[HN Gopher] RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
___________________________________________________________________
RSS is back as an underpinning to SlackOps
Author : conoro
Score : 135 points
Date : 2022-07-18 15:40 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (conoroneill.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (conoroneill.net)
| dewey wrote:
| > You can sign up for emails that go into the black hole of your
| inbox
|
| You could also just get the unique email address of a channel and
| let the email notifications go there, same result:
| https://slack.com/help/articles/206819278-Send-emails-to-Sla...
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| RSS never seems to work on Windows. Funny when it is so simple. I
| did not realize this before. A simple client that fetches a feed,
| parses it, and searches the content for a keyword took me ~25
| minutes to implement.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Don't call it a comeback!
|
| There's still this lurking mess of RSS 0.91 vs 1.0 vs 2.0 vs
| Atom. As one of the folks involved in creating Atom I'm
| frustrated with the outcome.
|
| These days it'd probably be JSON, right?
| detaro wrote:
| There is JSONFeed, but that was pretty much a flash in the pan.
| kevincox wrote:
| If it was created instead of Atom it would have been nice,
| but it doesn't have any major advantages so no reason to add
| yet another format to the mix.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It was created taking some lessons of Atom into account.
|
| It does have a few minor advantages: multiple attachment
| support, more "branding" images support (author avatars,
| post "banners"), easier to build JSON than XML in most API
| backends these days. The one major advantage is that
| JSONFeed is easier to work with it in tandem with WebSub
| and other pubsub systems that assume messages are natively
| JSON, you can use the same JSONFeed item generating code
| for both pull (HTTP GET) and push (WebSub) scenarios.
|
| Certainly even the main advantage isn't a huge reason to
| switch to JSONFeed if you've already got RSS/Atom feeds,
| but I believe the hope for JSONFeed was always that it
| would spark some sites/backends that don't want to support
| XML, don't have good XML libraries, or don't want to use
| their template languages to drive RSS/Atom feeds to be able
| to build something simpler instead resulting in more feeds
| overall than if things were just left to the XML-ish status
| quo. I don't know how successful it has been on that front,
| though, but I appreciate it exists for trying.
| latexr wrote:
| > that was pretty much a flash in the pan.
|
| I'll repurpose an older comment[1]. It was in response to "I
| doubt very much [JSON feeds] will catch on".
|
| > There's little incentive for websites to change to JSON
| feeds when their RSS feeds are already implemented, working
| well, and generated automatically. But several good RSS
| readers added support for JSON feeds when the format was
| introduced and that's all you need for it to be viable; it
| isn't important if it "catches on" after that when the
| flexibility is there.
|
| > JSON feeds were great for me because I generate my own
| feeds for personal consumption and can now do so with simpler
| code. I understand I'm in a minority--most people consume
| feeds and never create their own--but the larger point is
| JSON feeds may have already done their job: they exist and
| are supported if you need them.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30777477
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _There 's still this lurking mess of RSS 0.91 vs 1.0 vs 2.0
| vs Atom._
|
| Are there any technical reasons to use RSS instead of Atom in
| new deployments?
|
| (I can perhaps see leaving legacy RSS links created pre-Atom in
| place.)
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Are there any technical reasons to use RSS instead of Atom
| in new deployments?
|
| There's no technical reason. Unfortunately many CMSes still
| emit barely usable RSS v2. There's also the branding issue of
| RSS the format essentially being the name of the technology.
| Someone saying "I want an RSS feed" ends up with the
| implementer making an RSS v2 feed rather than a better Atom
| feed and just labeling it RSS.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _There 's still this lurking mess of RSS 0.91 vs 1.0 vs 2.0
| vs Atom._
|
| Maybe in theory, but as a heavy RSS user this has never been an
| issue in practice. For example, WordPress sites support both by
| default -- RSS at /feed/, Atom at /feed/atom/, but apps like
| Feedly hide this implementation plumbing during normal use.
| FernandoMax wrote:
| I loved blogs, I loved the vibe (like newsletters today) and I
| loved RSS (way better than email for receiving information. IN
| fact I am creating a project, and It will have updates by RSS.
| Why? Because I f**ing love it.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| Never underestimate the resilience of "low" tech. Rule of least
| power still holds true.
|
| Prior HN discussions: Turn GitHub into an RSS Reader
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010144)
| powersnail wrote:
| RSS has been alive this whole time. Blogs usually have it by
| default, the big news organizations have it.
|
| The only thing I'm not satisfied with reading news on RSS, is
| that news organizations push too many articles, to the point that
| reading the headlines alone takes quite some time. There's nearly
| 100 articles per day per source sometimes. Unlike a newspaper,
| which has a natural structure of priority and hierarchy, in an
| RSS reader, every head line has the same salience, and it's a
| pain to weed out what's important.
|
| I kinda hope news organizations would make a separate "weekly
| digest feed", 30 or so articles per week.
| jamesq wrote:
| With FlipRSS.com we let subscribers choose only the content
| they want to receive. Using RSS feeds, matched to interest
| groups, content creators can keep in regular contact but
| deliver more personalised subscriber experiences. We love RSS!
| ecliptik wrote:
| Newsblur has a training feature [1], with a thumbs up/down on
| article tags, author, and keywords in a title that can bubble
| up more interesting articles or completely hide them.
|
| Unfortunately training is per feed, there's a newer Premium Pro
| tier with global training coming out with it, but it is much
| more expensive [2].
|
| 1. https://www.newsblur.com/faq (under Intelligence section)
|
| 2. https://forum.newsblur.com/t/global-keyword-training/5419/6
| mh- wrote:
| Wow, $299/year. you weren't kidding.
|
| I assume this is targeted at professionals that are trying to
| stay abreast of developments around certain topics/subjects.
| If you think about it through that lens it's reasonably
| priced, I suppose.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| lol all these RSS readers really go in on solving problems
| as broadly as possible - not just ocean boiling, it leaves
| each user with a subpar experience even if it's novel
| (having to laboriously refine results yourself). it would
| be easy for them to for instance scrape many popular news
| sources or APIs for ranking/top story info to at least
| cover these extremely common and extremely noisy feeds
| uoaei wrote:
| Yes. Feedly seems to be marketing itself at investors and
| speculators lately (or trading bots I suppose), because
| they're using NLP to highlight and categorize articles
| based on whether they mention acquisitions, mergers,
| leadership changes, etc.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I think feedly has features to help filter less popular
| articles
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| I added rss filter/grep support to my homebrew rss->email
| script. So for example, I follow
| https://news.ycombinator.com/rss but only for articles with
| titles matching certain patterns:
| mike@klaus:~$ rss --list|grep ycomb 155.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/rss mike@klaus:~$ rss
| --list-grep 155 74. title =
| (?i)\b((e-?|web)?mail|hardenize|irc|internet relay chat|grpc|ha
| shicorp|rust|debian|c\+\+|perl|(bit|name)coin|tor|pgp|gpg|gnupg
| |openpgp|digitalocean|ovh|linode|grepular|email\s*privacy\s*tes
| ter|parsemail|ssl|https|backdoor|apache|exim|distribut|peer
| (to|2) peer|vpn|secur|anonym|webrtc|torrent|webtorrent|nextclou
| d|owncloud|graphql)(ity|ous|e?s|ing?|ed?)?\b
|
| I also randomly hit the front page of course, otherwise I
| wouldn't have seen this. Maybe I should add "rss" to my regex
| acdw wrote:
| I had this problem too, until I installed and configured
| sfeed[1] on my server --- now it's all on one page, and much
| less "push-y" :P
|
| [1]: https://codemadness.org/sfeed-simple-feed-parser.html
|
| (You can see my setup at https://acdw.casa/planet)
| reaperducer wrote:
| Not a complete solution to your problem, but the New York Times
| at least offers different RSS feeds for different sections.
|
| So you can have a different feed for Science and Technology,
| and one for Australia, and one for New York. By not using the
| front page firehose, you can keep the number of inbound
| articles to a more manageable level.
| remram wrote:
| The BBC as well: https://www.bbc.com/news/10628494 ("top
| stories", "world", "politics", "health", "technology", ...)
|
| Though like many sites, I have no idea how you would reach
| the "feeds" page from the front page (I gave up and searched
| Google for it)
| reaperducer wrote:
| If you have Reeder, you just paste the regular web page URL
| into it and it tries to figure out the RSS address on its
| own. It's possible that other RSS readers do the same,
| since the RSS information is usually in the page's
| metadata.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| If you just want highlights, https://brutalist.report is my go
| to
| asdff wrote:
| newsboat supports regex filters and macros/outside scripts
| which can be powerful
| tbyehl wrote:
| > You can sign up for emails that go into the black hole of your
| inbox
|
| I feel like Slack has already become a black hole equal to my
| Inbox in all respects and am hopeful that the Interoffice Mail
| envelope will stage a comeback for the things I really need to
| see.
| mbesto wrote:
| Is there any way outside of just polling every 1~5 minutes to get
| realtime updates to RSS? Curious what is standard here? If you do
| do polling, what interval?
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Yes, you need to poll. Ideally with If-Modified-Since and If-
| None-Match headers so you can save some resources if the feed
| hasn't changed.
| anotherevan wrote:
| WebSub (nee PubSubHubbub) can work well if the RSS feed
| supports it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
| rakoo wrote:
| Apart from websub, which does require some resources, servers
| could provide long-polling such that the socket remains open,
| and give a reply as soon as there is one. Clients don't poll,
| servers aren't flooded (but do need to keep an open connection
| )
| Pakdef wrote:
| I poll every hour... for my need, that is plenty
| qw wrote:
| I don't know if they are still in use, but there are pub/sub
| services that can be used for notifications.
|
| This was created to avoid unnecessary polling of RSS/Atom
| feeds:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
| zaik wrote:
| XMPP PubSub nodes: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| If you need realtime update, then RSS is probably not the right
| tool. For polling, I currently do the following:
|
| * with `HTTP 304: not modified` result, I'll come back in 60
| minutes * if there is any update, I'll come back in 4 hours *
| if there is no cache control header, such as etag or last-
| modified, I will poll every 12 hours.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I usually do 60 minutes. I'm not desperate enough to check
| every 5 or 10 minutes. I've come across a few websites that
| block you if you refresh too frequently. I'm not sure whether
| those ones still do that though.
| rambambram wrote:
| > RSS and advertising never really made good bedfellows.
|
| Isn't Feedburner part of Google nowadays? I remember reading
| somewhere that they inject ads in the feeds.
| mpclark wrote:
| Feedburner is a zombie product now, and has been for a few
| years.
| rambambram wrote:
| I'm subscribed to some feeds from them. I didn't notice any
| ads, yet. Do you mean by 'zombie product' that they don't do
| ads anymore?
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think it's that it feels like a dead product, even though
| it's still running.
|
| Not a lot of new features being developed, and some
| features getting turned off "to support the product's next
| chapter"[1].
|
| There hasn't been a firm announcement about Feedburner
| being sunsetted, but given Google's history of killing
| things off (including Reader, apropos of this thread's
| topic), it does feel like the walking dead.
|
| https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/changes-
| to...
| Kye wrote:
| They did at least clean out services that had been dead for
| 15 years.
| pbardea wrote:
| Funny seeing this pop-up on my #hacker-news slack channel that
| periodically polls for the top stories :)
|
| I actually prefer the ability to push things like the top stories
| of the day to me through either Slack on email rather than having
| the temptation to constantly refresh an RSS feed app. An added
| bonus is that I frequently add some custom logic to curate the
| feed to my liking (based on the feed).
| hosh wrote:
| I know XMPP is not as popular these days, but there is an XMPP
| extension for pushing Atom stanzas as a sort of the push
| complement to RSS.
|
| ... and using Slack to consolidate RSS turns RSS from pull to
| push. (Slack probably has caching mechanisms across all
| workspaces to reduce pull bandwith).
| zaik wrote:
| For those who want to try it, movim.eu is a federated social
| network build on this XMPP extension.
| hosh wrote:
| Do you know if there is a name for that XMPP/Atom pubsub
| service, and if web publishers can put up some kind of icon
| so people know they can subscribe to that kind of a feed?
| warpeggio wrote:
| If you're already using Slack to consume information
| asynchronously, this might be an OK fit.
|
| I would advise against co-mingling an RSS feed with your team's
| main communication or coordination channels.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think what really and significantly curbed RSS usage what
| Google reducing effective tooling (allowing you to see/subscribe
| to RSS in the browser) combined with killing Google Reader. Of
| course by that time, half my feeds were just links to the full
| URL (ads and all). Then, they take the next step and introduce
| AMP, which is really cool in a way, but effectively makes Google
| the gateway to it all, and Google Ads especially.
|
| Google makes ad revenue, cuts out most of the sites themselves
| and increases google value, while reducing the value of the
| actual site producing the content.
| aendruk wrote:
| A timely observation. I've just been setting up the /feed command
| for ops notifications in a local tech group's Matrix space.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I've been using a little matrix app of my own making that sends
| notificatins to a specific matrix room when big jobs complete.
| Its nothing fancy (and conceptually not different than slack
| notifications), and sysadmins have been leveraging email for
| the same exact purpose...but i like me some matrix...plus, said
| same matrix room can be made to receive other/outside
| notifications too; win-win!
| baskethead wrote:
| I've been using Blogtrottr to email me my RSS feeds for whatever
| I'm following. It's run without any hiccups in I think over 10
| years. I have tons of feeds just emailing me every day and I skim
| through them and read whatever I find interesting. It's really
| awesome, much better for me than anything else.
| lunaticman wrote:
| I haven't heard about blogtrottr before, but landed on a
| similar idea and built RSS-to-email service for myself and
| opened it for others (https://briefcake.com). Mainly, I did it
| to battle my pointless social network and doom scrolling
| addictions -- and it worked amazingly. I spend less of my time
| on internet, more of my time with kid.
|
| I'm slowly extending support for other social networks, to my
| surprise, they are not that "social" and it's quite a pain to
| scrape anything from them.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Yeah I also use a simple rss2email utility that I hacked
| together. Having feeds in my mailbox means I can search/filter
| and tag them appropriately.
|
| A lot of these online feed-readers have terrible UIs for
| managing large numbers of feeds, but I guess they allow the
| same benefit of keeping track of state (read vs. unread) that
| email also offers.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| Fuck Slack.. and interrupt driven workflows.
| amerine wrote:
| All I see is people claiming RSS is dead, but I never stopped.
| Moving between various readers and landed on Feedly for iOS a few
| years ago. Love it.
| jhot wrote:
| Same. After Google Reader I went with Feedly for a while, then
| self-hosted TTRSS, and currently self-hosted Miniflux.
| Miniflutt is my preferred Android client and ReadKit on Mac.
| The Miniflux web app is nice and simple but I prefer clients
| that mark as read on scroll.
|
| I occasionally venture onto Reddit or HN to see if I've missed
| anything big but rarely do.
| soco wrote:
| I use HN's RSS feed (plus a few others) with a Firefox
| extension (Feedbro) and that's all I need.
| yokoprime wrote:
| NetNewsWire has been my goto last couple of years. It's
| fantastic, and you cannot beat the price (free and open source)
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I dropped Feedly because I found that 90%+ of my feeds would
| only put the article title and the first sentence into the
| feed, then require I click the URL to pull up the full article.
|
| It wasn't very fun constantly having to switch between my RSS
| app and my browser, so I just stopped using it.
| distrill wrote:
| Yeah this really sucks. I think some do this for paywall
| reasons, but there are definitely models out there to allow
| in-reader paywall access. Stratechery has an interesting
| approach - when you subscribe you get a unique feed that can
| be cancelled when you stop paying.
| babelfish wrote:
| This is an issue with the site's RSS feed, not Feedly. Feedly
| has an option to open any individual feeds posts in an in-app
| browser directly (and if you're on iOS, even enable Reader
| mode!) to combat this, so you don't need to switch apps!
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| It's not dead, but many things I wish supported RSS don't.
|
| Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. These would be incredibly useful
| things to have native RSS feeds for, but instead I have to dig
| around and either use some tool someone built for the purpose -
| a tool at the mercy of the walled garden whose wall they're
| peeking over - or build my own nightmare factory.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Twitter_
|
| It used to; killed off ~2013:
|
| * https://brodiesnotes.blogspot.com/2013/06/twitter-has-
| killed...
| asdff wrote:
| At the end of the day, leaning into RSS for me lead to me
| leaning away from these sorts of services that don't support
| RSS or make it difficult.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| My dream is being able to get _only_ the events off my
| Facebook feed. Invitations, events my "friends" are going to
| that show up on my feed, events people post on their timeline
| that would show up on my feed, whatever.
|
| If Facebook had any kind of API I could probably build this,
| and stop using facebook otherwise. Which is probably why they
| don't?
| baskethead wrote:
| None of those will because they rely on engagement to make
| money. They need people logging into their servers so that
| they can see what they are looking at. That's not how RSS
| works, so of course they won't support it.
| asdff wrote:
| Some places that do offer rss only offer truncated feeds so
| you actually have to open the website and be monetized and
| fingerprinted. there are of course workarounds but its an
| arms race with only a few maintainers.
| FernandoMax wrote:
| And I think this is the main reason Google Killed Google
| Reader. It was controversial (or illegal or ugly) to put
| ads over the third party content. And it was way better to
| have Adsense on the websites directly. Such "spring
| cleaning" was an alibi, not the reason. It was abandoned
| after some attempts to build a kind of social network
| inside, and probably they preferred people to create
| content on +1 instead of on blogs. But Blogger still
| exists, and there's a strong contradiction why to kill the
| reader for the blogs except one: Ads. Google Reader was bad
| for Ad business. And that's a big business in Google. And
| terribly sad.
| lapcat wrote:
| They rely on ads to make money. Twitter could add ads to
| their RSS feeds, just as they add ads to their app feeds.
| RL_Quine wrote:
| You can use RSS for twitter via Nitter, it works perfectly
| for me.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _instead I have to dig around and either use some tool
| someone built for the purpose - a tool at the mercy of the
| walled garden whose wall they 're peeking over_
| RL_Quine wrote:
| I know, it sucks, but I'm saying what solution is solid
| and works.
| iroddis wrote:
| +1 for Feedly, although I use Feedly Classic on IOS for a more
| concise, no-frills UI. I really appreciate the header + summary
| without thumbnails format for quickly going through large-
| volume sources (like HN).
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Same. It was a major loss when Google killed Reader, but I just
| found another app and kept on RSSing. NewsBlurr is my current
| choice (windows).
| seltzered_ wrote:
| One thing that's been corrosive to rss the past couple years
| have been podcast platforms. I find more podcasts (free ones)
| that can only be accessed through platforms like Google
| podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or Anchor, with no rss feed link
| to use in a platform agnostic podcatcher app.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| My policy is to just ignore these. There's so much content
| out there it's not hard to find other (proper) podcasts to
| listen to.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Disagree on 'blaming the creator' argument. Not everyone is
| aware of these technical philosophies and are focused on
| getting a good story out there. Feel the same way about
| social media.
| PatreonLover89 wrote:
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I have only noticed that on spotify, but, without a spotify
| subscription, I hate it. I have had several podcasts I used
| to listen to move to spotify-only.
|
| (I actually still listen to them on an Apple iPod nano....)
|
| I could believe it being true of some of other platforms,
| trying to have "our-platform-only" content but I haven't seen
| it and am not finding confirmation. I don't think it's true
| of Google Podcasts, that they have any of their own content.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Unfortunately, to Spotify's great delight, the word "podcast"
| has been successfully embraced, extended, and extinguished.
| Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the
| word "podcast" to mean audio shows on proprietary platforms
| that require proprietary players.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The word never made much sense though. A "podcast" is a
| file that you download from the internet. What's the point
| of calling it a podcast?
| giantrobot wrote:
| Because it was broad _cast_ to your i _Pod_. Where iPod
| means a non-networked personal media player which in the
| 00s overwhelmingly meant an iPod.
|
| The distribution model was a client subscribes to the RSS
| feed on their computer, downloads new episodes (from the
| publisher's website), and then syncs them when the "iPod"
| is synced to the computer. Many PMPs but the iPod
| especially defaulted to syncing your computer library
| when plugged in (to charge). So the iPod just received no
| episodes of podcasts when people plugged them in to
| charge at the end of the day.
|
| When iTunes added explicit podcast support it became even
| easier to subscribe and sync podcasts. This was and
| remains a good distribution model but Spotify et al have
| done their damnedest to co-opt the term to mean content
| exclusive to their platform.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| And yet here we are clicking a floppy disk icon to save
| it. Language and meaning change over time. That's OK.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Of course it's okay for languages to evolve, but here's
| how you're missing the point:
|
| Imagine that shortly after the turn of the century, Adobe
| created a proprietary platform for delivering internet
| content and called it the "web". Viewers must use Adobe
| Web Reader to use Adobe "web pages", which are DRM-
| protected PDF files delivered using proprietary
| protocols. Adobe has done deals with several hundred
| popular sites to turn off their standards-based websites
| and deliver Adobe websites exclusively.
|
| This is what Spotify and others are doing, and nobody
| cares. Apple is effectively the last media giant left
| holding the flag for standards-based podcasting, but how
| long do we think that will last?
| throw0101a wrote:
| Etymology of the _pod_ cast was from i _Pod_ , which was
| (probably) the most popular audio/music device for a
| number of years in the 2000s:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology
|
| There was a minor movement to label them "netcasts", but
| it didn't really take.
| scrame wrote:
| Because it was some apple fanboys who started it with the
| original iPod. Apple and a few others tried to trademark
| it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Trademark_applicati
| ons
| CharlesW wrote:
| There's no point now, I suppose.
|
| The history was that "podcasting" was an open medium,
| "open" being the point. A "podcast" was a show (e.g.
| "Smartless"). "Episodes" were audio or video files
| combined with metadata that lived in the podcast's RSS.
| Anybody could play in that ecosystem.
|
| Now "podcasting" means anything/nothing. "Podcasts" are
| shows. "Podcasts" are episodes. "Podcasts" are things
| that increasingly need a proprietary app to play.
| cxr wrote:
| > Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing
| the word "podcast" to mean [...]
|
| Those types have done a lot of the same damage to the word
| "wiki". It blows my mind that Sourcehut of all places is a
| willing participant in debasing the term.
| ronsor wrote:
| What exactly is Sourcehut doing?
| cxr wrote:
| The same thing GitHub is doing: throwing a bunch of
| source files into a repo--i.e. the sort of thing that
| came _before_ wikis (and the reason why wikis were
| invented in the first place--to displace those kinds of
| systems)--but then calling _that_ a wiki. It qualifies
| certainly as what GNU calls a "Massive Multiauthor
| Collaboration Site". But to call it a "wiki" is wildly
| inappropriate--like saying "integral" when you're talking
| about derivatives:[1]
|
| > _Imagine you 're a mathematician, and fellow
| mathematicians start calling derivatives integrals
| instead; that's basically how badly the term[] is being
| misused: it's being used to describe systems that are
| almost the _exact opposite_ of the concept._
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561
| pentagrama wrote:
| Google Podcasts give you the RSS link of every podcast
| https://imgur.com/a/bmgzCFb
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Thanks. Wow, did not notice that you have to click not the
| globe button or share button, but the three dot 'hamburger'
| button at the top right in order to see this.
| cxr wrote:
| Note that the Google Podcasts mobile app differs greatly
| from the site at podcasts.google.com. When accessing Google
| Podcasts through the latter, the feed URL is encoded in a
| base-64 variant that you have to resort to extracting from
| Google's show page URL and descrambling. If you want to
| export your feed list, this can be tedious. (Made worse by
| how top-heavy the Google Podcasts site is just to load a
| page.)
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > If you want to export your feed list, this can be
| tedious
|
| Does Google Takeout support Google Podcasts? That'd be
| the usual method of exporting everything from a Google
| product.
| cxr wrote:
| > Does Google Takeout support Google Podcasts?
|
| Nope. One of the few use cases where I actually looked
| towards Google Takeout as an escape hatch for my data,
| instead of a mere novelty ("a ZIP of all my YouTube
| interactions--that's neat, I guess"), but Google Podcasts
| is not there. I've filed several complaints about this
| and several other shortcomings in response to the Google
| Podcasts app's spammy notifications requesting feedback.
|
| I ended up writing a short set of procedures to follow
| (an SOP--written like a software manual, really) that
| walks you through how to select page elements that are
| shown on screen while logged in, and then drag and drop
| them from the podcasts.google.com tab into the "export
| tool". The punchline is that the export tool is just the
| SOP document itself. It's meant to be read in your
| browser, and it takes advantage of the fact that the
| browser also happens to be a universal runtime...
|
| The exporter will descramble the links and output your
| subscriptions in text/uri-list format.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That sounds useful; do you have that tool published
| somewhere?
| cxr wrote:
| I got pretty carried away writing the thing as if it were
| a mid-century technical repair manual for a piece of
| industrial equipment, and never got around to publishing
| it but here you go: <https://crussell.ichi.city/gpe.html>
|
| It could really stand to have an associated 90-second
| video demonstration that walks through the steps because
| of how unorthodox the the-documentation- _is_ -the-
| implementation paradigm that I was experimenting with is.
| tootie wrote:
| RSS is still the default distribution system for podcasts. It's
| probably the thin thread that is keeping Spotify from building
| a walled garden for audio.
| marcrosoft wrote:
| I boycott all podcasts that are exclusive to Spotify because
| I want to do my part in at least slowing down the eventual
| podcast walled garden future.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| I also boycott them for a more practical reason: I can't
| listen to them in my normal podcatchers! I'd have to switch
| all my podcast listening to Spotify to change that, and
| that's a pain.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Spotify has started and rapidly escalated a program to pay
| podcast producers for spotify-only podcasts. (with no rss
| feeds). Several podcasts I used to listen to and enjoy have
| become spotify-only.
|
| When I recently asked friends for podcast suggestions...
| several were spotify-only, i don't think the suggestors even
| realized it, cause they just listened on spotify anyway
| regardless.
|
| So I think Spotify agrees with you and is working on it...
| adamrezich wrote:
| Spotify is in fact intending to move away from RSS, as a
| means of creating a walled garden:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/08/spotify-hypes-the-
| revenue-...
|
| > [...] The company spent a good portion of its presentation
| specifically focused on podcasts, which it said had been
| "largely unchanged" for years before its entry into the
| market, due to the limitations of RSS.
|
| > Spotify cited how unbundling podcasts from RSS technology
| has paved the way for Spotify to generate revenue through
| these popular audio programs -- a sentiment that's not
| universally beloved by those who support an open podcast
| ecosystem. Spotify has disrupted that market by bringing some
| podcasts in-house, where they can only be heard on its
| service, and competitors have followed. This has fractured
| the ecosystem and left consumers at a disadvantage as some
| shows are no longer broadly available.
|
| > "We've been able to replace RSS for on-platform
| distribution, which means that podcasts created on our
| platform are no longer held back by this outdated
| technology," Maya Prohovnik, Spotify's head of Talk, told
| investors.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Spotify has never used RSS, other than for Roach Motel-
| style ingest.
|
| The plan was to embrace, extend, and extinguish the
| podcasting medium, and the hard part of that is done.
| "Podcasting" was a standards-based, open medium. Now it's
| any audio show, and we've lost the unique name for the open
| medium. As Spotify incentivizes more and more creators to
| not publish an RSS feed, standards-based podcasting will
| become a fond memory.
| cxr wrote:
| The entire framing of this (esp. re "unbundling") is pretty
| gross. Unbundling is associated with disintermediation.
| What Spotify is doing is the opposite. What organizational
| dysfunction led to the circumstances here--where the
| writers and editors of the linked article uncritically
| publish and more or less legitimize this kind of shameless
| corporate spin?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > What organizational dysfunction
|
| The whole article is pretty much just re-wording
| Spotify's press release.
|
| There seem to be no sources in it except for Spotify's
| press release.
|
| So, a very old form of organizational disfunction in
| journalism: The cheapest and quickest way to write an
| article is to use someone's press release as the only
| source, as it doesn't actually require, well, any
| journalism.
| jokabrink wrote:
| Maybe of interest: Even Youtube has RSS for channels. If your RSS
| reader does not pick up the relevant tag, the URL is
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$ID with $ID
| starting with `UC`, e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVogAsA...
| for "ARTE.tv documentaries".
| zerop wrote:
| Want to start a subthread here on what makes it great and despite
| many attempts to kill it, it still rocks! My take
|
| 1. Widely adopted protocol, clients in all programming languages.
|
| 2. Publicly readable without password
|
| 3. Get notification for new items in many tools like Slack
|
| 4. Easy to produce and consume
|
| 5. Many nice Web UI Reader available
|
| <Add yours>
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Not necessary, but nice: can be monetized in a healthy way via
| things like API tokens. I have a few podcasts whose RSS feed
| endpoints accept a unique, revocable token and check that
| server-side -- but the client needs only the ability to pass
| query params in the URL (which it should have anyways). It's a
| great way for creators to get paid without imposing on their
| users.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a good terminal-based RSS reader? Preferably
| one that plays nice with small screens.
| dewey wrote:
| You could give https://newsboat.org a try, it's a fork of
| Newsbeuter. I shared my Newsbeuter setup a long time ago here
| (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/using-newsbeuter-to-
| read-y...) but have since moved on to https://miniflux.app and
| Reeder (iPad OS, iOS, Mac). They all support the Google Reader
| API so it makes using any client very easy.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I went in the oppositve direction of @dewey....i had a miniflux
| instance, then moved to newsboat. It serves my need well
| enough.
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