I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
247 comments
·January 18, 2025defrost
EvanAnderson
I worry about YouTube RSS feeds getting popular and Google killing them. Every time I see them discussed publicly I have this "Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!" reaction.
I browse YouTube anonymously, have an ad blocker setup that pretty much eliminates all ads, and track my "subscriptions" with RSS. It's highly usable. I use a fork of tt-rss and actually embed the YouTube videos in the reader pane so I never see any of YouTube's algorithmic recommendation schlock (beyond recommendations at the end of videos, which I ignore). Browsing YouTube, the site, is a jarring nightmare.
I am considering having my podcatcher use a YouTube downloader to just pull down all the videos in the feeds I watch. I believe Google is throttling yt-dlp to realtime speeds, but I figure if my podcatcher is doing it behind the scenes that shouldn't matter. I maintain curated collections of podcasts I like (in case they ever disappear), and since I just added 40TB if storage to my home system I figure it's time to do that with YouTube too.
badmonkey101
Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!
jhot
I run pinchflat [0] to automate yt-dlp and file management behind the scenes. Also can integrate with sponsorblock to remove in-video ads.
ibaikov
This! I am very sad x/twitter stopped offering RSS and the api price is ridiculous
account42
Somehow there are still a couple of Nitter instances that keep working despite the API shenanigans: https://status.d420.de/
I use that for my ex-twitter RSS feeds.
pentagrama
Reading your comment this intro started sounding on my mind https://youtu.be/hnlIiDBFlEA
donatj
That's good to know. The number of times I have subscribed to someone on YouTube only to not see anything from them in years, and then find tens of their videos YouTube never offered is just insane.
So many times I can't find anything to watch on YouTube and it just isn't showing me any of my subscriptions, it's ridiculous.
soulofmischief
The first three menu items in the navbar of the authenticated YouTube homepage are 'Home', 'Shorts', and 'Subscriptions'. 'Subscriptions' shows exactly what's on the tin, a timeline of videos from your subscribed channels.
0xEF
A lot of people might not realize this exists because of the way apps for smart tv's and game systems present the content and menus. I'm not sure if that's intentional or just misguided design, but the only reason I knew to see it out on my PS4's YouTube app is because I'd seen it on desktop.
renegat0x0
I use RSS for many sources, from YouTube also. I can open yt from there.
I do not understand why people keeps suggesting subscription view, as it is a worse experience for me, than central RSS management
oneeyedpigeon
The opposite problem is also bad: subscribe to a channel, then get frequent notifications of years-old videos.
MortyWaves
Don’t forget the “click the bell” too. Even when I have notifications enabled I rarely ever get any.
For some reason YouTube website never has any kind of notification popup in site either. Instead, the notification icon count increases by one.
Which caps at out 9+. Stupid.
Macha
Click the bell also adds many undesirable to me notifications like push notifications or email notifications.
What I want from subscriptions is basically a filtered list I pull from when going to youtube. With maybe some tiering so the people who upload once a year don't get lost in amongst the people who upload 2+ times a day
almostnormal
By "subscription" do you only mean subscription? Don't notifications need to be enabled in addition (bell button)?
I'm using the RSS feeds, so I'm not sure...
guilamu
Just use Freetube.
elpocko
There is a "Copy channel ID" link on each channel's page, but it's well hidden. Click "...more" in the channel description, then click "Share channel" to open a popup menu that has the "Copy channel ID" link. It does what it says.
trollied
Reddit also has feeds that they don't publicise. eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/.rss
Adding /.rss on to the end of lots of URLs works all over the place on the site.
entuno
It also provides feeds for individual playlists, where `playlist_id` is the `list` URL parameter when you view the full playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=
It's a really nice way to be able to follow creators/playlists without needing to register an account. I'm surprised that YouTube still allow it, but I hope it stays.
latexr
Unfortunately those have a major flaw: they always show the top 15 items in a playlist.
This is a problem because many channels have playlists where they put older episodes at the top and add new ones to the bottom. This makes the playlist RSS useless, because it will always show the same 15 videos.
lsaferite
I just want to contribute by saying that CEE is awesome content and I look forward to every video they post. Happy to randomly see them on HN.
latexr
Any half-decent RSS reader will detect the right feed if you give it the channel URL.
hexagonwin
Somewhat related, but does anyone know how one can only get RSS for live videos?
User123698745
Yes, by using Youtube's special playlist id prefixes and the "playlist_id" query parameter instead "channel_id".
Example: For channel id "UCXuqSBlHAE6Xw-yeJA0Tunw" replace the first two letters "UC" (channel ids always start with "UC") with "UULV". The feed url then looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULVXuq...
For more special playlist id prefixes see this StackOverflow answer by "coco0419": https://stackoverflow.com/a/76602819
gudzpoz
Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="assets/xml/rss.xsl" media="all"?>
[1] https://getnikola.com/rss.xml (Open it in your browser!)
[2] https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/blob/master/nikola/data/...
darekkay
I've once blogged about this technique, in case someone wants to learn more about it: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-styling/
pl4nty
thanks, really appreciate that your post was concise and included examples/followups. only needed 10 minutes to style my own rss feed
christkv
Man what a blast from the past. There was a moment in time where xml and xlst was considered the bright future of webapps
phh
I remember writing a blog with xml + xslt and thought it was very cool.
Retrospectively, writing code in XML, eewwww, but back then I liked writing XHTML by hand
fak3r
+1 on XHTML by hand, I'd always have the XHTML 1.0 badge up to brag about it too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Valid_XHTML_1.0.svg
christkv
I mean it was fine but debugging it was a pain.
PeterStuer
My suggestion for best practice would be to have a feed endpoint that is as minimal and clean as possible, and provide a separate endpoint (can be the same base url but with a parameter) for human consumption. This ensures maximal compatibility and ease of consumption for both machine and human.
alifeee
I disagree, you can have an XML feed that does both
For example: https://andrewstiefel.com/feed.xml
PeterStuer
Yes, and if everything is properly configured that is great. Where is falls apart is when your site host/admin slaps Cloudflare protection on the domain and forgets to properly exclude the RSS pages, then programs can't fetch the feed without resorting to anti-bot evasion tech scraping, and are left with rendered HTML instead of the actual feed and have to deal with that.
Niche? It happens far more than you think.
yakshaving_jgt
This is brilliant. Thanks for sharing.
tyleo
I recently added RSS to my personal site (https://www.tyleo.com/)
Even with a custom implementation it’s a simple thing to support. You can find the whole spec here: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification
I’ll mention that there is a competing Atom specification which is compatible with all notable RSS readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard). The POV I’ve seen on HN favors Atom because it offers more functionality and is a clearer standard.
I want to voice my support for RSS though based on its simplicity. To me the feed doesn’t need a bunch of bells and whistles. I get analysis paralysis I get deciding which Atom features to support.
talideon
Use whatever elements you need from Atom. Atom is a functional superset of RSS 2.0, and if you're hit with analysis paralysis, using only the functionality that exists in RSS 2.0 in your Atom feed.
Atom exists because RSS is ambiguous and prone to breakage. The "bells and whistles" exist only because there were a lot of common extensions at the time that made sense to fold into Atom itself. Even if you use none of that and just the bits that overlap with RSS 2.0, your feed will be less likely to break in random feed readers, and that's enough reason to use Atom over RSS.
In this day and age, there's no good reason to use RSS over Atom beyond brand recognition.
(Yes, I'm still salty from the feed wars of the 2000s, but I still stand by all that I've written above.)
Macha
Also, approximately every feed reader supports both, so you only really need one (once upon a time, sites used to offer 2-3 feeds for different rss standards)
oneeyedpigeon
> You can find the whole spec here
There's also this version, which I believe is the original: https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html
It's far from perfect, but at least it's not infested with spammy advertising.
tyleo
Interesting. I wouldn’t shave advised a site with spammy ads but it looks like they are sufficiently caught in my ad block.
oneeyedpigeon
> Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with.
Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?
akvadrako
I use RSS heavily and I don't want an RSS button - what would that even do? RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader.
Whatever comes with the browser will not be as good as an extension from a company focused on that feature. For example I use https://www.inoreader.com/
oneeyedpigeon
> what would that even do?
Open the current page's RSS feed in my configured client. Failing that, copy its URL. Absolute minimum, it's a shortcut for having to view source, cmd-f, "RSS", cmd-c
alexchamberlain
I thought RSS readers were able to extract the URL themselves?
n144q
> RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader.
Who said that? It's meaningful if you read the feed across multiple devices, but lots of people read RSS on their computer only.
And even so browsers could provide RSS status synchronization. In fact almost every browser is already syncing your browsing history, bookmarks and settings if you are signed in.
> Whatever comes with the browser will not be as good as an extension...
not true.
kevincox
Firefox had this and it was great.
- It rendered the feed in a pretty way.
- If provided a little widget to open the feed in your feed reader (in practice it substituted the feed url into a URL template with popular readers by default and the option to add your own). This basically made it a one-click subscribe option.
fak3r
I agree, it's like robots.txt, you don't have a link to it from the webpage, but it's always (well it's supposed to be...) there. However I can see how normal folk wouldn't look for a feed like I would on a site: right click -> view source, control-f `rss` or `feed` to get the RSS url.
latexr
> I use RSS heavily and I don't want an RSS button
Then don’t click it?
> RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader.
Hard disagree.
Look, you do you, but your preferences aren’t universal.
PeterStuer
Easy notification that a feed is present and an option.
rplnt
Most people also decided it's a good idea to use browser from an advertising company. RSS is not good for business and it won't be provided.
beretguy
> Most people also decide
Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.
magpi3
I'm a teacher, and Google Classroom is ubiquitous in American schools. I was not tricked into using Chrome. It is without a doubt the best browser for Google Apps. Mozilla is laggy when editing documents and doesn't have an extension for offline editing.
Give Google credit: they have created a very useful ecosystem that has won people over in the marketplace. I NEVER thought anything would convince companies to move off of Microsoft Office, but Google is actually doing it (on a small scale at least).
rplnt
That's fair. Though if I replaced "people" with "HN users" it would still hold true, and I would consider this group to be very computer literate.
dist-epoch
When Chrome appeared HN was full of comments like "I switched all my family to Chrome, I recommend you do too".
_Algernon_
[flagged]
picafrost
This is a great initiative. Large tech companies, through hijacking our web experience and pursuing maximum scale, have normalized not being able to talk to a human being on the other side of a website/app/business.
In many situations you _can_ just send an email. Most often someone will read it and be very happy to help out if they can. Not always, but how much of a time and effort investment is an email really?
The best part is that a few kind words can absolutely make someone’s week.
brisky
Recently I have posted about RSDS (really simple decentralized syndication) - a protocol that tries to solve RSS content global discovery problem. Here is the link if you are interested to read more about it
rwky
This is interesting timing. I was asked at work to remove our RSS feed. Turns out no one but me knew what it was for they just saw the link in the site footer clicked it their browser showed a bunch of xml and they thought it was broken. I checked the logs turns out it gets 1000s of requests a day so I think that convinced them to keep it.
darekkay
> 1000s of requests a day
Some RSS readers are quite aggressive with their polling time. At the same time, a single request may serve thousands of users. However, you can check your logs and get the actual number of subscribers, at least for popular RSS readers: https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/
uzyn
RSS was a key protocol in syndication a widely free and open web before the domination of big tech/social media. We now have new internet generation that has never known RSS, relying largely on "the algorithm" of the big tech in content syndication.
Thank you for your effort in advocating RSS support. I hope RSS makes a major come back especially with the recent events.
palata
RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it).
I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.
entuno
Where I have RSS feeds from news sites, I usually skim down the list of titles, read an article (in my feed) if it's interesting, and then move on. I never visit their website, I don't see their adverts, their tracking scripts can't run, and I don't see or interact with their comments.
Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.
galleywest200
Le Monde will tell you that you only got 70% or so of the article in your feed and you need to go to the site to get the full article. Why don't more feeds do that? Actually, I am unsure if this is the feed itself or the fact that my RSS reader scrapes the sites too.
Some sites even have different RSS links for subscribers only that give a full feed.
oneeyedpigeon
> makes it much harder for them to monetise.
On the other hand, RSS definitely provides extra opportunities to monitise. Imagine your business provides a customisable "offers" feed so you can tell interested parties when a sale occurs, etc. Businesses should be falling over themselves to get that kind of engagement.
entuno
That just sounds like a mailing list, but without the ability to easily identify and track the individuals you're sending to.
openrisk
Not everyone is out to monetise (e.g public sector). And even if you are after monetisation, sending out a teaser snippet makes sense. The user can decide if they want to visit the site to read more, subscribe etc.
saint_yossarian
Nobody's forcing them to put the full text into the feed, for me the main benefit is not having to check the site manually.
entuno
As the consumer, that's a big benefit, and the main reason I use RSS.
But for the company running the website, the fact that you're no longer browsing to their site, being served adverts and tracking code, and seeing what's on their homepage is not a benefit
_heimdall
It comes down to a push versus pull architecture. RSS is pull based, you aren't notified when a feed is updated. Most people today want push based with a feed, with all the bells and whistles of a social feed that is updated instantly.
Federation comes in mainly because push based systems require a server managing who follows who, what is posted, and who to notify of updates. That's a lot of information for one central service to be responsible for, leading some to think its better to federate and trust a bunch of servers to host copies of some or all of that same data.
palata
Right, those are good points.
Still I can't help but to wonder whether those notifications are needed or not. Except for instant messaging, I generally don't want notifications. Like I don't need to be told that a new podcast is available, I'll see it next time I open the app.
I would like to at least have the choice to use RSS instead of having to go through a complicated federated system.
_heimdall
That's actually the main reason I still use RSS, I never found a need for most notifications and the complexity required to manage a push-based system aren't worth it to me.
Even if I'm using someone else's system, I just don't like the idea of giving them a reason/need to manage all that for me. RSS works fine 99% of the time.
account42
The push-based federated systems could still be built on top of RSS - have a pull-based feed as the source of truth and then optional push-based notifications for those that want more timely updates.
Ideally the push-based parts would be optional for both ends so you could host a static feed and still have people see those updates in their fancy fediverse apps, just not immediately when you post them.
Instead we have a completely different standard without a simple core that you can easily implement if you don't need all the bells and whistles.
domysee
> RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default.
The people creating websites often don't know that they're providing RSS feeds though, and never link to it.
To solve that I developed a tool that finds RSS feeds, even if RSS autodiscovery isn't implemented: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
sourcecodeplz
Because RSS is "too old"...
mongol
> Podcasts typically use RSS
I would even say that a podcast that does not support RSS is not a podcast, it is something else.
octochamp
I'd say that the only thing that reliably differentiates a _podcast_ from a _radio show_ is just that the podcast's method of delivery is RSS.
mongol
I don't think it is the only thing, but I agree that if the delivery method is not RSS, then it is something else.
madiele
I don't agree plenty of podcast are only on YouTube and twitch and never bother to setup a proper RSS feed, it was so annoying I developed a project to fix it for my self
frde_me
I would be curious why you think the idea of a podcast is coupled to a specific distribution technology
_heimdall
I'd be curious how you define podcasts and radio shows if you don't consider the distribution method. I don't see much light between the two other than the fact that a podcast show list is distributed via RSS.
mongol
Similar to why radio relates to electromagnetical transmissions in the radio spectrum. When it happens over internet, we don't call it radio, but possibly internet radio. RSS was the origin of podcasts, and if it does not involve RSS, it is not podcasts
rglullis
Because the original idea of what we call "podcasting" is rooted on RSS.
oneeyedpigeon
It goes much further than that: as the name suggests, it's coupled to a specific, obsolete brand of device.
palata
I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons.
I often receive answers, that surprised me! People saying "thank you for your suggestion, we will think about what we can do". None of them has every changed anything (I've been doing that for years). I don't even know if they did anything more than answering to the email.
n_plus_1_acc
Thus is a pet peeve of mine. Some companies send an multi-part E-Mail, just for the plain text part to be an empty string. Why bother? Pretty often the plain text is just the same html, so you get to read raw ugly html. Do people not test this?
rwky
I'm pretty sure they don't test them. I got a good one the other day from a well known institution. It was a bill and the html part said I owed N amount but the plain text said 0.00. By default I read the plain text part but when I saw it says 0.00 I thought it was odd so checked the html and there it was the correct amount!
n_plus_1_acc
That would imply developers/testers default to reading html-formatted text, which I honestly find hard to believe.
magpi3
Honest question: wouldn't it be simpler for text-only email readers to have plugins that runs HTML-only emails through a command that converts the HTML to text?
WhyNotHugo
They often do.
The problem is when the email explicitly includes a plain text part which is an empty string (or a generic one-sentence placeholder), and a separate html part. In these cases, the email client is right in defaulting to the plain text version.
palata
I don't think so. If you print the HTML, it's often full of " ", images and links unrelated to the actual content. It's hard to extract the meaningful part of that pile of stuff in a trustworthy way (and you wouldn't want to lose information).
Also many of those emails are autogenerated. So the template has to be done once, and that's it. And it should be trivial for whoever composes the HTML email to copy-paste the important part into a text-only version. Maybe it would actually help them think about what the important part actually is.
null
account42
Decoding and other entities should be part of converting the HTML to text. This is absolutely basic.
> So the template has to be done once, and that's it.
Except the world is not static and then when the HTML template gets updated they'll forget the text template and now you are missing vital information. Perhaps even legally required information like unsubscribe links.
Supporting text email only makes sense if that will actually be tested. Otherwise you are better of just rendering the HTML to text locally. That's going to lose you less information than a forgotten text mail template.
rednafi
Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.
geor9e
I don't mean to sound super callous - but what? I have so many questions, as someone who uses screen readers a lot. How are you browsing HN - it's not like websites maintain a separate .txt file for the blind. When you click "Read aloud" in a browser (or whatever the inbuilt screenreader calls it), thanks to the structure of the html DOM it can find the main txt. Since your email client can't open most emails, you still have no idea what people said to you? Coworkers ignored, bills unpaid. Instead, you've just been scolding the senders for years, and admit you've not had one single success from it? Even if everyone changed, and you got dual format back for every email, would the senders be manually creating both, or would they just let software convert one to the other? If software, then as a general computer science infra question, for scaling, should that computation be run on the 99% of cases that never use it, or should it just be run at the 1% of endpoints that use it? Are you on an ARPANET PDP-10? You're shifting the burden onto hundreds of non-technical email writers, shaming them for not catering to your niche desire for dual format emails (gmail doesn't even do this), when your email reader could just enter the 90s era. Hackers make computers do things despite it all. If you created that email client, there are many open source tools for you to do html2txt in one line. pandoc for one.
palata
> I don't mean to sound super callous
Right, let me answer in a tone that I find similar to yours.
> gmail doesn't even do this
How the hell did you test that? Gmail sends goddamn plaintext together with HTML.
If you can't be arsed to even check that, why should I even answer to the rest? You've completely ignored the security aspect of it, but I guess you have similarly "not super callous" opinions about that. Don't bother, I don't care to read them.
talideon
One thing though: is you're adding "RSS" support, use Atom for the feed, not actual RSS. Everything supports Atom that supports RSS, it's no harder to implement, less ambiguous, less prone to breaking, and has a richer vocabulary that doesn't require you resort to pulling in additional vocabularies via namespaces.
I cringe every time I see a feed that uses RSS and then pulls in Atom for some of elements. If you're going to do that, then just use Atom for the whole thing rather than building a frankenfeed.
molticrystal
Openrss.org is a non-profit that advocates for RSS adoption in addition to providing RSS feeds for websites that have none and cleainup/improving existing rss feeds.
Consider helping them out if this interests you, you might even be using a feed already as they have some custom feeds for github like for discussions and issues.
As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video.
The form is
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v...
where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering
and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension) "Find Feeds in Current Tab" function.
https://nodetics.com/feedbro/