Social media tells you what you should see based on some implicit determination. Sure sometimes you can discover new things that did not interest you. You can feel serendipitous. With RSS feed, you can actually gain control, you could actually say when you see items in the feed, alert me. With current social media, I am constantly discovering things, which gives me a short high of finding new things which lasts for few minutes and then I find another new thing. I haven't been able to find what interests me for eg. In YouTube, where I get bored quickly even though I keep seeing new things, new domain I just discovered.
The difficult part is replacing the comment section and the network dynamics that make those sites grow.<p>I think all alternatives to youtube fail because of the dead comment sections. Not sure if there would be some way of creating distributed comment sections without them turning into pure spam and . Maybe chains of trust where you only see messages by users that have been "whitelisted" by someone you trust.
Twitter is especially good for RSS as you can see almost all 140 chars in a single line and see all the recents tweets for the twitter account. I've no interest in comments in twitter.<p>With Reddit you can subscribe to RSS feeds of subreddits and see the new topics. Click through to reddit if you want to engage.<p>It has its uses and frankly it's my method for info consumption. If something doesn't have an RSS interface then I don't use it. Life is too short.
I hope RSS is finally old enough to be in fashion again, and people are starting to wake up to the fact that it's much superior to social media as a periodic content consumption venue. Social media is for posting cat pictures, wedding invitations and ancient jokes you heard for the first time yesterday. RSS is for creating curated periodic content streams. I've been using it since forever, and there's never been anything better. Well, maybe better format - RSS, Atom, whatever - but the idea is the same.<p>Hopefully people start to wake up to this finally? One can hope.
The issue with these solutions is that they're only really one way, if I actually want to interact with anything posted to the RSS feed I have to navigate to the main website anyway, which renders the initial reading of them in a freer way pretty pointless.
I think RSS is a way to read social media, it's not a replacement for social media. But that's a good thing! I just want to stay updated with blogs, forums, <i>and</i> social media – in one place. I built and use <a href="https://sumi.news" rel="nofollow">https://sumi.news</a> to follow Twitter, newsletters, and RSS in a peaceful, chronological feed, and it works well for me. I still comment, reply, and interact, but I only have to check one website for updates.
Replacing existing approaches to social media needs a two way protocol like activitypub <a href="https://activitypub.rocks/" rel="nofollow">https://activitypub.rocks/</a><p>RSS plays well but is not sufficient
Technical correction: YouTube, GitHub and GitLab all produce Atom feeds, not RSS. (Nitter has /rss in its URLs but I can’t confirm they’re <i>actually</i> RSS because the feeds seem to be broken, producing HTML “user not found” error pages.)<p>(If you want to know more of my beef against RSS (both as a technology and as a term for web feeds regardless of actual format): <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+atom+rss&type=comment&sort=byDate" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+atom+rss&type=comm...</a>. RSS should have been killed off about fifteen years ago in favour of Atom.)
I've been enjoying using <a href="https://fraidyc.at/" rel="nofollow">https://fraidyc.at/</a> for the past year or so. It ingests RSS and is smart enough for everything else. I use it to follow people on Twitter, know when a favorite youtuber uploads a video, subscribe to a number of blogs, and know exactly when a new post is added to the subreddits I frequent.
I've thought about how RSS and social media relate to each other <i>a lot</i>. Social media works off the "feed" paradigm pretty explicitly (News Feed, Twitter feed, etc.).<p>I've thought about how to implement an open-standards social media site. Maybe with a feed server (FastCGI or otherwise) that takes authentication tokens in the request header or URL (over HTTPS only obviously), and - if the token is linked to a valid "friend" or "following" relationship, returns an RSS feed of the person's recent posts.
Forgotten OStatus have we? That was essentially RSS feeds + optional extras like ActivityStreams and push, all gracefully degrading into plain ol' RSS / Atom feeds.
For Twitter I use this Bridge to get RSS<p><a href="https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge</a><p>Just saw, it works also with other websites like youtube. But I have never tried this.
> RSS-bridge is the ultimate RSS feed helper and will not just give you RSS feeds for Facebook pages, but basically anything else.<p>This has been my opposite experience, all RSS bridges i have tried gets error with Facebook pages.
I love the loud colors and 90s feel to this site. RSS does not have the breadth of a combination of twitter, reddit, and curated youtube. I only read a couple news sources and blogs so bookmarks are fine there.
Has anybody used rss-bridge to replace the Facebook newsfeed? It seems like you have to point to individual people so I'm curious if you'd get blocked if you tried to follow more than a few friends.
It could be a solution! But in both cases (RSS reader or social media) there are a lot of noise...<p>We are on our way to fix this problem :) <a href="https://newzy.io" rel="nofollow">https://newzy.io</a>
I’m doing it the other way, using social media instead of RSS! Ok, only half joking.<p>Facebook is now what RSS was supposed to be, but for the non-tech masses. Sure, I still use RSS for tech blogs, but how do I find about local concerts and events, schedule changes for kid’s aikido, etc? All these small organizations, clubs, bands, artists, venues use Facebook as a way to notify their members/fans.<p>After some curating, I really like my Facebook. But I don’t use it as a social network, i.e. there’s not much social stuff there. “Loud” friends or relatives they are muted. But that’s where I find out about next concert of bands I follow, which I wouldn’t find elsewhere.
I use Reeder to follow the sites I enjoy reading e.g. slashdot, ars technica, xkcd, swift and golang blogs, some sections of the NY Times, etc.<p>I never read social media feed. For Twitter my Tweetbot client is configured to filter out all retweets and I use a 'mustered' list for the people whose tweets I don't want to miss.
It's fascinating to me that even in a post for something as simple and mundane as RSS feeds somehow Luke Smith still manages to sprinkle in some of his disgusting alt-right vocabulary. I have to respect the grift.
I'll post this every time someone tries to launder Luke Smith through HN: he is a reactionary with a relatively popular YouTube channel in which he openly espouses and trades in racist talking points[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA</a>
Twitter with an RSS feed is a waste of crawling traffic.<p>Suppose you follow 1k accounts, you have to subscribe 1k RSS. What a waste. Twitter's core functionality was based on how to aggregate all 1k updates into one feed.