I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead.

[jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz]

@stuebinm Re: RSS specifically, your point is very salient. People will bring up how the big web browsers used to have built-in RSS features and now they don't, so RSS is dead. But the thing that's very strange is, anyone who was around in those days knows that the built-in RSS features available in old browsers totally sucked ??? And I don’t think anyone used them?

[stuebinm@pleroma.stuebinm.eu]

@jonmsterling > as if that is a requirement ??

there does seem to be some core aspect of tech-bro-ism that's something like, "everything is a startup, even when it isn't", and it gets relentlessly applied to open source projects. it's very strange, and exhausting at times …

[jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz]

@stuebinm relentless is right.

[db@typo.social]

@jonmsterling yes! maybe it’s attentional bias but it feels like I’ve read one variation or another of this idea daily these past few weeks, very aggravating

[jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz]

@stuebinm And l find the GitHub stars thing so ???? weird ????. There’s literally marketing campaigns to get stars for infrastructure projects. These aren’t even SaaS or whatever. Marketing for (checks notes) an ORM library or whatever.

Like, aren’t we all about to stop using GitHub anyway ?? What are you going to do with your stars then? Can you eat them? Can you use them to pay your employees?

[jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz]

@stuebinm yeah but what I can’t figure out is, what is the point of SEO for an open source library?? its not like this is an actual customer funnel in almost any cases except a few…

[dlzv@mathstodon.xyz]

@jonmsterling RSS is the main way I find content to read on the internet. Mastodon comes a very distant second. I have never found it difficult to find RSS feeds on blogs or websites that interest me, and for the few missing I usually convert their email newsletter to an RSS feed through https://kill-the-newsletter.com/, which works extremely well.

I agree with you that RSS seems very alive and well!

[cdrichards@mathstodon.xyz]

@jonmsterling @stuebinm OSS as unpaid internship, compensated in “exposure”. Is it worth pursuing? If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

[dunhamsteve@mathstodon.xyz]

@edwinb what are you using? I've been meaning to shift away from feedly.

[edwinb@types.pl]

@dunhamsteve I'm using miniflux which was reasonably painless to install

[kitsuwhooa@fedi.tasossah.com]

@jonmsterling While I do mostly agree, as an avid RSS/Atom user, it does seem like there is little care put into it these days. At the very least, it has been enshittified to an extent.

Almost every night like clockwork, the YouTube feeds go down and I pray they come back up again and that this isn't the last time someone bothered to fix whatever went wrong with them. YouTube has 0 reason to keep them up.

Many other websites only show partial content in a feed. Whether it's the first paragraph of an article, or a comic strip that is too long and got abruptly cut off without you realising it, it's to make you click "view more" so that they get the sweet web tracking revenue. And as far as I know I haven't found anyone offering a way to pay to get full content in your reader.

Finally, Mozilla pretty much killed the only way you had to detect feeds in pages. There used to be a tab in the Ctrl+I menu in Firefox that'd show you all the feeds in a page. Now you have to resort to something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/boring-rss/

It's kinda difficult to view this as major players caring about it. If anything, it mostly exists because someone added it as a feature at some point and it never broke. In addition, I don't think most Wordpress site owners even know what RSS is or that they even provide it. I had to explicitly email someone because their feeds broke and they had no idea it was a thing in the first place.

Still, even as a niche, I am really glad it exists.

[naught101@mastodon.social]

@jonmsterling the one-ubiquitous RSS buttons disappeared, it's far less obvious how to use it for mast people. The tech might still be there, but the affordances collapsed.

[micahilbery@mstdn.social]

@jonmsterling while I see RSS feeds just as prevalent, unfortunately I find them less useful than they used to be as a lot of feeds are just a link back to the site with nothing but a headline and a "read it on the site" and/or "sign up for our newsletter". I want RSS to be my primary way to read the web but more and more feeds are basically useless. To be clear I don't think RSS is dead, but you can see how the ad funded web has hurt it's usefulness.

[rockario@kind.social]

@jonmsterling Tumblr has RSS feeds!

[canageek@wandering.shop]

@jonmsterling Every tumblr has one, every Reddit user has one for their posts, and every subreddit has one for all posts

[eldaking@weirder.earth]

@jonmsterling For me, the one thing that died was Firefox' "live feeds" feature. I still miss it, there isn't really any replacement that works quite the same.

I actually never heard of Google Reader while it was alive.

[steeph@queerchen.de]

@jonmsterling YT still has RSS feeds? Mine stopped working when Twitter still had RSS feeds. I remember switching RSS generating services every time my current one stopped working for YT channels until I gave up. Maybe I just didn't know the right URL.

[mattmaison@mastodon.world]

@steeph

Can confirm YouTube has them. Feedly finds them automatically with just the link to the channel also. Very easy.

[evert@indieweb.social]

@jonmsterling There's a huge difference between the kind of popularity during the height of the 'blogosphere' and today. Lots of things ship RSS but that's (thankfully) because it's enabled by default. It's not even discoverable anymore by browsers by default unless publishers take the time to add a button.

I think what people are lamenting is how front and center self-publishing and consumption of RSS was by a more general audience, not the fact that wordpress ships an Atom feed by default.

[admiralmemo@mastodon.social]

@jonmsterling I'm currently looking up some RSS-to-Mastodon converters so I can pull my Tumblr feed onto my Mastodon feed.