How come noone has managed to crack the RSS rock yet? Everything has an RSS feed (though it's decreasing). Rss readers have more content than any social network. It seems like you should be able to build something with this that has broad adoption. There has to be something missing.
My theory has been for a while that what is missing is publishing. People don't just want to consume, they also want to share what they find and like and what they made themselves. I even started working on a web-based rss-reader/(micro)blogging thing at one point. Maybe I should give that another crack.
If you don't know it, take a look at Shaarli[1], it's a bookmarking web app that allows you to share your bookmarks via RSS, you can add tags and comments, but you can also have "notes" without a link that can be used as microblogging posts.
It's a project from Sebsauvage[2] (an old school french blogger), who wanted to build a social network around the RSS technology.
I know there are projects around it to aggregate multiple shaarli and use it as an actual social network based around sharing links with RSS. I didn't search about it, but it seems that shaarlo[3] is one of them. EDIT: actually, projects like this are listed in shaarli's documentation[4].
EDIT2: tt-rss-shaarli seems to be what you want, Tiny-Tiny RSS with Shaarli, an aggregator with a sharing/commenting functionality.
This is exactly what I don't understand about all the feed readers out there.
It seems so obvious that the next step for feed readers would be social interactions like sharing, also it would be to easy to add I guess.
Additionally the aspect of consuming YouTube via RSS feed. Feed readers could simply add small logic which transforms a given YouTube account into one of
And so on for similar services. RSS has such great potential but somehow nobody uses all of it.
Is there anything I miss? Why don't feed readers support external services (like the YouTube example from above)? Why don't feed readers add social features?
RSS is used by those who aren't into "social" addiction, but just want a quick listing of relevant news from a super-simple news feed (as in "really simple syndication"). A couple years ago Google embraced, extended and almost extinguished RSS, so I'm not sure RSS users are willing to obtain/share their feed URLs from a pointless central service; just go to the web sites you're reading frequently, check if they have an RSS feed announced in their HTML metadata (as indicated by an RSS symbol in eg. FF), and add the URL to your feeds.
Because RSS gives readers too much signal, and not enough noise (ads, profiling), and doesn't keep users within the walled garden ecosystems. That's why apps are popular, too. It is all about control. Another disadvantage is that RSS doesn't have native incremental updates, which increases data volume. Though that isn't very relevant in 2018.
As an RSS lover, I have zero interest in social features. If I occasionally want to share something, I can email/WhatsApp/Slack the URL; but for the most part I don't, and I'm able to read without the distraction and noise.
You can add the RSS feed of a youtube channel with the Tiny Tiny RSS bookmarklet, it's working for most channels, but not all for a reason I don't understand yet.
YouTube channel feeds, if they have one, are at: www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={channel_id} Some channels have a custom url and the id isn't obvious but it should be in the page source somewhere.
For example, "It's Okay To Be Smart" is at "www.youtube.com/user/itsokaytobesmart". Right click, view page source, search for "/channel/". That finds "<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH4BNI0-FOK2dMXoFtViWHw">". So the feed url is:
Woah, I spent more time than I care to admit trying to find some feeds. I thought I had the secret sauce all figured out :) https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=itsokaytobesma... is much easier to use. I can think of a few channels where the play list thing will come in handy if it works. Gamers where I only want to see 1 out of 50 games they play and are who are orginized enough to keep seperate playlist is one example. You can't even do that with YouTubes own subscription method as far as I know.
- most RSS readers suck so bad you can't even retrieve years old articles. So if you follow blogs that don't post often, you simply can NOT get any of their older posts. Imagine a blog that has one seriously good article once a month. Typically you can't get more than a year's worth of posts, so that's like 12 articles. Why?
- the best RSS app I had on iPad let me archive feeds for a LONG time. I used it as a kind of a library. Returned to articles many times (philosophy and such). Most RSS readers out there have ZERO functionality in terms of archiving content indefinitely. (meaning : they typically have some leeway in max articles stored, or how old to archive feeds.. but you know you simply can not realy on the app to save your favorite articels, at some point they will be deleted).
- inability to highlight text. Again, if I read something I want to be able to at least highlight some text. Most RSS readers don't do this.
Instead RSS readers do the same thing every other RSS reader does. Basically, it's like the developers of RSS apps think that the only purpose of retrieving articles is for fueling some kind of "feed" addiction. Like the only purpose of content on the web is to satisfy an urge to quick scan and move to the nex article.
It's like the devs of RSS apps are so drugged out themselves in this day and age of short attention span, that they can't envision other uses for a feed reader than satisfying this urge for the daily/hourly doses of "novelty". Click click click. Swipe swipe swipe.
You're free to develop an RSS reader with those features yourself. RSS is - on paper - an extremely simple protocol, but since many feeds are broken (not wellformed/improperly escaped XML, often incompetently copied from HTML, with spam, etc. etc.), RSS readers must integrate individual feeds almost on a case-by-case basis, with feed-specific fixes and heuristics. And there goes your project budget. Considering RSS isn't exactly growing (because the number of valuable news site isn't neither), the state of RSS is as good or bad as it always has been. I don't know if that is actually a good thing, because when big media (Google) last turned their eye towards it, it monopolized and almost ruined it.
> - most RSS readers suck so bad you can't even retrieve years old articles. So if you follow blogs that don't post often, you simply can NOT get any of their older posts. Imagine a blog that has one seriously good article once a month. Typically you can't get more than a year's worth of posts, so that's like 12 articles. Why?
Most blogs don't include more than the last ten or so articles in their feed. Fetching backlogs of posts is beyond the scope of RSS. Unless you're complaining that posts you've already downloaded aren't persisted indefinitely?
This seems like the sort of thing that should be in the spec for a feed. RSS is basically a textual representation of a site's available articles; you have to explicitly GET the feed to see any new posts (at least without PubSub). If you're going to provide a static xml representation of your site's content, there's no obvious reason why you wouldn't want that to extend back indefinitely.
By looking into Podlove[1] I stumbled onto a specification[2] by the IETF for just that. It doesn't seem to have much support though, neither on the feed creator, nor the client side.
https://bazqux.com/ has long (I think indefinite?) history, text highlighting, a starring system and built-in integration with Pocket/Pinboard/Evernote/whatever.
Keep in mind your history issue is often the fault of the feed, not the reader. If you subscribe to a new blog that only has a year's worth of posts in its feed, then that's what you get. The reader can't proactively follow every blog in the world just in case someone subscribes in 3 years and wants to see the full history.
Yeah its predecessor, OStatus, was pretty much that: you start with a feed of anything, then you add another feed for the reader to comment, then a way to send the comment back to the source so everyone can see it, and lo and behold you've got yourself a social network brewing. Activitypub is a rethinking of the whole thing with clear requirements and specs instead of some informal pieces added here and there, which is a good thing. Except all the existing RSS feeds can't be used as such.
My theory has been for a while that what is missing is publishing. People don't just want to consume, they also want to share what they find and like and what they made themselves. I even started working on a web-based rss-reader/(micro)blogging thing at one point. Maybe I should give that another crack.