RSS is still pretty great

> For example, there is really no way to tell aggregators that you changed an article's path.

Of course there is, just change the URL. Both Atom and RSS have the concept of an "entry ID" which should never change, but anything else in the entry can just be updated (other than the published date I guess).

However this is easy to misunderstand because in RSS it is optional and in Atom people frequently use the URL as the ID and then accidently change that URL which according to the protocol is actually creating a new set of entries unrelated to the old ones.

In fact in the author's case it is very likely if they added items back to their feed with the old ID and new URL Feedly would update it. Although there is no way to undo duplicates and you shouldn't add back an entry that was removed from the feed (as it will appear new to subscribers that didn't know about the entry previously).

> Finally, and one of the biggest issues with RSS, is that it's not very intuitive to non-tech savvy individuals.

Back when Google reader was a thing this wasn't true. Your browser auto-themed and provided subscribing options for your configured reader. It's a true shame that Firefox gave up supporting RSS out of the box to match Chrome's stance on the subject

For anyone not using rss and wondering whether to get into it and how, this is what worked for me over the past year.

I used to have 4-6 sites I would check regularly. A couple occasionally had a news update article I liked reading. A couple were “firehose” sites for a hobby which produced 4-20 articles per day. Hard to keep up with on web without feeling overwhelmed.

I got NetNewsWire which has a good sync system across machines. Then I put the occasional news articles in one folder and the firehose feeds in another.

(If a site has no obvious rss, paste in the homepage. NetNewsWire seems to figure it out)

It now takes 2-3 min per day to look over the firehouses. Can scan, read the ones I want, mark the rest as done.

For the news/essay sites, no longer any need to check a site periodically to see “is there an update?” It all just comes in when published.

In a world where habit transformation is hard, this one stuck. Consistently has led me to read more of the stuff I wanted to keep up with, while spending less time and energy around actually finding it.

I remember the thread where people shared their blogs on HN.

Then, someone aggregated all of the feeds they could find in an OPML file, from which I built a site that shows an aggregation of some of the latest blog posts: https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/

I think RSS is pretty cool! Not many people know this, but even Thunderbird has a built in RSS feed reader, so I don't even need a separate program: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/05/thunderbird-rss-feeds-g...

I love RSS. I take a bit of an unconventional approach and use Discord as my RSS reader. I run a self hosted instance of MonitoRSS (https://github.com/synzen/MonitoRSS). I have a server with just me and my bot instance and I tend to group my feeds into categories and channels (effectively creating a tab system per subscription or group of subscriptions). I have Discord installed on my laptop, phone, and desktop so this means that I can easily look at all my subscribed feeds wherever it's convenient for me. When I'm not set to "do not disturb", I even get push notifications on my devices when content is posted to feeds that go to channels I haven't muted. I think the only real downside of the setup is some days I am very busy and don't check the server that often, so I'll come back to a large backlog of things to read and I'll end up missing or under-appreciating some gems.

Yay RSS :) A habit (useful one, i might add) i'll never get rid of :)

Quick PSA here: if you ever want (or need) to filter a RSS feed to get rid of adverts, random rants of a certain topic you don't want to read about - there's RSS Bridge [1] which lets you do that.

It also provides some bridges that let you subscribe to sites that don't even have an RSS feed via scraping, or YouTube channels or ....

It's pretty much a swiss army knife for RSS (no affiliation, just a happy, self-hosting, user!)

[1] https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

Related, from Molly White's excellent review of Chris Dixon's Read Write Own [1]:

> RSS is dead, he repeats endlessly throughout the book.[...] It's profoundly weird to read RSS's obituary as a person who checks her very-much-still-alive feed reader several times a day to get everything from cryptocurrency news to dinner ideas, and who rarely encounters a website that doesn't provide a functional feed.

[1] https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chr...

No matter how much people want to proclaim RSS is "dead" there is actually no way to kill it. It is decentralized. No one owns it. If we keep publishing RSS feeds, it still lives.

Woohoo, I love RSS. I feel this is a good a time as any to share Bubo RSS [0] by George Mandis, as well as my personal fork [1].

In essence, all it really is is a build script that reads your RSS feeds from a JSON file, and builds a static site as 1 HTML file and 1 CSS file. You can then run the script at whatever interval you want (basically however often you want to update your "feed"). I do this using Github Actions and publishing to Github Pages [2]. Anyway, its awesome and I've been doing this for a few years now.

[0] https://github.com/georgemandis/bubo-rss

[1] https://github.com/kevinfiol/rss-reader

[2] https://kevinfiol.com/reader

I could not be happier with my self hosted FreshRSS.

It's a major way i stay in touch without having to doom scroll

RSS is great and I can't imagine what my life would've been if I were to scan the news feeds on each individual site that I have included in my RSS feed. However, the text rendering feature is rather useless for the resources that are greedy for views, clicks and other analytics, as they simply truncate the body of the article, leaving you no choice but to open the original url to read the rest of it. For my use case in particular, a full title is enough, but I was rather bummed initially that the promised "read all articles rendered in the same style with no distractions that existed on the original website" never worked out.

I use rss for youtube and it's been great but lately a lot of "shorts" stuff has been junking up the feeds.

I have 50 or so RSS feeds, a few went stale, I thought the URL had changed. Turns out they are just not publishing. It's pretty rare to find a site I want without being able to find a RSS feed for it.

I use it almost every day, mostly to follow new content.

For a while I used social media (facebook, twitter, etc), but that stopped working well for me when algorithms started deciding what I was supposed to see. On top of this, the "drama" I was seeing and wasting my time on, ads, privacy concerns, etc, made leave social media and go back to RSS. For this use case, it's much better than social media, even when sites decide to only include a paragraph or two to force me to visit the website.

RSS is still pretty great indeed. It's just that the big tech and social media services want you to believe that it's "dead" just to keep you hooked and addicted into their system as possible.

I’ve used multiple rss readers over the years. I would read them for a few months and then stop because news reading would become a habit. I’ve ended up using bookmark folders in Firefox and visiting the sites I like once every few months when I can focus on them.

Where rss still gets the most use from me is podcasting. It’s open and human readable and it’s great to dump an opml file into a new player or catcher and have episodes download and start listening instantly.

I actually find that for most feeds, I dislike chronological sorting. It is a good default, but I prefer to have rules that promote certain authors and keywords. For example, on my Arxiv feeds, I promote certain keywords, and "autoread" everything else. On news feeds, I promote articles about my specific area of the city.

I use Gnus to create my own recommendation engine to do this.

For a person who is not a techie, we find it really difficult to navigate and use RSS

Waiting for a selfhost options with feedly pro features.

Web scraping (limited) for sites that doesn't have RSS.

Filters through dupes.

AI priority filters to for specific topics/subjects.

Twitter addresses a bunch of the downsides of RSS that were listed. The author's criticism of Twitter seems to be that it is too easy for people to use, that it is too helpful in finding you things to read, and that if offers a way to reply to posts. These seem like a net benefit to me and if you don't want to see replies then don't click into a tweet.

Gathering accurate publication dates is the only problem I’ve faced with RSS.

Some of these channels flat out don’t give them to you at all. Instead, I have to either resort to polling methods or archive data.

I’m open to better solutions

Just opened this via Miniflux

The main problem with RSS is there might be a large quantity of (useless) traffic produced by subscribers to a personal website which is update with a low frequency.

There were some services to fix this problem, but most of them have all been (deliberately) closed now.