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It’s not a coincidence that most social media used to have RSS feeds in the past (Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit for example), but decided to remove them altogether by the time they decided to extinguish the competition, around the same time they restricted their API. Nowadays, the only way to fetch data from these sites is by using scrapers, and even those are being regularly thwarted for the same reasons why ad blockers are failing on the regular.
Most online medias promote Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/… via share links on every articles and via official accounts. Then rightfully complain about those platforms’ algorithms screwing with their readership and hurting revenue.
But they rarely promote RSS/Atom, ie the standards that would allow reader to follow them without algorithms getting in the way, while avoiding dependency on any of big techs’ closed platform.
I’ve done this for a club’s webpage that I admin and what I found most challenging, is to describe what the fuck the user is looking at. If you just link them the RSS XML and they click on that, then the browser downloads the XML file, which isn’t useful. They have to copy that link and then paste it into their feed reader.
Ah, right, what feed reader? If they don’t know what RSS is, they probably don’t have one installed. Do I just tell them, to download a specific feed reader app for whichever operating system they’re on? Do they know what an operating system is? And do I really want to recommended feed reader apps for operating systems that I don’t use myself?
Well, and finally, if I do describe all that gubbins, will anyone actually read that rather than just noping the fuck out?
So far, I have a link to the Wikipedia article on feed readers, which somewhat explains the concept and has at least a few links for the different feed readers out there. But yeah, I don’t actually believe anyone is going to read that and then know what to do…
Browsers have severely regressed in their RSS support. It used to be Firefox would preview RSS and display an easy single-click option to subscribe with your favorite reader, with suggested readers for people who don’t have one yet.
I guess websites developers have to make up for this, develop a dialog with shortcuts to subsribe with a handful of popular readers, and a shortcut to copy the link. There may already be JS libraries for this.
Ah yeah, that’s unfortunate. I actually don’t remember that it had a UI for RSS, just the Live Bookmarks, so I was recently thinking they could at least detect that it’s an RSS XML and then show a message that the user has to put the link into their feed reader.
But yeah, even that’s easier said than done, since you also have to support Atom and JSON Feed and whatever other formats there might be, and the message has to be translated into a gazillion languages, too…
Ive been on the internet since early 2000s. I still don’t know what RSS does or how to use it.
Really Simple Syndication
Helps you subscribe to blogs or news sites where you expect regular update. From your Thunderbird, or some other RSS reader.
All it really is, is an URL where the articles all appear in a specific XML format. And the reader checks it regularly and gives you a nice view
it takes a list of items (think articles of a blog or episodes of a podcast) and publishes said list in a specified, machine-readable (XML) format under a static URL.
Considering that I am working on tweaks to what is essentially a secondary application of an RSS client, I am not really expecting it to go away any time soon.
I like Brent’s stuff. If you’re on the Apple side of things, his NetNewsWire RSS reader is great (and open source!). I use it with a self-hosted FreshRSS backend and it works great.
Do you use freshrss scraper?
I only tried it once and gave up i think.
It’s really hard, but I had some success in 3 out of 4 sites I tried. Using browser developer tools helps you understand how information is structured in the site.
RSS inventor is not around.
