Technology

42472 readers

552 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

coldredlight@beehaw.org

remington@beehaw.org

Vulture rediscovers RSS to dull the pain of the modern web (www.theregister.com)

submitted 3 days ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A couple of timely blog posts remind us that RSS is alive, well, and can help you resist enshittification of the Web.

Last week, Caroline Crampton's blog post, The View from RSS really caught our attention, helped by its subtitle: What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds. We were not the only ones who it grabbed: at the weekend, Cory Doctorow also picked up on it in a post called The web is bearable with RSS.

One of the snags of reporting on the tech sector is tackling the constant stream of announcements of radical new technology that is going to change everything. Another, of course, is trying to find out about them via websites in the 2020s, where even with an in-browser ad-blocker, plus a network one too, and an anti-cookie warning extension, many websites are still horribly cluttered.

So when someone following two thousand feeds tells you that an RSS reader can strip a lot of the cruft away, and a caped crusader of the blogosphere agrees ... well, this vulture sits up and pays attention.

The origins of the RSS system go back to the 1990s, and like the Markdown markup language we reported on earlier today, the RSS 1.0 standard was co-developed by the late Aaron Swartz when he was just 14 years old.

With enough RSS feeds, web search only becomes an occasional hell.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] a_random_fox@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago

I always used offline reader because the feeds i subscribed to don't have that many updates (most of them are currently webcomics updating 1-3 times a week) so i generally just check on it a few times a day and none of it is really urgent, so there is not really much point in expanding the time where i could check on it. Another factor might also be that i started using RSS with Firefoxes inbuilt reader (which they removed back in 2018) which didn't sync across devices, so i was just used to it being like that.