RSS Is Awesome
Original: RSS is awesome
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The eternal debate: is RSS really dead? Not according to many commenters, who swear by its simplicity and effectiveness in cutting through algorithm-driven feeds. While some lament the lack of RSS feeds on certain websites, others have found workarounds, such as notify-me.rs, to stay on top of updates. As one commenter quipped, RSS is "the antidote to algorithm feeds," a sentiment echoed by many who've rediscovered its charms after years away.
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not in my world it aint.
Even so it's no longer a de facto standard the way it used to be.
Every year around newyears time I trim it back, but it inevitably grows again.
- Three local independent theaters
- Every local venue I checked in my city (admittedly only checked a few I was specifically interested in)
- The local dvd rental place (we still have one and it's neat. The announce their newer niche additions via an updating page)
- My local folk school that hosts events and has an updated news page with no feed
There were a few things I can't remember now that I was shocked to see regularly update pages with lists of updates that there is no way to subscribe to. I would have expected most of these sites to be built using some kind of automated tool that would just include rss or atom. I guess most of the offer email lists, which is a crappy way to get updates comparatively imo.
I'm probably going to use a combination of changedetection.io and rss-bridge to get updates from these sites, but like, seriously?
If you do give it a try, let me know what you think, since I'm one of the founders.
Cheers!
I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work?
Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological.
More readers should have this
Feed with dozens of posts per day turn into noise, especially if you have a lot of them.
By choosing one site I trust, I let the editors edit, instead of the algorithm.
I did have a job where I got 10k email per day for a good 10 years, so I probably have some PTSD from that. I'd feel like I was right back there if I had thousands of items per day in my RSS reader. I've been out of that stage of my job for a good 8 years, and I'm just now starting to get a handle on my email again, after feeling like there was no way to control it for so long.
There are various local-first phone apps, desktop apps, and self-hostable apps that are good, completely free and have comprehensive features.
There are some what I would consider bait and switch options like Flipboard and Feedly that pretend to care about RSS but layer on features unrelated to the protocol. I think you can find one that works for you.
The problem with RSS right now is not, imo, the lack of tools to do the reading, thankfully. It's more that the major vote of legitimacy previously extended by Google was revoked and prompted an unwinding from RSS as a universal form of content distribution basically across the whole internet.
(Who makes the incentives at Google?! Seriously)
Adding RSS feeds to it feels kinda clunky though.
I've been using Feedly since Google killed reader, and while I like the RSS functionality it offers, I do agree that they've slowly been adding more and more features I don't care for.
Maybe it's time to migrate to something like TFA suggests.
I also agree with your other comments; it's huge a shame.
Used it for a long time until I switched to a self-hosted FreshRSS instance
there's also some subscription services that seem to do the same thing, but i have no experience with them.
> More readers should have this
Why? If that's what you want you can get it from your social medium of choice. I use RSS because it gives me precisely what I asked for (for better and for worse), and I suspect the vast majority of the userbase feels the same.
In theory, this is actually a very textbook ML supervised learning problem, and stuffing an already-trained LLM's context window with a small handful of samples like I suggested is a gross hack. But it might be the easier option.
> In contrast, a heuristic is an approach to solving problems without well-defined correct or optimal results.[2] For example, although social media recommender systems are commonly called "algorithms", they actually rely on heuristics as there is no truly "correct" recommendation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm
What are the consequences of conflating the two terms? I’m not sure yet.
Not really, as described in the quote you shared, it is common to refer to "recommendation systems" as "algorithms", even if its not actually such a thing.
There are plenty of examples of well-known aliases to concepts that obfuscate actual meaning in the English language, but they aren't wrong, as language is usage.
I wonder how long that will last until Substack closes it, I have never seen an RSS feed where the author is able to make it sustainable for them to make money from it.
As someone who's subscribed to a lot of substacks the thing that brought me there was the availability of asynchronous reading (mail, rss newsletters.) I'm sure I'm not alone in disliking the actual site itself.
[0] https://ivyreader.com/articles/rss-standart-collection
I hope X/Twitter back to this functionality, but that's a low probability.
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases.atom
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
Which killed all the legitimate fun and useful bots and just left the astroturfing and discord sowing kind state sponsored bots.
As was the plan.
FYI FreshRSS is fairly trivial to self-host, and is a really nice option for an RSS reader app.
FreshRSS hit the sweet spot for me, combined with NetNewsWire as a mobile UI
My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.
What they optimise for is time spent on the platform "engagement". And usually rage-baiting content gives better engagement metrics than things that make you happy.
1. Create a feed on https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. This will also give you a custom email address to send your newsletter to.
2. Subscribe to the newsletter with the custom email address and add the feed you created to your reader.
This setup works very well for me with NetNewsWire though there is friction in the multiple steps. No affiliation with either, just a satisfied user.
Feed entries then become emails which sit in your inbox/folders alongside your existing [emailed] newsletters.
(I prefer this approach myself, I can filter and search via my mail client, and manage state easily.)
https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub
(BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20070910131413/http://news.com.c...
Also that blog has some other good related articles:
- What is RSS: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss
- What is Atom: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom
- What is JSON feed: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed
- What are feed readers: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers
- What is OPML: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml
(As for SSE, it’s entirely unsuitable as it would require a persistent connection.)
- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_A...
- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR...
FreshRSS implements two APIs
Sadly, filtering features seem to be only available for paid subscriptions of online services, or for self-hosted solutions. Or are there solutions I am not aware of?
Flym (Android)
[0] https://blogs.hn
Other good directories:
[1] https://ooh.directory/
[2] https://blogroll.org/
I actually built a simple and free RSS reader because my needs are simple and I'm a sucker for punishment. You'd think websites would want bots to read their RSS feeds since that's the whole point of RSS, but apparently not! ツ
https://feedgrab.net
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
Using this curbed my Reddit usage quite a lot.
[1] https://rssrdr.com [2] https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics
A lot of people get put off because they don't like the dev, he's not a "let me hold your hand while you understand the basics of how to install my app" kinda guy, he's a "Oh you didn't read the docs and are now spamming forums with help requests? Here's a ban" kinda guy which I gotta say, I actually really respect. Why everyone thinks open source ALSO means you get your hand held through every little rough patch I don't know, probably because a lot of open source is backed by companies who can't say the things the probably want to say in public, like "Go away, idiot"
Anyway sorry, I digress. TinyTinyRSS is excellent, the filtering just makes it head and shoulders above anything else I've tried like Miniflux (also nice) and FreshRSS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471913
https://artemis.jamesg.blog/
I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices.
Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.
- There are million different formats.
- guids are not required, they are not monotonically rising integers, and there is no length limits on them (I've seen 50kb guid in the wild)
- date is not required
- you cannot fetch articles "since guid 123". If you go on vacation and return, if the feed had too much traffic they are gone, you'll never see the articles you missed except last 20 or so.
- whether article will be in full or just a teaser is fully in the hands of the server
Tip: use a service to stream quality content to your RSS feed reader. For Hacker News, http://hnapp.com/ does the trick for me.
I subscribe to a couple dozen authors on Hacker News.
Example: in hnapp, search for `author:bob1029`, there's an RSS link, paste that into your RSS feed reader to see that person's Hacker News comments.
I have an entire "Hacker News" section in Feedly, just with author's comments. Very useful!
I use it also for:
- bookmarks
- web crawling
- simple search engine
I also created simple RSS reader/parser, and web crawling system [1].
Links:
[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive
[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy