Ask HN: Is RSS Still Alive?

13 points by militanz 151 days ago | 12 comments

I read recently a post here in HN about this topic but I can't find it anymore so I'm writing here my thoughts.

Recently, I started a hobby project in Rust that collects some news from several websites and creates me a weekly digest.

Since I'm making it for fun I started developing a scraper.

However, one simpler option was to use the websites' RSS feed. So, I looked for them as well but few websites have them.

Now, with the advent of Agentic AI they seem to be an old fashioned way that is needed anymore.

What do you think?

ZuoCen_Liu 151 days ago |

RSS isn't just alive; it's the only remaining protocol for deterministic content delivery. There is a fundamental philosophical divide between RSS and the current AI-driven wave that people often miss: RSS is a Push system: If I subscribe to a source, I get 100% of the signal. The 'algorithm' is my own intent. AI is a Filtering system: AI is probabilistic. Its entire job is to guess what I want, which by definition means it creates a 'lossy' stream. People claim AI can 'replace' RSS by summarizing my interests, but AI will never be able to provide the certainty of a feed. I don't want an AI to 'guess' which security advisory or niche technical blog post I should read today; I want the raw signal that I explicitly requested. As long as there are professionals who value information completeness over algorithmic convenience, RSS (or its successor) will be a hard requirement. You can't replace a pipe with a concierge.

JohnFen 151 days ago |

It's very much alive. It's the primary way I keep up with sites on the web. One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of websites have RSS feeds but don't advertise them or offer an obvious link, but are discoverable by looking at the site's page source.

> Now, with the advent of Agentic AI they seem to be an old fashioned way that is needed anymore.

One of the main reasons I use RSS is to assemble a news feed that I read. It's hard to see how Agentic AI can improve on that.

militanz 151 days ago | |

Can you provide some resources to extract RSS feeds?

JohnFen 151 days ago | | |

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking for. I run tt-rss on my own server. It gets the RSS feeds from sources I've configured, then performs categorization of the individual RSS entries into topics that I've defined, and provides RSS feeds of its own that aggregate those entries. I read the aggregated feeds my server generates.

Does this help?

torunar 151 days ago |

> Now, with the advent of Agentic AI

Why having an easy way to organise a data feed that will work even on cheapest clients and servers, when you can simply boil a tank of water to get a half-assed hallucination loosely based on the source, right?

I have seen people trying to bury RSS for the past 15 years — didn’t happen yet. It is still widely used by blog enthusiasts — that’s basically how I get information about new posts from my favourite old-tech authors.

domysee 150 days ago |

> So, I looked for them as well but few websites have them.

Many sites have rss, it‘s just not advertised as much as it was some years ago. I built a feed finder tool that goes far beyond rss autodiscover, it might be useful: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

And an article how it works: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds

johnofthesea 151 days ago |

> So, I looked for them as well but few websites have them.

This is a bit surprising for me. I've just randomly checked news: BBC, Guardian, Norwegian NRK - all had RSS. But I'm not checking news that much so not sure about others. Mastodon and BlueSky are also providing RSS. I guess walled garden ones like Instagram/Twitter don't?

My RSS reader is subscribed to:

- one Youtube channel

- several blogs (most blogs do have RSS, for example Wordpress provide it by default)

- Hacker News (few keyword-based feeds)

- Gitlab and Codeberg projects (Github provides RSS, but I'm not currently subscribed to any, because I need to be logged there anyway)

- podcasts (podcasts are basically just RSS)

- few Mobilizon sites for events

- OpenStreetMap QA tool that checks my edits

- two subreddits

Maybe in general, you are right. I know just my bubble and even there are few sites without RSS (like Bandcamp).

militanz 151 days ago | |

My target websites are oddly specific: biotechnology news maybe it is only that particular case

aebtebeten 151 days ago |

I saw your Ask HN via RSS

hotbit9 151 days ago |

I use SimpleRSS Push on iPhone which have push notifications. It's old but works for me.

DemocracyFTW2 151 days ago |

Humans in general are overrated and not needed anymore.