The Rise and Demise of RSS

Same! I use Feedbin (https://feedbin.com/) to aggregate new posts. On desktop, I'll sync Feedbin up with NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/).

Substack and Medium both support RSS. You can just type /feed after the URL. e.g., tk.substack.com/feed and tk.medium.com/feed

For other newsletters, I use Kill the Newsletter (https://kill-the-newsletter.com/) to subscribe via RSS.

IMO some people use RSS as a proxy for the decline of 'blogosphere culture', which was already in decline when Google Reader shut down.

>Pretty much every website out there still has feeds.

Where is the RSS button on Facebook, Instagram, tiktok, twitter, or YouTube? Most websites might have feeds, but not the most used web sites.

It is not at all relevant any more. It will only be "revived" when top browsers and websites support it. The biggest website that I know that supports RSS is (old) reddit, and the biggest web browser that natively supports it is Internet Explorer which is definitely dead.

> I don't use social media, which I imagine wouldn't really be well served by RSS.

I don’t use Bluesky, but there are a few people on there I wish to see updates from (including one webcomic artist without a website) and I use Bluesky’s integrated RSS to do so. Same for Mastodon.

Some social media has RSS. Reddit, BlueSky, Mastodon, and YouTube all have it. X used to but it was dropped at some point. TikTok, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram don't.

I still use RSS, not for all content but for blogs that are now mostly Substack newsletters. Works fine, relatively noise-free.

HN has RSS feeds, I solely access it from there. I can skim titles much faster in the consistent UI of my feed reader then I could visiting the bespoke home pages of HN and many other sites.

When I used Google Reader, I didn't read everything together under one heading for that reason. I clicked on a feed, read the latest, and moved on to the next. So on a slower feed I might always read everything, while on a very busy one I might just occasionally check in or read a little while and then mark the rest read.

Now I use TT-RSS, which looks a lot like Google Reader did, but you run it on a local system. And I still read some feeds completely every day and let others pile up for weeks.

Hundreds sounds overwhelming! Did Google Reader let you look at a single feed at a time? I've never found readers that present a single "inbox" combining all my feeds to be usable.

Some of the feeds I subscribe to are effectively curated news from around the web, and I use filters to hide certain topics - e.g. from a newspaper I might filter the entire sport section.

What was needed is your own personal "algorithm" to provide you a feed of the things you'd subscribed to so you didn't have to read and check off every published thing. Imagine if you actually had control of this feed and could have the social aspect but tweaked to your preferences instead of somebody else's

In fact it's not such a bad idea to write this software now

Yet it survives to this day because of one reason - it's dead simple to serve and consume it. Chrome may need an extension to handle it properly (I use one on Firefox).

The singular challenge it faces is discoverability, as you point out. The above mentioned extension solves that for me. But if it were to be brought back as a default feature on browsers, RSS would be an instant hit again. There's always the opportunity to resurrect it.

You must be using different social media than me because it is all pushing celebrities and ads not friends and family that I want to see.

I much prefer being in control of my feed. In an ideal world there would probably be a mix of both (I have a list of people who I see every post and a list where I see popular or major items) but between the current options I far prefer something straightforward. Especially when the algorithm isn't fully tuned to optimize my interests.

The only ways I use social media would be better served by RSS. I follow specific businesses, organizations, and people, and want to see everything they post, in chronological order. I do my best to achieve this with social media, but RSS would be better.

For news: per-topic or per-region feeds would probably help. I think AP used to have those, maybe still does.

RSS feeds can drown you in quality content you're not interested in 75% of the time. Social Media can drown you in content that seems interesting, but is worthless 75% of the time. But that's my experience - yours could be different (I totally made up the numbers, but you get the idea).

On the contrary, IME social media sites seem to fight me on filtering what I get to see. They are happy to show me what they want me to see, but constantly thwart my attempts to decide for myself. How many plugins should I need to install to get FB or twitter to respect my choice to show the timeline chronologically.

In theory a market could arise around providing bespoke algorithmic feeds for one's RSS content, in some kind of adapter model, but I don't know enough about ML engineering to suggest whether that is at all economically feasible. Maybe?

An RSS client could do that, no?

Are you talking about something that can go out to any web site, grab the HTML, and turn it into a feed that's consistent with any other feed and not a big hairy mess of stuff that wasn't actually part of the content?

That doesn't sound trivial at all to me, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Agree! Just wrote basically this comment before I saw yours. Disappointingly even pay tools like Feedly have extremely poor RSS creators. All Feedly's features for the past few years seem to focus on some obscure niche of IT security threat awareness.

RSS is not an API, though. It's another content type like HTML, typically XML, but in a specific format that makes it easier for programs to consume.

Generating it is trivial in most web frameworks and CMSs, and sites that don't offer it either never bothered to set it up, or actively choose not to. This is hardly a fault of RSS itself.

What you suggest as a successor is a workaround for such sites, not something that should be the norm.