[HN Gopher] Turn to RSS Feeds to Regain Control of the World Wid... ___________________________________________________________________ Turn to RSS Feeds to Regain Control of the World Wide Web Author : URfejk Score : 158 points Date : 2021-02-06 17:03 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (techrights.org) (TXT) w3m dump (techrights.org) | phailhaus wrote: | RSS allows us to decentralize aggregation of content, but still | has some of the same critical pitfalls of social networks. Most | notably, the "bubble" effect is as strong as ever: my feed is | entirely unique and non-reproducible. I have complete control | over it, but I cannot see a feed as another user without | perfectly replicating their setup. | | I think there is a missing component that would allow us to | create a decentralized social network of RSS feeds. If we cannot | share our reality with others, we're going to reproduce the same | toxic patterns that social networks exhibit today, but it's going | to be completely unmanageable. | pharke wrote: | What's the difference between a bubble and personal interests? | A technology that allows no way of filtering out the things you | find uninteresting is about as useless as one that doesn't | provide any means of discovering new interests. Regardless, | this isn't the issue we should be focusing on, communities turn | toxic when they feed into the delusions, bad habits, vices, and | narcissism of their members. That's less of a technological | problem and more of a moral one. You can't produce moral | behaviour by creating a new (or changing an existing one into | a) platform that strictly enforces it, people will either | subvert your rules by inventing ways to get around them or they | will simply not use your platform and go elsewhere. The same | problems exist in the offline world, and it's always more | effective to address the root causes of the problem than it is | to legislate and punish. | phailhaus wrote: | > That's less of a technological problem and more of a moral | one. | | I ascribe to a "medium is the message" type of mentality, | where the design of your platform is going to inform the | nature of the behavior on it. For example, Facebook's | commenting system is, unfortunately, hot garbage. They don't | track comment threads, and instead they have this weird | "mention" system wherein the best you can do is @ someone and | hope they remember the thread. You can't read a conversation | in order, it's all jumbled up for some reason. | | What kind of conversations arise from such a mess? It ends up | being a convoluted stew of people just vaguely yelling in | each other's directions. You can't maintain a thread of | conversation, and neither can anyone else. | | Furthermore, Facebook views all interacts as equal. However, | users will often use "haha" and "angry" reacts in order to | mock the more extreme and toxic comments. Facebook doesn't | notice this, and goes "aha! This is a Good Comment. I will | promote it." So what happens? The top comments on popular | posts are often the most toxic, and they get the most | visibility. | | It's design like this that makes the internet a worse place. | I think RSS is on the right track, but I think the fact that | we can't see each other's feeds is a problem. Many will end | up spiraling into a feedback loop of toxic content, with no | way to see opposing viewpoints and a "way out". On Reddit, I | can actively peek at r/Conservative and see what a completely | different group of people are talking about. I can't quite do | that with RSS. | type0 wrote: | > On Reddit, I can actively peek at r/Conservative and see | what a completely different group of people are talking | about. I can't quite do that with RSS. | | you can, go to old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/.rss | anthropodie wrote: | But I think in real life as well people live in their own | bubbles. We see the world as we are but not for what it is. | It's just that Internet takes it to whole different level. | | I like to see Internet as catalyst. It accelerated speed of | people becoming more conscious or more stupid. The choice is | still in the hands of individual like it was before Internet. | phailhaus wrote: | There are definitely bubbles in real life, but they are far | less insular and toxic. I can't "unsubscribe" from a person | that I work with. Everyone around me shares in a lot of the | content that I see. Content streams like TV channels give me | the ability to switch channels and see what others are | seeing. | | Like you said, the internet takes this to a whole different | level, and then takes control away from me. How do I tell | Youtube that I'm just interested in researching Qanon, and | not that I want to be recommended it? How do I tell facebook | to stop recommending me content related to some topic? I | can't change the channel anymore, and I'm at their mercy. | That's a huge problem. | | RSS is fantastic in that it gives you complete control over | your content streams, but there's still something missing to | let you "change the channel." | giantrobot wrote: | Oh man someone should totally invent OPML [0] or XBEL [1] and | then everyone could easily publish their subscribed feeds. Then | they could import those and have the same subscriptions! /s | | [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML | | [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBEL | zozbot234 wrote: | RSS is nice as far as it goes, but we should think about enabling | more than that. ActivityStreams is essentially RSS on steroids | (for use cases beyond simple syndicated content) and is generally | more appropriate for the "social" use cases that are quite | popular nowadays. For example, it's essentially the underlying | data format behind the Fediverse. | sp332 wrote: | And having a hub, like WebSub, is nice for helping mobile users | keep up with feeds without polling a ton of websites constantly | and running down the battery. | alangibson wrote: | RSS's decline was/is due to 2 main factors. | | The first is a contagion effect. People just started to assume | RSS was 'over' because big names like Twitter and Craigslist | dropped support after they realized supporting it isn't in their | interest. | | The second much more powerful factor is that the vast majority of | users just want to see new stuff when they scroll. They probably | never bothered to use RSS (you'd find these people on cat meme | sites most of the time), and if they did they were happy to give | it up the first time they saw the Facebook news feed. The fact | that far greater numbers of people were watching the Fb news feed | meant that RSS was more or less instantly irrelevant just based | on sheer numbers of eyeballs available. | lifeisstillgood wrote: | But Facebook or Amazon or FAANG are not _just_ feeds. Facebook | has also all the other components - discovery for example, also | basic storage provision (let 's not forget that!). | | If RSS did the job we wanted it would be used everywhere. It is a | great solution to one tiny part of the jigsaw - and as half the | comments on here are already "I have a great idea to extend RSS | so that..." we all know this. | | Decentralising is a good thing - but boy there is still a lot to | solve. | symlinkk wrote: | Ok so what are some good feeds to follow? | deathlight wrote: | This was on hn recently: https://hnrss.github.io/ | | Any youtube channel you like | | Any subreddit you like: https://old.reddit.com/wiki/rss | | Nitter allows RSS feeds of twitter accounts, useful for low | post volume accounts like those of your local government | functions. | | Many (possibly most?) news websites have some RSS | functionality. | | And lets not forget the wide world of podcasting. | | Some interesting blogs I follow are | https://unintendedconsequenc.es/feed/ and | https://astralcodexten.substack.com/feed/ | possiblytom wrote: | I used QuiteRSS for a long time but ended up switching to self- | hosted FreshRSS. I like the convenience of syncing my reading | between devices too much. | deathlight wrote: | I switched to QuiteRSS from whatever I was using before awhile | back. It works great and it has some niche features like auto | tabbing back to the reader after opening a link. | estranhosidade wrote: | The problem I think is that nowadays more and more it's harder to | find RSS support services and you send up having to resort to | some third party application or service that will get some | content and convert them into a RSS format. Like, for instance, | instagram obviously doesn't offer support to RSS, the same goes | for facebook and so forth. | URfejk wrote: | Another problem is that there are sites out there that have | RSS, but they are hiding it from the users: | https://stop.zona-m.net/2021/02/the-snob-rss-hall-of-constru... | netfl0 wrote: | How many technologists on this site are responsible for the death | of RSS. | | Shame on you people. | thaumasiotes wrote: | What death? RSS is as alive as ever. | Acrobatic_Road wrote: | Twitter removed RSS in 2013. Facebook removed it too. Youtube | didn't remove it, but you have to go into the page source to | find the feed link. | jjulius wrote: | Three sites out of thousands upon thousands that still use | it hardly seems like it would be worth calling it "dead". | CodeGlitch wrote: | They are large (popular) sites though. They have actively | decided to not support RSS as they believe it is counter | to their advantage. It's not like they don't have the | resources to support RSS. | | What this means is that we have a moral obligation to | support and push RSS in our work/spare time. This is | something I now recognise I need to do at least. | pwdisswordfish0 wrote: | "Three sites out of thousands" is disingenuous. Twitter | alone is enough to make the difference. | | For "RSS is as alive as ever" to be true, it would follow | that you'd expect to find as many people publishing their | content via RSS as the case before. They're not. There | are many, many, many derelict blogs, all effectively | abandoned because their authors migrated to Twitter, | intentionally/consciously or not. | maximente wrote: | fairly strong claims from someone who had no trouble | calling someone else's disingenuous. care to share the | data so that we can see what you have seen, ostensibly | related to blog atrophy over time? should be fairly easy | to spot when twitter cropped up if, as you've claimed, | "they're not [publishing their content via RSS as the | case before.]" | | or, it could be - just floating this - that lots of blogs | are posting on RSS, /and/ twitter has gotten a lot more | traffic from previous RSS users. | k4c9x wrote: | Any decent RSS reader will find that link for you if you | point it at the url that gets you the html. Twitter and | Facebook no longer support it because they're predatory, I | take it as just one more indication the entire platform | should be avoided. | nickthegreek wrote: | I use Inoreader for my rss reader. it supports Twitter, | faceboook (public pages) and YouTube even though they don't | have RSS feeds. So even though some sites kill there rss, | the technologists provide. | hutattedonmyarm wrote: | Small nitpick: YouTube does have RSS feeds for every | channel (and playlist), they just don't have an icon in | their UI linking to it | mkup wrote: | RSS-Bridge can convert twitter feeds to RSS feeds (this is | a self-hosted solution). I host it on my server along with | TT-RSS. | sp332 wrote: | Twitter is extremely app-hostile. I wouldn't blame | "technologists" for that, because most of them/us would | prefer a more accessible Twitter feed. | FriedrichN wrote: | A tip for those who love RSS but bemoan the slow death it's | suffering. Sometimes it helps to simply send an e-mail to the | owner of the website and thell them their RSS feed is broken or | missing. I've done that and succeeded three times so far. | | Sometimes they break the feed because they changed something but | didn't bother to check if it affected their feed. This of course | won't be of any effect to the big SV type companies, but it might | with your local newspaper, municipality website, favourite blog, | etc. Doesn't hurt to try. | sneak wrote: | I get a few emails a year, every year, asking why I don't have | an RSS feed on my blog. | | I totally have RSS on my blog, and have for every blog I've had | for 20 years. It even has the appropriate HTML headers pointing | to /feed.xml, so you can just pop the bare website URL into a | feed reader and it will find it. | naravara wrote: | The main impediment I have had are magazines I subscribe to who | are behind paywalls. Ars Technica and Talking Points Memo have | a subscriber feed, but it's basically just an honor system | thing for you to not go sharing it but they're the only ones. | I'd honestly be okay if they just gave you a stub and had you | click through, but they seem resistant to doing even that. | eisa01 wrote: | Agree, some times they even have a feed that is just not | exposed! | toyg wrote: | A massive amount of websites built on wordpress have feeds | that the owners themselves don't know about. | mikeiz404 wrote: | I haven't used RSS in a long long while but one problem I had | with it was filtering. This was especially true where a site had | frequent updates, say a news site, but there was no way to filter | on the feed by topic unless the site provided custom feeds for | each topic/category/tag. Has this gotten better? | | From skimming around it looks like this still might be a | limitation. | sp332 wrote: | NewsBlur has a filtering feature, but I don't see a way to | tweak it beyond mashing thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons and | hoping it gets the idea. Might be worth a shot, though, it's | definitely better than nothing. | type0 wrote: | Recently I noticed more and more podcasts don't provide RSS/Atom | feeds directly, they link to iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud etc but | no feed, in some cases they link to one of the podcast hosting | services that do have feeds for every podcast but not visible by | any link or not being in the meta tags. Finding the URL for the | feed becomes some sort hunting, in a few cases even though I | liked a podcast I still can't subscribe because I don't maintain | an account on those services. | steveharman wrote: | Can anyone recommend an RSS app for Mac & Android that allows me | to sync my feeds and their read/unread statuses between the two | platforms? | metasyn wrote: | Feedly! | CharlesW wrote: | Sure, you can use Feedly* as a sync service and then use Mac | and Android apps that use Feedly as their back-end. | | https://feedly.com/apps.html | | * I assume there are other ways to skin this cat, but this is | what I do. | smsm42 wrote: | Feedly for the third time :) Been using it for years. Works | fine on desktop/mobile, synchronizes great, has a bunch of | useful features (bookmarks, tags, IFTTT integration, etc) | adrian1973 wrote: | Newsblur | drummer wrote: | I really love the recent resurgence of RSS feeds. It's so simple, | yet very powerfull way to return to a more decentralized web. | word8 wrote: | What decentralized web? Everything is behind some stupid WAF | that blocks your IP for "being a robot" now unless you want to | execute code for an unbounded amount of time before being able | to get access to the paragraph of text you were tricked into | reading from an SEO'd search reuslt. Even reading an RSS feed | will probably get you blocked for a scraping attempt if the | website is behind Cloudflare or some imitator. | tschellenbach wrote: | Open source RSS reader aiming to work well for regular users: | https://github.com/GetStream/winds | | Could definitely use some more contributors | ashishb wrote: | I built a custom RSS Reader just to streamline my reading list. | If I am bored and want to read something I don't go to social | media I read what I marked for reading later. | https://reading.ashishb.net | smsm42 wrote: | Been using Feedly for years now, since Google Reader died, one of | the most useful tools around. And more sites support it than you | think. RSS (and Atom, etc.) are not dead, they are just not | fashionable. | pedro1976 wrote: | I would love if people would see that their networks they | maintain are of incredible value. As a consequence I would like | to profit of e.g. information network a person x has. My idea is | that every person exposes an aggregated RSS feed of feeds they | consume. Every interesting person that tells me their secret RSS | link would empower me. | | I started a couple of projects in that area, one is a piece of | glue code [0] to automatically get a feed of a site, even if | there isn't one. It maps html to a feed structure, which works | decent, fixing broken feeds after the html changes is now the | main concern. | | [0] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy | eikenberry wrote: | This idea vaguely reminds me of Napster back in the day. One of | the great things about it was not getting the music you were | looking for but finding that user with similar tastes and | checking out what else they were sharing. I remember finding | several new artists I fell in love with that way. | phailhaus wrote: | > every person exposes an aggregated RSS feed of feeds they | consume | | I like this idea, and I think it is something that RSS is | missing. The "bubbles" that we decry on social networks is | largely caused by our inability to share feeds. Every feed is | tailor made to the person seeing it, so everyone is in their | own bubble by default. This is unlike Reddit, in which members | of a given subreddit can see the same feed. | | RSS empowers users with complete control over their own feed, | but there is still no mechanism by which we can share our | reality. We are still bubbled away by default, and thus will | result in the same toxic bubbles as social networks. | mycall wrote: | Isn't the act of friending someone in effect sharing feeds? | Acrobatic_Road wrote: | Does it support private websites where you have to login to see | anything? Like nextdoor.com. | pk78 wrote: | Been using it for over a decade now. My only source of info. | | It was google reader -> digg -> ino reader -> self hosted TTRSS | (using now). | | Anyone got suggestions for good non-mainstream rss? in area of | Tech/dev/design/ui/business/finance etc., | KirillPanov wrote: | Yeah, tell that to Craigslist, who nuked their RSS feeds | recently: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840310 | smsm42 wrote: | Non-rhetoric question - why would one need a feed on | craigslist? I've ever used craigslist only in two ways: 1) | trying to sell something (about 20% success rate) 2) trying to | buy something for cheap. In both cases, RSS feed serves to | useful function - as a seller, I only need to publish one post, | as a buyer, I need to find who sells cheap used bikes, | call/email them and be done with it, I'm not going to monitor | cheap used bike market for years to come. | | Is there some important craigslist use case I am missing here? | terinjokes wrote: | If you're looking to buy something locally, you could | subscribe to an RSS feed of the search results. If an item | became available, it would appear in your feed. | leephillips wrote: | RSS is great. I think it might have suffered a bit due to its | associations with the childish behavior of a group of supposed | adults (one in particular) squabbling over credit and control | over something as trivial as the RSS spec. Many so-called RSS | feeds actually use the superior Atom specification, which was | described early on by at least one of its authors as "RSS without | the psychopaths". | refulgentis wrote: | alas, can't turn up that quote or anything close to that via | Google :( | | I don't think you're being downvoted for your thoughts, but | rather, it's unclear what you're saying and how to read more | about it - we appreciate the honesty :) | | EDIT: Appears the references are to Dave Winer - this is an | excellent history, I wish I found a shorter one, but this is | really great: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mm4z/the-rise- | and-demise-o... | leephillips wrote: | "can't turn up that quote or anything close to that via | Google" | | It's not there. But I have no doubt about its accuracy. It | didn't survive long enough to be indexed. | spockz wrote: | The thing that holds me back from using RSS again is three | things. First of all my workstations are geared towards content | creation and I shut down all notifications. My tablet and phone | are what I use to consume and discover content and these form | factors or maybe the app implementations don't really lend to RSS | for me. Secondly, there is so much more content out there | compared to 10-15 years ago. I used to follow some sites that | would have posts every so often. But sites like hacker news and | Twitter have so much content it is hard to keep up. Thirdly, I | just have too many other responsibilities to keep track of it all | anymore. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-06 23:01 UTC)