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'RSS Has Already Won' (brianschrader.com) 161

Posted by msmash from the he-says-she-says dept.
Brian Schrader, an independent software developer, writes: It's been a little over 5 years since Google Reader shut down and the world of RSS readers was tossed into the junk drawer of collective memory. But, looking back on it today, I'd actually argue that RSS and Feeds as a whole never really disappeared, only the Feed Readers did. In building Pine, and as a long time Feed Reader user, I've been pleasantly surprised over these last 5 years to see that most sites still have RSS feeds. Sure, Facebook and Twitter don't support them, but YouTube, Reddit, Squarespace, Wordpress and so many more do by default. Feeds of all kinds still exist, nearly forgotten, in the markup of most websites, and this means that Feed Readers can, and will, make a comeback someday. The foundations are already laid; the hard work is done. RSS Feeds became a standard, and were built into the tools we use to make the web today. It's almost as if we laid the tracks and built the trains for a trans-continental railroad, but we've just forgotten how to sell tickets.
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'RSS Has Already Won' More

'RSS Has Already Won'

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  • Still lots of Readers (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @08:45PM (#56932402)

    I found this post via a RSS Feed reader.

    • Re:Still lots of Readers (Score:4, Interesting)

      by munwin99 ( 667576 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @09:36PM (#56932568) Homepage
      +1. Feedly user here.

      • Re:Still lots of Readers (Score:5, Informative)

        by caseih ( 160668 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @09:55PM (#56932632)

        Same here. I think the feedly Android app is a bit cumbersome (what's up with page at a time scrolling?), but it does the job. I track Slashdot, Ars, various forums, and world news sites using Feedly and RSS. Love it.

        A while back I asked the forum administrators on a forum I frequent if they could enable the RSS feed, which they did. I view that feed every day. Beats the heck out of using the web interface and trying to track activity on several sub forums.

        • Am using gReader Pro on Android hooked up to Feedly. Works a treat.
        • I know you didn't ask but I'll give my suggestion anyway.

          I use inoreader, the page for the desktop is very useful and the app (at least for android) is great, a lot of features including an internal small web browser to load feeds quickly with just an up or down pull gesture.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • I love the page at a time scrolling because I also have it set to mark those article as read. That way I can hide what I've already considered and passed on. I have no problem with this being an option rather than a requirement.

    • Re: Still lots of Readers (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Read via ttrss app on Android pulling from my ttrss install on heroku.

    • Firefox and it's more usable cousin, PaleMoon, both support RSS as live bookmarks. I use that for all my news. BBC World [bbc.co.uk], CBC World [rss.cbc.ca], CBC Canadian [rss.cbc.ca], CNN Latest [cnn.com], and CNN World [cnn.com]. You don't need a dedicated RSS reader to enjoy RSS. It also lets me laugh at people who (still today) get caught by fake stories on social media sites. People who get their news through social media deserve what they get, I think.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by nman64 ( 912054 )

      +1

      I follow Slashdot and a bunch of other feeds through Firefox and its "Live Bookmarks". I also use RSS feeds in various other ways at home and for work.

      I don't think RSS is going away any time soon, but I'm not sure that standalone readers will ever become more popular. Instead, I think RSS will live on through features included in other applications, like Firefox, and integrations with other communication and productivity products, such as Slack.

    • I added Slashdot's RSS feed to Thunderbird because of your post.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mathew7 ( 863867 )

      Flooding news of Google Reader shutdown made me investigate RSS feeds and started using selfoss. Local readers were not good for keeping "read" satus across multiple devices.

    • Same here. I use my email client, Thunderbird, to keep me up to date with the RSS feeds I subscribe to. It's far less time-consuming or frustrating than trying to follow anything on social media, even with skilfully organised bookmarks.
    • me too, feedly user.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by idji ( 984038 )
      Podcast Apps use RSS today

    • As did I, and have for a very, very long time - before iGoogle was closed even.

      The /. URLs I respond to start with http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/ [slashdot.org], since, after all, I'm using an RSS aggregator, and I get 30-40 sites data daily this way.

      RSS not only won, it survived, and it avoids a lot of unpleasantness from many other reader methods, since it's really all mine - I choose, I configure, I delete.

      Google News for instance is so up the WaPo butt I find it hard to read most of their news posts, since I run AdBlocke

  • sns (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Isnt twitter and facebook 50% rss reader? Everything you "want" to read is neatly organized

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Kind of I guess, the main difference is that they don't want users to have to much control over how they read it.

  • I'm betting on a gopher comeback.

    • I'm betting on a gopher comeback.

      Gopher. Pah. Been keeping my 110-baud acoustic coupler on the shelf waiting for telephones and BBSs to make their inevitable march back to the front lines. My ASR-33 is ready to print, and my Baudot teletype is standing in ready backup with an ASCII-to-Baudot converted attached.

      Real soon now!

      • From that day long ago when you first heard someone describe their website as an >>>EXPERIENCE<<< ... you know your simple literary text-based past is past. Now it's all about EYEBALLS on the PAGE, and the full extent of what tracking is possible with cookies and cookiecruft in gooblegook URLs that may be embedded levels deep. The HTTP Last-Modified: header is dead, even the ignoble ETAG is fakery-trackery in many cases. Your page has content hidden within it, often built on the fly by

  • Was it ever a competition? What was was there to "win"? Regardless, I've never stopped relying on them. I have several readers on my Android phone, and use Thunderbird on desktops to collect feeds for review alongside e-mail, which seems perfectly natural to me.

    • Was it ever a competition? What was was there to "win"?

      Ever hear anyone talk about ATOM feeds anymore?

      Yaz

  • RSS Smart bookmarks in Firefox rock (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I read all my news off them. Cuts out all the cruft.

  • Its not dead.... perhaps not well publicized, but not dead...

  • <marquee> is still supported by all major browsers, but I don't see it making a come back any time soon.

  • For me at least, if a website doesn't have an RSS feed, I'm not likely to frequent it. My RSS reader is how I interact with a large amount of the web. I honestly can't fathom how people can use the internet without one. It's so mentally taxing and you miss so much stuff.

    • Re: It's a foundation, not a competition. (Score:4, Informative)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @09:26PM (#56932532) Journal
      Mainly I don't mind missing stuff
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • UW Pine? Or copyright infringment? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Idiot plugging his lame-ass RSS reader, which is named the same as a famous mail client? Looks like another clueless "developer".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client)

  • Google Reader shutting down was great for RSS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @09:35PM (#56932562)

    Google Reader shut down and 10 more readers popped up - and today Feedly is much better than Google Reader was, or ever would be with Google's stewardship. It revitalized things.

    I'm not sure anyone thought RSS was dead though, except the people who want it dead like Facebook.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "Dead like Facebook" sounds too good to be true. (o;

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Feedly is okay on desktop... I used to have terrible performance and lots of "Web 3.0" dynamic bullshit that broke your extensions and made scrolling choppy as hell. They kept making the UI worse too but now it's reasonable again, with the return of the article view mode.

      On mobile Feedly is still pretty bad.

      Google Reader was better. The UI was simple, performance was good.

  • The my.yahoo.com feeds disappear and reappear all the time. It's especially annoying because they're controlled by Yahoo.

  • I assumed it (Google Reader, and thus RSS) was killed deliberately by Larry Page.

  • I get 90% of my news via RSS feeds. I listen to lots of podcasts (also using RSS). Not sure why everyone thinks they are dead. TheOldReader works for me, just fine.

  • RSS is dead?

    Actually, Feedly + Twitter + a well-curated list of bookmarks is all I need to inhabit my Internet bubble.

    I do kind of miss Usenet, though.

  • Sorry, I'm pretty attentive and mindful enough to know when to check regularly for updates.

    RSS served no useful role for me, so it lost from day one.

  • Easy and simple, no one can't compete with the simplest a fastest solution, even Facebook had to disable support for it as it couldn't control how it was competing with its own product, and the liberty it provides to free information; Another Beta vs VHS, but this time with Beta(rss) being the royalty free solution.

    As it has no limits for control the info, the big ones doesn't support it because they just couldn't release products to compete with its own rss implementations.

    That said, for almost th

  • YouTube support is at best reluctant. (Score:5, Informative)

    by pots ( 5047349 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:02PM (#56932798)
    YouTube does, technically, support RSS feeds, but you have to know the secret handshake in order to get the feed address. Saying that feeds are "supported by default" is a little over-optimistic. Google does everything short of completely banning feeds in order to get you to stop using them and sign up with their tracking service instead.

    For the secret handshake, use either:

    "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[your channel ID here, alphanumeric string]"
    or
    "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=[username here, but the username is not always the display name. Check page source.]"

    and copy that address to your RSS reader.

  • Slashdot users like to bag on CMSes, but one of the many benefits is syndication. Drupal, for example, makes it trivial to create RSS feeds of your content, and also has a good syndication module for pulling in entries from other sites' feeds. My cute little hobbyist site has RSS for this reason, and I have subscribers... Probably just because it was so easy.

  • RSS is flexible (Score:3)

    by imidan ( 559239 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:25PM (#56932866)
    I was working on a project with a guy who loved to over-engineer things. At one point, we wanted the ability to share XML documents between sites by advertising them and allowing remote sites to download them on their own schedule. He spent the evening in his hotel room drawing up a complex client-server system with an elaborate API. When we met the next morning, I said, "Why don't we just do it with RSS?" And over the next half hour we verified that RSS did everything we wanted it to, already has developed tools and APIs, and is super simple. We stood up that system in more or less its current state the Monday after we got back from the meeting. RSS FTW.

  • Get pornhub and the like to use em!

    (disclaimer, I haven't checked to see if they have one already, and wouldn't surprise me)

  • I still get my news via RSS.

    Simple, really. If a site doesn't support it, I don't support them.

  • Self-host TT-RSS (Score:5, Informative)

    by cerberusss ( 660701 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @12:49AM (#56933028) Journal

    I think lots of people here have some server running somewhere. Install Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) on there, and be able to access it from anywhere. Totally open source. https://tt-rss.org/ [tt-rss.org]

    What's great is that there are a number of RSS reading apps that you can point to your server, so it doesn't matter whether you're on mobile or on your desktop browser. For Android, I'd suggest just use the app from the same author. For iOS, I use Tiny Reader [apple.com] (App Store link).

    • Came here to say the same thing. I have used tt-rss for about a decade and cannot read the web without it. Run it at home and all I have to do is know my home IP and boom, I am good. If the site doesn't have RSS, (or some weird combo of so many RSS feeds it is useless), I don't use them.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I strongly suggest that you consider a different feed reader than TT-RSS - the developers of that software are Nazi sympathizers (seriously): https://flameeyes.blog/2017/09/03/tiny-tiny-rss-dont-support-nazi-sympathisers/

      When I found about TT-RSS's extreme POVs, I immediately switched to FreshRSS, which was quite easy to do, has a much friendly community, nice interface, and most importantly doesn't hate people.

  • RSS: Rumors of it's demise... (Score:3)

    by rsborg ( 111459 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @01:14AM (#56933062) Homepage

    Was just a blatant move to kill it off to get people to use G+ / FB / Twitter so our every engagement can be tracked and sold to the advertisers (and possibly nation-states).

    RSS "lost" like Obi-wan lost in Episode IV. It was never really gone.

  • The Vienna RSS reader is still be ing supported and it works very nicely on macOS
  • 12 years ago, I wrote a website that took RSS feeds checked the posts where on topic, sorted to output into new web pages and RSS feeds, was even open to the public to create new feeds, and search (via google API) for feeds on subject. I a million page view per month, but the views where mostly for the output feeds, so no ad revenue. Run it for seven years, but got tide of paying £110 per month for hosting and getting on £12 per month from google Adwords, so I had to shut down, then the server d
  • I use active bookmarks all the time, even for this. RSS is cool

  • Despite the Great RSS Wars back in the days when excessive blogging was the hip thing to do I still think that RSS is a killer concept and bound for a big revival when things get too badly out of hand with social media. Blogging is basically social media by and for the masses and with RSS and some other formats it could replace everything Facebook and Instagram have to offer in a heartbeat. I somewhat expect that to happen sometime in the future.

  • The main problem with RSS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Thursday July 12, 2018 @07:13AM (#56933658)
    Feeds are great but they don't align with the business models of Facebook, Yahoo, Google, et al. A feed is something outside of their control, their algorithms, their aggregation. These days if you want to use feeds you have to get an extension to do it. I use Feedbro in Firefox which is quite nice for this purpose.

  • As a nerd, one thing that has really annoyed me is the lack of support for scientific notation on the web. Even 30 years after the invention of the web there is no good way to put scientific notation on a web page. Now we do have the MathJax JavaScript librar, but it is not a standard. It requires a special web server installation procedure, or if you are hosting on a service you have to use the external MathJax service creating an external site dependency, and the browser has to enable JavaScript. This is

  • I would argue that the only place RSS has ever not really sank in is on the consumer side. Everywhere else, we use it all the time, for a lot of things. We use it for spidering, we use it for mapping, we use it for passing news between one website and another. It's incredibly handy, and part of the plumbing of the web. Yeah, we're using JSON services a lot these days for a lot of things, but not this. Not really. Might even be a fair argument that RSS and it's handy nature actually leads to it being pervasi

  • The OP is a retard. So google killed their crappy RSS reader. They killed the READER, they did not kill all and every fucking RSS feed on the internet. There are other readers out there, even fucking MS Outlook can do RSS feeds. I never bothered with their reader anyway, I just used outlook - not my preferred method, but it works. RSS has been out for a LOOOOONG time, I even wrote my own reader once, just for shits and giggles, which is what I use at home. Trying to infer that "google killed RSS" is j

    • So... you use both Outlook's reader and your own? Or did you code up Outlook? 0.o

      • No, I just use Outlook at work and my own code at home since I don't have MS Office at home. I also have a G15 keyboard at home, so I send the RSS feeds to it's LCD display. It has a built in RSS feeder, but I find it a bit limited. I know the keyboard is old, I would love to upgrade, but it still works perfectly so until there is a much more appealing keyboard at a reasonable price I will stick with it. Just bought my wife a mechanical gaming keyboard, and I am seriously tempted, if I can find one with
  • I think it's more in use than he thinks, but ... taking him at his premise, I'm not sure that "nobody uses it but it's available vestigially most places" is really "winning" ...

  • I found this post using theoldreader.com.

  • First, I used Tiny Tiny RSS [wikipedia.org] for a few years. It worked well. I ran it on my home server. Written in PHP and using MySQL made it easy to host.

    One day, it was choking on feeds from a certain site, and stopped updating.

    So I switched to the original MiniFlux [github.com] reader. Again, it is written in PHP, so easy to host. It can use either SQLite, MySQL, or other databases.

    The same developer has gone in a different direction, with MiniFlux 2 [github.com], which uses Go, and PostgreSQL (only!). The developer describes it as 'opinionate

  • All those people repeating the template response about how JSON somehow replaced RSS are full of crap.
  • I used to use standalone RSS readers, but keeping work and home separate became a bit tricky. Then browsers incorporated it, and I started using the RSS support in portable Opera. There were always web-based RSS readers, but they were rarely very mature, until Google Reader raised the pair. When Google Reader died, there was a collective scream, but Feedly, Ino Reader, and others stepped up to the plate, and I don't see any indication that they will be stopping any time soon.

  • Used FeedBin ever since Google shut down their free service, and Reeder on my Phone.

    These days I no longer need a Twitter client to follow people, even Twitter searches. Just add them as a feed. The great thing about it is it's cached and separated into separate feeds for me. So much easier than any Twitter client.

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