
RSS: there's nothing better - dyates
https://davidyat.es/2017/05/18/rss-nothing-better/
======
leejo
I wrote about this recently[1]. The "problem" with RSS, that essentially lead
to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction.
You can't "like" an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily
share. It's difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own
agenda. It's not "social" and since every other site these days needs to be
social, whether through aforementioned ways, or adding some sort of messaging
process, it's not a way that sites can keep users hooked _on_ the site to
boost ad impressions.

RSS is pure content, curated only by the consumer and presented in
chronological order not algorithmically messed with, which is why there's
nothing better.

[1]
[https://leejo.github.io/2017/09/27/social_media_zero/](https://leejo.github.io/2017/09/27/social_media_zero/)

~~~
dleslie
And this is why Google Reader was amazing. There we were, my friends and I,
reading RSS feeds and liking/sharing/commenting amongst ourselves.

 _pours one out_

~~~
aylmao
I see this promise in Mastodon. Under the hood it's just Atom + extensions. If
current blogging solutions had a mastodon extension; say if a Wordpress blog
also automatically set up a Mastodon instance for you even if it's just a
single identity one, you'd have liking/sharing/commenting by default.

Note: fairy new to Mastodon, not sure exactly if / how this would work, but
I've been thinking about this lately.

~~~
ece
There seems to be a few plugins like this:
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/mastodon/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/mastodon/),
but it's not RSS, and ultimately different. It could all potentially work
together nicely, and I wish federated services like Mastodon were more widely
used. They could definitely lower the burden to publishing/consuming RSS.

I don't think social news delivery/publishing is an easily monetize-able
business. Out of twitter/reddit, reddit seems to have found a model that works
for them. Twitter hasn't found what works yet.

~~~
aylmao
I think that if each site funded it's own social delivery, there would be no
single "social publishing platform" to monetize. It would be a matter of just
the publishers monetizing themselves, and the social platform would be the
web.

And that's the promise of Mastodon. It is free because each instance pays the
cost of keeping it alive in the form of hosting their instance. Like, right
now, the NYTimes acts like a "database" with all the pages, and reddit or
twitter like the content distribution feed, and both need funding. But if the
NYTimes had its own Mastodon instance and published there, the rest of the
Mastodon network would be its content distribution feed, each federation
funding itself.

As a sidetone, it even solves the problem of verification I think, because if
I have the Mastodon account aylmao@nytimes.com for example, I don't need a
central system to confirm that I'm working for the nytimes, like for example
twitter would.

And moreover, since Mastodon is just Atom, if people want to just see feed
updates they can do that, or they can get a client that supports the full
social features too. I think it's pretty cool.

------
sdfjkl
RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There's blogs,
news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader
(theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they
realised I don't have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to
read someone's 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there's
RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. twitrss.me). Facebook is kinda
left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they're too evil to
even consider going there anyways.

~~~
amelius
> Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then
> they're too evil to even consider going there anyways.

Can't we have RSS scrapers that are operated by people, generating RSS streams
of "inaccessible/paywalled/grey area" content in a collaborative effort?
Something like bittorrent but for ASCII text.

~~~
breischl
For any content that's being sold as such (eg, news sites) that's definitely
copyright infringement. For user-generated content, I'm not sure. Though I
would not be even a little bit surprised if Facebook asserted copyright to
anything put into it. In either case, probably violates the TOS as well.

Technically it's achievable, but it would likely be forever relegated to
mostly-illegal backwaters.

~~~
amelius
Yes, it's illegal. But if we don't at least acknowledge that we're in a fight,
then we're losing the battle for sure. By the way, Uber and AirBnB also did
many illegal things, and so did Google (see e.g. Google Books).

------
fredley
I've been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again.
All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN
still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don't support
it, e.g. Twitter.

Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of
my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I
want out of this situation, but overcoming addiction and interrupting the
automatic trigger cycle is hard. Maybe now's the time.

~~~
jakub_g
I _stopped_ using RSS circa 2010 since RSS produces just too much content
(well at least my reader did, as it was not archiving stuff until read, just
like an email inbox). I was reading my RSS feeds almost as a full-time job and
the unread count was only going up and up :)

TBH, it's a bit like this now for me with HN and Twitter even without RSS.
"This looks interesting... (click)(open in new tab)". One week later: 300 tabs
open.

~~~
icebraining
So what if the unread counts go up? I have a feed with 543 unread items, and
many others with 100+. Sometimes I scan the titles of the latest dozens of
items, then mark all as read.

For me, that's the advantage of RSS over Twitter: your unread counts are
separate for each feed, so that blog that rarely updates but is always
worthwhile to read doesn't get lost in the pile of cheap content.

~~~
hopesthoughts
Lol and I have a feed with 3000 unread items, actually several. I don't pay
attention to unread counts. Well actually I do, they're there for reference,
but that's it. I do the same thing, I might open 50-100 interesting-looking
links and then mark the rest as read.

------
jwilk
Atom syndication format is better than RSS.

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29)

~~~
viraptor
There's no difference in the consumption method though, is there? I kind of
lump Atom and RSS together in my mind. Some of my subscribed feeds use one,
some use the other, but without looking at the URL, I couldn't tell.

~~~
onli
There is no practical difference at all. RSS has more mindshare outside the
google universe, but all reader read both, the formats can be mapped from the
one to the other, and all languages have libraries to create both. And also
manually they are both equally easy to write.

I for one opted to solely generate RSS wherever possible. Having two equally
suited standards is a waste.

~~~
lifthrasiir
But RSS's date & time format was practically messy (due to being not properly
specified and enforced---take a look at [1]) and it had no way to specify that
an article has been updated so it should not show up again to the timeline.
When I had some dozens of feeds it had been quite annoying to mentally ignore
updated articles.

For the obvious reason ( _cough_ timely standardization _cough_ ) Atom is
technically and often practically superior to the RSS family of formats
(somehow not distinguished to each other). And after more than 10 years of
usage, I'm pretty sure that every feed reader in the continued existence now
has Atom support.

[1]
[https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser/tree/develop/feedpar...](https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser/tree/develop/feedparser/datetimes)

~~~
onli
No need to use the past tense here, I work on a project based on RSS feeds
right now :)

I'm not sure what I look at with the feedparser code. Looks like a bunch of
format support libraries?
[https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html](https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html)
says to use rfc822, and in practice for me that means just giving the date
string to my chosen languages date object.

You have a point with item updates, RSS was not really made for that. The blog
engine I use has different options to handle that, I for one think just
pushing a new entry with a new guid is the right solution; but then of course
rss readers can't mark updates.

~~~
lifthrasiir
My point about date string is that, if people really honored the
"specification" from the first place, why the `datetimes` directory has eight
different files :-) I have personally seen lots of websites with Korean date &
time format ("YYYY년 mm월 dd일 hh시 mm분 ss초", see `korean.py` there) and I'm not
sure if they are now gone. (And yes I did have my own aggregation engine back
then---it was at least born after feedparser though.)

~~~
pmoriarty
This "Korean date & time format" appears similar to ISO 8601, an international
standard for dates and times:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601)

------
superwayne
A friend and I made a tool/framework to easily create RSS feeds for websites
that don't offer one. It's written in Python and uses Scrapy for scraping the
website. Maybe it could be helpful to somebody. Out of the box mostly Austrian
sites are supported but adding a new site usually involves only a few lines of
code.

[http://github.com/nblock/feeds](http://github.com/nblock/feeds)

~~~
onli
If the site is simple enough, one could also use my Yahoo Pipes revival
project[0] to extract content from a page into an RSS feed.

[0]: [https://www.pipes.digital/](https://www.pipes.digital/)

~~~
amiraliakbari
The sites seems somehow immature to me. The "Shared Pipes" sections lists a
few examples, but the first one returns an empty feed and the second one
returns "Internal Server Error".

It is probably because of the definition of the pipes being outdated, but it
needs better presentation.

~~~
onli
Hi, thanks for the feedback. The first pipe is filtering for crypto currency
articles on HN, right now there seems to be none with those exact keywords,
I'll add some more. The second is user-provided and probably dies because of
the sub-pipe, I removed my upvote - now the second one is
[https://www.pipes.digital/pipe/kGqKVPOx](https://www.pipes.digital/pipe/kGqKVPOx),
which works fine.

In general I tried to keep backwards compatiblity as much as possible, I'm
only aware of one single breaking change (filter via regexpression, which was
not possible for long before the syntax changed and should not have affected
many pipes).

------
KORraN
I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my
friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to
like/follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get
news that I want - because despite I always use "Most Recent" sorting, FB is
hiding some content from me.

Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB "Top stories",
from let's say 2 hours ago. I switch to "Most Recent" and guess what, I can't
find this post anymore (except going explicitly to this person's page).

I'm getting closer and closer to stop using FB and using only messenger.

~~~
InternetUser
I love Google Reader as well, but switched quite seamlessly to Feedly. What's
your problem with Feedly? I assume it's something about the aesthetic design
of it, because it's very much the same as Google Reader.

~~~
Semaphor
Did they change things? Because when the great reader explosion happened after
Google Reader died I evaluated tons of readers and decided on a newsblur.com
subscription in the end. I remember Feedly catering to the "images are
great"-Pinterest crowd.

~~~
el_duderino
Yeah. I suggest giving them another try. I actually thought they were the most
popular RSS reader these days. It's very customizable (even for the free
tier).

~~~
Semaphor
It looks better than then, true. But it's still trying to be so flashy. And I
feel like they are trying to push all their useless social features on me. And
there's a lack of customizability. I guess the free tier is better than what
newsblur offers, but for me, newsblur is where I'm staying.

------
h43z
After the death of google reader I looked around for a new reader and finally
decided for newsbeuter an open-source RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals.
Since I always read the article on the source site newsbeuter is perfect for
me. newsbeuter does the heavy lifting of downloading and storing and I just
have to press 'o' to open the article in my browser.

------
asymmetric
I really want to like RSS but almost every from a commercial outlet serves
“stubs” instead of full articles, I.e. to read the full thing you have to
click through and land on their website (for ad-serving purposes I imagine)

I had found a solution in fulltextrssfeeds.com, but it was slow, cumbersome
and didn’t always work.

How do you folks solve this?

~~~
hasbot
Interestingly, many readers of /r/politics never read more than the headline
anyways.

------
4lch3m1st
Just deleted my Facebook account in about two weeks ago and started consuming
news through RSS and through Podcasts and some YouTube channels (which are
also, surprisingly, RSS). I've never felt better. This might be a stretch, but
this has been a good alternative to the way I was consuming online media,
indeed less useless info seems to be reaching me. However, it all depends on
the material you're subscribing to.

~~~
r3bl
YouTube is _very_ friendly towards the RSS readers from my experience.

~~~
ygra
... _iff_ you can find the Feed URL. It always boils down to pasting together
URL parts and the channel ID, which isn't exactly friendly.

~~~
bhrgunatha
It _is_ a pain - I've found 3 formats for users, channels and playlists:

    
    
        https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<user name from url>
    
        https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=<id from url>
    
        https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<id from url>
    

I wonder if there are more?

------
mrmondo
I truly love RSS, combining Feedly with Reeder makes for a fantastic
experience. I wrote a brief post on how I use RSS recently:
[https://smcleod.net/thoughts/return-of-the-
rss/](https://smcleod.net/thoughts/return-of-the-rss/)

------
gumby
I also use RSS as a way of publishing configuration and firmware updates to a
set of users/devices. Works great: surfs infrastructure we already have,
supports browsing past versions etc, and I didn't have to write any clients
for looking things up.

This is for a rather large, global, corporate-internal system, not a
commercial product, though I got the idea when thinking about solutions for a
commercial product a few years ago.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
This would make a great write up / blog post if you have time.

------
icc97
I use Thunderbird for my email + RSS together. Somehow the three things that
lots of people keep on thinking are dead or dying work perfectly together.

~~~
a3n
Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" is bare-bones good enough for RSS, especially if
feeds aren't going to be a conspicuous part of your online life.

~~~
icc97
I find that I read my RSS feed about as often as I check my personal email, so
having the two side-by-side works quite well. I also like the separation of
not having it in the browser so that I'm not tempted to read it in the middle
of working.

------
digi_owl
Ah yes, twitter lists. It seems they came up with those to undercut the major
reason people used the likes of Tweetdeck. Only to later buy up, and shut down
the desktop version of, the very same client.

And now it languishes in some side area of the service, seemingly forgotten.

------
satireguff
I have used RSS/Atom feeds for ever, recently I have decided to ditch
Twitter's client and for Twitter feeds consumption I am using twitrss.me to
parse twitter user feeds. I need to find a good parse for FB and than I will
be a happy man.

------
twsted
I agree completely.

It's the web at its best. There no need for a decentralized social network. We
have the web.

We should return using RSS (or Atom) and find some other tools to help for
forums / messages.

"Likes"? Are we sure we need them?

------
pinguinFromY
The page has a JS miner in it.

~~~
dyates
Yes, it's an experiment I'm running in advertising-alternative monetisation.
Importantly, all mining is consensual -- the miner will only run if you open
the accordion and hit Play. Not sure if I made that clear enough in the blurb
itself, but it's outlined in the linked post:

[https://davidyat.es/2017/10/01/js-crypto-
mining/](https://davidyat.es/2017/10/01/js-crypto-mining/)

I know these things have gotten a bad rap from various shenanigans with
Showtime and TPB, but on my site mining is only done with user knowledge and
permission.

------
shurcooL
I was quite excited when I heard of
[https://jsonfeed.org/](https://jsonfeed.org/). I was surprised at how much
more pleasant it seemed, considering the major feature is a simple switch from
XML encoding to JSON encoding and not much more.

So it’s a bummer to not see it mentioned (not at all in the article, not much
in the comments). Does that mean it didn’t really catch on, or what is its
status?

~~~
dreamdu5t
XML is not a transport encoding like JSON. It is a hypermedia format that
supports metadata. Even something as simple as an author attribute on a quote
requires a standard on top of JSON.

“I can’t parse without programming” is a terrible reason to prefer JSON.

------
eXpl0it3r
I see no mention of push notifications as a sort of alternative.
Technologically, the polling of RSS feeds to check for new content is a bit
wasteful. What I'd like to see is a setup that uses push notifications to
gather new content or maybe even a combination, where the push notification
tells the RSS reader to grab the new content.

Another interesting fact about RSS is, that it's the main distribution
solution for podcasts.

~~~
onli
RSS has that already, exactly that. It is enabled by Pubsubhubbub (PuSH), an
(older?) alternative (used by Wordpress) is rsscloud.

~~~
breischl
Yep, sadly it didn't really get going until RSS was moving out of the
mainstream. Really need setup, though.

Just noticed that it was renamed to WebSub and adopted as a W3C standard
earlier this year.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub)

------
Entangled
The problem with RSS is that I don't want to subscribe to blogs that have only
one lucky post in a decade, I want a curated list of topics on a daily/weekly
fashion and for that newsletters are the best. Unfortunately email is not the
best platform for delivering content so I came up with an idea to offer a news
reader that consumes newsletters you can subscribe/unsubscribe at any time.
It's just like an email client but just for newsletters.

Lo and behold, opened a gmail account specifically for newsletters, subscribed
to my swift, kotlin, design, UX and AI newsletters and I'm now using Apple
Mail to have the time of my life consuming all the content I need, delivered
to my inbox daily, with no spam, no friends, no follow, no ads, no nothing.

Of course there is still the possibility to provide a nice client rich in
features for the common user so the idea for a startup is still in the air.

RSS is dead, long live newsletters.

~~~
dsr_
That is not dead which can eternal lie.

I still derive significant value from Usenet.

People keep saying that IRC is dead (because Slack) or that Jabber is dead
(because Slack) but I use both of those daily.

It's a big Internet, there's room for lots of stuff.

------
grappler
RSS is great, but: If I could add one thing to a standard RSS setup, it would
be a volume knob for each subscribed feed.

Is a feed too noisy? You can unsubscribe. But what if you had another less-
drastic option to "turn it down"? That's doable if you have some way of
assigning scores to individual posts within the feed. Such scores could come
from the feed publisher, other places like the reader's own social media
accounts, or somewhere else. Have a user-determined threshold to determine
what posts are worth showing the user.

Then by "turn it down" the user means "bump the threshold up" (and vice
versa). Via trial and error a user could more or less adjust it to where they
want it.

This could be built using RSS as one of the building blocks, but I don't know
of anything like it.

------
0x006A
so whats a good rss reader in 2017?

~~~
detaro
Inoreader

~~~
_Mark
I still cannot see how
[https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/) doesn't get more
love. I easily moved to it from Google Reader, and spend my day in the web
browser version, and night with the App on my phone.

------
nokya
+1 for "nothing better". I have been using RSS for years and select my sources
of information depending on its availability.

Some comments bring the question about the readers, and their exposure to
publishers, who truncate their content in the RSS feeds.

I solved this by implementing my own reader, web based. It aggregates all RSS
feeds from my subscriptions and retrieves the article. When the source only
exposes limited data, the script retrieves the full article directly and shows
this instead.

I have shared this tool with my friends, they love it. Unfortunately, I cannot
widen the audience for legal reasons: the tool automatically scraps all ads
and removes any "non-content-related" stuff. I also convinced some of them to
share for membership access on some newspapers: a monthly subscription to the
NYT shared by 5 people, with a guarantee of "clean, ad-free" content beats
anything else.

Sharing these tools with a wider audience would expose me to legal actions,
notwithstanding websites that have a JavaScript paywall...

In conclusion, my only recommendation is to spend a few hours learning
scripting enough to be able to read from an XML url and parse it. Once you can
do that, you have your own RSS reader.

Next challenge will be websites, that expose their content through AJAX
requests only...good thing is that most of them have a fallback mechanism for
mobile devices, which relies on much simpler logic. The trick is to understand
how to convert the 'link' in the RSS feed to a 'mobile link'.

++

------
calmchaos
Feedbro RSS Feed reader has built-in Rule engine that lets you define rules
for filtering/highlighting/autotagging articles.

[https://nodetics.com/feedbro/](https://nodetics.com/feedbro/)

~~~
softwarelimits
With the HN feed I get this error:

    
    
      Unable to load feed https://news.ycombinator.com/rss:
      503: Unable to read feed: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
    

That is a pitty, looks like an interesting project? Does it have an open issue
tracker?

~~~
calmchaos
HN site sometimes throws that error i.e. that URL returns HTTP code 503 and no
feed content. It's intermittent and not really a Feedbro bug.

------
djhworld
I mostly consume my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where 70% of the time
you don't have cellphone or WiFi signal.

While my preferred RSS reader NewsBlur can download everything up front, for
offline use, I tend to find a lot of sites truncate their articles (with a
'Click here to continue reading!") or just post a headline and a one sentence
summary.

This makes me dislike using RSS, not because of the technology, just the way
it's delivered these days. It's fine (if a little irritating) if you are
online all the time, but offline it's practically unusable bar the few sites
that offer full length articles

~~~
sonar_un
I also use NewsBlur as my RSS reader of choice. It's great!

Truncated articles are a big problem with RSS I think. Sites are trying to get
you to jump to their page so you can consume their advertisements.
Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect as I stop consuming the site's
news and rarely click the links to the page. The small blurb for the feed
doesn't give me enough information to want to jump to the page. Often, inline
photos won't show up either, so I am less likely to find the article worth a
visit to the page.

------
oeuviz
>But, but, XML is gross! RSS is dead! 2007!

Favourite chapter. Never been fan of bashing xml in favor of json, both have
their own advantages and xml gets the job done here. Wouldn't care if it was
json.

~~~
dreamdu5t
XML is not just a transport encoding like JSON. Apples to oranges. They are
not comparable. It’s like comparing HTML or CSS with JSON. What’s he
equivalent of XPath in JSON? There isn’t! They aren’t remotely solutions to
the same thing.

~~~
oaiey
This

------
nreece
Absolutely, there's nothing better! Contrary to trends & general opinion, RSS
usage for content aggregation & monitoring is on an increase, specially in the
business world and niche industries.

I'm speaking from our own experience running a little startup, Feedity -
[https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), that helps create custom RSS feeds
for any webpage.

------
eikenberry
The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had
dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep
up. I wanted a reader that allowed me to better manage the incoming stream,
something like a score or rank system, better auto-expiring systems, maybe a
Bayesian system. I'm not 100%, but none of the readers at the time offered
anything but a time series. Has this improved?

~~~
slipmagic
I was thinking that perhaps changing the UI to where it was like tinder, so
that a user could swipe articles that they wanted to read later in one
direction and ones they knew they wanted to skip in the other would be at
least a faster way of going through things. Either that, or making it like
Inbox by Google, where someone could snooze an article for later. Information
could be collected based on that and sent to the publisher so they would know
which content was popular and what was not (along with which articles were
shared from the app, etc). A third option would be to use a messenger UI where
a user delete/archive links or favorite them, and reply to messages with their
thoughts and comments for things that they find useful. I currently have a
setup similar to this, but it's not very elegant.

There could be a new feed given to the user, based on that, if they feel
overwhelmed with their unfiltered one, but always switch over to the regular
view/feed as needed. It could be even more granular, where some feeds are
algorithmically sorted or ignored based on certain keywords set by the user
and others are not.

------
arlk
RSS is the best to follow up with the latest news or blogs you like, yet it
has some weaknesses like -I know this is the content provider's fault- not
serving the full articles.

That's why I ended up using RSS client to swiftly filter the content I get
then send the interesting titles to a read-it later service -Pocket
specifically- that has a better reading experience -TTS anyone?- and solves
the truncated RSS articles problem.

~~~
icebraining
Nothing prevents an RSS reader from fetching the linked page. I believe
NewsBlur does that.

------
millette
2nd RSS post today, and no mention of PubSubHubbub, aka WebSub? Or maybe it's
just a low-level feature, not important enough? Strange days indeed.

------
daveheq
RSS, like Facebook, Twitter, email, and every other way to post to people, has
its own uses in it's own situations that fit best for people in those
situations. I dislike people trying to say we should universally move over to
one format, and prefer the formats remain and be improved for people who can
best use those formats.

------
sjs382
I'm so in-the-bag for RSS that I've written scrapers to create feeds for sites
that don't support RSS...

------
tzahola
B-but you can’t have javascript within RSS!

~~~
petepete
Or tracking pixels! How will the marketing department cope?

~~~
onli
You absolutely can have tracking pixels in RSS feeds.

------
tiedmann
Wow, I wrote some code just yesterday that consumes RSS-feeds thinking I was
forever alone - guess I was wrong :)

------
z92
I wrote a script to periodically fetch the front page of my selected news
paper web sites. Pick only the top news from there. One news. And then compile
a news feed from all the sites. More like your own Google news. But one single
news from each site.

Don't know how much legal it is. But I do follow robots.txt.

------
drumhead
I've been using Sage on Firefox for the last decade. Its absolutely barebones
but does the job for me. However with Firefox 57 Quantum its likely it wont be
supported, so I looked at Feedly, but it was a bit too Hollywood for me. Any
suggestions for something simple and clean like Sage?

------
pers0n
You don’t have to put the entire post in rss, even Wordpress has that option.
You can easily put in a snippet and if it’s interes enough people can click to
read it, but yes, Web 2.0 was too open for the real world, capitalism prevails
and so the $$$ comes first before anything else

------
_pdp_
Google killed the RSS feeds for me. On the flip-side, I am thinking to get
back to them sometime soon.

~~~
smsm42
When Google killed the Reader, I switched to Feedly and still using them.
Useful enough so I have paid subscription. Still using them after four years,
nothing better around as far as I can see. Facebook certainly not even in the
same galaxy, and I have no idea why Twitter even mentioned in that topic. IMHO
RSS and accompanied readers are still the best for keeping oneself informed.

~~~
corobo
Feedly killed RSS for me. The way their mobile app scrolls[1] articles just
absolutely ruined the experience and I couldn’t find any better app/service
before giving up on RSS entirely

[1] [https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif](https://i.imgsir.com/G0jR.gif) \- weird
entire page scroll going on instead of just scrolling normally. Makes it
impossible to skim read the titles

~~~
pencilcode
I use reeder as the client, much better than feedly ‘s ui but feedly is still
the backend. Working great since I came back to rss for about a year.

~~~
corobo
Thanks I'll give that a go. I am going to have so many unread articles if I
get back into RSS reading hah

------
_up
I wonder if "Rankings" from sites like Reddit and HN could be considered
copyright protected. I think using rankings scraped from the RSS source entry
page could result in a better user experience. And give Newspapers back
incentive to produce quality Content.

~~~
r3bl
HN API doesn't have any limitations what so ever.

I'm not using its RSS, but I have a script running on my server every five
minutes that sends a new push notification on my phone every time a HN story
reaches 500 points.

Simple and straightforward way of keeping up with the tech, made in like 40
lines of Python: [https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/automation-
scripts/b...](https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/automation-
scripts/blob/master/hn500-to-simplepush.py)

~~~
mrighele
Funny, for me 500 points would be a flag that the story is not technical
enough, and probably about how the latest iPhone's UI sucks, gender inequality
in SV, Google/FB/Hw manufacturer spying on our life, and many other similar
topics that inevitably end up in a lot of bikeshedding

------
eqtn
I was using google reader with greader app on android and after google killed
it, greader switched to feedly. I imported all the feeds to feedly and
continued using it with greader as if nothing happened.

On other note, Feedly app is not good. An alternative for ios is reeder app

------
paule89
I love RSS/ATOM. The only problem i have is with sites, that don't let me see
the complete content inside feedly and i have to open the site in an extra new
tab. Would love some suggestions for this. (other feedgraber, self hosted,...)

~~~
calmchaos
Feedbro has built-in Readability style engine that can transform partial feeds
to full feeds (you have to set it in Properties for each feed):
[https://nodetics.com/feedbro/](https://nodetics.com/feedbro/)

------
andrewgleave
We launched a very simple RSS to mail product last year [1] and it's uptake
has been steadily growing. There's still life in the RSS ecosystem yet!

[1] [https://fliprss.com](https://fliprss.com)

------
djhworld
I subscribe to "Hacker Noon" RSS feed, it sometimes throws up some interesting
posts, but I swear most days 90% of them seem to be about bitcoin or other
cryptocurrency.

Is there any content curation on hackernoon at all?

------
hwu2whag
Couldn't agree more, which is why I was so disappointed when apple removed the
built in RSS reader from Safari. I now use RSS Not, but really much preferred
the discreet version built into the OSX browser.

------
b0rsuk
For the websites that actually provide whole articles via RSS, what's your
next step ? How do you keep and organize those articles ?

edit: I mean how users, not article authors, keep and organize full articles.

~~~
Artemix
I don't really understand your question but if you were asking about how we
actually store articles and provide such a feed, I can explain how I did it.

I made a markdown-based blog with the articles stored in a PgSQL database and,
for now, two interfaces: the website, which I kept as lightweight as possible
(no external content, no wasted space for ads etc) and a RSS feed, only
experimental for now, which gives the latest articles without content (title,
subtitle, dates and that's pretty much it), but I plan to give full article as
a markdown article, but that'll need a bit of research (for images and such).
Haven't made any way to change the query for latest articles but I'll add
pagination the same way my list does it.

~~~
b0rsuk
Okay, my question was ambiguous. I meant: how do _users_ store and organize
full articles from RSS feeds ? I used a RSS reader before a hard drive crash,
and I made the mistake of subscribing to too many feeds. Aside from cutting
unnecessary information overload, how do people organize their "old
newspapers" ?

~~~
icebraining
Some readers (e.g. TTRSS) have a "star" button. You can then just click on the
feed or category and view only the starred items.

Alternatively, you can use a separate bookmark system, like Pinboard.

------
tomerbd
I use a combination of google now + hackernews.

google now - I let it do the work and suggest me what to read. hackernews -
too much good stuff to miss so i read here as well.

------
tachaeon
For those looking for an RSS reader for mobile that doesn’t use flashy
animations and is highly customizable, I suggest checking out Newsify.

------
fwdpropaganda
Recently I was looking for an RSS reader for Ubuntu. Eventually I settled on
Liferea. Does anyone have a other suggestions?

~~~
ece
Not really it seems, unless you want a self-hosted solution like tt-rss,
freshrss, or selfoss.

------
rekshaw
May I add, RSS feeds are also exactly what makes up an Alexa special Skill
type called "Flash Briefing"

------
asimpson
This is why I made a service to serve up RSS feeds for Youtube channels,
ytrss.co.

Love live RSS! :)

------
fnl
And you can push out news on RSS as they arrive, not just "weekly (newsletter)
updates" or so.

------
dingo_bat
Google reader. Never forget.

------
agumonkey
any emacs user using elfeed ?

------
lcnmrn
I think sub.cafe is better than RSS or Twitter, but that's just me because I
created it.

------
tzahola
Is there a service that creates “bootleg” RSS feeds of sites that don’t
provide one themselves? If not, why don’t we create one? An RSS feed of pure
content, without clickbait, paywalls, like buttons, javascript tracking
nonsense...

------
alvil
I really like the idea of RSS I just would replace it with JSON.

~~~
yoz-y
I have great news for you. [https://jsonfeed.org](https://jsonfeed.org)

All major readers have already added support for it too

------
consultSKI
Love me some RSS.

------
qwerty456127
What about Atom? Isn't it better than RSS?

------
genericacct
Well there could be something better if someone rewrote it in JSON; but it
works so it's best left untouched i guess.

~~~
pferde
There could be something better if someone wrote a completely new format with
very strict requirements. Try implementing a RSS reader that can reliably keep
track of which items/articles are new, which are old but changed, which are
unchanged, etc.

There is enough wiggle room in both RSS and Atom specifications to make you go
crazy with all the crappy half-baked feed generators out there, which
unfortunately still do not run afoul of the specs, despite pulling all kinds
of inconsistent crap.

I don't care if it's json, xml or something completely different, as long as
the specs are tight and strict.

------
grape911
I don't understand where this "RSS is dead" mantra came from. RSS does what it
is supposed to do and indeed there is nothing better yet.

E.g. I don't have Facebook, Twitter nor YouTube accounts (since they collect a
lot of personal data about you). I use RSS to subscribe to YouTube channels.
Both Twitter and Facebook used to have RSS. Now I use third party services to
follow couple of pages I'm interested in:
[http://feed.exileed.com](http://feed.exileed.com) (supports Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram and some other) or [https://twitrss.me](https://twitrss.me)
(Twitter only). I don't have Reddit account, instead I subscribe to subreddits
via RSS. Any blog on LiveJournal, Blogger supports RSS. Any website built with
WordPress or Drupal has RSS support out of the box. Many forums have RSS
option. Even Wikipedia watch list has RSS. I'm not even talking about any news
site. With some knowledge of JavaScript and Apifier.com you can turn any page
into RSS feed.

Indeed there is still no any other technology that can do all this better.

(I use Inoreader.com to read RSS. It has many features, the only downside is
that their free plan is quite limited.)

