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 am sure people use RSS in many different ways though, it just doesn't seem useful to me.
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.
RSS works. Atom splitting the standard into two probably did more harm than good. In the end it doesn't matter since every reader supports both and both do the job well.
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.
Any half-decent feed reader app will do it for you after just pasting the website’s address.
> Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?
https://createfeed.fivefilters.org
And for newsletters:
Browsers used to detect this and show an RSS icon near the address bar if the website you were viewing had a feed - and you could click the icon to see more details and subscribe.
I use this Firefox addon which replicates that functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feed-preview/
FreshRSS is a good self-hosted RSS feed reader, and you can configure it to scrape non-RSS webpages for updates too: https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/
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)
Beyond this, is when they bake a 16:9 movie into the 4:3 format losing significant fidelity. Batman Begins was nearly unwatchable.
This of course doesn't get into the sound quality/mixing issues you mention... I wish they had something closer to h.265 at that time, as I don't mind a blurry background nearly as much as blotchy/blocky artifacts for similar sizes or smaller. A 2gb h.265 movie from blueray looks dramatically better than a 4+gb DVD movie.
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.
With email, you normally use unique image and link URLs for each recipient, so you generally know who's opened the email and what they've clicked and can map that to their email address and whatever other information you have about them.
With RSS, you generally don't have any information about who's accessing the feed other than an IP address. It is possible to require users to log in and receive a unique RSS URL, which is what podcasts often do to give paid subscribers access to paywalled episodes, but that's not common for web RSS.
If RSS has been more common, I imagine the bigger RSS readers (bearing in mind one of them was from Google!) would also have standardised on other ways of tracking clicks and ad views and all the rest. There just weren't enough people interested in RSS to make any of that worthwhile.
I say this as a user of RSS and someone who publishes a (very sporadic) RSS feed. It's a niche, because most people don't want to curate their own feeds.
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? :-)
Yes, but mostly because of a lost opportunity.
I was working on my own web based reader when Google made a significant upgrade to their reader. It was similar to what I had made, so I thought it would be foolish to compete with Google and stopped working on it.
I wonder where RSS would be now if Google had not discouraged potential competitors.
Polling rate also has nothing to do with frequency of updates if you care to receive those updates in a timely manner. I haven't seen a reader default to 30 minutes or less.
Probably in both cases you just notice the bad implementations more because they make more requests.
And Atom supports pagination so you can limit the main feed url to be just one entry while still allowing for clients to retrieve older ones.
Readers don't know how to reply to the author in a standard way (like an email)
Paying for content is a conscious action, it has a higher activation threshold than just clicking mindlessly on something that looks fun.
Then, transactions are expensive; micropayments are not a thing.
Subscriptions alleviate that a bit. Large middlemen alleviate that even more: Apple and Google can make micropayments like $0.50 viable within their ecosystems, so apps or in-app purchases can be tiny, and allow to remove ads for paying users. Attempts to do something similar for websites never took off, sadly.
I host freshRSS and it's been amazing for me.
- 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
Viewing the source of a subreddit on old.reddit.com shows an RSS link; viewing it on the new domain does not.
To consume an RSS feed you poll it. There are two polling speeds: too fast and too slow, and it's possible to be both at the same time.
Note the struggles of this Karen to turn RSS from a simple stateful protocol to a complex stated protocol, and she'll ban you if you ever reset your cache and rerun your fetcher because your cache got corrupted or you suspect it might have been corrupted.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/07/get/
You really want to have a stream of feed items and to be able to: (1) replay the whole stream all the way from or to the beginning and (2) query "what got added after time t?" and just get that. ActivityPub accomplishes this but people don't really like it. For Dave Winer it is all blub but even if he doesn't believe in the Fedi, he's on it.
I really like
because it does all the polling for you and hits your webhook whenever a new feed item appears. My webhook is about 15 lines of Python running as a Lambda function that posts items to an SQS queue and my YOShInOn RSS reader just drains the queue at its convenience. The pricing at 10 cents/feed/month is a bargain for high volume feeds like MDPI, arXiv, and The Guardian [1] but unfortunately I can't really afford to subscribe to 2000 little blogs that post maybe once a week at that rate. I wish there were more Planets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
[1] AWS costs would be trivial in comparison even if it got out of the free tier
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5005
Http might be better in 2025 than it used to be but historically the cache is as much a problem as it is a solution. That is, when you have heisenbugs the answers are frequently "clear the cache" [1] and "don't use the cache" [2] and it's often a better strategy to "rip and archive the whole site right now and come back in six months and make a fresh rip" if you're working on a large scale and can tolerate being up to six months out of date.
In general database-backed sites struggle to implement if-modified-since since a fully correct implementation has to traverse the graph of all database objects that are looked up in the request which costs about as much as… the request. Your cache needs a cache and you can make it work at the system level if you have a modified date cache and always invalidate it properly. If you are doing that you might as well materialize a static web site fronting your site the way the Wordpress supercache works —- then you’ll find your site crashing a lot less!
I’ll admit ActivityPub is complex but http caching is complex in a particularly poisonous way in that there are so many alternate paths. An ActivityPub system (client+server) could be 100% correct but an http-based system might not have a clear line around it and might never be quite right. A stateless system could run for 10 years without trouble, it might take you 10 years to realize a stateful system was feeding you corrupted data.
[1] fix it... for now
[2] ... and they're no longer part of your life
If anything characterizes the RSS community it is a lack of imagination and rejection of the last 25 years of work in relevance, ML and UX. RSS readers are still failing with the same failing interfaces that failed 25 years ago.
That said, the people who are still using it feel satisfied and other than Rachel that aren’t a lot of people who will try to stop you if you do try something ambitious. You just gotta poll poll poll and poll poll poll some more or pay somebody to poll poll poll for you.
Meanwhile, RSS is barely relevant today. For decades (Youtube turned 20 this year), people have had access to feeds curated by "the algorithm" operated by a commercial interest (hoping to maximize the amount of ads you look at); and most people seem to prefer it that way, if they're even aware of alternatives.
Case in point: I saw someone had unsubscribed from one of my email newsletters, and when I went to go read the "reason why" field, they'd filled out: "subscribed to the RSS feed instead."
That's right, my email newsletter has an RSS feed (thanks Buttondown!), and they prefer to receive the newsletter that way rather than via email. And can I blame them? Absolutely not! I love RSS. Is it better for my vanity to have their email address in my database instead, rather than some nebulous XML file going out to who-knows? Of course. But again, this format keeps on winning year after year because it's one of the best consumer-first features of the open web.
As far as I can tell, it's become the "de-facto" for Anthropic related RSS feeds.
You'd think RSS was dead, but I release this earlier this year and it's at 100 start.
Beyond this, maybe a framework to show a single header ad on the reader giving the revenue credit and money to the original content site.
The reason for newline separated json, is simply that you can do a partial content download in the reader... the most recent 100kb or 2mb or whatever... you the most recent is on top, and allows a site to publish more than just the most recent, but you don't have to grab that. Or maybe just standardize a since=(iso-style-datetime) or last=## (number of articles).
Just a couple loose thoughts on this.
PeterStuer•5h ago
Semiapies•5h ago
rob•4h ago
zenmac•5h ago
Bluesky is basically RSS on JSON.
latexr•5h ago
pndy•4h 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.