Sure RSS has it's limits. But there are plenty of times that's a positive. It's disheartening to see RSS not get the respect and value it deserves.

Right?

RSS is badly suited as a vector for virally driven waves of outrage. "Let's call it an accidental feature" as lwall once wrote.

pours one out

Said in a recent thread how much butthurt I still hold towards Google over the fate of Reader. Stupid shortsighted idiots at Google for deprecating Reader.

Maddening they gave it up for freaking horrible Google+.

Feedly was one contender, The Old Reader was another.

The primary reason I settled on Digg is that they came out with an iPhone app relatively quickly after they launched. Regrettably, their iPhone app has been broken for maybe 6 months now. Digg used an OAuth web-view embedded user agent. Google appears to no longer to support such requests from apps. Digg needs to update the app with Google's other authentication libraries.

Might have to find a new platform again. sigh...

Note: fairy new to Mastodon, not sure exactly if / how this would work, but I've been thinking about this lately.

In chronological order, of course.

Mastodon is built on top of OStatus and ActivityPub, which are inspired by RSS' successor Atom, but sadly I don't think either is compatible, so I'm gonna be cramming an RSS/Atom library in there. Ah well. It's not like Mastodon doesn't already have a dependency tree as long as your arm.

I don't think social news delivery/publishing is an easily monetize-able business. Out of twitter/reddit, reddit seems to have found a model that works for them. Twitter hasn't found what works yet.

And that's the promise of Mastodon. It is free because each instance pays the cost of keeping it alive in the form of hosting their instance. Like, right now, the NYTimes acts like a "database" with all the pages, and reddit or twitter like the content distribution feed, and both need funding. But if the NYTimes had its own Mastodon instance and published there, the rest of the Mastodon network would be its content distribution feed, each federation funding itself.

As a sidetone, it even solves the problem of verification I think, because if I have the Mastodon account [email protected] for example, I don't need a central system to confirm that I'm working for the nytimes, like for example twitter would.

And moreover, since Mastodon is just Atom, if people want to just see feed updates they can do that, or they can get a client that supports the full social features too. I think it's pretty cool.

The inability to publish ads inline RSS ultimately killed it.

If and when the news bundling model re-emerges, something like RSS will gain favor again.

   > Even before it's demise, a lot of content publishers 
   > were only publishing headlines and abstracts via RSS, 
   > with the intent to drive clicks to hosted articles.

i subscribe to ~20 of this subtopics and i'm sure i will never miss an article about one of that topics.

Google (partly) killed it (by pulling people into Google Reader and then killing Google Reader).

Most (all?) news sites still offer RSS feeds.

Edit: it didn't seem to work earlier, but is working now after I added the RSS subscriptions button.

Huh? There's no such inability.

And in terms of technology, there's nothing stopping you sticking an iframe or script block in your feed. It comes back to what the reader will allow. Origin really doesn't matter too much.

Heck, I don't think I ever use a site's sharing button. The only exceptions are probably "retweet" on Twitter and "share now" on Facebook, which reposts content on your timeline in a way that can't be replicated by posting the URL.

On Chrome for Android there's the Web Share API [0], which they claim makes it easier to share content, although I'm unconvinced it's needed or really even desirable.

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/09/navigator-...

From the end-user's perspective, I don't think anyone is asking for features that are fundamentally at odds with using RSS to distribute messages. The resulting network would be much more distributed and harder to "monetize" (imo, good for users)

For blogs and websites that consistently have things I want to read, I use RSS + Feedly (I follow around 40 feeds).

For actual news, I use Apple News.

I probably spend the least time on Twitter and the most in the Apple News app. Apple News does a remarkably good job of showing me things I want to read. I assume it's based on how long I spend reading articles because I don't use the like button a lot.

This will probably never happen but I maintain the view that if you want the web to become a better place you have to find ways to educate the (average) user.

When someone likes something without anything to say it's just a metric, doesn't bring value to a discussion.

That being said I prefer the firehose to a crafted cocktail.

Only problem I see is that these users would need a URL for the feed for their friends to subscribe to.

So you'd need an external service (like Google Reader was). How about one of these new(ish) open/decentralized social network thingies? I forget their names, there was one that was sort-of-twitter and another sort-of-facebook. They probably already have RSS built-in with various RSS API endpoints for different filters on the stream. Maybe such an idea could ride along with that?

Also, I want to echo the other comments, how it is nice that RSS just does one thing. Just means it's a building block.

I think The Old Reader tried to keep some of that social element but I do know how successful they were. Due to reasons that I now can’t recall, I preferred Digg Reader over TOReader. Even Digg, for whatever reason has tried to make their RSS offering more social with their Digg platform. I avoid social as much as humanly possible so again not sure how effective they are.

My point is more that, if there's going to be curation of content i want to do that myself because there isn't an algorithm that exists that can do it well for me[1]. And if your content is posted exclusively to the various social networks that try and fail to curate content for me (i.e. you don't have your own site outside of the walled gardens) then i probably have little interest in it.

[1] This is part of a wider problem in that people want to follow hundreds (thousands?) of sources, and that quickly becomes a deluge. In the same vein, people favourite just about every image they see on Instagram - to paraphrase, "if you favourite everything, then nothing is your favourite". Self restraint is the best form of curation against a world in which everyone is screaming to be heard over everyone else.

For HTML, these limitations were circumvented by burying the platform under an ever increasing heap of javascript crap.

- https://pugjs.org/api/getting-started.html

- https://www.dailydrip.com/blog/creating-html-elements-and-us...