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The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025)(smartlab.at)
57 points by jruohonen 2 hours ago | 26 comments
justinator an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Stop trying to make RSS happen again. It's not going to happen again.

Crowberry 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I set it up a year or two ago. Now i ready 90 of articles and news through it.

XenophileJKO 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Actually I would have agreed with you 2 years ago. But now working with AI so much, maybe RSS "is" just the thing we need for some of the distrobution.

hombre_fatal 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

RSS is dead because it’s backwards. It requires everyone you want to follow to implement it since that is the best we could do a decade ago.

We can do better than that: an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed. You shouldn’t need someone else to comply with a protocol just to ingest their data.

I don’t get why people keep fantasizing about a system that gave consumers no control. Scrape the website directly. You decide what’s in the feed, not them.

mmsc 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> an LLM can ingest unstructured data and turn it into a feed.

An LLM can try to do that, yes. But LLMs are lossy compression. RSS feeds are accurate, predictable, and follow a pre-defined structure. Using LLMs to ingest data which can easily be turned into an parseable data structure seems strange: use the LLM to do the "next part" of the formula (comprehension, decision making, etc)

There is also LLMs.txt https://llmstxt.org/ eg https://joshua.hu/llms.txt / https://joshua.hu/llms-full.txt

pipeline_peak 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

LLMs use up tons of energy and water.

shevy-java 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

That is the use case for predicting that RSS will dominate tomorrow?

shevy-java 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd be happy if AI would disappear, but I quite agree with the prior comment - AI is awful but RSS isn't too terribly useful for many of us either. It depends on the individual of course, some people love using RSS feeds. I don't use them. I find RSS not useful.

bananaflag 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been using RSS daily since 2008 (on feedly since 2013)

wmeredith an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Boy I hope so. I miss my RSS reader. I'd love to see one made with the modern UX that makes the doomscrolling apps so engaging. (Or maybe I wouldn't.)

UtopiaPunk 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I'm reading this on Feeder, which a free RSS app I found on F-Droid. Works for me

1123581321 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Reeder family of RSS apps goes for engaging scrolling on iOS.

beached_whale an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm reading this on my RSS reader right now :)

dozerly an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am pretty happy with Readwise’s Reader

SanjayMehta an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I came here via NetNewsWire. iCloud sync is flakey but that's the only quibble. Oh, and you can't yet export starred articles unless you fiddle with SQL.

catskull 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Plug for feeeed: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com

It’s my primary hn reader now.

heresie-dabord 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

A good RSS extension for firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...

crote an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I still mourn the loss of Google Reader.

There are plenty of RSS reader apps, but there are very few with good cross-device sync - let alone self-hosted cross-device sync.

bryanrasmussen 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don't think you could self-host Google Reader, so it sort of feels like these two sentences don't hang together.

gorfian_robot an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

when google reader died, I jumped to TheOldReader. it was great for a long time but has been having challenges lately and I jumped to the Vienna app on macos.

whatever1 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nah it’s just that the content consumers are now LLMs

shevy-java 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't quite use "social media" per se, unless of course hackernews is part of it (which, kind of, is ... anything we can use other people can read or relate to, is kind of social, by definition. I think Facebook etc... tried to claim ownership over the term "social media", and I disagree with this notion). Having said that, I don't use or need RSS, so I don't think there will be a renaissance for RSS for most people.

I do agree that AI is killing tons of things right now. This monster must be stopped; it is worse than Skynet in that it really, really sucks. Things started to decay before AI took over, though - for instance, Google search has been garbage since years. It was useful before that.

I used to compare the decay of google search with how youtube search works. You search for, say, "ninja cats". You get some results about cats. Perhaps also ninjas. After like 10 or 20 results, you suddenly get other videos that are totally unrelated, but you may click on it. That's addictive design. People click on it suddenly when it is interesting to them - but this also takes them away from their original search. Something similar happened to google search. The UI is total crap, it shows semi-related videos (I don't want to watch videos when I search for a specific term), some ads for companies (Google is milking it here) and then also useless entries such as "other people searched for sick grannies instead, do you want to search for this as well" and similar UI-ruining components. Without ublock origin I'd be quite lost already - lo and behold, Google killed ublock origin because it threatened their business model (another reason to use ublock origin; we really need to get rid of Google. It is no longer a useful corporation - just greedy).

zeusdclxvi an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Big if true

pipeline_peak 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

RSS only serves as a backbone of a product. There’s no commenting, summaries a sparse, i don’t even think there’s consistent posting dates.

These evangelists want to make it sound like all we need to do is get everyone on board with RSS and we’ll all just hold hands and share the web.

People don’t browse the web, there’s like 10 websites, that’s the whole internet.

Everything else is just asteroids and abandoned space stations.

memonkey an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

except that it only allows summaries behind paywalls. in many cases you never get the full article

pipeline_peak an hour ago | parent [-]

Are you talking about sites that actively support RSS?