
It's time to head back to RSS? - kawera
https://www.wired.com/story/rss-readers-feedly-inoreader-old-reader/
======
Animats
The key thing to know about RSS is that most of the real news sources, those
that have actual reporters who go out and find news, have RSS feeds. Reuters,
the Associated Press, the New York Times, the BBC...

Here's Reuters Top News.[1] Just the news, no ads, no clickbait. Reuters is
useful because their RSS feed contains a readable story summary. Many RSS
feeds just have a truncated sentence and a link. Both CNN [2] and Fox News [3]
are like that. Voice of America is at the other extreme - the whole story is
on RSS.[4]

[1]
[http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews](http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews)
[2]
[http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss](http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss)
[3] [http://www.foxnews.com/about/rss/](http://www.foxnews.com/about/rss/) [4]
[https://www.voanews.com/rssfeeds](https://www.voanews.com/rssfeeds)

~~~
Ajedi32
Pretty much everything has RSS feeds. Random blogs, webcomics, even major
sites like YouTube.

If it puts out content on a regular basis, chances are you can subscribe to it
via RSS.

~~~
amerine
I think the OPs point is that there are very valuable first-party sources of
information with RSS feeds that you shouldn’t ignore.

Basically, there is gold out there.

~~~
Animats
Facebook and Twitter both used to have RSS feeds, and stopped supporting RSS
to force people to use their ad-heavy client interfaces. But that's not where
the good stuff is. While "social" has dropped RSS, it's still doing great for
real news.

~~~
__david__
I wrote a simple Twitter API to RSS script and have been using that to read
Twitter (via Feedly) for a few years now. The downside is that you don't get
tweets at anything even approaching real time (Feedly seems to hit my RSS once
every 6 hours), but I find it just perfect for low volume Twitter feeds (like
bands announcing new releases or shows).

------
_pctq
Funny, I've set up a RSS reader again just this week.

Prior to that, my main source of information was google feed (when you sweep
right on android main screen - for those who don't know it, it's a feed of
news curated by google supposed to match our interests). I totally loved it,
as it properly detected my interests and shown articles about them even from
websites I don't know about.

But lately, I saw more and more posts I wasn't interested in. Well, it always
happened, but those made me wondering because they were posts about brands, or
very specific products. Was this promoted content? I don't have a clue.

Be it promoted content or not, I realized I was vulnerable: anything could be
pushed to me and I would think I see it because I'm interested in it. And I
have no way of checking why something appears in my feed.

So I decided to get back to RSS, and realized I could still have the discovery
of new sources using... google alerts. I can set a google alerts using the
advanced search semantics of google search, and get the result as a RSS feed.
This means I discover new sources and I can verify why it appeared (it matches
my custom search). Best of both world.

And obviously, I can also subscribe to specific RSS feeds to be sure to not
miss something I love.

~~~
Jetroid
> it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests

Really? I've always found it to be awful, majority things I am _not_
interested in.

I just checked, and only 2 in 10 were mildly interesting to me. Three of them
were about sports, which is way off the mark for me.

Does it optimise based on my interactions with that application in particular,
or is it meant to be linked with the rest of my google account?

~~~
rpedela
Being pro-active about telling it which topics or sources you don't like helps
a lot. My only wish is to say that I don't like a specific article. Often I
get an article on a topic from a source I generally like but the specific
article is junk.

~~~
hnuser1234
When the last election's campaigns were ramping up, I went into my Google
interests sections and made every effort to tell it I was disinterested in
politics and the 2 big names. I only started getting MORE political content
until it overwhelmed my feed. For a few months I tried swiping it all away
whenever I checked, but seemed to get zero response. I then started telling it
I'm not interested in any stories from any sources that report anything
political. In other words, I blocked the mainstream media. It got
significantly better, but it still tries to shoehorn in a few articles on
these topics by pulling from obscure local news outlets that are from the
other side of the country.

------
noam87
I've been a (paying) user of NewsBlur
([https://newsblur.com/](https://newsblur.com/)) since Google Reader shut down
and haven't looked back.

p.s: In HN spirit, it also happens to be one developer's side-project-turned-
profitable-business, and the "social" features a totally non-intrusive, but
there if you want to know what people are sharing and commenting on.

~~~
Symmetry
After Google Reader went away I was actively looking for a reader where, by
giving the creator money, I was ensuring it would stick around. And also where
I was the customer rather than the product. There's a free version you can use
to try it out but it's limited in the number of feeds. And $24 a year isn't a
high price for what I'm getting.

~~~
frizkie
Looks like it's $36/year now.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Still easily worth it. I probably get my $2/month value's worth in a single
couch session, throwing my saved YouTube feeds onto the Chromecast.

------
singingfish
RSS never went away. Podcasting has made careers (e.g. deboarah francis-white,
roman mars, andy & helen zaltzman, ollie mann and many others). The
technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS. And it ain't going
away, or getting embraced and extended any time soon.

~~~
Zhyl
Podcasting feels like an alternate reality where none of the massive players
took over and everything stayed federated.

~~~
macspoofing
Yep. It's perplexing that a YouTube for podcasts (with centralized ad serving
and similar profit sharing) hasn't emerged. The space is endearing - maybe
that's why it is so vibrant?

~~~
ghaff
Well, distribution is fairly centralized [ADDED: in practice through
iTunes/Google Play/etc.] and the hosting of the actual podcasts is cheap
enough that throwing them on S3 or wherever isn't really a burden for most
people. And advertising, when it exists at all, tends to be native
advertising.

> The space is endearing - maybe that's why it is so vibrant?

That's true but arguably YouTube at least started out that way as well. I
suspect that there are a number of factors; no single one I can think of
(except maybe the hosting costs and that seems an unsatisfactory explanation
by itself) really captures it.

~~~
jhauris
I think it's decentralized partly because itunes doesn't integrate with any
other services. So to serve android and IOS many podcasters NEED a single RSS
feed that they point iTunes and other services to. Many relatively small
services exist to help with hosting, and usually provide a hosted RSS link
independent of itunes/whatever.

I really hate that many podcasters are trying to push their own app or their
publishers / organizations app (even NPR is doing this). Getting everyone
using the same platform is how podcasts will get youtubified.

~~~
freehunter
The biggest thing I was surprised about when I started a podcast is that
iTunes doesn't host or distribute podcasts. As an end-user, I thought I was
getting iTunes content with podcasts. But in reality it's just an aggregator
like reddit or HN: it's full of links, but those links are external and pull
content from other places.

I was also surprised by how easy (and free) it is to get a podcast on iTunes,
especially compared to getting an app on the App Store.

~~~
ghaff
I suspect that a lot of it's just historical happenstance. Podcasting as we
think of it today started ~2003 and was very intertwined with the development
of RSS. The click-wheel iPod (which was really the breakout model) wasn't
until the next year. And the current era of podcasting didn't really take off
until it became easy to sync with smartphones.

So this was a case where Apple sort of came along for the ride and didn't see
podcasting as being a big deal--which they were sort of right about; arguably
even today it's somewhat mainstream but I'd bet the majority of people in the
US have never listened to a podcast and certainly don't listen regularly.

~~~
freehunter
Yeah another thing I'm surprised at, being a relatively new podcaster, is how
often I approach people/businesses to interview them and they tell me they
either don't listen to podcasts or don't even know what they are.

~~~
brownbat
On a recent trip back home, I had some downtime and my device was broken, so I
threw a bunch of podcasts on the Apple TV.

A few weeks later my dad calls to tell me he doesn't know how any of this
works, but now he gets amazing content while driving, instead of just
listening to the mostly ads that came through his antenna.

So.. just lack of awareness? Just fiddly enough to keep people away?

I have a sneaking suspicion that if tomorrow Apple or Google just subscribed
everyone to 99% Invisible and waited, FM radio would be dead in a year.

~~~
ghaff
Probably all of the above. Plus, for a lot of people, radio is mostly
background noise that, in the case of news and talk radio, is always current.
And there's always NPR to mostly avoid advertising.

Many people don't want to have to deliberately choose content a lot of the
time. I've heard people argue that they don't want to always have to use
Netflix because they can't just flip on a channel and/or channel surf.

------
toasterlovin
If you haven’t tried RSS as your main mode of information consumption in a
while, you should give it a shot. I went all-in on RSS recently and it’s been
great. Way more thoughtful, long form content. Smaller dose information
sources (Twitter, etc.) are useful in their own way, but I’ve found that the
amount of time required to create a unit of media is a pretty good reverse
indicator of how likely it is to use the baser emotions to acquire and keep my
attention.

~~~
bogomipz
> Way more thoughtful, long form content."

Isn't RSS the same content as on the publishers page or site though? Maybe I
am misinterpreting you comment?

~~~
toasterlovin
Yeah, it’s the same content. It’s just that if you switch to consuming it via
RSS, you don’t get sucked into all the bite sized media that permeates the
web.

~~~
bogomipz
I see, yes that makes sense. There's nothing that detracts from the reading
experience more than an advertisement placed between two adjacent paragraph in
s story. Even the moribund print news media doesn't do this.

------
sago
RSS is awesome. Bring on its resurgence.

But.

It is fundamentally not fit as a Facebook or social media replacement because
of it's lack of simple commenting support. It suits some curmudgeonly old
farts like me, perhaps. But even I want to feedback sometimes or join in the
discussion (hence this comment).

Are there solutions that a content creator can provide, via RSS, without
requiring its readers to install particular jiggery pokery? Or is the only
option HN / reddit style commenting sites, separate from the content?

~~~
lostlogin
I think HN might be the only place I read the comments. Missing the hell stew
of a comments section is a feature as I see it.

~~~
chestervonwinch
Agreed. I was glad when npr.org removed their Disqus comments sections. Disqus
comments on news websites tend to be very nasty and stain websites more often
than not IMO. Disqus comments on _local_ news sites are an absolute cesspool.

~~~
mlloyd
Funny because there was a time where Disqus comments actually improved the
quality of commentary.

------
cedricbonhomme
I use my own RSS reader since around 8 years now. It has evolved quite a lot.
Before I was using aKregator.

I started with a simple CherryPy project and a SQLite database. It is now
using Flask, SQLAlchemy and React:
[https://www.newspipe.org/](https://www.newspipe.org/)

I have something like 200000 articles in the database. And the oldest article
is from February 1995!

~~~
slater
Just a heads-up: Tried logging in before I got the confirmation e-mail, typo
in error message:

> User is desactivated

Should probably be something like

> User account has not been activated yet. Check your e-mail, etc. etc.

~~~
cedricbonhomme
Thanks, fixed. I used "Account not active", because an account can be
deactivated later.

Maybe it will be even better to just say something like 'bad login and/or
password'. In order to give the minimum of information.

------
mosselman
I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway?

The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I
couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the
author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal
of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add
RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommending content to people,
etc. |

~~~
grayrest
> When did RSS go out of style anyway?

It went away when Google killed Reader. Reader had more or less killed off the
independent RSS reader market. When it got shuttered, alternatives weren't
well developed and people shifted more or less entirely onto Twitter. The
Twitter shift had been happening already but the shutdown kind of forced the
issue.

~~~
awiesenhofer
I think you and HN in general vastly overstates the gravitas of the Google
Reader shutdown. I loved it too but the demise of RSS happened probably more
because of people switching to Twitter, Facebook and others as their
"aggregator" than by killing off one RSS-Reader.

~~~
wybiral
If Google had just added comments or other social elements to their reader
instead of killing it they might not have missed the boat.

Instead they killed their popular Reader and made Orkut and Google Plus.

~~~
sorenjan
They did have comments and other social elements [0]. It was possible to
follow people and share articles with or without adding your own note to it.
They had a bookmarklet that allowed you to share any article, even if it
didn't have an RSS feed. Their move to Google+ sharing wasn't exactly an
improvement though [1].

I never got why people moved to Twitter, it wasn't, and isn't, as good at
consuming or sharing content as Reader was. It's just one more step towards
the more centralized web we have today, and hopefully we will move back to a
more decentralized experience soon.

[0] [http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2009/03/google-reader-is-
you...](http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2009/03/google-reader-is-your-new-
watercooler.html) [1] [http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2011/10/new-in-reader-
fresh-...](http://googlereader.blogspot.se/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-design-
and-google.html)

------
manmal
To me, RSS and Twitter/FB/etc are very different things. With RSS you are
„alone“ while reading it. There’s no one to discuss things with you. I‘m not
really qualified to make this statement, but I‘d say RSS feeds don’t have a
social component, leaving your limbic system (responsible for social
interaction) widely out of the process. You process the info and that’s it.

With Twitter, everything is attached to a social context. If a link is posted
by your personal idol, you engage in (pseudo?) social behavior if you read it.
You may then feel compelled to discuss it, and you will feel rejected if
nobody answers, or very good if you get a lot of likes. So, lots of
limbic/social interaction.

Both have their merits.. without Twitter, I would have a content discovery
problem, and with (only) Twitter I‘ll live in a bubble, plus my IRL social
interactions might be somewhat crowded out by the interactions on Twitter,
plus Twitter can make me feel socially miserable for very petty reasons.

Personally I would love a system that combines my personal RSS feed with
recommendations resulting from mining Twitter and applying ML to generate
relevant results.

~~~
addicted
Well, one reason Google Reader’s closure was such a loss was because it added
a social layer to RSS. And it was a completely optional and non-intrusive
social layer. I really wish Google had tried to enhance Reader instead of
killing it to promote Google+. Allowing the ability to post short messages in
your shared feeds would have made it very Twitter like, only nicer.

~~~
manmal
They should kill Google Plus and resurrect the Reader.

------
mandelbulb
Have been using [https://inoreader.com](https://inoreader.com) since the Year
Google Reader closed, and imho, it's better than Feedly.

I'm also usually reading HN via my full-text feed. Meaning, I don't have to
load a link every time, I focus on the articles first, and I can easily pre-
load everything for offline reading on mobile.

I think, in case of RSS such online services are superior to self-hosted
solutions - whether server or client - as there is a greater chance someone is
already aggregating a feed you might discover only some time in the future.

~~~
daveFNbuck
What makes it better than Feedly? I've been using Feedly since Google Reader
closed and I think it pretty much nails this simple tool. How is it even
possible to be much better?

~~~
mandelbulb
The dev has always been really responsive and closely watching the community,
while Feedly focuses on premium support and feels more corporate.

Several features are free: Unlimited sources and feeds, entire search for your
own feeds, unlimited tags, sharing via inoreader email

There is also: loading of mobilized content via single click/key, better
shortcuts, comprehensive tagging management, more settings, better settings
placement, contact management, better feeds stats info, save an entry as pdf
or print it, more sharing options, better compact theme, more RSS export
settings, export the entire profile which includes the content for favorites
and save web pages

Free Feedly boards are limited to 3 and have been only introduced last year,
while tags in Inoreader are more powerful, free and part of the service since
2013

~~~
daveFNbuck
Now that I'm trying Inoreader, the killer feature for me is being able to open
items in background tabs. Too bad that requires a plugin for Firefox.

~~~
mandelbulb
Are you talking about the keyboard shortcut? If so, there is no need for an
addon on Firefox.

~~~
daveFNbuck
When I tried the keyboard shortcut without the addon, it just triggered a
popup saying I needed the addon.

~~~
mandelbulb
Ah, yeah, you're correct. Firefox had changed the permissions for this some
time ago.

You can optionally toggle the browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground value in
about:config to true, then the v shortcut will open in background.

That said, I find the add-on a must-have. I'm always using it to save web
pages. Do not forget to check the HTTPS option in setting, though.

As a reference [1]:

browser.tabs.loadInBackground => when you open a regular link in a new tab
using Ctrl+click (or right-click > Open in a New Tab) default = true, do not
make the new tab active In the Options dialog/page, this is controlled by the
"When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately" setting.

browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground => when you divert a script-generated
new window to a new tab using Ctrl+click, or when a page uses the target
attribute to launch a link in a new window and you divert it to a new tab
default = false, make the new tab active

browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground => when you load a bookmark in a new
tab using Ctrl+click (or right-click > Open in a New Tab) default = false,
make the new tab active

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/1066419](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1066419)

~~~
daveFNbuck
Thanks! That actually fixes my biggest problem with Feedly if this Inoreader
trial doesn't work out for me.

------
zafiro17
I've continued using RSS for years, even when it was a "dying" technology. It
certainly never died for me, and is super useful. It's probably the first app
I reach for in the morning. I use a few apps not mentioned here. Each is for a
Unix/Linux platform: Newsbeuter is a console RSS feeder that's a dream if you
prefer keyboard driven software. You can update one feed or all of them,
search across all feeds for key words, export to OPML, etc. I also used curn,
a java app that can email you your custom feed update whenever you run it with
cron. Lastly, rawdog updates feeds and publishes a custom web page. I use it
on a VPS running a webserver, and visit it from wherever I like. RSS has been
a good way for me to stay in touch with individual bloggers etc who publish
sporadically. And I inherently distrust any software that wants to customize a
feed for me based on my interests, etc. I always suspect they are more focused
on pushing to me what others have paid them to push, than showing me what they
think I'll like. How can any paid company ever keep straight those two
inherently different things? ("Here, I think you'd like this because I earn
money if you do").

~~~
hokus
> RSS has been a good way for me to stay in touch with individual bloggers etc
> who publish sporadically.

This!

This has to be the main selling point.

The second would be to NOT use a web service but to run your own desktop feed
aggregator. Everyone should stop using walled gardens for things you can
easily do yourself:

YOU should be responsible for what you publish - no one else.

YOU should be responsible for what you read - no one else.

It doesn't work any other way. I'm not able to decide what you can and cant
write on your blog. I'm also not able to decide what you can and cant read.

If your crap ends up on my webserver in whatever way I will be responsible for
it(!)

Someone once said: When you grow up you have to be your own mum. It might
sound like a lame joke but if you want lame nothing can beat a formula where
one ends up responsible for what other people publish. Any amount of needless
centralization will have the usual suspects pressure that entity into
censorship.

What is legal in one country will land you in prison in the next.

Employers, government, border and airport security etc cant "ask" you for
access to your home desktop computer.

But more importantly: Without RSS you cant read small websites that rarely
publish. This also means you don't have to make your own website anymore in
2018 because no one reads it.

------
theclaw
I've tried Feedly but my goodness, the corporate language is such a turn off.
I just want a feed reader, I don't want to "Fuel your team's success," "Enrich
articles with unique insights," "Automate your content workflows," "Reinforce
your digital brand". These features may be cool and useful, but the way
they're sold makes me gag.

I used my ad blocker to remove the "Well done!" that appears when everything
is marked as read, it's so patronising.

Now I use rrss
([https://github.com/pmarinov/rrss](https://github.com/pmarinov/rrss)) because
it just reads feeds and doesn't constantly promote itself with management
garbage.

~~~
splitbrain
To me inoreader.com is the perfect Google reader like feed reader. I don't get
all the fuzz about feedly, there are better alternatives. just my $0.02

~~~
trm42
Tried first The Old Reader but at some point of time switched to Inoreader for
a reason I can't remember anymore but Inoreader has been really awesome all
the way <3

~~~
tatami
I went the same route, but The Old Reader at one day announced shutting down
for all users that came after Google Reader's end.

They reverted this a few days later but by then I was on an alternative
already (could have been tt-rss then)

------
pacoverdi
> THE MODERN WEB contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers

This is from a page that connects to (excerpt):

    
    
       c.amazon-adsystem.com
       z-na.amazon-adsystem.com
       tag.bounceexchange.com
       graph.facebook.com
       sb.scorecardresearch.com
       cdn.mediavoice.com
       odb.outbrain.com
       cdn.quantummetric.com
       native.sharethrough.com
       s.skimresources.com
       pixel.tapad.com
       d.turn.com
       p.typekit.net
       use.typekit.net
       cdn.yldbt.com
       segment-data.zqtk.net

~~~
aoeusnth1
Yeah, but to be fair, the journalist who wrote this has little to no influence
over the analytics choices made by the web developers who run wired.com.

~~~
pacoverdi
Sure. Couldn't help to notice the irony though :)

------
jingwen
If you miss the clean UI and keyboard shortcuts of Google Reader, I highly
recommend BazQux Reader.

The front end tech is also pretty interesting: it's built with Ur/Web. [2]

[1] [http://bazqux.com](http://bazqux.com) [2]
[https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb](https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-
urweb)

~~~
nanodeath
The Old Reader[1] has been my go-to. Looks similar.

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

~~~
cmbailey
I'd been on The Old Reader ever since Google Reader shut down. Tried Bazqux
thanks to a post here on HN and switched because it's much faster. Very
noticeable with a lot of subscriptions (I have over 100).

Only relative downside is that there's no integration with Firefox's
"Subscribe to this page" button, which TOR has. That means you need to use a
javascript bookmark to subscribe to new feeds, which feels kludge-ey in
comparison.

------
robobro
Hot take: we should revive ATOM instead.

RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this
may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the
difference, this is a good article
[http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared](http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared)

\--------

When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a
feed for new threads but also for new comments (per thread and board-wide).
Made it very easy to monitor updates on all my devices. Most wikis have
RSS/ATOM feeds for recent changes which is a great power feature for admins.

Mastodon is atom-based, I believe. Early twitter supported RSS / ATOM feeds
which arguably made it easier to follow hashtags or news accounts.

Another benefit of RSS/ATOM is that you can plug them into chatbots or use
them to mirror content. I would love to see syndication come back to the
spotlight!

~~~
dannysu
I wrote tweets2rss[1] and use it to turn my private lists into RSS feeds. For
example, I have a feed in my RSS reader for interesting people (Bill Gates,
Elon Musk, etc) and a list for interesting companies.

    
    
      [1]: https://github.com/dannysu/tweets2rss

~~~
mxuribe
Hey, this seems neat; I think I'll check it out. Thanks for contributing this!

------
fulldecent
A visitor that comes to your site via social is MUCH more valuable than
someone that comes via RSS. The economics of this reality are what removed RSS
from the limelight.

Dear publishers, let's fix this. Whenever you publish a blog post, etc. please
syndicate it on social and then go back to your site to add "DISCUSS THIS ON
TWITTER/whatever AT [https://t.co/aesou02"](https://t.co/aesou02"). Make sure
that this also syndicates to RSS.

Dear pubsubbers, let's fix this. In your reader software, please lint these
special links and show the discussion below the news. We know you want to get
into the content discovery business -- this is the first step.

See the Slashdot RSS feed as a good example, they inline the discussion right
in the feed.

~~~
dingaling
I am struggling to understand. Why is a social-origin visitor more valuable?

Honest question. I would have expected an RSS-origin to be a more tech-savvy
reader and more likely to engage.

~~~
freehunter
Engage where? Engage how? Tech savvy may not be what you're looking for, and
is not always a good thing.

I think what fulldecent is saying is that people reading on RSS have a barrier
to sharing and a barrier to commenting that doesn't exist on social media. On
Twitter or Facebook, the "share" action is intrinsically linked to the article
in its native format. Not so on RSS.

------
tmikaeld
100% of my news feed is RSS and have been the past 7 years (It's how I read
HN[1]).

I use this Open Source RSS/Atom client:

[https://tt-rss.org/](https://tt-rss.org/)

Activate a couple plugins and it works just like Google Reader!

[1] [http://news.ycombinator.com/rss](http://news.ycombinator.com/rss)

------
cdancette
I used RSS while Google reader existed, and I stopped using it for a few years
after it disappeared.

Now, I'm using a service that sends some RSS feed to my email so so can read
them directly from there. I think it's amazing as it has all the features I
need (tagging, mark read / unread) and I don't need to open another website /
application to read my news.

~~~
IlPeach
Have you got a link?

~~~
adrianmsmith
I do the same. I use [https://blogtrottr.com/](https://blogtrottr.com/) and am
very happy wit it.

~~~
kungtotte
Are you paying for it or do you just put up with the ads? If so, how intrusive
are they?

~~~
adrianmsmith
I don’t pay for it. They’re not intrusive at all. Actually I’d forgotten there
were ads until you mentioned it :)

------
mrmondo
I agree with those that say RSS never went away, for the last 10 years or so
I’ve noticed my dependence on RSS grow and it’s critical to my keeping track
of news across a number of blogs and websites. I wrote a shitty little blog
post on it last year: [https://smcleod.net/thoughts/2017/09/22/return-of-the-
rss.ht...](https://smcleod.net/thoughts/2017/09/22/return-of-the-rss.html)

------
awat
I’ve been using a hosted copy of TIny Tiny RSS ([https://git.tt-
rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wiki](https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wiki)) for a few
years now combined with Fiery Feeds on iOS. It’s been rock solid for me, it
took a few weeks to dial in my settings for TTRSS but once those were locked
in It’s pretty empowering to filter out a lot of the noise in the news cycle.

~~~
eddyg
Agree that this is an excellent combo.

------
kemenaran
I found RSS feeds to be the best remedy for my accelerated bit-sized dopamine-
inducing news consumption.

RSS lets me focus on what I actually want to read, makes me take long-break
(instead of short bursts of Twitter updates), and gives me longer and more
structured content.

I also use RSS for sharing articles, by giving the URL of your Pocket RSS feed
to friends.

I'm glad that, in the age of algorithmically curated timelines, RSS still
exist!

------
aaronbrethorst
I'm bummed that no one has mentioned Feedbin, for which I have paid since it
launched back in 2013(?). It's fast, not too larded up with unnecessary
features, works across the desktop, iOS, and Android, and costs money, so I
know that it'll be around for a while, and that I'm the customer and not the
product.

[https://feedbin.com](https://feedbin.com)

Edit: it's also OSS: [https://github.com/feedbin](https://github.com/feedbin)

~~~
b__d
Also early supporter here. For the great product/service I even voluntarily
increaced my subscription rate, because $2 (what it started with) a month
seemed way too cheap to me, especially for a heavy user like me. Still love
it.

------
anomie31
Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put
more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article.

But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS
feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You
need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a
button to read the full article.

I was trying and fell short of something witty to say. Just, wow, this is a
sorry state of affairs. Just give me the damn content and I'll be on my merry
way.

~~~
iamdave
_I was trying and fell short of something witty to say._

But you're right. I use feedly and have chrome extensions that's give me full
articles in a readable fashion.

I would LOVE to visit some of my favorite sites and read articles as the site
designers meant for them to be read. But all of the js and ad fuckery makes
reading articles online an absolute goddamn chore lately.

So here we are.

RSS revival? Bring it on. I'll play drums.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
TinyTinyRSS lets you use xpath to specify which element on the linked page is
the “real” content. It was a life-saver when dealing with snippet-only feeds.

~~~
iamdave
Ohh I didn't know of this, thanks for the recommendation will definitely check
it out.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
BTW, you'll need the feediron plugin for the functionality I was talking
about.

------
modernerd
Yes. But please not RSS. At least newer initiatives like JSON Feed have
maintainers who respond to requests for improvements.

RSS feels like an abandoned standard. I tried to submit an improvement to the
author directly to explicitly allow HTTPS URLs in light of upcoming iTunes
changes to enforce HTTPS; they said by email that of course HTTPS resources
are valid in their view, but they weren't prepared to actively update the spec
to say as much. Until that's done some feed validators continue to mark HTTPS
resources as invalid.

~~~
pmlnr
Does it matter, really? RSS, Atom, JSON, microformats, whatever; there are
libraries that can parse any of these. What matters is the idea behind them,
the technical implementation is secondary. Please don't revive the format
wars.

~~~
modernerd
I agree with the spirit of, “better to popularise independent syndication than
fight over formats” except:

> the technical implementation is secondary

Until users get a bad experience that can't be solved easily because the spec
was set in stone over a decade ago.

Or until people want to extend and improve the spec to create new standards
that prevent fractured and disparate extensions to it.

Technical implementation is often secondary, but RSS already failed to achieve
mainstream status once. That is not all down to the RSS spec, but recognising
that RSS is a candidate for obsoletion and building on something active and
progressive might give the idea of indie syndication a healthier
second/third/fourth chance.

A non-dead spec that's actively tended, marketed, and used for building great
new platforms may garner more interest and prevent the “been there — tried
that — it wasn't for me” that RSS seems to induce in non-techies.

~~~
pmlnr
RSS is good enough for what it was made for and most of the parser libraries
and software parse both Atom and RSS (all 0.9, 1.0 and 2.0). Atom vs RSS
caused enough trouble already (
[https://indieweb.org/RSS_Atom_wars](https://indieweb.org/RSS_Atom_wars) ) and
the solution is definitely not JSONFeed, just to break all previous feed
reader implementation.

Let us accept that any parser lib should be able to deal with RSS and Atom,
and move on.

------
svalorzen
One thing I don't understand is people who use all these websites to handle
RSS. I've always used Firefox addons in order to handle RSS (before LiveClick
which was awesome, now FeedBro or similar).

Why would you give control away for something as decentralized as RSS?

~~~
kemenaran
I would guess mainly for synchronization between different computers and
devices?

------
tonylxc
I built a tiny website back in 2005-ish to aggregate RSS feeds from sites that
I was interested in. Just for myself and didn't think too much that it could
have been an actual product. That was before Google Reader launching in
October 2005. Today it's sad to see Google Reader discontinued.

Somehow I find this article very interesting in that it's kind of a sandwich
that the promotion of Feedly is inserted in the middle, which makes me wonder
if the article really wants to advocate the revival of RSS, or is just another
marketing one. Does anyone have the same feeling here (confusing face)?

Edited: fixed a typo: Google Reader launched in October 2005.

~~~
pinkano
Hi Tony, just to be clear, it is not a promotion for us, we've been
interviewed as well as all the other readers and only a fraction of what we've
been asked was published. We had no control to review how the final article
will look like either. -Petr @ Feedly

------
benbristow
I use TinyTinyRSS. Works pretty well. Fully free unlike services such as
Feedly, just like Reader was back in the day.

Works well on any shared hosting or VPS etc. as long as you've got
PHP/MySQL/Postgres and the ability to setup a CRON job (CPanel/Plesk give you
this) or the daemon.

------
ilmiont
Erm.. I never stopped using RSS. I have never consumed news primarily on
social media, I subscribe to hundreds of feeds and that's always where I get
my news from.

I use Feedly with the wonderful Nextgen Reader client for Windows. 10/mobile.
Beautiful app, service, news experience.

------
anotherevan
Just to plug Newsblur, as others have been posting what they use. I've been
using it since Google Reader shut down and am very happy with it.

------
janvdberg
May I suggest FreshRSS, a free and self-hosted RSS reader:
[https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS](https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS)

------
duncan_bayne
For those getting into RSS, I can recommend two resources.

For a SaaS newsreader, I really enjoyed using Newsblur. Great service,
excellent functionality, and first-rate support.

For a desktop newsreader, I suggest Emacs with elfeed. That's what I use
today, and is the only reason I'm not still happily paying for Newsblur.

~~~
nicky0
You lost me at Emacs.

~~~
nslamberth
Even if you don't use Emacs as an editor, consider using it just for elfeed
(or magit). It works on almost every platform in existence and is rock solid.

------
_emacsomancer_
Emacs has an interesting RSS feed reader: elfeed [
[https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed/blob/master/README.md)
], which even has an Android client [ [https://github.com/areina/elfeed-
cljsrn/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/areina/elfeed-
cljsrn/blob/master/README.md) ].

------
consultSKI
Many of us never left. Yes, it was disappointing for a few days when google
changed horses. Their loss. The article failed to mention that RSS feeds are
the backbone of Amazon's Alexa Flash Briefings. Seems once again, Bezos and
crew know best.

Shameless plug for our Flash Briefing (available on Alexa, iTunes, and our
website but only available the days ending in "y"):
[http://jmpurl.info/flashbriefing](http://jmpurl.info/flashbriefing)

~~~
mkirklions
I think the world is moving to a repeatable and reusable style of storing
data.

RSS and JSON have become standards that people can use for data on multiple
platforms.

~~~
consultSKI
Agreed. It is an API world. I recall trying make sense of xml then came RSS
feeds. Then, why JSON, and now you can have RSS like feeds (and a lot more)
via JSON.

------
forapurpose
I'm interested in a reader that focuses on efficiency; like probably most
people, no matter how much I try to cull them I end up with too many items in
my list, more than I have time for.

Let's say it takes an average of 2.5 seconds to read a feed item subject line,
decide whether to read it[0], and nothing else - not opening or reading any
articles. In half an hour of concentration you could do that with ~700 feed
items - again, without reading one article. Let's call 700 feed items a
generous maximum; I doubt many will want to devote 30 minutes of their day
only to reviewing feed items.

I end up with far more than 700 and I know I'm not the only one. How can I
make it faster?

1\. Obviously, the UI must not slow me down in any way.

2\. Deduplication

3\. Grouping of feed items covering the same topic. There may be dozens of
items covering the march last weekend: If I don't want to read about it, I can
ignore them en masse. If I do want to read about it, I can select the best
looking feed item from the group and ignore the rest.

4\. Display summaries instead of articles, at least optionally. If an item
interests me, I can read the RSS summary and possibly save reading full
articles that don't interest me or for which the summary contains the info I
want.

... Is there a reader that does all that? Even if I have to pay for it? And
it's still not enough; I doubt I could efficiently process all the items using
only above. What else can be done?

[0] Source: I just timed myself doing that with 10 feed items in 26 seconds

~~~
cyberpip
The major feature here would be deduplication, in my opinion. That would be
hard to do though as it would have to parse the feed contents (which vary from
links to articles to full blow articles sometimes) and use some kind of
percentage to determine whether or not it's a dupe? Curious if there is a
smarter solution to that feature possibility.

~~~
forapurpose
> use some kind of percentage to determine whether or not it's a dupe

That's the problem I intended to solve by 'grouping', as I called it: Don't
delete the similar items, but group them together (see my GP comment regarding
the functionality).

Also, it might not be as hard as it seems with this data. There would be maybe
thousands of records (though you'd want it to scale higher); how many would
have the same sets of proper nouns, for example, and not be about the same
topic?

------
bad_user
I never stopped using an RSS reader, or writing on my own blog, hosted on my
setup, with my domain for that matter.

For its purpose an RSS reader is a much better experience than everything
else.

The only thing that comes close is Twitter, but it’s too noisy, you can lose
really good, but less popular articles, between all the other shit happening
on Twitter. It’s also addictive and time consuming.

Sure, go back to RSS, but some of us never left it and we’ve been enjoying it.

------
z3t4
My phone, an old Nokia, has a built in RSS reader and when I visit a web site
that has RSS I get a "follow" button next to favorite. I can even set the RSS
reader to show me a notification when there's an update. The same convenience
could probably be accomplished with a browser extension or native app.

~~~
sametmax
Firefox does this, albeit in a more subtile and hence less discoverable way.

------
zsau
If you already use an email client and have a place to run cron jobs, I highly
recommend a feed->email converter. No need for a separate RSS reader, and you
get cross-device syncing for free. Options include feed2email[1],
feed2imap[2], and my own feedmail[3] (just "released", but I've been using it
for years). I prefer clients like the latter two that can upload via IMAP,
since that gives better control than sending via SMTP.

[1] [https://github.com/agorf/feed2email](https://github.com/agorf/feed2email)

[2]
[https://github.com/feed2imap/feed2imap](https://github.com/feed2imap/feed2imap)

[3] [https://github.com/zsau/feedmail](https://github.com/zsau/feedmail)

~~~
FranOntanaya
Thunderbird already supports feeds.

~~~
8bitsrule
And for anyone who still thinks that the T-bird project died long ago, look
again ... it's been greatly improved for the past few years and an interface
overhaul is in the works.

I don't subscribe to any podcasts that don't support RSS. Most do (altho a few
make you use a search-engine to find out where).

------
shortformblog
I support this, but I think that RSS services for publishers need to be a part
of this conversation, too. I wrote a piece a while back about how FeedBurner
has basically been allowed to survive in zombie form at Google—with literally
no improvements since at least 2011.

[https://tedium.co/2017/11/14/google-feedburner-rss-
history/](https://tedium.co/2017/11/14/google-feedburner-rss-history/)

There are alternatives to FeedBurner that are quite good (I personally use
FeedPress) but I think that if RSS is going to get any momentum back, we need
more people making these tools again. The emergence of JSON as an alternative
to RSS is a real opportunity here.

(Side note: Was a long-term Digg Reader user, so its loss was felt. I found
FeedBin a decent alternative for my needs, FWIW.)

~~~
maximevalette
I'm the CEO of FeedPress, thanks for your support!

BTW we're supporting JSON feeds since the 1.0 release:
[https://feed.tedium.co/?format=json](https://feed.tedium.co/?format=json)

Cheers

------
dankohn1
I describe myself as the last "old" using RSS because after Google Reader went
away, I found Inoreader. It's a clone, with tons more filtering features and
(importantly) the ability to follow Twitter feeds and searches as well.

I recently discovered HN RSS, which is awesome for showing comments:
[https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=kubernetes+OR+k8s](https://hnrss.org/newcomments?q=kubernetes+OR+k8s)

And here's the trick for seeing all new tweets with relevant hashtags but not
retweets:
[https://twitter.com/search?q=%23kubecon+OR+%23cloudnativecon...](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23kubecon+OR+%23cloudnativecon+exclude%3Aretweets)

~~~
ukyrgf
I don't know why I ever stopped using Inoreader in favor of Feedly. Feedly's
Android app is atrocious and I can't open links in Android Chrome using
feedly.com, which just made me stop using RSS altogether. It wasn't broken in
the first place, I have no idea why I meddled with it.

~~~
dankohn1
I prefer using Inoreader's mobile website to their iPhone app, since it opens
links in my regular browser.

------
imartin2k
RSS has been the backbone of my online information management and news
consumption since 2006 and it's still unrivaled. A web without is impossible
to imagine. In my eyes, Feedly has done a fairly good job at making the format
accessible even to average users.

------
jtanza
I decided to build my own RSS reader a few months back after getting into the
habit of consuming news via RSS, and not really being thrilled with any of the
readers out there. The source is open and can be pulled/built locally from
GitHub[0] or accessed at the public instance for free[1]. It also made it to
the front page of HN through a Shown HN post a while back, so at least a few
people here enjoyed it (:

[0] [https://github.com/jtanza/rufus](https://github.com/jtanza/rufus)

[1] [http://rufus.news](http://rufus.news)

------
daddosi
I role my own aggregator, its 1000 years ahead of the rest. Im only half
kidding.

Ill share my most recent idea: sort news items by the amount of time between
its pubdate and the previous pubdate in that feed. (Discard items older than x
where x is since last time you read the results, a fixed amount of time or
more if the number of "winning" results is insufficient.)

The idea is simple. That guy who never says anything. When he opens his mouth
it should be interesting to hear what comes out.

He will be delighted to have 1 reader. A much more enjoyable position than
listening to some screaming news anchor or other attention whore.

------
gbugniot
IMO, RSS is by far the best tool to get news content. Thanks to the ratio
signal/noise.

Problem is, how to convince website editors to promote theirs RSS feeds while
there are many social networks out there with built-in ads feature.

------
x0x
Comparison of feed aggregators on Wikipedia

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

------
seba_dos1
I'm using a self-hosted instance of CommaFeed and it's awesome. Simple, no
distractions, fast and reliable.

~~~
krn1p4n1c
This. Best reader I've found.

------
imagetic
Amen.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. But almost nobody is offering RSS
at the moment and most publishers who do drop the ball. Feeds are broken or
partial.

It might be time to start from scratch though, I'm not sure RSS is simple
enough for normal people. Podcast delivery format would be nice, where you
subscribe and discover from one aggregated portal and it's finding similar
content and making solid recommendations. Maybe inject some type of medium /
rank feature so you can track trending content and subscribe to channels of
what's popular.

~~~
tehwalrus
Podcasts _are_ RSS feeds aren't they?

~~~
grzm
Podcast feeds often are, though they can really be any web feed format[0].

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed#Confusion_between_web...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed#Confusion_between_web_feed_and_RSS)

~~~
adrianN
The RSS feed makes a podcast out of a bunch of audio content imho.

------
donpdonp
Also be able to consume activitypub feeds.
[http://activitypub.rocks/](http://activitypub.rocks/) supported by Mastodon
sites and others.

------
geraldbauer
Remember planets - public online news readers? Why not build your own little
news feed with pluto [1] (and SQLite) and the universal feedparser library [2]
supporting RSS, JSON Feed, Feed.TXT, HTML Microformat Feeds, and many more
formats :-). [1]
[https://github.com/feedreader](https://github.com/feedreader) [2]
[https://github.com/feedparser](https://github.com/feedparser)

------
synesso
I spend a lot of time in Slack during the day, so I decided it should become
my RSS reader. I created a dedicated team and used an RSS bot to subscribe. It
works really well.

------
cpeterso
RSS was not discoverable for non-techy users, in part because browser support
was clunky and publishers were reluctant to send readers away from their
websites (and ads). But these days publishers rely on Twitter and Facebook as
a "worse is better" method to syndicate links to their content. Twitter and
Facebook are discoverable and sharable.

I feel like there is some opportunity to create new personalized social
software or services using RSS in a post-Facebook world.

------
reggieband
Maybe MRSS has a chance. I am old enough to remember the first go around at
all this. I remember reading an article during the 1990s on O'Reilly about
RSS, semantic web, etc. I used to read Dave Winer's blog pretty regularly. I
remember being skeptical at the time and it turns out my skepticism was
prescient.

Nowadays it seems common to generate MRSS feeds for podcasts and video
playlists. Devices like Alexa, Google Home, etc. are taking advantage of this
format. Instead of it being used to "free-the-web" it is being used by content
aggregators to ease vendor lock-in. This lock-in could not be achieved with
textual content (where it is easy to write a competing application) but it can
be achieved with hardware devices.

I'm even more cynical now than I was in the 1990's. I do not see content
creators providing unfettered access to their content. The whole point of
vendor platforms like Facebook and newer devices like Alexa is that the
content is marshalled by the platform NOT the user. Content creators will give
that ground to another corporation that they can negotiate with but I don't
believe they will ever give it to users directly.

------
Abishek_Muthian
I always felt RSS/ATOM were underrated,

So in 2015 for the love of RSS and information consumption we set out to build
a completely customisable news aggregator app with fast parsing (RSS/ATOM),
category selection, reorder categories, notification customisation -(schedule,
DND), image toggle, data saving mode, filter, youtube, sharing news with own
voice attached called Talk about News -
[https://talkabout.co.in/](https://talkabout.co.in/)

Sharing news along with voice was the USP, so that the shared content gets
more value. While working on this, we saw that not every site followed
RSS/ATOM standards we had to individually handle different sites for the
shortcomings. I'm certain that, though Feedly started as RSS aggregator they
are now parsing the sites as a whole for content for the same reasons.

By the time we built and released it, we understood Facebook has become the
defacto news consumption source and without big marketing budget; our project
was dead as soon as it arrived. We tried to salvage the tech and re-brand it
as 'build your own app'for bloggers, but it didn't take off.

But we did take the voice sharing feature from TaN to another product called
larynx, as we understood the 'News' in the name of Talk about News was one of
the main inhibitors for downloads.

larynx (PH) -
[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/larynx](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/larynx)

Note: If any of you tried the app and if didn't work as expected; my apologies
as the app hasn't been actively developed for years now & the website exists
only for historical reasons.

~~~
imagetic
They were. It was just too complicated for people. I couldn't get my parents
to setup RSS. No way.

------
Digital-Citizen
The article asks if "anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you
see online" and then offers choices which are either hosted web services or
proprietary programs, both of which grant someone else the power to control
what you see via that reader. So even though standards everyone is free to
implement (RSS is certainly in that set) are critically important it's hard to
take some of the article seriously.

The real way to avoid the problem of non-freedom and deny the
admins/programmers the power to control your reading is to use free software
RSS feed readers instead of hosted services you don't host yourself or
proprietary programs. Choose RSS readers that respect a user's freedom to run,
inspect, share, and modify the program.
[https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Internet-
application...](https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Category/Internet-
application/newsreader) points to some.

------
sir_brickalot
I miss Sage++ (Higmmers Edition). [1]

Sidebar RSS reader for Firefox. It was perfect for my use case. (Now its dead
due to WebExtension)

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/sagepp-
higmmers-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/sagepp-higmmers-
edition/)

~~~
bostik
So do I, but I've discovered a reasonable replacement: Brief.[0]

0: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/brief/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
GB/firefox/addon/brief/)

~~~
sir_brickalot
I try to get along with Feedbro but its just not the same. [0]

[0]
[https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/feedbroreader/](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/feedbroreader/)

------
wybiral
I've been aggregating my news for my own use recently so I can keep a database
of articles and grab articles from more sources than just RSS (some are parsed
out of HTML).

The Python code for some of the sources is here:
[https://github.com/wybiral/stream-sources](https://github.com/wybiral/stream-
sources)

On my network there's a bunch of those stream sources feeding into a Golang
server that stores the articles and aggregates the ones I'm interested in for
real-time updates/alerts.

The nice thing is that I can attach temporary scrapers with alerts to monitor
status pages and other updates that don't use RSS or anything.

IMO WebSocket API's or streaming HTTP make more sense than RSS these days. But
RSS can easily be converted into a format like that if you store the recent
history and only push new content.

~~~
__bee
Generally speaking, is it legal storing RSS content (if the RSS contains the
article)

~~~
wybiral
It's for my own use.

Also I don't see why it would be any different than leaving it open in my
browser or something.

The articles here are mostly title, link, summary too. So not too unlike what
someone would share on social media or something.

------
andkon
I just remember the overwhelm: opening up Google Reader and forgetting what I
went there to do because there were so many unread things. I don’t think this
is endemic to a protocol, but the social filter on top of content is how I
find most of the things that I find useful and interesting today.

~~~
icebraining
I always found RSS/Atom most useful for following sources (usually personal
blogs and podcasts) that post infrequently, but where every post is worth
reading. Like Oona Räisänen's blog:
[http://www.windytan.com/](http://www.windytan.com/)

For sources that post a lot, it's less useful, since I can just visit every
couple of days and have stuff to read.

And this means one can easily keep up with the feeds.

~~~
randomsearch
How do you identify such sites?

~~~
icebraining
What do you mean by identify? Find them? Well, every way people find sites,
from websearches that hit on a good post, links from other such sites, link
aggregators, etc. I believe I got that one from Hackaday.

------
BuckRogers
I've been using the same method for about 16 years thanks to Firefox. RSS
toolbar feeds[0] have been supported since Firefox was in beta (Phoenix). I
never did use Google Reader, I viewed that as for the kids! Came and went and
I never paid any attention to it, didn't need it and I waited out its
existence apparently.

RSS toolbar feeds are also the reason I never switched to Chrome, ever. Google
never wanted anyone to have ad-free RSS feeds catch on when they could
potentially prevent a site visit.

For my iOS solution, I use Feedly by simply subscribing to the same sources as
I do in Firefox. Not much else is necessary. Other than picking up Feedly for
mobile, same tool all this time.

[0][https://i.imgur.com/6LTAie1.png](https://i.imgur.com/6LTAie1.png)

------
huy-nguyen
I subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds of more than 100 technical sites using Reeder,
hosted by Inoreader for free. Overall it’s been a great experience. The only
gripe I have is that many sites these days (especially small blogs) don’t have
an RSS feed or have one that isn’t discoverable.

------
geordee
True. RSS gives control over what and how we consume information. The curated
newsfeed is prone to gaming and misuse. In fact, we should be able to select
feeds, curation engines and reader apps. This way it would be less of a
"platform" and more of "www".

~~~
sdfmxiid1
The issue of control with newsfeeds and RSS has been on my mind a lot the last
year or so.

RSS and Atom are great as a protocol, but where things break down for me is in
discovery, filtering, and selection of content.

There's a few traditional RSS/Atom readers I like, because I have complete
control over the feeds I monitor. The problem with this is that then I have
complete control over the feeds, and have no way to be alerted to content I
might have otherwise missed. I think this is part of the "unread feed
overload" problem mentioned by some others, that I just a firehose of feeds at
me, with no prioritization of content.

The other end are more curated things, like Feedly. This is great, because I
get alerted to things that are popular, but they're very centralized, and it
seems like the more you get curation, the less often you're able to customize
your feeds. Also, for whatever reason, with the curated systems, it seems like
you kind of get the same things over and over again from different systems,
like there's a set of feeds they all dip into and don't deviate from.

This is my ideal in an RSS/Atom reader (not saying it's realistic):

1\. Open source

2\. Good UI

3\. Can import and export using OPML or other similar standard open format

4\. Cross-platform, between desktop and mobile

5\. Decentralized feed recommendation

The last part is where things go a little off the beaten path, which is that
it would be nice to have some way to get introduced to popular content without
it going through some centralized service, like a recommendation system that's
decentralized.

------
cmcginty
When did people stop using RSS? After Google Reader was available, I've never
looked back.

~~~
kzrdude
I would say that Reddit and hacker news are direct "competitors" to RSS
readers, it's a different kind of syndication flow that certainly replaced my
RSS Reader for me.

~~~
zworks
hm, I'm actually reading both HN and reddit through RSS right now, just add
.rss after any subreddit url and you are done:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/wtf/.rss](https://www.reddit.com/r/wtf/.rss)

------
murrayb
I went to Blogtrottr [https://blogtrottr.com/](https://blogtrottr.com/) when
Reader shut down. I have been very happy with it and it means one less place
to go look, my feeds just come to my inbox.

------
kabanossen
Here's a feed I made with pages that have reached number 1 on Hacker News:
[http://enklo.se/hackernews/best-of-hacker-
news.xml](http://enklo.se/hackernews/best-of-hacker-news.xml)

------
rcarmo
I’ve pretty settled on using Feedly and Reeder in iOS, even though I
experimented with RSS via IMAP[1] for a fairly long time.

I zip through 1000+ news items a day over breakfast in this way, and my only
real gripes are duplicated postings (which are usually best solved by careful
handpicking of news sources) and the lack of a decent backlog/archival feature
(I settled on Pocket for that).

On and off, I try to build my own “most relevant/trending/hot items” feed via
NLTK, but topics of interest vary too quickly in out industry for proper
training...

[1]: [https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap](https://github.com/rcarmo/rss2imap)

------
drdeadringer
I seem to have missed the "abandon all RSS" movement, which doesn't surprise
me. I am missing That One Puzzle Piece which enables me to understand why
people ditched RSS in the first place. I'd appreciate enlightenment.

~~~
alexandros
Google reader was introduced, made it look like it would be there forever and
cost nothing, which killed any alternatives. Then Google killed reader in
favor of Google+. At that point, there was no good reader, and even with not-
as-good alternatives like feedly, a lot of people didn't feel like setting
things up again. As a result, the whole ecosystem was knocked out of balance
and never recovered.

~~~
drdeadringer
> Google reader was introduced

Ah, a good point. This was a blip on my radar because, oddly, I had RSS and
wasn't as plugged into Google at that time as I am now [yet am still 'on' RSS
now more than ever].

------
wakkaflokka
I just started using Feedly again, but it looks like adding sub-Reddits is
broken - they don't get updated. Anybody know of a way to side-step this? Use
IFTTT to shoot new Reddit articles to an RSS feed that Feedly picks up?

------
tschellenbach
Version 2 of Winds (open source RSS/Podcast app) is coming out next month:
[https://github.com/getstream/winds](https://github.com/getstream/winds)

~~~
ausjke
looks good, will try

------
nicolaslem
I recently started using RSS again after a long break. Like many of you I
decided to build my own reader. Since RSS/Atom is quite easy to work with I
didn't take me long to get something usable.

I built a Python library[0] to parse feeds and a Django app using it[1]. It is
not ready for prime time yet, but I use it daily and like it.

[0] [https://github.com/NicolasLM/atoma](https://github.com/NicolasLM/atoma)

[1]
[https://github.com/NicolasLM/feedsubs](https://github.com/NicolasLM/feedsubs)

------
jasonkostempski
Multiple sources in one place, no new account, no giving away your email, no
re-skimming over read/skipped articles (across sorces if your reader is any
good), filters for known garbage (domains with pay/sign-up walls, blog spam,
etc.).

My frustration with YouTube subscription mechanics is what resparked my
interest in RSS years ago, that's when I found out most channels have a hidden
RSS feed. Reddit has them, but the way they're delivered makes them
difficult/impossible to filter. Most blogs have them, even if they don't
display a link.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This sort of thing makes me wonder .. well why are we on this proprietary site
here; why isn't the HN community using a decentralised sharing system?

------
jhund
Shameless plug: We created [https://contentgems.com](https://contentgems.com)
as a feed reader on steroids: You can follow feeds, however you can also
filter them based on powerful keyword based search (and other params). You can
follow the CG firehose (tens of thousands of feeds we follow and index for
you), to discover new feeds. And then you can curate and share the best
articles from CG. It's a mashup of Feedly, Google Alerts, Buffer, and
IFTTT/Zapier.

------
rhema
I've been slowly adding to my RSS feed since 2006. It's migrated from Google
Reader to "The Old Reader".

For some sources, it's the only way to keep up. I like that I can keep track
of web comics I'm interested in. For thinks like Medium and Wordpress, they
already have a feed reading compatible format.

I also add my Github, so I can see when other people commit to repositories in
my lab.

Feed reading is great because it allows one to lurk. It gives the consumer
more control over when to view material.

------
NicoJuicy
Not finished ( performance), but my personal bookmarking site ( like HN or
Reddit) supports the auto-download of Feeds and implements Tags through it (
RSS based).

[http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest](http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest)

For now, it's usefull for me personally, but it seriously needs a update.

It also supports url customizers ( eg. preventing paywalls from certain sites
to redirect through the facebook share url)

~~~
duiker101
Seems pretty dead. There's a timeout on the db.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Performance, it's probably syncing RSS feeds or too many people ( as
mentioned, need to improve it).

Seems to work fine though when i'm watching it:
[http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest](http://handlr.sapico.me/Home/Newest) but
a db timeout could be indeed.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Edit: made it 50% faster by now. Not enough though

------
braindongle
What is the best RSS reader that has a customizable tiled layout, like
[http://www.protopage.com/](http://www.protopage.com/)? By this I mean, I have
(nearly) the whole screen at my disposal, can choose the number of columns and
rows, and the height (number of article titles) for each tile/feed. For my
money, no other layout comes close in terms of information ingestion
efficiency.

------
sygma
I would argue that RSS survived because feeds are offered by default on
Wordpress blogs, and Wordpress powers a significant part of online publishing.
Luckily, Automattic isn’t the kind of company to pull off a Microsoft-style
“Embrace, extend, extinguish” [0]

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

------
borplk
The internet has become so hyper-commercialised that I don't think "innocent"
technologies like RSS/Atom are going to make a comeback.

------
kin
As a news publisher, wouldn't encouraging RSS hurt the value of my ad space?
What's the incentive? Would readers pay for access to an RSS feed?

~~~
allhailkatt
Premium RSS feeds are one option, as well as putting only a brief summary of
the article into the RSS with a link to the full site. The monetization model
will probably look similar to Twitter, except without needing to dodge
algorithmic uncertainty since RSS is a pure feed.

Plus, Outlook does have an RSS feed function. The incentive can be the same as
newsletter publication. It just depends on how you want to reach people.

------
wemdyjreichert
Ive used it a bit, but i havent found any solution that can store about half a
million aeticles without choking (even though my computer can handle it)

------
crispinb
Syndicated feeds (whether RSS or ATOM) are fabulous and are by far the best
way to aggregate a wide variety of sources with a minimum of corporate
surveillance. There aren't many that don't emit RSS/Atom or can't be coerced
in some way (even Twitter with services such as
[https://twitrss.me/](https://twitrss.me/))

------
Jaruzel
RSS is the prime way I consume my daily news, and has been for several years
now.

I even knocked up a rather lame online reader on a spare domain I had:
[https://www.weegeeks.com](https://www.weegeeks.com)

That way, regardless what machine I'm on, I can still get my fix. It needs a
re-write to bring it up to modern standards, but it still does a sterling job.

------
kevwil
This strikes a nerve, one still tender and stinging from Google's betrayal of
Reader users. Yes, still.

Things like Facebook's non-chronological feed algorithm still annoy me
greatly, and a good RSS/Atom aggregator would please me to no end. I switched
to Feedly but really need to take better control of my Internet news
consumption so I welcome a revival of RSS.

------
pinfeed
Interesting timing. I'm in the process of launching a privacy-first feed
reader with tight Pinboard integration. May add support for other services
eventually, but I love Pinboard. Lmk what you all think of the idea:
[https://www.pinfeed.net/](https://www.pinfeed.net/)

------
subroutine
This article comes just days after DIGG shut down their RSS reader. Sux, I
used it every day. Me and my OPML file are looking for a new home...

[https://digg.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360000678608](https://digg.zendesk.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360000678608)

~~~
kabes
I went from digg to feedly. It's almost the same experience.

~~~
subroutine
Per your suggestion I checked out feedly; i like it. Thanks!

------
chrisweekly
The focus here is on consumption, but IMHO it's also an ideal time to return
to decentralized publishing, too [blogs, personal ("vanity") websites, etc.].
Of course the two go hand-in-hand... but maybe instead of trying to replace FB
or Medium, it'd be better to take this alternate federated approach.

------
boterock
It's sad that no one has mentioned Pushbullet. Is a small app that notifies
you when things happen, and you can set it to notify RSS news, it also
integrates with IFTTT and has a bunch of other features. You should check it
out. Edit: It also has top HN, and it notifies when a story reaches 100 points
IIRC.

~~~
Tijdreiziger
A feed reader allows you to catch up on your feeds at a time that's convenient
to you (much like old-fashioned magazines), rather than pestering you every
time an article is published.

------
fatfox
[https://miniflux.net](https://miniflux.net) \- simple and self-hosted

------
cxromos
that's my ship on these vast oceans for 14 years now. every evening i open
(now a beautiful macos reeder app) and depart on sailing as i see fit and
where i want to. a treasure, rss feeds collected over the years, from compsc
and programming related things, STEM, liberal arts, and several mischiefs.

------
swlkr
Yes it is. I run some email newsletters and it’s kind of a pain to have
someone give you their email just to stay up to date without a third party
like twitter or Facebook, I like the idea of RSS feeds as a more direct way
for people to subscribe to updates without giving up their email

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

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

------
Alex3917
I implemented RSS on FWD:Everyone this past week (not deployed yet). It was
super easy, didn't take more than a couple hours, and only required two or
three extra lines of code for each endpoint.

I have no idea how much use it will get, but seemed like an important thing
to.

------
pvsukale3
I recently added RSS support to my sideproject blogging platform.

[https://stdlog.net/logs/show/stdlog-net-now-supports-rss-
fee...](https://stdlog.net/logs/show/stdlog-net-now-supports-rss-feeds-7693f1)

------
importantbrian
RSS never stopped being a thing for me. When Google Reader shut down, which I
still miss, I moved over to Digg Reader, and now that that is shutting down I
finally decided to try out Feedly which I like so far. I just like curating my
own content.

------
guybedo
i never thought it was time to give up on rss. Facebook has become a mess, and
never was a place to get news from.

After Google Reader was shutdown, i switched to Feedly, but was missing some
features, so i decided to build something that would be a cross over between a
regular RSS reader and a news aggregator like Google News. So now i can manage
my rss feeds, and check out the news in the world that don't show up in my
feeds. I also added automatic categorization, entity extraction, and will be
adding recommendations, filters, rules, etc...

If you want to give it a try and give me somme feedback, you're welcome :-)

[http://aktu.io](http://aktu.io)

------
timdeneau
I want to use RSS to increment unread content badges on my bookmark icons, to
show me so-and-so’s website added a new blog post since the last time I
visited. Implemented into the standard bookmark browser, no reader necessary.

Is this already a thing anywhere?

------
pers0n
Yes let Web 2.0s dream of open standards win over this world walled web we
have today

------
username223
It always has been. I've been a happy NetNewsWire user for well over a decade.
It even supports shell script feeds, so you can write scrapers for sites that
don't provide an RSS/ATOM feed themselves.

------
tjadowski
I use my own piece of software as RSS reader -
[https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder.git](https://github.com/tjadowski/rsspodder.git)

------
sbaha88
I've actually been working on RSS-like feed for newsletters website in my free
time. It's still soon to tell if it's useful, but I am slowly starting to
replace email subscriptions.

------
thinkloop
No voting, no comments. It's very tough trying to identify what's important,
and when you do, you want to talk about it. Should/can RSS be extended to
include voting and comments?

~~~
icebraining
Yeah, I think ActivityPub support could be nice.

------
p0nce
I've implemented RSS for my blog because its pull mode instead of push mode
(like god awful notifications everyone wants you to enable). I don't know if
anyone uses it though!

------
captn3m0
Does anyone know of something that could help maintain OPML files? I would
like to keep a long list of categorized RSS feeds in a simple YAML file and
generate a OPML feed out of that.

------
dirtylowprofile
Days ago I received an email from the makers of Airmail about their upcoming
RSS Reader app called Cappuccino and invited me to their beta app. It still
early but a promising app.

------
specto
Frustratingly, feeds are gone for such things as reviews on amazon, instagram
accounts, youtube, and other sites. It's dying because people don't use it
anymore.

------
bb101
I'd be bored out of my mind between sets at the gym if I didn't have my Feedly
RSS feeds and gReader Pro on my Android.

Facebook and Twitter are much poorer cousins in comparison.

------
katebrooks
I just started with RSS. It's good thing to hav them back.

------
kakarot
Set up a reader a few months ago, it's been nice.

I started on a python-based HTML scraper to summarize, tag, and prioritize
news articles but put it on hold to work on other things.

------
iuguy
> You've read your last complimentary article this month. > To read the full
> article, SUBSCRIBE NOW.

I'm surprised they haven't kicked off over my ad-blocker.

------
emodendroket
I really just want a local app for doing this that doesn't suck. Google Reader
really masterfully killed all the momentum behind local RSS clients, I guess.

~~~
Sylos
On what OS? And what are your criteria for "doesn't suck"?

~~~
emodendroket
Windows, and I guess what I mean is that I can generally read the articles
without having to open them in my Web browser (which something like
Thunderbird isn't really good for). If you have a recommendation I'd be happy
to take a look at it.

~~~
Sylos
That doesn't seem like too hard of a criterion to fulfill, but well, I'm
rather fond of QuiteRSS.

It has all of the options for automatic filtering and tagging, and its UI is
rather configurable, too. It's also open-source.

[https://quiterss.org/](https://quiterss.org/)

------
mike--
Another one -
[https://github.com/truerss/truerss](https://github.com/truerss/truerss)

------
chx
Problem is, Facebook for me is the tool to stay in touch with friends. Events
are organized on Facebook and I can't just drop FB because of this.

------
pjmlp
It never went away, my native client has always worked.

~~~
jobigoud
This so much. Never saw the appeal of web based readers. Been using a desktop
based newsfeed for more than a decade.

And since we are using it to have a more focused experience, less clutter,
etc. it seems logical to have it away from the browser where distractions are
just a click away.

------
alrs
bandsintown and bandcamp both ditched RSS only within the last year.

What were they thinking? Under no circumstances am I installing either of
their apps on my phone.

------
Mauricio_
I recommend blogtrottr for sending rss to your email. If you set a Gmail
filter you get pretty much the same experience you had with Google Reader.

------
blacklight
RSS have been my main source for consuming web content for the last 15 years.

Social feeds? Ads? Trackers? I don't know what you guys are talking about :)

------
DeepWorker
I just subscribe to the weekly newsletters of news websites/blogs I'm
interested in. Does RSS have any advantages over this?

------
knorker
I don't understand. If RSS went away, how did people read webcomics and stuff
like that?

~~~
icebraining
I assume Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, email subscriptions or simply visiting the
site regularly.

------
dcalixto1
RSS is the best source of getting information that i've experienced until now.

------
lousken
After reading just the title - it was never time to leave RSS in the first
place.

------
Havoc
RSS isn't conducive to advertising. That in itself makes it a non-starter

~~~
hnarn
What makes you say that? Text based advertising sure could be a part of RSS.

~~~
Havoc
>Text based advertising sure could be a part of RSS.

Nobody cares about text based adverts

------
IronCore864
What feeds have you bookmarked? Let's share some good ones shall we!

------
VirgilShelton
I never stopped using RSS !

------
wordpressdev
Most of the information I consume is through RSS. I use Feedly for that.

------
hopesthoughts
I never stopped using RSS. Currently between theoldreader and feedbin.

------
meganibla
If wired is saying it’s time for a revival it’s probably long overdue

------
ryanpcmcquen
What is a good open source RSS reader with Android and Linux support?

------
nasalgoat
I still read tonnes of RSS feeds, including HN. It never went away.

------
bartl
But Google News says "This RSS feed is deprecated"...?

------
spacemonkey92
If any one who doesn't like RSS like me but wish to get all their news
websites in one place, I made an app for that.
[https://7web.co](https://7web.co) Hope it helps someone.

------
sudhirkhanger
Do you read HN and Reddit in your RSS readers?

------
qwerty456127
Great idea. But why RSS when there is Atom?

------
SubiculumCode
Is there RSS used as a social platform?

------
noemit
Can we get Google Reader back?!?!?!

------
macmac
Never left.

------
arca_vorago
Yes and irc and usenet.

------
ashildr
Does anybody read Hacker News outside their RSS-Reader?

------
ant6n
Yes.

------
platz
Inoreader

------
tootie
RSS + AMP. Let's do it.

------
mikulabc
goodnews.click been around a while :)

------
hacknat
I never left.

------
amriksohata
Agreed!

------
jk2323
I never stopped using RSS. I follow a few hundred blogs (many of them have
only very very few posts. Rule of thumb: The lower the post frequency, the
higher the quality). I host my tinyRSS. I consider offering it to the public
for free.

Here is a good RSS feed for Hackernews:
[http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300](http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300)

Here is a service to convert a twitter feed to RSS (never really understood
twitter, sorry) Example
[http://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=Lsigurd](http://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=Lsigurd)

Here is a service to convert many RSSless websites to an RSS feed. Works soso.
[https://feedity.com/](https://feedity.com/)

EDIT: Hackernews RSS feed link was wrong

------
fwdpropaganda
Can anyone clarify to me: why do people use web RSS readers, as opposed to
local applications?

~~~
awiesenhofer
For me personally it's mainly about synchronisation. I use feedly on my phone,
tablet and laptop and never have to see or archive a story twice. Plus i can
star/save an interesting story on my laptop and read it on my phone later, say
while commuting.

~~~
icebraining
Same here, although I use a self-hosted TinyTinyRSS server rather than a
third-party service.

------
adamnemecek
it's hard for rss to compete with say reddit

~~~
cheschire
That’s sort of like saying it’s hard for a fast food delivery service to
compete with a fast food chain.

They’re complementary services, not competition. Reddit supports the RSS
standard.

------
ahmetsulek
Hello founder of Panda here, you can use
[http://usepanda.com](http://usepanda.com) to read RSS as well. Right now you
can add maximum 3 RSS feeds for free. With pro account you can add unlimited
feeds. (It's as low as $2.99 per month) We're planning to start a Patreon
campaign and our goal is to make all the premium features free for all the
users as we reach our goals on the platform. As soon as we reach $2000 we'll
make RSS feeds free for everyone. Hope you guys give it a try :)

