RSS is awesome

https://evanverma.com/rss-is-awesome

206•edverma2•8h ago

Comments

k2enemy•8h ago

Boy do I feel old if a short, low content PSA about the existence of RSS is considered "hacker news."

rufus_foreman•8h ago

You're one of today's unlucky 10,000.

senectus1•7h ago

I mean.. it shouldn't be controversial.. but people keep claiming rss is dead.

not in my world it aint.

nntwozz•7h ago

Podcasts needs an RSS feed, that about sums it up how not dead it is.

glenstein•3h ago

Definitely not dead, thank goodness. I probably read 4-5 articles a day through RSS and skim through dozens.

Even so it's no longer a de facto standard the way it used to be.

senectus1•3h ago

haha, I skim through about 800 a day and read dozens of them.

Every year around newyears time I trim it back, but it inevitably grows again.

user3939382•7h ago

RSS is the antidote to algorithm feeds. I’m glad for any mention of it. 90% of the tools users need were built 1970-2000 including RSS.

627467•6h ago

Having restarted using rss in the past months (after probably 10+ years of not using it) i am now starting to remember why I stopped using it: lack of a personal "algorithm" that made hundreds (if not 1000s) of unread daily items to be manageable.

I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work?

Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological.

More readers should have this

al_borland•6h ago

The thing that made RSS work for me is to really limit my feeds. Instead of following 10 tech news sites that have a bunch of overlap, I follow 1 that has most of what I want. A few blogs are for apps I use and want to be informed of new information, but they post infrequently, which is good.

Feed with dozens of posts per day turn into noise, especially if you have a lot of them.

By choosing one site I trust, I let the editors edit, instead of the algorithm.

akoboldfrying•5h ago

If you're looking for a project, I think this is something that an LLM, even a dumb local one, would be pretty good at. Give it a list of 50 articles you like, 50 you hate (or however many fit into the context window), and let it read the full text of each post and assign a 1-5 score. Then sort and/or filter by that.

In theory, this is actually a very textbook ML supervised learning problem, and stuffing an already-trained LLM's context window with a small handful of samples like I suggested is a gross hack. But it might be the easier option.

jayd16•5h ago

Is there still no alternative filling Google reader's void?

uz3snolc3t6fnrq•5h ago

you could self-host your own rss reader on a server & set it up to automatically update the feeds in the background every now and then, and just check on it whenever you want to read what's new. freshrss seems to be the popular choice.

there's also some subscription services that seem to do the same thing, but i have no experience with them.

glenstein•3h ago

Google reader was simple and beautifully designed, free, and online first. There are alternatives but they sacrifice one of the three. Inoreader, the old reader, and newsblur are all pretty good but require a subscription to fully replicate Google reader.

There are various local-first phone apps, desktop apps, and self-hostable apps that are good, completely free and have comprehensive features.

There are some what I would consider bait and switch options like Flipboard and Feedly that pretend to care about RSS but layer on features unrelated to the protocol. I think you can find one that works for you.

The problem with RSS right now is not, imo, the lack of tools to do the reading, thankfully. It's more that the major vote of legitimacy previously extended by Google was revoked and prompted an unwinding from RSS as a universal form of content distribution basically across the whole internet.

alex1138•3h ago

I think a company that makes products that last may actually literally be more rare than the discovery of alien life in the universe

(Who makes the incentives at Google?! Seriously)

devjam•2h ago

> ... Feedly that pretend to care about RSS but layer on features unrelated to the protocol

I've been using Feedly since Google killed reader, and while I like the RSS functionality it offers, I do agree that they've slowly been adding more and more features I don't care for.

Maybe it's time to migrate to something like TFA suggests.

I also agree with your other comments; it's huge a shame.

imp0cat•2h ago

YMMV, but I have been using Flipboard for along time and think that Flipboard is a very nice blend of an RSS reader that gives you precisely what you asked for and a random article curator in one.

Adding RSS feeds to it feels kinda clunky though.

theshrike79•1h ago

Newsblur was the one I fled to after Reader's death.

Used it for a long time until I switched to a self-hosted FreshRSS instance

rootnod3•2h ago

Gnus in emacs is a good reader for that due to the scoring system in gnus.

lmm•2h ago

> Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological.

> More readers should have this

Why? If that's what you want you can get it from your social medium of choice. I use RSS because it gives me precisely what I asked for (for better and for worse), and I suspect the vast majority of the userbase feels the same.

cxr•6h ago

What's an algorithm?

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•5h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system

tolerance•5h ago

The parent comment raises a valid distinction.

> In contrast, a heuristic is an approach to solving problems without well-defined correct or optimal results.[2] For example, although social media recommender systems are commonly called "algorithms", they actually rely on heuristics as there is no truly "correct" recommendation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm

What are the consequences of conflating the two terms? I’m not sure yet.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•4h ago

> The parent comment raises a valid distinction.

Not really, as described in the quote you shared, it is common to refer to "recommendation systems" as "algorithms", even if its not actually such a thing.

There are plenty of examples of well-known aliases to concepts that obfuscate actual meaning in the English language, but they aren't wrong, as language is usage.

tolerance•4h ago

It’s actually not such a thing. So is the distinction valid or not?

netule•7h ago

Not only that, but an ad for their mobile app. Pretty low quality content.

al_borland•7h ago

It’s not their app. NetNewsWire is developed by Brent Simmons and has been around for over 20 years. It’s free and open source. Last I saw, he didn’t even accept donations.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•7h ago

Seen this? https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed

cm2187•35m ago

Ask a junior at the office what is that "save"or "new directory" logo, or what "CC" stands for in an email, or what a dialup connection is!

skeptrune•7h ago

Ironically just told the founder of my company that it was mission critical our blog had RSS. He had never used it before somehow and didn't know why it would be a big deal lol.

charcircuit•3h ago

How is it mission critical for the company to have an rss feed?

skeptrune•3h ago

Blogs should be written to be read and not just for SEO slop. RSS feed helps a lot with that.

surprisetalk•7h ago

Amen! If you're looking to fill out your RSS reader, I maintain a directory of tech blogs (ctrl+f "feed" for rss links):

[0] https://blogs.hn

Other good directories:

[1] https://ooh.directory/

[2] https://blogroll.org/

colesantiago•7h ago

> RSS is really simple, so it is still very well supported. Notably, all substack publications automatically have an RSS feed included at https://{{substack-domain}}/feed .

I wonder how long that will last until Substack closes it, I have never seen an RSS feed where the author is able to make it sustainable for them to make money from it.

msgodel•7h ago

Substack seems to have done an incredible job allowing people to monetize their blogs. Maybe Substack themselves aren't profitable but the authors certainly seem to be doing well.

As someone who's subscribed to a lot of substacks the thing that brought me there was the availability of asynchronous reading (mail, rss newsletters.) I'm sure I'm not alone in disliking the actual site itself.

Defletter•6h ago

The only complaint I have about RSS is that it seems antagonistic to edits. It's not usual that, when refreshing my podcast RSS feed, there are multiple versions of the same episodes because they made some edit somewhere in the title or description, etc. I've had five versions of the same episode before. I feel like we should have the technology to fix this by now :P

lwhsiao•6h ago

We do. Atom feeds have an updated field for this. But, it's up to whoever is generating the feed to know how to handle their metadata.

vhcr•6h ago

That's what the guid / id field is for.

throw0101a•6h ago

No love for Atom?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)

henriquegogo•6h ago

RSS/Atom is great to follow blogs, news and some social network such as hackernews and reddit.

I hope X/Twitter back to this functionality, but that's a low probability.

AndrewDavis•5h ago

I just restarted using RSS recently. And I discovered I can also use it to track software releases (on github). The url is the release page with .atom appended. Eg

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases.atom

uz3snolc3t6fnrq•4h ago

Nitter[0] seems to support it still, although it seems unmaintained - not sure how stable it is by this point. if you self host this, you should probably use burner account tokens, anti-botting measures might decide to shut down your X/twitter account

[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

theshrike79•1h ago

Twitter killed their API and RSS feeds "to fight bots" :D

Which killed all the legitimate fun and useful bots and just left the astroturfing and discord sowing kind state sponsored bots.

As was the plan.

ropable•6h ago

I'm sad that a basic description of what RSS consists of makes it onto HN. I still upvoted to help educate the kids :/

FYI FreshRSS is fairly trivial to self-host, and is a really nice option for an RSS reader app.

senectus1•5h ago

FreshRSS is dabomb! Highly recommend it.

vanc_cefepime•3h ago

Preferential to Miniflux myself, but any RSS reader is better than none.

theshrike79•1h ago

I tried both, but Miniflux was like 15% _too_ bare-bones for me.

FreshRSS hit the sweet spot for me, combined with NetNewsWire as a mobile UI

gullevek•20m ago

Yeah, even as a desktop UI NetNewsWire is great. FreshRSS rocks

digital_voodoo•44m ago

Same here, tried both and sticked with Miniflux that seems on the lighter side. I don't really need the web interface or an app, because I channel everything towards a Telegram bot, where I read the feeds: a glance at the title, "Instant View" or long read if needed.

fzxu22•3h ago

+1 happy freshrss user here

geor9e•6h ago

Yes! I've been using RSS (feedbro reader) to de-algorithm social media for a long time now. Twitter (via nitter), Facebook (public posts only), HN, etc. It's all in a chronological RSS feed. No algorithms choosing what I see, no infinite scroll. If it's not a public post from a user I added, I don't see it. Luckily all my close friends are public-only type posters so it works.

My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.

glenstein•3h ago

I think your conspiracy theory is quite a natural reading of the incentives for big tech. IIRC, different iterations of Twitter, YouTube, Craigslist, Facebook, Google News, Google blog search, and even the Chrome browser had built in RSS support of various forms that were later removed or scaled back or significantly de-emphasized.

theshrike79•1h ago

Not just the ads, they can't add recommendations to your RSS feed.

What they optimise for is time spent on the platform "engagement". And usually rage-baiting content gives better engagement metrics than things that make you happy.

drukenemo•35m ago

How are you using Nitter? I’ve tried, but it’s a headache to host it.

Perizors•5h ago

Is there any RSS reader that is also able to subscribe to newsletters in some way? There are lot of contents that are only provided as newsletters nowadays and I wanted to be able to read my feed and newsletters in the same app, without going into my mail inbox.

zikzak•5h ago

Many can accept forwarded emails and some will offer an email address you can use to subscribe to newsletters. I prefer the former because you can cancel the forward rule if you don't want to continue with a given rss app or service.

1una•5h ago

There are projects which generate web feeds for websites that don't have one.

https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub

daydream•4h ago

You can subscribe to newsletters with any RSS reader nowadays, but it’s a multi step process requiring the use of an external (free) tool.

1. Create a feed on https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. This will also give you a custom email address to send your newsletter to.

2. Subscribe to the newsletter with the custom email address and add the feed you created to your reader.

This setup works very well for me with NetNewsWire though there is friction in the multiple steps. No affiliation with either, just a satisfied user.

imp0cat•2h ago

I, too, use kill-the-newsletter to convert newsletters to rss and it works amazingly well.

nickthegreek•4h ago

inoreader has that on some of their pay tiers. i use my own self host freshrss instance and https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to accomplish the same.

theshrike79•1h ago

Kill the Newsletter was suggested above, but Newsblur has a built-in support for newsletters.

stevekemp•13m ago

If you want everything in one place, and you're using email already, then it sounds like you want one of the various rss2email projects.

Feed entries then become emails which sit in your inbox/folders alongside your existing [emailed] newsletters.

(I prefer this approach myself, I can filter and search via my mail client, and manage state easily.)

insane_dreamer•5h ago

After using GUI RSS readers for decades, been trying TUI RSS feed readers recently and quite liking that style. On iOS, Reeder is still my favorite app.

tamimio•5h ago

It was greader for me before netnewswire, I still use RSS, I can prioritize what to read myself after a quick glance I don’t need a “recommendation algorithm” to do it for me!

nine_k•5h ago

RSS is terrible as a format (Atom is much better), but RSS is awesome as an idea. If your web site were a database, RSS would be like WAL. If your website were differentiable, it would be like its derivative, or rather a Lagrangian, taken at the moment of last update.

(BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)

DamnInteresting•4h ago

We should popularize a JSON-based alternative, we'll call it "Absurdly Simple Syndication."

nine_k•4h ago

How about JSON Enhanced Syndication and Tracking?

advisedwang•3h ago

Because the main content of a blog post is an article, markup actually works really nicely. Although I suppose you could embed HTML in a JSON string

pentagrama•4h ago

I like the general term "Web feed" as an umbrella term, I found about that on this article https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-web-feeds

Also that blog has some other good related articles:

- What is RSS: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss

- What is Atom: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom

- What is JSON feed: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed

- What are feed readers: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers

- What is OPML: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml

rawling•1h ago

Your site's RSS feed is just another view of the items on your site, no? It's the RSS _reader_ that "differentiates" it for you?

ajdude•5h ago

I'm all in on RSS. Matter of fact, I used an RSS reader (netnewswire) to find this post!

I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices.

Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.

vivzkestrel•3h ago

i wish RSS protocols would update to support SSE for pushing new items instead of you polling them. Does anyone know a reliable way to use aiohttp with proxies to load data from RSS so that your requests are not blocked when using the feedparser library in python?

chrismorgan•2h ago

Pushing instead of polling was done more than fifteen years ago, and various major feed producers and consumers do support it. It was initially known as PubSubHubbub (PuSH), but was renamed to WebSub when adopted by W3C, where it has been a Recommendation for over seven years now <https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/>.

(As for SSE, it’s entirely unsuitable as it would require a persistent connection.)

pacifika•48m ago

RSScloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Cloud

rifty•3h ago

To some degree this is more a knock on the state of UX on the web than a intrinsic advantage for web feeds, but my favourite thing was my ability to compact list view content feeds, categorize them, and flip between them quickly because everything has been pre-acquired. As soon as I found out I could use Youtube that way, it felt like a 10x better experience for browsing my subscriptions.

due-rr•3h ago

RSS is awesome! That’s why I made the simplest RSS reader[1] and a RSS feed of Hacker News classics that’s updated daily[2].

Using this curbed my Reddit usage quite a lot.

[1] https://rssrdr.com [2] https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics

muppetman•2h ago

I love RSS. I am a huge fan of TinyTinyRSS, it's incredibly powerful with its filtering. I subscribe to just masses of RSS feeds, and the filtering bubbles up the stuff I'm interested in, ignores the stuff I'm not, and deletes articles I know to be hot garbage. You'd be amazed at how much crap this regex catches on tech news feeds: "^\d+ of the (best|worst|cheapest|highest|lowest|most)"

A lot of people get put off because they don't like the dev, he's not a "let me hold your hand while you understand the basics of how to install my app" kinda guy, he's a "Oh you didn't read the docs and are now spamming forums with help requests? Here's a ban" kinda guy which I gotta say, I actually really respect. Why everyone thinks open source ALSO means you get your hand held through every little rough patch I don't know, probably because a lot of open source is backed by companies who can't say the things the probably want to say in public, like "Go away, idiot"

Anyway sorry, I digress. TinyTinyRSS is excellent, the filtering just makes it head and shoulders above anything else I've tried like Miniflux (also nice) and FreshRSS.

blackbear_•1h ago

Does anybody know if there is a RSS reader with embedded recommendaions based on previous likes and/or user-specified keywords?

theshrike79•1h ago

Newsblur has some of this, it shows how popular some feeds are and has a "popular with other users" section.

suslik•1h ago

Does anyone know if there is a self-hosted rss tool which exposes the data over API? I am interested in processing feeds programmatically but ideally would prefer not to bother with writing the update / subscription / parsing logic myself.

righthand•1h ago

You may be interested in tools that parse XML, I'm sure there are libraries for parsing RSS/Atom specifically. I'm not sure what you're asking exactly. You want a tool that will read RSS feeds then reformat the data to a different (JSON?) format or something and have an API endpoint return that converted format? But then for what purpose of transforming the XML(an already suitable format)?

suslik•1h ago

Yeah, perhaps I did not explain myself correctly (or, to be precise, explained myself incorrectly - I should not comment right after waking up). I want a tool that would take as input one or more RSS feeds and emits an aggregated RSS which I can then open in an RSS reader. I would then do certain things with the RSS entries (for instance, for some academic journals only the header of the article is emitted, so I can attach the full text or even an AI summary to it).

theshrike79•1h ago

Pretty much all of them? They usually implement the Ye Olde Google Reader API and a few more so that mobile applications can connect in a standard way.

- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_A...

- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR...

FreshRSS implements two APIs

stevekemp•15m ago

Run "rss2email" then your API becomes IMAP/POP3?

pseudo_meta•1h ago

Love rss, but the upside of not having an algorithm determine your content consumption quickly results in a fire hose of content.

Sadly, filtering features seem to be only available for paid subscriptions of online services, or for self-hosted solutions. Or are there solutions I am not aware of?

Claude Sonnet will ship in Xcode

Strange CW Keys

Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

The Synology End Game

Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie

A deep dive into Debian 13 /tmp: What's new, and what to do if you don't like it

Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

PSA: Libxslt is unmaintained and has 5 unpatched security bugs

Fuck up my site – Turn any website into beautiful chaos

AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

Uncertain<T>

My startup banking story (2023)

The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

Launch HN: Dedalus Labs (YC S25) – Vercel for Agents

Expert: LSP for Elixir

An eyecare foundation model for clinical assistance

AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

Python: The Documentary [video]

How life-size cows made of butter became an iconic symbol of the Midwest

Rupert's Property

Sometimes CPU cores are odd

Building your own CLI coding agent with Pydantic-AI

Thrashing

In Search of AI Psychosis

Web Bot Auth

TuneD is a system tuning service for Linux

You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome

Powerful GPUs or Fast Interconnects: Analyzing Relational Workloads

RSS is awesome

Claude Sonnet will ship in Xcode

Strange CW Keys

Make any site multiplayer in a few lines. Serverless WebRTC matchmaking

Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

The Synology End Game

Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie

A deep dive into Debian 13 /tmp: What's new, and what to do if you don't like it

Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

PSA: Libxslt is unmaintained and has 5 unpatched security bugs

Fuck up my site – Turn any website into beautiful chaos

AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

Uncertain<T>

My startup banking story (2023)

The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

Launch HN: Dedalus Labs (YC S25) – Vercel for Agents

Expert: LSP for Elixir

An eyecare foundation model for clinical assistance

AI coding made me faster, but I can't code to music anymore

Python: The Documentary [video]

How life-size cows made of butter became an iconic symbol of the Midwest

Rupert's Property

Sometimes CPU cores are odd

Building your own CLI coding agent with Pydantic-AI

Thrashing

In Search of AI Psychosis

Web Bot Auth

TuneD is a system tuning service for Linux

You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome

Powerful GPUs or Fast Interconnects: Analyzing Relational Workloads

RSS is awesome

RSS is awesome

Comments