
Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence? - vfulco
I am considering offering some microservices for my job seeking clients whoh hire me for English resume editing, LinkedIn Profile enhancement and interview coaching.  Doing a decent search, seems the term is much more in the mainstream than in years past.  TIA.
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clintonb
I don't think RSS ever truly went away. Sure, Google ditched Reader, but (for
me, at least) Feedly and other services took its place. The millions of sites
running on WordPress have RSS enabled by default. Podcasts are distributed via
RSS.

Social media sites and smart news aggregators (e.g. Apple News) have failed to
replace RSS for me.

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upofadown
I think it is more a matter of; what else is there?

You want to follow an infrequently updated blog? You pretty much have to use
Atom/RSS. The fact that, say, Facebook has gotten super popular doesn't really
help. Facebook is the worst for infrequently updated stuff. It's mostly noise.

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Hedja
RSS/Atom is still used by most syndications. The average user may be unaware
of its existence but that same audience is similarly unaware of most
technologies that drive the web.

Other than the death of Google Reader, there hasn't been much of a change.

The only alternative to RSS right now (afaik) seems to be bespoke APIs and
<meta> which is a pain for publishers to maintain and for software to
syndicate.

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troylinn
Yeah I was myself surprised when recently I needed RSS feeds of a few
parameters and was pleasantly surprised to see them still inplemented even
with API’s on most of the sites.

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clintonb
We created an API at edX that is much more robust than our RSS feed. People
still use the RSS feed because it is much easier than (a) registering for API
credentials, (b) figuring out how OAuth works, and (c) learning what JSON is
and how to parse it. The simpler solution was good enough for many clients.

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Sevrene
When I used to use Google reader (RIP) almost every site that posted content
weekly had RSS. I personally haven't experienced any indication of a
resurgence of using RSS besides some obviously niche technical communities or
applications that are using it. Hardly a resurgence from my perspective,
though.

RSS is great when people need it and use it, but most 'normal' people don't
use it these days from what I can tell. Prove me wrong :)

~~~
clintonb
"Normal" people may not know it, but they use RSS when they download/subscribe
to podcasts.

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JamesLeonis
I'm an active RSS consumer. I use NewsBlur after Google Reader closed down. I
highly recommend it.

I found that RSS became an assumed protocol. It's so rare that RSS is missing
that it's absence makes me startlingly grumpy. Beyond content RSS is embedded
in many machine announcement services. I use Github's release feed for
Ethereum[1] to monitor updates, for example. One stellar feature of NewsBlur
is it's ability to find the feed address from a given URL, which makes
discovering feeds far easier.

For what it's worth, RSS and feeds have graduated from the Hype Curve into
widespread unobserved use.

EDIT: I forgot to mention my favorite Meta-Feed[2] for Clojure! It's all RSS
all the way down.

[1]: [https://github.com/ethereum/go-
ethereum/releases.atom](https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases.atom)

[2]: [http://planet.clojure.in/](http://planet.clojure.in/)

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mnzaki
Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience! A Feedly with
Friends! (does this already exist?)

Basically a follow-based social graph on top of the excellent feedly
experience. So there's a "Social" tab, a timeline of sorts, with things like:

"Your friend just read 'Some Cool Article Title' from 'That publication'"

"X commented on Y: ... "

"X1, X2, X3 subscribed to 'Some Publication Making The Rounds'"

Call it Socialfeeds or Feedbook or something. Bootstrap over twitter/fb social
graphs.

Back in the day of google reader I remember there were some basic social
features (hope these are not false memories...) and I actually really enjoyed
them because of course I want to discuss all the cool shit I'm reading with my
friends!

~~~
frumiousirc
> Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience! A Feedly with
> Friends! (does this already exist?)

NewsBlur resembles that description.

~~~
JamesLeonis
NewsBlur is my browser's home page. I was a refugee from Google Reader years
ago. It supports many of the former's features, is open source, and a SaaS pro
if you don't want to deal with self hosting.

But man, that's just a handful of it's features.

~~~
mnzaki
And it has a social feature, "blurblogs" on which you share articles. It's
quite great, just signed up :)

And it's open source!

Thanks for the tip frumiousirc!

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SyneRyder
I feel I've noticed an upswing in RSS recently, but I'm not sure if that's
because I'm looking for it.

A lot of people I follow on Twitter (and myself) seemed to quit Twitter around
November last year. Some of them went back to blogging instead, and some
others went to micro.blog, both of which use RSS as the syndication method.

Feedly also added keyword mute filters to their RSS readers late last year,
which I think might be helping adoption. (Lots of personal and news feeds
become more tolerable when you add a few political keywords to the mute list.)

But that said, most of the people I follow via RSS only have double digit RSS
subscribers. Those same people have/had 10x - 100x the followers on Twitter
and Medium.

~~~
t3h2mas
Thanks for sharing micro.blog. Recently I keep finding myself drawn to simple,
content first social network alternatives. I hope RSS stays strong. I also
hope scuttlebutt takes off, and gopher (protocol) makes a comeback.

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bmpafa
I evaluated using RSS for aggregating blogs for my graduate-school-aspirant
users / clients.

The challenges I faced were mostly b/c of poorly formed RSS feeds on blogs I
wanted to aggregate, but as someone who does a lot of web scraping, working
with RSS for this use case is a boon.

It sounds like we're in adjacent businesses & would love to learn more about
your use case, so feel free to shoot me a msg (brandon at admitbrain c0m).

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dchuk
I think because it's enabled by default with most publishing platforms/cms it
will naturally just stay alive into the future. It's a great medium in my
opinion, and I prefer to use my feed reader to keep up with sites I would
never normally visit on a whim.

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baltimorehacker
Even though Google ditched Reader, Google Alerts still offer a RSS delivery
option, which is extremely powerful when the alert is configured properly.

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Tomte
Is there even a local RSS reader anymore (except Thunderbird and Emacs maybe)?

All the readers I found when I was last looking were cloud-based.

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Something1234
Firefox has a built in reader of sorts. I forget the exact name but I think
it's called live bookmarks or something. I never really used it, but I know it
prompts me about it when I go to look at some rss url, because I'm trying to
scrape it.

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dundercoder
I hope so! I really do.

