> 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?
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 :-)
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
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 been advocating for [X], and you should too
This seems like the things we should do against negative trend. I think complaining is more common, probably more accepted (?) than advocating, but logically, the latter is what we should do.
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.
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.
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/
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?
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 :-)
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42654891
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.
This seems like the things we should do against negative trend. I think complaining is more common, probably more accepted (?) than advocating, but logically, the latter is what we should do.
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 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.
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 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.
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