I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.
I suspect a lot of blogs only have a feed now because it's a default feature of the blog platform they use rather than because they see it as important.
I don't buy any of the arguments not to implement it. I don't think it is too expensive or confusing. I think it is too empowering to users and inconvenient to marketers.
Add websub and few more and you have a social network, duh. Decentral. People owned.
well, that's the unspoken fallacy: becoming active is cumbersome.
But that doesn't have to be, it could be as easy as renting a domain and copying a single file. (Plug: https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo)
But if taking a breath is too much of an effort, one may well remain unheard.
At some point we need to stop trying defend the idea that capitalism is good for tech.
Why would a state-owned social media platform be any better? I can think of numerous ways in which it would be dramatically worse. And if given the choice, do you really think people would choose Fedbook over Facebook?
I think the argument for this is mainly that this would be funded by taxes, so it would not need to rely on advertisements and exhibit the predatory behaviours that Facebook and other social media do.
How about Mastodon/Fediverse options?
Same convenience of platform features - finding friends, social gaming, comments, likes, etc. - nobody trying to monetize your eyeballs or actively surveil you.
I get tons of requests in my web logs for my RSS feed. And I’m not a big site or anything, just have a scrub personal blog.
So that’s lots of demand.
I suspect that every platform owner sees their rss requests and sees it as high. So any claims that there’s no demand without clarifying that they don’t get http gets for RSS feeds seems disingenuous to me.
“I don’t see any demand for RSS when I ignore looking at all the RSS requests I get tiny site.”
But I think successful requests to my RSS feeds are regular users who are routinely checking my feed and have set up some tool to do so. So that’s demand. And it’s pretty regular.
The people trying to ssh are likely doing so automatically on every host in existence.
You mispelled "the way for me to monetize it is practically non-existent".
It feels very much like an alive protocol to me, and more in need than ever before given the insane calls on everyone's attention.
And to the guy with "service shutdown fear" - just export your opml and bring it into another service. It's highly portable and imo totally mitigates any risk of getting locked in then locked out.
Turns out, most of the blogs I subscribed to back in the day are now defunct or not updated much. I think that's why I eventually stopped going to my Feedly for RSS aggreggation, and instead for the few moments a day I want to read news/waste time, I just go directly to The Verge, Hacker News, and/or Reddit.
Funny aside, though. My product at work still has a RSS plugin for importing content, and I have it pointed at Reddit RSS feeds for sub-reddits, and it's still working....
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Let's hope it will not go defunct anytime soon.
One of those feeds is how I came across this post.
However, as a user I'd need to decide: do I want to open the funnel of content like this where I feel obligated to read all the stuff in my feed? I kind of feel like I don't need to be so diligent with these things. And if that's the case, my use case looks more and more like only using RSS for super specific, niche websites that I don't want to remember to visit on a regular basis. Which could be OK, but then I have to remember to visit my RSS reader.
"Using the Publisher Center tool, you can share your content with Google News by listing RSS feeds, website URLs, or videos."
[1] https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9607...
[2] My original link to how it works: https://ppcexpo.com/blog/how-does-google-news-work
EDIT: found the original Google docs instead
I tried using Feedly last year. Added feeds and it was HORRIBLE experience. Not Feedly but the actual feeds.
Some of them give you the title and then tell you to go to actual website to read the article.
Others has a virtually non-existent summary.
During RSS's heydays I remember being able to just see the summary and click on it and read the article right there and then. Now these feeds try to push you back to the website hard. Making RSS feeds feel like a broken tool. With the content there mostly an after thought.
I think sites killed off RSS feeds.
I am always on the lookout for a simple, decentralized, modern alternative, if anyone knows of any.
Thanks for the tip on weloverss. I'll give it a try.
Even though the water isn't boiling, the heat may still be on.
Is it still useful? Yes. Is it also under attack? Yes.
I believe a lot of the bigger sites like Feedly will recommend you popular feeds. I would love a service that I can paste a list of feeds into and it could recommend popular related feeds.
1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse).
2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites.
3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed.
4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list.
Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read.
Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that way) - but if you treat it as a personally curated source of sporadic content, then it's great. In many respects Moderate post volume (quality over quantity) is something I find more useful in what I choose.
On the aggregator front, I try to avoid anything that's too noisy (low signal to noise) - and I definitely minimise subscribing to news sites as the volume is just too high (I tried rss subscribing to The Verge when it was new, but there were too many articles I don't read). For example, i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.
RSS is still heavily used for information I find really professionally useful (IT) - but I don't know about other industries.
Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed - which makes offline and mobile consumption more difficult / annoying - I suspect that in some cases it's a result of default choices - and in others it's a deliberate decision as a trade off against improved analysis a site gets from a browser hit.
The popular HN RSS feed generator linked elsewhere in this page allows for a ton of customization! You can filter by points and raise the floor until you get a reasonable number of articles per week.
> Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed
My RSS reader (miniflux) has a handy feature for getting around these. It even works for naïve paywalls (like the New Yorker’s, for example). It basically cURL’s the original address of the content and allows you to specify the content with a CSS selector. It’s some trouble to configure initially, but very handy!
I saw that they also have some kind of tool that lets you scrape websites that don't have native RSS feeds, but it is only at the "super duper" pricing tier, whatever that one is called.
Precisley, that's how I got to this post. In this day, keeping a list of interesting sites and being able to consult them all from a single place is ever more useful.
I get RSS for some Twitter accounts via a Nitter instance. Sadly, some institutions and people only spread news via Twitter.
- Forum activity (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom)
- Forum's new discussions (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom/discussions)
- This discussion (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom/d/20-i-miss-rss)
Of course these days browsers don't indicate that browsers are available. You will need an extension to detect feeds. (Or paste the site in your feed reader and hope it does, most readers will do the auto-discovery for you)
it doesn't seem to be linked anywhere, but I think that's: https://www.wilcosky.com/atom