What Happened to RSS?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • awesome-rss

    Puts an RSS/Atom subscribe button back in URL bar

  • Reading the rest of the comments, I was wondering if I missed something. I use awesome-rss firefox extension [1] to discover RSS feeds on firefox. I maintain a list of feeds using elfeed-org and follow them using elfeed on Emacs. It's clean and extremely fast - especially while searching. Granted that it isn't really beginner friendly. But there are nice beginner-friendly alternatives like liferea too. Here are somethings that confuse me while reading these sorts of articles and discussions:

    1. I don't see why they say browsers killed RSS/atom feeds. The only casualty was the discoverability of those feeds (like the discontinued live bookmarks on Firefox). But it is easy enough to restore it using extensions like awesome-rss, if you care enough. And I find a lot of dedicated feed reader applications catering to all sorts of users.

    2. I don't understand how twitter and firefox killed RSS/Atom feeds. I find it extremely tedious to search for meaningful information with them. These sites are full of material designed to hold your attention captive while frustrating your efforts at finding worthwhile material. In contrast, RSS/Atom is information dense, easy to search, narrow and archive.

    3. There is no dearth of RSS/Atom feeds on the web. Every good news website news site seems to host one. Almost all the blog engines and static site generators automatically generate them without any configuration or intervention. I find my feedlist growing very large overtime.

    4. It also appears like many people associate RSS/Atom feeds with an online service like feedreader or (the dead) Google reader. My understanding is that you don't need an online service to aggregate feeds. An intermittently online desktop/mobile client can do it just the same. I haven't noticed an RSS/Atom client ever failing to aggregate a feed. The only thing I found missing was an automatic way to share and synchronize the feed list itself - though it's easy enough to implement with something like syncthing. Am I missing something here?

    For me, twitter, FB etc are inferior to RSS/Atom feeds in every conceivable way - with the exception of lack of a discussion forum. I too find the death proclamation of RSS/Atom a bit of an overstatement.

    [1] https://github.com/shgysk8zer0/awesome-rss

    [2] https://lzone.de/liferea/

  • Selfoss

    multipurpose rss reader, live stream, mashup, aggregation web application

  • Yep, google reader was great.

    Luckily, there are many self-hosted alternatives available, one of them being selfoss: https://selfoss.aditu.de/ (not affiliated or anything, just like the reader)

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

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  • rss-proxy

    RSS-proxy allows you to do create an RSS or ATOM feed of almost any website, just by analyzing just the static HTML structure.

  • I'm using it every day, that's what happens to it. Many sites provide their own feeds and those which don't can often be fed to something like rss-proxy [1] which will create a feed (or several feeds) based on an XPath query [2]. This can be self-hosted so you don't have to inform external entities about your feeding behaviour.

    [1] https://github.com/damoeb/rss-proxy

    [2] e.g. here's how to get Göteborgs Posten (a Swedish newspaper which ditched its feed some time ago) in an RSS feed reader (Atom is also supported through ...&o=Atom) - note that this is an example.org domain so the link does not work as is - https://rssproxy.example.org/api/feed?url=https://gp.se&pCon...

  • rsslookup

    A free tool to find the RSS feed for any website

  • Code quality isn't the greatest(this was my first real React/Next.js project) but I've just published it: https://github.com/mratmeyer/rsslookup.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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