I hate RSS. It’s a bad format that developed organically in all the worst ways, and it should have died completely in favour of Atom by about twenty years ago. I started a draft describing some of the problems that actually matter (thing that can’t be represented reliably in RSS, and such) in <https://chrismorgan.info/atom%3Erss>.
And so I wish people would stop calling feeds RSS, because it continues to compound the problem. Let RSS die! More than once I’ve seen people implement RSS feeds, at great pain and often with errors, simply because they hadn’t heard of Atom.
(I still need to decide which spec I hate more, RSS or OpenGraph. Hmm… RSS had more excuses for being bad, OpenGraph was just a spectacularly bad thing thrown over the wall by a company that should have known better. I drafted something examining how comprehensively bad it was some years ago, I should put it onto my new site and continue it at some point.)
jjordantoday at 5:50 PM
Wow, what timing. Not to shill, but I'm also nearly done building a directory of RSS feeds. It stemmed from a frustration of outdated and broken RSS feed collections, and the long slow death of the orange RSS subscribe button across the web. I'm not officially launched yet but I would love some feedback and maybe some of the RSS feeds that land in your directory can be added to mine.
Pardon the dust. There's an app tie-in that I'm almost done with too, a widget-first app that shows your RSS feed collections on your phone's home screen. It would really be great if we could start to bring about an RSS renaissance!
mickeyptoday at 5:24 PM
I love RSS but what I love more than RSS are people who blog about stuff: high concept stuff, day-to-day stuff and just what they did yesterday.
I wish people would blog more like in the old days.
ninjahawk1today at 5:19 PM
seeing an emoji in a title on HN really surprised me, I didn’t even know you could do that. Shows how much emotion we use on here lol.
edhelastoday at 5:02 PM
If you love RSS, embrace Atom 1.0 :)
Its the final modern form of RSS.
qudattoday at 5:42 PM
Nice! The entire https://pico.sh constellation of services are built off rss for notifications.
It's great to see someone else using FeedLand. While it has some quirks, is has some clever ideas, like that blogroll feature.
My favorite part of FeedLand is that you can see who subscribes to a blog and where else they subscribe. This makes RSS feel social, without the algorithmic tricks of traditional social media. Here's the listing for my blog, for example: https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...
pooploop64today at 5:58 PM
Surprisingly cool site. I've seen lots of sites for RSS feeds but they aren't any good because they just dump their mountain of every feed that was ever known to exist, and there's not really any aspects of curation or discovery. RSS feeds themselves embody the exact way I think the internet should work, where the internet itself is the platform. However it's very nice to get some help finding new stuff.
nicole_expresstoday at 5:59 PM
I'm always surprised how many people who read my blog do so over RSS. It's probably one of my biggest traffic sources. (Definitely due to my niche topic and small reach, but still)
I don't really use RSS myself anymore, though; not since I stopped using Google Reader a few months before they pulled the plug. Wouldn't even know where to start nowadays.
dgellowtoday at 5:01 PM
HN renders emojis in color?! I’m reading that on an iPad and see a red heart. That’s a first
smarkovtoday at 5:27 PM
Maybe you love being the consumer of RSS feeds, but you certainly wouldn't love being the poor bastard who has to parse them.
Even though it's a simple standard that's been around for decades, there are still many sites which serve their feeds with a subtly wrong format. When something doesn't work, users come knocking on your door saying "it works in X reader but not in yours", so now you have to handle that and contribute to the ever growing list of out of spec edge cases that feed readers need to account for.
luciana1utoday at 8:02 PM
the format wars ended and the prize was that nobody won and we all just use a different feed reader for the rest of our lives
bolt012today at 5:08 PM
I love self hosting my own RSS feed with miniflux!
paradoxyltoday at 5:27 PM
What sort of punishment should the monopolist google execs who destroyed blogs undergo? A fair punishment might be clawback of all wages and stock options and about five years in a minimum security prison with a permenant felony on their record. I think that's fair.
elevententoday at 8:10 PM
> An Atom feed correctly labelled application/atom+xml won’t match — that tag is right, it just isn’t the format we list - https://iheartrss.com/guide
...why?
poisonborztoday at 5:15 PM
Nowadays I see these sites as nothing else but mining grounds for personal profiling by big tech. Nothing can be a cutesy show-off anymore.