It's depressingly and irritatingly common to come across podcasts now which provide links to a dizzying array of podcast aggregation services but not to o their RSS feed, even though they definitely have one because it's how you feed data to these services in the first place.

I suspect a lot of blogs only have a feed now because it's a default feature of the blog platform they use rather than because they see it as important.

I believe that there was an agenda to kill RSS, very much like how the auto makers in the United States conspired to kill public transit.

I don't buy any of the arguments not to implement it. I don't think it is too expensive or confusing. I think it is too empowering to users and inconvenient to marketers.

I bet it scared the shit out of Zuck and still does today.

Add websub and few more and you have a social network, duh. Decentral. People owned.

this is what Reader was and has always made me even more confused as to why Google killed it off. They had the right start for a unique take on content focused/small group discussion based social networking and the tossed it for “circles”

Google itself is part of Big Tech Social Control. They're not willing to engage in services where they're not ultimately in control, like RSS. They suffered in the short term, but if you've struggled to find the RSS feed for a website or a podcast lately, that's exactly what they were trying to achieve.

Google has given up on RSS completely. They are still supporting https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ and bringing back a variation of rss reader https://in.pcmag.com/browsers/145379/google-follow-rss-reade.... “Follow the web” is the new theme.

and so did facebook (=> remember friendfeed).

That's not social network because there's no interaction between entities and most people wouldn't set up a blog.

> most people wouldn't set up a blog

well, that's the unspoken fallacy: becoming active is cumbersome.

But that doesn't have to be, it could be as easy as renting a domain and copying a single file. (Plug: https://demo.mro.name/shaarligo)

But if taking a breath is too much of an effort, one may well remain unheard.

Twitter obviously hates it too.

I think the same. RSS and Atom feeds couldn't be riddled with ads/trackers and dark patterns so they don't generate revenue/control for corporations. However, they are great for the users. Keep them alive people.

I suppose you could call it an agenda, I think it’s just the consequence of every major social networking platform being incentivized to reduce outgoing links as much as possible to keep everyone in their walled garden of data collection and engagement.

At some point we need to stop trying defend the idea that capitalism is good for tech.

> At some point we need to stop trying defend the idea that capitalism is good for tech.

Why would a state-owned social media platform be any better? I can think of numerous ways in which it would be dramatically worse. And if given the choice, do you really think people would choose Fedbook over Facebook?

Can you elaborate on your reasons why it would be a bad thing?

I think the argument for this is mainly that this would be funded by taxes, so it would not need to rely on advertisements and exhibit the predatory behaviours that Facebook and other social media do.

Why does it need to be "owned" at all?

How about Mastodon/Fediverse options?

Same convenience of platform features - finding friends, social gaming, comments, likes, etc. - nobody trying to monetize your eyeballs or actively surveil you.

Right on.

Of course it's not "too expensive" or "too confusing" but the demand is practically nonexistent.

I think the demand is high but doesn’t show up in some dumb ways that people think represents demand.

I get tons of requests in my web logs for my RSS feed. And I’m not a big site or anything, just have a scrub personal blog.

So that’s lots of demand.

I suspect that every platform owner sees their rss requests and sees it as high. So any claims that there’s no demand without clarifying that they don’t get http gets for RSS feeds seems disingenuous to me.

“I don’t see any demand for RSS when I ignore looking at all the RSS requests I get tiny site.”

Do you also conclude from your logs that there is a huge demand for regular users to log in to your Web server through ssh?

Yes, most certainly people sure do want to ssh into my servers.

Yeah but they're not regular users who are just interested in reading the content. And probably neither are the RSS scrapers.

I don’t think war drivers trying to break into my host aren’t regular users.

But I think successful requests to my RSS feeds are regular users who are routinely checking my feed and have set up some tool to do so. So that’s demand. And it’s pretty regular.

The people trying to ssh are likely doing so automatically on every host in existence.

> but the demand is practically nonexistent.

You mispelled "the way for me to monetize it is practically non-existent".

No I didn't. Go ahead and canvas 100 people and figure out how many of them even know what RSS is, let alone would like to use it.

One offender is buzzsprout, which has an RSS feed but no link to the actual episode... So you know when there's a new episode, but you have to google it to find it.

Have you pointed this out to them? Ridiculous oversight.

Yeh, came here to say this. I love RSS, it is such a nice balance of enabling me to keep up with stuff but under my own terms and at my own speed.

It feels very much like an alive protocol to me, and more in need than ever before given the insane calls on everyone's attention.

And to the guy with "service shutdown fear" - just export your opml and bring it into another service. It's highly portable and imo totally mitigates any risk of getting locked in then locked out.

I just logged into my Feedly for the first time in a couple years (maybe longer). I had moved all my RSS from Google Reader to Feedly back when all that went down.

Turns out, most of the blogs I subscribed to back in the day are now defunct or not updated much. I think that's why I eventually stopped going to my Feedly for RSS aggreggation, and instead for the few moments a day I want to read news/waste time, I just go directly to The Verge, Hacker News, and/or Reddit.

Funny aside, though. My product at work still has a RSS plugin for importing content, and I have it pointed at Reddit RSS feeds for sub-reddits, and it's still working....

Here's HN's RSS:

https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Let's hope it will not go defunct anytime soon.

There are also custom feeds with more features available from https://hnrss.github.io/

One of those feeds is how I came across this post.

BTW, I just also realized, that I get a lot of my articles/news from my Google News widget on my Android phone (and in the Google News app on my iPad), and the AI on that has curated a pretty decent list of topics that I like to follow.

Final, final realization/thoughts. It's pretty obvious I let the curation of my Feedly go stale and that I should clean out the old cruft, and give it a try again. I forgot about the nice keyboard short-cuts for navigating article titles. And it's also nice way to view heavy news sources, like The Verge.

However, as a user I'd need to decide: do I want to open the funnel of content like this where I feel obligated to read all the stuff in my feed? I kind of feel like I don't need to be so diligent with these things. And if that's the case, my use case looks more and more like only using RSS for super specific, niche websites that I don't want to remember to visit on a regular basis. Which could be OK, but then I have to remember to visit my RSS reader.

How do news apps get their content when it is aggregated from multiple sites? (I've never used google news but the ios news app shows content from multiple popular sites). Is it rss, atom, or something completely different?

Looks like Google has a product called Google News SEO, a way for websites to optimize their SEO so that Google's "news" crawlers can grab the content [1] [2]

"Using the Publisher Center tool, you can share your content with Google News by listing RSS feeds, website URLs, or videos."

[1] https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9607...

[2] My original link to how it works: https://ppcexpo.com/blog/how-does-google-news-work

EDIT: found the original Google docs instead

Exactly. I've never stopped using RSS. And if I look at follower counts on Feedly (which is just one RSS aggregator our of multiple options) I see tens of thousands of followers to many popular feeds. So there are many people who use RSS - probably millions. It didn't go away, some people chasing new shiny things like twitter did - they are always welcome to come back, it still works quite fine.

Active RSS user here till Google killed Reader.

I tried using Feedly last year. Added feeds and it was HORRIBLE experience. Not Feedly but the actual feeds.

Some of them give you the title and then tell you to go to actual website to read the article.

Others has a virtually non-existent summary.

During RSS's heydays I remember being able to just see the summary and click on it and read the article right there and then. Now these feeds try to push you back to the website hard. Making RSS feeds feel like a broken tool. With the content there mostly an after thought.

I think sites killed off RSS feeds.

Those sites existed back during the Google Reader era already. I don’t even avoid those, and currently have only one title only, and 2 or 3 title + short summary sites in my TT-RSS list, everything else is full text.

Not to mention, you can actually file an issue on the blog owner's github (if present), making a ruckus about the feed quality. I did it once and he was happy to patch it - after familiarizing himself with what a feed even was, as he didn't know his site had one.

Simple RSS for Android is still available at F-droid. It's 14 years out of maintenance & it still loads(with warning) & works for my feeds. Some give just a summary, some the 1st paragraph and a few still supply the whole article.

I am always on the lookout for a simple, decentralized, modern alternative, if anyone knows of any.

I use https://weloverss.com/ as my Google Reader alternative. TheOldReader is also nice. I prefer the first due to its ui not being bloated - only thing I miss is timestamps.

TheOldReader.com was and remains my replacement for Google Reader. I have a paid account as a gesture of support although I use only a tiny fraction of the 500 subscriptions available. Their "add a subscription" utility works quite well on sites with no mention of a feed. And of course I discovered this post via RSS...

I remember the Theoldreader. I quite liked it. I can't remember why I stopped using it and switched to feedly.

Thanks for the tip on weloverss. I'll give it a try.

My preference is for inoreader. I’ve tried old reader a couple of times, just seemed to be missing things. For instance I couldn’t seem to get a dark theme. In inoreader it’s easy to switch theme. Inoreader seems to have a nicer ui, I also like the fact you can see what articles are popular during the day/week.

Or you can use apps like Reeder who'd parse the original webpage for you with a single click.

Yeah I always opened the website when using RSS, even in 2008, so I don't mind.

I still read all the same feeds I had on Google Reader first on Digg Reader and now on Inoreader free version. Main way I consume news although I do look at Facebook for family stuff and twitter for very topical stuff and following folks like Elon Musk who mostly tweet.

>"The trend has crept into new software and new web building technologies. Sometimes depending on what you are building your website with it is harder than ever to add RSS feeds."

Even though the water isn't boiling, the heat may still be on.

I agree wholly with this. I only very recently started using RSS and almost every site/blog has one that produces quality content. For example the St. Louis Fed has a few high quality blog feeds and when I couldn’t find the RSS feed I sent them an email and lo and behold, there was an RSS feed to each one (just on a different page that I missed). It seems to be a rarity that good content feeds don’t have RSS.

huh, maybe if you want to make a crawler that competes with google you want to penalize content that does not have RSS feeds.

I also still use RSS and have several hundred subscriptions, but the OP isn't wrong and it's far more pervasive than just Twitter. One of the biggest ones for me is that Spotify is buying up podcasts that previously did have an RSS feed and then removing the feed, for example. Other services are doing the same. For another example, when Bloomberg bought City Lab recently they removed the RSS feed. I've had this happen all the time, so my feeds list and podcast lists would be dwindling if I weren't actively seeking out things to replace those with.

Is it still useful? Yes. Is it also under attack? Yes.

Thanks.

I think you are missing the point here. It is not about if the technology exists or not. But when the community rely on it as the main way for following updates, it changes a lot of things. The quantity and quality of the articles. What does it feel to get a new update. I remember I was getting excited every time I get something new in Google Reader, Twitter doesn't feel like this at all.

How did you aggregate so many sources to read articles from? What is your discovery process? Do you have any recommendation where I can read good stuff from?

Pretty much what gavanm said with his #1. The process is usually that I see some interesting article on a site like HN, then say "hmm, I'd like to read more by this person, but I will probably never remember the website address, so I'll just add it to Feedly."

Whenever I'm looking at content I like I just go and see what else that author has posted. If it sounds vaguely interesting I add it to my reader. If after a couple of posts it's not too interesting I remove it.

I believe a lot of the bigger sites like Feedly will recommend you popular feeds. I would love a service that I can paste a list of feeds into and it could recommend popular related feeds.

Not the OP, but these days I find new things (mostly blogs) through four different mechanisms:

1 - Hacker News - If there's an interesting article linked, then I'll consider adding the site to my feed (using feedbin since the great Google Reader apocalypse).

2 - Blog referrals - Sometimes existing feed items will link to other articles sites (sourced from, similar problem, etc) and I'll sometimes add those sites.

3 - Search Results / Organic - If I'm investigating a particular problem/issue/topic and find a good blog, then I'll add it to my feed.

4 - Topic Specific Aggregators - in some cases there are people that produce topic specific post summaries (such as the .Net Morning Brew https://blog.cwa.me.uk/ or Michael Tsai https://mjtsai.com/blog/ ) that link articles - again, if the articles are good, or I notice I've visited the site before, I'll sometimes add it to my feed list.

Just checking my OPML, I have around 600 sites (more than a few are likely no longer posting) in my current reader - accumulated over the last 20 years or so - that I've found specifically interesting (mostly professionally, and a few hobby based ones as well). I still get around 60 or so new items per day, and probably skim 20, read 10 in detail, and mark the rest as read.

Like the linked article discusses here, it's no longer possible to easily get a feed from major social media sources - which limits the usefulness of RSS from a purely social perspective (but I've never tried to use it that way) - but if you treat it as a personally curated source of sporadic content, then it's great. In many respects Moderate post volume (quality over quantity) is something I find more useful in what I choose.

On the aggregator front, I try to avoid anything that's too noisy (low signal to noise) - and I definitely minimise subscribing to news sites as the volume is just too high (I tried rss subscribing to The Verge when it was new, but there were too many articles I don't read). For example, i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.

RSS is still heavily used for information I find really professionally useful (IT) - but I don't know about other industries.

Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed - which makes offline and mobile consumption more difficult / annoying - I suspect that in some cases it's a result of default choices - and in others it's a deliberate decision as a trade off against improved analysis a site gets from a browser hit.

> i wouldn't use a RSS feed of Hacker News because I probably only look at 1 in 10 articles on it.

The popular HN RSS feed generator linked elsewhere in this page allows for a ton of customization! You can filter by points and raise the floor until you get a reasonable number of articles per week.

> Possibly the only bugbear I have around the RSS ecosystem these days is that some authors don't include the full content in the RSS feed

My RSS reader (miniflux) has a handy feature for getting around these. It even works for naïve paywalls (like the New Yorker’s, for example). It basically cURL’s the original address of the content and allows you to specify the content with a CSS selector. It’s some trouble to configure initially, but very handy!

Did you read my article? I agree with everything you are saying.

I think it’s mostly a question of developer mindshare around RSS and syndication technologies. The early 2000s were a golden age in this sense but we all just let the centralized social media platforms decide that all innovation was moving there.

I missed getting everything from RSS. A couple years ago I built my own engine that could bring in twitter, reddit, here and a few other services that didn't have RSS feeds and published the results to river of news style flow with a few topic specific tributaries. Haven't used it in years but have been thinking about restarting it.

Did you try using Leo, the AI-powered Feedly's robot that supposedly can do smart filtering? I'm curious how good it is.

Leo is really great to let you focus on topics you care about without the overwhelm. You might also try Web Alerts https://blog.feedly.com/how-to-use-leo-web-alerts-to-track-e...

Not yet.

I saw that they also have some kind of tool that lets you scrape websites that don't have native RSS feeds, but it is only at the "super duper" pricing tier, whatever that one is called.

Yes we do have RSS Builder, very handy :)

Same. Though I don't follow as many sites. Really useful for blogs and website with irregular/no update schedule

Even useful for blogs that do because I will never remember their schedule or what the website was anyways.

> RSS is as present and useful as it was 20 years ago

Precisley, that's how I got to this post. In this day, keeping a list of interesting sites and being able to consult them all from a single place is ever more useful.

> I think that what the author really means is that he misses RSS feeds from Twitter.

I get RSS for some Twitter accounts via a Nitter instance. Sadly, some institutions and people only spread news via Twitter.

Nope. I do not care about RSS feeds from Twitter. That was an example.

I'm also surprised no one has pointed out the irony that the author's blog doesn't have an RSS feed. That would be the least you could do to keep it around.

There are three feeds referenced from that page:

- Forum activity (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom)

- Forum's new discussions (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom/discussions)

- This discussion (https://www.wilcosky.com/atom/d/20-i-miss-rss)

Of course these days browsers don't indicate that browsers are available. You will need an extension to detect feeds. (Or paste the site in your feed reader and hope it does, most readers will do the auto-discovery for you)

Yes. That’s part of the point. Browsers should better auto detect that I have multiple feeds.

> I have a feed for this blog

it doesn't seem to be linked anywhere, but I think that's: https://www.wilcosky.com/atom

I get Twitter feeds in my RSS reader via my Feedbin account. Not RSS, unfortunately, but just as good as far as my usage goes.

I used to just have RSS feeds saved in my Firefox bookmarks. I didn't know Twitter had or has any sort of RSS feeds.

Feedbin can capture items from Twitter feeds so that's covered for those who want this.