• tyleo 27 minutes ago

    I recently added RSS to my personal site (https://www.tyleo.com/)

    Even with a custom implementation it’s a simple thing to support. You can find the whole spec here: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification

    I’ll mention that there is a competing Atom specification which is compatible with all notable RSS readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard). The POV I’ve seen on HN favors Atom because it offers more functionality and is a clearer standard.

    I want to voice my support for RSS though based on its simplicity. To me the feed doesn’t need a bunch of bells and whistles. I get analysis paralysis I get deciding which Atom features to support.

    • talideon 13 minutes ago

      Use whatever elements you need from Atom. Atom is a functional superset of RSS 2.0, and if you're hit with analysis paralysis, using only the functionality that exists in RSS 2.0 in your Atom feed.

      Atom exists because RSS is ambiguous and prone to breakage. The "bells and whistles" exist only because there were a lot of common extensions at the time that made sense to fold into Atom itself. Even if you use none of that and just the bits that overlap with RSS 2.0, your feed will be less likely to break in random feed readers, and that's enough reason to use Atom over RSS.

      In this day and age, there's no good reason to use RSS over Atom beyond brand recognition.

      (Yes, I'm still salty from the feed wars of the 2000s, but I still stand by all that I've written above.)

      • oneeyedpigeon 19 minutes ago

        > You can find the whole spec here

        There's also this version, which I believe is the original: https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html

        It's far from perfect, but at least it's not infested with spammy advertising.

      • defrost 5 hours ago

        As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video.

        The form is

        https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v...

        where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel:

        https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering

        and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension) "Find Feeds in Current Tab" function.

        https://nodetics.com/feedbro/

        • EvanAnderson 3 hours ago

          I worry about YouTube RSS feeds getting popular and Google killing them. Every time I see them discussed publicly I have this "Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!" reaction.

          I browse YouTube anonymously, have an ad blocker setup that pretty much eliminates all ads, and track my "subscriptions" with RSS. It's highly usable. I use a fork of tt-rss and actually embed the YouTube videos in the reader pane so I never see any of YouTube's algorithmic recommendation schlock (beyond recommendations at the end of videos, which I ignore). Browsing YouTube, the site, is a jarring nightmare.

          I am considering having my podcatcher use a YouTube downloader to just pull down all the videos in the feeds I watch. I believe Google is throttling yt-dlp to realtime speeds, but I figure if my podcatcher is doing it behind the scenes that shouldn't matter. I maintain curated collections of podcasts I like (in case they ever disappear), and since I just added 40TB if storage to my home system I figure it's time to do that with YouTube too.

          • pentagrama 18 minutes ago

            Reading your comment this intro started sounding on my mind https://youtu.be/hnlIiDBFlEA

            • badmonkey101 2 hours ago

              Ssshh! Keep it on the down low!

            • donatj 4 hours ago

              That's good to know. The number of times I have subscribed to someone on YouTube only to not see anything from them in years, and then find tens of their videos YouTube never offered is just insane.

              So many times I can't find anything to watch on YouTube and it just isn't showing me any of my subscriptions, it's ridiculous.

              • soulofmischief 3 hours ago

                The first three menu items in the navbar of the authenticated YouTube homepage are 'Home', 'Shorts', and 'Subscriptions'. 'Subscriptions' shows exactly what's on the tin, a timeline of videos from your subscribed channels.

                • 0xEF 3 hours ago

                  A lot of people might not realize this exists because of the way apps for smart tv's and game systems present the content and menus. I'm not sure if that's intentional or just misguided design, but the only reason I knew to see it out on my PS4's YouTube app is because I'd seen it on desktop.

                • MortyWaves an hour ago

                  Don’t forget the “click the bell” too. Even when I have notifications enabled I rarely ever get any.

                  For some reason YouTube website never has any kind of notification popup in site either. Instead, the notification icon count increases by one.

                  Which caps at out 9+. Stupid.

                  • oneeyedpigeon 4 hours ago

                    The opposite problem is also bad: subscribe to a channel, then get frequent notifications of years-old videos.

                    • almostnormal 4 hours ago

                      By "subscription" do you only mean subscription? Don't notifications need to be enabled in addition (bell button)?

                      I'm using the RSS feeds, so I'm not sure...

                      • guilamu 3 hours ago

                        Just use Freetube.

                      • elpocko 3 hours ago

                        There is a "Copy channel ID" link on each channel's page, but it's well hidden. Click "...more" in the channel description, then click "Share channel" to open a popup menu that has the "Copy channel ID" link. It does what it says.

                        • trollied 2 hours ago

                          Reddit also has feeds that they don't publicise. eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/.rss

                          Adding /.rss on to the end of lots of URLs works all over the place on the site.

                          • entuno 4 hours ago

                            It also provides feeds for individual playlists, where `playlist_id` is the `list` URL parameter when you view the full playlist.

                            https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=

                            It's a really nice way to be able to follow creators/playlists without needing to register an account. I'm surprised that YouTube still allow it, but I hope it stays.

                            • latexr 2 hours ago

                              Unfortunately those have a major flaw: they always show the top 15 items in a playlist.

                              This is a problem because many channels have playlists where they put older episodes at the top and add new ones to the bottom. This makes the playlist RSS useless, because it will always show the same 15 videos.

                            • hexagonwin an hour ago

                              Somewhat related, but does anyone know how one can only get RSS for live videos?

                              • latexr an hour ago

                                Any half-decent RSS reader will detect the right feed if you give it the channel URL.

                                • WithinReason 3 hours ago

                                  I highly recommend Feedbro as an RSS reader.

                                • talideon 24 minutes ago

                                  One thing though: is you're adding "RSS" support, use Atom for the feed, not actual RSS. Everything supports Atom that supports RSS, it's no harder to implement, less ambiguous, less prone to breaking, and has a richer vocabulary that doesn't require you resort to pulling in additional vocabularies via namespaces.

                                  I cringe every time I see a feed that uses RSS and then pulls in Atom for some of elements. If you're going to do that, then just use Atom for the whole thing rather than building a frankenfeed.

                                  • gudzpoz 3 hours ago

                                    Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet:

                                        <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="assets/xml/rss.xsl" media="all"?>
                                    
                                    And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your RSS feeds themselves a dedicated page for advocating RSS, in case an interested reader is browsing through the links on your site.

                                    [0] https://getnikola.com/

                                    [1] https://getnikola.com/rss.xml (Open it in your browser!)

                                    [2] https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/blob/master/nikola/data/...

                                    • christkv 3 hours ago

                                      Man what a blast from the past. There was a moment in time where xml and xlst was considered the bright future of webapps

                                      • phh 41 minutes ago

                                        I remember writing a blog with xml + xslt and thought it was very cool.

                                        Retrospectively, writing code in XML, eewwww, but back then I liked writing XHTML by hand

                                      • PeterStuer 3 hours ago

                                        My suggestion for best practice would be to have a feed endpoint that is as minimal and clean as possible, and provide a separate endpoint (can be the same base url but with a parameter) for human consumption. This ensures maximal compatibility and ease of consumption for both machine and human.

                                        • alifeee 2 hours ago

                                          I disagree, you can have an XML feed that does both

                                          For example: https://andrewstiefel.com/feed.xml

                                          • yakshaving_jgt an hour ago

                                            This is brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

                                      • oneeyedpigeon 5 hours ago

                                        > Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with.

                                        Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?

                                        • akvadrako 3 hours ago

                                          I use RSS heavily and I don't want an RSS button - what would that even do? RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader.

                                          Whatever comes with the browser will not be as good as an extension from a company focused on that feature. For example I use https://www.inoreader.com/

                                          • n144q 11 minutes ago

                                            > RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader.

                                            Who said that? It's meaningful if you read the feed across multiple devices, but lots of people read RSS on their computer only.

                                            And even so browsers could provide RSS status synchronization. In fact almost every browser is already syncing your browsing history, bookmarks and settings if you are signed in.

                                            > Whatever comes with the browser will not be as good as an extension...

                                            not true.

                                            • oneeyedpigeon 3 hours ago

                                              > what would that even do?

                                              Open the current page's RSS feed in my configured client. Failing that, copy its URL. Absolute minimum, it's a shortcut for having to view source, cmd-f, "RSS", cmd-c

                                              • alexchamberlain 2 hours ago

                                                I thought RSS readers were able to extract the URL themselves?

                                                • oneeyedpigeon an hour ago

                                                  If you're using one of those kinda of RSS readers, that makes the process a little easier, sure. It doesn't address discover ability, though.

                                              • kevincox 2 hours ago

                                                Firefox had this and it was great.

                                                - It rendered the feed in a pretty way.

                                                - If provided a little widget to open the feed in your feed reader (in practice it substituted the feed url into a URL template with popular readers by default and the option to add your own). This basically made it a one-click subscribe option.

                                                • latexr an hour ago

                                                  > I use RSS heavily and I don't want an RSS button

                                                  Then don’t click it?

                                                  > RSS is best when integrated with a stateful server-side reader.

                                                  Hard disagree.

                                                  Look, you do you, but your preferences aren’t universal.

                                                  • PeterStuer 3 hours ago

                                                    Easy notification that a feed is present and an option.

                                                  • rplnt 4 hours ago

                                                    Most people also decided it's a good idea to use browser from an advertising company. RSS is not good for business and it won't be provided.

                                                    • beretguy 3 hours ago

                                                      > Most people also decide

                                                      Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.

                                                      • rplnt 3 hours ago

                                                        That's fair. Though if I replaced "people" with "HN users" it would still hold true, and I would consider this group to be very computer literate.

                                                        • beretguy 32 minutes ago

                                                          Unfortunately, yes.

                                                        • _Algernon_ 3 hours ago

                                                          Adults have agency and being uninformed is a choice.

                                                          Im sick of this paternalism for tech illiterate people. Its a choice.

                                                          • freetanga an hour ago

                                                            Just for reference:

                                                            - 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.

                                                            - 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).

                                                            I would argue than everyone who is stuck a below 6th grade understanding of a language they use everyday can hardly be tech literate ( which in itself requires good reading and abstraction capabilities)

                                                            Is it their fault because they choose to be like this? Their parents? Their goverment? Nature gave them the wrong genes? Society shun them for their skin color? A bearded white guy in a cloud chose to ruin their lives?

                                                            Don’t know, don’t care, but demanding agency to all adults feels a bit narrow minded, selfish, and not too thankful for avoiding a few external barriers that other humans have to endure…

                                                            most of us here skipped those challenges, and ignoring how much headstart we got by sheer luck and no own merit is a bit inmature, IMHO.

                                                            Opinions are like noses: everyone has one, and almost all of them are unremarkable and irrelevant to other people. This is my nose.

                                                            • latexr an hour ago

                                                              Not everyone has the time, inclination, patience, or opportunity to “be informed” about all the shit every tech company does. It’s exhausting even for tech-literate people.

                                                              Have some empathy.

                                                              • _Algernon_ an hour ago

                                                                The bar isnt keeping up with shit every tech company does.

                                                                The bar is knowing what a directory or file is. Yes, the bar is that low. https://www.forbes.com/consent/ketch/?toURL=https://www.forb...

                                                                If people arent functioning because they choose to refuse to learn to read or write, you wouldn't defend them. Why is it different for computers? Computers are just as important for functioning in society today as being able to read or write.

                                                              • beretguy 27 minutes ago

                                                                I don't know, it's almost kind of like saying that newborn babies are illiterate by choice. Not everybody cares about computers or how to use them, they just want to find that restaurant address or read this news article or whatever. They don't have time or interest to learn how to use computers. I don't know how to replace transmission in my car. It's not by choice - I just don't have time and money to learn how to do that. Things take time and money to learn.

                                                              • dist-epoch 2 hours ago

                                                                When Chrome appeared HN was full of comments like "I switched all my family to Chrome, I recommend you do too".

                                                                • n144q 9 minutes ago

                                                                  Dude, that's completely irrelevant.

                                                                  Most people switched from Internet Explorer.

                                                                  Firefox was never the "mainstream" choice.

                                                                  • latexr an hour ago

                                                                    When Chrome appeared, Google still had “don’t be evil” as a motto and was generally considered a champion of users. It’s been a decade and a half since then, the tech landscape shifted tremendously. Think we’re Apple was back then, the iPhone barely existed.

                                                            • picafrost 5 hours ago

                                                              This is a great initiative. Large tech companies, through hijacking our web experience and pursuing maximum scale, have normalized not being able to talk to a human being on the other side of a website/app/business.

                                                              In many situations you _can_ just send an email. Most often someone will read it and be very happy to help out if they can. Not always, but how much of a time and effort investment is an email really?

                                                              The best part is that a few kind words can absolutely make someone’s week.

                                                              • pyromaker 2 hours ago

                                                                I absolutely love RSS format. It's one of the easiest ways for devs to get data and do something quickly with it.

                                                                If you remember, Yahoo Pipies allowed devs & others quickly build something with RSS feeds. I've recently rebuilt and launched my own Yahoo Pipes clone

                                                                https://www.mashups.io

                                                                Along the way of building this tool, I came across a plenty of major websites that do not provide RSS feeds and indie devs who maintain niche tools to provide these feeds.

                                                                Then again, RSS are still plentiful!

                                                                • ryan-duve 4 minutes ago

                                                                  Site feedback: when I drag "Popular sources" into the field, I see the options "YouTube" and "HackerNews". But when I click either I just see a blank modal. I'm using Firefox 135.

                                                                  • oneeyedpigeon 15 minutes ago

                                                                    I'm starting to do this more and more with the command line and actual pipes! You can go a long way with curl, xmllint, and the full Unix toolset.

                                                                  • brisky 5 hours ago

                                                                    Recently I have posted about RSDS (really simple decentralized syndication) - a protocol that tries to solve RSS content global discovery problem. Here is the link if you are interested to read more about it

                                                                    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42654891

                                                                    • domysee an hour ago

                                                                      There are also a bunch of websites that have RSS feeds but don't link to them and don't make them available via RSS autodiscovery.

                                                                      I created a tool to find such RSS feeds for as many cases as possible: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

                                                                      And if you're interested in the details: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds

                                                                      • bluebarbet an hour ago

                                                                        While I use RSS, I think we need to recognize that it's slowly going away. Even a single publisher that's missing a feed will be a deal-breaker for any new adopters.

                                                                        And RSS is an over-complex solution anyway, designed for a time before web standards when sites all had spaghetti table layouts. Today there's no need to create a whole shadow site in fussily-formatted XML for what can usually be found in the page source of the article list page as a bunch of `<li>`s.

                                                                        The more sustainable solution, I believe, is client-based: RSS readers that also parse HTML. There is even an HTML attribute schema, `hfeed`, that makes this easy-peasy and is much easier to implement for publishers. I still don't understand why this solution has not taken off yet. It's clearly optimal.

                                                                        • _heimdall an hour ago

                                                                          At least for me, there is still benefit in being able to load only the list of articles. Attempting to fetch the full HTML and scrape it can be error prone and may not even work depending on how the site is using client-side rendering.

                                                                          Microformsts, which give us things like h-feed, are useful but the author is already thinking about the feed reader use case. Why wouldn't they also hook up an RSS feed?

                                                                          • bluebarbet an hour ago

                                                                            The scraping issue is resolved by just putting the `h-feed` attributes on the relevant HTML elements. Far easier to implement and maintain than RSS. Maintaining a parallel XML endpoint is itself very error-prone, I know this from unpleasant experience. The only drawback to `h-feed` I can see is that the feed reader must fetch a larger initial payload. Seems like a small price to pay for much easier implementation and maintainability.

                                                                        • uzyn 4 hours ago

                                                                          RSS was a key protocol in syndication a widely free and open web before the domination of big tech/social media. We now have new internet generation that has never known RSS, relying largely on "the algorithm" of the big tech in content syndication.

                                                                          Thank you for your effort in advocating RSS support. I hope RSS makes a major come back especially with the recent events.

                                                                          • lufte 25 minutes ago

                                                                            I recently had the need to subscribe to changes to a Github repo and it turns out it provides a feed for them. For rust master branch, for example, subscribe to https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/master.atom.

                                                                            • palata 5 hours ago

                                                                              RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it).

                                                                              I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.

                                                                              • _heimdall an hour ago

                                                                                It comes down to a push versus pull architecture. RSS is pull based, you aren't notified when a feed is updated. Most people today want push based with a feed, with all the bells and whistles of a social feed that is updated instantly.

                                                                                Federation comes in mainly because push based systems require a server managing who follows who, what is posted, and who to notify of updates. That's a lot of information for one central service to be responsible for, leading some to think its better to federate and trust a bunch of servers to host copies of some or all of that same data.

                                                                                • domysee an hour ago

                                                                                  > RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default.

                                                                                  The people creating websites often don't know that they're providing RSS feeds though, and never link to it.

                                                                                  To solve that I developed a tool that finds RSS feeds, even if RSS autodiscovery isn't implemented: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

                                                                                  • entuno 4 hours ago

                                                                                    Where I have RSS feeds from news sites, I usually skim down the list of titles, read an article (in my feed) if it's interesting, and then move on. I never visit their website, I don't see their adverts, their tracking scripts can't run, and I don't see or interact with their comments.

                                                                                    Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.

                                                                                    • galleywest200 an hour ago

                                                                                      Le Monde will tell you that you only got 70% or so of the article in your feed and you need to go to the site to get the full article. Why don't more feeds do that? Actually, I am unsure if this is the feed itself or the fact that my RSS reader scrapes the sites too.

                                                                                      Some sites even have different RSS links for subscribers only that give a full feed.

                                                                                      • openrisk 2 hours ago

                                                                                        Not everyone is out to monetise (e.g public sector). And even if you are after monetisation, sending out a teaser snippet makes sense. The user can decide if they want to visit the site to read more, subscribe etc.

                                                                                        • oneeyedpigeon 3 hours ago

                                                                                          > makes it much harder for them to monetise.

                                                                                          On the other hand, RSS definitely provides extra opportunities to monitise. Imagine your business provides a customisable "offers" feed so you can tell interested parties when a sale occurs, etc. Businesses should be falling over themselves to get that kind of engagement.

                                                                                          • entuno 3 hours ago

                                                                                            That just sounds like a mailing list, but without the ability to easily identify and track the individuals you're sending to.

                                                                                            • oneeyedpigeon 2 hours ago

                                                                                              So... a win-win? RSS also avoids all the problems associated with spam.

                                                                                          • saint_yossarian 4 hours ago

                                                                                            Nobody's forcing them to put the full text into the feed, for me the main benefit is not having to check the site manually.

                                                                                            • entuno 3 hours ago

                                                                                              As the consumer, that's a big benefit, and the main reason I use RSS.

                                                                                              But for the company running the website, the fact that you're no longer browsing to their site, being served adverts and tracking code, and seeing what's on their homepage is not a benefit

                                                                                          • sourcecodeplz 4 hours ago

                                                                                            Because RSS is "too old"...

                                                                                            • mongol 4 hours ago

                                                                                              > Podcasts typically use RSS

                                                                                              I would even say that a podcast that does not support RSS is not a podcast, it is something else.

                                                                                              • octochamp 3 hours ago

                                                                                                I'd say that the only thing that reliably differentiates a _podcast_ from a _radio show_ is just that the podcast's method of delivery is RSS.

                                                                                                • mongol 2 hours ago

                                                                                                  I don't think it is the only thing, but I agree that if the delivery method is not RSS, then it is something else.

                                                                                                • frde_me 4 hours ago

                                                                                                  I would be curious why you think the idea of a podcast is coupled to a specific distribution technology

                                                                                                  • _heimdall an hour ago

                                                                                                    I'd be curious how you define podcasts and radio shows if you don't consider the distribution method. I don't see much light between the two other than the fact that a podcast show list is distributed via RSS.

                                                                                                    • mongol 2 hours ago

                                                                                                      Similar to why radio relates to electromagnetical transmissions in the radio spectrum. When it happens over internet, we don't call it radio, but possibly internet radio. RSS was the origin of podcasts, and if it does not involve RSS, it is not podcasts

                                                                                                      • rglullis 4 hours ago

                                                                                                        Because the original idea of what we call "podcasting" is rooted on RSS.

                                                                                                        • lkjdsklf 4 hours ago

                                                                                                          The idea of what we call “writing” is rooted in stone tablets and chisels, but we still call Shakespeare a writer

                                                                                                          • rglullis 3 hours ago

                                                                                                            There has been a significant longer amount of time between ancient civilizations and Shakespeare compared to today and l the first people who are recording audio content periodically and distributing it via RSS.

                                                                                                        • oneeyedpigeon 3 hours ago

                                                                                                          It goes much further than that: as the name suggests, it's coupled to a specific, obsolete brand of device.

                                                                                                    • molticrystal 4 hours ago

                                                                                                      Openrss.org is a non-profit that advocates for RSS adoption in addition to providing RSS feeds for websites that have none and cleainup/improving existing rss feeds.

                                                                                                      Consider helping them out if this interests you, you might even be using a feed already as they have some custom feeds for github like for discussions and issues.

                                                                                                      https://openrss.org/about/contributing

                                                                                                      • palata 5 hours ago

                                                                                                        I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons.

                                                                                                        I often receive answers, that surprised me! People saying "thank you for your suggestion, we will think about what we can do". None of them has every changed anything (I've been doing that for years). I don't even know if they did anything more than answering to the email.

                                                                                                        • n_plus_1_acc 2 hours ago

                                                                                                          Thus is a pet peeve of mine. Some companies send an multi-part E-Mail, just for the plain text part to be an empty string. Why bother? Pretty often the plain text is just the same html, so you get to read raw ugly html. Do people not test this?

                                                                                                          • rednafi 4 hours ago

                                                                                                            Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.

                                                                                                          • medhir 4 hours ago

                                                                                                            I recently had a popular post on HN and several people reached out asking if I had an RSS feed implemented.

                                                                                                            Was surprised that anyone would be interested in keeping up with my writing, but was happy to oblige the request as it had been on my to-do list for a while. Happy I did do as it seems many people are hitting the RSS endpoint now. Cool to see that RSS is relevant in 2025, and will definitely advocate for its usage more moving forward :-)

                                                                                                            • rambambram 4 hours ago

                                                                                                              I might have been one of these people, because I was following your site as a bookmark in my RSS reader already. I didn't see any content in your feed so I checked again for a feed endpoint. I found it eventually on your site, but you might consider making it auto-discoverable (see https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery). People only have to enter your domain name into their RSS reader then.

                                                                                                              • medhir 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                Ah nice, thanks for the heads up! I’ll look into adding this soon.

                                                                                                                • oneeyedpigeon 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                  That might be a useful site, but why on earth is it stuffed full of privacy-abusing, invasive advertising? I'm sure there are better sources for the RSS standard.

                                                                                                                  • rambambram 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                    Oh, really? My bad. I don't see ads over there.

                                                                                                                    Auto-discovery for RSS is simple enough to explain here: just put the following code in your head element (at least on the homepage).

                                                                                                                    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/feed.xml" title="RSS Feed">

                                                                                                                • rednafi 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                  The Hacker News folks do love their RSS. I also added support for RSS[1] to my site when one of my posts hit the front page, and a few people reached out for an RSS link.

                                                                                                                  I came to the industry way later than the Web 2.0 inception and didn’t even know about it until a while back.

                                                                                                                  [1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml

                                                                                                                  • 6510 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                    How long did it take you to implement?

                                                                                                                    I never bothered to make a list of the mails I send but now I see it is quite useful to show how well it works. Maybe some data on implementation time would be as useful.

                                                                                                                    • medhir 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                      Took me a few hours. I use MDX for formatting so most of the time was spent figuring out how to convert the MDX to plain HTML. Not a very heavy lift overall :)

                                                                                                                  • openrisk 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                    Publishers of content have really no excuse to disable RSS feeds. RSS is also a signal that some new content has arrived, why would one not send it to the world if its essentially free? Even if their business model requires that you visit their website (instead of reading everything on a client app) syndicating a teaser message makes sense.

                                                                                                                    In any case, many actually useful sites that disable RSS are public orgs that do not rely on adtech or subscriptions. Its the sad result of digital illiteracy and outsourcing their web presence to some inane outfit thats up their neck in the SEO and social media shit.

                                                                                                                    Incidentally a Web that makes full use of RSS is also one where more complex protocols like ActivityPub and ATProto can flourish. A client is a client is a client. Now that Mozilla has essentially abdicated their role as a user-centered window to the universe maybe there is room for something else?

                                                                                                                    • rook1e_dev 5 hours ago

                                                                                                                      RSS is my main source of information. And I've built some RSS-related projects:

                                                                                                                      1. https://github.com/0x2E/fusion - A lightweight, self-hosted friendly RSS aggregator and reader

                                                                                                                      2. https://rawweb.org/ - A search engine for indie websites (the crawler collects data from RSS feeds)

                                                                                                                      3. https://github.com/0x2E/rss-finder - A tool for finding the RSS link of a website

                                                                                                                      • domysee 41 minutes ago

                                                                                                                        Same for me, and would like to add my own list

                                                                                                                        1. https://lighthouseapp.io/ - feed reader combined with bookmarking

                                                                                                                        2. https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder - tool to find RSS feeds (https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds)

                                                                                                                        3. https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/newsletter-to-rss - tool to convert newsletters to RSS feeds

                                                                                                                        • emporas 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                          Nice list. I tried at some point to analyze html using a tree-sitter grammar and generate a list of articles, index them, and be on alert every so often for new entries.

                                                                                                                          RSS feed could be generated automatically with some AI code generator (or tree-sitter query generator), and just parsing the elements of the page.

                                                                                                                          Eventually i failed, but also i didn't try hard enough.

                                                                                                                          • freetonik 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                            Rawweb is very cool! Curious, have you implemented your own crawler, RSS parser and search engine?

                                                                                                                            • rook1e_dev 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                              Crawler is a simple HTTP requester + RSS parser. Full-text searching uses Elasticsearch.

                                                                                                                          • rrgok an hour ago

                                                                                                                            What I really want in an RSS Reader is to fetch and show also the comments. Think about this post on HN, I'm more interested in reading the comments. Sadly, RSS only fetch/shows at most the body of the item. It would be really good to have a centralized and unified interface for getting news and comments just in your RSS reader.

                                                                                                                            • adhoc_slime an hour ago

                                                                                                                              I've almost never cared about learning about rss before but seeing the response it alsways gets, I decided I'd try feedly on my phone and add this blog to it.

                                                                                                                              Feedly asks for a url, this site makes me download a .bin file. It doesn't make sense how this is my first user experience. I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But it is a nav item on the site.

                                                                                                                              Call me nieve or whatever you like but with ux like this I can start to see how this technology has become less popular.

                                                                                                                              • imadj an hour ago

                                                                                                                                > I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But its nav item on the site.

                                                                                                                                In feedly and many readers, you can just enter the website URL and it'll find the feed(s) automatically if present.

                                                                                                                                But in general, how RSS work, you copy the URL to the RSS feed and give it to Reader to subscribe/follow the website. https://reedybear.bearblog.dev/feed/

                                                                                                                                When the author publishes a new piece, they update the file located at this URL and your reader will fetch you the new content.

                                                                                                                                • galleywest200 an hour ago

                                                                                                                                  Why don't you use a feed reader that just have you input the URL? I use News Explorer and I just paste in the RSS URL. Heck, some even just let you paste in the root URL of the site and they find the RSS link for you.

                                                                                                                                  Feedly is a huge beast besides just an RSS reader. Try something lightweight.

                                                                                                                                  • MortyWaves an hour ago

                                                                                                                                    I believe browsers, for some conspiratorial reason, actively sabotaged RSS and RSS support in their browsers. Might even be as simple as under the table deals from scumbag ad companies.

                                                                                                                                  • hackerbeat an hour ago

                                                                                                                                    The problem with RSS today is that bad actors use it to scrape and rewrite content using AI.

                                                                                                                                    Not having it enabled makes life harder for them since many are too lazy/not savvy enough to use other means to steal content.

                                                                                                                                    • tjoff 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                                      Never got around to use RSS for some reason, what software do people recommend?

                                                                                                                                      For me I believe I'd prefer a TUI in the terminal, but probably depends.

                                                                                                                                      • rednafi 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                        RSS is a wonderfully simple solution to get notifications for things I care about.

                                                                                                                                        I came to the software industry a lot later than the inception of Web 2.0 and rediscovered RSS almost accidentally. I advocate for it too.

                                                                                                                                        You’d be surprised how many people still care about this. My static site build broke the RSS[1] once recently, and I immediately got like 5 emails from different people.

                                                                                                                                        [1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml

                                                                                                                                        • theanonymousone 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                          I have some app/service ideas which all involve "informing" the user about something.

                                                                                                                                          Implementations of this notification mechanism are either spammy, privacy-problematic, or both: (Web) Push notifications, Email, or Messages.

                                                                                                                                          The only solution that doesn't have either of these problems seems to be RSS: Provide the user with (customised) feed link and let them/their RSS client deal with it.

                                                                                                                                          I really wish RSS was less niche and more mainstream. I will "advocate" for it regardless.

                                                                                                                                          • rambambram 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                            In the vein of: the web is already decentralized and social by it's nature, I built an RSS reader-and-feed-in-one for Hey Homepage (a DIY website pack that I made). So there's one place for reading posts and for publishing your own posts, just like the timelines from big tech.

                                                                                                                                            Combine that with a list of shared links which functions as a blog roll and consists of the feeds that you follow, and you have yourself a Really Social Site. You can even download the OPML file that contains all the shared links and start following some feeds from it yourself. So discovery is also possible with RSS feeds and OPML lists, albeit it works slightly different than you're used to from big tech.

                                                                                                                                            After that I built a Newspaper module that automatically collects new posts from feeds that I selected. This is my main way to get news without some algorithm deciding for me. The only wish I have is that more of your personal sits/blogs (most websites I follow come from HN) offer more 'photo feeds', just an enclosure-element in your item with a link to a picture or other media.

                                                                                                                                            • mg 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                              If you have an application that does not support RSS/atom yet, you can easily add support with a few lines of Python.

                                                                                                                                              Or use an open source module. Here is a general atom feed generator that I wrote and published under the GPL:

                                                                                                                                              https://github.com/no-gravity/atomfeed.py

                                                                                                                                              Just 14 lines of Python. And it has been reliably serving the feed for my own website for quite a while now.

                                                                                                                                              • rednafi 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                Interesting. Also, almost all static site generators support RSS. But sometimes it’s not turned on by default.

                                                                                                                                              • amitport 5 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                I'm still waiting for https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ to catch.

                                                                                                                                                • econ 5 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                  I do this too! Reception is wonderful.

                                                                                                                                                  I also include a short description of rss, which parts to support with an example and a description of how one could make an rss feed: you take whatever code produces the index html, remove everything except the part that outputs for each item the title, introduction text, the link and the publication date.

                                                                                                                                                  Followed by one more short example rss with $title

                                                                                                                                                  Not that any developer would really need this but it puts everything they need to know and do on a single page. You don't have to think, just do it.

                                                                                                                                                  • bmacho 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                    > I've been advocating for [X], and you should too

                                                                                                                                                    This seems like what we should do against negative trends. I think complaining is more common, probably more accepted (?) than advocating, but logically, the latter is what we should do.

                                                                                                                                                    • danielktdoranie an hour ago

                                                                                                                                                      I love RSS and I actively used it until modern browsers dropped support for it and then websites stopped using it. I always felt RSS being dropped wasn’t the choice of users but more a conspiracy between those browser developers (or rather their managers and company leaders) and marketing/sales departments of pretty much any company that advertises on the internet: Google being the main one.

                                                                                                                                                      Why? You can’t bombard RSS with advertising like you can on browsers and if people could get the information they need from RSS they won’t see ads.

                                                                                                                                                      I recall the dropping of RSS happened over 6 months to my recollection. RSS was here and every website of merit used it, then all of a sudden Chrome, FireFox and Safari all dropped RSS support. You could go and install a separate RSS client but few people did that (extra steps and all) and then websites saw no one was using RSS and dropped support.

                                                                                                                                                      RSS was particularly useful for browsing jobs for IT contractors. I used it daily, using RSS I was able to get job listings fast and apply before other candidates.

                                                                                                                                                      • grumbel 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                        If RSS could solve the problem it would have done so a decade ago.

                                                                                                                                                        The core issue is that browsers have completely failed at offering anything to keep track of websites. Why aren't notifications simply build into the bookmark system? I don't need the website to provide that information via yet another special format, my browser should be able to figure that out itself from plain .html. But bookmarks haven't changed one bit in about 30 years, instead we moved that functionality server-side for no reason.

                                                                                                                                                        • rglullis 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                          Poe's Law, or you really don't remember the time where browsers had a huge button in the address bar to announce their feeds or that Firefox used to have a "Smart Bookmarks" feature to show you all the latest updates from all the feeds you subscribed to?

                                                                                                                                                          • grumbel 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                            I am not talking about RSS, I am talking about plain old bookmarks. Browser never would give you notification when something you bookmarked changed.

                                                                                                                                                            The RSS feature was always kind of useless, since it required that the website provided a RSS feed to begin with, which most don't. The implementation in Firefox was also horrible on top.

                                                                                                                                                            HTML is a markup language, with header, datetime and article tags, parse that and do something useful with it, we don't need yet another format that duplicates the information that is already on the website.

                                                                                                                                                            • rglullis 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                              I guess you are vastly underestimating the complexity of parsing HTML and extracting the relevant information out of it. It might seem trivial nowadays, but it falls well within https://xkcd.com/1425/ territory if you take into account that the majority of web pages are basically producing non-spec conforming (X)HTML.

                                                                                                                                                              And if you respond with "well, I don't care about the actual content, I just want to receive a notification when the page has changed at all", think how long would it take for every marketer use that "feature" to simply make minimal changes in the site to trick their viewers into inflating their page view numbers...

                                                                                                                                                              • grumbel 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared. But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well...

                                                                                                                                                                • cgriswald an hour ago

                                                                                                                                                                  A publisher does not want countless browsers scraping arbitrary web pages just to see if they’ve changed when they can instead offer a single lightweight end point specifically for content that is intended to be updated. If browsers started doing this scraping I can only imagine the arms race.

                                                                                                                                                                  I can only see this happening as a service. A company crawls the web—probably a search company. Their LLM classifies changes. Their users can subscribe to individual sites or pages.

                                                                                                                                                                  Even then there are downsides to publishers including loss of some tracking information and users spending less time on their sites being subjected to advertisements.

                                                                                                                                                                  • rglullis an hour ago

                                                                                                                                                                    > But hey, instead of fixing some HTML tags lets reinvent a completely new format and require every singe website on the planet to adopt that, that'll sure work out well...

                                                                                                                                                                    It worked amazingly well! It worked so well that it became a problem for the publishers when they realized the standard for syndication has become so widely adopted that people were not visiting the websites anymore and they had lost control of content gatekeeping.

                                                                                                                                                                    > Mozilla had half a billion dollars each year to work with, I am sure they could have figured something out if they cared.

                                                                                                                                                                    I agree with you that Mozilla has shown that they don't really care about an open web, but I think you are reversing cause and effect. RSS was already a reality when Google had to kill (*) it, and Mozilla went along with it because they never managed to get out of Google's money tit.

                                                                                                                                                                    * Not really kill it, but just taking all the steam out of it so it wouldn't destroy their own business.

                                                                                                                                                              • frouge 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                I agree that to succeed RSS must be properly managed right in the browser. The problem is that it was not properly implemented inside Firefox, so I personaly didn't want to use that system.

                                                                                                                                                                What I want is a simple counter that show how many new posts there are of the RSS, and that's it. I only click for new content.

                                                                                                                                                              • devmor 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                God wouldn't that be simple and novel? Check a box when you bookmark a website and your browser polls it every so often for updates and gives you a little badge like a mobile app icon.

                                                                                                                                                                No need for JS workers or push servers.

                                                                                                                                                                • oneeyedpigeon 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                  I wouldn't mind if browsers want to offer that feature in addition to RSS. But I also don't want to be forced to use my browser's bookmarking feature - RSS helps to decouple that.

                                                                                                                                                                  • cgriswald 43 minutes ago

                                                                                                                                                                    I must be misunderstanding you. If this were possible standalone bookmark managers could do what standalone RSS readers do.

                                                                                                                                                                • 6510 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                  Switching to the phone home screen was like we skipped a few dozen iterations.

                                                                                                                                                                  Or wait, that was just a clone from the pc desktop which was a clone from the 1973 Xerox Alto.

                                                                                                                                                                  https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/know-your-icons-part-1-...

                                                                                                                                                                  Ah yes, how familiar it looks...

                                                                                                                                                                  My joke since the 90's: Mosaic had full text history search!! It aged well I must say.

                                                                                                                                                                  With all the money coming in from google it was hard for Mozilla to understand the point of subscribing to RSS or organizing what one finds online. For google it must have been even more incomprehensible.

                                                                                                                                                                • pjmlp 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                  Spot on, I keep using it for years, and never understood why the tragedy around Google's RSS reader, there are tons of readers out there.

                                                                                                                                                                  And since this is HN, implementing a RSS reader tutorial is surely more interesting than TODO lists.

                                                                                                                                                                  • rmnclmnt 5 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                    Love RSS, been using (and paying for) miniflux for a few years now.

                                                                                                                                                                    Do someone knows a way to retrieve RSS feeds URLs for any podcast that would be hosted on major platforms? (Spotify, Apple Music)

                                                                                                                                                                    I subscribed to podcast having some hosted website (where they are publishing the RSS feed from) but most of them don’t

                                                                                                                                                                  • nxtbl 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                    Been doing that, but especially in the last few years sites have been dropping RSS support and won't bring it back no matter how you reason for it.

                                                                                                                                                                    For example, job seeking sites:

                                                                                                                                                                    https://tyomarkkinatori.fi/ is the national "job market" for the whole of Finland. Municipal and state employers are obligated to publish their openings there. That site has been in development for years and from 1.1.2025 onwards it replaced the old one - which supplied RSS feeds. Tyomarkkinatori does not and when asked, they will only reply that RSS is not going to be supported and that's the end of it.

                                                                                                                                                                    https://indeed.com doesn't provide feeds anymore.

                                                                                                                                                                    Neither does (yet another Finnish aggregator) https://laura.fi

                                                                                                                                                                    • program 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                      Great initiative. All WordPress sites has multiple RSS feeds enabled by default.

                                                                                                                                                                      • ivanstame 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                        We all need to advocate for RSS, really important.

                                                                                                                                                                        • eminco 5 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                          RSS is indeed worth advocating for. One of its greatest strengths is its simplicity.

                                                                                                                                                                          • fire_lake 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                            Question about the RSS spec:

                                                                                                                                                                            When pulling RSS, how do you know how often to poll? How do you know which items have been seen previously?

                                                                                                                                                                            • domysee 25 minutes ago

                                                                                                                                                                              RSS actually has fields for it, but I've never seen it used.

                                                                                                                                                                              https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification#optionalChannelEl...

                                                                                                                                                                              ttl, skipHours, skipDays

                                                                                                                                                                              Source: working on a feed reader (https://lighthouseapp.io/) and feed finder tool (https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder).

                                                                                                                                                                              • octochamp 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                RSS can be polled as frequently or infrequently as you like, it's just a bit of XML hosted by a site which lists content or links to content.

                                                                                                                                                                                Tracking what's been read or not isn't done by the RSS feed or whoever hosts it, it's performed by the user's feed reader, which be just a local app on your phone or PC, or it might be a cloud service, either hosted (like Feedly) or self-hosted (using ie. FreshRSS).

                                                                                                                                                                                • oneeyedpigeon 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                  > how do you know how often to poll?

                                                                                                                                                                                  I would guess a combination of frequency from sitemap.xml, last modified http header, and past heuristics. Previously viewed items would, I think, need to be cached in the client (unless the RSS URL uses some kind of token to identify the user, which sounds ripe for abuse).

                                                                                                                                                                                  • asjo 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                    rachelbythebay has a service and a series of blog posts about the technical side of this, starting at https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

                                                                                                                                                                                    TL;DR: readers should not poll more often than once and hour, use ETag and If-Modified-Since to determine whether to download the full feed again.

                                                                                                                                                                                    Which items you have seen previously is something the feed reader keeps track of.

                                                                                                                                                                                    • 6510 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                      You could examine the time between feed items.

                                                                                                                                                                                      Personally I just start my reader then it aggregates and sorts my feeds by date into a single interface. This works well specially for much larger numbers.

                                                                                                                                                                                    • xenodium 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                      > in a way that you're completely in control of, without bloat, without ads, without algorithms.

                                                                                                                                                                                      If they don’t play nice, they often offer short digests in feeds, driving users to open their sites where you get ads, tracking, bloat, paywalls, and no longer in control…

                                                                                                                                                                                      Thank you for advocating RSS. It’s the least we should strive for in our services.

                                                                                                                                                                                      We can also strive for services themselves without tracking, ads, bloat…

                                                                                                                                                                                      If you have a blog or want to start one, consider supporting platforms that genuinely improve the web experience.

                                                                                                                                                                                      I built https://lmno.lol after growing tired of the popular blogging platforms.

                                                                                                                                                                                      Here’s my blog on it https://lmno.lol/alvaro

                                                                                                                                                                                      If you prefer a different blogging service, there are other folks working on building a more mindful web.

                                                                                                                                                                                      By supporting services like these, you prove that like-minded services are not only possible but fully sustainable without deceitful tech.

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Bear

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Ghost

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Glitch

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Haven

                                                                                                                                                                                      • LMNO.lol

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Mataroa

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Micro.blog

                                                                                                                                                                                      • mmm.page

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Montaigne

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Nekoweb

                                                                                                                                                                                      • omg.lol

                                                                                                                                                                                      • pages.casa

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Pika

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Posthaven

                                                                                                                                                                                      • prose.sh

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Scribbles

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Smol Pub

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Write.as

                                                                                                                                                                                      • Yay.Boo

                                                                                                                                                                                      • yakshaving_jgt an hour ago

                                                                                                                                                                                        So, should we be using RSS? Or Atom?

                                                                                                                                                                                        It seems like Atom is better, but RSS as a name is more well known?

                                                                                                                                                                                        I'm guessing adding a button on your website which says "Subscribe via RSS" but which actually points to an Atom feed would be confusing and bad?

                                                                                                                                                                                        • sirolimus 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                          RSS is GOAT

                                                                                                                                                                                          • ginko 2 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                            How would you even use RSS now that no browser supports it anymore? Do people run a separate RSS reader on the side?

                                                                                                                                                                                            • talideon 3 minutes ago

                                                                                                                                                                                              Browsers have never really supported feeds. Even Firefox really only supported feed auto-discovery. There are extensions that implement feed readers, but browsers are ill suited to be feed readers. Most people who consume feeds do so via a dedicated feed reader, and there are plenty of online feed readers out there if you don't want a desktop one and plenty of services if you don't want to self-host. I self-host and use Miniflux personally.

                                                                                                                                                                                            • LAC-Tech 4 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                              how much of a PITA is it to add RSS to your own site?

                                                                                                                                                                                              • rednafi 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                                Not much at all. If you are using a static site generator, they usually support it out of the box.

                                                                                                                                                                                                Recently, one of my posts hit the front page here, and a few people emailed me asking for an RSS[1] feed. It turned out that it was just a simple config update to enable this on Hugo.

                                                                                                                                                                                                Other SSGs usually support it out of the box too. Plus, it’s not too hard to build the XML from your HTML if you want to build it yourself from scratch.

                                                                                                                                                                                                [1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml

                                                                                                                                                                                                • oneeyedpigeon 3 hours ago

                                                                                                                                                                                                  It's an open text format. There are some complexities if you dive down the rabbit hole, but at the most basic level, it's pretty simple. I even do it by hand on one site that I rarely update.