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0 pointsrablackburn4y ago0 comments

> RSS is increasing popularly again.

Is this true?

Every time RSS comes up we have this same discussion

A: “RSS is dead”

B: “well, I’m still using it and it’s great. Clearly it’s not dead!”

But A and B are having two different conversations.

For broad public consumption the only success RSS had was podcasts, and Spotify is actively trying to capture that open ecosystem and make it their cash cow.

Kids aren’t sitting around sharing the RSS feeds they like, it’s YouTube, TikTok, Discord; all proprietary walled gardens of content.

So yes, the technology isn’t dead, and the world is big enough there’s even a self-sustaining (probably) community of RSS users, but it still hasn’t quite lived up to it’s promise.

Streambus is exciting because the cost of hosting content keeps dropping, maybe we can reproduce the podcast model with video now. But as always the network effect and discoverability are big hurdles to overcome.

Podcasts succeeded not just because of RSS, they succeeded because Apple supported them in the iTunes Store (which is _still_ the most important place to get reviewed as a podcast) solving the discoverability problem.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

throwawayswede4y ago· 2 in thread

Depends on your definition of dead.

Public recognition of what thing X they're using or relying on is not necessary for something to be "alive" or "dead", otherwise you'd have to say that TCP/IP is dead because I bet less than 10% of internet users know what that is and even less know how it works.

People using podcasts still rely on RSS. Spotify's and Apple's attempt to circumvent an open-standard doesn't seem to be working as podcastindex.org already has double the amount of podcasts registered.

E-commerce product feeds still (mostly) use RSS.

Everyone still uses RSS, they just don't know it.

Jorengarenar4y ago

> otherwise you'd have to say that TCP/IP is dead because I bet less than 10% of internet users know what that is and even less know how it works.

Barely any user knows about TCP/IP, but everybody uses it daily. Using the Internet basically means using this protocol stack.

The same cannot be said about RSS

throwawayswede4y ago

Listening to podcasts means using feeds.

1 more reply

Isthatablackgsd4y ago· 1 in thread

As throwawayswede said, people are still using this technology and to my opinion, that is still active. There are a lot of things that are using RSS, it is not oblivious to us which why people believe it is dead.

Yes, RSS specification haven't made any improvement since 2010ish. However, the community are still using this technology. It honestly blew my mind that it is still around when I decided to go back to RSS few months ago. The community have developed various tools to make RSS amazing to use. There is RSS-Bridge (souped up RSS on steroid), RSSHub, RSS.app, Feedburner, FetchRSS, etc. RSS readers and it tools are still active and making improvement.

shermix0114y ago

The main issue is with the funding model of open ecosystem. Once open models have a viable business model they'll all flourish. As consumers start realizing the dark side of closed systems and thus the need of open models it'll drive companies to go open and engineer models to cater them.

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