Her problems are the problems of a polling-based protocol and really if she does not like the RSS protocol she should stop publishing it and stand up an ActivityPub or PubSubHubBub service instead.
A big part of the value of Google Reader and the ecosystem around it was that Google could poll your RSS feed once and everyone could read it... A huge win for the Rachels!
I built a site that's similar in concept to Hacker News, but is entirely fed by RSS feed content, that is then bullet-pointed summarized on the article page: https://engineered.at/
But I also extract topics automatically from the content too with LLMs, to allow for dynamic topic pages that users can separately subscribe to to tune their feeds.
Haven't promoted it much, but it's pretty amazing what you can do for a couple bucks a month. And my main thesis with this site is that by locking the content to only rss feeds of known blogs, you dramatically reduce the spam submission risk (basically eliminate it). Doesn't handle the spam comment side of things, but that's a different problem.
I have almost 40 feeds I subscribe to and they're my primary way of getting information I care about without being exposed to ads or other things I don't want to see.
What's old is new again. The solution RSS offered was structure for an otherwise unstructured challenge (trying to figure out updates on a site). That value grew exponentially when connected to AI (providing the signals of when do I need to look at this site/podcast again). Smart marketing.
I kinda don't like RSS because I often want like a whole blog archive downloaded if I add a new feed and it usually has limits how far back of posts it will download (randomly configured by each site)
Unless someone has a fix of whatever settings I've been using
For the Premium Archive tier, NewsBlur attempts to download a blog's entire backlog to backfill stories, whether it's exposed through paging or RFC 5005. Here's more info about how NewsBlur does it: https://blog.newsblur.com/2022/07/01/premium-archive-subscri...
Anyone know the best practices for keeping AI crawlers off your RSS feeds? I know robots.txt works for the well-behaved bots. Other tools like interstitial captchas don't as the feed readers break if you send them anything but XML.
Putting just the post intro in the feed and linking to the website feels like a safer approach, assume you have bot protections on the website, but that's a poor experience for people who want to read in their feed reader.
I must add that I self-host FreshRSS to fetch news and GitHub repos updates so I can update my stuff, everything in-house, controlled by me.
RSS makes life so much easier, some only provide the bare minimal while others, provide the whole post so I can read everything right there without opening a website.
Also, some podcast support it so I have a list of podcast that I list and can go back without having to go from website to website.
i mean, i still read hacker news primarily via RSS in feedly. i kind of never stopped using it, and everybody is much more generous with their feeds nowadays than back in google reader times. bearblog, etc. RSS rules
Re: Rate Limits, see
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/
but coming from an aggressively anticommercial world view. She collects evidence that real world feed readers don't implement RSS correctly
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/02/23/readers/
Her problems are the problems of a polling-based protocol and really if she does not like the RSS protocol she should stop publishing it and stand up an ActivityPub or PubSubHubBub service instead.
A big part of the value of Google Reader and the ecosystem around it was that Google could poll your RSS feed once and everyone could read it... A huge win for the Rachels!
I built a site that's similar in concept to Hacker News, but is entirely fed by RSS feed content, that is then bullet-pointed summarized on the article page: https://engineered.at/
But I also extract topics automatically from the content too with LLMs, to allow for dynamic topic pages that users can separately subscribe to to tune their feeds.
Haven't promoted it much, but it's pretty amazing what you can do for a couple bucks a month. And my main thesis with this site is that by locking the content to only rss feeds of known blogs, you dramatically reduce the spam submission risk (basically eliminate it). Doesn't handle the spam comment side of things, but that's a different problem.
EDIT: I also open sourced a Rails engine I made to power this site if anyone is interested: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
I have almost 40 feeds I subscribe to and they're my primary way of getting information I care about without being exposed to ads or other things I don't want to see.
What are your favorite feeds?
These are my top ones:
Protesilaos: https://protesilaos.com/codelog.xml and https://protesilaos.com/commentary.xml
HN: https://hnrss.org/frontpage
Sacha Chua: https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/index.xml
David Revoy: https://www.davidrevoy.com/feed/rss
Davep: https://blog.davep.org/feeds/all.atom.xml
xkcd: https://xkcd.com/atom.xml
YouTube - Michelle Khare: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCGGZ_PO...
YouTube - TmarTn2: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC36MGPf...
AI agents don't need RSS. What they need is some representation in text. The XML/RSS markup is completely unnecessary.
What's old is new again. The solution RSS offered was structure for an otherwise unstructured challenge (trying to figure out updates on a site). That value grew exponentially when connected to AI (providing the signals of when do I need to look at this site/podcast again). Smart marketing.
I kinda don't like RSS because I often want like a whole blog archive downloaded if I add a new feed and it usually has limits how far back of posts it will download (randomly configured by each site)
Unless someone has a fix of whatever settings I've been using
Sorry, I don't have a solution. But I use RSS for everything, and I can confidently say: RSS is not designed for your use case.
For the Premium Archive tier, NewsBlur attempts to download a blog's entire backlog to backfill stories, whether it's exposed through paging or RFC 5005. Here's more info about how NewsBlur does it: https://blog.newsblur.com/2022/07/01/premium-archive-subscri...
I use Elfeed for Emacs and it stores the history as you download updates so you can always go back and read an old post.
I guess if you want your content all slurped up and served as coming from AI with no backlinks.
Anyone know the best practices for keeping AI crawlers off your RSS feeds? I know robots.txt works for the well-behaved bots. Other tools like interstitial captchas don't as the feed readers break if you send them anything but XML.
Putting just the post intro in the feed and linking to the website feels like a safer approach, assume you have bot protections on the website, but that's a poor experience for people who want to read in their feed reader.
You mean scraping instead of reading it? Reddit does not like the sound of that at all and are mulling to remove RSS support due to scrapers [0]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1tq9vxo/protecting...
Well yeah if they provide open access to content then AI labs wouldn’t have to pay them for bull access.
>RSS was declared dead in 2013
Where? Not within the homelab space.
I must add that I self-host FreshRSS to fetch news and GitHub repos updates so I can update my stuff, everything in-house, controlled by me.
RSS makes life so much easier, some only provide the bare minimal while others, provide the whole post so I can read everything right there without opening a website.
Also, some podcast support it so I have a list of podcast that I list and can go back without having to go from website to website.
One place to govern them all, RSS still king.
i mean, i still read hacker news primarily via RSS in feedly. i kind of never stopped using it, and everybody is much more generous with their feeds nowadays than back in google reader times. bearblog, etc. RSS rules