RSS as a Facebook alternative is like suggesting a fresh caesar salad, a medium-rare steak tenderloin, and a glass of seven-year-old french cabernet as an alternative to some chunks of roof shingles and pond water.
Like… yeah, it's good, give it a try. Do recommend. four and a half out of five stars.
I don't understand why people use FB as a source of news and information. It's terrible at that. RSS is an excellent protocol for that, and has some really good tools.
What FB used to be good-ish at and is now mediocre at is being a social feed of friends and family. Dreamwidth is better at that than FB is, but FB's got the network effect of users already. Convincing people to switch is problematic.
RSS doesn't give you reliable access to first-hand accounts, citizen livestreams, the people and their groups directly involved in events, or a network of other observers actively searching for and sharing from sources you would otherwise never have heard from or of.
RSS brings you the publications you're aware of, and maybe a few bloggers with the time, money, and energy to maintain a blog.
I can't ask a journalist for more details or check their work. I don't know how well they translated the niche knowledge required to understand the story for public consumption.
Facebook comment sections can be a cesspool, but with groups you can usually find an actual subject matter expert who's engaged with what's happening and is engaging as an interested observer (not a preacher) that you can drop a line for more details.
RSS is about passive consumption. It has its place, but it can't replace the tools Facebook give (engaged) users to understand the world better.
This era is all about reshuffling the expert / data source distribution.
There used to be a semi static structure of vetted journalism who would bet their reputation on a certain amount of quality.. but now it's not enough and people have the tools so they DIY.. but in the end we'll all need a less random structure .. I think it's exhausting to always be worried about who is a real expert on the matter, are these real time events really what I think they are. New needs the old, old needs the new.
> I can't ask a journalist for more details or check their work. I don't know how well they translated the niche knowledge required to understand the story for public consumption.
I only follow outlets and journalists whose thoroughness and thoughtfulness I know and respect.
Following an RSS feed for a blog also means you can click into the links and see comment threads for any article, so it's not any different. And Google Reader (PBUH), had social tools integrated into it as well so it isn't even a foreign concept to RSS.
Almost everything on Facebook has a comment thread attached, in-app, with your friends' comments at the top.
People care as much about what the people they know think about something as what they themselves think about something.
RSS readers almost never inline comments/discussion, can't easily surface your closest friends' comments at the top, don't have a consistent interface for leaving comments on items, and don't notify you of replies.
RSS is inherently antisocial, like watching TV or reading the newspaper alone.
> Almost everything on Facebook has a comment thread attached, in-app, with your friends' comments at the top.
Two things about comment threads. Does everything have to have a comment thread? And this isn't just Facebook specific question, the vast majority of media sites put comment threads below their articles. Clearly, allowing user engagement at massive scales comes with a cost: moderation, disinformation, etc.
On Facebook, I can't choose to disable comments or likes on a per-post basis. They are always there, whether I like it or not. The only agency I have is to change the visibility of the entire post, and even that's not necessarily what I want.
I only post something on social media if I'm willing to engage with others. Comments are ephemeral and very much direct. They are specific writing format. There are times when I want to put something up but I'm not interested in this kind of direct and immediate feedback.
> RSS is inherently antisocial, like watching TV or reading the newspaper alone.
Newspapers, RSS and TV are only "anti-social" to the extent that don't get immediacy of giving feedback in the form of a comment or a like.
You are very much free to share and publish your own opinions about TV and newspapers via different channels. You could even write a reader letter to news outlets if you don't like what they publish. Or you could e-mail your opinions to friends and discuss them via a mailing list.
RSS itself doesn't give you that immediacy either. But you're very much free to make a post on your own blog, discussing someone else's content and have a discussion via RSS feeds and pingbacks. Back in the late 00's, during the heyday of blogs and RSS, that's exactly what happened for a brief while.
The main reasons why social media are popular is immediacy, visibility and short-lived. The massive downside of such communication is that it reduces the opportunity to reflect and make well-thought, nuanced arguments. While immediate communication has it's place, it's not healthy to have that as your only type of communication or learning about the world around you.
I suspect that people don't intend to use FB as a news source, but rather as a source of cheap entertainment and dopamine hits of the comment sections. People don't really post status updates as much these days, and those that do are usually posting something generic that you're that won't engender controversy or a juicy, drama-filled discussion.
It hadn't really occurred to me that anyone does use it as a news source. Looks fairly devoid of real world news to me - just whatever old friends and family on there have bothered to post mixed in with adverts. I suppose I'd have had to engage with some groups at some point. But I suppose that's no different to actually subscribing to RSS feeds.
Gravity... social gravity in a way. People are scrolling on facebook, now they have news right there and they can share and comment right there. It's a game of low effort... gravity.
I agree with you. I am living in a country where FB is banned but some people like me can find some methods to access it. I find FB really boring but enjoy Twitter and Feedly ver much.
I’m surprised nobody burned me for this comment, HN usually frowns on snark ;)
But I would like to add a constructive note: I’ve been dabbling around the RSS space for a long time, including a ten-year-old feed service and web client. In my opinion, RSS has failed where centralized social media succeeded largely because of discoverability.
I’ve put RSS clients in front of plenty of users, and the response is invariably, “okay, now what?” Using a bookmarklet to subscribe to feeds is confusing and unnatural to them. They want getting The Atlantic RSS feed to be as easy as following The Atlantic on Twitter. And they do want to see the “liked” articles of their friends who are fellow readers.
To anyone who is trying to make RSS fetch again, I beg them to take the take the social and discoverability issues seriously.
Incidentally, I think the Overcast podcast app (remember, podcasts are also RSS) is an ideal model of an in-app directory.
I think the great power of RSS is being able to quickly sift through information. I use newsboat, so every title is on a single line and information density is therefore at its max. I can quickly skim through a day's worth of news articles from dozens of sources, blog posts, youtube channels, journal articles, pubmed search hits, hacker news posts, and reddit posts, in hardly any time compared to visiting these platforms individually and sifting through one at a time.
For my hundreds of feeds, I get through them in like 10 minutes if nothing peaks my interest, then I'm done with the internet for the day. It's so liberating to be free of platforms that insist on the infinite scrolling and other dark patterns, such as bloated pages full of empty space rather than content, that force you to spend more time engaged/addicted.
Looking back, at least my “old ways” of using RSS involved a lot of FOMO and inevitable information overload.
A key lesson I’ve since learned is to be much more minimalist and deliberate about what I subscribe to. The news feed under my control now feels serene relative to the adversarial offerings of major social media outlets.
One thing I wish RSS readers were better at is more granular controls over how they do workflows and notifications. Podcasts actually do this well, but regular old text-RSS does not.
There are some feeds where I just do not care about anything older than a day or 3 and would rather it just automatically ignores them on refresh. There are some feeds where I prefer them held indefinitely. I'd love a master dashboard where I can program this in on a per-feed basis.
There's also feeds where grouping matters. Like with webcomics where chronology is important and I'm a few issues behind, I'd like them to be presented in chronological order and grouped together. In ones where it's not I'd prefer them as part of the feed.
And then there's the tendency to collapse all content into one format. There's blogs where visuals are very important and I'd prefer they be displayed in the page's default and there's others where I'd prefer a "reader" view. Some apps design around it, but many still don't.
The alternative is trusting someone (or something) else, who's values, motives, and incentives are rarely obvious, to curate your news for you.
Even if you could find a curator that you have significant faith in, eventually, they will become a centralized target that powerful interests can carrot or stick in various ways to push their interests into your curated feed.
You’re 100% describing how news organizations operate, that are source of the actual news. They have same initiatives. Skipping middle man curator leaves you with same fundamental problems.
I've been living this way for a decade. No Facebook, use RSS or Atom for every possible thing that I can. I even use it to subscribe to video feeds, such as YouTube channels. It really boggles my mind what so many billions (!) of people tolerate just to avoid having to learn to do something simple themselves.
It’s hard to produce an easier alternative for people who are too busy and disinterested to deal with anything technical. You need to beat Facebook on ease of use, cost, and network. The first one might not be too hard but the next two are almost impossible at this point. The only thing that could beat free is if it actually pays you to use it. The only thing that beats ubiquity is maybe exclusivity?
“ too busy and disinterested to deal” is a filter that allows RSS to work since FB et al would filter and bloat RSS if enough people used it. It’s value was already diminished considerably years ago when many systems and publication removed full text from RSS. It would get worse if it was used more.
All three are possible now with federated social networks, which are networks in the true sense and not just single websites calling themselves networks.
Me too! It's great. I started doing it for YouTube when the algorithm started selectively showing updates for channels I like. Now the algorithm is irrelevant.
I'm facing this issue as well. Too many short, addictive videos being recommended instead of the ones included in the channels I subscribed to. I'm going to include yt in my subscriptions.
I'd kill for YouTube to start recommending short videos again. All I get recommended now are 20 minutes worth of content on something interesting stretched out to an hour long video. The recommendation algorithm seems to prioritize longer-form content, but the result has been creators being pushed to streeeeeetch and that usually means not editing down stuff that ought to be edited out.
In my case, the short videos I'm talking about are things like Dragon Ball Z scenes and GTA V screw arounds. Yt will now and then show me one of those on my page and, if I watch one, it starts to flood the page with similar content.
> It really boggles my mind what so many billions (!) of people tolerate just to avoid having to learn to do something simple themselves.
Do you go to the doctor immediately every time something hurts? Do you get your car checked immediately every time there's a warning light on your dashboard? Most people don't and those things could affect their lives immensely.
Most people, most of the time, don't care about anything than that which brings them immediate joy.
It's a shame he didn't recommend cli programs like sfeed or newsboat.
I recently also stopped using youtube to be notified about new videos from the channels I follow, and now I use exclusively RSS with some scripts to made my life easier. Because youtube doesn't provide a RSS with all your subscriptions anymore, I had to extract all of them using the browser console[0] and convert all the links to the (hidden) RSS feed. This issue also happens with LBRY but this time I had to use an external service (I don't blame them because by design, you can't have something like a linear RSS feed in a blockchain).
I also used twitter for a while but at one point I felt tired of letting them tell me what I want to read. I was usually distracted by other tweets and feelt like I was wasting my time and didn't find any important or interesting stuff. Because there are still good twitter users in this platform and they don't support RSS feeds anymore, I managed to follow them using nitter[1].
I can tell you that, now, I see those two platforms like they were 10 years ago and I'm enjoying them like never before.
You can even subscribe to a particular playlist! (So, say someone produces many videos, but you only want the ones that they add to a particular playlist, you can do that.)
The reason I couldn't stick with other feed aggregators in the past is because of the perpetual accumulation of the unread count. The output of sfeed_html is just links [2]. No unread counts. I can remember whether I've read something or not.
Just stick it on a server, run as a cronjob, and you have your new browser homepage. And if you want to move your "database" it's just a directory of tsv files. Brilliant.
In practice, is that an issue? you could just ignore that number, or mark all as read when you are done reading. It looks like the example you gave in link 2 has some unread counts perpetually accumulating, in fact, unless I misunderstand.
sfeed_html just outputs a flat html file, I know it looks like unread counts, but it's just showing a count of entries with a published date within the last 24 hours of when the page was generated. It's just an easy way to draw attention to "new" entries.
An unread count feels to me like another todo list. I like not having it.
I started again to use RSS and Atom feeds last week.
I used to use facebook as an aggregator, but its curated list has become too poisoned since the pandemics and "political outbreaks" that followed. The algorithms noticed that I've been (automatically/inadvertently) interacting too much with such content, and decided to focus on that in order to keep me hooked.
Facebook and other platforms profit by subtracting value from society. I ask myself if that will stop someday.
If you want to go crazy with RSS and build your entire information stream on top of it, you might need some glue code that semi-automatically turns static markup to rss [0]. (Disclaimer: I am the author)
I've had the opposite experience. Facebook's been actively unfollowing and hiding my political groups for me. Every few days I have to go through a list of pages, check to make sure I'm still following them, and interact with posts to keep them in my feed.
that seems like the point where you'd stop using facebook, when you're altering your behaviour to appease the algorithm, because it won't just let you control what you want to see anymore. although i admit I also open all youtube videos of categories i don't intend to watch regularly in private tabs
It's been an issue for quite a while, but it's becoming unbearable since they started really clamping down on 'extremism' (left and right) around November. Unfortunately, there's no tool quite like it online for getting access to such a wide swath of firsthand knowledge, opinon and experiences.
Twitter has an option to just skip the algorithm and let you drink from the firehouse - switch to timeline view and put everyone you are following in “alarm” mode (otherwise, they’ll filter it as THEY see fit).
Most of the people I care about post on both, and when there’s an important long form article they post a link to it (whether on Facebook or their private blog)
Interestingly, youtube did that on me for some time, then it stopped. It repeatedly unsubscribed me from channels I used to watch more often, but kept intact some subscriptions I didn't visit regularly.
Facebook, by its turn, added some friends on my behalf. I was surprised some times to see a notification like "John Doe accepted you friendship request", but I'd never sent on. They also stopped doing that.
The pivot of Facebook from "here's a way to connect with family and friends" to "here's a steady drip of 'engaging' content made to generate 'likes'" is very interesting.
Propaganda is endemic, nobody is immune, it's the matrix around us. Self selecting echo chambers with the brand of propaganda containing the message they like best, and if they don't like it, switch to another brand. DRINK MORE OVALTINE!
I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. Facebook does so much stuff, everyone uses it for different reasons. Like me, I use it for the marketplace nowadays, and for events. Some people like groups, some like meme pages
It would be interesting to have something like FB Purity [0] run in a headless browser that will RSS you meaningful posts based on rules you provide. I'd totally use something like that.
If there was an open standard api/protocol for liking/commenting I reckon this could actually work quite well. I guess you'd also need some kind of standard for identity and "friending" too (perhaps something akin to Open ID).
Yeah. One can go read the protocol. But the Activity Vocabulary probably gives a good idea for the versatility, the use of (core) ActivityPub[1]. ActivityPub is streams of actions, most of which we know & are familiar with already from existing social media.
I guess so. ActivityPub seems a lot more complicated than what I have in mind. With RSS itself, most developers could create a reasonable implementation in a weekend. I see no reason why couldn't have something of similar simplicity for commenting.
It wasn't an open protocol but Google Reader had this. And it had commenting. I had some of the most thoughtful and productive conversations on there. Total shame we don't have that anymore.
More people should know about RSS. I explain how it work to my friends, they seems wowed, but don't see much used of it(It's the thing that you need to experience yourself, I guess)
I can't imagine how one keep track of various website of interest. It's like they don't know better, or unknowingly think that Facebook feed is everything they need and no other internet outside it (It's understandable, I don't blame them)
Monetization is an issue due to the general lack of ads and tracking, but there are some possible solutions, like Ars Technica’s model of $50/yr for access to the full-text RSS feed.
I had no idea they did that, and that's a really genius idea. I'd happily pay that for sites I like reading so I can pull the content in and read it how I want to rather than deal with the absolute dumpster-fire of a mess that the modern web is.
$25. $50 is the pro++ version. i say this as a happy subscriber. I know a few other sites that do the same, and being able to access a plaintext feed is a huge plus to me.
Only the first image of Arstechnica's image is available in a feed, though, and videos they sometimes embed in the header do not show. I assume both are bugs, but I can open the page if the article is interesting.
If your question is specific to the Ars Technica subscription, there is no authentication. Each subscriber is given a unique feed link (for whatever they want to subscribe to) so any fetch operation for the link is tied to the subscriber. Ars says that it monitors the use of feeds and will take action if any abuse is detected, but doesn’t go too deep into explaining that part.
Some other services like Stratechery follow the same model, AFAIK.
I guess for RSS you could pull a New York Times and have the RSS feed just link to the website, ads / paywalls included once the user clicks on the link.
There was a time when you could plug any old RSS feed into your facebook account. I had my posts from del.icio.us, flickr, and twitter all going to facebook with that feature. It was glorious, until facebook unceremoniously ripped it out.
I look at that event as the time when facebook went from a neutral entity to a malevolent one.
In Finnish fish is kala. And galaxy is galaksi. So it sounds a bit like a mix of the two words, like fishaxy and it's also quite close to how you actually pronounce galaksi. Or it could mean "to fish", as in "[jokin] vaihtui kalaksi" = "[something] changed to fish". :)
its galaxy in another language(can't remember which one lol). Galaxy because of the "planets" concept in aggregators... and it being a collection of planets
This is obvious. The bigger question is how to persuade and educate people who find false value in Facebook to leave the platform. A big part of polarization in American politics (not that you necessarily care or participate) has to do with social media consumption. Facebook users see a highly formulaic subset of events in their stream, and that reinforces their idea of what's going on around them.
I see comments like yours often, it's just that it never really leads to anything productive for those still trapped in the cycle. They just see outsiders from their POV, who don't do what they're doing. I don't think the average social media users is that cognizant of the behavioral modification possibility of using socials in the first place, or even of advertising in general.
Isn't it the kind of hoarding / addiction that you feel you'll lose something if you drop it. But the next day you do, you already forgot you had it and you miss nothing ?
Am I the only one who still largely keeps up with stuff via explicitly going to a website? The thing I never liked about RSS is that it fed on my inbox zero compulsion. I don't feel that I'm missing out on content when I just don't see it because it's moved to an older section of a website I regularly visit.
I did add a read it later app into the mix several years ago. This is helpful for consuming longer content, but I have to explicitly put articles there.
Me, I will bookmark sites and visit them when I feel like it.
RSS never worked properly for me when it was "big" in the 2000s. Half the time I'd click the RSS icon on a site and it would display XML code and an error message I didn't understand.
At the end of the day, it's also still a 'feed'. The websites I visit write about a variety of topics, and I'm only interested in a couple. For that use case, it's simpler to just visit the site on a regular basis.
I do save articles to Pocket though, as I can't stand the news website trend of breaking up the article flow with embedded tweets, Related Articles links, email signup CTAs and what not.
I'm amazed RSS is still supported. It just seems like one of those trusty old technologies that would be forgotten in the emergent web clustered around social networks, "mobile first" sites, Javascript generated content / single-page applications, wrapped into Google AMP sites... I mean, it doesn't even advertise itself for user awareness.
I am using RSS since the early 2000s, it's great! The best way to get focoused information about what I want and when I want without scrolling through shit
I pay for Feedly Premium because with it I can
- filter stuff out (coronavirus, trump etc.)
- subscribe for Twitter
- has this Leo thing what is trying to prioritize stuff that you read most
I think some are missing the point when we say "RSS as a Facebook alternative".
Yeah, current feed readers will not replace Facebook.
RSS as an exchange medium of content (in my naive opinion) can replace Facebook. It's just that a project needs to build around it.
Follow friends? Click "Follow" in UI, it subscribes to their feed.
Live streams? Live stream link can be contained in the RSS feed, subscribers see it in their feed.
Facebook groups? Same as users, just a subscription to an RSS feed.
Security? Perhaps feed content is encrypted, and only Friends can decrypt? Exchange of keys at Friending could provide this functionality?
It would take a lot of work to make this decentralised, secure, private, and usable to regular users. But I think this kind of model sounds much nicer than what is currently on offer. What do others think?
RSS being awesome is the one thing that everyone on HN seems to agree about. Every couple of years I give it a try but for some reason I'm struggling to get into it. Something prevents me from checking my Feedly feed. Seems uninteresting even though I populated with sources I like.
Can someone set out a "getting started" guide? Like does it help to have good categorisation? Are there some tricks that make a big difference (adding email newsletters perhaps?)? Is there a recommended App or workflow that brings out the best in RSS?
For me, the main problem with Facebook is the amount of content which is exclusively available on it. We homeschool our daughter and the whole homeschooling community is organised on Facebook. I'm involved in some niche exercise (handbalancing), and that is also pretty much exclusively on Instagram/Facebook. I would love a way to get the content of Facebook groups via RSS since I have no interest in the social aspects and I miss out on a lot by not using it.
Just today I was thinking this exact thing. I'm trying to stop using Twitter and decided to setup and RSS reader as my source for finding out about news.
i would very much like a hn style ui for my favourite sources of news/music/social chaff .. like a reader mode .. if anyone can suggest anything foss? Not enough sites support rss for it to be useful. Had started on a 'feed filter' browser extension for soundcloud a while back but wasn't so much for aggregating as for highlighting the gold slash filtering out the dross in /stream.
What’s the best RSS reader service these days? I was a big user of Google Reader but never found something I liked after, that I could access from all my devices. It’s been a few years since I last asked, though.
I can't speak to "best", but I can say that I've been very happy with BazQux Reader. It has good keyboard shortcuts, is very fast, lets you make filters within your subscriptions, has a good in-reader article view, a good mobile site (no app, which I like), and also allows to subscribe to see social media sites if that's your thing. I had previously used Feedly and much prefer BQR
This is a solution for getting away from Facebook, but it neglects the problem of news discovery. Unless you don't care about finding interesting things that aren't available from your choices of news sources, you're going to miss out on things that folks in your social circle find and want to share. To me, that's the value of a social network. At the very least, it doesn't really make RSS an alternative to Facebook, it serves a different purpose. The folks that the article mentions who rely on Facebook as their exclusive source of messaging are already relying on news discovery, since a story is either shared by a friend or promoted to you as an ad.
Can anyone recommend any good blogs to add to my RSS feed? I see a lot of really interesting content being shared here on HN, especially the material that isn't super technical.
One way you can find what’s interesting to you from the HN crowd is to go to hn.algolia.com, search for stories by date and enter keywords like “Ask HN”, “recommend”, “blog”, “follow”, etc. Over the years there have been many “Ask HN” posts about what sites to follow. You may initiate one too, preferably after narrowing down on interest areas and including examples of what you’ve found.
I would indeed prefer that facebook provides those feeds themselves as it sometimes break because Facebook changes things (the latest breakage I encountered being Facebook replying with "You must be logged in to view this page").
NNW is great, I'm also quite partial to Reeder too. It can sync feeds via iCloud, so if you're all-in on the Apple ecosystem there's no need for an external feed service.
newsgroups = big community spaces filled with activity
rss = a person or entity's personal space. which can also be fed into a planet / aggregator to make a shared space.
they each have great uses, but rss maintaining the sense of identity & ownership & knowability over the space is a huge boon (to reader & writers both) imo, & where-as newsgroups have always felt (reading or writing) like i was venturing off into wild-lands.
Social media is not a news source, it's a pit of misery and sadness. Of all of them, I only find some redeeming value in Instagram as it seems by default to give you something positive.
RSS can be a news source. I used Firefox live bookmarks for years, and now use LiveMarks on Firefox. I'm currently doing one of my test drives on Edge to see if it's time to switch, where I use Inoreader instead. If you try Inoreader, remember to disable uBlock Origin for it so the author can be supported. It has a great mobile app too!
Like… yeah, it's good, give it a try. Do recommend. four and a half out of five stars.