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'RSS Has Already Won' (brianschrader.com)
Brian Schrader, an independent software developer, writes: It's been a little over 5 years since Google Reader shut down and the world of RSS readers was tossed into the junk drawer of collective memory. But, looking back on it today, I'd actually argue that RSS and Feeds as a whole never really disappeared, only the Feed Readers did. In building Pine, and as a long time Feed Reader user, I've been pleasantly surprised over these last 5 years to see that most sites still have RSS feeds. Sure, Facebook and Twitter don't support them, but YouTube, Reddit, Squarespace, Wordpress and so many more do by default. Feeds of all kinds still exist, nearly forgotten, in the markup of most websites, and this means that Feed Readers can, and will, make a comeback someday. The foundations are already laid; the hard work is done. RSS Feeds became a standard, and were built into the tools we use to make the web today. It's almost as if we laid the tracks and built the trains for a trans-continental railroad, but we've just forgotten how to sell tickets.
I found this post via a RSS Feed reader.
Seconded and thirded. I never understood feeds. Sure I've had those feed thingies in various places over the years wherever some developers thought they wanted to use up some screen real estate and at work they made us subscribe to the internal blog's RSS feed to get readership and contributions up. I just can't bring myself to take a look at them though and the scrolling feed on screen at all times is either just distracting or serves no actual purpose if successfully ignored. The RSS feed I have to pull up manually just never gets read. If I get an email notification about a new blog post I'll see it right away together with all my other incoming emails.
RSS is dead and in my book never really lived anyway. The only reason its there as the article alreay mentioned is because its more work to remove it than to leave it. As always default options is how you get most people to use something.
Isnt twitter and facebook 50% rss reader? Everything you "want" to read is neatly organized
I'm betting on a gopher comeback.
Was it ever a competition? What was was there to "win"? Regardless, I've never stopped relying on them. I have several readers on my Android phone, and use Thunderbird on desktops to collect feeds for review alongside e-mail, which seems perfectly natural to me.
I read all my news off them. Cuts out all the cruft.
rss,
Its not dead.... perhaps not well publicized, but not dead...
-beaker
<marquee> is still supported by all major browsers, but I don't see it making a come back any time soon.
My crotch has an RSS feed. Every time I bust a nut, it's published to the feed.
For me at least, if a website doesn't have an RSS feed, I'm not likely to frequent it. My RSS reader is how I interact with a large amount of the web. I honestly can't fathom how people can use the internet without one. It's so mentally taxing and you miss so much stuff.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Idiot plugging his lame-ass RSS reader, which is named the same as a famous mail client? Looks like another clueless "developer".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(email_client)
On the same tracks, 30 years offset.
I don't know about you but I personally love RSS. Have 14 sites that add new articles daily (this place included), go to one page scroll through what has been added, don't need to refresh or look to see if any of them would have updated. Basically I can pretty easily keep up with reddit, Slashdot, and random other news sites. Plus the places that barely update once a week or so I don't have to check them, but since I'm checking my feed anyway I see their new posts right away.
Google Reader shut down and 10 more readers popped up - and today Feedly is much better than Google Reader was, or ever would be with Google's stewardship. It revitalized things.
I'm not sure anyone thought RSS was dead though, except the people who want it dead like Facebook.
Fjording for the pines?
Every time I bust a nut,
You mean the two drops that ooze from your micropenis? Cool story, creimer.
RSS may still be hanging around, but gopher:// is making a big comeback. Just take look at all the gopher servers that have appeared since 1999.
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/new
The my.yahoo.com feeds disappear and reappear all the time. It's especially annoying because they're controlled by Yahoo.
Kriston
I assumed it (Google Reader, and thus RSS) was killed deliberately by Larry Page.
I found this post and most others via RAsS
FB made everyone to come to their rss system, just made it convenient and appealing to average person, cut all tge urls... and tossed IM and more with it. its a killer.
besides, i do get rss of fb groups, so why do u say not supporting it ?
I get 90% of my news via RSS feeds. I listen to lots of podcasts (also using RSS). Not sure why everyone thinks they are dead. TheOldReader works for me, just fine.
RSS is dead?
Actually, Feedly + Twitter + a well-curated list of bookmarks is all I need to inhabit my Internet bubble.
I do kind of miss Usenet, though.
Fiat Lux.
I liked RSS but I had to shut it down for my site, people were hammering my feeds relentlessy and causing problems. Small personal site in shared hosting got me calls from webhost several times. And the readers didnâ(TM)t stop when I 404â(TM)ed the pages. Itâ(TM)s like signing up for a dos
they take the money and run. Wha? Not? Then by definition, they LOST!
Sorry, I'm pretty attentive and mindful enough to know when to check regularly for updates.
RSS served no useful role for me, so it lost from day one.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Easy and simple, no one can't compete with the simplest a fastest solution, even Facebook had to disable support for it as it couldn't control how it was competing with its own product, and the liberty it provides to free information; Another Beta vs VHS, but this time with Beta(rss) being the royalty free solution.
As it has no limits for control the info, the big ones doesn't support it because they just couldn't release products to compete with its own rss implementations.
That said, for almost the last 20 years no news has reached to me if it was not through a RSS reader as it has been the only way to control what was readed or not, and synchronize that all over all my devices; fb a tw r for newies or social adicts with lostsa time to loosse.
you can't beat what's in other dimension... (*spolier*)
here ends what some neis
YouTube does, technically, support RSS feeds, but you have to know the secret handshake in order to get the feed address. Saying that feeds are "supported by default" is a little over-optimistic. Google does everything short of completely banning feeds in order to get you to stop using them and sign up with their tracking service instead.
For the secret handshake, use either:
"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[your channel ID here, alphanumeric string]"
or
"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=[username here, but the username is not always the display name. Check page source.]"
and copy that address to your RSS reader.
Likewise, Live bookmarks on Firefox.
I didn't realize Thunderbird also supported live bookmarks, but I'm on the browser more than email, so I'll stick to Firefox thanks.
I tried RSS once and decided it wasn't for me. I've seen the little RSS icon on one or two sites in the past 5 years, so I figured it was dead. R.I.P.
Today you're telling me it won? I guess congratulations are in order for being the last feed to die?
RSS is dead. Long live RSS.
Slashdot users like to bag on CMSes, but one of the many benefits is syndication. Drupal, for example, makes it trivial to create RSS feeds of your content, and also has a good syndication module for pulling in entries from other sites' feeds. My cute little hobbyist site has RSS for this reason, and I have subscribers... Probably just because it was so easy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yep, lame. Pine is a celebrated email client that has a special place in many hearts, even in today's world of desktop and web-based email clients. It is, and will never be, an RSS reader.
Podcasts are distributed via RSS, so RSS never died, it's only getting stronger.
I was working on a project with a guy who loved to over-engineer things. At one point, we wanted the ability to share XML documents between sites by advertising them and allowing remote sites to download them on their own schedule. He spent the evening in his hotel room drawing up a complex client-server system with an elaborate API. When we met the next morning, I said, "Why don't we just do it with RSS?" And over the next half hour we verified that RSS did everything we wanted it to, already has developed tools and APIs, and is super simple. We stood up that system in more or less its current state the Monday after we got back from the meeting. RSS FTW.
Get pornhub and the like to use em!
(disclaimer, I haven't checked to see if they have one already, and wouldn't surprise me)
I still get my news via RSS.
Simple, really. If a site doesn't support it, I don't support them.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
What was always wrong with RSS form the beginning was, I have no clue what RSS is. I mean I think it's some sort of feed reader for yourself, you subscribe to "channels" or something, different bloggers publish and you get to read, like long-form twitter feeds? I think?
Here's the thing, I have a degree in computer science, and I worked a long time, and it was from MIT so not a complete idiot, and also an MBA, and I've tried to look up how to participate, but it's just a bunch of word salads that include the word syndication a lot. Syndication doesn't have one meaning in English (high verbal score too) so no clue what they're talking about.
I have no idea if I would benefit from using RSS, and I have no idea how I would do it, but it never seemed I needed it, like I can just go read the blogs I want to read, so it's just a reminder service?
Can anybody clue me in? or just insult me, that'd be good too. Hope I remember to come back and check for answers, could I RSS this and be told if there are answers?
Was it ever a competition? What was was there to "win"?
Ever hear anyone talk about ATOM feeds anymore?
Yaz
That escalated fast. Wishing death to someone because you were called a kid?
Relax and smell the old peop.. I mean roses.
I think lots of people here have some server running somewhere. Install Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) on there, and be able to access it from anywhere. Totally open source. https://tt-rss.org/
What's great is that there are a number of RSS reading apps that you can point to your server, so it doesn't matter whether you're on mobile or on your desktop browser. For Android, I'd suggest just use the app from the same author. For iOS, I use Tiny Reader (App Store link).
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
A) Links in feeds often don't match the URL of the content visited directly. For mixed browsing (following feeds, surfing manually) links can't be detected as already visited properly.
With A) solved it still wouldn't play nicely, because
B) insufficient support in Web browsers. Firefox has livemarks, but they are pretty limited (e.g. don't consolidate multiple feeds). Outside of the browser "already visited" can't work easily.
Was just a blatant move to kill it off to get people to use G+ / FB / Twitter so our every engagement can be tracked and sold to the advertisers (and possibly nation-states).
RSS "lost" like Obi-wan lost in Episode IV. It was never really gone.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Can anybody clue me in? or just insult me, that'd be good too
If you're looking to get roasted, just post a picture of yourself holding a link to your comment to r/iamverysmart and/or r/roastme.
I'm here because of a RSS feed reader.
Have a look at https://theoldreader.com and forget about Google.
Sadly, while cleaner, it lacks some RSS features. So everybody still goes for RSS.
Who the hell gave a fuck abouz Google Reader, and why would it have anything to do with the life of RSS?
I just addd RSS feeds to my Thunderbird, l*ike normal people*, and to the built-in RSS client of my smartphone.
What fucked-up planet are you and OP from? Serious question.
(In the same vein: Chrome dominating is a thing of the USA. Not anyone in Europe AFAIK. Just like IE dominated with you guys back then, but not here. So stop acting like Chrome dominance is "normal" too. It is only normal in "special" countries.)
Google News RSS are broken for more than a month now (links return to gnews landing page instead of linking to article) and it looks like nobody cares.
But does anybody is working for GN ?
Except to make it worst every now and then.
wtf do we even talk about rss and xml anymore. Just burn them all and use JSON ffs. Why are we stuck in the 90's?
Pathetic.
Veronica-2 is back. And Floodgap is still alive any kicking. And just in case you want to be a weirdo, you can serve up your WordPress over Gopher.
Perhaps the nicest stand-alone Gopher client is Little Gopher Client. It's open source and multi-platform, if you're into Pascal/Delphi programming.
I love FF RSS. I wouldn't be reading this article without it. :P
The Vienna RSS reader is still be ing supported and it works very nicely on macOS
You are falsely assuming that the degenerated livestock that frequents Facebook, is everyone.
As from subject: RSS reader IMVHO can be dead. In the past, after GReader I tried many others
from RSSOwl to Liferea and Elfeed. Now with notmuch-emacs as my MUA I can manage so
easily my mails that I can have tons of them including RSS posts with the benefit of search and
tag and a unique interfaces and the possibility to store locally feed contents and sync them to
all my mailboxes issueless.
I'm grateful to Google: probably if GReadeer was kept I do not look at other and better solution!
Google killing RSS reader reminds me of when Steve Jobs proclaimed Flash player was dead and wouldn't be on Mac's by default. I guess one thing this does prove, is that one companies decision doesn't always dictate the future. People want what they want and won't just stop using it just because a Google or Apple says so.
12 years ago, I wrote a website that took RSS feeds checked the posts where on topic, sorted to output into new web pages and RSS feeds, was even open to the public to create new feeds, and search (via google API) for feeds on subject. I a million page view per month, but the views where mostly for the output feeds, so no ad revenue. Run it for seven years, but got tide of paying £110 per month for hosting and getting on £12 per month from google Adwords, so I had to shut down, then the server died.
I use active bookmarks all the time, even for this. RSS is cool
Despite the Great RSS Wars back in the days when excessive blogging was the hip thing to do I still think that RSS is a killer concept and bound for a big revival when things get too badly out of hand with social media. Blogging is basically social media by and for the masses and with RSS and some other formats it could replace everything Facebook and Instagram have to offer in a heartbeat. I somewhat expect that to happen sometime in the future.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
RSS is a standardised XML format for publishing lists of articles.
That's pretty much it.
Its strength is that it is standardised, so if you build a reader for the RSS on one site, you've built a reader for the RSS on almost every other site. An RSS reader has the advantage over a web browser that you don't have to wade through all the crud of advertising etc to find the articles. They'll be listed in whatever order you like in a nice list view. The reader can also maintain state so it can flag articles you haven't read yet and it will give you a list of all the site RSS feeds and how many unread articles are in each one.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Feeds are great but they don't align with the business models of Facebook, Yahoo, Google, et al. A feed is something outside of their control, their algorithms, their aggregation. These days if you want to use feeds you have to get an extension to do it. I use Feedbro in Firefox which is quite nice for this purpose.
I still use an RSS reader. In fact, I don't know a single person that ever stopped using them. Everything I see indicates an increase in their use.
I say this story is without credibility.
I use "Another RSS" on Android. I like it.
Using Nextcloud News here. My feeds are updated and waiting for me, no 3rd party tracking required.
With Nextcloud, all my client devices have the same view of read/unread articles. Between phones, tablets, and 3 computers, re-re-reading articles just got too frustrating.
Too many sheeple in the world giving their habits away to others for free, without any consideration.
As a nerd, one thing that has really annoyed me is the lack of support for scientific notation on the web. Even 30 years after the invention of the web there is no good way to put scientific notation on a web page. Now we do have the MathJax JavaScript librar, but it is not a standard. It requires a special web server installation procedure, or if you are hosting on a service you have to use the external MathJax service creating an external site dependency, and the browser has to enable JavaScript. This is a PITA, not a standard mark-up.
The really odd thing about this is that the WWW was invented at a physics lab by a physicist. If Tim Berners-Lee had only made an a "latex" (or just "tex") tag a required part of HTML, rendering the standard scientific equation markup already in use, things would have been so much easier.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
RSS is widely used to publish the content of one site on another.
The RSS readers are now secondary.
I would argue that the only place RSS has ever not really sank in is on the consumer side. Everywhere else, we use it all the time, for a lot of things. We use it for spidering, we use it for mapping, we use it for passing news between one website and another. It's incredibly handy, and part of the plumbing of the web. Yeah, we're using JSON services a lot these days for a lot of things, but not this. Not really. Might even be a fair argument that RSS and it's handy nature actually leads to it being pervasive, or even over-used. It's not dead. It never went anywhere.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I don't know. Reddit has gone crazy with moderators censoring and banning people for basically nothing. I wish free discussion were better tolerated.
Congruent with "...we've just forgotten how to sell tickets"?
This isn't a sign of winning, it's a sign of neglect, not caring, and abandonware. Sure the RSS feeds may continue to exist and some greyhairs may continue to access them, but so what?
This is like trumpeting that the old Usenet forums "already won" because there is residual use of that system. Yowzah, talk about gilding the lily!
The OP is a retard. So google killed their crappy RSS reader. They killed the READER, they did not kill all and every fucking RSS feed on the internet. There are other readers out there, even fucking MS Outlook can do RSS feeds. I never bothered with their reader anyway, I just used outlook - not my preferred method, but it works. RSS has been out for a LOOOOONG time, I even wrote my own reader once, just for shits and giggles, which is what I use at home. Trying to infer that "google killed RSS" is just fucking stupid, and shows a complete lack of knowledge on the subject.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
I think it's more in use than he thinks, but ... taking him at his premise, I'm not sure that "nobody uses it but it's available vestigially most places" is really "winning" ...
I found this post using theoldreader.com.
First, I used Tiny Tiny RSS for a few years. It worked well. I ran it on my home server. Written in PHP and using MySQL made it easy to host.
One day, it was choking on feeds from a certain site, and stopped updating.
So I switched to the original MiniFlux reader. Again, it is written in PHP, so easy to host. It can use either SQLite, MySQL, or other databases.
The same developer has gone in a different direction, with MiniFlux 2, which uses Go, and PostgreSQL (only!). The developer describes it as 'opinionated!' Using Go is an odd choice here, since this is not an application that has to be super fast. The slowest parts will be retrieving feeds (limited by the speed of the network and servers that host the feeds), or reading the database. Moreover, being a single executable, it does not integrate with your existing Apache or Nginx (if you already have them and want to use existing SSL certificates, ...etc.) and therefore has to run on a different port. PostgreSQL only is higher maintenance than MySQL, and if I don't not run PostgreSQL already, then I will not install, configure and maintain PostgreSQL just for the this one application.
So for now, the original MiniFlux does the job adequately, running behind SSL and password protected, so not much chance for a vulnerability getting exploited. Tiny Tiny RSS had a better user interface, but you get used to MiniFlux quickly. It even uses short cut keys that are like vim (j, k,...).
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Gopher. Pah. Been keeping my 110-baud acoustic coupler on the shelf waiting for telephones and BBSs to make their inevitable march back to the front lines. My ASR-33 is ready to print, and my Baudot teletype is standing in ready backup with an ASCII-to-Baudot converted attached.
Real soon now!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
From that day long ago when you first heard someone describe their website as an >>>EXPERIENCE<<< ... you know your simple literary text-based past is past. Now it's all about EYEBALLS on the PAGE, and the full extent of what tracking is possible with cookies and cookiecruft in gooblegook URLs that may be embedded levels deep. The HTTP Last-Modified: header is dead, even the ignoble ETAG is fakery-trackery in many cases. Your page has content hidden within it, often built on the fly by JS because the 'experience' requires total compliance and continual browser obsolescence. RSS is just giving it away.
Ironically this comes on the heels of bandwidth and compression techniques that really could have blown us away with triple-to-ten-throughput back in the slow modem and PPP turnaround delay days. I mean, we could have been swimming in text like the Matrix! Instead of the Matrix's goofy nonsense KanjiGreekWhatsits dribbling down from the top of the screen,
IMAGINE a whole generation of children who might have had grown up NOT with the thumb twaddling tile-scrolley Instagram twiddle-screen tiny web page mush and over-resolution JPGs... but with an actual Matrix style of text presentation. They might have learned to read multiple streams in parallel (up/down or lleft/right) with crisp bright text illuminated in the same ANSI color palette that Jesus used.
And when these ANSI text character sprites began to float in a 3D field, now you're talking. Things could recede in Z with axis-flopping ... and the same kids who can solve a Rubik's cube in seconds could keep a mental position within a virtual space, one that would NOT disappear when some WEBFUCK decides it's time for everyone to upgrade ... it would be a style/presentation uniquely their own, that would evolve as an extension of their mind. Instead of this HYPER-LITERATE possible Universe we now have,
Look Ma! It's a rectangle with a talking head! Let's watch it and listen to what it has to say... even though I can read three times as quickly.
AND OF COURSE I'm only generalizing on method when I talk ANSI (though I'm serious about the reduced color palette). By all means make this Matrix-style text sprite environment support Unicode and the world's scripts and symbols. And expandable tiles that represent visual zoomable image and video -- but my rub is those tiles MUST reduce to the size of characters so they join the text stream, not disrupt it. And if you clamor for EMOJIs that's backwards and stupid. Emojis are tools of Big Brother, who's just waiting in the wings for people to express themselves in pictorial symbols so Big Brother can change the symbols overnight.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
All those people repeating the template response about how JSON somehow replaced RSS are full of crap.
the whole skipping the ads thing is exactly the problem with RSS in the eyes of some.
I used to use standalone RSS readers, but keeping work and home separate became a bit tricky. Then browsers incorporated it, and I started using the RSS support in portable Opera. There were always web-based RSS readers, but they were rarely very mature, until Google Reader raised the pair. When Google Reader died, there was a collective scream, but Feedly, Ino Reader, and others stepped up to the plate, and I don't see any indication that they will be stopping any time soon.
Blogtrottr send RSS feeds to your email.
Used FeedBin ever since Google shut down their free service, and Reeder on my Phone.
These days I no longer need a Twitter client to follow people, even Twitter searches. Just add them as a feed. The great thing about it is it's cached and separated into separate feeds for me. So much easier than any Twitter client.
I found this thread with an RSS reader too--KDE's Akregator.
No, really, its the only desktop client actually worth using.