When I created my personal website I thought: “Eh, if anyone asks for RSS I’ll make it then.” To my surprise I started getting asked after the second article! It didn’t take long to code up (relative paths to full urls was the biggest hurdle—but not exactly hard) and it’s kinda nice knowing that people can just follow the content without having to be lucky enough to see an article go by on Twitter.

I am guilty of emailing or otherwise attempting to contact authors for a feed link for their blog. It's often because I have become really engaged with one of their articles, read a few more and developed a hunger to see their fresh work.

Twitter is just a firehose, but my aggregated feeds are categorized and hand picked so I am far more likely to catch content I'm interested in on there and therefore be much more engaged with it.

This has been my experience as well. Granted, my audience is primarily tech people, but man do they want a feed. I had no idea.

(I am curious though, I may just try using feeds myself.)

> The best thing about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Honestly, I don't think algorithmically curated feeds are a problem. The main problem is the goal of the given algorithm which is often trying to maximize someone else's profit rather than minimize your time reading the feed...

That being said, I am always amazed at the ability of my brain to go through my feed and filter the interesting out quickly.

> The main problem is the goal of the given algorithm which is often trying to maximize someone else's profit rather than minimize your time reading the feed...

True that. Sadly, that is the business model for the larger part of the internet. My use of RSS is partly a way of trying to escape that.

Every feed algorithm's goal is to maximize someone else's profit. Ergo, feed algorithms are the problem.

Did RSS ever die?

I've migrated from Google Reader to TTRSS when I was forced to make a change.

Then a few months ago TTRSS started to act up and started making bold claims like "your database doesn't respond" so I moved over to FreshRSS which was a much bigger improvement than I thought that it would be to begin with.

Runs fine using Postgres as a database.

> Then a few months ago TTRSS started to act up and started making bold claims like "your database doesn't respond"

Oh, exactly what happened to me. All kinds of strange errors, especially after upgrades. I eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a year, without a single problem.

Thanks for the twitrss.me link -- I don't use Twitter, but I follow a couple of journalists who do, and my RSS reader is much better than Twitter's website, with its semi-random threading and light-boxes. I've run NetNewsWire since forever, and it's easy to add a few Twitter feeds in their own folder. If I have time, I'll scan through them; if not, Command-K and they're all gone.

This article really overstates RSS's problems, and underestimates "users," who it seems to view as epsilon semi-morons attached to credit cards. On the reader side, it's simply not that hard to control the rate of things you receive, and to quickly scan them for things you want to read. On the publisher side, it's trivial to keep track of the number of people subscribed to your feed(s). And if you want to know how long each of them spent on each article, and where their mouse cursor and eyeballs pointed that whole time, then too bad -- you are part of what's wrong with today's media ecosystem.

Twitter offered a RSS feed directly. But they disabled it, with their "new" API, because of some bogus reason.

They had a very simple reason, they can't show ads in the RSS feed.

There's nothing stopping ads in RSS feeds, just tracking. Those should be separate things.

>There's nothing stopping ads in RSS feeds, just tracking. Those should be separate things.

Bingo. Plenty of my RSS feeds have ads, they just publish them as articles and say "This RSS feed is sponsored by. . ."

It's the same ad model as podcasts basically.

Other ones just give you an abstract or short blurb on your feed with a link to go back to the main site, which works just as well.

I always thought of a "marketing" "reason". Like "we want people on our site" which is not the case when a user reads postings with a RSS reader. At the same time they restricted apps more. Which, was probably because ads.