RSS is awesome

[ropable]

I'm sad that a basic description of what RSS consists of makes it onto HN. I still upvoted to help educate the kids :/

FYI FreshRSS is fairly trivial to self-host, and is a really nice option for an RSS reader app.

[vanc_cefepime]

Preferential to Miniflux myself, but any RSS reader is better than none.

[DonHopkins]

Who old enough to remember when everybody was syndicating all their favorite RSS feeds on their own blogs, and then some joker posted a blog entry to his own RSS feed with a title like "What happens when you put an unbalanced <BLINK> tag into the title?", and the ENTIRE BLOGOSPHERE started blinking?

[fzxu22]

+1 happy freshrss user here

[ibfreeekout]

This is what I use, and I also have Readrops on my phone that syncs back to my FreshRSS instance. Makes it really convenient to have a lightweight reading app where I can submit new feeds to it and have it sync back to the server.

[senectus1]

FreshRSS is dabomb! Highly recommend it.

[k2enemy]

Boy do I feel old if a short, low content PSA about the existence of RSS is considered "hacker news."

[user3939382]

RSS is the antidote to algorithm feeds. I’m glad for any mention of it. 90% of the tools users need were built 1970-2000 including RSS.

[cm2187]

Ask a junior at the office what is that "save"or "new directory" logo, or what "CC" stands for in an email, or what a dialup connection is!

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Seen this? https://microformats.org/wiki/h-feed

[lylo]

Anything that raises awareness of RSS to a new generation is a wonderful thing!

[senectus1]

I mean.. it shouldn't be controversial.. but people keep claiming rss is dead.

not in my world it aint.

[netule]

Not only that, but an ad for their mobile app. Pretty low quality content.

[rufus_foreman]

You're one of today's unlucky 10,000.

[surprisetalk]

Amen! If you're looking to fill out your RSS reader, I maintain a directory of tech blogs (ctrl+f "feed" for rss links):

[0] https://blogs.hn

Other good directories:

[1] https://ooh.directory/

[2] https://blogroll.org/

[john-tells-all]

I adore RSS! Use it literally every single day. I have many feeds on Feedly.com, and add to it every week or two.

Tip: use a service to stream quality content to your RSS feed reader. For Hacker News, http://hnapp.com/ does the trick for me.

I subscribe to a couple dozen authors on Hacker News.

Example: in hnapp, search for `author:bob1029`, there's an RSS link, paste that into your RSS feed reader to see that person's Hacker News comments.

I have an entire "Hacker News" section in Feedly, just with author's comments. Very useful!

[nine_k]

RSS is terrible as a format (Atom is much better), but RSS is awesome as an idea. If your web site were a database, RSS would be like WAL. If your website were differentiable, it would be like its derivative, or rather a Lagrangian, taken at the moment of last update.

(BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)

[pentagrama]

I like the general term "Web feed" as an umbrella term, I found about that on this article https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-web-feeds

Also that blog has some other good related articles:

- What is RSS: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss

- What is Atom: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom

- What is JSON feed: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed

- What are feed readers: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers

- What is OPML: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml

[DamnInteresting]

We should popularize a JSON-based alternative, we'll call it "Absurdly Simple Syndication."

[rawling]

Your site's RSS feed is just another view of the items on your site, no? It's the RSS _reader_ that "differentiates" it for you?

[skeptrune]

Ironically just told the founder of my company that it was mission critical our blog had RSS. He had never used it before somehow and didn't know why it would be a big deal lol.

[charcircuit]

How is it mission critical for the company to have an rss feed?

[pseudo_meta]

Love rss, but the upside of not having an algorithm determine your content consumption quickly results in a fire hose of content.

Sadly, filtering features seem to be only available for paid subscriptions of online services, or for self-hosted solutions. Or are there solutions I am not aware of?

[timbit42]

QuiteRSS (Linux, MacOS, Windows, OS/2),

Flym (Android)

[lylo]

Yes! I've been lovingly curating a set of RSS feeds for over 20 years. It's a wonderful gift from the internet.

I actually built a simple and free RSS reader because my needs are simple and I'm a sucker for punishment. You'd think websites would want bots to read their RSS feeds since that's the whole point of RSS, but apparently not! ツ

https://feedgrab.net

[renegat0x0]

I use my own RSS reader [0]. I found other to be lacking in some areas.

I use it also for:

- bookmarks

- web crawling

- simple search engine

I also created simple RSS reader/parser, and web crawling system [1].

Links:

[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

[1] https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

[due-rr]

RSS is awesome! That’s why I made the simplest RSS reader[1] and a RSS feed of Hacker News classics that’s updated daily[2].

Using this curbed my Reddit usage quite a lot.

[1] https://rssrdr.com [2] https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics

[rifty]

To some degree this is more a knock on the state of UX on the web than a intrinsic advantage for web feeds, but my favourite thing was my ability to compact list view content feeds, categorize them, and flip between them quickly because everything has been pre-acquired. As soon as I found out I could use Youtube that way, it felt like a 10x better experience for browsing my subscriptions.

[Defletter]

The only complaint I have about RSS is that it seems antagonistic to edits. It's not usual that, when refreshing my podcast RSS feed, there are multiple versions of the same episodes because they made some edit somewhere in the title or description, etc. I've had five versions of the same episode before. I feel like we should have the technology to fix this by now :P

[not--felix]

I think the problem is that there are so many different standards[0] which makes it hard to parse them in a uniform format. The second problem is the most feeds only have 15 items, even if a reader handles updates they are fast lost for ever.

[0] https://ivyreader.com/articles/rss-standart-collection

[lwhsiao]

We do. Atom feeds have an updated field for this. But, it's up to whoever is generating the feed to know how to handle their metadata.

[_Algernon_]

RSS provides GUID + update timestamp which combined allows the client to integrate changes or replace entries.

[vhcr]

That's what the guid / id field is for.

[colesantiago]

> RSS is really simple, so it is still very well supported. Notably, all substack publications automatically have an RSS feed included at https://{{substack-domain}}/feed .

I wonder how long that will last until Substack closes it, I have never seen an RSS feed where the author is able to make it sustainable for them to make money from it.

[msgodel]

Substack seems to have done an incredible job allowing people to monetize their blogs. Maybe Substack themselves aren't profitable but the authors certainly seem to be doing well.

As someone who's subscribed to a lot of substacks the thing that brought me there was the availability of asynchronous reading (mail, rss newsletters.) I'm sure I'm not alone in disliking the actual site itself.

[KTallguy]

I’ve been using Artemis ever since it was posted here earlier this year. I love it because there is very little pressure to read everything and it updates infrequently so I don’t impulsively check it. Great product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471913

https://artemis.jamesg.blog/

[throw0101a]

No love for Atom?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)

[insane_dreamer]

After using GUI RSS readers for decades, been trying TUI RSS feed readers recently and quite liking that style. On iOS, Reeder is still my favorite app.

[ajdude]

I'm all in on RSS. Matter of fact, I used an RSS reader (netnewswire) to find this post!

I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices.

Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.

[ompogUe]

The most useful value of RSS for me was >20 years ago. craigslist let you create rss feeds with params, so I made a script that got me subscribed to feeds for every location they had in north america where someone was looking for a "telecommute lamp developer"

[leephillips]

I’d like to suggest newsboat (https://newsboat.org/index.html). I’ve been happily using it for a few years. It’s fast, runs in the terminal, with a great set of keyboard shortcuts.

[Perizors]

Is there any RSS reader that is also able to subscribe to newsletters in some way? There are lot of contents that are only provided as newsletters nowadays and I wanted to be able to read my feed and newsletters in the same app, without going into my mail inbox.

[daydream]

You can subscribe to newsletters with any RSS reader nowadays, but it’s a multi step process requiring the use of an external (free) tool.

1. Create a feed on https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. This will also give you a custom email address to send your newsletter to.

2. Subscribe to the newsletter with the custom email address and add the feed you created to your reader.

This setup works very well for me with NetNewsWire though there is friction in the multiple steps. No affiliation with either, just a satisfied user.

[1una]

There are projects which generate web feeds for websites that don't have one.

https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub

[stevekemp]

If you want everything in one place, and you're using email already, then it sounds like you want one of the various rss2email projects.

Feed entries then become emails which sit in your inbox/folders alongside your existing [emailed] newsletters.

(I prefer this approach myself, I can filter and search via my mail client, and manage state easily.)

[nickthegreek]

inoreader has that on some of their pay tiers. i use my own self host freshrss instance and https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to accomplish the same.

[zikzak]

Many can accept forwarded emails and some will offer an email address you can use to subscribe to newsletters. I prefer the former because you can cancel the forward rule if you don't want to continue with a given rss app or service.

[sewalsh]

Feedly has this. You can generate a unique email address for each newsletter. Pretty sure you'll need pay. I'm on a lifetime sub.

[theshrike79]

Kill the Newsletter was suggested above, but Newsblur has a built-in support for newsletters.

[azv_]

I keep using RSS daily through Feedly classic mobile app and I'm quite happy with it.

[suslik]

Does anyone know if there is a self-hosted rss tool which exposes the data over API? I am interested in processing feeds programmatically but ideally would prefer not to bother with writing the update / subscription / parsing logic myself.

[theshrike79]

Pretty much all of them? They usually implement the Ye Olde Google Reader API and a few more so that mobile applications can connect in a standard way.

- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_A...

- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR...

FreshRSS implements two APIs

[righthand]

You may be interested in tools that parse XML, I'm sure there are libraries for parsing RSS/Atom specifically. I'm not sure what you're asking exactly. You want a tool that will read RSS feeds then reformat the data to a different (JSON?) format or something and have an API endpoint return that converted format? But then for what purpose of transforming the XML(an already suitable format)?

[stevekemp]

Run "rss2email" then your API becomes IMAP/POP3?

[muppetman]

I love RSS. I am a huge fan of TinyTinyRSS, it's incredibly powerful with its filtering. I subscribe to just masses of RSS feeds, and the filtering bubbles up the stuff I'm interested in, ignores the stuff I'm not, and deletes articles I know to be hot garbage. You'd be amazed at how much crap this regex catches on tech news feeds: "^\d+ of the (best|worst|cheapest|highest|lowest|most)"

A lot of people get put off because they don't like the dev, he's not a "let me hold your hand while you understand the basics of how to install my app" kinda guy, he's a "Oh you didn't read the docs and are now spamming forums with help requests? Here's a ban" kinda guy which I gotta say, I actually really respect. Why everyone thinks open source ALSO means you get your hand held through every little rough patch I don't know, probably because a lot of open source is backed by companies who can't say the things the probably want to say in public, like "Go away, idiot"

Anyway sorry, I digress. TinyTinyRSS is excellent, the filtering just makes it head and shoulders above anything else I've tried like Miniflux (also nice) and FreshRSS.

[tamimio]

It was greader for me before netnewswire, I still use RSS, I can prioritize what to read myself after a quick glance I don’t need a “recommendation algorithm” to do it for me!

[henriquegogo]

RSS/Atom is great to follow blogs, news and some social network such as hackernews and reddit.

I hope X/Twitter back to this functionality, but that's a low probability.

[theshrike79]

Twitter killed their API and RSS feeds "to fight bots" :D

Which killed all the legitimate fun and useful bots and just left the astroturfing and discord sowing kind state sponsored bots.

As was the plan.

[uz3snolc3t6fnrq]

Nitter[0] seems to support it still, although it seems unmaintained - not sure how stable it is by this point. if you self host this, you should probably use burner account tokens, anti-botting measures might decide to shut down your X/twitter account

[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

[AndrewDavis]

I just restarted using RSS recently. And I discovered I can also use it to track software releases (on github). The url is the release page with .atom appended. Eg

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases.atom

[blackbear_]

Does anybody know if there is a RSS reader with embedded recommendaions based on previous likes and/or user-specified keywords?

[theshrike79]

Newsblur has some of this, it shows how popular some feeds are and has a "popular with other users" section.

[david90]

RSS is underrated.

[vivzkestrel]

i wish RSS protocols would update to support SSE for pushing new items instead of you polling them. Does anyone know a reliable way to use aiohttp with proxies to load data from RSS so that your requests are not blocked when using the feedparser library in python?

[chrismorgan]

Pushing instead of polling was done more than fifteen years ago, and various major feed producers and consumers do support it. It was initially known as PubSubHubbub (PuSH), but was renamed to WebSub when adopted by W3C, where it has been a Recommendation for over seven years now <https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/>.

(As for SSE, it’s entirely unsuitable as it would require a persistent connection.)

[pacifika]

RSScloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Cloud

[fithisux]

Innoreader/Feedly load balance my daily feeds

[dvh]

No it's not.

- There are million different formats.

- guids are not required, they are not monotonically rising integers, and there is no length limits on them (I've seen 50kb guid in the wild)

- date is not required

- you cannot fetch articles "since guid 123". If you go on vacation and return, if the feed had too much traffic they are gone, you'll never see the articles you missed except last 20 or so.

- whether article will be in full or just a teaser is fully in the hands of the server

[sewalsh]

You can tell OP is a newb as he's using NetNewsWire and not Reeder.

[geor9e]

Yes! I've been using RSS (feedbro reader) to de-algorithm social media for a long time now. Twitter (via nitter), Facebook (public posts only), HN, etc. It's all in a chronological RSS feed. No algorithms choosing what I see, no infinite scroll. If it's not a public post from a user I added, I don't see it. Luckily all my close friends are public-only type posters so it works.

My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.

[theshrike79]

Not just the ads, they can't add recommendations to your RSS feed.

What they optimise for is time spent on the platform "engagement". And usually rage-baiting content gives better engagement metrics than things that make you happy.

[trippyballs]

I’ve been looking for a way to get RSS feeds from Twitter profiles. tried RSS-Bridge but couldn’t get it working. rss.app works, but it’s paid. nitter feeds look promising but come through as invalid. how did you do it

[drukenemo]

How are you using Nitter? I’ve tried, but it’s a headache to host it.

[glenstein]

I think your conspiracy theory is quite a natural reading of the incentives for big tech. IIRC, different iterations of Twitter, YouTube, Craigslist, Facebook, Google News, Google blog search, and even the Chrome browser had built in RSS support of various forms that were later removed or scaled back or significantly de-emphasized.

[instagraham]

Reading this headline in India and sweating