RSS is awesome

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

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

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.

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

not in my world it aint.

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.

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

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/

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

No love for Atom?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

What's an algorithm?

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.

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

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.

FreshRSS is dabomb! Highly recommend it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

How about JSON Enhanced Syndication and Tracking?

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

+1 happy freshrss user here

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

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.)

> ... 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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)?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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).

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?

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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.)

RSS is underrated.

I use my own RSS reader [0]. I found other to be lacking in some areas.

I use it also for:

- bookmarks

- web crawling

- simple search engine

I also created simple RSS reader/parser, and web crawling system [1].

Links:

[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

RSS provides GUID + update timestamp which combined allows the client to integrate changes or replace entries.

I’ve been looking for a way to get RSS feeds from Twitter profiles. tried RSS-Bridge but couldn’t get it working. rss.app works, but it’s paid. nitter feeds look promising but come through as invalid. how did you do it

No it's not.

- There are million different formats.

- guids are not required, they are not monotonically rising integers, and there is no length limits on them (I've seen 50kb guid in the wild)

- date is not required

- you cannot fetch articles "since guid 123". If you go on vacation and return, if the feed had too much traffic they are gone, you'll never see the articles you missed except last 20 or so.

- whether article will be in full or just a teaser is fully in the hands of the server

Reading this headline in India and sweating

Yes! I've been lovingly curating a set of RSS feeds for over 20 years. It's a wonderful gift from the internet.

I actually built a simple and free RSS reader because my needs are simple and I'm a sucker for punishment. You'd think websites would want bots to read their RSS feeds since that's the whole point of RSS, but apparently not! ツ

https://feedgrab.net

Anything that raises awareness of RSS to a new generation is a wonderful thing!

Yeah never subscribe to a feed that publishes more than once a day (basically any news website).

And instead of "feeds", call them "holes". And instead "subscriptions", they're "heads up". Dave Winer's would be the biggest with the most!

https://web.archive.org/web/20070910131413/http://news.com.c...

Who old enough to remember when everybody was syndicating all their favorite RSS feeds on their own blogs, and then some joker posted a blog entry to his own RSS feed with a title like "What happens when you put an unbalanced <BLINK> tag into the title?", and the ENTIRE BLOGOSPHERE started blinking?

I have been using miniflux for a while. I love it. It's great.

I adore RSS! Use it literally every single day. I have many feeds on Feedly.com, and add to it every week or two.

Tip: use a service to stream quality content to your RSS feed reader. For Hacker News, http://hnapp.com/ does the trick for me.

I subscribe to a couple dozen authors on Hacker News.

Example: in hnapp, search for `author:bob1029`, there's an RSS link, paste that into your RSS feed reader to see that person's Hacker News comments.

I have an entire "Hacker News" section in Feedly, just with author's comments. Very useful!

Innoreader/Feedly load balance my daily feeds

NetNewsWire is beginning to choke for me because I have a large number of feeds. I was using it today and when I pressed Alt-K to "mark all as read", it beachballed on me and I had to force quit. This has been happening more often recently as I've added more feeds.

I’d like to suggest newsboat (https://newsboat.org/index.html). I’ve been happily using it for a few years. It’s fast, runs in the terminal, with a great set of keyboard shortcuts.

People were literally XSSing themselves and the worst someone did was a funny prank. Those were simpler times.

QuiteRSS (Linux, MacOS, Windows, OS/2),

Flym (Android)

It depends how pedantic you’re feeling.

I was extremely bummed when setting up RSS for the glance app to find that a bunch of stuff I'd assumed would just have RSS feeds, do not. Mostly local things that post regular updates to pages that already look like feeds.

- Three local independent theaters

- Every local venue I checked in my city (admittedly only checked a few I was specifically interested in)

- The local dvd rental place (we still have one and it's neat. The announce their newer niche additions via an updating page)

- My local folk school that hosts events and has an updated news page with no feed

There were a few things I can't remember now that I was shocked to see regularly update pages with lists of updates that there is no way to subscribe to. I would have expected most of these sites to be built using some kind of automated tool that would just include rss or atom. I guess most of the offer email lists, which is a crappy way to get updates comparatively imo.

I'm probably going to use a combination of changedetection.io and rss-bridge to get updates from these sites, but like, seriously?

I keep using RSS daily through Feedly classic mobile app and I'm quite happy with it.

You can give notify-me.rs a try if you want as well. We have a free plan available, and we should be able to track all of the sites you mentioned.

If you do give it a try, let me know what you think, since I'm one of the founders.

Cheers!

Because a local algorithm not dictated by a social media walled garden will probably not optimize for engagement to deliver a large amount of ads.

This is what I use, and I also have Readrops on my phone that syncs back to my FreshRSS instance. Makes it really convenient to have a lightweight reading app where I can submit new feeds to it and have it sync back to the server.

Yikes. I read THOUSANDS of RSS headlines on a daily basis. This is exactly why I use RSS. You can easily get a glimpse of headlines and keep browsing.

Feedly has this. You can generate a unique email address for each newsletter. Pretty sure you'll need pay. I'm on a lifetime sub.

You can tell OP is a newb as he's using NetNewsWire and not Reeder.

I’ve been using Artemis ever since it was posted here earlier this year. I love it because there is very little pressure to read everything and it updates infrequently so I don’t impulsively check it. Great product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471913

https://artemis.jamesg.blog/

That's the beauty of RSS, people can tailor it to their needs and wants. If I saw thousands of unread items, I'd shut down and give up. On the flip side, if you had my feed list, you'd probably feel like you were missing a ton of stuff. But we can both make it work for us.

I did have a job where I got 10k email per day for a good 10 years, so I probably have some PTSD from that. I'd feel like I was right back there if I had thousands of items per day in my RSS reader. I've been out of that stage of my job for a good 8 years, and I'm just now starting to get a handle on my email again, after feeling like there was no way to control it for so long.

The most useful value of RSS for me was >20 years ago. craigslist let you create rss feeds with params, so I made a script that got me subscribed to feeds for every location they had in north america where someone was looking for a "telecommute lamp developer"

What’s a word, if you really think about it?

Something is up with your web page. It stutters when scrolling, and crashes my tab. I’m using Safari on an iPhone 14 Pro running iOS 18.6.2 (22G100). No content blockers or extensions.