RSS: there's nothing better

I wrote about this recently[1]. The &quot;problem&quot; with RSS, that essentially lead to it falling out of favour, is that it is pure consumption, not interaction. You can&#x27;t &quot;like&quot; an update that comes to you via RSS, nor comment, nor easily share. It&#x27;s difficult for sites to monetise it, or track, or promote their own agenda. It&#x27;s not &quot;social&quot; and since every other site these days needs to be social, whether through aforementioned ways, or adding some sort of messaging process, it&#x27;s not a way that sites can keep users hooked <i>on</i> the site to boost ad impressions.<p>RSS is pure content, curated only by the consumer and presented in chronological order not algorithmically messed with, which is why there&#x27;s nothing better.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leejo.github.io&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;27&#x2F;social_media_zero&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leejo.github.io&#x2F;2017&#x2F;09&#x2F;27&#x2F;social_media_zero&#x2F;</a>

RSS is the only sane way to follow multiple sites and people. There&#x27;s blogs, news sites, Twitter, YouTube channels, etc. - only in my RSS reader (theoldreader.com) it all comes together. Some removed RSS feeds because they realised I don&#x27;t have to load their horrible ad-infested Javascript crud to read someone&#x27;s 160 characters, but if it has content worth reading, there&#x27;s RSS scrapers that turn it into a feed (e.g. twitrss.me). Facebook is kinda left out as most of their content is walled off, but then they&#x27;re too evil to even consider going there anyways.

I&#x27;ve been seriously considering trying to consume the web solely by RSS again. All the news sites, the few twitter accounts I actually care about, HN. HN still provides RSS, and there are ways to get it for sites that don&#x27;t support it, e.g. Twitter.<p>Everything seems to be gearing more towards deliberately occupying as much of my time as possible, algorithmically selecting content that achieves this. I want out of this situation, but overcoming addiction and interrupting the automatic trigger cycle is hard. Maybe now&#x27;s the time.

Atom syndication format is better than RSS.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc4287" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tools.ietf.org&#x2F;html&#x2F;rfc4287</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Atom_%28standard%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Atom_%28standard%29</a>

A friend and I made a tool&#x2F;framework to easily create RSS feeds for websites that don&#x27;t offer one. It&#x27;s written in Python and uses Scrapy for scraping the website. Maybe it could be helpful to somebody. Out of the box mostly Austrian sites are supported but adding a new site usually involves only a few lines of code.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nblock&#x2F;feeds" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nblock&#x2F;feeds</a>

I really miss Google Reader. Nowadays if I want to follow updates from my friends or events from some organizations, I almost certainly have to like&#x2F;follow them on FB. But even doing this I cannot be sure that I will get news that I want - because despite I always use &quot;Most Recent&quot; sorting, FB is hiding some content from me.<p>Many times I saw interesting post when accidentally entering FB &quot;Top stories&quot;, from let&#x27;s say 2 hours ago. I switch to &quot;Most Recent&quot; and guess what, I can&#x27;t find this post anymore (except going explicitly to this person&#x27;s page).<p>I&#x27;m getting closer and closer to stop using FB and using only messenger.

After the death of google reader I looked around for a new reader and finally decided for newsbeuter an open-source RSS&#x2F;Atom feed reader for text terminals. Since I always read the article on the source site newsbeuter is perfect for me. newsbeuter does the heavy lifting of downloading and storing and I just have to press &#x27;o&#x27; to open the article in my browser.

I really want to like RSS but almost every from a commercial outlet serves “stubs” instead of full articles, I.e. to read the full thing you have to click through and land on their website (for ad-serving purposes I imagine)<p>I had found a solution in fulltextrssfeeds.com, but it was slow, cumbersome and didn’t always work.<p>How do you folks solve this?

Just deleted my Facebook account in about two weeks ago and started consuming news through RSS and through Podcasts and some YouTube channels (which are also, surprisingly, RSS). I&#x27;ve never felt better. This might be a stretch, but this has been a good alternative to the way I was consuming online media, indeed less useless info seems to be reaching me. However, it all depends on the material you&#x27;re subscribing to.

I truly love RSS, combining Feedly with Reeder makes for a fantastic experience. I wrote a brief post on how I use RSS recently: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smcleod.net&#x2F;thoughts&#x2F;return-of-the-rss&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smcleod.net&#x2F;thoughts&#x2F;return-of-the-rss&#x2F;</a>

I also use RSS as a way of publishing configuration and firmware updates to a set of users&#x2F;devices. Works great: surfs infrastructure we already have, supports browsing past versions etc, and I didn&#x27;t have to write any clients for looking things up.<p>This is for a rather large, global, corporate-internal system, not a commercial product, though I got the idea when thinking about solutions for a commercial product a few years ago.

I use Thunderbird for my email + RSS together. Somehow the three things that lots of people keep on thinking are dead or dying work perfectly together.

Ah yes, twitter lists. It seems they came up with those to undercut the major reason people used the likes of Tweetdeck. Only to later buy up, and shut down the desktop version of, the very same client.<p>And now it languishes in some side area of the service, seemingly forgotten.

I have used RSS&#x2F;Atom feeds for ever, recently I have decided to ditch Twitter&#x27;s client and for Twitter feeds consumption I am using twitrss.me to parse twitter user feeds. I need to find a good parse for FB and than I will be a happy man.

I agree completely.<p>It&#x27;s the web at its best. There no need for a decentralized social network. We have the web.<p>We should return using RSS (or Atom) and find some other tools to help for forums &#x2F; messages.<p>&quot;Likes&quot;? Are we sure we need them?

The page has a JS miner in it.

I was quite excited when I heard of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsonfeed.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsonfeed.org&#x2F;</a>. I was surprised at how much more pleasant it seemed, considering the major feature is a simple switch from XML encoding to JSON encoding and not much more.<p>So it’s a bummer to not see it mentioned (not at all in the article, not much in the comments). Does that mean it didn’t really catch on, or what is its status?

I see no mention of push notifications as a sort of alternative. Technologically, the polling of RSS feeds to check for new content is a bit wasteful. What I&#x27;d like to see is a setup that uses push notifications to gather new content or maybe even a combination, where the push notification tells the RSS reader to grab the new content.<p>Another interesting fact about RSS is, that it&#x27;s the main distribution solution for podcasts.

The problem with RSS is that I don&#x27;t want to subscribe to blogs that have only one lucky post in a decade, I want a curated list of topics on a daily&#x2F;weekly fashion and for that newsletters are the best. Unfortunately email is not the best platform for delivering content so I came up with an idea to offer a news reader that consumes newsletters you can subscribe&#x2F;unsubscribe at any time. It&#x27;s just like an email client but just for newsletters.<p>Lo and behold, opened a gmail account specifically for newsletters, subscribed to my swift, kotlin, design, UX and AI newsletters and I&#x27;m now using Apple Mail to have the time of my life consuming all the content I need, delivered to my inbox daily, with no spam, no friends, no follow, no ads, no nothing.<p>Of course there is still the possibility to provide a nice client rich in features for the common user so the idea for a startup is still in the air.<p>RSS is dead, long live newsletters.

RSS is great, but: If I could add one thing to a standard RSS setup, it would be a volume knob for each subscribed feed.<p>Is a feed too noisy? You can unsubscribe. But what if you had another less-drastic option to &quot;turn it down&quot;? That&#x27;s doable if you have some way of assigning scores to individual posts within the feed. Such scores could come from the feed publisher, other places like the reader&#x27;s own social media accounts, or somewhere else. Have a user-determined threshold to determine what posts are worth showing the user.<p>Then by &quot;turn it down&quot; the user means &quot;bump the threshold up&quot; (and vice versa). Via trial and error a user could more or less adjust it to where they want it.<p>This could be built using RSS as one of the building blocks, but I don&#x27;t know of anything like it.

so whats a good rss reader in 2017?

+1 for &quot;nothing better&quot;. I have been using RSS for years and select my sources of information depending on its availability.<p>Some comments bring the question about the readers, and their exposure to publishers, who truncate their content in the RSS feeds.<p>I solved this by implementing my own reader, web based. It aggregates all RSS feeds from my subscriptions and retrieves the article. When the source only exposes limited data, the script retrieves the full article directly and shows this instead.<p>I have shared this tool with my friends, they love it. Unfortunately, I cannot widen the audience for legal reasons: the tool automatically scraps all ads and removes any &quot;non-content-related&quot; stuff. I also convinced some of them to share for membership access on some newspapers: a monthly subscription to the NYT shared by 5 people, with a guarantee of &quot;clean, ad-free&quot; content beats anything else.<p>Sharing these tools with a wider audience would expose me to legal actions, notwithstanding websites that have a JavaScript paywall...<p>In conclusion, my only recommendation is to spend a few hours learning scripting enough to be able to read from an XML url and parse it. Once you can do that, you have your own RSS reader.<p>Next challenge will be websites, that expose their content through AJAX requests only...good thing is that most of them have a fallback mechanism for mobile devices, which relies on much simpler logic. The trick is to understand how to convert the &#x27;link&#x27; in the RSS feed to a &#x27;mobile link&#x27;.<p>++

Feedbro RSS Feed reader has built-in Rule engine that lets you define rules for filtering&#x2F;highlighting&#x2F;autotagging articles.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nodetics.com&#x2F;feedbro&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nodetics.com&#x2F;feedbro&#x2F;</a>

I mostly consume my RSS feeds on the London Underground, where 70% of the time you don&#x27;t have cellphone or WiFi signal.<p>While my preferred RSS reader NewsBlur can download everything up front, for offline use, I tend to find a lot of sites truncate their articles (with a &#x27;Click here to continue reading!&quot;) or just post a headline and a one sentence summary.<p>This makes me dislike using RSS, not because of the technology, just the way it&#x27;s delivered these days. It&#x27;s fine (if a little irritating) if you are online all the time, but offline it&#x27;s practically unusable bar the few sites that offer full length articles

&gt;But, but, XML is gross! RSS is dead! 2007!<p>Favourite chapter. Never been fan of bashing xml in favor of json, both have their own advantages and xml gets the job done here. Wouldn&#x27;t care if it was json.

Absolutely, there&#x27;s nothing better! Contrary to trends &amp; general opinion, RSS usage for content aggregation &amp; monitoring is on an increase, specially in the business world and niche industries.<p>I&#x27;m speaking from our own experience running a little startup, Feedity - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feedity.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feedity.com</a>, that helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage.

The main problem I had with RSS was the fatigue of keeping up. I usually had dozens of new entries each day and it was always a constant struggle to keep up. I wanted a reader that allowed me to better manage the incoming stream, something like a score or rank system, better auto-expiring systems, maybe a Bayesian system. I&#x27;m not 100%, but none of the readers at the time offered anything but a time series. Has this improved?

RSS is the best to follow up with the latest news or blogs you like, yet it has some weaknesses like -I know this is the content provider&#x27;s fault- not serving the full articles.<p>That&#x27;s why I ended up using RSS client to swiftly filter the content I get then send the interesting titles to a read-it later service -Pocket specifically- that has a better reading experience -TTS anyone?- and solves the truncated RSS articles problem.

2nd RSS post today, and no mention of PubSubHubbub, aka WebSub? Or maybe it&#x27;s just a low-level feature, not important enough? Strange days indeed.

RSS, like Facebook, Twitter, email, and every other way to post to people, has its own uses in it&#x27;s own situations that fit best for people in those situations. I dislike people trying to say we should universally move over to one format, and prefer the formats remain and be improved for people who can best use those formats.

I&#x27;m so in-the-bag for RSS that I&#x27;ve written scrapers to create feeds for sites that don&#x27;t support RSS...

B-but you can’t have javascript within RSS!

Wow, I wrote some code just yesterday that consumes RSS-feeds thinking I was forever alone - guess I was wrong :)

I wrote a script to periodically fetch the front page of my selected news paper web sites. Pick only the top news from there. One news. And then compile a news feed from all the sites. More like your own Google news. But one single news from each site.<p>Don&#x27;t know how much legal it is. But I do follow robots.txt.

I&#x27;ve been using Sage on Firefox for the last decade. Its absolutely barebones but does the job for me. However with Firefox 57 Quantum its likely it wont be supported, so I looked at Feedly, but it was a bit too Hollywood for me. Any suggestions for something simple and clean like Sage?

You don’t have to put the entire post in rss, even Wordpress has that option. You can easily put in a snippet and if it’s interes enough people can click to read it, but yes, Web 2.0 was too open for the real world, capitalism prevails and so the $$$ comes first before anything else

Google killed the RSS feeds for me. On the flip-side, I am thinking to get back to them sometime soon.

I wonder if &quot;Rankings&quot; from sites like Reddit and HN could be considered copyright protected. I think using rankings scraped from the RSS source entry page could result in a better user experience. And give Newspapers back incentive to produce quality Content.

I was using google reader with greader app on android and after google killed it, greader switched to feedly. I imported all the feeds to feedly and continued using it with greader as if nothing happened.<p>On other note, Feedly app is not good. An alternative for ios is reeder app

I love RSS&#x2F;ATOM. The only problem i have is with sites, that don&#x27;t let me see the complete content inside feedly and i have to open the site in an extra new tab. Would love some suggestions for this. (other feedgraber, self hosted,...)

We launched a very simple RSS to mail product last year [1] and it&#x27;s uptake has been steadily growing. There&#x27;s still life in the RSS ecosystem yet!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fliprss.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fliprss.com</a>

I subscribe to &quot;Hacker Noon&quot; RSS feed, it sometimes throws up some interesting posts, but I swear most days 90% of them seem to be about bitcoin or other cryptocurrency.<p>Is there any content curation on hackernoon at all?

Couldn&#x27;t agree more, which is why I was so disappointed when apple removed the built in RSS reader from Safari. I now use RSS Not, but really much preferred the discreet version built into the OSX browser.

For the websites that actually provide whole articles via RSS, what&#x27;s your next step ? How do you keep and organize those articles ?<p>edit: I mean how users, not article authors, keep and organize full articles.

I use a combination of google now + hackernews.<p>google now - I let it do the work and suggest me what to read. hackernews - too much good stuff to miss so i read here as well.

For those looking for an RSS reader for mobile that doesn’t use flashy animations and is highly customizable, I suggest checking out Newsify.

Recently I was looking for an RSS reader for Ubuntu. Eventually I settled on Liferea. Does anyone have a other suggestions?

May I add, RSS feeds are also exactly what makes up an Alexa special Skill type called &quot;Flash Briefing&quot;

This is why I made a service to serve up RSS feeds for Youtube channels, ytrss.co.<p>Love live RSS! :)

And you can push out news on RSS as they arrive, not just &quot;weekly (newsletter) updates&quot; or so.

Google reader. Never forget.

any emacs user using elfeed ?

I think sub.cafe is better than RSS or Twitter, but that&#x27;s just me because I created it.

Is there a service that creates “bootleg” RSS feeds of sites that don’t provide one themselves? If not, why don’t we create one? An RSS feed of pure content, without clickbait, paywalls, like buttons, javascript tracking nonsense...

I really like the idea of RSS I just would replace it with JSON.

Love me some RSS.

What about Atom? Isn&#x27;t it better than RSS?

Well there could be something better if someone rewrote it in JSON; but it works so it&#x27;s best left untouched i guess.

I don&#x27;t understand where this &quot;RSS is dead&quot; mantra came from. RSS does what it is supposed to do and indeed there is nothing better yet.<p>E.g. I don&#x27;t have Facebook, Twitter nor YouTube accounts (since they collect a lot of personal data about you). I use RSS to subscribe to YouTube channels. Both Twitter and Facebook used to have RSS. Now I use third party services to follow couple of pages I&#x27;m interested in: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;feed.exileed.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;feed.exileed.com</a> (supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and some other) or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitrss.me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitrss.me</a> (Twitter only). I don&#x27;t have Reddit account, instead I subscribe to subreddits via RSS. Any blog on LiveJournal, Blogger supports RSS. Any website built with WordPress or Drupal has RSS support out of the box. Many forums have RSS option. Even Wikipedia watch list has RSS. I&#x27;m not even talking about any news site. With some knowledge of JavaScript and Apifier.com you can turn any page into RSS feed.<p>Indeed there is still no any other technology that can do all this better.<p>(I use Inoreader.com to read RSS. It has many features, the only downside is that their free plan is quite limited.)