Imagine an open version of Twitter or Facebook News Feed, with no psy-op ads, owned by no oligopoly, manipulated by no algorithm, and all under your full control.
Imagine a version of the newsletter where you don’t have to worry about them selling your email to scammers, labyrinth-like unsubscribe pages, or stuffing your inbox with ever more crap.
Now imagine this existed and was extremely popular 15 years ago. Then we got suckered by the shiny walled gardens.
Well, it’s time to make like a tree and go back to the future, baby!
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Unfortunately, it’s much harder to monetize. So, any publisher that wants to make money (like all those walled gardens), has pretty much abandoned it. And therefore so do tools from moneymaking companies, like the dear departed Google Reader. (You may think of them as some benevolent force because they give you Search andGMail and Maps and so on for free, but only because they can track you and sell that data – which is much harder with RSS.) It’s still useful, though, for creative outlets and other people who just want to share (like blogs) – I still have a couple hundred active feeds.
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I think part of the problem is that browsers have made it hard - when I was using RSS feeds I did with Opera (before they became a chrome based browser) and it was simple. I am not even sure Safari has an RSS reader!
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I have no idea, but doubt it does, due to the lack of popularity of RSS any more, plus how many people read RSS via a web site. (Probably more back when Google Reader was a thing, though.)
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In opera I basically used it as a notifier - so would subscribe to various blogs (mostly Ruby bloggers) and then Opera would notify me when there was a new post, and then I’d just be taken to the site to read it…
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I use Feedly, and some things it can present right there, but there are many where the RSS item is just a notification.
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If you are on Mac and iOS you can use NetNewsWire, it’s been around for decades and was made open source a while back. I’m using to read feeds that I aggregate through Feedbin, though the app supports fetching the RSS feeds directly as well.
I’ve pretty much exclusively used RSS for tech news for the last couple of years and for me it works a lot better than social media sites to deliver relevant content.
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Thanks both… the other problem is it seems hardly anyone self-hosts a blog these days. Back when I started learning programming it felt like most of my Ruby friends had blogs, but they’ve all but disappeared.
Think it’s in part because people’s interests have changed and platforms have evolved (and so any new blogging platform would need to take that into account imo).
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I never actually got on the whole RSS thing, like I have a couple things in my Akgregator that I do actually check on occasion, but RSS has just never been a terribly friendly way for me to read things for some reason, I don’t really go with that firehose stream of stuff.
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I really miss Yahoo Pipes. It let me take assorted firehoses (firehosen?) and filter them down to trickles of the stuff I wanted. Frex I could take huge feeds of job openings from sites that didn’t have built-in filters, and filter out the ones using languages I didn’t want to use, locations I didn’t want to live, too junior-level, and so on.
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Just checked, and I think this is a huge part of the problem:
No RSS reader installed on Safari!!! I am thinking about posting this as a bug, there really should be one and Apple should be doing more to support open technologies like this.
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Lol, I have akgregator default installed in my OS for RSS handling, although firefox has some great extensions I hear. Akgregator isn’t bad at all though, but saying that I have no experience for if others are better or how. ^.^;
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Tempting as it might be, remember what happens when practically anything attempts to do everything. Stick to the Single Responsibility Principle. We already lost the “email is not a web page” battle, don’t backstab us in the “RSS is not a web page” battle. Having Safari cooperate with some RSS-reading plugin seems a reasonable compromise. Meanwhile, I just use Feedly – the app on iOS, and the website on “real” computers. (The important thing being that they all sync.)
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Shameless plug: I have made a frontend only RSS aggregator call AirSS (github link) which is hosted here: [https://airss.roastidio.us]
There are some caveats associated with a frontend only solution, such as CORS. I also offer some solutions that you can choose from.
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