When I see articles like this, my reaction is always: when did RSS go away? I have close to 200 sites in my Feedly list, and I have trouble keeping up with all the articles I get from RSS every day.
I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.
It's depressingly and irritatingly common to come across podcasts now which provide links to a dizzying array of podcast aggregation services but not to
o their RSS feed, even though they definitely have one because it's how you feed data to these services in the first place.
I suspect a lot of blogs only have a feed now because it's a default feature of the blog platform they use rather than because they see it as important.
I believe that there was an agenda to kill RSS, very much like how the auto makers in the United States conspired to kill public transit.
I don't buy any of the arguments not to implement it. I don't think it is too expensive or confusing. I think it is too empowering to users and inconvenient to marketers.
this is what Reader was and has always made me even more confused as to why Google killed it off. They had the right start for a unique take on content focused/small group discussion based social networking and the tossed it for “circles”
Google itself is part of Big Tech Social Control. They're not willing to engage in services where they're not ultimately in control, like RSS. They suffered in the short term, but if you've struggled to find the RSS feed for a website or a podcast lately, that's exactly what they were trying to achieve.
I think the same. RSS and Atom feeds couldn't be riddled with ads/trackers and dark patterns so they don't generate revenue/control for corporations. However, they are great for the users. Keep them alive people.
I suppose you could call it an agenda, I think it’s just the consequence of every major social networking platform being incentivized to reduce outgoing links as much as possible to keep everyone in their walled garden of data collection and engagement.
At some point we need to stop trying defend the idea that capitalism is good for tech.
> At some point we need to stop trying defend the idea that capitalism is good for tech.
Why would a state-owned social media platform be any better? I can think of numerous ways in which it would be dramatically worse. And if given the choice, do you really think people would choose Fedbook over Facebook?
Can you elaborate on your reasons why it would be a bad thing?
I think the argument for this is mainly that this would be funded by taxes, so it would not need to rely on advertisements and exhibit the predatory behaviours that Facebook and other social media do.
Same convenience of platform features - finding friends, social gaming, comments, likes, etc. - nobody trying to monetize your eyeballs or actively surveil you.
I think the demand is high but doesn’t show up in some dumb ways that people think represents demand.
I get tons of requests in my web logs for my RSS feed. And I’m not a big site or anything, just have a scrub personal blog.
So that’s lots of demand.
I suspect that every platform owner sees their rss requests and sees it as high. So any claims that there’s no demand without clarifying that they don’t get http gets for RSS feeds seems disingenuous to me.
“I don’t see any demand for RSS when I ignore looking at all the RSS requests I get tiny site.”
I don’t think war drivers trying to break into my host aren’t regular users.
But I think successful requests to my RSS feeds are regular users who are routinely checking my feed and have set up some tool to do so. So that’s demand. And it’s pretty regular.
The people trying to ssh are likely doing so automatically on every host in existence.
One offender is buzzsprout, which has an RSS feed but no link to the actual episode... So you know when there's a new episode, but you have to google it to find it.
Yeh, came here to say this. I love RSS, it is such a nice balance of enabling me to keep up with stuff but under my own terms and at my own speed.
It feels very much like an alive protocol to me, and more in need than ever before given the insane calls on everyone's attention.
And to the guy with "service shutdown fear" - just export your opml and bring it into another service. It's highly portable and imo totally mitigates any risk of getting locked in then locked out.
I just logged into my Feedly for the first time in a couple years (maybe longer). I had moved all my RSS from Google Reader to Feedly back when all that went down.
Turns out, most of the blogs I subscribed to back in the day are now defunct or not updated much. I think that's why I eventually stopped going to my Feedly for RSS aggreggation, and instead for the few moments a day I want to read news/waste time, I just go directly to The Verge, Hacker News, and/or Reddit.
Funny aside, though. My product at work still has a RSS plugin for importing content, and I have it pointed at Reddit RSS feeds for sub-reddits, and it's still working....
BTW, I just also realized, that I get a lot of my articles/news from my Google News widget on my Android phone (and in the Google News app on my iPad), and the AI on that has curated a pretty decent list of topics that I like to follow.
Final, final realization/thoughts. It's pretty obvious I let the curation of my Feedly go stale and that I should clean out the old cruft, and give it a try again. I forgot about the nice keyboard short-cuts for navigating article titles. And it's also nice way to view heavy news sources, like The Verge.
However, as a user I'd need to decide: do I want to open the funnel of content like this where I feel obligated to read all the stuff in my feed? I kind of feel like I don't need to be so diligent with these things. And if that's the case, my use case looks more and more like only using RSS for super specific, niche websites that I don't want to remember to visit on a regular basis. Which could be OK, but then I have to remember to visit my RSS reader.
How do news apps get their content when it is aggregated from multiple sites? (I've never used google news but the ios news app shows content from multiple popular sites). Is it rss, atom, or something completely different?
Looks like Google has a product called Google News SEO, a way for websites to optimize their SEO so that Google's "news" crawlers can grab the content [1] [2]
"Using the Publisher Center tool, you can share your content with Google News by listing RSS feeds, website URLs, or videos."
Exactly. I've never stopped using RSS. And if I look at follower counts on Feedly (which is just one RSS aggregator our of multiple options) I see tens of thousands of followers to many popular feeds. So there are many people who use RSS - probably millions. It didn't go away, some people chasing new shiny things like twitter did - they are always welcome to come back, it still works quite fine.
I tried using Feedly last year. Added feeds and it was HORRIBLE experience. Not Feedly but the actual feeds.
Some of them give you the title and then tell you to go to actual website to read the article.
Others has a virtually non-existent summary.
During RSS's heydays I remember being able to just see the summary and click on it and read the article right there and then. Now these feeds try to push you back to the website hard. Making RSS feeds feel like a broken tool. With the content there mostly an after thought.
Those sites existed back during the Google Reader era already. I don’t even avoid those, and currently have only one title only, and 2 or 3 title + short summary sites in my TT-RSS list, everything else is full text.
Not to mention, you can actually file an issue on the blog owner's github (if present), making a ruckus about the feed quality. I did it once and he was happy to patch it - after familiarizing himself with what a feed even was, as he didn't know his site had one.
Simple RSS for Android is still available at F-droid. It's 14 years out of maintenance & it still loads(with warning) & works for my feeds. Some give just a summary, some the 1st paragraph and a few still supply the whole article.
I am always on the lookout for a simple, decentralized, modern alternative, if anyone knows of any.
I use https://weloverss.com/ as my Google Reader alternative. TheOldReader is also nice. I prefer the first due to its ui not being bloated - only thing I miss is timestamps.
TheOldReader.com was and remains my replacement for Google Reader. I have a paid account as a gesture of support although I use only a tiny fraction of the 500 subscriptions available. Their "add a subscription" utility works quite well on sites with no mention of a feed. And of course I discovered this post via RSS...
My preference is for inoreader. I’ve tried old reader a couple of times, just seemed to be missing things. For instance I couldn’t seem to get a dark theme. In inoreader it’s easy to switch theme. Inoreader seems to have a nicer ui, I also like the fact you can see what articles are popular during the day/week.
I still read all the same feeds I had on Google Reader first on Digg Reader and now on Inoreader free version. Main way I consume news although I do look at Facebook for family stuff and twitter for very topical stuff and following folks like Elon Musk who mostly tweet.
>"The trend has crept into new software and new web building technologies. Sometimes depending on what you are building your website with it is harder than ever to add RSS feeds."
Even though the water isn't boiling, the heat may still be on.
I agree wholly with this. I only very recently started using RSS and almost every site/blog has one that produces quality content. For example the St. Louis Fed has a few high quality blog feeds and when I couldn’t find the RSS feed I sent them an email and lo and behold, there was an RSS feed to each one (just on a different page that I missed). It seems to be a rarity that good content feeds don’t have RSS.
I also still use RSS and have several hundred subscriptions, but the OP isn't wrong and it's far more pervasive than just Twitter. One of the biggest ones for me is that Spotify is buying up podcasts that previously did have an RSS feed and then removing the feed, for example. Other services are doing the same. For another example, when Bloomberg bought City Lab recently they removed the RSS feed. I've had this happen all the time, so my feeds list and podcast lists would be dwindling if I weren't actively seeking out things to replace those with.
Is it still useful? Yes. Is it also under attack? Yes.
I think you are missing the point here. It is not about if the technology exists or not. But when the community rely on it as the main way for following updates, it changes a lot of things. The quantity and quality of the articles. What does it feel to get a new update. I remember I was getting excited every time I get something new in Google Reader, Twitter doesn't feel like this at all.
How did you aggregate so many sources to read articles from? What is your discovery process? Do you have any recommendation where I can read good stuff from?
Pretty much what gavanm said with his #1. The process is usually that I see some interesting article on a site like HN, then say "hmm, I'd like to read more by this person, but I will probably never remember the website address, so I'll just add it to Feedly."
Whenever I'm looking at content I like I just go and see what else that author has posted. If it sounds vaguely interesting I add it to my reader. If after a couple of posts it's not too interesting I remove it.
I believe a lot of the bigger sites like Feedly will recommend you popular feeds. I would love a service that I can paste a list of feeds into and it could recommend popular related feeds.
Not the OP, but these days I find new things (mostly blogs) through four different mechanisms:
1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse).
2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites.
3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed.
4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list.
Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read.
Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that way) - but if you treat it as a personally curated source of sporadic content, then it's great. In many respects Moderate post volume (quality over quantity) is something I find more useful in what I choose.
On the aggregator front, I try to avoid anything that's too noisy (low signal to noise) - and I definitely minimise subscribing to news sites as the volume is just too high (I tried rss subscribing to The Verge when it was new, but there were too many articles I don't read). For example, i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.
RSS is still heavily used for information I find really professionally useful (IT) - but I don't know about other industries.
Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed - which makes offline and mobile consumption more difficult / annoying - I suspect that in some cases it's a result of default choices - and in others it's a deliberate decision as a trade off against improved analysis a site gets from a browser hit.
> i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.
The popular HN RSS feed generator linked elsewhere in this page allows for a ton of customization! You can filter by points and raise the floor until you get a reasonable number of articles per week.
> Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed
My RSS reader (miniflux) has a handy feature for getting around these. It even works for naïve paywalls (like the New Yorker’s, for example). It basically cURL’s the original address of the content and allows you to specify the content with a CSS selector. It’s some trouble to configure initially, but very handy!
I think it’s mostly a question of developer mindshare around RSS and syndication technologies. The early 2000s were a golden age in this sense but we all just let the centralized social media platforms decide that all innovation was moving there.
I missed getting everything from RSS. A couple years ago I built my own engine that could bring in twitter, reddit, here and a few other services that didn't have RSS feeds and published the results to river of news style flow with a few topic specific tributaries. Haven't used it in years but have been thinking about restarting it.
I saw that they also have some kind of tool that lets you scrape websites that don't have native RSS feeds, but it is only at the "super duper" pricing tier, whatever that one is called.
> RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago
Precisley, that's how I got to this post. In this day, keeping a list of interesting sites and being able to consult them all from a single place is ever more useful.
I'm also surprised no one has pointed out the irony that the author's blog doesn't have an RSS feed. That would be the least you could do to keep it around.
Of course these days browsers don't indicate that browsers are available. You will need an extension to detect feeds. (Or paste the site in your feed reader and hope it does, most readers will do the auto-discovery for you)
Douglas Adams, [how to learn to love the internet]:
1. everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2. anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3. anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
>3. anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
This started happening when I was 14 (~2007) and really started to accelerate after I was 20 (~2013). I don't correlate this with me getting old but more like getting more and more aware of the profiteering, surveillance and bullshit everywhere.
And from the other side of the coin: I'm in my late thirties now and there also has been plenty of new tech (or improvements on existing tech) from the last decade that has me really excited. Unsurprisingly, almost all of it can be used outside of the aforementioned bubble of "profiteering, surveillance and bullshit".
Does he talks about the fact that vintage stuff that was before my birth are also better ? and how antique people were better ? These feelings are regularly in my head. Mostly because I feel so much waste from all the new things.. I'm not sure if it's a special attribute of the last decades (smartphones etc) or not.
I still use RSS. I use Feedly to curate various RSS feeds and many website still have them, or at least the tech focussed ones.
I used to be subscribed to more but some RSS feeds have such high traffic it's difficult to follow them, such as the BBC news feed.
Feedly has a nice new feature [0] that makes an RSS feed out of a standard website, so that might be worth considering if you have some news sources that don't publish a RSS feed. Unfortunately this wouldn't work with anything that requires authentication like private Twitter feeds for example.
When Google reader shut down, I moved to feedly for like a week. Then I started getting anxiety that feedly would shut down too. Because if google could kill off a product i relied on, anyone could. And that got me into self hosting and running my own services.
ttrss was basically my first self hosted thing almost a decade ago. It was great. And then it turned out the guy running it was a bit not pleasant, and I didn't want to support that. So I recently migrated to freshRSS. Both work great, are open source and self hostable.
And feedly hasn't shut down yet (probably just to spite me). So yeah, tons of options for RSS.
Having self-hosted for a long time, I find it's getting easier in a lot of ways what with Docker and all.
I'm starting to wonder where "Sandstorm 2.0" is. Sandstorm, for those who don't know, was basically an attempt to make self hosting really viable, but was tragically ahead of its time because it predated Docker. So they burned tons of effort on sandboxing, and wrapping existing applications into their sandbox, and it was just too hard to port things into their world to get very many applications running.
It seems like a project that would do that in terms of docker-compose files could be created for much less effort, and maybe not quite all the pretty-shiny they had. But as I'm struggling right now a bit to bring up a Bitwarden server, there's still pain around setting up the forwards properly and getting the Let's Encrypt certificate. Something that managed all this better wouldn't be too hard, and could just be slammed up on a small AWS instance or something would be easy. (Branching out to other services over time or something.) Plus setting up proper backups would be nice. We're so, so much closer to being able to do this nowadays than we used to be... for instance, S3 has also become a near universal API, so backups using it have gotten to be easy but they can still be done without vendor lockin.
Then it would be really easy to self-host an RSS reader or something.
I'm hoping this will either prompt someone to consider this project, or prompt someone to tell me "It already exists, go here and here and run this docker command to install it."
I've taken the self hosting journey to learn tons about docker, and kubernetes. (Disclaimer: Kubernetes is overkill for self hosting). Not because it was the easiest, but because it was a great way to learn about a technology that has benefited me in my job.
Nowadays, for me at least, it IS really easy to self-host anything. Get the docker image, add a deployment to my k8s cluster. Ship it. Getting to this point was less simple.
I use Dokku for that (I can share my Bitwarden repo if you want, the entire thing is four lines or something). I also made https://gitlab.com/stavros/harbormaster for things that weren't so "web server -> app -> database" and love it.
I'm aware. but also, they aren't the only company to shut down services. They do it more often and more flippantly than other companies, but other companies still do it from time to time.
My response to the situation was drastic overkill, but now I get to rely on myself and I have a hobby I enjoy, rather than having to worry about what other companies decide to do with my data.
I’m using NetNewsWire which works great but is iOS and Mac only. I’ve considered Feedly, but I would have to do the pro plan because of the cap on number of feeds. I haven’t switched because I have a hard time justifying the cost. I would rather that money go to the people creating the content.
Sort of obvious why RSS went away. It is really hard to put ads into RSS. Sure you can just add a update but that's not really feasible (and could be filtered). So the large sites just started removing it and it helped them capture ad sales.
RSS feeds don't replace a website. Most of the websites don't publish their whole articles on the RSS feed, only a summary (or even just a line).
Therefore, RSS doesn't cause any advertisement loss, as the user needs to go to the website anyway (which, to be clear, is totally fine - RSS still works as filter/preview, which is very helpful).
It's really no different than email lists, medium, substack, etc. which are all working through ways of effectively monetizing themselves. RSS feed for your content + a patreon or similar place (that potentially gives you access to a premium RSS feed with more/expanded content) would totally be feasible.
Email ads are more effective than RSS. The reader's email address is known (obviously!) and the content can be targeted individually. RSS is typically a single feed for everyone.
Premium RSS is possible, with individual links per user, but it's much more complicated than just typing your email address into a field (something you already do when you pay for anything). Also, chances of the link being shared around is high and aggregators often inadvertently leak premium links. In contrast, someone's inbox is about as private as it gets.
You can mitigate link sharing by counting the feed reader hits per link (anything more than two standard deviations is probably a shared link, which you can set a revocation policy for). You can reject requests to content that don’t have a non-revoked referrer. This way, they can only get your content by copy-pasting content and rehosting the feed, which is an unavoidable risk.
In any case, as Netflix’s early history shows, depending on your cost structure, link sharing is likely a net positive. It’s probably only worth prosecuting the feeds that get shared with 100s of people.
It definitely is more complicated, but the tools to make it simple are easy to build! Maybe we’ll see growth in this space. One can dream
You can, albeit with some effort involved, e.g. Ben Thomson has mentioned Stratechery does some kind of link counting like that with the podcast feed.
It's a good point that some amount of unauthorised sharing can be a positive. The main issue is it's hard to control without also having false positives, where the paying subscriber is annoyed by their service being revoked, having to re-auth, etc.
I can’t deal with most news sites now because I’m usually reading them on my phone. There’s just so much garbage between ads, scroll locked videos and JavaScript breaking the pages. AMP was supposed to help with this stuff but it breaks all the time too.
I know I’d happily pay for plain text content that I can format myself but I’m guessing there’s just no market for that sort of thing.
Successful blogs I follow do sponsored RSS feeds. It’s perfectly feasible to work ads into RSS content. What’s not doable is targeted ads, but I’d rather those all go away anyway.
as other's pointed out, RSS is still here if you want to use it. It's just not ubiquitous as it once was.
IMO the big thing that killed RSS ubiquity was Google Chrome not having support for it natively. Before that, Firefox, Opera, Safari all had RSS as well-supported, central thing and I remember finding it super annoying that Chrome didn't have it when it launched. But I kept using Chrome for the same reasons everyone else started switching to Chrome. And the RSS extensions all sucked. And eventually I stopped using them. And here I am, no longer reading RSS.
But as Chrome ate up browser share, I'm sure fewer people went to RSS because it wasn't natively there and so the incentives to implement RSS decreased as fewer people expected it to be there, especially as many more people were coming online only having used Chrome.
Oddly enough, I switched back to Firefox years ago and _could_ get back into RSS at any point (or with any number of RSS reader apps, etc.), but the habit has stuck, and I now stay up-to-date on everything via email newsletters, Twitter and this orange website instead. it's worse and I hate it, but oh well
My solution to this was getting a miniflux.app subscription and pinning the tab/setting it as my home page. I got directly to this page via an RSS feed.
I remember using this! I liked it and used it for a while! But not having it in the bookmarks bar, I kept forgetting about my feeds :/ and then I stopped installing it. I'm sorry :( Glad to hear it's still going strong though. Maybe I'll give it another shot!
Vivaldi has support for RSS feeds now. Vivaldi has been getting better and better. I urge anyone who hasn't tried it in the last year or two to check it out. It's the new Opera.
The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today (especially on mobile). Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is no accepted standard for it.
>Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today.
1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly.
2) Most people then and now would go through an aggregator. So they'd really be talking to that instead of the source feed.
3) There were push notification standards out well over a decade ago, including RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub.
> 1) It's not that inefficient, especially if you recalculate your feed only when it changes and use HTTP statuses (particularly 304 Not Modified) correctly.
Besides, assuming you're not hideously overcomplicating things, you'll just be serving a static file off disk. If your server is a raspberry pi, you ought to still be able to serve some 1000 requests/second if that is what you are doing.
Assuming most RSS readers poll at most once every 15 minutes (which is a really high rate), you'll need at least a million subscribers before you need to get a second raspberry pi.
Also worth mentioning the obvious, feedly etc is updating all the users on their platrom with a single call to your site (every 7 minutes in your case). No doubt they scale the update frequency by how popular it is on their platform / frequently updated / however often the ai decides it is needed.
Yeah, I ran a niche aggregator for a few years and we polled ca. 3m feeds a day. Every time a feed had an update since the last time we'd polled it we'd subtract a percentage of the polling interval with a floor of about 5m. Every time there wasn't an update we'd reduce the rate until a ceiling of about 24h. Very simple and no doubt you could do better but better wasn't necessary.
Should also depend on whether a push extension is used, then the reader can fetch the feed less often. The feed of that blog seems to be a plain RSS feed without that.
Everyone used to "ping" sites whose only purpose was to provide feeds of when blogs changed, so all the aggregators would use that as a starting point anyway. But really it isn't that necessary - there are few feeds where getting things to your subscribers that urgently matters enough that you necessarily want them to hammer your site the moment you publish.
I'm not aware of any push functionality in RSS -- something needs to poll the feed, no? Or is there an RSS extension that uses long polling or something?
PubSubHubbub/WebSub (the latter is effectively the slightly modernized W3C standardization of the former) is the standard solution for that. (Feed declares where to register for updates (hubs), readers register their callback URLs with hubs, publishers tell hubs when something changed, hubs run through the registered callbacks and ping them with the update. Thus needs a server-component for the reader side.)
I'd assume that somebody who misses RSS will also be happy with pulling only few times a day and not every few minutes. That's why push became so popular but with a different subset of users. Everybody goes through a push-positive phase but some (like me) come to a conclusion that this is unhealthy and distracting in the long run - hence the fond memories of technology like RSS.
Switching back to Linux after ten years on Mac, I had completely forgotten how much I love it when my computer does _not_ notify me about anything. I have no notification system installed. It’s been a few months and I haven’t missed anything, but I feel more relaxed and focused while using the computer. Notification are mind pollution.
I like notifications on linux. It allows me to know when a livestream starts or when a person I like tweets immediately instead of me only realizing hours later.
Haha, I suppose this illustrates how well Linux can work for every different preference, but both of those sound like exactly what I don’t want at all. Being called to pay attention to something, immediately, because some other person did something, not directly interacting with me, is the antithesis of how I want to spend my time.
>The author paints it as some kind of conspiracy, but the simple truth is that RSS waned in popularity once push notifications became popular and widespread. Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient and unfeasible to do on most platforms and devices today. Pub/sub is the clear way forward, but it's just sad that there is no accepted standard for it.
Polling isn't a requirement. If your reader is polling it's strictly because the author wanted to implement such a feature; that's it.
There's also ETag and last-modified which are used when checking and have very little overhead (most especially in the case when the content has not changed).
I think it was the sunsetting of Google Reader that triggered the downfall. I don’t think I ever cared about push notifications for feeds. When you have your morning coffee, open up Reeder, refresh the feeds and read through a few articles.
Push notifications have a cost too, now you need the server to maintain state of all clients and notify them on changes. This has huge implications at scale, especially if it's extremely cheap or easy for new clients to spin up. Think about every single browser tab now requiring a server to maintain some state on the backend--that's a nightmare with billions and billions of users and tabs. Pull-based architectures have the nice effect that less popular content has almost no cost to continue serving and just falls into the background forever.
I don't think it was even just a technical issue. Linear feeds of all content just died out to be replaced with sites like Hacker News / Reddit where you have ranked ordering and comments.
As much as HN hates the out of order feeds, that's what the average user wants because most content is boring.
> Every user's RSS reader polling every website for changes every few minutes for all eternity is horribly inefficient
I think you're greatly overestimating this inefficiency. Especially for websites properly implementing the HTTP protocol. 'Push' requires a lot more complexity and it's also outside of the user's control. For fuck's sake, you can just serve a static file. We've been doing this for decades.
Talking about control, my hypothesis is that it was the main driver of the downfall of RSS. It started when Google killed Reader and Facebook took control of what you see in the timeline. Users picking and choosing what/when to read is not compatible with the way the major gatekeepers of information drive engagement.
FWIW my RSS reader is set up to only refresh manually when I open it and pull to refresh, and I like it that way. It's a much nicer way of reading than having everything yelling for my attention all the time.
I've noticed a healthy amount of websites with pretty granular RSS, for example the auto parts outlet rockauto.com has RSS feed for every make, model, and production year that they service.
I'd wager this saves them some unpaid overtime. It seems that a service which provides correct, useful RSS nearly obviates the entire hassle of dealing with bot scrapers and the resource drain and health insurance premiums that come along. You can easily serve any volume of RSS with cloudflare or nginx.
It is quite true that mobile clients scraping a url is inefficient vs pub/sub. Maybe you could just uses mqtt to trigger a GET or something.
I spent about five minutes considering what a world with facebook, instagram, ebay, amazon RSS feeds might look like. The experience felt like goat staring.
I was part of a startup that aggregated items for sale years and years ago (we were sold to LookSmart for a pittance in the end) and we did RSS feeds for everything. Every page spat out a list of items, in fact and the website and the RSS and atom feeds were all generated from the same middle layer. A huge part of our inventory came from RSS feeds too.
That's not true, but might be a common misconception. RSS rode the wave of the realtime hype at that time and has multiple standards for push notifications. RSSCloud und Pubsubhubbub are the two immediately in my mind, note that PuSH got turned into WebSub.
Wordpress does support both. You can make a blog on wordpress.com right now and you get both standards activated by default in the RSS feed. That takes care of half the web ;) (well, it would if it's also true for standalone Wordpress installations, which I don't know). And all relevant readers support at least PuSH. This is really not a standard problem, and I doubt the concept itself is part of the adoption problem.
No, not having a way to subscribe when stumbling over an RSS feed was the main problem in my eyes, and the existence of a feed not being highlighted in browsers anymore. Firefox dropping support was not only an act of treason against the free web, it was also very effective in making it very hard for new users to understand how to use RSS. Not that chrome is any better. Here lies the problem, and that's where it could be solved.
Add into browsers an icon when a site has an RSS feed, and let that point to a foundation managed site that points to RSS readers, where users can select their favorite. I'm 100% certain that would have a huge effect on adoption numbers.
As this comment thread shows very well RSS is not dead at all, but it's not in the mass market right now and that could be changed easily enough.
Push notifications are a replacement for RSS in the same way that cars are a replacement for public transit.
This is a nonsense comparison. RSS is about presentation, not about real time interaction. And it would not be hard to have RSS feeds support push notifications, or other modernization.
RSS is a universal and accessible way of presenting content, that is what is so inconvenient about it to publishers.
The business model of most platforms today has RSS as competition. It completely undermines analytics, and their ability to fine-tune presentation, for the benefit of the end-user.
So of course GM will say that their gas guzzlers make electric trains obsolete.
Sites like Movim (https://movim.eu/) offer an user friendly front-end for this protocol (building upon the ATOM format). You can login using any XMPP account and also self-host Movim instances.
I don't agree with your premise or conclusion. Its far easier for a website to just publish a dead XML file that any client can read at their own pace, as frequently as they would like. Also, anyone can create a pub/sub 'middle man' that can implement a push system for clients who want that. You can have the best of both.
Haha, I literally just set up Newsboat[1] and this is my second article I read from the comfort of my terminal :) So far Newsboat is great: Everything configurable with text, fast and effortless. The key-binds took a little bit, but now I can even do stuff with hjkl!
I will take the opportunity to ask about two issues I am currently facing.
- Is there a feed for Github discussions?
- Does anyone have some ideas/sources for bookmark scripts? I found [2], but I am not really sure what it does.
E: To add, in my opinion the killer feature of Newsboat is the fact that all links get appended to the article, similar to how I added the two links below my post. In Newsboat I can just press the corresponding number and open the link!
GitHub has per-repo feeds for commits and a private feed for all your events[1], but not for issues or discussions, apparently[2]. Of course, you can always roll your own using the API, a web server, and a cron job, even if it is a bit inelegant.
I rediscovered RSS about six months ago when I switched back to Linux from MacOS and realized Akregator was still part of KDE. Most actual long form content - blogs, news, company websites, podcasts all still have RSS feeds, and once you have 10-20 good ones loaded into Akregator, it's actually a pretty good experience.
Most of the big socials dropped RSS feeds a while back for the same reason their APIs became less useful: they monetized with ads being mixed in with content. Allowing users to view their stream outside the UI literally cuts into the ad revenue.
I'm still consuming plenty of stuff via RSS using the Mac app Vienna. I honestly don't spend as much time in Vienna as I did in Google Reader back in the day though - primarily because over the years more and more feeds went dead.
It seems like different niches treat RSS differently - many of the webcomics I've subscribed to still publish via RSS. Even if the actual comic image isn't included in the RSS, there's at least a feed entry with a link to go to the site to view the comic. But my "Cars" category in Vienna is basically empty - I guess the various automotive blogs and magazines I subscribed to were run by folks who didn't care about RSS as they migrated platforms, etc. Or maybe they actively shut their feeds off to try to drive traffic to their homepages.
I certainly understand why various sites, including mainstream and social media sites, dropped their RSS feeds, but it's never made sense to me why browsers did (especially when browsers have so many features). It seems to me RSS is good for the web and therefore good for browsers.
That said, the UX of RSS was pretty terrible compared to social media. I think it could have been different—podcasts managed to make RSS mainstream and with a bit more tuning and standardization it probably could have worked. I really think the issue was that in the 2009-2015 period huge amounts of industry mindshare went into mobile apps and social media and RSS (or its eventual successor) were left half-baked.
That also seems strange to me. For a majority of current browsers, based on Chromium, one can argue that Google has little interest in supporting RSS. But that doesn't apply to Firefox, for example. What's the explanation?
I have a private Discord server that acts as an RSS reader via MonitoRSS[1]. It works great because Discord has really good notification configuration. Some feeds I want to know about immediately, others I only want to see when I check the news, and because I can mute channels I can let my friends use it as well. They set up their own feeds and I don't have to be alerted to it but I can go look if I'm interested in what they're reading lately.
All that is to say that RSS still works. What's missing is the original content creators of the early RSS world. Nowadays, most people create small, easy-to-write, easy-to-consume content in one of the walled gardens since the notifications, interactions, and network are all included for them.
I started using feedly again this week for monitoring some listservs / mailing list archives, and also some craigslist searches for things I want to buy, all in one place.
The sensible websites still offer it, and the ones that don't are a toxic dumpster fire anyway. Yes, I too remember the good old days when you could monitor facebook, twitter, etc all in an RSS reader, and then they stopped their RSS feeds. The thing to realize is that they also stopped being useful, user-oriented sites at the same time.
Hmm, I grabbed one of the links, hit "view source", searched for "atom" and "rss", and found: https://openai.com/blog/rss/
I haven't fed it into my RSS reader, which is on another machine, but, inspecting it with curl, it looks like RSS XML... does it not work for you?
It is a problem that the webpage doesn't give any visible sign that it supports RSS. That is unfortunately common; I don't know why they do that. Anyway, for what it's worth:
# fish shell here, with an alias
~> for x in (P | tr -d ' '); echo $x (curl -sL $x | egrep -c -i 'rss|atom'); end
... omitting the non-matches ...
https://blog.close.com 1
https://bloggingfordevs.com/blog 1
https://discord.com/blog 1
https://linktr.ee/blog 2
https://openai.com/blog/openai-api 1
https://segment.com/blog 2
https://web.dev/blog 1
https://www.linode.com/blog 4
https://www.tradingview.com/blog/en 1
I always check the source code as well to find the RSS/Atom link but looks like I've missed a few of them.
However, some of them like (tradingview.com/blog/en) mention words RSS/Atom but they don't have a feed and for some of them (like blog.close.com) it's broken.
Interestingly, all blog engines I have ever tried support RSS. I don't know if I have it set on any of my sites (they don't have any content or traffic anyway), but the option is always there.
RSS never went away for me. My NextCloud News app hosts ~100 feeds, RSS feeds power my news dashboards at home, as well as my newsletters (who ever needs to subscribe to spammy newsletters when you can easily configure your own based on the feeds you follow, with the frequency you want, with the level of aggregation that you want?), as well as the daily/weekly digests automatically sent to my e-readers.
Curate your feeds list well, and you won't need another timeline.
I've been working on a self-hosted (not federated) model for social media called Haven[1]. RSS (with HTTP basic auth) was the obvious answer for "how do I track all of my friends' different sites?" It has the advantage that building an RSS reader into the system means you can follow other Havens and other websites in one place.
It's interesting to me that you say "Not federated", because RSS has always seemed to me to be one of the best-adopted federated protocols, after SMTP and HTTP. Indeed, the first generation of federated social media protocols were originally based on souped-up RSS feeds (Atom) with an optional PubSub enhancement (Pubsubhubbub, later renamed to WebSub).
So when you say "not federated", what exactly do you mean? If you're publishing to your own site, and other people are reading it on their own compatible sites, isn't that fundamentally a federated model?
I'm trying to distinguish between Haven and Mastodon-type systems. "Federated" to me generally means you have many multi-user servers. With Haven, the server only hosts a single identity--yours, since you're the administrator/operator. I wouldn't describe a Wordpress blog with RSS as federated either.
Mastodon runs just fine in single user mode—in fact, it's was one of our most popular options back in the beginning. I personally don't think of single user and multi-user mode as particularly different, and neither is "core" to the functionality of Mastodon—the core functionality is the ability to interface with other users, whether they're hosted on your server or elsewhere. In that sense, whether a server is single- or multi-user is really isomorphic to the way I think about Mastodon's user experience, most of the time.
I'm with Inoreader and have never been happier. They integrate what they can, which means public Twitter and Facebook feeds, Telegram channels and also plain web pages with either text or image-based tracking in addition to all the "normal" RSS goodies. RSS never died, but a lot of people gave up on "their" web which has been both premature and unnecessary.
I use RSS daily with Miniflux. Tiny Tiny RSS is another popular self hosted option and there are a number of freemium platforms like Feedly & Inoreader. I prefer to self host primarily for cost/no ads or tracking/private data. It's true that social media platforms don't support it but that's never been my personal use case - every news site or discussion group I like to keep up with has a feed and it's worked great for me.
News aggregators are my main business since 2001 and all I can say is that reports of the death of RSS have been greatly exaggerated. Recently launched https://biztoc.com where 75% is still RSS, the rest being APIs and custom scraping. Yes, support is not increasing but drops among established sites are very rare — Even all major crypto news sites sport a feed.
Very nice to see the author uses Flarum (https://flarum.org) an open-source forum software to power his blog. Very innovative use!
We also use Flarum to power our user feedback site for Orion browser https://orionfeedback.org another example of Flarum's ability to adopt to different use cases.
Since my browser removed the two-click feature for sending a site's feed URL to my RSS reader, I now do a bit more manual work to find RSS URLs myself.
When I don't know if a site offers a syndication URL, I fall back to viewing the page source, and searching for these telltale strings: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
I use a reader that automatically pulls feeds from Twitter and other social media like Reddit. Just need to plop the URL into the feed field and they figure it out. I pay for it, but it's pretty nice for getting back to the old Google Reader feel.
This topic comes up semi-frequently. I'm personally a fan of RSS but it certainly has issues:
(For the purposes of this comment I'm mostly referring to Atom/
1. RSS is, at the end of the day, a syndication format, _not_ a feedback or posting format.
2. RSS feeds have no real concept of portability between devices or user agents. Kludges like OPML can be used to aggregate feeds for sharing across user agents, but they still don't actually store device-specific metadata that a user would like.
3. If RSS feeds contain both the article and the content, then there's both little incentive for the user to actually visit the site and no analytics for the author to understand which articles are popular. When authors put summaries in their feeds with links to the original article, they degrade the experience for the reader.
Services like Wallabag which scrape and store article contents for later viewing seems, IMO, more Lin line with what users want while being fairly seamless for the author. There's also technologies like WebMentions for server owners to comment on other blogs or things like Usenet to freely discuss articles.
>If RSS feeds contain both the article and the content, then there's both little incentive for the user to actually visit the site and no analytics for the author to understand which articles are popular. When authors put summaries in their feeds with links to the original article, they degrade the experience for the reader.
Yeah, this is definitely a problem. FWIW, Ars Technica solved that by giving you full-text fees only if you pay for a subscription, which seems like a nice approach that more places could hypothetically use.
So do I. There was plenty that needed improving but fundamentally the idea was awesome. What's more is that I miss Google reader like nothing I've ever missed. I've been pitching the idea to rebuild it to multiple people, even started working on it on my own when I got no response but fundamentally it's too much work for a single person... Truly a shame.
Some days ago there was a ShowHN (if I'm not misremembering) of a tool to generate RSS for sites that do not support them. I haven't tried it but maybe it can be useful to you
WebToons does have feeds, but they only show the first frame. Then you need to wait 10s for their shitty JS to load before it starts to download the comic.
I really want to make a scraper that will pull the full comic into the feed but don't want to play the cat-and-mouse game.
If you're familiar with CSS selectors, you could try this that I work on to generate a feed from the webcomic site: https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/
To be honest, I don't. Websites like Reddit or Hacker News are better because they provide popularity scores into the links, helping me filtered out junk links.
I thought like this until I started missing posts from blogs I liked. I remembered why RSS feeds are useful and got back into it after a friend recommended a reader he uses. I also picked up a good habit from him: subscribing to releases/commits of projects I want to stay up-to-date with.
There were many rss to kindle services back then, that I really miss..
The only bad thing about RSS I could find was following the news sites, where every news was equal, so "cat lost" and "massive bomb killed everyone in a city next to you" are treated equally.
I don't think Google Reader killed RSS. Sure, it was nice to have a common place to discover feeds but I don't think that was enough to make or break RSS.
I think the failing of RSS is that no major browsers have RSS indicators anymore. Defaults are king and if users need to install an extension, view source and search for feeds, paste the URL into a reader and hope that there is a feed or click an RSS link and wonder what this XML is then >90% of users won't use it.
If browsers add a "subscribe to this site" button that opens your reader or redirects to your "app store" to get one then there is a decent chance of non-trivial user adoption.
Me too where I use inoreader for my feeds. I really can’t imagine consuming content any other way. Agree when Google reader died then a lot of webpages cut off support.
I get the RSS feed of Hacker News via Feedbin, but only as a backup; I find it much more pleasant to log on to the website once or twice a day and browse.
how do you have a RSS feed of HN? what links does it include out of the thousands that are posted here daily? also, can I ask you what service are you currently using for you RSS feed?
thanks.
Unfortunately, it only includes the title and the submission’s link, no content, which makes it a bit useless if your intension is to read the articles and not just the titles, which you can already do by visiting the home page.
Some people have created complementary RSS feeds like this → https://github.com/cixtor/rssfeed#readme which basically take the submission’s URL, download the web page, and removes the irrelevant HTML tags using Mozilla’s Readability.js library. Although, this project uses a Go (golang) port: https://github.com/go-shiori/go-readability#readme . It seems to work quite well, with minor bugs here and there due to inconsistencies of modern web development.
There's probably more of them but if you look at the html (browsers used to have an icon for this...) there's a <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="rss"> tag in there on the home page, so https://news.ycombinator.com/rss should be the feed
Everytime I see RSS on HN I'd like to recommend Aldo Gunsing's[0] work on creating a solution for managing Feeds, Calendars and Addresses. It takes some learning but it works fine. Couple it with Syncthing and you have them synced on all your personal computers. He maintains also forks of some popular readers[1].
Thank you I hadn't looked into a replacement, just thought RSS feeds infringed on some techno-gatekeepers fiefdom and had been deemed too dangerous to live.
I went to add an RSS button to Safari from the Mac App Store, and the only option is two bucks.
I pay for software all the time but this offended my sensibilities. Not the paying for it, although I admittedly didn't, but that RSS has fallen so far that there's no free extension. Desktop Safari is a minor browser, but not so tiny that this should matter.
Substack supports RSS, so I'm cautiously optimistic about a revival. But that was a sobering reminder of its moribund state.
My search engine has found RSS feeds on about 70% of the domains it's indexed. It may be dead for the big sites, but I do think RSS is alive and well in the personal website category.
(I gathered them because I had this idea of maybe polling RSS feeds of high ranked domains to check for changes without having to do a full re-crawl. It's not something I do, it's more of an experiment at this point)
I still use RSS on a daily basis, and it's great. I like Newsblur.com but there are a fair number of options based on your desire to self-host and/or use social features.
The primary thing I wish was better is a way to handle social commentary. Unfortunately this is an extremely hard problem to solve without allowing spamming and brigading.
I stand by my comments. Video killed the radio star. And, social media killed RSS. Sure, it still exists. But, you don’t see that RSS logo on every website like you once did. A new-ish web user may not even know what RSS is.
Everyone’s like, let’s meta, let’s fediverse. Pft, it’s all just kids re-doing RSS.
The one time I wanted to use an RSS feed I found I had no (acceptable) way to ensure I didn't miss data. New items could be truncated off the feed after anywhere between 10 minutes and two hours, and the solution to this was supposedly to use a third party service to sit in the middle and act as a buffer. There was no way to provide a timestamp or anything like that and I presume the reason is its meant to be generate 1 & serve M.
I'm sure the driving factor to RSS losing popularity is it just doesn't fit into the modern model of making fat stacks of cash off of content that other people create which you control the publishing of.
But it certainly doesn't help that it seems very limited as far as a protocol for retrieving a portable log of activity.
Yes, unfortunately I was in that case where pagination simply wasn't provided by the feed. Push notifications of course wouldn't have worked (if they were even supported, and I don't believe they were), since otherwise I would have just sat there polling the feed itself every 20 minutes like a maniac.
It seems like this widespread limitation leads to the reliance on aggregators, and second-hand it seems google playing the disappearing act with their aggregation service was one of contributing factors to (or a symptom of?) the decline of RSS. Certainly I would have been willing to just shrug my shoulders and use it if it was still operating when I ran into my one and only case of wanting to use an RSS feed.
I use RSS pretty heavily via Feedbin and Unread on iOS but I do sometimes wish I could view my feeds in a curated format akin to a magazine or newspaper rather than a flat undifferentiated list. There probably isn't a big enough market for it but I would love to see more experimentation in feed reader design instead of just cloning the UI of email clients.
> I have a feed for this blog although I don’t think anyone would be interested in subscribing.
OP has at least two subscribers on the Innoreader RSS reader according to their little subscriber widget thing (but I'm not signing up for an account to post a comment just to tell them that, so hopefully they read these comments and get a smile today :) )
RSS is alive and well. I use it daily and I can't even keep up with the feeds I subscribe to (hundreds). In recent years, it has mostly replaced Twitter for me.
I think what the author really means is "I wish I could read tweets as RSS." And the answer to that is that there are several different third party ways of doing so, if you wish.
RSS-Proxy can watch sites without RSS and inform on changes. Well worth self hosting it alongside FreshRSS. There are also solutions for watching Twitter, Facebook et el too. In todays technology there is no reason to just visit a website to check for updates and I find most sites I use do have RSS anyway.
RSS is not suited for large news networks or social medias; had they use RSS my reader would be jammed anyway. On the other hand, RSS is the best tool for blogging so as long as there are bloggers around there will be RSS.
The problem is not that RSS is declining, it is people don't write as much as before.
The obligatory annual lament of google killing off "Reader" ???.
I still use RSS via Feedly (paid for the one time lifetime subscription) - start it up first thing in the morning but sadly noticed some interesting stuff posted on twitter but it is like finding a gemstone in a fetid swamp.
Feedly and Innoreader are both good and use various apps and or extensions that hook into those two. It’s one of the best ways to quickly scan content from multiple upsteam sources and a decent reader makes for a pleasant reading experience too.
it's embarrassing to admit (i mean, I have a CS degree from a Famous School(TM) and I'm an old school unix and C programmer), and it's been a long time since I've tried, but I could never figure out how to get RSS working. the instructions always had terms-of-art without explanation, like syndication or something. Like, I know what syndication is in terms of newspaper publishing, but that doesn't tell me if that's something I want to turn on or not. Like I said, it's been a long time so maybe that wasn't one of the words, but it just seemed like an insular world that I wasn't a part of.
FWIW I use News Explorer for iOS/Mac (the syncing is great btw) and newsboat for Linux, and I've never been asked if I want to turn on syndication. I just add feeds and then articles from those feeds show up, and I read them.
Unless you mean how to enable publishing an RSS feed for your own website? In that case I have no idea, and I wouldn't expect an old school unix/C person to know how to configure web things (speaking as one as well).
I'm starting to get as tired of "I miss RSS" blog posts as I used to be of those ever-so-authentic-and-grassroots "RSS is dying!" blog posts years and years ago.
I've noticed that most major websites covering crypto (supposedly one of the most decentralized industries) don't have RSS at all or it just doesn't work. Looking at you, CoinDesk and The Block.
While this topic is still on the front page, does anyone have some feed recommendations? Some of my favorites are Hackaday, Damn Interesting (including curated links), and hnrss for terms like side project.
Can anyone recommend a nice RSS client for Apple systems that uses iCloud to sync the list of feeds across devices? I've tried Reeder and NetNewsWire and they both miss the mark of "ideal".
I still read some high-volume Twitter accounts via my RSS reader, but I guess my aggregator (Feedbin) is doing something fancy to allow that if Twitter has turned it off on their side.
RSS is still there, it's just that sites don't enable it anymore. Have loads of sites that don't do it that I have to follow manually through crawlers.
I bought ReadKit for Mac a few years ago and still use it today. I still like having a nice standalone news reader. It even ties into my Instapaper account.
This wouldn’t be necessary if all browsers automatically auto detected RSS feeds still. But, good point. I will add a link to my feed on the main page. I haven’t because of the fact that society killed RSS. But, you all are disagreeing so I’ll add a link.
Clearly based on the comments, that tech isn't a problem here, but economics.
I don't think we should return RSS as it was pretty bad format, but something that would serve like that and have some more wider adoption or approval would be fantastic.
RSS feeds have become my one and only way to consume the web and subscribe to people, websites and various things on the web.
Tiny Tiny RSS[0] is an addictive RSS reader with tons of options to sort, manipulate, filter in/out, etc. RSS entries. Feed Preview[1] is a must-have Firefox add-on for finding available feeds on websites (and previewing them).
All alternative front-ends to YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. provide feeds to subscribe to people like Invidious[2], nitter[3], Bibliogram[4], etc. (large list of alternative front-ends here [5]).
Fortunately, Github and Reddit, still natively support RSS feeds.
As others have mentioned, WordPress-based websites natively include RSS feeds for the whole website, by category, for comments of a particular post, etc. This is much better than crappy newsletters.
Regarding newsletters, when it's the only option, I use Mailnesia[6] to turn an inbox into an RSS feed.
Speaking of bridges, RSS-Bridge[7] makes feeds available to hundreds of websites through community plugins.
Feed43 [8] is also a great tool to force an ordinary page to be available as an RSS feed.
SearX [9], a metasearch engine, turns into a very powerful tool to watch for something on the whole web with advanced search functions and results available as RSS feeds. This is better than many dedicated tools, imo.
Anyway, I don't think RSS feeds are missing or even dying. But they are definitely a relic of the good old days, when Aaron Swartz was around, and unfortunately reserved for people who are looking for them or are curious enough to dive into that world.
One thing is for sure though: if they disappear, I'm out.
RSS is still alive and kicking. I came here via RSS.
But the masses browse a locked down web. That is true.
We might have another shot at an open web for the masses via the whole crypto movement.
If content goes on decentralized blockchains in the future, nobody can lock the content down like big tech did for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc.
Projects like Arweave show how it is possible to store huge amounts of data on a blockchain without using much resources.
If we get there, it will be trivial to build blockchain-to-rss bridges. I am ready to build some to get my favorite content into my RSS reader.
My feeling is that there might be a way towards a decentralized web via financial incentives. In a decentralized web, crypto currencies can float around freely. Making it easy for the actors to earn. Old platforms will probably be slow to open up to crypto currencies.
Consider a “decentralised” blockchain system that does the work of The Pirate Bay – providing hashes of particular files, along with their names, so that people can select and request data from the P2P network.
How, exactly, does this system help with RSS in any way?
Additionally, how does this system help with the “censorship” issues that The Pirate Bay has? Even when The Pirate Bay remains up, that doesn't mean anybody's seeding.
And a blockchain-based system has to have this limitation. If all the data is directly on the blockchain, nobody can actually download it all, so the blockchain becomes unverifiable and ceases to have any cryptographic properties at all. (In short, there's no benefit to a blockchain at all.)
How, exactly, does this system
help with RSS in any way?
You cannot make a Twitter-2-RSS bridge because Twitter block access to the data. In a decentralized system, access to the data is inherent.
Even when The Pirate Bay remains up,
that doesn't mean anybody's seeding
That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised.
If all the data is directly on the
blockchain, nobody can actually
download it all
Blockchains have come a long way since Satoshis version in 2009. We have approaches now where participants only need to download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the network as a whole keeps the chain intact.
> In a decentralized system, access to the data is inherent.
Well, yeah – but we already have that. It's called the Fediverse. No blockchain in sight. (In fact, it predates Bitcoin.)
> That is where the financial incentives come into play. Seeding will be economically incentivised.
The margin for any given piece of content will be low, so there's an economic incentive to honour takedown requests, no matter how fraudulent or unenforceable, if the effort to check whether they're valid is lower than the expected average reward minus the expected average legal cost.
> We have approaches now where participants only need to download arbitrarely small parts of the chain. Yet the network as a whole keeps the chain intact.
We had those back in Satoshi's time, too. They work by having n centralised trusted nodes, then asking all your peers to double-check what you got from those trusted nodes. That approach is, surprisingly enough, also vulnerable to censorship!
(Also, I don't really think your proposed scheme is good enough to have Satoshi's name associated with it. The innovation of Bitcoin was the coin melting pot thing, not the blockchain; Satoshi's original blockchain, which Bitcoin still mostly uses, was just a worse version of Git repositories.)
The margin for any given piece of content will
be low
Not when the financial incentive rises the rarer (less shared) a piece of content gets. This will be baked into the protocols. Arweave already has this.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand Bitcoin. People don't pay to store data on the blockchain; they pay to get their transactions mined. There's no guarantee that all the blocks of the Bitcoin blockchain will stick around forever, only that there'll be a consensus as to what the current block is, and what the states of all the wallets are (since that's the only information you need to validate a new block).
Keeping historical blocks around is not a property of Bitcoin. No up-front blockchain payment system can keep data around for any length of time. (There is no mechanism enforcing the storage of the data; such a mechanism cannot exist within a computer system.) “$10/GB for 200 years” are the words of a snake-oil salesperson – or, more charitably, somebody who hasn't properly read the marketing copy.
Spam cannot be dealt with. Illicit material sticking around is a feature. There is an economic incentive for material that creates a liability for the “seeders” to not be kept around.
To give it as much credit as I can: individual peers could do their own content moderation, deciding what they do and don't want to be around, and if enough people decide something shouldn't be there, it'll basically drop out of availability. But that goes against the whole “market forces” philosophy that it's supposedly based on, and also goes against some of the claims that the proponents of these systems keep making.
It's just a bad system, not even taking into account the pointless CPU cycle wastage. Blockchains sort of make sense for something where each block is based on the previous, but for arbitrary pieces of data? Chaining them like that is faddish unless it brings real concrete benefits over just doing the same thing without blockchain.
Mirror.xyz currently renders HTML from its Arweave backend, but not RSS, which is a bit disappointing, as there are a few Mirror blogs I'd love to have in my news reader. If it's capable of rendering HTML, RSS should be just a few lines of code away, but I can't find any repository for the frontend to try and implement it myself. More disappointing is the overall reactions to this comment including totally unhelpful comments that are basically just "OMG GTFO" and likely violating HN guidelines.
I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so from my perspective, RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago.