I'm pleased to see renewed interest in RSS (web feeds generally). But my concern is that, for first time users, the onboarding process is too complex. There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear.
A plug for my own answer to this:
I recently launched https://aboutfeeds.com -- a one pager "getting started" guide aimed at first-time users of web feeds/RSS. The goal is to have it linked next to every "RSS subscribe" button out there.
Hey, looks like you had a very similar idea to me!
https://www.youneedfeeds.com/
Though you've gone for the 'simple one-pager' approach where I tried to sell people on it via a full site.
I was going to do a visual revamp sometime soon, hopefully include more readers etc but time has been an issue.
I chose 'web feeds' since it covered both RSS/ATOM and avoided the need to define their acronym meaning.
My view stats were very low last time I checked, but I haven't done much in the way of promotion either. (I did look into keyword advertising but that was prohibitively expensive.)
I'll probably try for another round of organic promotion once I do the site overhaul.
>There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear.
You are 100% correct with this. But not only that is the problem. There are too many sites that don't offer obvious RSS feeds. Like YouTube. I don't have a google account, but I still want to follow some channels. What would be the best way? Right RSS, but YouTube doesn't offer that really obviously. So here is how you follow a youtube channel with RSS:
1) Klick on a YouTube Video from a channel you want to follow
2) From there click on the youtube channel (Doesn't work if you directly click on the channel from the serach)
My favourite rss reader NewsBlur (no affil, just very happy user) allows subscribing to YouTube channels just by entering its URL - no need to digging for RSS feed :)
I completely agree genmon! RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user.
My belief is that, in order for RSS / ATOM to really catch on, we need to completely abstract those concepts for the end-user.
In my opinion, getting people to care about RSS / ATOM is like getting them to care about HTTP. They do not care about the actual mechanisms - only the end result. That being said, I think all we're missing is GREAT product design. Too many pipes are still exposed and it scares away the average user.
Make webfeeds as intuitive as social media giants and we have a revolution on our hands :p
PS: would love to build this with someone if there's any takers :)
> RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user.
I think basically you want reddit's early marketing, "the front page of the web". Except it's your front page. It's a feed where you can go to see the latest stuff from everywhere you're interested in, rather than having to check each site individually. Like how one's reddit home page shows posts from all the different subreddits to which one is subscribed.
I think the best entry point is probably the browser, like Firefox's "top sites" on about:home. The browser is uniquely positioned to know what sites you frequent. If it also knows where to find those sites' rss feeds, it could automatically suggest adding them (also on the home page or similar). Once you've got that -- people actually using it -- you're over the hump, and it's easy enough to for users to transition to curating their feeds, using a different application, etc
Browsers used to have RSS built in — I forget when Safari removed its reader. But you’re right about that button... something that glows when a feed is present.
The current UX, at least on my iPhone, is that I go to a site that looks like it _probably_ has a feed, and then I use the share sheet to push that URL to NetNewsWire. Then RSS auto-discovery takes over.
But there are a growing number of sites that look like they _should_ have feeds (posts on the front page arranged chronologically) but don’t. And the user experience is simply terrible when you attempt to subscribe with auto-discovery and it silently fails.
The problem is getting that in-browser glowing button on mobile. Browsers are too locked down.
I think history has shown us that there's no use in hoping from change on the browser or OS side. Unless new competitors come in, it seems the majority of people are stuck with Chrome / Firefox / Safari.
On top of that, a big problem with they are walled gardens as well. Some support exporting easy enough, but we've seen firsthand what happens when big readers (google reader, etc) go down.
That being said, I think our best hope is to create an open-source, web-based reader.
raw feeds are one of the last bastions of freedom on the internet, and we can't afford to keep building them on bad foundations.
If I had to imagine it from the ground up, I'm picturing a desktop-esque environment running straight from the browser. almost like google's environment, to be honest. There could be full-blown search, email, news, etc; but they are all intertwined by the ability to 'subscribe' to any of these results, and have them piped right into your homepage.
Sort of like smichel said above, a true front page of the internet, but your front page.
Yes, but just having that button isn't enough. Consider: I'm someone who understands the benefits of RSS, and despite seeing that button for years, I rarely clicked it, and mostly wasn't sure what to do after I did click it. Because that button showed you the feed, but the browser didn't really have a centralized reader built-in (that I remember, anyway, and if I couldn't find it then you bet the average user can't, either). There's a big difference between just showing the feed and having an "Add stories from {{newspaper}} to my home page" button.
unfortunately, I think browsers will continue to be locked down for the foreseeable future. given the locked-down nature of the app store as well, I think our best bet is building an open source, web-based RSS feed.
What’s unusually about the feed ecosystem is that it was once popular, and now it’s present but nobody really understands it. Like, Wordpress sites are 30% of the web and they have RSS by default... but are the site owners really aware? It would be a hard push to get any of them to change.
And, for most technologies, the existing users are the best word of mouth evangelists. But here, the existing users have their own favourite apps, and if you change anything too much then they won’t evangelise.
So (imo) growing the ecosystem means finding ways that respect that situation.
uh, I think "abstracting away concepts" is the base for enduring cluelessness and thus dependencance.
Still the UX has to be excellent. As you wouldn't abstract the fact of a sharp edge off a knife. Still the grip has to be very different from the sharp edge. It's 2 things that have to balance to make sense. The worse limits the result.
No user ever is bothered with Atom spec technicalities, is it?
Would you mind letting people know about the ATOM format as well? The sentence
1. What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS)
is wrong. It is not "a.k.a. RSS". It must be "What is Really Simple Syndication (a.k.a. RSS)?"
ATOM, in many, but not all cases, is superior, since it allows for easy extensibility. Should people be made aware of Feed technology, I would love them not learn to associate it with RSS, but understand, that there is also ATOM, which even has derivates, namely OPL and ODPS. There also exists a PubSub type API for ATOM.
Great work. This should be extended to podcasts and images would be nice as well. At the end, maybe there is no way anymore to get non-technical people interested into these technologies if they can get their news from a preinstalled "news-app" and "podcasts" from spotify.
I myself just wrote a little script to turn youtube channels, playlists and searches into video feeds that I can subscribe to in my podcast player. I love rss.
Illustrations would definitely help, you’re right. It’s in our issues list, and I have some ideas about simple ways to address that. Issues list is on Github incidentally https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds
Podcast: I’m not close enough to this world to know. Has podcasting answered the discovery question by centralising directories, or are podcasts still discovered “in the wild”?
It especially does because people think that being against 'Chinese apps' like TikTok is 'sinophobia', when really we love Chinese people it's just the government we don't trust. So it really does makes it special to see those Chinese characters in that README. I want to see more of that.
But I also immediately feel concern. I hope this Shanghai developer is not targeted, bullied, or persecuted in any way like having their money seized.
Damn. Just donated to their PayPal because I feel so encouraged by it.
I think this is bullshit. It's like saying, "I'm not racist, my friend Bob is black."
You don't get a "get outta jail free" card for saying "I love CHinese people" and "oorah for China devs" and then heaping shit all over their country's achievements the rest of the time.
Do people who say this think they understand China or Chinese people even a little bit?
> and then heaping shit all over their country's achievements the rest of the time.
I didn't say that anywhere. China's achieved a lot, in amazing ways. My comment said nothing about that.
> Do people who say this think they understand China or Chinese people even a little bit?
- Have you been to China, invited by their government in an official delegation and seen first-hand the mob-like lack of distinction between business and government, the nepotism, and the opaque vista of corruption, like I have?
- Have you had more than one Chinese national as a romantic partner, like I have?
- Have you worked and studied extra-curricularly with Chinese people for much of of your life, like I have?
- Have you learned Mandarin at age 18, like I have?
I think I "understand China or Chinese people" more than the average non-Chinese person.
But even that I think doesn't count for much. Chinese people don't share their real cultural opinions with people in the West much, including my ex-partners.
I still have lots more to learn about the very contrasting popular opinions there and slowly understand some of it. I respectfully listen to pro-government Chinese people who occasionally appear on HN, and engage with them with an open mind, though with no concession granted in regards to expectation of intellectual honesty. Recently in my comment history, there's one such conversation. I gave a very unforgiving rebuttal to their comment, but I respected them by not just downvoting, but engaging. We really should talk more.
It appears you're a non-Chinese person who's been triggered by my comment based on other experiences. I really invite you to not 'other' individual people like me as faceless "people" like you just did. In contrast, it would have been great to hear from a thoughtful Chinese person.
Triggered sounds like irrational and unhinged so...if it's what you need to say about other people's views to (in your mind) censor them and protect your own views, I get it, but I'm afraid it makes you a less trustworthy assessor!
It sounds like you've confused "identity" with opinion. I wasn't saying, "you are bullshit", and I'm sorry that you seem to have taken it like that. I was saying "I think that (view you write) is bullshit". I wasn't trying to offend you.
But also, to assume that had I had the experiences you list, I would arrive at your conclusion is incredibly narrow minded (and, to be honest, arrogant), and makes me trust even less that you would be able to see beyond the nose of your existing biases and consider others with different views... Because it's a big world out there, plenty of room for differences of opinion and experience.
The false dichotomy between "the Chinese state/government and the Chinese people" is a common Western propaganda tactic I've noticed to, exactly as I said, seem like you're not being racist when you are. And, unfortunately for you, god bless you, you've done exactly as I predicted, "I'm not racist because look at all the connections I have"
You didn't go on to criticize anything beside saying you don't "trust" the government, but I'm great at reading between the lines, and reading people and I know the type of argument you're hinting at and where it goes.
It reminds me that people don't hold these anti-China views from ignorance, simply because they've carried a Western-propaganda mindset into their own affairs. It seems like in your jaunts you forgot to check your pre-existing biases at the door/luggage-check counter.
Which, so far, has meant, not that you don't have enough experiences to think about and understand China, but only that you've so far failed to properly think about them, being blinded by your biases. So far, you've wasted those experiences you have by not yet thinking clearly about them. I'm not sure where you're from (and I don't care here because it doesn't matter, like it doesn't matter where I'm from or who I am, what matters is the quality of my thought and my ability to think clearly, critically and for myself, as I hope you can too), but here's a video of a white dude saying something that is mostly correct. I don't know him nor anything else about him but this is about right:
Now to everyone else, because it sounds like you will find this very hard to listen to right now, I think a good antidote to the fake narrative that "the Chinese government does not represent the Chinese people" is history. China in 20C had the bloodiest most awfully brutal civil war for the last 400 years. It was a popular revolution overthrowing a corrupt, lazy, anachronistic, incompetent dynasty (and then republic) and basically stretched from 1911 to the end of the cultural revolution. Then, the governing system they created out of this, has gone about in the last 70 years lifting more people out of poverty than anywhere else, and building something truly amazing. I hope you'll, you know, give the Chinese and their system some credit. Anyway...my point is, that if the Chinese people are not happy with their government, there's no other place on earth where the government would be more afraid of their people's wrath than China. Just look at the history. Look at the hunger they have for creating a better life. Look at how the government is forced to deliver. And look at the complacent stagnation and lazy woolly propagandist rest-on-yer-laurels thinking that has metastasized in most of the Western world.
So, contrary to the popular, but incorrect anti-China notion that you can't trust the Chinese government, I think you can trust them more than any other place on Earth right now to deliver as they say, and to deliver results for their citizens. Simple as that, really. And I think most Chinese are proud and happy to have such a system.
This shrieking Western hysteria smacks (to me, anyway) of bitter nostalgia for imperial glory-days where we could pull off stunts like "the treaty of Nanking" and "the Opium War", the "United East India Company" and wiping out native populations of N and S American, and Australian aborigines.
I'm not anti-West. I'm just balanced between both places. And speaking up against the river of fake and negative opinion, which, in my view, only serves to hasten the West's demise by blinding them to what they could learn, and giving them the fake pay off of feeling good by (doing that old colonial thing) of putting other people down and pretending they're better.
But to bring it back to you finally... if you want to make it about identity, then sure, I'm just more cosmopolitan than you are. In your future jaunts, I hope you're able to see beyond the veil and check those implanted biases with other stuff you don't need. So you can finally see clearly. Best of luck! :P ;) xx
As soon as I hit 'send' on my message I knew someone would agree because more people in FOSS is a great thing, but someone else would find a way to make the followup comment look racist.
It sucks that I can't even say 'I love Asians' without being tagged as racist. It sucks that I can't have prejudice against or for some people. We are not all equal, and if you pretend we are, YOU are racist. I recommend the sketch 'I don't see race' by collegehumor: https://youtu.be/5qArvBdHkJA
I repeat what I said countless times the past few years: A country is not its people. Even if you pretend it's a democracy.
That said, I hate America for ruining the world's economy and environment. I love most Americans though. Hang in there.
Me, too. Seafile is another good example. Gogs was great nbut the sbdfl went awol too often. Its fork Gitea still has many Chinese devs, though and is one of my favorite projects with Asian roots.
Took me a while to get this one — so people from communist China don’t cover their origins, for they’re from a completely isolate culture or being bold in a way, or whatever, and put Chinese readme high up and front, or talk in clearly Chinese grammar, whereas other non-European devs tries to stay under the radar and blend in as a generic non-native English speaker. Isn’t that it?
I mean, I’m a Japanese but how I notice a developer is a good fellow countrymen is usually through noticing telltale signs and chasing them down, not because there’s a filename in the language I speak at the root of a repository.
If I see more than one language in a repo or the developers' names sound foreign to me, I'm more likely to check out their profile.
I always love to find out more about (development) culture in other parts of the world. Can you elaborate a bit on how it's 'bold' to use your own language in a README or docs? Do you find it annoying?
Those may be correlated with a lack of family and, thus, more free time for personal projects. Not that one outgrows an appreciation of anime once married, but that the tendency toward cute girl avatars probably decreases.
I was going to counter that it could instead just be that they're not employed, in education, or in training. But personally, I'm employed and can devote entire weekends and evenings to side projects. Family would certainly take up the rest of that time.
Edit: Actually just noticed your comment was about anime girl avatars, and not the project quality. I have no opinions on that matter.
I’m curious: why is this using RSS? RSS is uniformly technically inferior to Atom, and all feed reader apps that I know of support Atom, and libraries are available for both (some RSS-only, some Atom-only, some general). The only place I’d ever use RSS now is podcast feeds, because podcast feeds haven’t caught up up with 2007 yet.
For the most part you only care that it’s a feed, but the technical inferiority of RSS does matter from time to time. My favourite example is having things that look like HTML markup in a title. All RSS specs are silent on what that means and there’s no popular XML namespace that fixes that like with content:encoded¹. So some clients will treat it as plain text, some will treat it as HTML and strip it, some will treat it as HTML and render it. (Some will double-encode it, but that’s a bug in the reader. Atom probably won’t save you from that kind of error.) The result is that in RSS you simply can’t safely use <, > or & in a title, because no matter how you do it, it will be mangled by some meaningful fraction of clients. Meanwhile, Atom has <title type="text"> and <title type="html"> and the problem is averted; almost all clients will get it right, and any that get it wrong are unquestionably buggy so you can file a bug report and hopefully get it fixed.
———
¹ And seriously the whole podcast RSS scene is full of “well RSS is bad, so let’s add our own elements to fix it” namespaces, so that you’re writing the same thing four or five times, where Atom would have obviated at least some of those.
There is no reason to use Atom. RSS has in practice some specifics like content:encoded and description that are strange at first look, but by now are solved in every reader. So why not just use the standard that works?
There’s pretty much no documentation of anything in the feed world past 2007. Everything interesting happened between 2002 and 2007, and then everyone forgot about it because it was good enough¹ and we could just keep copying the code we wrote last time.
———
¹ Except podcasts. Have I mentioned them? They’re still frozen in 2004.
You can get everything as ATOM, as well. From the docs:
RSSHub conforms to RSS 2.0 and Atom Standard, simply append
.rss .atom to the end of the feed address to obtain the feed
in corresponding format, default to RSS 2.0.
Maybe someone else will benefit from my experience as well: I recently wanted to create an RSS feed for https://www.apmreports.org/ as they didn't seem to offer one, nor did Feedly (my preferred RSS reader) manage to find one that was up-to-date. I ended up using http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/ instead because there wasn't an existing route in RSSHub that I could use, and it didn't seem trivial to set one up for this particular case; I hope someone will prove me wrong though.
With the Feed Creator feed URL I'm not able to see the content within Feedly (it just says "no content"), but it does relay new posts to me, which I can open directly, and it was amazingly quick to get a functional feed URL, so I'm very happy nonetheless.
This is interesting, I was building something similar for my personal use case a while ago but there I have to build a plugin for each website I want to support which is not ideal (https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge). I'll have to check it out, community maintained integrations make a lot more sense.
> Your catchword is "share", but you don't want us to share. You want to keep us within your walled gardens. That's why you've been removing RSS links from webpages, hiding them deep on your website, or removed feeds entirely, replacing it with crippled or demented proprietary API. FUCK YOU.
> You're not social when you hamper sharing by removing feeds. You're happy to have customers creating content for your ecosystem, but you don't want this content out - a content you do not even own. Google Takeout is just a gimmick. We want our data to flow, we want RSS or Atom feeds.
> We want to share with friends, using open protocols: RSS, Atom, XMPP, whatever. Because no one wants to have your service with your applications using your API force-feeding them. Friends must be free to choose whatever software and service they want.
> We are rebuilding bridges you have wilfully destroyed. Get your shit together: Put RSS/Atom back in.
From that readme. Nice project!
I wish someone would make a social rss reader. It would be pretty neat. Although, activitypub might be better protocol for that.
I'm currently using rss-bridge and have not had that great of an experience. I put some of that down to the site-specific bridges, but some problems persist:
- I regularly recieve feed updates that mark all articles as "new" (i.e. the bridge fails to recognize that it already exported some articles before)
- I also often receive "error 521" from rss-bridge (i.e. the bridge cannot create a feed), but on manual investigation, the feed can be created just fine. I assume this is due to a lack of request throttling somewhere in the process, but can't be bothered to investigate.
Nice! I am excited by this. I decided to go back to trying RSS after a blogger I enjoy got deplatformed from where I usually found their stuff. I installed a firefox rss reader and it was fine. But today after seeing this I realized I wanted more centralized RSS to have it synced on difference devices. So I went and installed FreshRSS over the past 30 mins on my webserver, added a MariaSQL db and user, added a Apache subdomain, directed my DNS to it, ran letsencrypt, fired up the web config, added my feeds, and we're up and running in 30 mins flat.
Next I guess I have to install this thing to RSS-ify other channels I like.
What might be the best way to aggregate multiple RSS feeds onto a webpage? So have been recently thinking about density of information and I want to create a webpage with as much information as possible and park it on a large 55inch screen I have in my home-office.
Someone at my company wanted to use RSShub for turning Instagram into an RSS feed. This kept breaking, because rsshub just scrapes Instagram profiles on the web and Instagram pushes its users to the app.
It’s probably more Instagrams fault than rsshub’s that it was breaking. Just be aware of these limitations.
You might be interested in feed2maildir [1], which saves feeds in maildir format so you can use all your favorite mail clients and index with notmuch. That way, you aren't dependent on another centralized privacy-invasive proprietary SaaS walled garden being online and running without major changes.
I've been planning on transitioning from my current TUI RSS reader (Newsboat) to a maildir-based CLI with notmuch filters for a while; I might give it a shot next weekend and post some of my notmuch filters for RSS.
A plug for my own answer to this:
I recently launched https://aboutfeeds.com -- a one pager "getting started" guide aimed at first-time users of web feeds/RSS. The goal is to have it linked next to every "RSS subscribe" button out there.