My take on the RSS-renaissance chestnut: The original sin is the name. Only clueless nerds could come up with such a soporific, opaque, geeky moniker as "RSS". It should have been called "Webfeed". Then there would be no explaining to do.
Perhaps if the product is compelling enough, the name doesnât matter - and conversely, if the product is borderline, it had better have a great name.
Chat gpt is a great name though â you âchatâ with the âGPTâ so its self informing (even if you dont know what a GPT is), itâs 4 syllables that roll off the tongue well together.
RSS, has no vowels, no information, and looks like an alphabet term you might see at the doctorâs office or in an HR onboarding form at a corpo.
I think web feed is a good name, though I also think invoking "Web" might put off some users. There are a few things that are unknown to new users:
1. How do you subscribe?
2. How do you post your own?
3. Do I need a browser to read feeds?
4. Can I view my feed from any device?
The current status quo for web feeds is very unfriendly to new users. If you click on an rss icon or an rss feed link, it takes you to a white page with a bunch of text that you don't understand. It just makes you think you're not supposed to be here, so you close the tab and leave.
Many feed readers are old and look dated. The UI can often be confused for an email client. And many of these readers don't support synchronizing feeds with different devices.
The number of people who will recognize that will only go down over time. I'm not exactly ancient (at least outside tech) at 32 but have no recollection of ever seeing that icon or confidence that I'd recognize it, which I'd argue puts a rough lower bound on how old someone can be while considering it "well-known". Maybe if people only a few years older than me consistently recognize it then my instinct here is wrong, but I'm skeptical that there are enough people who consider this well-known for the supposed renaissance to take place purely from that.
(It's possible I'm entirely missing that this was intended in sarcasm, but it at least seems like it's was intended seriously to me)
You don't need to explain RSS any more than you need to explain SMTP or HTTP. A product that uses RSS could gain traction without the user ever knowing it uses RSS. Products like Google Reader prove that is possible.
Feedly does this. Just drop the URL of whatever source you want to follow and it figures out the feed for it behind the scenes. For popular sources, you don't even need the URL, just type in "Ars Technica" or whatever and it does the right thing.
> If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
Here's the thing, one should not need to explain it no mire. Devices or applications accessing content with an RSS option should present it to the end user through a convenient interface.
There is an economy here that the effort investment is paid with a reward of quality. Many teens feel the discomfort of being locked into platform attention farms and are stoic about it. They deserve the opportunity of being told other options exist.
Are you a teen or you speak on behalf of the whole world? My impression of said demographic is totally different, though. And I would not speak for them just like that, as they be very diverse depending on where you find them.
It just needs to be described in a more concrete way to people. Such as, You know how the podcasts you listen to keep getting updated on your phone? That's RSS. Imagine if other things you liked turned up when they were new and you had a lot of control over that process.
It's been the absolute worst thing for 10+ years that some podcasts have adverts, even their own website, but somehow fail to provide the RSS feed link anywhere - only app specific links for the biggest 2.
You also have people producing "podcasts" that only exist on youtube.
> With RSS, you subscribe directly to websites, blogs, or news outlets, meaning there is no middleman algorithm deciding what you see.
This enters a failure mode very soon, especially because most people using RSS-like technologies would typically subscribe to more sources than they can typically read through. Like it or not, _the algorithm_ does serve the purpose in prioritizing and discovery. The trouble, IMO, is with the objectives for these recommendation and ranking algorithms.
A middleman/aggregator who is paid by subscribers would be incentivized for the users, a marketplace-like aggregator would always have trade-offs.
Algorithms other than FIFO are fine when they serve you. Way back when I had a mail reader (Gnus) that used a Bayesian classifier to predict which emails I might especially want to read, based on last reading experiences. That was nifty! An RSS reader could do the same, on my own machine, based on my own preferences and not some marketerâs. Iâd like that an awful lot.
You sort of can with very little work. When I used RSS more I had a "primary" folder and a number of secondary folders. I always looked at the primary; I'd dip into various secondaries when I had the time.
I do sort of agree with the general premise. The sort of social media that sort of replaced RSS is largely dead.
This is already a problem with things like Mastodon - as soon as you subscribe to some more "spammy" accounts such as news outlets, all the other content is drowned out.
So yes, having kind of re-ranking _algorithm_ can be a good thing, whether we like it or not.
Semi-Popular youtube channels regularly get offers from someone who wants to buy their channel. There are people and companies that put up good/useful content for a while to get subscribers and then shift focus. There have been several cases where someone has lost control of their system/password because of a "hack". Likely there are more that I'm not aware of.
Didn't Bluesky solve this problem already by allowing anyone to publish their own algorithms?
I feel like user generated sorting algorithms would be a great fit for RSS. Power users would get an ability to tweak their feeds to their liking, while other users would have a lot to choose from
Considering the topic of this article I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, but to be honest - if you're not writing your articles with LLMs, you should strongly consider changing your writing style. I peeked some of your other articles, like the one about half your readers being bots, and it reads straight out of ChatGPT. I trust given your framing in this article that you know that's not a good thing.
I've been using one of the numerous "RSS to Email" programs for the past 20 years.
To me that's peak usability, I can use my mail workflow to have cross-device state, I can use my mail clients tagging and spam support to filter, and I have a reasonably good searching facility too.
Some sites only include "teasers" rather than full posts, but they're a minority.
theoldreader was built to be as close as possible to Google Reader. And from an interface PoV it's really close. Problem is that without critical mass you can't do the social features.
We used to live counting the days in awe for the surprisingly new Google invention or release.
Then, one by one, Google started killing more services than it was announcing (Wave, News, +, etc), and enshittifying with spyware those that were still up
I've been using Feedly ever since the death of Google Reader. If you ignore all the ai bullshit it's simple to use and I've had no issues with cross-device sync.
If you count Podcasts as RSS then surely RSS is more popular than ever. I can imagine that if Apple bundled a hypertext version of the Podcasts app it would be similarly popular. But they won't because it would compete with their own News+ subscriptions.
Iâve left social networks behind and returned to RSS, and I couldn't be happier. Iâm using Delta Chat as an interface with FeedsBot, so the whole setup feels just like Telegram channels, but without Pavel Durov reading everything. Itâs been a great experience so far.
I self host miniflux. Elfeed in Emacs, read you on android. The read status syncs between devices and clients.
I have miniflux set up so it integrates with instapaper so I get interesting articles on my kindle. And saving an article will send it to karakeep automatically for permanent storage! (image, video, screen shots and text storage).
This just wonât work. If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with âalgorithmâs. It will be the same thing, just the discovery and content separated.
RSS appears good now only because itâs not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I donât use RSS, so I donât really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
RSS is just one element of the ecosystem - the input.
I envision that the filtering mechanism CAN use any rules - hand-written, heuristics, old-school machine learning, LLMs. Just with a key difference - you are the one controlling it. No hidden tricks to make you "engaged" (read: addicted) or "sold".
If you feel it is too much politics, you reduce it. If too little - add. If you want less clickbaits and intellectual fast food, you filter it. Etc, etc.
> itâs not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with
About that, I was sad to see that TDMRep [1] doesn't provide a way to signal reservation for RSS feed, so it has to be done at the HTTP level, otherwise the same content delivered in RSS feed can be legitimately scrapped and mined even if the author opted-out using an HTML meta tag on the website.
> If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with âalgorithmâs.
So? If plain RSS exists, then you can still consume it the way you want.
I'd like to remind that when RSS was really popular we had "planet" aggregators everywhere, where someone interested in particular topic bundled posts from multiple people.
RSS exists but those authors who don't publish through it probably wouldn't care about it either. Like, if by magic, RSS became popular as a technology, they would publish through it, but then there would be demand for discoverability and algo feeds would win the engagement race and then RSS is in the background and th platform would naturally decide to just focus on the algo and drop RSS and the regular users wouldn't care and authors would only care what regular users care about. Except for the tiny techie bubble.
It's not a technical problem. Less effort will always be more popular and drown out more effort in the mainstream.
Imagine if you could order completely free McDonald's food to your doorstep anytime and could also choose to cook your meals at home. Guess what portion of people would choose which option.
You don't need "that technology to become popular" to make it even more popular. It already was popular enough and it already worked.
Your whole comment makes no sense to me. Completely confusing.
Who are you arguing with? Why RSS has to compete with anything? Why do you even refer to it as "technology" - it's a text file people used to edit by hand in notepad. And maybe automate that with a script in their html editor.
It was popular, it's a fact. It was and is included in multiple blogging platforms. It was used by techies. It was used by non-techies. Learning curve was non existent and it was trivial to use on both ends.
What created friction was: killing the biggest RSS reader service that was free for all and killing very good support in browsers.
It used to be trivial - every browser was showing an orange button if site had rss. You could click it. You could add the feed to browser bookmark bar. It would display feed as nice bookmarks, downloading it live. This is what we lost - and we lost it because big companies wanted us to be entrenched in their socials. The rest was literally trivial.
Blogs kinda dwindled in importance as a whole. Substack brought it back to a degree, through email distribution, which is a more familiar technology to regular people compared to RSS. But even Substack is becoming more of an algo feed based social site nowadays.
You are talking about bookmarks and stuff but that's not how regular people use the internet. They open a handful of social media apps and scroll whatever is shown to them.
I am more optimistic, good blogs will continue being there, and crap ones are no new invention or menace, be it LLM slop or Markov chain SEO babble content of 10 years ago.
I came here via NetNewsWire. iCloud sync is flakey but that's the only quibble. Oh, and you can't yet export starred articles unless you fiddle with SQL.
the obvious problem with replacing the algorithm is that people actually crave that shit, after all there have been tens of thousands of highly trained engineers making it as addictive as possible. So, no chance.
recently I had a thought that the AI revolution will actually be a good thing for the web.
it kills SEO advertising. someone writing an article for the purpose of ranking high and making money off of clicks doesnt get clicks anymore because of AI summaries.
direct content-to-ad-revenue is dead. Either you're a hobbyist and write for the heck of it - so your writing will be honest and better quality. Or, you're a product vendor and your writing is documentation meant to be found by AI summaries, again - that's honest.
If the AI people win, there will be no human audience for your writing. I don't think people will write simply to benefit someone else's subscription-funded service.
I like RSS and I use it, but this sounds like wishful thinking. Even the amount of human produced content is just too big for one to be their own curator. We have those few authors or sites we keep up, but other than that we must rely on external help, such as HN or an agent.
The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays. They don't visit the site itself, where the work origins from, so they also can't give back / support the source.
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
> The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays.
I truly do not believe this is the same type of topic. People visit websites and RSS feeds and writers they care about, and don't ask LLMs for this content. They ask LLMs for content that they don't care about those elements for.
If I want to know what Gruber thinks about iPhone whatever, I'm just going to check Daring Fireball. I'm not going to ask Claude what Gruber thinks.
Then charge for it. I happily pay for high quality services. I pay for Jetbrains editors, I pay for my email, I pay for LLM tokens, and I pay for Patreon subscriptions. Stop supporting content with advertising.
Google Reader died and took with it the social graph that made RSS useful. You didn't just subscribe to feeds; you saw what your network was reading and sharing. That discovery mechanism is what Twitter/X replaced, not the reading itself.
The problem with RSS today: you have to already know what you want to follow. There's no equivalent of "people like you are reading this." Until someone solves discovery for RSS, it'll stay a power-user tool.
The irony is that LLMs could actually solve this â a model that knows your reading history and surfaces relevant feeds you haven't found yet. That's the product that could bring RSS back to the mainstream.
Can't wait to try some of the readers in this thread. I landed on inoreader not long after the Google reader died. The old reader wasn't doing what I needed back then. I've probably been using this a little too long without checking for what else is out there.
i think it is more than just a renaissance of rss...the entire blogosphere thing from 20 years ago can be very interesting to revive. back then blogs were curated travel logs from real people with specific interest and real domain knowledge.
I built lurkkit for this reason, so that you can build your own feeds combining reddit, substack, youtube. The algos are clearly out of control and making the experience worse. Especially Substack has gone full slop, there isn't even a feed for the posts themselves.
thanks appreciate it! you can boost sources and categories (youtube and substack have a boost by default since they're published less frequently than reddit posts), create priority views, filters etc.
planning to set up 'topics' which can be a feed you can subscribe to that combine different source types, that are tagged and associated to the topic based on previous content.
RSS is all well and good, but a serious question. What will prevent AI content from showing up in your RSS Feed ? If RSS becomes popular again, I fully believe AI will start appearing there too.
Just make valid robots.txt and sitemap.xml, please, so I can crawl and update mirrors of the sites I am interested in with least amount of impact on the site.
Not sure if I'm missing something, but for AI slop to get into your RSS feed, you have to be following something with slop which can easily be unfollowed; this is unlike algorithmically driven recommendations where there is no direct filter from your end.
I think youâd just have to unfollow sources that publish AI slop. But that doesnât seem too difficult with RSS, I canât think of any source that sometimes publishes AI slop and sometimes I want to read their stuff. I guess if you tried to put an X feed in there, but I doubt you can do that now anyway.
when google reader died, I jumped to TheOldReader. it was great for a long time but has been having challenges lately and I jumped to the Vienna app on macos.
Very good article. I am not referring to the RSS part.
Interesting thing is, much of what AI is now regurgitating is human output, accumulated over the years. Model training dataset. Stuff like Reddit posts, even posts here?
If, say, AI output becomes THE 99% over the next few years, we will enter the era of incestuous inbreeding within AI -when it simply regurgitates its own output.
do you have any good sources for rss material? i self host miniflux but the difficult part is to find someting good and interesting. Any field is ok for me, i will then decide what to keep.
Thanks
Social media will be dead because it will be replaced by Artificial Media, which will be the most potent and powerful of all media types, people will struggle to look away.
Sick and tired to be forced to see content from creators that I did't choose to follow, I switched to RSS as an aggregator and doom scrolling is suddenly interesting again.
I don't quite use "social media" per se, unless of course hackernews is part of it (which, kind of, is ... anything we can use other people can read or relate to, is kind of social, by definition. I think Facebook etc... tried to claim ownership over the term "social media", and I disagree with this notion). Having said that, I don't use or need RSS, so I don't think there will be a renaissance for RSS for most people.
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
This, at best bullet talking points were fed to the prompt and given and output length restriction, it's padded to fit the space diluting the message to the point only an LLM can
I thought so too, but it's almost too insane to me to believe the author would use generative AI to talk about the death of social media due to the flood of slop from the very same generative AI. But only almost.
Someone said, âif you have to explain it, then youâve already failedâ. Thatâs basically the problem in a nutshell. It would be great to see someone build a service based on an open standard, but then you have no moat. Anyone else can come along and build the same service using the same format.
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they donât. Thatâs why RSS doesnât get pushed or used more often.
Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.
I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.
RSS is dead because itâs backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago.
We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldnât need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data.
I donât get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide whatâs in the feed, not them.
> an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed.
An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc)
I mean that your RSS feed can basically be "Go to https://techcrunch.com/latest/ and use each non-video item as a feed item" or "Go to x.com/some_user and make each tweet a feed item", and the LLM can do a perfect extraction of links from html response blobs.
The only thing you have to do is ensure it can reliably get the response html. Maybe MCP browser + proxy or mirror to seem more human.
I built this for myself. The idea is that each feed is a url + title + a prompt to tell the LLM how to extract the links you want so that it generalizes over all websites.
And each feed item is a canonicalized url + title + a local copy of the content at that url which is an improvement over RSS since so many RSS feeds don't even contain the content.
I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?
Every article that Iâve read in the last 5 years about the RSS revival has a big section explaining what is RSS.
And thatâs the answer about RSS renaissance. If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
My take on the RSS-renaissance chestnut: The original sin is the name. Only clueless nerds could come up with such a soporific, opaque, geeky moniker as "RSS". It should have been called "Webfeed". Then there would be no explaining to do.
And at the same time, the fastest growing consumer product of all time is called âChatGPTâ.
Perhaps if the product is compelling enough, the name doesnât matter - and conversely, if the product is borderline, it had better have a great name.
Chat gpt is a great name though â you âchatâ with the âGPTâ so its self informing (even if you dont know what a GPT is), itâs 4 syllables that roll off the tongue well together.
RSS, has no vowels, no information, and looks like an alphabet term you might see at the doctorâs office or in an HR onboarding form at a corpo.
Randos are just calling it "Chat" now.
"I'll ask Chat about x!"
Itâs the new âI looked it up on wikiâ.
This is a great point. Maybe we can start now?
Apparently is is called web feed, although I never have heard this until I searched off the back of your comment[0].
Apparently, web feed also encompasses Atom and JSON feed as well as RSS, which is probably more in the spirit of how people actually say "RSS".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
I think web feed is a good name, though I also think invoking "Web" might put off some users. There are a few things that are unknown to new users:
1. How do you subscribe? 2. How do you post your own? 3. Do I need a browser to read feeds? 4. Can I view my feed from any device?
The current status quo for web feeds is very unfriendly to new users. If you click on an rss icon or an rss feed link, it takes you to a white page with a bunch of text that you don't understand. It just makes you think you're not supposed to be here, so you close the tab and leave.
Many feed readers are old and look dated. The UI can often be confused for an email client. And many of these readers don't support synchronizing feeds with different devices.
Sure, naming is important, but the RSS icon was well known. It was part of the Firefox address bar.
The number of people who will recognize that will only go down over time. I'm not exactly ancient (at least outside tech) at 32 but have no recollection of ever seeing that icon or confidence that I'd recognize it, which I'd argue puts a rough lower bound on how old someone can be while considering it "well-known". Maybe if people only a few years older than me consistently recognize it then my instinct here is wrong, but I'm skeptical that there are enough people who consider this well-known for the supposed renaissance to take place purely from that.
(It's possible I'm entirely missing that this was intended in sarcasm, but it at least seems like it's was intended seriously to me)
It's simple. It stands for Radically Syndicated Seeds... right?
You don't need to explain RSS any more than you need to explain SMTP or HTTP. A product that uses RSS could gain traction without the user ever knowing it uses RSS. Products like Google Reader prove that is possible.
Feedly does this. Just drop the URL of whatever source you want to follow and it figures out the feed for it behind the scenes. For popular sources, you don't even need the URL, just type in "Ars Technica" or whatever and it does the right thing.
> If you have to explain it, there is zero chance of massive adoption.
Here's the thing, one should not need to explain it no mire. Devices or applications accessing content with an RSS option should present it to the end user through a convenient interface.
So how did it manage to gain wide adoption originally?
There is an economy here that the effort investment is paid with a reward of quality. Many teens feel the discomfort of being locked into platform attention farms and are stoic about it. They deserve the opportunity of being told other options exist.
Are you a teen or you speak on behalf of the whole world? My impression of said demographic is totally different, though. And I would not speak for them just like that, as they be very diverse depending on where you find them.
I've been calling it 'Really Social Sites' for a long time. ;)
It just needs to be described in a more concrete way to people. Such as, You know how the podcasts you listen to keep getting updated on your phone? That's RSS. Imagine if other things you liked turned up when they were new and you had a lot of control over that process.
Most non-tech people I know listen to podcasts through Spotify and some think Spotify invented them.
Looking how podcasts advertise themselves, those who do use RSS advertise "Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app" here.
It's been the absolute worst thing for 10+ years that some podcasts have adverts, even their own website, but somehow fail to provide the RSS feed link anywhere - only app specific links for the biggest 2.
You also have people producing "podcasts" that only exist on youtube.
I'm happily using RSS despite you needing an explanation. Funny how that works.
> With RSS, you subscribe directly to websites, blogs, or news outlets, meaning there is no middleman algorithm deciding what you see.
This enters a failure mode very soon, especially because most people using RSS-like technologies would typically subscribe to more sources than they can typically read through. Like it or not, _the algorithm_ does serve the purpose in prioritizing and discovery. The trouble, IMO, is with the objectives for these recommendation and ranking algorithms.
A middleman/aggregator who is paid by subscribers would be incentivized for the users, a marketplace-like aggregator would always have trade-offs.
Algorithms other than FIFO are fine when they serve you. Way back when I had a mail reader (Gnus) that used a Bayesian classifier to predict which emails I might especially want to read, based on last reading experiences. That was nifty! An RSS reader could do the same, on my own machine, based on my own preferences and not some marketerâs. Iâd like that an awful lot.
You sort of can with very little work. When I used RSS more I had a "primary" folder and a number of secondary folders. I always looked at the primary; I'd dip into various secondaries when I had the time.
I do sort of agree with the general premise. The sort of social media that sort of replaced RSS is largely dead.
Wouldn't a personalized RSS algo be a great use case for a simple LLM?
This is already a problem with things like Mastodon - as soon as you subscribe to some more "spammy" accounts such as news outlets, all the other content is drowned out.
So yes, having kind of re-ranking _algorithm_ can be a good thing, whether we like it or not.
I've been thinking about this, and I actually think these days this might be a feature not a bug.
Given the amount of AI generated content out there, I am increasingly searching for ways to keep track of the sources I DO trust to be human-made.
RSS would completely solve that problem in a way that algorithms just reintroduce, because it forces you to tailor the content yourself.
Semi-Popular youtube channels regularly get offers from someone who wants to buy their channel. There are people and companies that put up good/useful content for a while to get subscribers and then shift focus. There have been several cases where someone has lost control of their system/password because of a "hack". Likely there are more that I'm not aware of.
RSS protects against none of these.
Didn't Bluesky solve this problem already by allowing anyone to publish their own algorithms?
I feel like user generated sorting algorithms would be a great fit for RSS. Power users would get an ability to tweak their feeds to their liking, while other users would have a lot to choose from
Considering the topic of this article I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, but to be honest - if you're not writing your articles with LLMs, you should strongly consider changing your writing style. I peeked some of your other articles, like the one about half your readers being bots, and it reads straight out of ChatGPT. I trust given your framing in this article that you know that's not a good thing.
I still mourn the loss of Google Reader.
There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.
I've been using one of the numerous "RSS to Email" programs for the past 20 years.
To me that's peak usability, I can use my mail workflow to have cross-device state, I can use my mail clients tagging and spam support to filter, and I have a reasonably good searching facility too.
Some sites only include "teasers" rather than full posts, but they're a minority.
Iâve setup a local RSSBridge instance and use its âCSS Selector Feed Expanderâ module to expand these feeds into full feeds.
They also have a public instance.
https://rss-bridge.org/
Self plug: I use matcha[0] which produces markdowns which with icloud (or any other file sync service) automatically sync cross devices.
https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
Been happy with Feedly for a long time across many devices.
Self-hosted is its own can of worms. Google Reader was not self-hosted either.
I don't think you could self-host Google Reader, so it sort of feels like these two sentences don't hang together.
It's more linked to there not being any / many high quality RSS reader applications, so the comment is talking about a feature, so it does make sense.
theoldreader was built to be as close as possible to Google Reader. And from an interface PoV it's really close. Problem is that without critical mass you can't do the social features.
Self-hosted FreshRSS + NetNewsWire, works like a charm.
Why do you add FreshRSS in instead of subscribing directly in NNW? (Real question, not leading.) What am I missing by not doing that?
> cross-device sync
FreshRSS acts first as your central backend to manage your subscriptions, refresh and read status.
You can use its web UI to act on it, or you can use any reader app you want (NNW, Reeder...)
miniflux is pretty good. news.mystuff.net is pretty sweet.
We used to live counting the days in awe for the surprisingly new Google invention or release.
Then, one by one, Google started killing more services than it was announcing (Wave, News, +, etc), and enshittifying with spyware those that were still up
I've been using Feedly ever since the death of Google Reader. If you ignore all the ai bullshit it's simple to use and I've had no issues with cross-device sync.
If you count Podcasts as RSS then surely RSS is more popular than ever. I can imagine that if Apple bundled a hypertext version of the Podcasts app it would be similarly popular. But they won't because it would compete with their own News+ subscriptions.
MacOS mail used to have RSS integration
Iâve left social networks behind and returned to RSS, and I couldn't be happier. Iâm using Delta Chat as an interface with FeedsBot, so the whole setup feels just like Telegram channels, but without Pavel Durov reading everything. Itâs been a great experience so far.
I'm using KDE Akregator. It's nice to have a consistant interface for checking the headlines, and only opening web pages to give them a closer look.
I self host miniflux. Elfeed in Emacs, read you on android. The read status syncs between devices and clients.
I have miniflux set up so it integrates with instapaper so I get interesting articles on my kindle. And saving an article will send it to karakeep automatically for permanent storage! (image, video, screen shots and text storage).
Pretty pretty pretty good.
I'm also self hosting miniflux, along with Reactflux to get a nice webui. I use Read You on android, and then Reactflux in a browser anywhere else.
I'll have to check out karakeep. I'm running linkwarden right now but it's not really doing it for me.
I never realized, but the appeal of RSS in one way or another was always intentional curation.
In a world where every site with a feed is algorithm-driven makes sense that RSS would eventually come back around.
Didnât/doesnt have to be RSS, Iâm no devotee to it. But some standard that lets you import things into your own âfeedâ
This just wonât work. If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with âalgorithmâs. It will be the same thing, just the discovery and content separated.
RSS appears good now only because itâs not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with. I donât use RSS, so I donât really mind, but those who use RSS are making disservice to its _purity_ by trying to popularize it.
RSS is just one element of the ecosystem - the input.
I envision that the filtering mechanism CAN use any rules - hand-written, heuristics, old-school machine learning, LLMs. Just with a key difference - you are the one controlling it. No hidden tricks to make you "engaged" (read: addicted) or "sold".
If you feel it is too much politics, you reduce it. If too little - add. If you want less clickbaits and intellectual fast food, you filter it. Etc, etc.
> itâs not popular enough for LLMs to meddle with
About that, I was sad to see that TDMRep [1] doesn't provide a way to signal reservation for RSS feed, so it has to be done at the HTTP level, otherwise the same content delivered in RSS feed can be legitimately scrapped and mined even if the author opted-out using an HTML meta tag on the website.
[1] https://www.w3.org/community/tdmrep/
> If RSS becomes popular, there will be discovery platforms with âalgorithmâs.
So? If plain RSS exists, then you can still consume it the way you want.
I'd like to remind that when RSS was really popular we had "planet" aggregators everywhere, where someone interested in particular topic bundled posts from multiple people.
RSS exists but those authors who don't publish through it probably wouldn't care about it either. Like, if by magic, RSS became popular as a technology, they would publish through it, but then there would be demand for discoverability and algo feeds would win the engagement race and then RSS is in the background and th platform would naturally decide to just focus on the algo and drop RSS and the regular users wouldn't care and authors would only care what regular users care about. Except for the tiny techie bubble.
It's not a technical problem. Less effort will always be more popular and drown out more effort in the mainstream.
Imagine if you could order completely free McDonald's food to your doorstep anytime and could also choose to cook your meals at home. Guess what portion of people would choose which option.
You don't need "that technology to become popular" to make it even more popular. It already was popular enough and it already worked.
Your whole comment makes no sense to me. Completely confusing.
Who are you arguing with? Why RSS has to compete with anything? Why do you even refer to it as "technology" - it's a text file people used to edit by hand in notepad. And maybe automate that with a script in their html editor.
It was popular, it's a fact. It was and is included in multiple blogging platforms. It was used by techies. It was used by non-techies. Learning curve was non existent and it was trivial to use on both ends.
What created friction was: killing the biggest RSS reader service that was free for all and killing very good support in browsers.
It used to be trivial - every browser was showing an orange button if site had rss. You could click it. You could add the feed to browser bookmark bar. It would display feed as nice bookmarks, downloading it live. This is what we lost - and we lost it because big companies wanted us to be entrenched in their socials. The rest was literally trivial.
Blogs kinda dwindled in importance as a whole. Substack brought it back to a degree, through email distribution, which is a more familiar technology to regular people compared to RSS. But even Substack is becoming more of an algo feed based social site nowadays.
You are talking about bookmarks and stuff but that's not how regular people use the internet. They open a handful of social media apps and scroll whatever is shown to them.
> there will be discovery platforms with âalgorithmâs.
We already have platforms like feedly that has optional AI curated feeds.
I am more optimistic, good blogs will continue being there, and crap ones are no new invention or menace, be it LLM slop or Markov chain SEO babble content of 10 years ago.
Boy I hope so. I miss my RSS reader. I'd love to see one made with the modern UX that makes the doomscrolling apps so engaging. (Or maybe I wouldn't.)
I'm reading this on Feeder, which a free RSS app I found on F-Droid. Works for me
The Reeder family of RSS apps goes for engaging scrolling on iOS.
I'm reading this on my RSS reader right now :)
I am pretty happy with Readwiseâs Reader
yeah, Readwise is bloody great. Turns out if you want good software, it can help to pay for it.
I came here via NetNewsWire. iCloud sync is flakey but that's the only quibble. Oh, and you can't yet export starred articles unless you fiddle with SQL.
Reading this on Feeder
Plug for feeeed: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com
Itâs my primary hn reader now.
A good RSS extension for firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...
plug for feed database
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
no android version though?
the obvious problem with replacing the algorithm is that people actually crave that shit, after all there have been tens of thousands of highly trained engineers making it as addictive as possible. So, no chance.
Just like other addictions, people can choose to quit them.
I feel tiktok is slightly more difficult to drop than cigarettes.
Maybe one day we will view those indulging in social media the way we see those sitting at Vegas slot machines at 9am on Tuesday.
recently I had a thought that the AI revolution will actually be a good thing for the web.
it kills SEO advertising. someone writing an article for the purpose of ranking high and making money off of clicks doesnt get clicks anymore because of AI summaries.
direct content-to-ad-revenue is dead. Either you're a hobbyist and write for the heck of it - so your writing will be honest and better quality. Or, you're a product vendor and your writing is documentation meant to be found by AI summaries, again - that's honest.
Once profit is gone, love is all left.
If the AI people win, there will be no human audience for your writing. I don't think people will write simply to benefit someone else's subscription-funded service.
I like RSS and I use it, but this sounds like wishful thinking. Even the amount of human produced content is just too big for one to be their own curator. We have those few authors or sites we keep up, but other than that we must rely on external help, such as HN or an agent.
The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays. They don't visit the site itself, where the work origins from, so they also can't give back / support the source.
It's similar to the viewership of coding tutorials having sunk incredibly low these, creators, especially the ones creating high quality content, can't finance such work / content anymore.
> The problem is that the majority of people who used to visit websites just ask LLMs nowadays.
I truly do not believe this is the same type of topic. People visit websites and RSS feeds and writers they care about, and don't ask LLMs for this content. They ask LLMs for content that they don't care about those elements for.
If I want to know what Gruber thinks about iPhone whatever, I'm just going to check Daring Fireball. I'm not going to ask Claude what Gruber thinks.
Then charge for it. I happily pay for high quality services. I pay for Jetbrains editors, I pay for my email, I pay for LLM tokens, and I pay for Patreon subscriptions. Stop supporting content with advertising.
Google Reader died and took with it the social graph that made RSS useful. You didn't just subscribe to feeds; you saw what your network was reading and sharing. That discovery mechanism is what Twitter/X replaced, not the reading itself.
The problem with RSS today: you have to already know what you want to follow. There's no equivalent of "people like you are reading this." Until someone solves discovery for RSS, it'll stay a power-user tool.
The irony is that LLMs could actually solve this â a model that knows your reading history and surfaces relevant feeds you haven't found yet. That's the product that could bring RSS back to the mainstream.
How can a human communication needs be replaced with something that is read-only?
RSS brought me here. RSS is a component, not the whole system.
Can't wait to try some of the readers in this thread. I landed on inoreader not long after the Google reader died. The old reader wasn't doing what I needed back then. I've probably been using this a little too long without checking for what else is out there.
Why does this article feels like itâs written with ai
RSS is unfortunately just a technology for getting headlines from somewhere.
Doesn't fix the problem of discovering sources that aren't "AI" slop.
Also wondering if the article is "AI" slop or not. Seems a bit too verbose for me.
i think it is more than just a renaissance of rss...the entire blogosphere thing from 20 years ago can be very interesting to revive. back then blogs were curated travel logs from real people with specific interest and real domain knowledge.
I built lurkkit for this reason, so that you can build your own feeds combining reddit, substack, youtube. The algos are clearly out of control and making the experience worse. Especially Substack has gone full slop, there isn't even a feed for the posts themselves.
https://lurkkit.com/
Looks cool, will definitely try it out. Brilliant name.
thanks appreciate it! you can boost sources and categories (youtube and substack have a boost by default since they're published less frequently than reddit posts), create priority views, filters etc.
planning to set up 'topics' which can be a feed you can subscribe to that combine different source types, that are tagged and associated to the topic based on previous content.
also, email send outs per topic.
RSS is all well and good, but a serious question. What will prevent AI content from showing up in your RSS Feed ? If RSS becomes popular again, I fully believe AI will start appearing there too.
Just make valid robots.txt and sitemap.xml, please, so I can crawl and update mirrors of the sites I am interested in with least amount of impact on the site.
I fail to see how RSS helps filter out AI slop. Started a business based in RSS 20 years ago but that failed against Social Media slop.
I believe human validation protocols might help, think captcha enabled ping backs, but RSS I believe may have very little impact on its own
> I fail to see how RSS helps filter out AI slop.
Not sure if I'm missing something, but for AI slop to get into your RSS feed, you have to be following something with slop which can easily be unfollowed; this is unlike algorithmically driven recommendations where there is no direct filter from your end.
I think youâd just have to unfollow sources that publish AI slop. But that doesnât seem too difficult with RSS, I canât think of any source that sometimes publishes AI slop and sometimes I want to read their stuff. I guess if you tried to put an X feed in there, but I doubt you can do that now anyway.
when google reader died, I jumped to TheOldReader. it was great for a long time but has been having challenges lately and I jumped to the Vienna app on macos.
Check out News Explorer. Works on iOS, too, and syncs everything via iCloud.
Very good article. I am not referring to the RSS part.
Interesting thing is, much of what AI is now regurgitating is human output, accumulated over the years. Model training dataset. Stuff like Reddit posts, even posts here?
If, say, AI output becomes THE 99% over the next few years, we will enter the era of incestuous inbreeding within AI -when it simply regurgitates its own output.
Wonder what will be the result at that point!
Plug for Fiper https://www.fiper.net
do you have any good sources for rss material? i self host miniflux but the difficult part is to find someting good and interesting. Any field is ok for me, i will then decide what to keep. Thanks
https://ooh.directory/ is a great list of blogs that is nice to navigate
I'm no longer keeping it updated with new content, but I curated and made searchable about 40k feeds over the years https://blognerd.app/
thanks for the hard work! have a nice day
Social media will be dead because it will be replaced by Artificial Media, which will be the most potent and powerful of all media types, people will struggle to look away.
plug for FeedFlow http://feedflow.dev/
Sick and tired to be forced to see content from creators that I did't choose to follow, I switched to RSS as an aggregator and doom scrolling is suddenly interesting again.
Nah itâs just that the content consumers are now LLMs
I don't quite use "social media" per se, unless of course hackernews is part of it (which, kind of, is ... anything we can use other people can read or relate to, is kind of social, by definition. I think Facebook etc... tried to claim ownership over the term "social media", and I disagree with this notion). Having said that, I don't use or need RSS, so I don't think there will be a renaissance for RSS for most people.
I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.
I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).
Big if true
This whole article reeks of AI slop
This, at best bullet talking points were fed to the prompt and given and output length restriction, it's padded to fit the space diluting the message to the point only an LLM can
I thought so too, but it's almost too insane to me to believe the author would use generative AI to talk about the death of social media due to the flood of slop from the very same generative AI. But only almost.
Someone said, âif you have to explain it, then youâve already failedâ. Thatâs basically the problem in a nutshell. It would be great to see someone build a service based on an open standard, but then you have no moat. Anyone else can come along and build the same service using the same format.
No one wants to make a bet like that, so they donât. Thatâs why RSS doesnât get pushed or used more often.
RSS only serves as a backbone of a product. Thereâs no commenting, summaries a sparse, i donât even think thereâs consistent posting dates.
These evangelists want to make it sound like all we need to do is get everyone on board with RSS and weâll all just hold hands and share the web.
People donât browse the web, thereâs like 10 websites, thatâs the whole internet.
Everything else is just asteroids and abandoned space stations.
There are so many cool asteroids with people on them though, you can find them here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/
Idk about RSS feeds, but I do hope at least personal websites make a comeback. Social media is absolute slop nowadays
except that it only allows summaries behind paywalls. in many cases you never get the full article
I just don't follow sites with paywalls using RSS, it's that simple.
If you have the key to the paywall, then you can create a feed hydrator to fetch the content to the feed.
Then pay for the content to get access?
Are you talking about sites that actively support RSS?
Stop trying to make RSS happen again. It's not going to happen again.
I set it up a year or two ago. Now i ready 90 of articles and news through it.
Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.
I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.
RSS is dead because itâs backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago.
We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldnât need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data.
I donât get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide whatâs in the feed, not them.
> an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed.
An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc)
There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt
I mean that your RSS feed can basically be "Go to https://techcrunch.com/latest/ and use each non-video item as a feed item" or "Go to x.com/some_user and make each tweet a feed item", and the LLM can do a perfect extraction of links from html response blobs.
The only thing you have to do is ensure it can reliably get the response html. Maybe MCP browser + proxy or mirror to seem more human.
I built this for myself. The idea is that each feed is a url + title + a prompt to tell the LLM how to extract the links you want so that it generalizes over all websites.
And each feed item is a canonicalized url + title + a local copy of the content at that url which is an improvement over RSS since so many RSS feeds don't even contain the content.
I imagine a reasonably intelligent coding agent would notice that an RSS feed already exists and use it. Possibly transformed if it's not quite the format you want?
LLMs use up tons of energy and water.
That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?
Itâs still happening.
I was never an RSS user until half a year ago. Now thatâs my only way of browsing my choice of (tech) news sources and blogs.
I've been using RSS daily since 2008 (on feedly since 2013)
I came here via RSS.