I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too

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/

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:

    <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="assets/xml/rss.xsl" media="all"?>

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/...

I recently added RSS to my personal site (https://www.tyleo.com/)

Even with a custom implementation it’s a simple thing to support. You can find the whole spec here: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification

I’ll mention that there is a competing Atom specification which is compatible with all notable RSS readers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard). The POV I’ve seen on HN favors Atom because it offers more functionality and is a clearer standard.

I want to voice my support for RSS though based on its simplicity. To me the feed doesn’t need a bunch of bells and whistles. I get analysis paralysis I get deciding which Atom features to support.

> 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?

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.

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

This is interesting timing. I was asked at work to remove our RSS feed. Turns out no one but me knew what it was for they just saw the link in the site footer clicked it their browser showed a bunch of xml and they thought it was broken. I checked the logs turns out it gets 1000s of requests a day so I think that convinced them to keep it.

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.

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.

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.

One thing though: is you're adding "RSS" support, use Atom for the feed, not actual RSS. Everything supports Atom that supports RSS, it's no harder to implement, less ambiguous, less prone to breaking, and has a richer vocabulary that doesn't require you resort to pulling in additional vocabularies via namespaces.

I cringe every time I see a feed that uses RSS and then pulls in Atom for some of elements. If you're going to do that, then just use Atom for the whole thing rather than building a frankenfeed.

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

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 :-)

There are also a bunch of websites that have RSS feeds but don't link to them and don't make them available via RSS autodiscovery.

I created a tool to find such RSS feeds for as many cases as possible: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder

And if you're interested in the details: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds

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

I absolutely love RSS format. It's one of the easiest ways for devs to get data and do something quickly with it.

If you remember, Yahoo Pipies allowed devs & others quickly build something with RSS feeds. I've recently rebuilt and launched my own Yahoo Pipes clone

https://www.mashups.io

Along the way of building this tool, I came across a plenty of major websites that do not provide RSS feeds and indie devs who maintain niche tools to provide these feeds.

Then again, RSS are still plentiful!

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.

While I use RSS, I think we need to recognize that it's slowly going away. Even a single publisher that's missing a feed will be a deal-breaker for any new adopters.

And RSS is an over-complex solution anyway, designed for a time before web standards when sites all had spaghetti table layouts. Today there's no need to create a whole shadow site in fussily-formatted XML for what can usually be found in the page source of the article list page as a bunch of `<li>`s.

The more sustainable solution, I believe, is client-based: RSS readers that also parse HTML. There is even an HTML attribute schema, `hfeed`, that makes this easy-peasy and is much easier to implement for publishers. I still don't understand why this solution has not taken off yet. It's clearly optimal.

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.

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.

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.

What I really want in an RSS Reader is to fetch and show also the comments. Think about this post on HN, I'm more interested in reading the comments. Sadly, RSS only fetch/shows at most the body of the item. It would be really good to have a centralized and unified interface for getting news and comments just in your RSS reader.

Publishers of content have really no excuse to disable RSS feeds. RSS is also a signal that some new content has arrived, why would one not send it to the world if its essentially free? Even if their business model requires that you visit their website (instead of reading everything on a client app) syndicating a teaser message makes sense.

In any case, many actually useful sites that disable RSS are public orgs that do not rely on adtech or subscriptions. Its the sad result of digital illiteracy and outsourcing their web presence to some inane outfit thats up their neck in the SEO and social media shit.

Incidentally a Web that makes full use of RSS is also one where more complex protocols like ActivityPub and ATProto can flourish. A client is a client is a client. Now that Mozilla has essentially abdicated their role as a user-centered window to the universe maybe there is room for something else?

I want to attribute RSS never taking off in popularity to malice on the part of big tech to catch and kill a threat to their walled garden social media advertising model, because I don't want to face that humanity is just too incompetent to realize how great RSS is.

I was happy to see Bluesky supporting RSS on all profiles, but less excited to see that there's nothing in the content and title fields:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/3384

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3nfshkzomgboapasu6amkhui/rs...

Obviously I can see why they don't want to subsidize the entire internet with high-res videos and images, but a blank RSS feed for media isn't the way to go.

After getting sick of maintaining the JavaScript in iWeb myself after Apple deprecated it, I ended up migrating my personal blog from iWeb to Hugo almost a decade ago. And when getting my Hugo template set up, I considered RSS a 'nice to have but not need to have' thing during the process.

After the migration was complete without an RSS feed, I received dozens of emails within the same week from people I never knew read my blog specifically requesting an RSS feed on the new site. So I added it.

That quickly reminded me about how important and common RSS is, and I'll continue ensuring that RSS feeds exist on any blog I create as a result.

> 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.

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.

RSS is indeed worth advocating for. One of its greatest strengths is its simplicity.

I love RSS, but I often want to create a feed from websites that don’t offer RSS support (or the right features). So I built a little web service that, given a URL and a CSS selector, returns an RSS feed of those items. Figured it might be useful for others too. Code -> https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker Hosted version -> https://feedmaker.fly.dev/

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.

I've almost never cared about learning about rss before but seeing the response it alsways gets, I decided I'd try feedly on my phone and add this blog to it.

Feedly asks for a url, this site makes me download a .bin file. It doesn't make sense how this is my first user experience. I can assume I'm supposed to copy the url in the link? But it is a nav item on the site.

Call me nieve or whatever you like but with ux like this I can start to see how this technology has become less popular.

I used Feedly, tried several RSS clients, I was into RSS but content providers started to only give you a portion of the content, subverting the very idea of RSS (at least what I wanted), even some clients had (or have) the feature to download the content and present it to you with a clean RSS style. So I quit it, because it was a new tech arms race. Not sure how is all that now.

Never got around to use RSS for some reason, what software do people recommend?

For me I believe I'd prefer a TUI in the terminal, but probably depends.

My favorite RSS reader is Feedbro. I see hackernews front page posts, friends facebook posts, friends nitter (x) posts, friends substack posts, youtube subscriptions, all in one chronological feed. And a browser icon shows how many posts are waiting to be viewed. There are some paid services that scrape other sites to RSS for you too (like zapier).

I recently had the need to subscribe to changes to a Github repo and it turns out it provides a feed for them. For rust master branch, for example, subscribe to https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/master.atom.

It's nice to have a single feed of updates for all the releases of the software I use. Newsflash (https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk) is an awesome, modern RSS reader. Highly recommended!

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?

I only follow sources that have RSS support. The minute Reddit or YouTube drops such support I drop them.

Most introductions to RSS assume that people want to know about RSS.. and so instead here’s a more people-centric explainer: https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/

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

So, should we be using RSS? Or Atom?

It seems like Atom is better, but RSS as a name is more well known?

I'm guessing adding a button on your website which says "Subscribe via RSS" but which actually points to an Atom feed would be confusing and bad?

Having an RSS feed is one thing, but without making sure that the feed is retrievable by RSS readers it's pointless. In the modern buttflare web this seems to be the harder part.

The problem with RSS today is that bad actors use it to scrape and rewrite content using AI.

Not having it enabled makes life harder for them since many are too lazy/not savvy enough to use other means to steal content.

I love RSS and I actively used it until modern browsers dropped support for it and then websites stopped using it. I always felt RSS being dropped wasn’t the choice of users but more a conspiracy between those browser developers (or rather their managers and company leaders) and marketing/sales departments of pretty much any company that advertises on the internet: Google being the main one.

Why? You can’t bombard RSS with advertising like you can on browsers and if people could get the information they need from RSS they won’t see ads.

I recall the dropping of RSS happened over 6 months to my recollection. RSS was here and every website of merit used it, then all of a sudden Chrome, FireFox and Safari all dropped RSS support. You could go and install a separate RSS client but few people did that (extra steps and all) and then websites saw no one was using RSS and dropped support.

RSS was particularly useful for browsing jobs for IT contractors. I used it daily, using RSS I was able to get job listings fast and apply before other candidates.

Been doing that, but especially in the last few years sites have been dropping RSS support and won't bring it back no matter how you reason for it.

For example, job seeking sites:

https://tyomarkkinatori.fi/ is the national "job market" for the whole of Finland. Municipal and state employers are obligated to publish their openings there. That site has been in development for years and from 1.1.2025 onwards it replaced the old one - which supplied RSS feeds. Tyomarkkinatori does not and when asked, they will only reply that RSS is not going to be supported and that's the end of it.

https://indeed.com doesn't provide feeds anymore.

Neither does (yet another Finnish aggregator) https://laura.fi

How would you even use RSS now that no browser supports it anymore? Do people run a separate RSS reader on the side?

I am using an RSS reader to read latest hackernews and other stuff... the more RSS support the merrier

Great initiative. All WordPress sites has multiple RSS feeds enabled by default.

> in a way that you're completely in control of, without bloat, without ads, without algorithms.

If they don’t play nice, they often offer short digests in feeds, driving users to open their sites where you get ads, tracking, bloat, paywalls, and no longer in control…

Thank you for advocating RSS. It’s the least we should strive for in our services.

We can also strive for services themselves without tracking, ads, bloat…

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We all need to advocate for RSS, really important.

Bluesky has RSS feeds.

how much of a PITA is it to add RSS to your own site?

RSS is GOAT