Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet:
And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your RSS feeds themselves a dedicated page for advocating RSS, in case an interested reader is browsing through the links on your site.
There is a "Copy channel ID" link on each channel's page, but it's well hidden. Click "...more" in the channel description, then click "Share channel" to open a popup menu with the "Copy channel ID" link. It does what it says.
That's good to know. The number of times I have subscribed to someone on YouTube only to not see anything from them in years, and then find tens of their videos YouTube never offered is just insane.
So many times I can't find anything to watch on YouTube and it just isn't showing me any of my subscriptions, it's ridiculous.
The first three menu items in the navbar of the authenticated YouTube homepage are 'Home', 'Shorts', and 'Subscriptions'. 'Subscriptions' shows exactly what's on the tin, a timeline of videos from your subscribed channels.
A lot of people might not realize this exists because of the way apps for smart tv's and game systems present the content and menus. I'm not sure if that's intentional or just misguided design, but the only reason I knew to see it out on my PS4's YouTube app is because I'd seen it on desktop.
It's a really nice way to be able to follow creators/playlists without needing to register an account. I'm surprised that YouTube still allow it, but I hope it stays.
This is a great initiative. Large tech companies, through hijacking our web experience and pursuing maximum scale, have normalized not being able to talk to a human being on the other side of a website/app/business.
In many situations you _can_ just send an email. Most often someone will read it and be very happy to help out if they can. Not always, but how much of a time and effort investment is an email really?
The best part is that a few kind words can absolutely make someone’s week.
RSS was a key protocol in syndication a widely free and open web before the domination of big tech/social media. We now have new internet generation that has never known RSS, relying largely on "the algorithm" of the big tech in content syndication.
Thank you for your effort in advocating RSS support. I hope RSS makes a major come back especially with the recent events.
Openrss.org is a non-profit that advocates for RSS adoption in addition to providing RSS feeds for websites that have none and cleainup/improving existing rss feeds.
Consider helping them out if this interests you, you might even be using a feed already as they have some custom feeds for github like for discussions and issues.
> Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with.
Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?
Recently I have posted about RSDS (really simple decentralized syndication) - a protocol that tries to solve RSS content global discovery problem. Here is the link if you are interested to read more about it
I recently had a popular post on HN and several people reached out asking if I had an RSS feed implemented.
Was surprised that anyone would be interested in keeping up with my writing, but was happy to oblige the request as it had been on my to-do list for a while. Happy I did do as it seems many people are hitting the RSS endpoint now. Cool to see that RSS is relevant in 2025, and will definitely advocate for its usage more moving forward :-)
I might have been one of these people, because I was following your site as a bookmark in my RSS reader already. I didn't see any content in your feed so I checked again for a feed endpoint. I found it eventually on your site, but you might consider making it auto-discoverable (see https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery). People only have to enter your domain name into their RSS reader then.
That might be a useful site, but why on earth is it stuffed full of privacy-abusing, invasive advertising? I'm sure there are better sources for the RSS standard.
The Hacker News folks do love their RSS. I also added support for RSS[1] to my site when one of my posts hit the front page, and a few people reached out for an RSS link.
I came to the industry way later than the Web 2.0 inception and didn’t even know about it until a while back.
I never bothered to make a list of the mails I send but now I see it is quite useful to show how well it works. Maybe some data on implementation time would be as useful.
Took me a few hours. I use MDX for formatting so most of the time was spent figuring out how to convert the MDX to plain HTML. Not a very heavy lift overall :)
In the vein of: the web is already decentralized and social by it's nature, I built an RSS reader-and-feed-in-one for Hey Homepage (a DIY website pack that I made). So there's one place for reading posts and for publishing your own posts, just like the timelines from big tech.
Combine that with a list of shared links which functions as a blog roll and consists of the feeds that you follow, and you have yourself a Really Social Site. You can even download the OPML file that contains all the shared links and start following some feeds from it yourself. So discovery is also possible with RSS feeds and OPML lists, albeit it works slightly different than you're used to from big tech.
After that I built a Newspaper module that automatically collects new posts from feeds that I selected. This is my main way to get news without some algorithm deciding for me.
The only wish I have is that more of your personal sits/blogs (most websites I follow come from HN) offer more 'photo feeds', just an enclosure-element in your item with a link to a picture or other media.
RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it).
I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.
Where I have RSS feeds from news sites, I usually skim down the list of titles, read an article (in my feed) if it's interesting, and then move on. I never visit their website, I don't see their adverts, their tracking scripts can't run, and I don't see or interact with their comments.
Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.
On the other hand, RSS definitely provides extra opportunities to monitise. Imagine your business provides a customisable "offers" feed so you can tell interested parties when a sale occurs, etc. Businesses should be falling over themselves to get that kind of engagement.
I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons.
I often receive answers, that surprised me! People saying "thank you for your suggestion, we will think about what we can do". None of them has every changed anything (I've been doing that for years). I don't even know if they did anything more than answering to the email.
RSS is a wonderfully simple solution to get notifications for things I care about.
I came to the software industry a lot later than the inception of Web 2.0 and rediscovered RSS almost accidentally. I advocate for it too.
You’d be surprised how many people still care about this. My static site build broke the RSS[1] once recently, and I immediately got like 5 emails from different people.
I have some app/service ideas which all involve "informing" the user about something.
Implementations of this notification mechanism are either spammy, privacy-problematic, or both: (Web) Push notifications, Email, or Messages.
The only solution that doesn't have either of these problems seems to be RSS: Provide the user with (customised) feed link and let them/their RSS client deal with it.
I really wish RSS was less niche and more mainstream. I will "advocate" for it regardless.
> I've been advocating for [X], and you should too
This seems like what we should do against negative trends. I think complaining is more common, probably more accepted (?) than advocating, but logically, the latter is what we should do.
RSS can be polled as frequently or infrequently as you like, it's just a bit of XML hosted by a site which lists content or links to content.
Tracking what's been read or not isn't done by the RSS feed or whoever hosts it, it's performed by the user's feed reader, which be just a local app on your phone or PC, or it might be a cloud service, either hosted (like Feedly) or self-hosted (using ie. FreshRSS).
I would guess a combination of frequency from sitemap.xml, last modified http header, and past heuristics. Previously viewed items would, I think, need to be cached in the client (unless the RSS URL uses some kind of token to identify the user, which sounds ripe for abuse).
Personally I just start my reader then it aggregates and sorts my feeds by date into a single interface. This works well specially for much larger numbers.
I also include a short description of rss, which parts to support with an example and a description of how one could make an rss feed: you take whatever code produces the index html, remove everything except the part that outputs for each item the title, introduction text, the link and the publication date.
Followed by one more short example rss with $title
Not that any developer would really need this but it puts everything they need to know and do on a single page. You don't have to think, just do it.
If RSS could solve the problem it would have done so a decade ago.
The core issue is that browsers have completely failed at offering anything to keep track of websites. Why aren't notifications simply build into the bookmark system? I don't need the website to provide that information via yet another special format, my browser should be able to figure that out itself from plain .html. But bookmarks haven't changed one bit in about 30 years, instead we moved that functionality server-side for no reason.
Poe's Law, or you really don't remember the time where browsers had a huge button in the address bar to announce their feeds or that Firefox used to have a "Smart Bookmarks" feature to show you all the latest updates from all the feeds you subscribed to?
I agree that to succeed RSS must be properly managed right in the browser.
The problem is that it was not properly implemented inside Firefox, so I personaly didn't want to use that system.
What I want is a simple counter that show how many new posts there are of the RSS, and that's it. I only click for new content.
God wouldn't that be simple and novel? Check a box when you bookmark a website and your browser polls it every so often for updates and gives you a little badge like a mobile app icon.
I wouldn't mind if browsers want to offer that feature in addition to RSS. But I also don't want to be forced to use my browser's bookmarking feature - RSS helps to decouple that.
My joke since the 90's: Mosaic had full text history search!! It aged well I must say.
With all the money coming in from google it was hard for Mozilla to understand the point of subscribing to RSS or organizing what one finds online. For google it must have been even more incomprehensible.
Not much at all. If you are using a static site generator, they usually support it out of the box.
Recently, one of my posts hit the front page here, and a few people emailed me asking for an RSS[1] feed. It turned out that it was just a simple config update to enable this on Hugo.
Other SSGs usually support it out of the box too. Plus, it’s not too hard to build the XML from your HTML if you want to build it yourself from scratch.
It's an open text format. There are some complexities if you dive down the rabbit hole, but at the most basic level, it's pretty simple. I even do it by hand on one site that I rarely update.
Speaking of advocating RSS, I was trying out Nikola [0] for static site generation and found that they have a really nice-looking RSS end-point [1] that is viewable both from the browser and an RSS reader. Looking into the XML, it turns out it's called xml-stylesheet:
And I would argue that this is an excellent way to introduce new readers to RSS: instead of the browser popping up a download prompt, you can make your RSS feeds themselves a dedicated page for advocating RSS, in case an interested reader is browsing through the links on your site.[0] https://getnikola.com/
[1] https://getnikola.com/rss.xml (Open it in your browser!)
[2] https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/blob/master/nikola/data/...
As a general PSA, youtube channels have an RSS feed to alert you when a favourite creator releases a new video.
The form is
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v...
where channel_id is the channel hash code which is buried in the source for the "nicely named" channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering
and can be found without source diving via (say) FeedBro (RSS browser extension) "Find Feeds in Current Tab" function.
https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
There is a "Copy channel ID" link on each channel's page, but it's well hidden. Click "...more" in the channel description, then click "Share channel" to open a popup menu with the "Copy channel ID" link. It does what it says.
That's good to know. The number of times I have subscribed to someone on YouTube only to not see anything from them in years, and then find tens of their videos YouTube never offered is just insane.
So many times I can't find anything to watch on YouTube and it just isn't showing me any of my subscriptions, it's ridiculous.
The first three menu items in the navbar of the authenticated YouTube homepage are 'Home', 'Shorts', and 'Subscriptions'. 'Subscriptions' shows exactly what's on the tin, a timeline of videos from your subscribed channels.
A lot of people might not realize this exists because of the way apps for smart tv's and game systems present the content and menus. I'm not sure if that's intentional or just misguided design, but the only reason I knew to see it out on my PS4's YouTube app is because I'd seen it on desktop.
The opposite problem is also bad: subscribe to a channel, then get frequent notifications of years-old videos.
Just use Freetube.
By "subscription" do you only mean subscription? Don't notifications need to be enabled in addition (bell button)?
I'm using the RSS feeds, so I'm not sure...
It also provides feeds for individual playlists, where `playlist_id` is the `list` URL parameter when you view the full playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=
It's a really nice way to be able to follow creators/playlists without needing to register an account. I'm surprised that YouTube still allow it, but I hope it stays.
I highly recommend Feedbro as an RSS reader.
This is a great initiative. Large tech companies, through hijacking our web experience and pursuing maximum scale, have normalized not being able to talk to a human being on the other side of a website/app/business.
In many situations you _can_ just send an email. Most often someone will read it and be very happy to help out if they can. Not always, but how much of a time and effort investment is an email really?
The best part is that a few kind words can absolutely make someone’s week.
RSS was a key protocol in syndication a widely free and open web before the domination of big tech/social media. We now have new internet generation that has never known RSS, relying largely on "the algorithm" of the big tech in content syndication.
Thank you for your effort in advocating RSS support. I hope RSS makes a major come back especially with the recent events.
Openrss.org is a non-profit that advocates for RSS adoption in addition to providing RSS feeds for websites that have none and cleainup/improving existing rss feeds.
Consider helping them out if this interests you, you might even be using a feed already as they have some custom feeds for github like for discussions and issues.
https://openrss.org/about/contributing
Spot on, I keep using it for years, and never understood why the tragedy around Google's RSS reader, there are tons of readers out there.
And since this is HN, implementing a RSS reader tutorial is surely more interesting than TODO lists.
> Please advocate for more RSS support - especially with orgs you want to stay up-to-date with.
Also advocate for support with browser manufacturers. It used to be good, then one of them dropped it and the others blindly followed. People clearly want the RSS button, why on earth not provide it?
Most people also decided it's a good idea to use browser from an advertising company. RSS is not good for business and it won't be provided.
> Most people also decide
Most people didn't decide. Most people were tricked into using chrome. Most people are not computer literate.
That's fair. Though if I replaced "people" with "HN users" it would still hold true, and I would consider this group to be very computer literate.
Recently I have posted about RSDS (really simple decentralized syndication) - a protocol that tries to solve RSS content global discovery problem. Here is the link if you are interested to read more about it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42654891
I recently had a popular post on HN and several people reached out asking if I had an RSS feed implemented.
Was surprised that anyone would be interested in keeping up with my writing, but was happy to oblige the request as it had been on my to-do list for a while. Happy I did do as it seems many people are hitting the RSS endpoint now. Cool to see that RSS is relevant in 2025, and will definitely advocate for its usage more moving forward :-)
I might have been one of these people, because I was following your site as a bookmark in my RSS reader already. I didn't see any content in your feed so I checked again for a feed endpoint. I found it eventually on your site, but you might consider making it auto-discoverable (see https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery). People only have to enter your domain name into their RSS reader then.
Ah nice, thanks for the heads up! I’ll look into adding this soon.
That might be a useful site, but why on earth is it stuffed full of privacy-abusing, invasive advertising? I'm sure there are better sources for the RSS standard.
Oh, really? My bad. I don't see ads over there.
Auto-discovery for RSS is simple enough to explain here: just put the following code in your head element (at least on the homepage).
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/feed.xml" title="RSS Feed">
The Hacker News folks do love their RSS. I also added support for RSS[1] to my site when one of my posts hit the front page, and a few people reached out for an RSS link.
I came to the industry way later than the Web 2.0 inception and didn’t even know about it until a while back.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml
How long did it take you to implement?
I never bothered to make a list of the mails I send but now I see it is quite useful to show how well it works. Maybe some data on implementation time would be as useful.
Took me a few hours. I use MDX for formatting so most of the time was spent figuring out how to convert the MDX to plain HTML. Not a very heavy lift overall :)
In the vein of: the web is already decentralized and social by it's nature, I built an RSS reader-and-feed-in-one for Hey Homepage (a DIY website pack that I made). So there's one place for reading posts and for publishing your own posts, just like the timelines from big tech.
Combine that with a list of shared links which functions as a blog roll and consists of the feeds that you follow, and you have yourself a Really Social Site. You can even download the OPML file that contains all the shared links and start following some feeds from it yourself. So discovery is also possible with RSS feeds and OPML lists, albeit it works slightly different than you're used to from big tech.
After that I built a Newspaper module that automatically collects new posts from feeds that I selected. This is my main way to get news without some algorithm deciding for me. The only wish I have is that more of your personal sits/blogs (most websites I follow come from HN) offer more 'photo feeds', just an enclosure-element in your item with a link to a picture or other media.
RSS is great. Most blog engines support RSS by default. Podcasts typically use RSS (even if the app goes to great length to hide it).
I sometimes wonder why there is so much push for "federation" and so few for... well just simple interoperable solutions that just require a client to connect to whatever server it wants with a well-known protocol.
Where I have RSS feeds from news sites, I usually skim down the list of titles, read an article (in my feed) if it's interesting, and then move on. I never visit their website, I don't see their adverts, their tracking scripts can't run, and I don't see or interact with their comments.
Which is great for me as the end user - but makes it much harder for them to monetise.
> makes it much harder for them to monetise.
On the other hand, RSS definitely provides extra opportunities to monitise. Imagine your business provides a customisable "offers" feed so you can tell interested parties when a sale occurs, etc. Businesses should be falling over themselves to get that kind of engagement.
Nobody's forcing them to put the full text into the feed, for me the main benefit is not having to check the site manually.
> Podcasts typically use RSS
I would even say that a podcast that does not support RSS is not a podcast, it is something else.
I'd say that the only thing that reliably differentiates a _podcast_ from a _radio show_ is just that the podcast's method of delivery is RSS.
I would be curious why you think the idea of a podcast is coupled to a specific distribution technology
It goes much further than that: as the name suggests, it's coupled to a specific, obsolete brand of device.
Because the original idea of what we call "podcasting" is rooted on RSS.
The idea of what we call “writing” is rooted in stone tablets and chisels, but we still call Shakespeare a writer
Because RSS is "too old"...
I have been doing that for plaintext emails. Whenever I receive an HTML-only email (that my email reader cannot open), I send a kind email to the company, asking if they could consider adding a plaintext version next to it. I clearly explain that they can keep the HTML version as a default, and that some people need plaintext for accessibility and security reasons.
I often receive answers, that surprised me! People saying "thank you for your suggestion, we will think about what we can do". None of them has every changed anything (I've been doing that for years). I don't even know if they did anything more than answering to the email.
Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do it. I wonder how to do that in a mainstream email client like Gmail on the web.
RSS is a wonderfully simple solution to get notifications for things I care about.
I came to the software industry a lot later than the inception of Web 2.0 and rediscovered RSS almost accidentally. I advocate for it too.
You’d be surprised how many people still care about this. My static site build broke the RSS[1] once recently, and I immediately got like 5 emails from different people.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml
If you have an application that does not support RSS/atom yet, you can easily add support with a few lines of Python.
Or use an open source module. Here is a general atom feed generator that I wrote and published under the GPL:
https://github.com/no-gravity/atomfeed.py
Just 14 lines of Python. And it has been reliably serving the feed for my own website for quite a while now.
Interesting. Also, almost all static site generators support RSS. But sometimes it’s not turned on by default.
RSS is my main source of information. And I've built some RSS-related projects:
1. https://github.com/0x2E/fusion - A lightweight, self-hosted friendly RSS aggregator and reader
2. https://rawweb.org/ - A search engine for indie websites (the crawler collects data from RSS feeds)
3. https://github.com/0x2E/rss-finder - A tool for finding the RSS link of a website
Rawweb is very cool! Curious, have you implemented your own crawler, RSS parser and search engine?
I have some app/service ideas which all involve "informing" the user about something.
Implementations of this notification mechanism are either spammy, privacy-problematic, or both: (Web) Push notifications, Email, or Messages.
The only solution that doesn't have either of these problems seems to be RSS: Provide the user with (customised) feed link and let them/their RSS client deal with it.
I really wish RSS was less niche and more mainstream. I will "advocate" for it regardless.
I'm still waiting for https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/ to catch.
> I've been advocating for [X], and you should too
This seems like what we should do against negative trends. I think complaining is more common, probably more accepted (?) than advocating, but logically, the latter is what we should do.
Question about the RSS spec:
When pulling RSS, how do you know how often to poll? How do you know which items have been seen previously?
RSS can be polled as frequently or infrequently as you like, it's just a bit of XML hosted by a site which lists content or links to content.
Tracking what's been read or not isn't done by the RSS feed or whoever hosts it, it's performed by the user's feed reader, which be just a local app on your phone or PC, or it might be a cloud service, either hosted (like Feedly) or self-hosted (using ie. FreshRSS).
> how do you know how often to poll?
I would guess a combination of frequency from sitemap.xml, last modified http header, and past heuristics. Previously viewed items would, I think, need to be cached in the client (unless the RSS URL uses some kind of token to identify the user, which sounds ripe for abuse).
You could examine the time between feed items.
Personally I just start my reader then it aggregates and sorts my feeds by date into a single interface. This works well specially for much larger numbers.
I do this too! Reception is wonderful.
I also include a short description of rss, which parts to support with an example and a description of how one could make an rss feed: you take whatever code produces the index html, remove everything except the part that outputs for each item the title, introduction text, the link and the publication date.
Followed by one more short example rss with $title
Not that any developer would really need this but it puts everything they need to know and do on a single page. You don't have to think, just do it.
If RSS could solve the problem it would have done so a decade ago.
The core issue is that browsers have completely failed at offering anything to keep track of websites. Why aren't notifications simply build into the bookmark system? I don't need the website to provide that information via yet another special format, my browser should be able to figure that out itself from plain .html. But bookmarks haven't changed one bit in about 30 years, instead we moved that functionality server-side for no reason.
Poe's Law, or you really don't remember the time where browsers had a huge button in the address bar to announce their feeds or that Firefox used to have a "Smart Bookmarks" feature to show you all the latest updates from all the feeds you subscribed to?
I agree that to succeed RSS must be properly managed right in the browser. The problem is that it was not properly implemented inside Firefox, so I personaly didn't want to use that system.
What I want is a simple counter that show how many new posts there are of the RSS, and that's it. I only click for new content.
God wouldn't that be simple and novel? Check a box when you bookmark a website and your browser polls it every so often for updates and gives you a little badge like a mobile app icon.
No need for JS workers or push servers.
I wouldn't mind if browsers want to offer that feature in addition to RSS. But I also don't want to be forced to use my browser's bookmarking feature - RSS helps to decouple that.
Switching to the phone home screen was like we skipped a few dozen iterations.
Or wait, that was just a clone from the pc desktop which was a clone from the 1973 Xerox Alto.
https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/know-your-icons-part-1-...
Ah yes, how familiar it looks...
My joke since the 90's: Mosaic had full text history search!! It aged well I must say.
With all the money coming in from google it was hard for Mozilla to understand the point of subscribing to RSS or organizing what one finds online. For google it must have been even more incomprehensible.
Love RSS, been using (and paying for) miniflux for a few years now.
Do someone knows a way to retrieve RSS feeds URLs for any podcast that would be hosted on major platforms? (Spotify, Apple Music)
I subscribed to podcast having some hosted website (where they are publishing the RSS feed from) but most of them don’t
RSS is indeed worth advocating for. One of its greatest strengths is its simplicity.
how much of a PITA is it to add RSS to your own site?
Not much at all. If you are using a static site generator, they usually support it out of the box.
Recently, one of my posts hit the front page here, and a few people emailed me asking for an RSS[1] feed. It turned out that it was just a simple config update to enable this on Hugo.
Other SSGs usually support it out of the box too. Plus, it’s not too hard to build the XML from your HTML if you want to build it yourself from scratch.
[1]: https://rednafi.com/index.xml
It's an open text format. There are some complexities if you dive down the rabbit hole, but at the most basic level, it's pretty simple. I even do it by hand on one site that I rarely update.