Posted by appreciatorBus 6 days ago
I know I am not the average user, but for those who care about their information diets, RSS is essential.
One underappreciated aspect: RSS can forward both machine readable and human readable content at the same time. I am experimenting with it for information processing, and I like that you can always peek into the pipes, even mid-stream, to see what is happening.
I will be writing more about this at https://writings.alethia.news (alongside AI, product design, macroeconomic data, and the occasional bit of trivia).
I don’t use Bluesky, but there are a few people on there I wish to see updates from (including one webcomic artist without a website) and I use Bluesky’s integrated RSS to do so. Same for Mastodon.
I have used RSS continuously since near the beginning. When Google Reader died I just changed clients. There are many client options now, basically all of which are better than Google Reader ever was. Pretty much every website out there still has feeds. I can even use it for extremely old fashioned local news sites.
Substack and Medium both support RSS. You can just type /feed after the URL. e.g., tk.substack.com/feed and tk.medium.com/feed
For other newsletters, I use Kill the Newsletter (https://kill-the-newsletter.com/) to subscribe via RSS.
You see, there are still more blogs than you can shake a stick at. What left isn’t the content, it’s the money. Blogs are for people who are intrinsically motivated. They are publishing on the web because they want to, and for no other reason. They don’t care how many readers there are, if any.
All the extrinsically motivated people who need likes, views, subscribes, dollars, fame, they are the ones who left. If you believe that the presence of those people determines what is alive and dead, then sure, blogs are dead.
My personal view is the opposite. People who have nostalgia for the old web. It’s not the aesthetic. It’s not the technology. It’s that extrinsic motivations hadn’t yet fully taken hold. People made a Geocities website just because they wanted to. That web still exists. You just have to go to it on purpose, and you have to ignore the very loud platforms full of those with extrinsic motivations.
First, almost all big websites support RSS. Just because there's no giant yellow RSS icon doesn't mean it's not supported, autodiscovery is the main way people subscribe to feeds these days. YouTube supports RSS. Nearly every news site supports it. Every blog. Every podcast. Substack supports it despite launching long after RSS supposedly died.
Even when a website has no RSS support, there's often a way to subscribe anyway using a scraper tool.
There's no reason for it to be supported in browsers when third party clients work great. By this standard email would be dead since browsers don't support it anymore. Most people would rather keep their subscriptions in an online service that can synchronize between devices and has native mobile apps.
Note that a plurality of websites use Wordpress which has RSS feeds by default.
Vivaldi, a Chromium browser, has a built-in RSS feed reader. There's also Brave's News feature.
Where is the RSS button on Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, twitter, or YouTube? Most websites might have feeds, but not the most used web sites.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCtI0Hod...
Worst case, pretty much every modern client has features that let you subscribe to things that aren’t RSS friendly. For example Feedly (which I don’t use) has the ability to subscribe to Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, Facebook, Telegram, Google News search queries, etc.
https://docs.feedly.com/article/660-can-i-follow-facebook-fe...
Yes, YouTube has RSS feeds for channels (technically I think the feed is per playlist but channels have a default playlist).
But my experience must be different than most. I had hundreds of feeds in Google Reader, which quickly became overwhelming. It was hard to tell what was worth reading, and I often just marked everything as “read,” the same way people get email fatigue.
While I support a more open web, I think the real missing piece in the conversation is curation.
Take HN, for example. It’s essentially community-driven curation, and I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds trying to find something interesting.
I never used Google Reader, did it not have any ability to put feeds in directories or any other way of prioritizing?
I have hundreds of feeds in my RSS reader, a dozen of them are in the directory titled "Good", and for those I read pretty much every entry in every feed every day. There are a hundred or so of them in the directory titled "Bored". I get to those every once in a while. There's a limit on how many entries it keeps, so most of the entries in the Bored directory will expire unread. But it's good sometimes to have a self-curated source of reading material even if you don't get to it all.
>> I get far more enjoyment browsing HN today than I ever did sifting endlessly through my RSS feeds
HN, of course, has an RSS feed. (It's in "Bored").
Now I use TT-RSS, which looks a lot like Google Reader did, but you run it on a local system. And I still read some feeds completely every day and let others pile up for weeks.
Some of the feeds I subscribe to are effectively curated news from around the web, and I use filters to hide certain topics - e.g. from a newspaper I might filter the entire sport section.
i access it via emacs and some lisp code cleans it up the way i like it (remove most AI stuff etc.)
my brother has literally thousands of feeds that he runs through some AI pipelines to get his stuff
there are ways
In fact it's not such a bad idea to write this software now
The main reason it isn't as popular as it once was is because of advertising. Companies want you on their sites because they can track you and show you ads. They could show ads in RSS feeds as well, but since there's no JavaScript environment, they can't data mine your browser, serve you cookies, profile you, track your behavior, and, ultimately, can't show you valuable microtargetted ads.
This is why even when sites offer RSS feeds, it's often a short blurb with a link to the main site. For these, special solutions like RSS-Bridge or RSSHub are needed, which are often blocked and need constant maintenance. I'd rather not have to use these tools, since they're effectively going against the site's wishes and scraping their content, but I think this is justifiable considering that the content is available publicly, and the user should have ultimate control in how they wish to consume it. I'm not going to be forced to accept a business transaction with a shady middleman where my data is mined, sold, and used to manipulate me into buying something or thinking a certain way.
In any case, I agree with the article's other reasons for the decline of RSS: it's too technical, most people prefer algorithmic feeds, platform centralization, etc. I think all of those are UX and technical challenges that can be addressed by building on top of RSS, but there is little incentive for a company to take them on.
I feel like the EU has successfully pushed the world towards USB-C as a standard, which seems like a big success to me (I no longer need, but obviously still have, my giant tub of various connectors and wires in my garage).
Would some kind of policy make sense to encourage an open syndication standard? Would it be a good thing?
RSS is fine. The article stretches both in how well-known it suggests RSS was a decade ago (leaning hard on the word "might"), and in talking about its "demise" now. Some of its complaints are just silly, like when it agrees with the New York Times that "RSS" isn't a "particularly user-friendly" acronym. So they think if it had been named Bundling Up Feeds For You everyone would be using it now?
RSS never caught on with average users because the average user doesn't want to think that much about his use of the web. He wants to go to one or a few sites he's comfortable with, and read what they choose to show him. That's just how it is. For the minority who aren't satisfied with that, RSS is a useful tool. There's no problem, except for people who get frustrated that the average user isn't sophisticated enough.
As to the topic: Yes, of course the European Union should make sure that every website uses RSS. It is probably the most pressing issue the alliance faces today.
The lack of the algorithmic "feed" and the fact that I'm "pulling" rather than being "fed" content is such a great change in content consumption.
Chrome always opened RSS links as raw XML file with no hint of what to do with it whatsoever.
The singular challenge it faces is discoverability, as you point out. The above mentioned extension solves that for me. But if it were to be brought back as a default feature on browsers, RSS would be an instant hit again. There's always the opportunity to resurrect it.
People deploy these solutions across their entire domain without thinking about it and then suddenly all the feed readers cannot access the feeds. I have about 1800 feeds in my feed reader and if the number of bad default cloudflare deployals keeps increasing at the rate I'm seeing by 2026/27 none of my feeds will be acessible at all.
I much prefer being in control of my feed. In an ideal world there would probably be a mix of both (I have a list of people who I see every post and a list where I see popular or major items) but between the current options I far prefer something straightforward. Especially when the algorithm isn't fully tuned to optimize my interests.
My friends and family don’t seem to post anymore. At least FB has groups for shared niche interests.
For news: per-topic or per-region feeds would probably help. I think AP used to have those, maybe still does.
which one? there are a bunch. you could either be talking about whatsapp or youtube
RSS would be better, but this works OK.