
Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS Renaissance - neflabs
https://neflabs.com/blog/rss-renaissance/
======
douglaswlance
I'm surprised how often RSS is mentioned on Hackernews, and how infrequently
some recommends Feedly. It has wonderful features, like saving articles,
collection boards, team features, and popularity-based sorting options.

(Full disclosure, I don't work for Feedly nor do I own any of the company. I
just like the service!)

[http://feedly.com](http://feedly.com)

~~~
ASalazarMX
When Google Reader died, I tried several alternatives including Feedly. At
that time it could import your feeds, but it didn't do export. I don't now,
but I didn't want to use a service that locked-in RSS feeds.

~~~
smsm42
I think you can back up OPML to Dropbox, which should provide kind of export
facility, since OPML is a generic format.

~~~
essayist
Feedly does OPML import/export now. It worked for me the other day.

I'm just a (non-paying) customer.

[https://blog.feedly.com/opml/](https://blog.feedly.com/opml/)

~~~
smsm42
Ah, didn't know that. Even better, thanks for the pointer!

------
cocktailpeanuts
Anyone who talks about revival of RSS without talking about how it will be
sustainable is just ignorant or naive, because the main reason it became what
it became has everything to do with money.

Content providers centralized because centralized attention is more valuable
than aggregation of decentralized attention in an ad driven economy.

Just because you want RSS to make a come back doesn't mean it has any chance
of coming back unless it makes sense economically. And I don't see any of that
mentioned in this article, nor am I aware of one that's guaranteed to work as
good as ad driven model.

You might as well say it's a perfect time for the renaissance of steam
engines.

~~~
reitanqild
Ars technica provides full rss - to paying readers. The price is reasonable.

It's a win-win: they probably earn more on each paying customer than on 10 or
20 adblocking users like us. Paying customers get full uncrippled RSS, no ads
and no tracking (I think it's tiered though so you might have to pay slightly
more to get all these three).

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
I would say that's not RSS winning, but more like Ars Technica adding many
"premium features" as a bundle to justify the subscription fee.

It's like NYTimes providing crossword puzzle for free to subscribed users. You
wouldn't call that "It's the perfect time for a crossword puzzle renaissance",
would you?

~~~
icc97
> Ars Technica adding many "premium features" as a bundle to justify the
> subscription fee.

Personally I think this is fine. If paying for their content encouages them to
maintain a quality RSS feed and not track you that seems like a reasonable
exchange.

------
unicornporn
RSS never went away for me. Try FreshRSS[1], it's awesome. It works well on
shared hosting and it runs on SQLite.

TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected
times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade. I
eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a
year, without a single problem.

One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use
[https://twitrss.me/](https://twitrss.me/) to follow users. If you don't find
a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the
most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I'm reasonably happy with TTRSS running on Sandstorm.io, but it's web client
sucks. To me, the reason TTRSS wins is because there are about a dozen
different clients that work with it, and most of them are vastly better than
the server's UI.

~~~
jeena
Exactly, I do the same, TTRSS is running without problems since about 2013 but
I never use it's frontend, just the API to read in different clients on my
mobile phono and on my desktop (actually with my own client
[https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey](https://github.com/jeena/feedthemonkey)).
TTRSS does the work of gathering the feeds, updating and parsing them, and
holding the 'read'and 'starred' information, everything else I do in the 3rd
party clients.

------
disconnected
"People" keep rattling on about how RSS needs to be revived.

Do these people live in some sort of alternative reality where:

\- The guardian

\- BBC

\- Reuters

\- Ars Technica

\- LWN

\- Hacker News

and a fuck ton others don't have an RSS feed?

Or some sort or reality where Flym (or the myriads of RSS apps) don't exist?

Because I sure as hell don't.

~~~
jjrh
Main reason I don't exclusively use RSS (like I used to) is tons and tons of
websites just provide a couple lines in the RSS feed and not the entire
article.

Super annoying.

~~~
WorldMaker
That's always been a complaint about RSS going back to its original age, the
balance between short summaries and full articles; ads/pageviews/analytics
versus "content is king".

Have you tried an RSS Reader with an embedded web view for those types of
sites?

(I use Newsblur and it has a really neat view where it shows the original
blog/page and uses a bit of logic to track your cursor to mark as read
articles you read directly on the originating site in a frame inside of
Newsblur. It doesn't work for all sites but the ones it does work for can be
pretty magic. That said, I'm an old school "river" user and simply have a
habit workflow that heavily makes use of keyboard shortcuts to open new tabs
and close them quickly.)

------
Mediterraneo10
If RSS threatens to become mainstream again, expect pushback from content
providers. I know a blog where the owner will ban any commenter from the site
for even mentioning that there is an RSS feed. He believes that the RSS feed
that his CMS provides by default, is somehow important for SEO, but he doesn’t
want people getting his content through RSS because his way of monetizing the
site requires that people reguarly visit the site itself.

~~~
jug
The obvious solution here seems to be to configure your feed to only provide
excerpts? Like the most common default is anyway...

~~~
Mediterraneo10
If people go to your website to get the headlines, it is easier to monetize
them because they may view ads there, you can market things to them based on
their cookie history, etc. That is harder with RSS.

------
bad_user
I love RSS and I use an online RSS Reader (NewsBlur.com, but there are
others).

However the article makes the mistake of saying that RSS is about " _obtaining
content from a website without having to visit the site itself_ ". That's
definitely not true.

RSS is about being notified of new articles. Subscribing to an RSS feed is
like subscribing to a mailing list.

But it won't deliver the content reliably — many RSS readers restrict the HTML
being rendered, for good reasons I'm sure, but they mess it up, there's no
standard for what kind of HTML is accepted of course, so it only works well
for textual articles, but rich text (e.g. images, CSS) is very problematic.

On my own website (alexn.org) I had many problems with rendering articles, due
to images and code syntax highlighting, enough so that I decided to no longer
render the entire article in the RSS feed, I prefer to deliver just a
_summary_.

Being notified of new content, with a good summary, is all you need. If a
website's readability is shitty, you can always invoke the browser's Reader
View (Firefox, Safari) or open it with Pocket or whatever.

------
sporkland
Totally agreed with the article. I was talking to a friend who uninstalled
facebook/instagram and she thought the idea of RSS was cool having burned out
on constantly refreshing for new items.

As a happy [https://theoldreader.com/](https://theoldreader.com/) user, I
can't recommend it enough. It is just basic reliable RSS, subscribe and you'll
see new items from them, no intelligent feed recommendations.

It has a few light social features which I easily ignore.

~~~
PikachuEXE
I have been using it since Google Reader died in... I forgot when

------
dewey
I'm always positively surprised how compatible the whole RSS ecosystem mostly
is. They either implement the Google Reader API or the Fever API and you can
choose between a lot of different apps for your platforms.

My current combination that I'm happy with for a few years is:

[https://miniflux.net](https://miniflux.net) \+ Reeder on iOS and Mac

~~~
codyogden
Curious, did you upgrade to 2.0? I went to check in on my site recently, and
found that they nuked the project and rewrote it in Go.

~~~
dewey
Yep and as someone who works with Go at my day job that's just an additional
point to like the project ;)

~~~
codyogden
Ahhh...that's cool! It was kind of intriguing that they removed a bunch of
features/things. I built out some custom systems that rely on the semi-public
RSS feeds the legacy project generated, so upgrading is more of a long-term
goal, I guess.

------
doomjunky
I have subscript the HackerNews RSS Feed. Using Thunderbird as my RSS client
it bothers me to see multiple copies of the same post in my inbox every time
the title a post is changed. Adding the <guid> tag containing the post id can
help the RSS client to distinguish posts.

------
ravenstine
Is there anything that can turn your email into a secure personal RSS feed? A
feed reader that also includes emails would replace quite a bit of what
centralized social media provides.

~~~
jobigoud
This reminds me of the author of SuperMemo[1], which is a software for
remembering things using carefully spaced repetition. (Started in 1982 and
still maintained).

They pioneered "incremental reading" a technique where an article is split
into pieces and ingested by the software and fed back to you in an
asynchronous manner at the most appropriate time.

Then the main author apparently started to feed everything, including emails
into this system, and so he would consume everything only through this
channel. Replying to conversations sometimes month later depending on the
algorithm. He describes a bit more the process at the bottom of [2] in the
apology paragraph.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-
wozniak/](https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/)

[2]
[https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm](https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm)

~~~
wrinkl3
Doesn't Duolingo operate on roughly the same principles?

------
chourobin
One of my favorite mac/ios apps right now is the RSS reader "News Explorer" by
Betamagic. It has replaced Reeder+Feedly for me and everything just syncs to
iCloud. Highly recommend checking it out:
[https://betamagic.nl/products/newsexplorer.html](https://betamagic.nl/products/newsexplorer.html)

------
st26
Coincidentally, I just switched to consuming news mostly through RSS. There
just wasn't any better news aggregator that let me focus on news I actually
cared about, and filtered out the crap I don't.

What I long for is something like Google Newsstand, with the power to scrape
the whole web for my interests- except Google Newsstand incessantly shows me
all the inane "hot", "trending", "popular" etc mainstream stuff no matter how
many hundreds of times I mark, "show me less like this".

Using RSS is a little limiting because there's so little discovery for related
subjects from new sources- but I can completely turn off the firehose of pop
news.

------
hprotagonist
I am another long-time RSS user.

For me, it is the only sane way to keep up with my scientific journal reading.

That it's also a fine way to read webcomics and tech blogs is a nice bonus.

------
PeterStuer
I loved the 'RSS feed' ecosystem but it did have its problems.

Plain old 'everything you can eat' RSS suffered from lack of a decent curation
system. You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When
the number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much,
you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and
still might do. Most never got round to this and so stuff piled on.

A good personalized priority/curated feed out of your subscriptions would have
been nice, but at the time nobody succeeded.

~~~
josefresco
> You got to a site/article you liked, and subscribed to the feed. When the
> number of feeds you accumulated got to the point where it became too much,
> you then faced the 'chore' of deleting stuff you once actually liked, and
> still might do. Most never got round to this and so stuff piled on.

This describes my social media feed / process, and I would imagine most others
as well.

------
os7borne
While, to some extent, I agree that we should move back to RSS, shouldn't we
think of RSS readers? While most of us in tech could figure it out, the mass
of people find it tough to use an RSS Reader.

Maybe in the future, RSS readers could take another form altogether. But
solutions out there aren't as easy to use.

------
frouge
How about implementing RSS in the browser? My ideal implementation would be to
click on my special RSS bookmark folder and immediatly see how many new items
there are for each site of the folder, something like "kottke.org (5)" <\-
special mention to a lovely blog

~~~
icebraining
Firefox has had that since version 1.0 (2004):
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-
bookmarks](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks)

~~~
gkya
Live Bookmarks has a very weird UI. I have upwards of 90 feeds currently, and
it's simply impractical for me to check each one of them manually to see if
there is soemthing new.

~~~
frouge
Yeah just tested and its close from what I want but I need to know how many
new items I've got. Can't just remember from each site what was the last item

------
forapurpose
I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to
efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to
automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a
replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem).

By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide
whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it), delete the feed
item. Repeat 1,000x.

Deduplication is necessary but will only cut items process by maybe 5%, I
would guess.

'Grouping' is much more valuable - grouping feed items by topic. For example,
after the big event last night, instead of skimming dozens of headlines
interspersed among 1,000 others, group together the feed items for that event
under a single headers. Then I can quickly pick out the item I want to read
and discard the remainder en masse. I'd _guess_ that it would reduce the feed
items I need to process by well over 50%.

Other tricks are needed too: 1,000 in 20 minutes is just under 1 feed item per
second.

~~~
dewey
I don't want to tell you what to do but wouldn't it be more helpful to just be
more selective on what you subscribe to?

I subscribed to way too many feeds in the past and going through them with
shortcuts / opening them in the background and then going through the opened
pages to read them afterwards works well. It's even quite fast but as soon as
you skip a day it just piles up until you can't work off the queue any more.

I then just decided to really look at which feeds I really get most out of and
unsubscribed from most of them. Way happier with that strategy and I don't
feel like I'm getting overwhelmed by the unread count.

~~~
forapurpose
> wouldn't it be more helpful to just be more selective on what you subscribe
> to?

I am very selective! Otherwise there would be far more. There are many feeds I
cut despite having some excellent, irreplaceable content, because they also
add too many unread feed items (i.e., poor signal-to-noise).

------
pferde
RSS and/or Atom should primarily look at improving the format specification.
both formats are woefully underspecified in some parts, leading to a lot of
headaches for RSS parser writers, since RSS generators play fast and loose
with the rules, and will take any possible and impossible shortcut just to
make it a bit easier for themselves.

------
Grumbledour
Since we are talking RSS: For years I have tried to find a good RSS reader for
my android phone and have failed so far. The feature that mostly kills it for
me is, much to my surprise, layout. For applications made for reading text,
they all seem to hate the idea of letting the user actually decide how he
wants that text displayed.

If you can even change the font size, often there are only predefined options,
only works on certain views (article but not list etc.). Forget about changing
the font itself or the colors aside from light/dark themes. It is ridiculous!

Do any of you know of a reader app, that lets me really customize that stuff
why also being somewhat minimalist? The best thing I found so far is Palabre,
but it also clutters the screen with useless header images, buttons and
"Similar content" sections.

~~~
QAkICoU7IDNkpFu
After years of looking around I found
[https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/) (also available as
app). _Finally_ a decent replacement for Google Reader IMO.

UI on the site is a bit clunkey IMO, but the app at least has some
customization options (font-type, font-size, different layout sizes, open tabs
inside the app or direct them to an external browser, etc)

No affiliations, other than that I'm a happy user!

~~~
glaberficken
I also switched to inoreader recently (after going >GoogleReader>DiggReader)
and I'm happy with it. I used to be a firm believer in a simple list of text
headers, but with inoreader I found myself opting more and more for the
thumbnail grid list.

------
nreece
Absolutely, RSS feeds rock! They're much less "noisy", and best of all -
untouched by algorithmic sorting.

* _Shameless plug_ *: our service & API at [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com) helps create custom feeds for any public webpage.

------
dmix
> No suspicious javascript.

My only problem with this is the very positive trend towards design-heavy
journalism... just like the NYTimes Wind Turbine article currently on the
homepage:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/ener...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/energy-
environment/big-windmills.html)

I love the Instapaper/RSS style consumption as much as anyone but that doesn't
mean that multi-MB pages with plenty of JS/CSS/Images are always a bad thing.

Maybe the solution is to differentiate between our long-form high-quality
content reading UX from the faster-paced blog/RSS style consumption?

~~~
gkya
That'll probably die out as people understand that nobody gives a flying fuck
to all that silly evil sorcery, except the guys who made them. The way
analytics works today, most web publishers are basically living in a bubble
that distorts the image of the outer world.

~~~
callumlocke
Can you expand on this? How do analytics distort publishers' perspective of
what's popular? Not disagreeing, I just want to know what you mean.

~~~
gkya
Numbers don't tell much. You make a web page, say an interactive news article,
and it's read (i.e. viewed top to bottom, but knowing even this is very hard,
still let's assume that we can know) a hundred thousand times since it was
published. What does this tell? That the interactive design helped make people
read the article? How do you know if people would've read it anyways if it was
a static HTML file, or just a normal page like others? How do you know people
actually liked the design and did not just ignore it focusing on content? How
do you know people came to play with the interface instead of reading the
actual article? How do you know what percentage of those views are from people
restoring their tabs?

If all you want is to say "Hey I got a hundred thousand views, put your ads
here!", than that's useful. But if you really want to know if users are
content or they care, those numbers are just mute. But knowing whether users
really care or not can lead you to better, cheaper design decisions.

------
phab
Infuriatingly, this site is using vw units to set font-size; not only does
this make the body copy text almost unreadably large on my HiDPI display (~330
PPI), but it means the text then refuses to scale when the page is zoomed out
in the browser. Low quality.

------
rexf
> So the very idea of RSS - obtaining content from a website without having to
> visit the site itself - is due for a comeback. No ads.

RSS content may or may not be free of ads, but that is based on what you
subscribe to.

I used Google Reader heavily, now I use theoldreader.

------
nunodonato
Been using rss since the early days, and still growing strong :) Google reader
was my go to app for rss needs, but since they killed it I switched to "The
Old Reader" and everything continued as usual :)

I do understand why some companies/people would prefer not to use RSS. From a
money-standpoint, if you need to bring people to your website to get $$ from
ads or other stuff, RSS makes it difficult. Basically, all content is free.
Its great, but perhaps many websites with good content would not survive
(perhaps many blogs neither)

------
danboarder
Has anyone launched an RSS reboot? I think RSS could catch on if there was a
leading reader that produced a facebook-like wall, social commenting
integrated, and some marketing effort behind it.

~~~
KajMagnus
I was also wondering about that. I'm uninterested in subscribing to individual
blogs via RSS — but if a new magic RSS format / technology, could list the
blog posts I actually want to read (similar to how Facebook finds interesting
FB posts), + notify me about @mentions & comment replies — then yes maybe.
Would want some way to connect with other people too, probably (like, add
friends).

------
Brajeshwar
RSS is wonderful. Like the few out there, I don't read the newspaper nor watch
TV for news; but just a handful of RSS feeds that I subscribe to. I'd also
stop subscribing to the few other newsletters if they have the same in RSS
Feeds.

[Plug] I rely solely on RSS Feeds to power a tiny in-house project[1] which
helps us get contract leads and jobs for other people.

Would love an RSS comeback.

1\. Get Better Luck -
[https://app.getbetterluck.com/](https://app.getbetterluck.com/)

------
parvenu74
Can part of the renaissance be switching to a JSON format? Please?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
[https://jsonfeed.org/](https://jsonfeed.org/) has had some preliminary
traction. Of course, the reason RSS works so well is that everyone uses the
same format. So you wouldn't see so much of a "switch" as a bunch of readers
accepting either format, for a very, very long time.

That being said, I don't see what's "wrong" with XML in this context.

~~~
craftyguy
Most of the complaints I've seen with the 'wrongness' of xml are centered
around its human unreadability, which doesn't matter in this context. I'm
curious if there's another reason.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
While I shouldn't speak for JSON Feed's developers (Manton Reece of Micro.blog
and Brent Simmons, original developer of RSS/Atom reader NetNewsWire), their
argument basically boils down to "developers seem to be better at constructing
valid JSON than they are at constructing valid XML."

I know a lot of HN folks will say _but you can just construct perfectly valid
XML with library such-and-such or API this-and-that_ and, yes, I'm sure
they're all absolutely, positively 100% correct. But in my real-world
experience, Reece and Simmons seem to be correct _in practice._ Given that
Simmons wrote NNW, worked at the now-defunct server-side RSS company
NewsGator, and is now writing a _new_ RSS (and JSON Feed) reader, I'm inclined
to believe that when he says JSON Feed "reflects the lessons learned from our
years of work reading and publishing feeds," he means it.

~~~
UncleEntity
It's funny, the only RSS feed I use I turn into json so I can store it tinydb
in "native" format. Well, technically, I turn it into a python dict and then
tinydb does the conversion to json automagically. Took 50 lines of code which
I banged together from google searches.

Back before I started using the db backend I was parsing the feed with an
auto-generated (from the schema) "rss reader" in python then merging the items
into a master rss feed sorted by channels. That worked for a while until I got
motivated and made it searchable/modifiable but couldn't find a simple
database that I could just dump xml into.

Anyhoo, my point is it's easy to work with rss in either native xml or json
with some simple tools that do most of the work for you. Would be super easy
to bang together a converter that goes both ways if someone was motivated
enough.

Actually... now that I think about it, changing generateDS to use a dict to
store xml attributes could easily go back and forth with all the error
checking one would desire -- might have to hack that together.

------
aetherspawn
Would anyone be interested in an RSS social network that allows you to

1\. Pull in RSS news streams

2\. Automatically generate your own RSS streams from your posts (and re-
shares)

3\. Provides content curation over the RSS streams amongst your friends that
are subscribed on the same streams

4\. Presents previews with images and scraped data in a 3/4-column summary
layout that is easy to skim

~~~
bhhaskin
There are already protocols out there that do that. Ostatus and Activitypub
being two. Some examples of social networks already using them are GNU Social
and Mastodon.

~~~
aetherspawn
I dont think any of the above social sites allow you to directly consume i.e.
the hackers news rss stream on your timeline

~~~
dcbadacd
One of the primary issue with these alternative social networks is the lack of
good content, RSS integration should honestly be one of their main priorities.

------
anacleto
Couldn't agree more.

This kinda of `anti-active` pattern where you only take the output (no need to
read the news online), could also be applied to SaaS products.

You don't need to use the product, you just take the tech output that matters
to your business.

Recently wrote a thing on the topic: The Next Generation of SaaS Won’t
Optimize for User Engagement

While reading these comments, it popped up in my mind.

[0] [https://www.plainflow.com/blog/next-generation-saas-user-
eng...](https://www.plainflow.com/blog/next-generation-saas-user-engagement/)

------
smsm42
I still use RSS (or alike) for almost all of my regular news consumption, in
combination with Feedly. Works way better than anything Facebook or Twitter
can offer - in fact, they are not even on the same category. If you want
momentary distraction or some lighthearted content from your friends/family -
go Facebook. If you want to consume information in an organized way - use an
RSS reader. There's nothing better.

------
dant00ine
Now is also a great time to change that font-size

------
smilbandit
RSS is one of my favorite formats. An RSS reader is always the focus of my pet
projects when I need to learn a new language.

------
anotherevan
In case the site is timing out for you like it is me.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180423210101/https://neflabs.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180423210101/https://neflabs.com/blog/rss-
renaissance/)

------
keyle
Thing is, RSS needs to change to become more user friendly. Yes it's really
easy to understand, but it's a hell of a lot easier for someone to type
"fa"<enter> in their browser to get their 'currated' news than some
specialised app.

~~~
jiggunjer
but facebook is also a specialized app? what's stopping you from typing
"fe"<enter> in your browser to get your news feed?

------
git-stash
I like RSS given it provides the exact stuff I want, not more, not less. Or it
can also be as simple as [http://www.pxlet.com](http://www.pxlet.com) which I
check every day for now to get the tech news.

------
pcardoso
Shameless plug: I made a small RSS to email service, which I use to keep up to
date on rarely updated feeds. Has been working well for me.

Give it a test at [https://mailtheblog.com](https://mailtheblog.com)

------
whazor
I tried to use RSS and I added some websites I liked. However, websites have
too much articles nowadays and many news sites have the same stories. I am
going to need filtering and grouping of articles in order to use RSS again.

------
tjadowski
I love reading news via RSS using my piece of software[1].

[1]
[https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder](https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder)

------
remir
A RSS/ATOM reader with a social aspect (comments) would be cool.

~~~
jeena
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/micro-
blog/id1253201335?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/micro-
blog/id1253201335?mt=8)

~~~
remir
Looks interesting, but there's not Android app unfortunately.

~~~
jeena
That is true, not yet. And in theory it's kind of compatible with
[https://indieweb.org/](https://indieweb.org/) but in practice I haven't been
able to find out how to connect my website to this community so they can read
it too in their app.

------
FrozenVoid
Related: HN has third party customizable RSS feeds.
[https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/](https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/)

------
dosycorp
Is this actually happening? Are there paid RSS products?

~~~
idle_processor
There're various freemium RSS services that cropped up after Google Reader
shut down.

[https://zapier.com/blog/best-rss-feed-reader-
apps/](https://zapier.com/blog/best-rss-feed-reader-apps/) lists a few.

------
bobwaycott
It’s starting to feel like everyone is jumping on the write-an-article-about-
reviving-RSS bandwagon.

Not disagreeing with the premise, but I think I’ve seen at least a half-dozen
articles saying the same thing in the last few weeks. Can’t help but wonder if
it’s getting click-baity (or perhaps click-hungry) every time I see yet-
another-RSS-is-back-baby.

------
macawfish
RSS & DAT could be the foundation of a wonderful decentralized social
platform.

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sirsuki
Link is broken. Anyone have an alternative so others can read this article?

------
cmtx
newsboat <3

~~~
dpwm
Having just got back into RSS in the last week, I tried newsboat and found it
does at least what I needed it to, from the terminal, without it adding
features that get in the way. I haven't looked for anything else.

~~~
cmtx
it helps control my compulsory feed checking being in term. was a google
reader fan from the beginning, and have tried and paid for most of the
replacements. newsboat is fast, light and super easy on my data plan
(1.5hrs/day on bus). my triage and read below...

browser "links" macro l set browser "open -a Safari %u"; open-in-browser ; set
browser "links" define-filter "Starred" "flags = \"s\"" macro m "edit-flags"
s; ENTER macro k "edit-flags" ''; ENTER

------
originalsimba
Did anyone else notice how corporations like Twitter and Facebook quietly
tried to kill RSS in the past 10 years?

RSS is a wonderful technology with embodies the spirit of the Internet.
Facebook and Twitter are, by comparison, cancer.

I often recommend WordPress to folks as an alternative for blogging, because
it is free and has RSS functional out of the box.

~~~
LoSboccacc
RSS has no analytics. that's the big weakness. RSS has been stripped of
content even in most other blogs, substituting it for links back to the main
sites, which is a workable compromise for webmaster but not one that helps
readers. yahoo pipes where a stopgap for a while, until yahoo pulled the plug.

I think what's needed is an intrusive format that delivers metrics and
tracking. sure it'd be another tool for control and manipulation, but we'd at
least have back the ability to read our news centralized.

~~~
eric_the_read
RSS doesn't need analytics. If you want analytics, put them on the links in
the feed. If you want to know that people are reading the link at all, either
put in an invisible pixel, or just include a paragraph with a [more...] link.

~~~
ge0rg
RSS feeds that provide a paragraph (or less) and a "more..." link make me
unsubscribe immediately. I'm most often reading my feeds when offline or on
the go, and not having the full article makes it worthless.

