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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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)

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.

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

> ... 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.

> 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.

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

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!

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.