hckrnws
RSS and AT Proto have been on my mind all week.
Even though RSS is my main source of news, it’s impossible to get around the fact that the (incredibly, unfathomably stupid) shutdown of Google Reader kneecapped it.
AT Protocol is more than “let’s make Twitter more open” — it’s an open protocol for anything that’s real-time and shareable. I was never a big Google Reader guy, I liked traditional clients like NetNewsWire, but the sociability of Google Reader cannot be dismissed.
I’m not sure that just bridging RSS to Bluesky is the future… a distinct AT Proto lexicon seems like the actual way forward IMHO
Exciting times!
Google Reader shut down nearly 12 years ago. Its legacy now is that there are still people who are pissed off about that, and I get the impression that a surprising amount of them are now in positions where they get to make purchasing decisions over whether or not to buy Google Cloud.
(Being a Mac+iPhone person I've settled in quite happily with NetNewsWire now, but it took me a few years to get there.)
My distrust of Google certainly started with the shutdown of Reader. Everything they've done since has made it worse. I was in the position to choose a cloud provider several years ago and would not even consider GCP. I seriously doubt they'll kill GCP, but I see no reason to take a chance on anything Google does outside of search, docs, mail and the core things.
My self hosted FreshRSS instance is better than Google Reader ever was.
Just about every website and service I use has feeds.
People/geeks are rediscovering RSS.
I think this might be the golden age of RSS.
Self-hosted FreshRSS + NetNewsWire on Mac and iOS/iPadOS is my combo of choice, works great. After Reader died I migrated to Feedly for a while, but self-hosting the backend and not having ads injected + being able to debug and properly manage feeds is way nicer.
I recently discovered that FreshRSS has a built-in xPath parser/webscrapper[1] so you can actually subscribe to any website, even if it doesn't have an actual feed.
It's not straightforward to use because of the lack of a test/debug interface, but its worth the effort to set it up!
[1]: https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/users/11_website_scra...
The fact that they shut down Google domains (and cloud domains now uses squarespace, who bought Google domains) shows that you can't necessarily trust they won't shut down critical GCP services either.
It is unlikely Google will shut down GMail, but at an individual level you can lose access to it without any warning. I no longer trust it as my primary email.
We chose GCP, and the work to accommodate restructuring of services (currently container registry to artifacts) is indeed an annoying.
They tried to force the free GSuite editions into paid a year or two ago.
Bluesky has launched RSS feeds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39007756 - Jan 2024
https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds
How would you extend this ("a distinct AT Proto lexicon seems like the actual way forward IMHO") beyond the RSS feed you can get from a Bluesky profile?
RSS feed is a pull type thing, AT Proto is push if I understand it correctly.
So instead of you polling an RSS feed on Bluesky, they would send you a stream of messages
Certainly, I asked because I am building on AT Proto for fun and wanted to hear more on the idea for building purposes. I love RSS, but am excited what potential open standard successors could be built on AT Proto.
Yeah, exactly.
Just in terms of software models and consumer uptake, I think it’s abundantly clear that the way Twitter and Instagram work “won” and RSS “failed.”
Like, just forget about "push/pull" for a minute, what about feed discoverability? A couple years ago my father asked me how I read news, and I told him to install Reeder on his iPad, then he could just start filling in feeds from The Atlantic or whatever. “Okay how do I find those?” “Well, you could install a browser extension — wait you're not going to do that — or view the web page source and look for an RSS link — wait what am I saying —”
RSS depends on website designers making their feeds discoverable, and as a career web dev I can assure you that’s simply not on their radar. Only alpha geeks care. The only reason RSS is still around is that it’s built into enough CMS's so most web devs don't have to do any work, and they still can't be bothered to put a little radar icon in the footer.
Discoverability is intrinsic to social though. No, I don't know how someone on Bluesky will search accounts on other networks in "the atmosphere," but I’m positive this will get solved. RSS fans deny that discoverability is a problem to this day, because the only people who use it are the same alpha geeks who don’t care about UX at all.
Agree with all of your RSS points. AT Proto are data rails, but they are more fancy and open rails; they are a superior primitive imho while also inherently preventing ecosystem closure that has happened with every social network previously. Consumption and discovery can be solved for, and I argue, generative AI has a role to play here. u/echelon and u/wild_egg have comments that touch on this in another thread:
> I expect for this kind of tech to have really novel use cases. For it to sit between me and the internet and remove the ads, nuke time wasting clickbait, and obliterate low-information irrelevant noise. For it to be my personal bodyguard that protects me from any and all forms of attention stealer. ... I want this to be tech to give birth to an anti-Google, anti-social media algo, anti-advertiser terminator from the future. Something that torpedoes the previous paradigm and that does it so quickly that the old purveyors can't adjust in time. [1]
---
> It's now my daily driver for web access. It monitors for content I'm interested in (that's how I found your comment), handles all my searches and feeds, can dynamically adapt its interface, and is working on integrations to submit content for me so that I don't have to leave that interface to write these replies. [2]
We can build and tailor the interface for both discovery and consumption of the data transiting the AT Proto rails. This could be a client on your device (what Apple Intelligence should be, exposing an API to other apps to perform this compute), this could be an agent that runs on your own PDS [3] and then provides a distilled feed for you based on what it learns about you through signal from your client that is not shared, and you would be able to share your customized discovery feed with others. Plug DeepSeek in for now (while keeping an eye towards drivers so you can plug any other LLM in and you're off the the races and the state of the art advances). In the book "The Internet Con", Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. AT Proto and Gen AI allows, to an extent, to sidestep the adversarial interoperability needed to diminish Big Tech control of the digital social fabric. We are currently on a path towards seizing the means of computation and users controlling their experience and consumption. To me, this is the most exciting part of the work ahead.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836289
I’d love to talk to you more sometime in the future about this. @wvgg.co on Bluesky if you’d like to follow up sometime
> an open protocol for anything that’s real-time and shareable
Does that mean that at the protocol level one can share content of larger sizes than what Bluesky does by default?
Even though not standard at least via the ActivityPub protocol one can set more reasonable character lengths, though unsure how most Mastodon clients handle that in practice.
Bluesky devs seem set, from some past HN interaction, on keeping the restriction in place for the app.
In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits. As to what HN would be in such a future: a stream (or whatever term their use) of content curated/moderated by dang.
In my experience, Mastodon clients handle large posts (say 5000 chars instead of 500) very well.
> In a decentralized application, such as Bluesky, as opposed to Mastodon, I can see a future where it would be a replacement for Reddit and HN, without those limits.
Not sure if you're saying that Bluesky is decentralized and Mastodon not, which if anything would be the other way around. The other interpretation is that you can see Bluesky as a replacement for HN/Reddit, but not Mastodon. My take is that both are unfit for that, since they're heavily embracing the micro-blogging format. I'm not sure if there are any ATProto applications like this already, but Lemmy and MBin are both examples of decentralized link aggregators using ActivityPub.
Probably should have been a bit more clear.
Involuntarily when I say decentralized I'm thinking about more peer-to-peer distribution of content (a la torrents), instead of federated. Mastodon instances are these islands of content, at the whims of the owner, as to what content you can see and what policies they think there should be. Your identity is also attached to the instance, migration isn't seamless and you can't just move around your account like a domain name.
My understanding of Bluesky, actually the AT protocol, is that there are features in there to allow you to own your identity (via domain names) which would make migration between instances seamless. At the same time, there is a different deployable services for redistributing (filtered/moderated) content.
Based on posts I've seen on HN, these were still partial of planned things (?). On the other hand, not even sure if there are self-hosted Bluesky instances yet.
> which would make migration between instances seamless.
Which instances? :)
If you're referring to "Personal Data Stores", sure. However, it's the "Relay" (i.e. the aggregator that generates timelines) that everyone relies on is centralized. In contrast, with Mastodon for example, both "Personal Data Store" and "Relay" functionalities are decentralised, offering a complete solution with no centralised choke-points. At least that's my non-authoritative understanding.
There is this lengthy blog post, _How decentralized is Bluesky really?_ [0], if you want to read more about the differences between Bluesky and ActivityPub (e.g. Mastodon).
[0] https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Thanks for the clarification. That makes more sense now.
I host my own GoToSocial instance, with only me as it's single user. Doesn't get much more decentralized than that.
I guess it's easier to move your identity to a different PDS on Bluesky, but for me Bluesky doesn't count as decentralized as long as there's only one single relay. You may own your identity, but currently Bluesky (the company) owns the network.
There already is a Reddit-like application that uses ActivityPub. It's called Lemmy (https://join-lemmy.org/).
Thanks. I'm aware of most, if not all, these alternatives as I've spent some time a few years ago researching them before sending a proposal @ NLnet for funding in this space.
I should have said P2P in my comment instead of decentralized, as the broader term captures the concept of federated as well.
How did Google Reader dying kneecap RSS? I still use it to this day
I can't remember the exact history, but Google's dropping of Reader may have encouraged browser manufacturers to drop their support of RSS.
Ah that tracks. I never used a browser and initially used the Google reader app and then switched to an alternate app afterwards
I don’t know what you mean by “kneecapped.” I’ve using Newsblur for at least a decade and it works fine.
It's complicated, and I think it's less malicious in a way that "kneecapped" implies. Sure, RSS still exists in some form, but I think the utility of it has been in decline, and a lot of 'content' simply isn't accessible by RSS feed anymore.
An argument can be made that they provided an RSS reader service no one could come close to matching and basically dominated the area. Google's deep support also helped it proliferate. It is maybe underrated that RSS was likely one defense the web had against the dominance of walled gardens and social media. It allowed a lot of sites to flourish that I think would not get any traction today.
I haven’t noticed a decline in support for RSS. Essentially all blogs support it, even relatively new ones like Substack that are more email-centric.
The decline in support for RSS is more visible on the client side. Sure there are reader options for the determined, especially if technically minded, but that's a marginal population.
In today's hyperconcentrated digital landscape about the only thing that matters for mass market relevance are the default options on client software controlled by gatekeepers.
Mozilla too has abandoned RSS, which may or may not be correlated with them being (alas) increasingly irrelevant.
Eventually lack of popular RSS clients lead to slow decline on the server side as well. A new and fancy website today using a "modern" stack more likely than not does not support RSS, its fully aligned with the "follow us on XYZ" mentality.
I found a blog yesterday, from a well-known indie gamedev, with no feed at all. No RSS, no atom. It was quite shocking because the vast, vast majority have one.
I didn't say "decline in support for RSS" but there are many examples of them being removed.
Twitter dropped RSS completely. Facebook dropped them for pages. And then other large sites (Youtube I think is one if I recall right) made it less of a public feature.
Twitter is one that's pretty annoying because there is a lot that gets posted there first before it's published or not published elsewhere at all.
Even YouTube has RSS feeds
I rarely see RSS buttons on websites any more, rarely does a podcast link to an RSS feed
I ride a horse to work. But I will admit the lack of watering holes and places to tie her up outside the supermarket has become a pain.
I mean that it kneecapped the idea of RSS in the social consciousness. Most people believe that when Google Reader shut down RSS stopped existing, if they even knew what RSS was in the first place.
A friend of mine — in tech — asked me the other day where I was hearing a bunch of stuff and I said “my RSS feeds” and he laughed at me. That”s what I mean.
Lots of stuff shared on Hacker News is far from mainstream. Is it really so bad to use a tool that other people aren’t aware of?
Your friend sounds rather ignorant.
> if they even knew what RSS was in the first place
This is the point. Even when it existed, almost no-one knew what RSS was.
We've really come full circle. Back when Facebook was a user-friendly place, you could connect any RSS feed to your Facebook feed. My FB was just a collection of things I posted to del.icio.us, flickr, etc etc. It really was a sign of the crapification of that place that was to come when they ripped out this feature.
Not to mention XMPP integration. Obviously a totally different philosophy that actually cared about the user.
XMPP fully support news feed publication using XMPP Pubsub https://github.com/edhelas/atomtopubsub
Here's the result https://mov.im/community/news.movim.eu/ArsTechnica
The awesome thing is that articles stored in XMPP are actually Atom articles, so there's very little to do.
Used to be able to add friends birthdays and events you'd rsvp'd "Going" to your calendar via iCal URLs too. That was so damn useful.
I'll make a plug for n8n which is a tool to rig stuff to other stuff. I bet it could do this.
Can self host too
> AI-native
It's IFTTT with an LLM integrated?
maybe more an open source zapier and its history goes back way before LLM:s. It is a good no code product for selfhosting (just a user, no connection to the company)
The author also made a post here:
https://hachyderm.io/@joschi/113914355705581670
Second post in that thread has some demo output.
Nice! Bluesky’s App Passwords make it easy to try third-party integrations like this, which is great.
I might have misunderstood. If this a part of static site generation it might make some sense. But just syncing some random rss feed to bsky with GH actions seems like a bit excessive and wasteful. A simple daemon can do.
Is it weird that I feel weird about using github as basically a free lambda service?
Well Microsoft is using Github to put developers out of a job.
So I wouldn't feel all that much sympathy for them.
I think it's far more fair to say that developers have agreed to let them use their data (that they will use to reduce dev jobs) in exchange for a service that can almost entirely be easily migrated elsewhere.
If you think MS using github code to train AI is bad, let's be pragmatic about where we're putting the blame or there's no shot we can course correct.
I personally am not looking forward to the pain of losing my job, but I would never presume my job is more important than progress. My job wouldn't even exist if we halted progress to save the jobs.
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Somehow spooky for what github actions are used. On the one side it is cool to have hosted task runners with multiple options thanks to using vms in github actions, on the other side is the question: is this what github actions ate ment for?
According to the official documentation[1]:
> You can discover, create, and share actions to perform any job you'd like, including CI/CD, and combine actions in a completely customized workflow.
I guess it wasn't the goal initially, but it includes so much features now that it became a kind of _serverless_ orchestrator.
I don't use GitHub for that but my own self-hosted Gitea instance (so not quite serverless here), and I use it for this exact purpose: orchestrating containerized jobs without needing to setup something trickier. And since it's directly attached to a git repository, you don't need a second tool. So you know have everything configured and versionned at the same place.
Sure, it won't work if you need to run multiple big runners to do a job, but for small, periodic tasks like that, it's just so easy to do.
Is the cache so that items in the RSS feed don't get re-posted? Feels like it could go wrong, especially if the RSS feed is a slow one.
Oh this is way better than me manually running my "post to sites" script https://github.com/MattSayar/post_to_socials
There's a val (hosted function) that does this too!
Is there a Python library to do this someplace already, or a good REST walkthrough?
Nice work! I’ve been thinking a lot about rss lately
OK but not writing your own Cron expressions is just sad.
I've been using Cron for over 20 years. I still use https://crontab.guru rather than trying to remember the syntax for those fields.
Cron expressions aren't bad. Now regex.... nope.
For some reason regex just clicked for me very easily. Granted, I use regexr.com to check my work and tune it, but I find that the syntax just makes sense when I know what I want to find.
I can't even remember tar or find options reliably.
The only tar command I can remember reliably is this one:
tar -tf ./archive.tar
journalctl -fu some-service
Try tldr find or tldr tar for examples. Use fzf on history to find past success. Consider a toollike ouch [1] or fd instead of find.
Not everyone knows how to use Cron, the comment is a good tip for those that don't. The target audience for a solution like this might be less technical than the average Github user.
I'll assume that your comment was not intended to reflect on the average Bluesky user, but there might also be something there too.
We can be a little sassy, as long as we acknowledge that the average X user is no better.
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