Posted by appreciatorBus 7 days ago
RSS isn't "dead", but it (actively?) neglected when even a "blog" like https://waymo.com/blog/ (to pick one random-ish example) doesn't have an RSS or Atom feed. Content sources see zero (or negative) value in RSS.
Rise and Demise of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18896168 - Jan 2019 (123 comments)
The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18002503 - Sept 2018 (186 comments)
The successor to RSS is where each feed is an arbitrary URL that your client hits to generate a feed. With an LLM this is trivial compared to before.
That doesn't sound trivial at all to me, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.
From there you can extract each article content with an LLM or use something like readability.js or just download the whole page for later consumption.
I have a prototype of it. You add a feed as { feedUrl, feedPrompt, articlePrompt }.
`feedPrompt` lets you append rules for extracting the article url list from the `feedUrl` like "ignore video articles". `articlePrompt` lets you append rules for how to extract article content for a given website, like "translate to english".
Generating it is trivial in most web frameworks and CMSs, and sites that don't offer it either never bothered to set it up, or actively choose not to. This is hardly a fault of RSS itself.
What you suggest as a successor is a workaround for such sites, not something that should be the norm.
It's trivial to implement an RSS endpoint, but what's not trivial is requiring everyone to implement it.
Needing someone to implement an API just to have machine-friendly pull access to their latest content is only a trade-off that made sense last decade.
It's not a good solution if you had the power of generating feeds yourself.
RSS is far from dead.
Edit: lol just noticed the article is from 2018...