> Sure, it's great for readers as it allows them to read all the content from one reading app but, on the other hand, the publication can't provide a custom experience, or - what's most important for some publications - display ads. That's likely why RSS is slowly moving into obscurity, at least IMHO.
Sure. But a title-only RSS feed seems like a very reasonable compromise.
And it's so much better than what everyone seems to have moved to, which is email notification.
There are a lot of feeds now with titles and maybe a short paragraph of text, like the beginning of the article or a summary.
There is a world of difference between sites maintaining those feeds vs. nothing at all. Having a signal that an article is there with even the slightest amount of context is so much better than the alternative.
It's mildly annoying to visit a site for the full text (with your ad blocker), but signing up for newsletters etc. from each site one-by-one is really painful.
If I'm going to take 5+ minutes to really read something, it's OK to visit the site. That means something is interesting or relevant enough to invest my time in. That signal can usually be gleaned from a title and short paragraph. Compared to the number of new things published every day, it's relatively rare to find things worth those 5+ minutes.
From what I can gather, many people use RSS readers to follow 5-10 feeds, and they slowly look through and read most of the articles. It serves as a convenient way to follow their top few sites and maybe a few aggregators like HN. Other people track 100s of feeds and quickly scan what's happening, only diving into something if it's interesting or important.
I'm building a service for the second type of person (mainly because I'm that type of person, TBH). No idea what the ratio of "completionists" vs. "scanners" is. Having title-only feeds is not ideal for the latter group, but it's usually fine.
I’ve found some respite in email-to-RSS, but its still not great.
I’m definitely interested in a (hopefully FOSS) service for us “scanners”. I average around 300~ articles in my RSS daily, and I’m always hungry for more information. Though I should probably see about re-organizing it all so I’m not as consistently overwhelmed.
I want to make a FOSS reader that we can run on our own machines. It would poll on demand and be really good at archiving sites/posts. A combination of feed reader and scraping/archiving from residential IPs (at a low rate) where it will almost always be successful.
I want to pair that with an (opt-in) service for syncing feed subscriptions and handing off a stream of things worth archiving (it's often not urgent that this happens, you just want to make sure it happens soon so the content is not lost in a few years). That service could be a very low cost monthly subscription thing plus a FOSS option that you could run on a cheap VPS, etc.
24/7 services are also essential for generating notifications when something in a filter is spotted, being able to have an email gateway, doing things like POSTing items to other sites automatically, etc.
Making that "full" service FOSS is not in the near term plans, though. This is a distributed system that has run 100s of millions of jobs already, has a very specific security and monitoring setup, uses a number of queues and databases, etc. From my past experience, it's really hard to support people with on-premises distributed systems software like this (FOSS or not). I couldn't do this part alone (bootstrapping and can't afford to hire anyone yet).
i found out a tool that convets emails back into RSS, it even provides a custom e-mail address that you can use per feed. it can be self hosted, or used on their website (which is ad free): https://kill-the-newsletter.com
This might be the solution. RSS readers could serve as a general link aggregators (like HN), but with immediate listings of the latest content from your favorite sites. Too bad most just prefer to get rid of RSS entirely.
On the other hand, I don't necessarily dislike the email model (especially when having dedicated address just for newsletters) but it's much less comfortable than RSS and quite limiting from the publishing standpoint (given how far behind emails are behind modern Web).
Personally I still try to have RSS in all my content websites (with full content) as I'm primarily thinking about reach rather than ads. The ones that I haven't implemented RSS for yet, are just because it was more challenging or required more effort when integrating with e.g. CMS or something.
Have you used any modern RSS reader recently like inoreader, they load the content of the page without visiting the publishing website. So still, no ads.
> Have you used any modern RSS reader recently like inoreader, they load the content of the page without visiting the publishing website.
I'm happy with newsboat[1]; but I'm not surprised that people have integrated scraping into RSS readers.
Fundamentally, that's not a problem with RSS, that's a war between scrapers and content providers. If the email newsletter model persists long enough, I'd expect that people will come out with "newsletter readers" that scrape websites too.
I'm not sure there's a good long-term solution to the problem. Aside from constant vigilance (obfuscation).
Sure, you can obfuscate all you want.
But my point still stands valid.
Earning a living from ads for these types of people.is not sustainable. They will have adblocker installed, so you are also wasting respurces with no income.
RSS or newsletter or whatever scrapper, it's there today already.
Adding ads into feeds works, just make them an entry in the feed. I have also seen embedded images with ads.
Issue is that Google Ads and such don't offer this and you don't get the "typical" ad networks.
If RSS were more popular there wouldn't be a problem to build the required tooling.
Even when feed readers don't send cookies etc. while fetching you can do a permanent redirect to a feed with an unique ID in the URL and most feed readers will store that URL, thus you can do tracking (incl. personalizing URLs in the feed) and all that.
What saves reader privacy currently is the small user base.
Yeah, that's roughly aligns with what I've experienced. RSS is beneficial to publishers when reach is the top priority (e.g. it's a company marketing blog or the ads are "embedded" directly into the content).
Sure. But a title-only RSS feed seems like a very reasonable compromise.
And it's so much better than what everyone seems to have moved to, which is email notification.