I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead.
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I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead. Literally every blogging platform has RSS/Atom support. Not just the "indie" ones, even the big corporate ones, like Substack and Medium. Every mastodon account has a built-in RSS feed. Every Bluesky account has a built-in RSS feed. Almost every major news site has an RSS or Atom feed. WordPress automatically produces RSS feeds (and WordPress powers almost half the Web).
RSS and Atom are almost certainly even more ubiquitous than they were in the 2000s, if only because the web has gotten so much bigger than it was back then.
There are more podcasts now than there ever have been, and each of these has an RSS feed.
Every fucking YouTube channel has an RSS feed. In 2005 there were probably fewer than 20 million blogs. Right now there are more than a hundred million YouTube channels.
RSS/Atom is bigger than ever.
@jonmsterling I love RSS. One of the (few) things I self-host is a feed reader, and pretty much every site I'm interested in paying attention to publishes a feed. I don't think it's going away.
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@jonmsterling I love RSS. One of the (few) things I self-host is a feed reader, and pretty much every site I'm interested in paying attention to publishes a feed. I don't think it's going away.
@edwinb Yeah. It's the main way that I read the Web… It's everything we like about the Web and none of the things we don't.
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I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead. Literally every blogging platform has RSS/Atom support. Not just the "indie" ones, even the big corporate ones, like Substack and Medium. Every mastodon account has a built-in RSS feed. Every Bluesky account has a built-in RSS feed. Almost every major news site has an RSS or Atom feed. WordPress automatically produces RSS feeds (and WordPress powers almost half the Web).
RSS and Atom are almost certainly even more ubiquitous than they were in the 2000s, if only because the web has gotten so much bigger than it was back then.
There are more podcasts now than there ever have been, and each of these has an RSS feed.
Every fucking YouTube channel has an RSS feed. In 2005 there were probably fewer than 20 million blogs. Right now there are more than a hundred million YouTube channels.
RSS/Atom is bigger than ever.
@jonmsterling I’ve never stopped using an aggregator since Bloglines!
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I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead. Literally every blogging platform has RSS/Atom support. Not just the "indie" ones, even the big corporate ones, like Substack and Medium. Every mastodon account has a built-in RSS feed. Every Bluesky account has a built-in RSS feed. Almost every major news site has an RSS or Atom feed. WordPress automatically produces RSS feeds (and WordPress powers almost half the Web).
RSS and Atom are almost certainly even more ubiquitous than they were in the 2000s, if only because the web has gotten so much bigger than it was back then.
There are more podcasts now than there ever have been, and each of these has an RSS feed.
Every fucking YouTube channel has an RSS feed. In 2005 there were probably fewer than 20 million blogs. Right now there are more than a hundred million YouTube channels.
RSS/Atom is bigger than ever.
@jonmsterling Where are you hearing this?
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I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead. Literally every blogging platform has RSS/Atom support. Not just the "indie" ones, even the big corporate ones, like Substack and Medium. Every mastodon account has a built-in RSS feed. Every Bluesky account has a built-in RSS feed. Almost every major news site has an RSS or Atom feed. WordPress automatically produces RSS feeds (and WordPress powers almost half the Web).
RSS and Atom are almost certainly even more ubiquitous than they were in the 2000s, if only because the web has gotten so much bigger than it was back then.
There are more podcasts now than there ever have been, and each of these has an RSS feed.
Every fucking YouTube channel has an RSS feed. In 2005 there were probably fewer than 20 million blogs. Right now there are more than a hundred million YouTube channels.
RSS/Atom is bigger than ever.
The only thing that died was Google Reader, and that didn't come close to "taking down RSS". Today there are more options for reading and authoring RSS/Atom feeds than there ever were in the past. We've never had this many good apps and services in the RSS/Atom ecosystem.
I think there were some really interesting aspects of Google Reader that I do regret losing. But it's just so weird to hear people say things like "Ahh yes, RSS, that was a very elegant thing, I'm nostalgic for the days when we had that..." It's like being nostalgic for the good old days when the sun used to go up in the morning and come down in the evening. It's still doing that!
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@jonmsterling Where are you hearing this?
@fahrni Pretty much every time RSS is mentioned on Hacker News or Lobste.rs or similar sites, this is the refrain...
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The only thing that died was Google Reader, and that didn't come close to "taking down RSS". Today there are more options for reading and authoring RSS/Atom feeds than there ever were in the past. We've never had this many good apps and services in the RSS/Atom ecosystem.
I think there were some really interesting aspects of Google Reader that I do regret losing. But it's just so weird to hear people say things like "Ahh yes, RSS, that was a very elegant thing, I'm nostalgic for the days when we had that..." It's like being nostalgic for the good old days when the sun used to go up in the morning and come down in the evening. It's still doing that!
The other thing that died, I guess, was the enthusiasm in the Big Web industry to jam RSS everywhere. There was a lot of weird hype back in those days, and for some reason people thought they could make money from it. Of course, the reality was the opposite: RSS empowers the *operators* of Internet-capable devices, rather than the parasites who try to extract money from the Web. That is why the weird hype died and megacorporations stopped making weird announcements about how they are transforming everything with RSS. But that stuff was never the soul of it, and it didn't matter at all.
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@fahrni Pretty much every time RSS is mentioned on Hacker News or Lobste.rs or similar sites, this is the refrain...
@jonmsterling As you mentioned in your first post, folks just don't understand that at this point RSS is woven into the fabric of the internet.
I feel like we're having a resurgence if anything!
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@stuebinm Tech people are so weird…
I notice this effect too when people go to war to make one library more popular than another or something… Like, who cares?? Why does it matter if more or fewer people are using this ???
Or if you build something they are like, “OK but how are you going to get everyone to use this?" as if that is a requirement ??
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@stuebinm Tech people are so weird…
I notice this effect too when people go to war to make one library more popular than another or something… Like, who cares?? Why does it matter if more or fewer people are using this ???
Or if you build something they are like, “OK but how are you going to get everyone to use this?" as if that is a requirement ??
@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?
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@stuebinm Tech people are so weird…
I notice this effect too when people go to war to make one library more popular than another or something… Like, who cares?? Why does it matter if more or fewer people are using this ???
Or if you build something they are like, “OK but how are you going to get everyone to use this?" as if that is a requirement ??
@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 > 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 …@stuebinm relentless is right.
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I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead. Literally every blogging platform has RSS/Atom support. Not just the "indie" ones, even the big corporate ones, like Substack and Medium. Every mastodon account has a built-in RSS feed. Every Bluesky account has a built-in RSS feed. Almost every major news site has an RSS or Atom feed. WordPress automatically produces RSS feeds (and WordPress powers almost half the Web).
RSS and Atom are almost certainly even more ubiquitous than they were in the 2000s, if only because the web has gotten so much bigger than it was back then.
There are more podcasts now than there ever have been, and each of these has an RSS feed.
Every fucking YouTube channel has an RSS feed. In 2005 there were probably fewer than 20 million blogs. Right now there are more than a hundred million YouTube channels.
RSS/Atom is bigger than ever.
@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
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@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 …@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?
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@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…
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I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead. Literally every blogging platform has RSS/Atom support. Not just the "indie" ones, even the big corporate ones, like Substack and Medium. Every mastodon account has a built-in RSS feed. Every Bluesky account has a built-in RSS feed. Almost every major news site has an RSS or Atom feed. WordPress automatically produces RSS feeds (and WordPress powers almost half the Web).
RSS and Atom are almost certainly even more ubiquitous than they were in the 2000s, if only because the web has gotten so much bigger than it was back then.
There are more podcasts now than there ever have been, and each of these has an RSS feed.
Every fucking YouTube channel has an RSS feed. In 2005 there were probably fewer than 20 million blogs. Right now there are more than a hundred million YouTube channels.
RSS/Atom is bigger than ever.
@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!
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@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…
@jonmsterling @stuebinm OSS as unpaid internship, compensated in “exposure”. Is it worth pursuing? If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
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@jonmsterling I love RSS. One of the (few) things I self-host is a feed reader, and pretty much every site I'm interested in paying attention to publishes a feed. I don't think it's going away.
@edwinb what are you using? I've been meaning to shift away from feedly.
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@edwinb what are you using? I've been meaning to shift away from feedly.
@dunhamsteve I'm using miniflux which was reasonably painless to install
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I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead. Literally every blogging platform has RSS/Atom support. Not just the "indie" ones, even the big corporate ones, like Substack and Medium. Every mastodon account has a built-in RSS feed. Every Bluesky account has a built-in RSS feed. Almost every major news site has an RSS or Atom feed. WordPress automatically produces RSS feeds (and WordPress powers almost half the Web).
RSS and Atom are almost certainly even more ubiquitous than they were in the 2000s, if only because the web has gotten so much bigger than it was back then.
There are more podcasts now than there ever have been, and each of these has an RSS feed.
Every fucking YouTube channel has an RSS feed. In 2005 there were probably fewer than 20 million blogs. Right now there are more than a hundred million YouTube channels.
RSS/Atom is bigger than ever.
@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.
