While I was busy aging like soft cheese, someone killed-off RSS. It used to be everywhere. Now it’s gone; hidden or dead. How do you kids stay up to date with websites you like?
I keep pushing a RSS feed but do you know what it does?
How are websites supposed to advertise update-subscriptions?
Really Simple Syndication was invented in the Cretaceous period, roughly 100 million years ago. It enabled websites’ fans to get updates, quickly and easily. It got used for everything else —and is still a fundamental part of podcasting— but it was a very serious part of keeping independent websites in touch with their user-bases.
I recently restored the Subscribe Icon back to the main navigation here when it started to dawn on me…
Does anyone actually know what to do with an RSS feed?
Once upon a time you clicked a link to a RSS feed, you’d see an option to do something with it: save a live bookmark in Firefox, or add it to Google Reader. Both long dead. There still are a clutch other readers today, but the automated handling of this, and seemingly the desire of browsers to handle this seems to have evaporated, leaving novices in the lurch.
If you click a link to my main feed, your browser might pretty-format the XML code but that’s all the help you get. You need to take that URL and manually plumb it into something that will poll it for updates. And that relies on you knowing what it is.
So straw poll, please. If you don’t know anything about RSS, let this old doughnut know and I’ll stop pushing it. Ideally you’ll also have an answer to my next question…
So, how do people subscribe to websites in 2022?
I’m people so I’ll go first: I still use RSS.
I use Feedly and I’m happy with my wash. That’s where this consternation comes from. I’m noticing more websites not bother with it. I’ve even had to hack together my own feed generators for sites I want updates for.
Do people just consume what they’re fed through Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok now? Would I have to dance from platform to platform to hawk myself? I’m concerned that’s just feeding into the problem. But I’m just guessing. Please tell me in the comments.
Where are Google, Microsoft and Apple?
It’s super easy to blame “The Rise of Platforms”, but it’s hard to ignore that the big desktop and mobile operating systems have done nothing to help here. Browser vendors washed their hands. It’s especially galling as most of these run a personalised news aggregation service but none let you specify feeds to add into the mix. I’d think that each of them has a vested interest in reining back control of web consumption.
Maybe the EU can mandate RSS support next.
from Planet Ubuntu https://ift.tt/FPQEYke
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