Regularly on HN we see threads about the apparent demise of the feed file as a technology and how sad it is. Despite the answers to those threads showing that RSS/Atom is not dead at all, what is clear is that it is not in a great spot. Less sites support it, percent-wise a smaller amount of internet users knows what it is and how it might be of use, browsers dropped their integrations.
I have a plan on how to counteract this. It includes getting people together who feel that this technology is elemental for the open web and should be preserved. It then vaguely continues like this (not necessarily sorted by feasibility):
1. Open PRs for browsers with provided-by-us code to integrate RSS again, with UI elements that make existing feeds visible and supports subscribing via a feed reader
2. Run a site that can be used for this, that takes a "I want to subscribe to a feed"-request and presents RSS readers to do so.
3. Implement default feeds for CMS that are missing them.
4. Implement easy to use libraries for programming languages that might miss them.
5. Create a website that explains why this is important, that hosts or links to the specifications and that contains additional documentation.
It's nothing I can do on my own, but I really think that if some people come together, that we could have a real influence on this development. Even if the browser integration step fails (which might be likely) there are alternative ways forward. And I'm sure there will be many more ideas on what could be done.
If this is of interest to you, consider joining https://gitter.im/FosterRSS/community.
The code is all open source, at https://github.com/symkat/BlogDB/ and I wrote an article on my own blog about initially writing the software from design to deployment: https://modfoss.com/building-blogdb.html
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 threads on twitter now. And discoverability is a whole topic for itself…
So even if rss was in-your-face in every browser, how would you get content creators to support it?
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.)
Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using?
Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when people have chosen solutions like Discord and then refusing to acknowledge why people prefer Discord. RSS (and IRC) didn’t just fall out of favor because people refuse to see how amazing it is nor is it just because of ads.
The answer to the post-RSS world is something more like a better, polished Fraidycat that can track content on any website. We can do better than RSS: a solution that doesn’t rely on everyone implementing it.
I am certainly interested in trying to improve this. There has to be a less privacy invading and engagement promoting system that can work and compete with the mess that is the big silicon valley sites.
Fortunately we can still find many websites and services that provide RSS feeds (probably because the tool/framework they are built with, automatically provides that feature). Implementing it is not hard, but in the end I think the most important aspect of that list is `5.`, not a website in particular but creating awareness that this tech/tool exists and in what cases it can be useful.
Imagine a service that offers a social media experience comparable with Twitter/Insta/Tumblr with rich clients, but under the hood it's all RSS, so not only can you subscribe to third-party feeds out of the box but your "profile" is also an RSS feed that other people outside of the platform can also subscribe to.
For example, when I had a blog a million years ago, I wanted to add a "search" engine to it (just a really dumb string comparison). It was pretty easy to do it client-side, in JavaScript, by reading the RSS feed generated by Jekyll and then just plopping the results on the screen.
Was it elegant? Nah, but it was easy and "good enough", and it would not have been nearly as easy if I hadn't had RSS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)#Atom_compa...
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 like it's dying.
HTP is an internal project for the company I work for, but it could be spun up to match any topic. I called it "Planet" in honour of the old Planet software which I really miss.
The big issue I see with feeds is that you are forced to accept whatever is generated from the feeds. HTP, although it reads all the feeds, checks to see if the feed matches certain requisites before displaying it. So personal blogs (like mine) won't be included in the end result if I'm just talking about my breakfast and the cat. But it I mention something that is topical, then it will. It's an additional layer of processing that keeps everything relevant.
Add to that the ability to pick out trends and themes and allows you to focus on just those topics of interest and it starts to get really useful. In fact the Internal site was the primary source of news and details for the PrintNightmare and Log4j issues.
For Feedly users I also recommend this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedly-notifi... It can be opened as a sidebar turning my browser into my feed reader.
I get why they do this as a new listener will want to start off with a full list of episodes and may want to pick up a show from the start.
It would be useful if an RSS could specify a separate URL to query that will only list new episodes, returning an empty RSS (or a standardized HTTP status code) until the new episode is available.
The original RSS with the full list would still be the primary URL for the podcast, the one I get when I right-click and select "Copy RSS URL".
What I am thinking is a lowtech social network that utilizes a phone/desktop client for writing posts that then other users can subscribe to via RSS. The client would also provide a feed reader which allows you to either intermingle social and web RSS or setup "folders" to keep your feeds organized how you like. No servers would be ideal so that it's just a new browser paradigm.
So, this renewed interest in RSS might not be that farfetched.
For additional context: I've used RSS since 1999, and I likely won't ever stop. Much better than algorithmic social media echo chambers, and I can read it on my e-ink device offline.
However, I see the death of RSS as the symptom of a larger problem: when platforms get big enough, they restrict access to their data. RSS feeds disappear, but so do other machine-readable endpoints. If it wasn't for GDPR, there would be no way to export that data. GDPR gave us clunky one-time exports, but even those are often incomplete. Making RSS popular again won't fix that.
The industry has a strong incentive to kill RSS, since the readers can strip the valuable bits (content or data) from the business bits (analytics, monetisation). RSS users are hard to count or monetise. This might not suit every business model.
This is a battle worth fighting, but it's not one you should expect to win.
I began to expect my lists and read status to be synchronized across my phone, tablet, and laptop. This meant using a service, and I really didn’t want another paid or fermium service.
This all changed last year when I finally set up my own instance of freshrss which I love. But I don’t know what you’d do for “regular users”
The biggest push RSS could get for me is if there was an Twitter-to-RSS bridge where I can get an RSS feed for a list of Twitter accounts.
https://github.com/ba9f11ecc3497d9993b933fdc2bd61e5/temporar...
I am an RSS noob.. so maybe some of the above IS possible with RSS but consider the case of Medium.
Medium thought to incentivize content creators with cross-pollination of readers. Person A is an author and writes on medium because medium will promote content to its network of readers which is larger than the auidence that Person A has today. Person A inevitably also brings an audience with them albiet likely humble.
Medium MAY have failed for a few different reasons but I suspect retention being low for the larger majority of its visitors and also being unable to monetize in a meaningful way - I know this team is actively working on this and more and I am rooting for them!!
Substack is the new platform.. it focuses on the ease of capturing an audience and monetizing it. Today that is what most writers want for their efforts.
If you could somehow bake the ability to capture and monetize an audience into the RSS subs then perhaps we'd have something.. the reality is whatever RSS becomes it needs to provide a 10x better incentive to the content creator than the traditional means.. and if its just "another" channel.. likely it will be ignored for the more lucrative channels (ie build my own list.. or even sites like medium)
Its also worth mentioning Master Class .. but I dont know enough about them to make any real conjecture.. just that they seem to have cracked the nut on reputation and content creation. Who doesn't wanna learn how to shoot threes from Steph Curry?
As many websites are built by clever people and/or based on somewhat ready-made frameworks, when you DON'T see the RSS/Atom icons appear -> take a look at the source of the website and search (ctrl-f) for the word "rss" or "atom" or "xml" -> you might end up finding a surviving RSS link in there.
This is their podcast where they talk about what they are doing; https://podcastindex.org/podcast/920666 That podcast RSS feed; http://mp3s.nashownotes.com/pc20rss.xml
They also have their own mastadon where all the developers working on Podcasting 2.0 hang out. https://podcastindex.social/web/home
One reason i love rss is a deal site in my country offer a feed of when a particular product is at a discount. So i can subscribe to those and get alerts when that happens.
Greg Young of the "event sourcing" crowd pointed out that RSS is natural way for event subscribers such as read model projections to subscribe to append-only event logs. Makes sense, but wouldn't have thought of it myself.
I think one reason this happens is that some technologies are less visible to the general public. RSS is not completely invisible, because a lot of browsers show an RSS icon when you visit a page that includes RSS feeds, but it's still subtle. Another example of a less visible technology would be the Semantic Web. A web page that you visit might be marked up semantically using RDFa or microdata, but the visitor could never know it unless they are looking for it.
It'd be kinda neat if email clients natively supported digesting RSS feeds sent as email, presenting the same user-experience, but without the polling.
Please please please don't reinstate the "support" browsers had, it was effectively useless.
As someone who's built their own browser extension for tracking and reading feeds, I really don't want the confusion of a half feature. The browser is GREAT at navigating pages and rendering them, but when we start bundling in other services (ahem Pocket in firefox?) it feels like cruft.
I'd much rather browsers focus on building out solid features that support building amazing websites and extensions.
how many github pages exist? currently, that number is apparently 2,866,300 [0]. imagine a tool that generates an rss from all the html files collected. before pushing back with git, you run a script that generates the rss. any new html files are added to the rss. and it doesn't have to be just github pages, it can be any html/blog website. i can build such a tool but am currently working on something else.
You need to get the big names on board, namely Chrome/Chromium, Firefox and Edge. Google and Microsoft seem quite happy with not supporting RSS, they don't want you to bypass their services.
I think simple RSS feed readers are still the way forwards. The browser should not pretend to be an RSS feed aggregator and the RSS feed reader should not pretend to be a browser.
> 4. Implement easy to use libraries for programming languages that might miss them.
I think that it would be great to advocate for the largest website frameworks to have these on by default. For example, WordPress. The biggest boundary are these websites that serve text/images but do _everything_ in JS.
> 5. Create a website that explains why this is important, that hosts or links to the specifications and that contains additional documentation.
I think that a feed validator is good [1], standardized icons (along with style guides) [2], a service to convert existing pages into feeds, guides on what content and how much content to insert, etc.
I believe that it would be good to start having discussions about how to decentralize RSS too, with signed feeds allowing third-party propagation without fear of tampering. (Note that in keeping with RSS, this would be simple and optional.)
Another thing I have wondered about how to address is the processing of comments/feedback, bypassing the requirement of a browser entirely. It's still not clear to me how to do this simply, securely and effectively, in my mind this is still an open question.
> If this is of interest to you, consider joining https://gitter.im/FosterRSS/community.
Requiring some kind of sign-up in order to interact with content (in this case messaging) seems kind of anti-RSS. I would personally suggest something like IRC or XMP.
It seems ridiculous to be obsessed with a protocol or file format. If you need to solve a problem, then solve the problem. It doesn't matter what technical means you use to solve it. If you're just trying to implement some specific technical thing because you're in love with the idea of it, that's never gonna go anywhere.
From posts like this, it seems like RSS still has a hardcore group of fans but it is not something everyday users ever found that useful.
1. Email is more efficient. Email doesn’t require constant polling.
2. Email client support is superior. Everyone has an email service and can sync across devices.
3. Email is social, it allows subscribers to reply to the author.
4. Email is more reliable. Authors have a copy of all their subscribers, they aren’t tied to a URL. Subscribers can easily update their subscription if they want to change emails. Running an RSS client, I see many subscriptions break over time due to the feed URL changing.
To be clear, I also think the web has gone wrong and miss coherent and useful web search, exploring interesting user created content (people have mentioned the return of web rings) and curating my own news feed via RSS.
But it's strange to me that when I started everything was about what we were going to do in the future, and increasingly the conversation is about going back to the past.