Many times this sort of meta information reveals much more than expected
The last time someone tried to convince me this was a good idea was just after the iPhone was announced, and before everyone and their monkey had a super computer in their pocket. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so we almost started - but my advice to the punter then was "lets see what the mobile phone industry looks like next year" .. well that put a pin in it.
Nowadays, I'm not so sure I'd be so willing to do this - again, because it requires the user do the printing - but if you were to, say, make this into a vending machine product, which users can walk up to in the street and walk away with a custom 'zine full of their own interests, you might be onto something.
Here in Europe we have a lot of old telephone booths converted into mini neighborhood free libraries. I've often wondered whether it would make sense to put a public printer in those libraries and let people print things .. seems like this would be a revolutionary new product to make, with printable broadsheets based on a custom RSS, an obvious killer app .. assuming someone can be found to maintain the printers.
(Off to find thermal paper for my ClockworkPi, which I always wanted to turn into a custom RSS printer in the toilet...)
My feeds are pretty unpredictable - sometimes I have 40 new articles in a day, sometimes just a few. The cheapness of digital consumption and interface makes it viable for me to skim titles and read, defer, or dismiss at my judgement. I don't want the entire feed printed out - not viable.
But if some SaaS is curating my feeds for me, I fear it'll turn into another algorithmized something optimizing for what exactly? At least the first-pass filter is explicitly set by me - feeds I subscribe to.
Curious to hear your thoughts on it, and wishing you luck.
I suspect maybe it's easier now to nail the layout if ai can read content before it goes to print.
AI is indeed a crucial part in solving the two most difficult challenges -- typesetting and curation, although we'll probably do things that don't scale for a little while before fully automating.
Recently I’ve been living in a cottage town and thought of this idea again… rather than be reading on phones or tablets people could read printed books with their favourite articles or blogs. But I think the actual distribution system would be the killer, unless it’s at a big resort the transportation will kill the idea.
RSS did not weather Twitter. Social media is huge compared to RSS. It turned out that singular recommendation feeds are able to push URLs around better than needing every site to build in feeds themselves and then still requiring someone to turn those feeds into a singular feed for the user.
They still are in most cases.
Then I remembered that Twitter was once referred to as "micro blogging," so I put those folks in my blog list on Feedbin, and was happy again.
I do miss the glory days of Twitter, tbh.
First, RSS has a bit more friction. Smashing the follow button on Twitter et al is faster than adding the feed to your RSS reader of choice unless your OS has support for default RSS app.
Second, discoverability. Just like with any distributed system vs monolithic platform, you need to find what to read yourself. For some niches this works well. If you are a software developer/hacker, you are more familiar with blogs in your area of interest. But if you have a wide range of interests you’d need to find the blogs yourself and hope their RSS feed is well formatted.
Third, the algorithm. A monolithic platform can do more to try to mix in new content based on your interests and intelligently mix up the content from sources you follow. This is of course controversial because feed algorithms can also try to cram bullshit into your feed or hide important stuff from you or create an echo chamber. But in the best case scenario they can also expose you to new sources of content you wouldn’t have found otherwise. An RSS reader would mean it is up to you to do this discovery which is more friction.
And ultimately content creators realized that they get more eyeballs on their stuff by using platforms like Facebook, Medium, Instagram, Twitter, than on blogs especially since blogs tend to be then repackaged by blog spam bots, Google’s AMP, and now LLMs.
So IMO RSS is just too manual and requires too much work. And of course since you can’t effectively advertise through it there is less incentive for creators and platforms to support it.
(In contrast, ICE did not weather RSS.)
I think, as someone that has a RSS feed on my blog, that RSS is a total mess and Atom was probably the better choice.
Maybe even some modern JSON based format would be OK, but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?
Anyway, after dealing with the mess of images and inline HTML with CDATA in RSS, I have complete fatigue of the whole endeavour.
That’s what JSON Feed is. It’s supported by several RSS readers.
> but maybe that’s what ActivityPub is?
No, that’s for social networking.
Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.
Is it a popular main stream thing? No. Does every since site offer feeds for every reasonable thing you could want to subscribe to? But does it still work quite well for those that want to use it? Yes.
For apple ecosystem best client is https://reederapp.com/classic/
Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?
You can link it to your reader so you just click the button and it adds the feed into it.
People found the web more boring, because it became more boring.
They found the algorithm more interesting, because it allowed them to see what was going on with people they barely knew (from former school mates they'd lost touch with to celebrities without press filtering), and that was compelling.
But there's a next phase available to us, which is to make the web more interesting, entertaining and compelling again.
I love that b3ta.com still exists. I love that metafilter.com is moving on. I think it's great that web comics I love still publish to RSS.
I just think more of us need to provide more demand, and more people will wake up to supply, and the flywheel will start to turn.
RSS beat ICE, and it can beat Meta and X if people want it too, albeit for different reasons.
People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality.
People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability.
People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.
That was it
"When Betamax was introduced in Japan and the United States in 1975, its Beta I speed of 1.57 inches per second (ips) offered a higher horizontal resolution (approximately 250 lines vs 240 lines horizontal NTSC), lower video noise, and less luma/chroma crosstalk than VHS, and was later marketed as providing pictures superior to VHS's playback. However, the introduction of Beta II speed, 0.79 ips (two-hour mode), to compete with VHS's two-hour Standard Play mode (1.31 ips) reduced Betamax's horizontal resolution to 240 lines.[7]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war#Picture_q...
If you want to collect obsolete formats and you have a TV with analog inputs VHS is probably your best thing to get into. This place
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114286077399818803
sells VHS decks for $12 and you can get pretty good movies for $2. Contrast that to compact cassette decks which start at twice that and have a good chance of being non-functional. That place has the complete works of Barbara Streisand but if you want music that anybody would want on cassettes the sky is the limit for collectables.
My impression is that the quality of VHS isn't terrible. The video is worse than DVD of course but a lot of DVDs have NERFed soundtracks because they mixed them assuming you're going to play their 5.1 mix on a 2-channel system. Any deck you get now is going to support VHS Hi-Fi and if you have a 5.1 system with some kind of Dolby Pro Logic the soundtrack of a good VHS can be better than the soundtrack of an average DVD. (Blu-Ray often has better sound not because the technology is better but because the 5.1 soundtrack is more likely to really be a 5.1 soundtrack)
I can imagine an alternate timeline where Google Reader turned into a sort of Twitter (or FB or IG) feed.
That's a silly thing to say. Of course you can put ads in it since it allows linking to things. What you mean probably, is that it's not as easy as embedding some google ads markup in your sidebar.
Advertisers love to burn money, but they draw the line at not being able to verify that the spend did what was promised.
Podcasts inject ads into the content: from RSS you get the link and description of the episode, and inside the episode are ads.
I guess that's why RSS is still a thing for podcasts? :-)
- Some major platform still provide RSS, which makes me use them (I do not use twitter, because it does not provide RSS
- If not for RSS I would not be using Reddit
- the moment platform drops RSS, I drop the platform
Links:
[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own RSS reader
PeterStuer•2h ago
Semiapies•2h ago
rob•2h ago
zenmac•2h ago
Bluesky is basically RSS on JSON.
latexr•2h ago
pndy•1h ago
A dedicated extension is needed to have that feature back. Chrome needs one as well, so does Edge; only Vivaldi and Opera come with build-in feed readers. There are of course standalone applications but that seems to be a niche nowadays.
I've found an old rssowl opml file from 2014 last week and I decided to see what's still up. I've found some RSS readers in flathub but sadly, majority of what I was visiting back then died.