adding support for js analytics kind of defeats the purpose.

Re: Please, expose your RSS

#100

Post by zlg_codes »

politelemon wrote: post #74
ramijames wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was intentional. RSS is a way to sidestep advertising. Guess who makes the most widely used browser today.

Firefox dropped RSS/Atom support too

Part of Mozilla's bad decisions with Firefox generally boiled down to "we don't have someone to maintain this", or "our analytics show people don't use this".

Shit gets removed, people get upset, and they're told to deal with it. They didn't consider that the people who used the features that were removed also didn't send telemetry data, so they made a dumb decision based on incomplete and inaccurate data instead of something sane like appeal to the community and invite people to maintain or test it.

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