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Now AI agents need what RSS does

Re: Rate Limits, see

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

but coming from an aggressively anticommercial world view. She collects evidence that real world feed readers don't implement RSS correctly

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/02/23/readers/

Her problems are the problems of a polling-based protocol and really if she does not like the RSS protocol she should stop publishing it and stand up an ActivityPub or PubSubHubBub service instead.

A big part of the value of Google Reader and the ecosystem around it was that Google could poll your RSS feed once and everyone could read it... A huge win for the Rachels!

5 minutes agoPaulHoule

I have almost 40 feeds I subscribe to and they're my primary way of getting information I care about without being exposed to ads or other things I don't want to see.

25 minutes agophyzix5761

What are your favorite feeds?

24 minutes agofrigidwalnut

What's old is new again. The solution RSS offered was structure for an otherwise unstructured challenge (trying to figure out updates on a site). That value grew exponentially when connected to AI (providing the signals of when do I need to look at this site/podcast again). Smart marketing.

2 hours agoalextillman

>RSS was declared dead in 2013

Where? Not within the homelab space.

9 minutes agoh4kunamata

I must add that I self-host FreshRSS to fetch news and GitHub repos updates so I can update my stuff, everything in-house, controlled by me.

RSS makes life so much easier, some only provide the bare minimal while others, provide the whole post so I can read everything right there without opening a website.

Also, some podcast support it so I have a list of podcast that I list and can go back without having to go from website to website.

One place to govern them all, RSS still king.

6 minutes agoh4kunamata

I kinda don't like RSS because I often want like a whole blog archive downloaded if I add a new feed and it usually has limits how far back of posts it will download (randomly configured by each site)

Unless someone has a fix of whatever settings I've been using

an hour agoerelong

Sorry, I don't have a solution. But I use RSS for everything, and I can confidently say: RSS is not designed for your use case.

an hour agohappytoexplain

I use Elfeed for Emacs and it stores the history as you download updates so you can always go back and read an old post.

26 minutes agophyzix5761

I guess if you want your content all slurped up and served as coming from AI with no backlinks.

37 minutes agob3ing

i mean, i still read hacker news primarily via RSS in feedly. i kind of never stopped using it, and everybody is much more generous with their feeds nowadays than back in google reader times. bearblog, etc. RSS rules