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Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
304 points by onli on Jan 6, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 167 comments
I would like to create a group that promotes RSS.

Regularly on HN we see threads about the apparent demise of the feed file as a technology and how sad it is. Despite the answers to those threads showing that RSS/Atom is not dead at all, what is clear is that it is not in a great spot. Less sites support it, percent-wise a smaller amount of internet users knows what it is and how it might be of use, browsers dropped their integrations.

I have a plan on how to counteract this. It includes getting people together who feel that this technology is elemental for the open web and should be preserved. It then vaguely continues like this (not necessarily sorted by feasibility):

1. Open PRs for browsers with provided-by-us code to integrate RSS again, with UI elements that make existing feeds visible and supports subscribing via a feed reader

2. Run a site that can be used for this, that takes a "I want to subscribe to a feed"-request and presents RSS readers to do so.

3. Implement default feeds for CMS that are missing them.

4. Implement easy to use libraries for programming languages that might miss them.

5. Create a website that explains why this is important, that hosts or links to the specifications and that contains additional documentation.

It's nothing I can do on my own, but I really think that if some people come together, that we could have a real influence on this development. Even if the browser integration step fails (which might be likely) there are alternative ways forward. And I'm sure there will be many more ideas on what could be done.

If this is of interest to you, consider joining https://gitter.im/FosterRSS/community.



I made https://blogdb.org/ to collect blogs from around the Internet, it gets an RSS feed of the blogs. I posted a Show HN about it yesterday that didn't get much traction.

The code is all open source, at https://github.com/symkat/BlogDB/ and I wrote an article on my own blog about initially writing the software from design to deployment: https://modfoss.com/building-blogdb.html


Very nice! I did something similar with https://nightfall.city


Thanks, that's pretty neat!


Bookmarked, thanks for the great resource.

One minor thing: The preview images take up a lot of space on mobile, I have to scroll forever just to look through all the options. Perhaps the preview could be text only at least on smaller screens?


Delighted to see that BlogDB is written in Perl! I've submitted my blog to this directory/aggregator. Sites like these are indispensible for strengethening the independent Web.


Thank you! I'm a huge fan of Perl too, looks like your blog is listed now!


Ah, the discovery angle. I didn't think of that. Looks like a nice project, and it shows what RSS can help build. Fits well I think.


Thank you! I'm thrilled people are finding it useful!


Lots of people are saying it's a collective nostalgia or a blast to the past to consider using RSS. Even in my daily life I hear this from other people. It's not just nostalgia, I've been using it since my last year of high school as a gen Z. I don't see how people can repeatedly check websites or put faith in twitter or whatever non-RSS users do to get their new information. RSS is very practical, it's just a server/app repeatedly checking websites for me, in an XML document that fits a standard. Use createfeed.fivefilters.org to make given HTML conform to RSS with CSS selectors if need be. Why check websites when this app can do it for me?


You are focusing on the consumption side and your proposed steps seem like a good way to bring back easy consumption of RSS feeds.

But the problem lies elsewhere: the blogs I regularly visit still have RSS feeds, but most content now isn’t in blogs anymore. For-profit sites have crippled or completely dropped their feeds to make users see ads. Many people that would have been bloggers a decade ago just publish threads on twitter now. And discoverability is a whole topic for itself…

So even if rss was in-your-face in every browser, how would you get content creators to support it?


Valid points!

My hope is that the one would follow from the other. If consumption is easy and awareness better, creators would want their content available via a feed. Think Youtube: With ads integrated into the videos every feed subscriber is a money source, both for the platform and for the creator.

I know a podcast I like but never listen to it, because it's behind a strange podcast platform without a feed. If they had that they had at least one listener more, and more listeners would mean more potential for advertising. Simple awareness could help here.

Also, I think it's somewhat of a misconception that ads are impossible to add to feeds. The article itself can contain them, the feed can even have special ads, there are no rules against that. Sure: We are talking static ads like banner ads, not Javascript-tracker-driven dynamic adspaces, but that's a direction the web should go to anyway. There has been technology and industry in that direction in the past, why shouldn't it exist again?


A good compromise is to just ship the headline and first paragraph or two, with a link to the full article.


Wholeheartedly agree. And even if a feed ships a lot of text, the reader software can always trim it down and/or present it as it wants. For the website builder I develop and sell, I use the reader side of RSS as a 'social timeline', so there's no room for long articles in the feed anyway. Want to read more, just visit the website. The website is the best place for ads as well, dirtying up your timeline with ads is a no-no for me.

I also want to use the opportunity to propose a new name for RSS, which is 'Really Social Sites' or 'Real Social Sites'. RSS had name changes in the past, so it's only natural it gets a new name when it will revive in the coming years. And since all this web3 sh1t (names without meaning) I really felt the need to put energy in RSS and also it's name. To make it more accessible to everybody, not only devs and nerds, it needs a better name. Nothing else has to change, RSS is rock solid as a technology. Can't wait to use my own software to read the personal blogs/websites of all you guys and gals. Social Media without Big Tech.


You would need a monetizing option for RSS Feeds, but is this really something that we want?

Enjoy your new RSS Feed about Quantum Mechanics, featured by BIGCOMPANY, we sell the shitty products you like.


That's what FeedBurner [1] was for. Google put that into maintenance mode last July.

[1] https://feedburner.google.com/


Authentication on RSS feeds is a thing, and I get RSS feeds from several premium subscriptions.


I almost never find something I want to follow that doesn't have a feed.

As someone pointed out to me, most of the RSS nostalgia is really more Google Reader nostalgia. I found that weird as it wasn't the first or the last RSS reader I used, but it was the reader that made RSS closest to mainstream. And for many people, it was the only reader they ever used, and so they're completely unaware of the ecosystem of web-based readers that sprung back up after it died or of the stand-alone apps that never went away.

And that makes me think trying to get RSS wired into browsers is unnecessary. Just make people aware of the web-based readers. For example, I'd say Feedbin is better than Google Reader was, and it's probably not the only one that is. It solves the Twitter problem, and you can even point email newsletters at it. I use the Hell out of it and cheerfully pay, which has helped cover upgrades as the guy's gotten more customers.

(Also, since it always comes up, people shouldn't obsess with trying to get all content into the RSS feed. It's always been perfectly reasonable to just put a summary or title in the feed.)


It's not just pushing web-based readers: I think the largest thing behind Google Reader nostalgia was social. It was Google's biggest social network to date in terms of daily active usage. (They'll throw stats that Google Plus did "better", but who is nostalgic for Google Plus, exactly?) That's why it got the closest to breaking mainstream: it wasn't just "go out in the wilds and hunt for RSS feeds on blogs" like most web-based readers appear to be to a new user, but "hey, follow my Gmail email in Google Reader and I'll share some cool things I read and then you can also yourself subscribe to where I got that". It was the conversation around stories. It was the network effect of all the Gmail users at the time.

Web-based readers today are better than Google Reader was in terms of features and data sources supported, etc. (I'm partial to and pay for Newsblur myself.) But none of them have the network effects or "social scene" of Google Reader at its peak. Likely none of them ever will. They are competing today with Twitter and Facebook. Those are the spots where people share and comment on the articles they read today.


Considering that the social angle was not what people bemoaning the lack of updates for Reader, then its shutdown, complained about? I don't think that was the majority usage by far. You (and the two people responding to that effect) may be literally the first people I've seen bring up the social functions of Google Reader in conversations and articles as something they missed since it shut down.

That said, if you want a social network, they exist. If you want an RSS reader, they exist. If you think reading web pages and adding feeds to an RSS reader is going into "the wilds", you may not want the latter.


I think you missed some things in my comment. I have an RSS reader and it has social features. I'm happy with it and have used RSS pretty much continuously from its early days. I agree with you, on paper feature-for-feature, my RSS Reader of choice today is better than what Google Reader was in many ways. What it doesn't have versus Google Reader, where I still draw some small nostalgia for Google Reader is Google's network effect (nor does it have Facebook's or Twitter's).

You found it weird that people are so nostalgic about Google Reader and said you didn't see why people are so nostalgic about it: my point was that a big thing that people who are nostalgic for Google Reader miss both directly and indirectly was its social features and their network effect. At Google Reader's peak I did have non-technical friends that had no idea what RSS was or how it worked, but they followed a bunch of their friends socially in "that reading thing connected to Gmail" and sometimes picked up that they could subscribe to other feeds just by subscribing to feeds they saw in friends' feeds. That was a big deal for almost-mainstream adoption. Most of that has moved to other social media today (Facebook and Twitter) and that's why "RSS is dead" according to all the headlines, but for a brief period Google Reader was people's "Twitter" and rather than top-posting short quips and a link to an article some of the time every "tweet" was bottom-posted in reply to articles. ("It was a more cultured social media for a more civilized age," in old man words.)

It's not unlikely that you don't have nostalgia for Google Reader simply because you weren't even indirectly aware of its social features. I'd wager a lot of the people that truly have nostalgia for did take some advantages of its social features. I know some friends anecdotally who still don't know what RSS is today but are still nostalgic for Google Reader. I've tried to convince a few of them to join me on my RSS Reader of choice and I can use its social features to teach some it in a similar way to how we all used to use Google Reader, but "no one" but me is still left in my RSS Reader of choice among that original group and most "everyone" is on Twitter or Facebook. It was the network effect that made Google Reader nearly mainstream, that put RSS to the closest to the mainstream it may ever get.


I miss interesting posts from Kernel developer and Google employee on Google+.


Dammit I miss the Google Reader social scene.


Most people don’t use RSS because most people don’t prefer to consume the web that way nor that sort of content. They are scrolling social media and aggregators, not pruning their long form content subscriptions.

Even in the heyday of RSS how many of us just had an overgrown 10000+ unread RSS reader that we simply stopped using?

Promoting RSS seems backwards to me because that ship has sailed. Like promoting IRC when people have chosen solutions like Discord and then refusing to acknowledge why people prefer Discord. RSS (and IRC) didn’t just fall out of favor because people refuse to see how amazing it is nor is it just because of ads.

The answer to the post-RSS world is something more like a better, polished Fraidycat that can track content on any website. We can do better than RSS: a solution that doesn’t rely on everyone implementing it.


Thanks for referencing https://fraidyc.at/ - I haven't heard about it before.

I agree that the way how RSS clients were designed 10 years ago wouldn't work well today, but that is an a problem with architecture and UX design of rss client. I don't think that it has anything to do with the RSS or ATOM XML data structure standard.

Having machine readable data in open format is useful so that anyone can use it, and create a it's own solution without spending too much time on interpreting the data. While with unstructured, javascript heavy sites one would need to build it's own little search engine to be able to process it and desing/train it's solution for reasonable information extraction, which increases barriers to entry.


The converse is equally true: most people don’t use RSS because the largest content platforms prefer to deliver monetizable algorithmic suggestions.


True, there is no point in accumulating feeds. News sites are the worst when it comes to this, personal blogs don't grow that fast.


Agreed. The world is moving past static text content as a medium, which is what RSS/IRC are built for. I want more rich video/media oriented content like what the New York Times is producing, which takes advantage of user interactivity and new Javascript APIs. RSS isn't going to make that happen for me.


Most of NY times content is non interactive. The reason why they don't want RSS isn't because RSS sucks, it's because everyone is trying increase user retention time in their apps to make shareholders happy.


All paranoid conspiracizing aside, the NYT has a metric fuckton of different RSS feeds that all work perfectly fine. RSS is primarily a notification system and only secondarily a content-delivery one.


Though this is one reason why we can do better than RSS: the implementer (or HN commenter) isn’t the one that should get to decide what I primarily or secondarily use my “feed reader” for. In this case, my local post-RSS feed reader is absolutely a way for me to store content for consumption on my own time, not just a notification service.

You’re right about RSS. I just see a better solution for this idea of a content-delivery system being one implemented as a smart client that can handle all websites rather than a dumb client that hopes every website in 2022 implements RSS. That way there’s no “you’re just using it wrong.” ;)


Though this is one reason why we can do better than RSS: the implementer (or HN commenter) isn’t the one that should get to decide what I primarily or secondarily use my “feed reader” for. In this case, my local post-RSS feed reader is absolutely a way for me to store content for consumption on my own time, not just a notification service.

I don't care what you use it for. You can use SMS messages primarily to make a phone stuffed in your underwear keep vibrating, but if you want to complain that it's an inconvenient teledildonics protocol and client, that's on you.

Though, if you think you can code up a "smart client" that doesn't use puny RSS, but can "handle all websites" and will work better at tracking and delivering content to you than RSS does on zillions of websites (including new ones), you open up your editor and get at it, then. Have fun.


RSS is built for notification. You can get notifications of new rich-text content, videos, whatever. But notifications when you choose to get them, rather than push notifications. (If I got a push notification to my phone for every RSS article I read I'd go nuts.)


Some people get obsessed with trying to read everything through RSS and never going to a web page. I've never understood that.

I find invoking the NYT especially funny because they have MANY RSS feeds, letting you filter by sections.


That's because a lot of us like to read offline and via e-ink. It's replaced a newspaper for many folks who want to just relax and somewhat unplug for a bit.


You can get the NYT literally delivered to your door in completely offline form. I used to pick up a copy to read during lunch at work, back before smartphones.

The Sunday NYT is a bit of a challenge, mind you.


The news I'm interested in doesn't come in a newspaper though. Too niche.


I'd point to something like Feedbin's ability to pull remote content from the subscribed site, then. No idea how well it works on something with an e-ink display, though. You might look whether anyone's made a stand-alone RSS client aimed at offline reading that has that ability.


This is a very important part a lot of people miss, I think.


I think broadly RSS needs tools to make content prioritisation and find better. Certain feeds like news sites put everything in their feed and they do a terrible job of surfacing what is likely to be valuable. It would be nice if the high volume sites could be tamed some how and its not going to come from them and its not something RSS/Atom deals with. Customised feeds, filtering and people who liked this liked that kind of surfacing without the obnoxious adverts has a decent chance of being niche popular with the right interface.

I am certainly interested in trying to improve this. There has to be a less privacy invading and engagement promoting system that can work and compete with the mess that is the big silicon valley sites.


You are describing the project I'm building: https://linklonk.com

You connect to RSS feeds when you "thumb up" or directly submit a link that this feed posted. The more of the content you like from the same feed - the more other content from that feed will be prioritized. So feeds that post too frequently naturally go down in the ranking. And feeds that have a high signal-to-noise ratio are at the top.

On LinkLonk I am subscribed to 202 RSS feeds (you can see your subscriptions here https://linklonk.com/feeds), and I don't get overwhelmed by too much content.

You also connect to people who like the same content as you did. In that case each user is similar to an RSS feed (a user has "channels"). The more in common you have with a user - the more content you see from them.

No obnoxious adverts, no trackers and it's free. Would love to get any feedback (email in profile).


Hey it's me from the future. This is cool.


Hello future! Glad you like it. Do you have any suggestions on how it could work better for you?


That's not what RSS is for. It's a subscription system that notifies you when something has added new content. You control what you follow.

You can follow aggregators, you can follow curators, and you can filter what you follow. Discovery comes from what you get from who you follow. Humans going, "This is interesting.", you agreeing, and you following another blog or outlet.

Anything else definitionally is the "Silicon Valley algorithms" people say they don't want.


I'm in, too. I and my team built several news aggregators (https://TechURLs.com, https://DevURLs.com, https://SciURLs.com) and they are all powered by RSS. Every month we have issues with some of the feeds as either RSS has been removed or broken, and in this case, we have to write HTML parsers that extract the news, which is very tiring.


I created the OG popurls which started the whole single page aggregator thing. https://biztoc.com is my primary project today.


Nice to meet you! All my URLs sites are inspired by popurls. Biztoc looks awesome as well. Congrats on raising money from Mark Cuban!


I've never stopped using RSS, since it is so useful for many use cases. I've even recently built a tool, as an experiment, using it (https://github.com/dethos/worker-planet). Who remembers what a "planet" software is?

Fortunately we can still find many websites and services that provide RSS feeds (probably because the tool/framework they are built with, automatically provides that feature). Implementing it is not hard, but in the end I think the most important aspect of that list is `5.`, not a website in particular but creating awareness that this tech/tool exists and in what cases it can be useful.


> Who remembers what a "planet" software is?

The planets you link in the description are kind of popular in my blogging niche :) Nice project!


I was thinking the other day about RSS-based social media.

Imagine a service that offers a social media experience comparable with Twitter/Insta/Tumblr with rich clients, but under the hood it's all RSS, so not only can you subscribe to third-party feeds out of the box but your "profile" is also an RSS feed that other people outside of the platform can also subscribe to.


I spend a lot of time thinking about this too.

I think a way to do this and still allow private or restricted feeds is to take advantage of the fact that URLs are encrypted under HTTPS. Have the RSS served via FastCGI or a dedicated handler that verifies read permissions for a URL token against a permissions database.[1]

I think you'd want the permissions database to affiliate auth tokens with email addresses or mobile numbers.

When you request to follow someone, you input your email address or mobile number. If they approve your request, you'll receive a link to generate a feed URL with your auth token included. You can then easily input that into your feed reader of choice.[2]

If you lose the feed URL/auth token, you can request a new one using the same email or mobile number. When and only when the resulting link is activated will the old auth token mapping be replaced.

--

[1] This design is inspired by Slashdot's old auth system, which allowed you to log in via a saved URL. While that was probably horribly insecure over HTTP, you could restrict it to an IP/subnet. In any case, now that HTTPS is widespread the security concerns are substantially mitigated.

[2] An issue I haven't figured out is how to prevent feedly, inoreeder, etc. from caching private feeds.


I also thought about RSS as a basis for social media (I call it 'Really Social Sites'), but I think trying to make certain stuff private is against the whole idea of pub/sub and therefor RSS. I'm not saying you're wrong though, I just think mixing private and public (that's where the word 'publish' is coming from, right?) makes it more confusing.

I do think there's a gap to fill in RSS based social media, because users of current social media would like to send a private message (or at least not public) from time to time. I basically cover this with a contact form and email, at the moment. Sounds crude and not very techy, but it works like a charm.


You've just described FriendFeed. RIP. :(


A bit tangential, but something I really like about RSS feeds on blogs and the like is that they're relatively easy to parse, and as a result relatively easy to do programmatic stuff with them.

For example, when I had a blog a million years ago, I wanted to add a "search" engine to it (just a really dumb string comparison). It was pretty easy to do it client-side, in JavaScript, by reading the RSS feed generated by Jekyll and then just plopping the results on the screen.

Was it elegant? Nah, but it was easy and "good enough", and it would not have been nearly as easy if I hadn't had RSS.


I’m interested in this idea, would be cool to have a library for custom on-site search. Just plug in the rss feeds to parse and then add the box to your website.


Yeah, I was pretty proud of myself for thinking of it (this was a long time ago when I was still kind of learning). I'm sure using a real "search engine" thing like Solr or something could give you even better results than a dumb "does string contain" thing that I did.


I think the issue might be that ATOM is the less ambiguous feed specification and RSS should be just left to languish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)#Atom_compa...


RSS and ATOM are completely interchangeable, the format does not matter here imo. If ATOM had completely took over and everyone used it now instead of closed platforms, I'd be happy. As it is my message would be "Use one of the two, these are the technical differences, in practice it does not matter as all readers support both".


That doesn’t mention either of what I think are the most important differences:

(a) That RSS doesn’t support relative URLs, whereas Atom supports xml:base. I think some clients support xml:base on RSS, but certainly not all, so all links should be converted to absolute in RSS for compatibility.

(b) That RSS titles are of an unspecified format and bodies are only mostly HTML, leading to things like angle brackets in titles being mangled in different and incompatible ways by different clients, and plain text bodies being unreliable (indicated by the <content:encoded> mess which is I think theoretically identical in semantics to <description>, but they felt the need to duplicate it because clients had made such a mess of <description> because RSS developed “organically” in the worst way). By contrast, Atom gets it all right, allowing you to specify in each case whether you’re providing text or HTML. (And HTML is useful in titles: things like <em> and <code> are completely reasonable, and it’s a crying shame that almost no content management systems support inline formatting in titles. But if you are converting to plain text and know you’re dealing with HTML, you can strip tags. I do wish it supported both, e.g. “You don’t need <code>cat</code>” and “You don’t need `cat`” so you get backticks if monospace formatting is denied you.)

RSS is a mess that should have been completely retired about fifteen years ago. If you’re doing podcasts you have to use RSS because Apple started doing podcasts a few months before Atom was finalised, and they’ve chosen to just keep layering hacks upon hacks, namespaces upon namespaces, duplication upon duplication, for the next 16 years, rather than ever switching to Atom which would have resolved a lot of that (and maybe worked to standardise other parts, rather than duplicating fields half a dozen times for RSS, Apple, Spotify, &c. &c.). But if you’re not doing podcasts, please let RSS die. As a term, too, in favour of just “feeds” or “web feeds”, because it’s harmful, leading to people only hearing of RSS and so implement RSS because they didn’t realise they should be implementing Atom.


Activity Streams / Activity Pub has been referred to as "RSS on steroids". It's where the web is going. It'd probably be a good idea to target for it in your promotion plans (being W3C recommendations and all).

https://indieweb.org/ActivityStreams

https://indieweb.org/ActivityPub


ActivityStreams specifically is the RSS-like part. ActivityPub is more of a "push" standard that builds on the former. You need it, e.g. to federate across servers with instant delivery of content (no need for polling with its added latency), or to have a standard "post content" workflow for an app to support an arbitrary choice of server. But ActivityStreams is the more basic standard.


Thanks for explaining, both of you.


I totally support anything that promotes RSS, but I have to wonder if I live in a bubble.

I don't use social media except a single, oft-neglected Mastodon account and get all my info from RSS. According to Newsblur I have ~500 feeds subscribed and ~5000 unread items (can't keep up) every week.

I don't doubt that RSS is getting less popular, but perhaps due to moving in circles where RSS is popular I really don't feel like it's dying.


I don't even think RSS is less popular in absolute numbers, there have been interesting articles about the RSS reader user population after Google Reader that suggest otherwise. But it can still be less popular relatively - when newcomers don't learn about it, which is how our internet access technology is set up right now.

Apart from that I'm in a similar bubble as you, RSS never stopped being relevant to 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.


I’m curious, what is your business model? Biztoc.com doesn’t seem to have ads and it’s free.


It's backed by Mark Cuban — That's the business model so far.


And this is exactly why I built my "Hack the Planet" website. http://dragons-tech.blogspot.com/2021/07/subscribe-to-newsle...

HTP is an internal project for the company I work for, but it could be spun up to match any topic. I called it "Planet" in honour of the old Planet software which I really miss.

The big issue I see with feeds is that you are forced to accept whatever is generated from the feeds. HTP, although it reads all the feeds, checks to see if the feed matches certain requisites before displaying it. So personal blogs (like mine) won't be included in the end result if I'm just talking about my breakfast and the cat. But it I mention something that is topical, then it will. It's an additional layer of processing that keeps everything relevant.

Add to that the ability to pick out trends and themes and allows you to focus on just those topics of interest and it starts to get really useful. In fact the Internal site was the primary source of news and details for the PrintNightmare and Log4j issues.


I'm in. RSS is a core part of some stuff I've been working on, and I am definitely all about advocating it more broadly.


I don't think Firefox will re-add built-in RSS support after removing it in 2018 (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks), but the replacement addon whose development spun out of that deprecation is quite good. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

For Feedly users I also recommend this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedly-notifi... It can be opened as a sidebar turning my browser into my feed reader.


I'm of course also not certain of this. But live bookmarks might not be the goal that needs to be reached, the simple RSS icon when a site has a feed would already a big improvement.


Is https://aboutfeeds.com/ an answer to #2 and/or #5?


I think it covers 5. Could be extended a bit (especially if in the future there really exists a group with activity that can be presented as well), but it's awesome and very close! Are you the author?

2 was different. I was thinking about what happens when a user clicks on a feed - it's not very user friendly, especially now that browsers just show the XML file content. If we had a mechanism that wraps that request and gives the user a way to subscribe directly via one of the many available feed reader, that would help a lot.

The idea is not completely novel, https://github.com/superfeedr/subtome goes into the direction but I think it is broken. A website carried by an independent group could be a solution. Maybe even something that could help in case browsers are open for some changes here, but don't want to create the UI part. Or when working on extending a CMS and instead of implementing that UI again, we use that mechanism to wrap the feed. As a web developer making it a website was probably an idea near to me, but there might be better solutions.


> I was thinking about what happens when a user clicks on a feed - it's not very user friendly, especially now that browsers just show the XML file content. If we had a mechanism that wraps that request and gives the user a way to subscribe directly via one of the many available feed reader, that would help a lot.

I agree. But I'm also willing to think that a simple button to copy the feed URL would suffice. Since feed URLs can be read by all kinds of reader software (and you don't know upfront which ones, definitely way too many possibilities) there's no way as a subscriber to go from a website with a feed link to your reader app without just copying that link somehow. It's too much baked in to the protocol to do it otherwise, I guess.


I think we need more. The button to copy the feed URL alone will leave users bewildered on what to do with the link. While I don't see a chance to integrate RSS reader functionality back into the browser given the current zeitgeist of minimal UIs for them (outside of Opera/Vivaldi), to lead users from feeds to feed readers is reasonable. I'm not saying feasible for us, but reasonable as an idea ;)

But sure, the button to copy the feed on by default would already be a great improvement.


RSS feed embedding/autodiscovery is a thing. I don't even remember the last time I've bothered with a feed link.

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery

Back in the day, I think Firefox even put an icon in the address bar when a feed was available.


Matt Webb is the author, their contact information (GitHub repo, personal site with email) is at the bottom of the page.


Nice one! Very 'friendly' looking site with clear explanations.


One thing I've noticed with podcasts, is that my reader will download the full RSS every day, listing hundreds of episodes, just to see if there's a new one.

I get why they do this as a new listener will want to start off with a full list of episodes and may want to pick up a show from the start.

It would be useful if an RSS could specify a separate URL to query that will only list new episodes, returning an empty RSS (or a standardized HTTP status code) until the new episode is available.

The original RSS with the full list would still be the primary URL for the podcast, the one I get when I right-click and select "Copy RSS URL".


IMO, this is not a problem of RSS but how that particular feed endpoint is implemented (assuming your reader will append entries). Usually, popular news sites (that provides RSS/Atom) will have e.g., "/rss/all" endpoint to get all the news for that day, and these entries are refreshed a couple of times per day. Also, they will provide "/rss/latest" refreshed every couple of minutes or so, so it's up to your reader to check that endpoint frequently, parse and populate only the newest entries.


This should be doable just using existing Cache-Control/If-Modified-Since headers, shouldn't it? Basically both sides just need to treat the "age" of the feed document as being equal to the newest entry in it.


Right! This is actually done in blogging platforms, at least in the old ones like Wordpress (last I looked, and I think) and Serendipity. I wouldn't guarantee though that this code still works or that readers do use it...


Some podcast clients support rfc5005: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005


When I was writing my comment, it felt like my idea was too obvious for no-one to have already written it up as a formal specification.


I am seeing a lot of ideas around just increasing exposure of what's there; but to bring RSS back full-force would require a new innovative use (that safely coexists with current syndicated content).

What I am thinking is a lowtech social network that utilizes a phone/desktop client for writing posts that then other users can subscribe to via RSS. The client would also provide a feed reader which allows you to either intermingle social and web RSS or setup "folders" to keep your feeds organized how you like. No servers would be ideal so that it's just a new browser paradigm.


Building this right now. No need for a specific client, every device and it's grandmother has a browser. Intermingling happens because the reader software for all the subscriptions is built into the website software that publishes it's own feed (or multiple feeds).


Perhaps the most important thing we can do is fund a scraper that creates an RSS feed for sites that don't have one.


It's a decent stopgap, but a bad primary effort. If you get big enough to notice, you end up offering basically two things to the people running those sites:

1) Do work and support RSS or

2) Do nothing and we do it for you for free

Which do you think they'll choose? And then you're stuck running a big clearinghouse for RSS feeds, with fund-raising problems, users griping at you because some feed isn't perfect, etc.

Myself, I've had decent success just asking if someone could please add an RSS feed to their site the few times it's come up. It's apparently easy to do in many CMS's that don't do it by default.


https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub/


I'm pretty sure Feedly does this (about as well as it can be done).


Not that I'm advocating the use of Google Chrome (I am not a user), but they recently added the ability to follow RSS feeds: https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-follow-rss-reader-appears-...

So, this renewed interest in RSS might not be that farfetched.

For additional context: I've used RSS since 1999, and I likely won't ever stop. Much better than algorithmic social media echo chambers, and I can read it on my e-ink device offline.


I added RSS to my websites, because my timeline thing (https://github.com/nicbou/timeline) uses them to retrieve posts from my websites.

However, I see the death of RSS as the symptom of a larger problem: when platforms get big enough, they restrict access to their data. RSS feeds disappear, but so do other machine-readable endpoints. If it wasn't for GDPR, there would be no way to export that data. GDPR gave us clunky one-time exports, but even those are often incomplete. Making RSS popular again won't fix that.

The industry has a strong incentive to kill RSS, since the readers can strip the valuable bits (content or data) from the business bits (analytics, monetisation). RSS users are hard to count or monetise. This might not suit every business model.

This is a battle worth fighting, but it's not one you should expect to win.


This is why people use scrapers that turn this information into an RSS feed. So no, even without GDPR, this information would still be available.

You say that the industry has incentive to kill RSS, and yet Google has just added a Follow button to Chrome for RSS feeds. Go figure.


Scrapers take more effort to implement, use more resources, and require constant maintenance.

Chrome is not the industry. It's a web browser built by a content aggregator, not a website.


"the industry" being what? A so-called browser industry? Publishing? Blogging?

If we're talking marketshare, Chrome won: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

Disclaimer: not a Chrome user.


The industry that monetises content on the web. It's quite clearly not the web browser industry.


I was a heavy user of rss for a long time, then around 2014 stopped using it until about a year ago. The reason I stopped using it was that my desktop isn’t my primary form of consumption.

I began to expect my lists and read status to be synchronized across my phone, tablet, and laptop. This meant using a service, and I really didn’t want another paid or fermium service.

This all changed last year when I finally set up my own instance of freshrss which I love. But I don’t know what you’d do for “regular users”


Web-based readers. That's one major reason why I use Feedbin instead of a desktop app or elfeed in Emacs.


All my news consumption is either RSS or Twitter.

The biggest push RSS could get for me is if there was an Twitter-to-RSS bridge where I can get an RSS feed for a list of Twitter accounts.


That's something I did implement in Pipes, but the API limit and API changes made it hard and I basically can't guarantee that it works. https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge is an alternative you might like.


I am 100% in on this, I use rss notification on my website (temporary.chat) to notify users of new messages, the code is open source, perhaps it can be used as an easy platform to diffuse content via rss (works for images too)

https://github.com/ba9f11ecc3497d9993b933fdc2bd61e5/temporar...


Great! Join us in the meeting tomorrow if you can, or in general the gitter channel for some later meeting.


Food for thought, RSS is dead because it does not provide an incentive for the author. If you do not collect a mailing list/email list you do not have a known audience. If you dont have a known audience there is no way to measure growth and monetize it. You also would struggle to monitor popular articles over time without your own web real estate and analytics.

I am an RSS noob.. so maybe some of the above IS possible with RSS but consider the case of Medium.

Medium thought to incentivize content creators with cross-pollination of readers. Person A is an author and writes on medium because medium will promote content to its network of readers which is larger than the auidence that Person A has today. Person A inevitably also brings an audience with them albiet likely humble.

Medium MAY have failed for a few different reasons but I suspect retention being low for the larger majority of its visitors and also being unable to monetize in a meaningful way - I know this team is actively working on this and more and I am rooting for them!!

Substack is the new platform.. it focuses on the ease of capturing an audience and monetizing it. Today that is what most writers want for their efforts.

If you could somehow bake the ability to capture and monetize an audience into the RSS subs then perhaps we'd have something.. the reality is whatever RSS becomes it needs to provide a 10x better incentive to the content creator than the traditional means.. and if its just "another" channel.. likely it will be ignored for the more lucrative channels (ie build my own list.. or even sites like medium)

Its also worth mentioning Master Class .. but I dont know enough about them to make any real conjecture.. just that they seem to have cracked the nut on reputation and content creation. Who doesn't wanna learn how to shoot threes from Steph Curry?


I agree that rss as a protocol doesn’t have clear incentives but I don’t think the right people have given a serious attempt at building said incentives (via examples).

One such example could be building a rss based content publisher that gives money, spotify-style, to the authors via view on their own rss clients. The publisher would have to have a good value add for a premium, too, so it’s not just an easy business but I could absolutely see it work.

Essentially it’s the same as the Spotify model. A lot of good content is available in one spot, for free, with ads and premium features, and authors are getting money for it.

Of course, if you do this, nothing stops you from … not using rss, and instead using some proprietary crap. But using rss means most blogs will already have compatibility with you ready to go so it’s a huge get for lowering the barrier of entry to your service.

This is just a 5 minutes idea I’m sure there’s lots of issues with it but I’d put money on a model like this working, given good marketing and evangelism.


> But using rss means most blogs will already have compatibility with you ready to go so it’s a huge get for lowering the barrier of entry to your service.

This is a very important characteristic, making it possible for any new software to immediately deal with real content. Without paying a cent for that content.

Besides, the OP might conflate a thing or two, just like you point out. RSS is an open protocol, not a closed source app with guarded walls (there's not even a garden behind these walls anymore). RSS is so simple and open, one might even type their XML feed by hand.


I like that idea, it could be a worthwhile project - I doubt it's for me, but I also can see this work for the right team. Many good ideas in this thread now!


Your newbie is showing. Authentication on RSS feeds is a thing. Plenty of major publications offer RSS feeds to paying customers. Been a thing for many, many years.


For info:

As many websites are built by clever people and/or based on somewhat ready-made frameworks, when you DON'T see the RSS/Atom icons appear -> take a look at the source of the website and search (ctrl-f) for the word "rss" or "atom" or "xml" -> you might end up finding a surviving RSS link in there.


This is a big part of why I think that making feeds better discoverable could help a lot. Often the feeds are still there, but the browsers are not showing it to the site visitors.


So that you know, that's autodiscovey, not some weird remnant. That's so you can just put the URL for the page in your feed reader and it can find the feed(s) for you. Browsers with RSS support detected it, too.

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery


https://podcastindex.org is building a lot of infrastructure for "Podcasting 2.0" and it all centers around RSS. I've been following this and if you find RSS interesting this will be great to check out.

This is their podcast where they talk about what they are doing; https://podcastindex.org/podcast/920666 That podcast RSS feed; http://mp3s.nashownotes.com/pc20rss.xml

They also have their own mastadon where all the developers working on Podcasting 2.0 hang out. https://podcastindex.social/web/home


Another service that would be useful would be an email list to rss bridge. So you can get marketing emails as rss then easily unsubscribe by simple removing the feed.

One reason i love rss is a deal site in my country offer a feed of when a particular product is at a discount. So i can subscribe to those and get alerts when that happens.


NewsBlur has this capability


As does Feedbin.


Not really interested in joining, but I definitely agree that some technologies get forgotten despite their merits.

Greg Young of the "event sourcing" crowd pointed out that RSS is natural way for event subscribers such as read model projections to subscribe to append-only event logs. Makes sense, but wouldn't have thought of it myself.

I think one reason this happens is that some technologies are less visible to the general public. RSS is not completely invisible, because a lot of browsers show an RSS icon when you visit a page that includes RSS feeds, but it's still subtle. Another example of a less visible technology would be the Semantic Web. A web page that you visit might be marked up semantically using RDFa or microdata, but the visitor could never know it unless they are looking for it.


I think this is a great idea. I don't have much time to commit right now but I'd love to stay connected with your efforts. Do you want to put up a quick google form or similar to collect emails of people like me who are interested if you have relevant updates?


(In case you get reply notifications)

I created a form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc9lWrieLAn9azMI_88... . Does it work for you?


In hindsight, you should set up an RSS feed with updates :)


Hope this thing gets so far that it has a website home with news, which then certainly will have a feed ;)


Joining the chat at https://gitter.im/FosterRSS/community would probably not work as well, as it would not be limited to relevant updates?


Just a bit of feedback, as someone who hasn't used Gitter before, I just clicked that link and was invited to join by logging in with GitLab, GitHub or Twitter.

I don't use my GitHub account for logging in to other sites without a decent amount of consideration (I didn't sign up to GitHub to use it as an SSO system and generally don't like using it for that purpose). And I have neither of the other two accounts.

So I would agree with the parent that removing some of the friction and offering people an email form to drop their email into might get you a higher uptake?

I am however interested in these efforts. For reference, my email is in my profile if that helps.


Okay, sure! I created a form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc9lWrieLAn9azMI_88... . Does it work for you?


Great! I’ve added my email.


I'm a long term user of RSS too, through Thunderbird of all things. My one beef with it, is that it seems terribly inefficient, that potentially millions of client will poll the resources "to check if there's something new". Potentially hundreds or thousands of requests per user, per day. It'd be a lot nicer if it was subscription based, since the content-provider knows when there's something new, they can then push it to their subscribers when it is relevant (and do other neat things like slower rollout to avoid congestion and bad user experience).

It'd be kinda neat if email clients natively supported digesting RSS feeds sent as email, presenting the same user-experience, but without the polling.


There are two standard that are used for the push setup you describe already! :) RSScloud and Pubsubhubbub/websub. I don't know whether Thunderbird supports it, but pretty much all the big RSS clients do.


I just recently moved back to RSS after being fed up with all the dark patterns and insane ads. My main goal is to wrestle back control of what I choose to read instead of being led around so much. It's been great so far but the setup was a bit onerous.


> Open PRs for browsers with provided-by-us code to integrate RSS again, with UI elements that make existing feeds visible and supports subscribing via a feed reader

Please please please don't reinstate the "support" browsers had, it was effectively useless.

As someone who's built their own browser extension for tracking and reading feeds, I really don't want the confusion of a half feature. The browser is GREAT at navigating pages and rendering them, but when we start bundling in other services (ahem Pocket in firefox?) it feels like cruft.

I'd much rather browsers focus on building out solid features that support building amazing websites and extensions.


i think a tool that creates rss from a directory's content would help.

how many github pages exist? currently, that number is apparently 2,866,300 [0]. imagine a tool that generates an rss from all the html files collected. before pushing back with git, you run a script that generates the rss. any new html files are added to the rss. and it doesn't have to be just github pages, it can be any html/blog website. i can build such a tool but am currently working on something else.

0: https://github.com/search?q=.github.io


I'm partway through a rewrite of http://www.youneedfeeds.com/ I should get onto that again!


On point 5. There was this website that tried to promote RSS and Atom but, unfortunately, it doesn't work anymore. You could get some ideas for how to explain why RSS/Atom is important, so here's an archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200707230716/https://mg.guelke...


The original site still load for me. Maybe it was down for a minute? Thanks for the link!


We will have a first try for a kickoff meeting in that gitter [0] channel tomorrow at 20 UTC, https://time.is/en/compare/2000_7_Jan_2022_in_UTC/EST/Berlin. Join us! :)

[0]: https://gitter.im/FosterRSS/community


> 1. Open PRs for browsers with provided-by-us code to integrate RSS again [..]

You need to get the big names on board, namely Chrome/Chromium, Firefox and Edge. Google and Microsoft seem quite happy with not supporting RSS, they don't want you to bypass their services.

I think simple RSS feed readers are still the way forwards. The browser should not pretend to be an RSS feed aggregator and the RSS feed reader should not pretend to be a browser.

> 4. Implement easy to use libraries for programming languages that might miss them.

I think that it would be great to advocate for the largest website frameworks to have these on by default. For example, WordPress. The biggest boundary are these websites that serve text/images but do _everything_ in JS.

> 5. Create a website that explains why this is important, that hosts or links to the specifications and that contains additional documentation.

I think that a feed validator is good [1], standardized icons (along with style guides) [2], a service to convert existing pages into feeds, guides on what content and how much content to insert, etc.

I believe that it would be good to start having discussions about how to decentralize RSS too, with signed feeds allowing third-party propagation without fear of tampering. (Note that in keeping with RSS, this would be simple and optional.)

Another thing I have wondered about how to address is the processing of comments/feedback, bypassing the requirement of a browser entirely. It's still not clear to me how to do this simply, securely and effectively, in my mind this is still an open question.

> If this is of interest to you, consider joining https://gitter.im/FosterRSS/community.

Requiring some kind of sign-up in order to interact with content (in this case messaging) seems kind of anti-RSS. I would personally suggest something like IRC or XMP.

[1] https://validator.w3.org/feed/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS


What percentage of users that find RSS useful are not computer nerds? Whose grandmother actually wants RSS?

It seems ridiculous to be obsessed with a protocol or file format. If you need to solve a problem, then solve the problem. It doesn't matter what technical means you use to solve it. If you're just trying to implement some specific technical thing because you're in love with the idea of it, that's never gonna go anywhere.


I'd argue that this is for many about solving a problem. RSS is a stand-in here for a technology that enables users to consume contents from distributed authors with a client they prefer, with the default option of not having an algorithmic sort order that serves only the content platform.

This is something also someone's grandmother could want if it enables here to follow her interests online, whatever they may be.

If another solution than RSS achieves that goal - while avoiding the n+1-standard problem - then that's fine with me. RSS could then still be promoted for different usecases, with a technical merit foundation.


> a technology that enables users to consume contents from distributed authors with a client they prefer, with the default option of not having an algorithmic sort order that serves only the content platform

Yeah that last part's the problem. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. RSS doesn't have a viable business case. Average users need a reason to invest themselves in it, and business owners need to see that it generates its own source of revenue [greater than whatever else they've got going on]. Even if you have answers for both of those things, you have to show people it for them to accept it ("show me the money")


I'm actually very new to the RSS space. I only gave it a try back in November and I absolutely adore it. In fact I found this thread through my RSS feed in Newsblur! (Usually I use Feedbin but I like Newsblur's intelligence trainer for Hacker News) I've been nerding out about RSS lately and it makes me so sad seeing how much popularity it lost and how many websites don't support it.


https://ncase.me/rss/ is a nice intro to rss for the uninitiated.


I would like to see a new web with a reduced feature set. Something like web 1.0 pages but with only semantic tags like RSS. Remove the ability to create user interfaces and forms. Could we build a spec for this new WWW and create a way for it to crawl and search RSS at the same time? It's time to go backwards. We lost the good Internet along the way to getting the crap we have today. Let's build Web -1.0


I was never a big consumer of RSS, but I built a number of feeds over the years. Most of the time we would build them and no one would use them (except maybe the guy in IT who pushed for the feature).

From posts like this, it seems like RSS still has a hardcore group of fans but it is not something everyday users ever found that useful.


None of your points really address the underlying problem is that most websites that people visit rely on ads to the point that widespread adoption will be a big issue. Also two large web browsers are run by large corporations such that what’s the point of doing a Pull request for code that may or may not be maintained.


I was surprised to find out that most Indian news sites still have an active RSS feed


If you need a focused Telegam channel, let me know! You can email me on contact (at) myfastmail dot com and I'd be delighted to help your efforts. I rely on RSS to keep a track of everything around me!


As someone who runs an RSS feed reader (https://sumi.news), I think RSS is terrible compared to email for notifying users of updates.

1. Email is more efficient. Email doesn’t require constant polling.

2. Email client support is superior. Everyone has an email service and can sync across devices.

3. Email is social, it allows subscribers to reply to the author.

4. Email is more reliable. Authors have a copy of all their subscribers, they aren’t tied to a URL. Subscribers can easily update their subscription if they want to change emails. Running an RSS client, I see many subscriptions break over time due to the feed URL changing.


RSS is much better organized than an inbox


RSS is still used for podcasts. I use is every day. I have stopped reading my news sites using my RSS reader... For reasons I have not thought about enough.


I love and miss RSS as much as the next hacker, but it's weird to see an increasing trend of technological nostalgia starting to emerge.

To be clear, I also think the web has gone wrong and miss coherent and useful web search, exploring interesting user created content (people have mentioned the return of web rings) and curating my own news feed via RSS.

But it's strange to me that when I started everything was about what we were going to do in the future, and increasingly the conversation is about going back to the past.


This is a feature of HN which seems to be increasingly populated by an older crowd that enjoys pining for an imagined golden age of technology. I’m in the same boat: I love plain text, RSS, and Vim as much as the next guy, but the trend of reminiscing about the superiority of ancient tech rather than musing on the future and how people actually use computers these days is woefully out of touch.

I also like mechanical calculators, horse drawn plows, and fine tinsmithing all for the skills and craftsmanship that go into each. And yet I wouldn’t think to start campaigning to bring back animal powered plowing. The new generation of technologists and programmers entering the workforce doesn’t give a damn about your ugly RSS feeds or your plain text productivity workflow or your finely tuned EMacs config and I think that mindset shift is going to be irksome to a lot of established old heads.


I don't think it's "nostalgia" or "going back to the past". I think it's people in their thirties and older that somehow start to realize the promise of 'social media' was there all the time. This whole RSS thing... it's never pushed to it's potential, I think. Thanks to walled gardens and other kinds of closed jails. Surrounded by a lot of buzz, hype and money to be made.

Besides, I could say the same thing about electric cars. Your neighbor's new Tesla? Why is he going back 100 years in time? Nostalgia? Or new potential?


Pretty close. To be fair, the RSS-as-social-media was a thought I had a decade ago (more than a thought, there was a working prototype), but that doesn't mean it's not in my mind now.


I just saw your website with the Pipes software. Very cool! I'm going to subscribe to your feed.


Thanks :)


I created https://submirror.xyz to add RSS to mirror.xyz


I would love to be able to filter RSS feeds.


Can you tell me more? What things would you filter on?


For example, if I have no interest in Node, it would be nice to take the HN RSS feed and filter words like Node in the title or content. Or if I really can’t stand sources like LiveStrong for health news I’d like to filter out that domain.


There are services that can do that. https://www.pipes.digital/ is mine and filtering feeds is probably its main use case. There is also https://siftrss.com/ and I know that some RSS reader have similar functionality, like https://blog.feedly.com/leo-and-mute-filters/.


Thanks, clear to me now!


Feedbin is one reader that offers that.


I’ve been using feedly for like a decade now. I also use it to discover content.


Can you get substack to start using rss?


They do! https://mockingbird.substack.com/?utm_source=discover (a random substack site from the frontpage) links https://mockingbird.substack.com/feed in their source. If that feed were to break https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ would be a service to workaround that.


I should have thought to search the source... thanks!


I miss RSS so much!


We need one central place to find feeds, see this relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/


Yeah, let's avoid that ;)


Nice initiative. Other than HN, I only use RSS to consume content which I care about (I use theoldreader.com). While I currently don't have the time or technical skills to contribute much, would be happy to support financially if required. I also encourage anyone I know to use Firefox, Duckduckgo and RSS; however, most people (especially the intelligent technical ones) are not willing to change.


I don't. It's time has come and gone.




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