I think a lot of people think RSS is dead because they never see it promoted anywhere. Pretty much every web site has a row of social media icons, but hardly ever is there an RSS icon in the row, even if the web site supports it.
Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them.
Yesterday I stumbled across an app called Fraidy Cat, which is supposed to be a privacy-focused news ingester. I haven't done much with it yet, but I was surprised when I pasted in the URLs of several newspapers that I read, the program showed RSS feeds for all of them. None of the paper web sites have any mention of RSS at all.
The NYTimes is actually an example that undermines the ideals of RSS for the average web surfer who is not a tech geek.
The NYTimes RSS feeds are not full texts of the article such that a one can read the entire story within the comfort of the RSS reader. NYTimes only provides snippets and excerpts to bait people to click on to the real web page. For many normal people, this crippled functionality of article summaries in RSS is worthless to them.
Yes, many low-traffic WordPress sites still give RSS feeds of full text but that's not going to reverse the decline of RSS.
Again, I emphasize and concede that many hardcore web surfers (e.g. HN users in this thread) still find the limited RSS summaries useful because they don't have to "visit 100 websites" but that's not a problem the mass population has[0]. This "go-to-our-real-website-to-see-the-entire-article" amplifies the trend of RSS declining in popularity. If RSS is just "teasers", the typical web surfers would rather get their "aggregation" from Facebook or just use the NYTimes smartphone app which has enhanced rich content such as video, etc.
The publishers of popular mainstream websites simply don't have any economic incentive (i.e. ads) to give readers the full text in their RSS feeds.
I still contend that a bunch of RSS enthusiasts in this thread talking about how they use RSS doesn't answer actual the question the HN poster asked. The actual question is about mainstream trends and not about the habits of HN hardcore users. Take another look at the words used in the Ask HN question. HN users don't need to "hope" for a new web or smartphone RSS client. They're already using RSS right now!
[0] similar example previous comment from 9 years ago that makes a distinction between "normal mainstream" web surfers and hardcore RSS enthusiasts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707
So, I do find that behavior annoying, but I wouldn't call it worthless. I still get a list of articles that I can skim through fairly quickly, and, while one more click to get to the full article is a (very) mild inconvenience, it hardly eliminates the value of the RSS Feed.
It is admittedly more of an issue in airplanes. But I'm disinclined to throw out the baby over a few hours per year's worth of bathwater.
Well yes, of course you wouldn't! A techie HN discussion participant like you is not the demographic I was talking about when I qualified my sentence with "For many normal people, ..."
In the most complimentary way I can convey it, you are example of "not normal" in the context of dealing with a higher threshold of pain regarding any RSS inconveniences.
Again to emphasize for productive discussion, a bunch of us HN geeks sharing anecdotes of how we're still using RSS in sophisticated and clever ways does not actually answer the OP's question.
When you use terms like "pain", that suggests that RSS is significantly worse than other options in this respect.
I'd argue that it's quite the opposite. Facebook always gives you a blurb. Twitter gives you no more than 280 characters minus the length of a link. Pinterest gives you a picture. RSS/Atom remains the only option where it's at all common to get the whole article without clicking a link and taking a shotgun blast of JavaScript to the face.
>When you use terms like "pain", that suggests that RSS is significantly worse than other options in this respect.
Sorry for not being clear. The "pain" of RSS or "pain" of Facebook/Twitter is multi-dimensional and so it's not just comparing 1-for-1 annoyances such as "extra click to get to the real publisher website" being equivalent with RSS vs Facebook.
>RSS/Atom remains the only option where it's at all common to get the whole article without clicking a link and taking a shotgun blast of JavaScript to the face.
Yes that's true but the other "pain" that normal mainstream users don't want to deal with is setting up a separate RSS reader/app. They already have Facebook loaded because that's where there friends are. They also don't want the pain of finding relevant RSS feeds and curating them. Facebook already gives them suggested articles passively. And it's irrelevant if Facebook's newsfeed algorithm is bad; the selling point is that it's passive and automatic and the typical non-HN user doesn't have to bother configuring anything. So for normal typical websurfers, RSS theoretically is a solution for news aggregation, but it also creates new problems they don't want to deal with. Yes, HN techies are happy to fine-tune RSS feeds; but regular users have no interest in that.
And if you want to mention how RSS is the option that sometimes provides full text, you also have to be fair and mention that the real websites are the option that sometimes provides video. A lot of normal mainstream web surfers love rich content like video for consuming news.
Again, I keep trying to focus the discussion on the mass psychology and habits of non-HN mainstream users but people keep talking about the benefits that HN techies enjoy. We are already in this HN forum and already know what the benefits of RSS are. Thus, it doesn't actually add productive discussion to the OP's actual question.
There are ways around this. I use ttrss and it has the option to fetch the actual page and replace the RSS content with it. It has a few bugs with formatting and such on some sites, but generally works well. There is a built in Readability plugin for it, but I also use a plugin called Mercury full text for some feeds that don't play nicely with Readability.
Mercury works better than Readability usually, but the downside is that Mercury uses a third party to process it, whereas Readability is all local. So some sites will block Mercury from accessing it, because it's seen as a bot (Forbes does this, as do a few other sites).
This combo works great for reading entirely in your RSS reader. I use my phone to download my feeds for offline before flights, so I can read the actual content as well without an Internet connection (assuming it doesn't have formatting errors).
I use feedly myself which pulls in articles via RSS. I even got into this thread with an RSS link. Frankly, it's a great resource to keep up with different blogs and sites without having them all live in your bookmarks bar.
I put together a list of popular US newspapers with RSS feeds in OPML format a few years ago. I haven't checked to see if any of them have gone dead yet though. https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml
might be useful for people trying to start a collection of feeds
I had a few emails recently asking if my site had an RSS feed. I have never used RSS and had no idea. Went into Squarespace settings, messed around for 2 mins, it gave me a button and set it all up for me. Honestly I thought it was already dead until I had those emails come in...
When sending such emails I always include a tiny example of a minimum item rss feed. "If you take whatever code you have that spits out text files that are html documents it shouldn't take long to have it spit out text files that are rss feeds."
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>hacker news</title>
<link>https://news.ycombinator.com</link>
<description>Description of website</description>
<item>
<title>newest article title</title>
<link>https:// link to article</link>
<description>first few lines of article</description>
<pubDate>Publication timestamp according to RFC 822 like: Thu, 1 Apr 2060</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>slightly older article title</title>
<link>https:// link to article</link>
<description>first few lines of article</description>
<pubDate>Date</pubDate>
</item>
<!-- and any number of extra <item>'s here. -->
</channel>
</rss>
Then include this some place in the head of the index for auto discovery.
The number of items suggested in the email should depend on the type of website. If it is a news website 1 day should be fine. A busy forum the most recent 20 or 30 items. Be biased about it :0)
There is lots more to know about feeds but the above is really all they need to use it. Things like, pubDate is not required but a feed without it isn't worth much. RSS aggregators should accept RFC 822 dates with 2 year digits. They don't have to know that. Such details only make implementation less likely.
Ooh, i stumbled across this one site that I wanted to add to my feed reader, didn't find <link rel="alternative"> tags in the header, but a <link rel="https://api.w.org/"> tag. I'm not sure it is their intention to open up the WordPress back-end, but I found how to get the list of articles from it, so added support for it to my own feed-reader: https://github.com/stijnsanders/feeder#feeder
One of the early advantages of Wordpress was precisely its excellent support of all formats of feeds out of the box, back in the hot days of the Rss/Atom feud.
New York Times actually has a page listing all their feeds, and updates that page as they change sections. There’s a lot of overlap, of course, natural for a site of their size.
Opened this post using RSS in Inoreader. All my news comes via RSS. I use it for news sites, I use it for Medium and I also use it for Reddit. The nice thing about it, is that everything stays in one place, categorized and I can see unread counts. Especially useful while checking reddit feeds. There's no infinite scroll and I can clearly see/mark what's been read and what's not. I can come back later and continue from where I left or review my favorites. If the site does not have RSS, or I can't make it appear in Inoreader - most likely I won't be visiting it again, or at least not scrolling daily. RSS gives you freedom and saves you a lot of time.
By asking the question using the word "dead"[0] which has such offensive connotations, it will spur some to say "it's not dead" -- which isn't really going to be productive for what I think you're really asking.
First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because somebody somewhere will always be providing it and somebody somewhere will always be consuming it. Just like horse & buggies are not truly "dead" because a few are being run for tourists and the Amish communities, there are some old dialup BBS's serving callers with old modems even though the internet+web has supplanted it.
I think the longer form of your question for productive discussion is this: Is RSS usage decline possible to reverse with new clients on the web & mobile?
The answer is no. RSS/NNTP/IRC don't have the incentives (both economic and social) that allow them to experience a renaissance. E.g. StackOverflow may someday be supplanted by another Q&A site but it won't be supplanted by NNTP news forums. Same with RSS. Typical mass consumers use Facebook as their "rss" reader. It won't matter what kind of new RSS reader you develop, the typical web surfers don't want to manage RSS feeds.
[0] to the replies below about why "dead" often triggers unproductive arguments:
In observing decades of debates on USENET,BBSs,web, etc... the word "dead" has 2 very different meanings which needlessly causes participants to talk right past each other.
meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.
meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
The amazing phenomenon that happens with asking "Is X Dead?" is that the question asker is almost always innocently using meaning #1 but the most enthusiastic answerers are using meaning #2. This is why "dead" triggers unproductive threads because both sides are talking past each other with different semantics of "dead".
RSS does play a growing role in a few places: podcasts [1] and virtual assistant apps (e.g. Alexa [2], Google Home[3], etc.) Although in both cases consumers do not tend to have direct access to it.
I'm not sure its role is growing. I fret a bit about Spotify and Stitcher becoming the defacto place to discover and consume podcasts, because podcasts seem to be the last bastion of steady RSS usage.
If some site chirps 'listen to our podcast', I'll have a look for acceptable (e.g. no password) feed URLs. If they don't make one obvious, they've lost their chance. Generally, IME those worth downloading offer RSS.
While I agree with everything you wrote, I think it is fair to add that an eventual demise does not mean it is quite dead yet, especially among the HN audience. I use RSS to follow a number of blogs and I know that a lot of other nerds follow some of my stuff using the RSS feed. It works just fine and until it gets replaced, a new client might receive a warm welcome by this large-in-absolute-numbers audience.
> meaning #1: "dead" is harmless synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.
> meaning #2: "dead" is provocative synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.
IMO if you can identify two major audiences who will have two different interpretations for your statements, then both interpretations are simultaneously "live" for your context. It is for that reason that Group #2 should always rise to the defense of a technology they don't want derided as terribly useless. It doesn't matter if Group #1 meant something else, because they weren't in full control of their meaning as they spoke into a larger audience.
This is a really great answer and analysis. By my rough estimate 90% of internet arguments boil down to people using different definitions of the same word and talking past each other.
I don't think you can meaningfully talk about this without distinguishing between user facing applications and server to server aggregation.
RSS/Atom serves a purpose in federation of content that is not necessarily visible to people so much any more.
We spoke about RSS and Atom more before in part because it wasn't ubiquitous, but today it's almost hard to find a blogging platform or CMS that is post oriented that doesn't expose feed endpoints by default - I have a hobby project that relies on feeds to aggregate content, and the proportion of sites I've wanted to add that has lacked feed is miniscule. It's become boring plumbing.
At the same time we have gotten more ways of consuming aggregated content. Some uses feeds, some rely on social aggregation. Combined that may have reduced the number proportion of users that run apps that hit feeds direction rather than seeing the content elsewhere. That's fine. But at the same time my impression at least is that a large proportion of clients accessing feeds are doing it on behalf of services rather than end users.
I don't think the word itself is what's offensive; rather it's connecting it to a particular thing which some people cherish. If I'm a fan of ska music and active in that scene, I'm obviously going to take umbrage with "ska is dead", even if it's vastly less popular than its apex. And "dead" is clearly an exaggerated euphemism in the vast majority of cases: even "Latin is a dead language" isn't strictly true.
"Dead" may not be intrinsically offensive, but in practice "X is dead" is at least triggering (by the casual/mild definition of the term). :)
I think what's really prevented RSS from recovering after the death of Google Reader is the cultural shift toward content farms. Most news sites have started to publish as many articles as possible to drive as much ad revenue as possible; unfortunately, most RSS platforms still treat every entry in a feed as equally important as another. IOW, if you add something like Engadget to your feed reader, be prepared to be flooded by nothing but their content.
This is what Facebook and Twitter are good at and why people are choosing it for consuming news: they recommend relevant content. If feed readers are to take off today, I think figuring out a way to promote posts from my feeds that I'd find relevant is key; this sounds like something Fever[1] was good at, although I was never interested in self-hosting it.
Sidenote: it seems like an obvious play for Facebook/Twitter to add a toggle to filter their algorithmic feeds to just news to become a hub for personalized information.
In a certain sense Google Reader killed a lot of RSS feeds and users because it was an excellent passive content distribution platform which hurts the ad revenue stream f Google. Google requires maximal active engagement of people. If people start getting stuff news etc passively why would people go to the default search engine?
The fact that 2/3rd of the answers - so far - to your post seems to completely miss the point and some are even back to arguing about the definition of `dead` or RSS's relevance as a tech running thing in the background is... depressing.
"Unproductive for discussion", then. Calling RSS "dead" will offend people who are partial to it, because there are fanboys everywhere, and that's not going to lead to a particularly useful discussion.
Normally, I'd agree with you - however, my org just had some minor drama over someone attempting to classify a certain piece of tech as "dead". The people who were invested in that tech were riled up.
It's difficult to know with certainty the motivations and emotional attachments people on either side of a debate will have, so it's sometimes easier to avoid some of the more "loaded" words.
Asking if something is "dead" generally offends people passionate about that thing, as to them it's obviously not dead, which makes them passionately defend that it's NOT "dead".
For my part I'm currently building and updating a feedreader / feedparser kit that lets you build a newsfeed in minutes [1] or use a ready-made client such as rubynews [2]
RSS the protocol, or RSS the experience?
The Protocol is alive and kicking, as far as being available, but it's been more or less killed by publishers not promoting it out of the box. AFAIK ad revenue is basically the reason.
The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.
Inoreader just rolled out a new feature that allows you to subscribe to newsletters directly in their reader and have them available with the rest of your feeds.
Have you heard of podcasts? They're booming and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.
The podcast industry might be booming, but the days of nearly every podcast being freely available with an RSS feed is certainly over. Granted this is mostly a business decision rather than a technical decision. Companies like Spotify want you to listen to their podcasts on their platform. This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.
> This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.
It's not just better ad statistics -- with apps like Stitcher/Spotify, the app contains both discovery and download, and also the player. When you listen to podcasts on their apps, they're able to report useful, interesting metrics to podcast producers like skip rate, bounce rate, etc. They're valuable metrics.
As far as I know, podcasts that are distributed by RSS and consumed by the apple podcasts app / any other app don't gather these metrics. There's no reason they couldn't though, because RSS / Atom have plenty of flexibility to add a field for a metric reporting callback/webhook. We could have an open convention for what goes over that webhook, maybe even some competition in providing podcast playback metrics as a service.
(... does this all exist already and I'm just behind the times?)
There are plenty of 'open' standards[0] for webhooking and reporting ads, however there isn't much client support. As far as listening metrics go, Apple has implemented non intrusive podcast analytics already[1].
Podcasts work really well as is. They don't need fixing. Barrier to entries are low, and like the early days of youtube, you can have a successful podcast with a relatively low production value. They are published openly, monetizing gets easier with some traction. There is so much cross promotion that discoverability isn't a challenge either. I just hope the 'open podcast ecosystem' can resist attempts to be destroyed by Spotify/Luminary etc. This happy medium doesn't need personalized targeted advertising.
You are correct and that data certainly has other uses that can benefit content creators. However let's be honest, the primary reason for gathering those statistics is to leverage them for ads.
They're funding podcasts on the condition they are Spotify-exclusive. It's not about if you enjoy it or not, but just that you need to use Spotify to listen to a particular podcaast.
I'm in the strong belief if your podcast doesn't have a public feed (even if it's paywalled) and it's only on spotify then it's not a podcast, it's a very long unmelodic song. The feed is essential.
iTunes hasn't tried to "fix" it. iTunes runs a podcast directory for discovering podcasts, but it still uses the podcaster's feeds to actually deliver episodes. The API for the directory is public, so any podcatcher can use it for their search functionality.
I have quite a few websites in my RSS Reader (I love TinyTinyRSS) and over the last 2-3 years I've seen probably ~10 sites get "makeovers" and every time, the RSS feed I was using for those sites has gone away/broken.
Each time I've emailed them to ask "Oh hey are you going to bring back RSS" and of the ~4 that replied, 1 bought it back ~3 months later, the other 3 said "Nope, no one uses it" and the others didn't even reply.
So yes, it's on a steep decline I'd say. I love the "But Podcasts use it" argument! There's what, ~100 major podcast sites people use? Yes, RSS is the backend workhorse that makes it work, but the podcast(content) producers aren't using RSS, they'll be uploading their content to a website. RSS is just the backend magic that makes the podcast clients work.
RSS at most sites seems to suffer bitrot. Sometimes the RSS URL is still http when the site has moved to https etc etc.
It's sad to see the decline of it, because an RSS Reader really is a beautiful thing. But yes, RSS as a way to exposing content to people is dying and used by only a very few hardcore "oldschool" people these days I'd suggest.
According to my httpd logs, between 50 and 100 people[1] are fetching my (not particularly popular) blog via RSS daily. That's enough people for it to be (personally) worth ensuring that RSS continues to function.
Whether that meets the standard of being "alive" is probably a community judgement.
[1]: The exact number is hard to get, since a lot of feed hits are for RSS services and not all of them announce their subscriber count in their user agent.
Unless you are using a not-podcast player like Spotify or whatever Google has that hosts podcasts themselves instead of just using RSS and letting the player download from the content providers server.
The industry's seeming loss of interest in RSS as a technology does have me wondering, is there a replacement for podcasts? Are podcasts migrating away from RSS as their primary distribution concern? If there is a replacement, is it platform-independent like RSS or does it hinge on a single company like Apple?
I think podcasters generally only care about RSS because it's how to get into the Apple Podcasts app.
There are many hosting companies that will create friction and pain if a consumption platform attempts to vertically integrate and eliminate the idea that you can publish a podcast on any web server, but we're already in a world where some of the consumption platforms have distinct flavors of RSS published especially for them.
Not hard to imagine one of them offering better support if you use a more custom integration, which it's not impossible to imagine major hosting providers building.
Newsblur is my Internet's start page. We use MS Teams at work and I have noticed that coworkers have setup RSS subscription channels to follow businesses, etc.
I use hidden RSS feeds on many websites (/feed on Wordpress for example), it is a shame they are not visible.
Thanks for mentioning this. I dug up my old NewsBlur account and it's pretty slick. I had a lot of issues with Feedly and other aggregators. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of the sites I visit have RSS feeds still.
Firstly - call out to Dave Winer - his work on outliners and RSS have both proven incredible useful, influential and long lasting.
Is RSS dead? No not by a long shot. Is it as visible as it was in bloggings early days nearly 20 years ago when the spec had been written (2002) and the orange logo was displayed on websites - certainly not.
I think the question needs context - Are you aiming to use it to syndicate content and expect an audience boost because your using RSS- then unlikely - but thats more to do with the state of blogging and syndication in general versus alternative publishing platforms such as facebook and medium.
Are you looking to use it for a syndication standard to base an implementation on for an app or tooling? If the later then you will find RSS has proven itself a rather nice spec that is utterly boring and stable - which is exactly what you want. It is not sexy, nor is it fashionable but it can be foundational - you can build on it and it does what the spec says. No one is likely to applaud your choice - its an old format but a goodie and if you coose to build on it for what its designed for then your likely to get the job done. If you dont like XML and prefer JSON - Manton Reece and Brent Simmons' JSONFeed also does a great job.
Thanks for start.me. I just registered. I forgot these kind of portals still exist. I used to have netvibes.com but for some reason I stopped using it. I will give another try with Start.me.
Recently switched to FreshRSS (from tt-rss), running on my own system. I very much prefer sites that provide an RSS feed, or that can be made to have one with something like RSS-Bridge.
Every morning at 6am a script wakes up on my PC gets HN's RSS feed (plus a few others), bundles them all up as a nice html list and sends it as a single email to my inbox.
To the average consumer: yes. Why? Almost all news sites, blogs, journalists, etc. use Facebook pages and other social media as "RSS feeds" for their own websites. When people "like" a Facebook page or "follow" a Twitter account, they are basically adding that outlet to their RSS feed. And when they scroll through Facebook or Twitter, they are consuming that feed.
Social media has replaced RSS feeds for the vast majority of people. They tailor their feed by choosing who to follow and which pages to like, and the writers / media producers ensure that new content is automatically cross posted to their social media accounts so that it appears in people's feeds.
For tech people / people that read more niche sites, RSS is useful, but RSS will never become mainstream or widely adopted given the already widespread adoption of other Internet feeds such as social media platforms.
We’re working full time on https://feeder.co and growing MRR every month. Does the average consumer know what RSS is? No. Will it become the next Twitter anytime soon? Probably not. Is there a need for managing news outside of your e-mail inbox, our usage data definitely shows yes. Is the market ultra saturated? You betcha!
That said we’re eager to help grow the space. Would love to know if HN has any ideas or feedback on this.
I love RSS, using IFTTT tools, I can automate and share different feeds to other different sites, populating and share information from static portals. I can even make RSS feeds from sites that dont offer native RSS.
Many different sites offer RSS feeds, many people dont even know they exist unless they are webmasters or advanced users.
Podcasts are based around RSS feeds, even youtube offers RSS feeds. This really is a powerful tool that is all over that you can use to build core infrastructure for social media and knowledge bases. You would be surprised how many backends of websites uses RSS to spread links around the Internet.
Nobody saw anything wrong in RSS until Google Reader came along, then everyone started using the reader, then content creators realized that GR is stealing thunder and started dropping RSS, and then GR died and we ended up with no Reader and no RSS.
It's certainly not dead, but it's not as popular as it used to be.
I used Live Bookmarks (powered by RSS) to get to this post. I hope not!
I have a pet pipe dream that once symmetric upload/download is a thing vs. ADSL (whether FTTH or 5G effects this, I dare not speculate) in 10-20 years, mesh networks and fediverse style stuff will have their greatest opportunity in years to leverage open protocols like RSS, Delta.Chat's chatting over autocrypt-encrypted emails, chat-over-Wifi-SSID and more to split open the walled gardens that people are in mainly because of their network effects and lack of a convenient alternative.
I think there is hope. Ask sites for RSS feeds (especially podcasts, which often forget to link to the RSS feeds). Build interesting new things with it that inspire other people to build things with it. Convince browsers to make RSS friendlier. Mozilla should have Firefox at least tell people what do with RSS when they click the button instead of downloading a raw XML file: "you clicked an RSS feed -- would you like to download this extension to read it?"
I have used RSS daily for longer than I can accurately say. Since at least when Opera had a built in RSS client. When Google Reader died I switched to https://g2reader.com and have been using that daily since.
I don't know how younger people do it but I can't see any other way to get my preferred news in one organized headline only in an outline-like place. Maybe I am just old school but I really like RSS as I am able to get through headlines from tech, finance, etc on daily basis and go through them quickly. Anything that pikes my interest I click on the headline and it takes me to the site to read whole article. One of my favorite things to do while winding down in bed.
RSS though is like a foreign language to the under 35 crowd when I have brought it up or they have seen me using it. So it is already dead in that sense. They just prefer to get their news through Instagram/Facebook feeds or just visiting their few preferred websites directly.
Google Reader literally killed all Web and Clients side RSS development. It make sense it lives on the web rather than an App. And it was one of the best RSS Reader.
I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days, but I have been using Feedly since Reader discontinued. And as long as they keep their free tier I dont see myself stop using them.
I think most people who use RSS are nerds or geeks anyway. So in terms of usage it is very small in the world where we have 4 billion Smartphone users. And I dont even look for RSS icon in website. I just search it inside Feedly to see if they have it listed. And most of the time they do.
The problem with RSS is no one has figure out a sustainable business model or UX for the majority of the market.
Is Something "Dead" in tech often means something entirely different to its literal sense. What the precise word you are / may be looking for is declining.
> I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days
Reeder is the best RSS application I've seen. I sync it with Feedly on macOS and iOS. Vienna RSS is another solid (open source!) option on mac, although the UI isn't as nice as Reeder.
Linux users have FeedReader, which seems pretty great.
I haven't found a client I love on Windows. There's a lot of abandoned applications that look and feel a few decades old.
The model is to use RSS feed of intelligent stuff to drive folks to my revenue machine. Exactly what blogs do. You don't monitize the feed, it feeds the machine.
Like how, just recently, Tailwind leveraged is feed followers (but not on rss, on other streams) to $$$.
RSS, and other streams (your insta, Twitter, etc) monitize the same way.
RSS powers podcasts. 110+ feeds in my feed reader come from extremely diverse sources. It isn’t dead yet.
Spotify, iHeartRadio, and others want to wall off podcasts but their selection is still too limited. Frankly their apps frustrate me greatly. Trying to play things back on Xubuntu while writing is too much of a challenge compared to pairing gPodder & VLC.
I have a blog and a newsletter that doesn’t duplicate the blog. Using TinyLetter forces me to shoot for long form pieces and to get them in good shape. I also end up approaching things in the newsletter that I don’t on my blog.
I can’t remember if the bot on Telegram is fed by RSS but that’s how I spotted this anyhow...
My feed reader app is my go to app when I'm bored. I will say its becoming less prominent. Half the time I want to add a site I have to guess where rss feed is generated since its less common to link to it. Apple makes the experience worse on iOS since rss link open in the News app but it doesn't support rss.
Some new sites don't have it at all, when https://www.thefarside.com/ came to life I didn't have a way to follow it until someone made feed based on scraping.
Most sites seem to have a sitemap for search, I wish my reader app could fall back to that.
RSS/Atom still has its place and for many is still the favorite way to subscribe to content on the internet. I built my own feed reader just a few months ago. On top of it I added a simple recommendation algorithm based on statistics of my reading behavior and article topics.
I prefer the simplicity and accessibility of RSS. The standard itself plays more or less a secondary role nowadays. The various feed readers building on top it are still innovating and still attract new users.
It takes like 20 seconds to add an Rss feed to whatever feed generator software you've been writing. For the love of God please take those 20 seconds to help people like us！
2 weeks ago, I released a Python package (700+ stars on GitHub) that "automagically scrapes" the last news from more than 3k news sources. You just have to provide the base form of URL.
Behind the package is just a list of websites and their RSS URLs.
For example, the input is "nytimes.com" and the output is all the latest news.
If the European countries want to see competition in social media they ought to require that platforms support open protocols such as RSS, XMPP, SIP, etc.
It drives me nuts that Facebook Messenger does exactly what Skype does, which does exactly what AIM did, which did exactly what ICQ did, etc.
None of these platforms get better, in fact, each one rots over time, driving people to whatever the next platform is -- people keep moving to escape the rot but they never get ahead.
It's a bit much to try to explain in the comments here - but I am glad to answer questions and hear from others who are trying this kind of thing. RSS isn't dead at all - in fact, I'm introducing some extensions for it next week.
I think I sort of take my internet access for granted. Because I never use RSS since at any time I can open a browser or an app and get the news.
Imo there are two uses for RSS. 1) People who still scroll through a digest of news at certain times in their day. I envy these people for their disciplined habits.
2) And having a service that syncs news to your device via RSS for when you're not online.
RSS is not dead, but it's not cool to ship RSS clients in new projects. It's consumed far and wide, both directly and indirectly from readers, leechers, and listeners; it's used inside products and projects ranging from enterprise to mom-and-pop shops.
Do I need a list? Nah. If I did, it'd be more telling about me than RSS anyways.
No, it's just unpopular with mainstream-users, and kinda dying for newssources. As a format there seems to be not much improvment done in the last decade, as an ecosystem there are always new clients and libs, but no innovation is done IMHO, it's always the same set of features being implemented. As a longtime user of at least 15+ years now I've seen some strong dying of feeds in the last years, To the point that I'm thinking now aboubt alternative ways to scrap data from my sources. I think most existing feeds are more a case of legacy code in popular frameworks. Also, there are many new sources growing which are build without RSS for commercial reasons. So having alternative source-scrapers is a neccessary anyway.
Using it daily… reading 300+ titles and around 50 full articles every day of the year… Definitely not dead for me. I can't even imagine how I'd read as much /interesting/ content in as little time without RSS.
No. I read HN through RSS, as well as around 200 other sites. I would never be bothered to check them all manually, and this affords me a much higher signal to noise ratio over a much shorter period of time.
Rss / Atom is not dead, but it has become part of B2B stacks rather than being a standalone B2C format. Considering it’s XML, it was somewhat naive (in retrospect) to hope for anything different.
Btw, Podcasting is an interesting window on what an XML-powered web might have been: a multitude of different specialised clients and semantic aggregators, consuming content in agnostic formats, with no dependency on a handful of big browsers. Like a 1955 illustration of “Tomorrow World”, it still looks like a nice future, even though we know it will probably never happen.
No, I use it every day. There isn't an alternative to subscribe to lots of feeds of specialist things. It's a great tool for anybody who needs to supplement regular journalistic output with
As to new clients, it's hard to say. Gnome RSS just became a thing (relatively recently, emphasis on relatively) and I love it. AntennaPod is great for podcast subscriptions and I find Feeder is perfectly adequate on mobile.
It is a specialist tool though. That's the thing. It means it is as likely to get a new set of shiny clients as say, IRC. Which is to say, probably not.
The reason RSS is not dead is because it is relatively free. The people who don't want it on their website remove the RSS button from their list of share-buttons. They have no clue that their website still supports it.
Example: Vice wrote an article titled "The rise and demise of RSS" (you can google it). Now go to their homepage, look at the page source, and there you go:
I wrote a fast feed aggregator a couple months ago. I’ve found I’ve read HN less because of it, and have read more of what I’m interested in. RSS feeds are fantastic, could still be improved though (eg pagination of feeds).
I do use Facebook to get at news but that's a feed someone else (well, an AI) curated for me.
Which is often useful but mostly I'd like to be the one who decides about the sources to check out. Then I turn to a feed reader. I would be driven insane if this technology were not at hand, aggregating a plethora of resources into a single comprehensive UI. I use the excellent Bazqux Reader for this (which in my opinion continues the legacy of Google Reader in the best way).
I am currently using Feedly with their recent "Leo" feature and it is really interesting how well it works.
It requires some setup and imho is a bit expensive (Pro+ plan required) but this announcement should give a good overview of its capabilities: https://blog.feedly.com/leo/
Innovation in the RSS space is still happening and therefore I wouldn't call it 'dead'.
RSS feeds aren't dead. On the contrary, their usage for content aggregation, media monitoring and podcasts has increased in the past few years, specially by power users (inforvores) and in the business world.
Speaking from my own experience running Feedity - https://feedity.com, a growing service that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.
Hey, I'm trying to revive it somewhat!
You Need Feeds is my attempt to create an explainer and RSS promo page.
(I admit the copy and design needs a refresh, and I still haven't done a proper Android page...)
https://www.youneedfeeds.com/
Suggestions welcome...
Feed reader support for JSONFeed (Brent Simmons and Manton Reece, jsonfeed.org) is quite unclear at the moment; maybe only iOS Reeder apart from NetNewsWire?
It's a pity, as Web feeds in JSON can be produced in a more ad-hoc fashion – an even more simple format with one entry per JSON feed line (admittedly with redundancy across lines) would have been great, too.
It's only dead insofar as most blogs don't have a decent RSS feed to begin with. I've scoured the web looking for high quality RSS feeds that are updated regularly, and have even shared an OPML file with close friends who happen to really like RSS too. The amount of effort was astonishing gathering those RSS feeds, but it was worth it.
Yes but not many of those are not updated regularly, and the content is sometimes very thin and not written well and doesn't have sources for various claims.
No, but if you look around Hackernews there are plenty of blogs that have a high quality RSS feed. I'm not sharing my own personal preferences on here with others for privacy reasons. By high quality, I mean the content is exceptional and not blogspam and the content is updated regularly. Bonus points if the RSS feed is not a list of 'summaries' and includes the full content of each post. Even more bonus points if the feed doesn't have ADs and 'share this on Facebook' links :)
The USGS offers a feed of earthquake activity, if you're in to that sort of thing. It can be quite chatty if you set the threshold too low but I'm only interested in 5+ and there are far fewer of those.
No, but I certainly don't find it as useful as it used to be. Used to be able to add newsfeeds to an RSS feeder and actually be able to read the news. Now the ticker is just the headline or one-to-two sentences, with a URL to the full article. Why bother with a bloody RSS feed if I'm gonna have to open my browser anyway?
For most sites, BazQux Reader (in my opinion, the absolute best RSS reader), can pull in the entire article even if the RSS feed only provides a headline or abbreviated version.
I use Feedly myself which pulls in articles via RSS. I even got into this thread with an RSS link. Frankly, it's a great resource to keep up with different blogs and sites without having them all live in your bookmarks bar.
No way! I use The Old Reader and it's a great way to kinda deal with FOMO; having feeds in one place from various outlets. It's only annoying when some news sites don't have RSS/Atom feeds.. meh
At my work we considered removing the RSS functionality, a quick analysis showed it fed a whole bunch of apps both internal and external. It's definitely alive and heavily used just not as much by humans
Keep in mind, the goal of RSS is and always was to serve as a sort of shim between the simplest, most static of websites (the ones that live an entirely-static life, which don't run code during the rendering lifecycle, and therefore which can't call out to tell anyone about their new content) and users (who want to receive a notification or message somehow anyway.)
RSS was largely supposed to be a hidden bit of infrastructure, allowing some intermediary (like an RSS-to-email-digest gateway, or a news aggregator service) to scrape the RSS feed and convert that into useful notifications/events/messages in some form. The idea was that you, as an author, would pick one of these services, set up an account with it, and point it at your RSS feed URL; and then you'd put a link to that service on your page, which your users could then subscribe to, in place of subscribing to your site itself. Just like a regular email-notification service, but with the webhook part "turned around" so that it's the service poking your server, rather than your server poking the service.
"RSS Readers" were never meant to happen; RSS was never meant to be used as a direct link between authors and users. If you think about it, such a direct M:N link is exactly the opposite of what an author with a simple static resource-constrained blog wants—their whole user-base would now constantly be polling their (or their ISP's) dinky little server! (But it's fine in practice, since we eventually got Cloudflare and PuSH.)
If you're a content author with a full-on web-app, you can call out (with webhooks, or messages in a message queue, or even API calls to a service like Sendgrid or Twilio), and so, for you, RSS is unnecessary. As we've seen higher-level PaaS-style personal web hosts like Netlify, Squarespace, and WordPress.com supplant the old-school Apache public_html/-style hosting, fewer and fewer authors have needed RSS, because they've had access to other methods to deliver notifications directly.
As well, microblogging (mostly in the form of posting links to your new blog posts on either a Twitter account, Facebook page, or subreddit dedicated to your blog) also take the place of notifications of new content on the blog, as well as providing the bonus feature of moving the "comments section" of your posts outside the blog itself, such that you no longer need to host or moderate it. Many people today combine a static-site-generator blog on S3/Github Pages/etc. (having no real "front page", only at most an "all posts" archive for web spiders) with an external, mostly-ephemeral social-network-microblog "index" of their blog.
RSS still exists for those authors who it serves, of course; but it's always been an author-side feature, and so, if you're seeing it less, it's because fewer authors need it.
(And, if this annoys you as a consumer-of-feeds, know that RSS is probably not the universal-notifications-infrastructure you want. Please don't write gateways that scrape pages and spit out RSS. If anything, emit emails. Mail readers are a strict superset of RSS readers, and usually do everything RSS readers do better than RSS readers do those things; but that's a topic for another post.)
I'd really prefer RSS instead of marketing emails I choose to opt in to. An email feels like a todo, a stressor! An RSS feed feels like a "to read at lesiure" stream.
I've given up RSS. Until the end of the year 2019 I still had a RSS.xml file which I updated by hand, but eventually I got too much work. The main reason was not that RSS is "dead" but the old and cumbersome syntax. I cannot get used to XML. Another reason is that browsers have started not to support RSS anymore. I have never used a reader, but rather read RSS in the browser than some kind of minimalist blog. It is difficult to say if RSS is dead, but I have the "subjective" feeling that less and less people implement RSS in their projects. In my opinion, RSS should be completely revised, not only in concept but also in syntax.
In my experience, the rss feed of so many blog sights is often so broken that it makes it challenging to use, and Soni abondon it every time I try to use it meaningfully.
I don't think RSS will ever die because it takes little to no effort for a content producer to provide it. It's as simple and straight forward as it gets.
I personally use RSS on my website as a way to automatically publish to various social media sites. It works great, and I don’t know what I would replace it with.
If anyone comes across a site witout an RSS feed, try Feed Creator - http://createfeed.fivefilters.org - It'll let you target a set of links or other HTML elements to be turned into a feed. (I developed this.)
It still exists but awareness that it exists is at an all time low with both users, web developers, and SEO specialists.
Valid reasons for continuing to invest in having this feature on your websites include better discoverability of your content by various content aggregators that still depend on this. In short, if you are running any kind of blog or news site, it probably helps you to have some RSS feeds but not not a lot.
But lets be real, a lot of RSS out there is just a side effect of many companies having used the same CMS for more than a decade. It's just something the CMS does by default. I stopped using feed readers some time after Google reader shut down. I used feedly and inoreader for a while but found myself opening that less and less over the years. I still have the bookmark but haven't looked at it in over a year and have not added any new feed in probably close to five years.
These days I depend on HN, twitter, and a few other social media accounts to discover content. I use but am increasingly unhappy with Google News; or rather what's left of it after Google's AI hipsters got their hands on it and turned into a clickbait aggregator to drive their ad revenue. Trump trump trump, more trump, did you know trump farted? etc. It's hopelessly biased to crap I definitely don't care about. All my attempts to nudge it away to more interesting stuff seem to be not working. I hope he loses the election; mainly it because it might clean up my news feed.
By chance I'm actually working on a project currently where I'm dealing with RSS feeds. A lot of feeds out there are actually shockingly bad in terms of content, usage of fields, etc. You get stupid things like brain-dead marketeers putting their company name in every title and description; people forgetting to add a timestamp. Or categories. Or an image. These things kind of matter if you want to aggregate and present content from multiple sources. Looking bad is never a good thing for any company whose primary business model is content distribution (i.e. major news papers and magazines).
Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them.
Yesterday I stumbled across an app called Fraidy Cat, which is supposed to be a privacy-focused news ingester. I haven't done much with it yet, but I was surprised when I pasted in the URLs of several newspapers that I read, the program showed RSS feeds for all of them. None of the paper web sites have any mention of RSS at all.
Edit: Even the New York Times has RSS:
Latest: https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml
New York: https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion
Technology: https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology
Science: https://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://w...