Ask HN: Could plain old RSS be a replacement for Twitter?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25711982

by trestenhortz • 6 years ago

25 24 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If Trump just started pumping out updates to RSS, could this lead to “RSS as a Twitter alternative”?

xupybd• 6 years ago

Twitter is not on top just because of their technology. They are on top due to their users. RSS would only be worth it if people read it. I don't think you could get people using it.

nunodonato2• 6 years ago

Maybe not for twitter but for other social networks more Facebook-like. I'm building a social network on top of rss :)

sfgweilr4f• 6 years ago

how do people reply?

nunodonato2• 6 years ago

metadata applied to rss feeds.

zhte415• 6 years ago

I commented yesterday on 'replacements' for Twitter and included RSS in it.

Thing is, RSS is just a bit 'technical' for a lot, especially with Google shutting down Reader which (far from ideal) was a visible entry point (and Wave, which IMHO was a Twitter-killer). If there was an easy adoption where everyone has an RSS reader app and RSS feeds were heavily promoted just 1-click then yeah.

As a stereotypical early adopter of Twitter sitting on the toilet pondering life while Tweeting, the stereotype was indeed a thing, as was the blogosphere then in my niche. Twitter complimented that blogosphere with short posts and strong social bonds from those that might not have a blog. Now the blogosphere, I feel, may be coming back. And with that super potential for a product that makes self-hosting, blogging, short posts, following, following back ( avian mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention), super smooth and simple. But it's chicken-and-egg. I'm all for it and that's nothing to do with Trump.

sneak• 6 years ago

It doesn't allow you to know when people @-mention you, or when new people follow you.

Twitter is a social network.

slightwinder• 6 years ago

RSS is a format, not a service, not a website, not an app, nor a kind of network. He would not use RSS. He would use a software that might also output a kind of newsfeed. This software would need to run on or feed to a server, which would need an IP and a domain. This would need to be secured against malicious and legal attacks. Meaning there needs to be someone hardening and maintaining the setup.

And in the first place RSS has no feedback-option, to get the whole twitter-experience and build up his echo chamber.

runawaybottle• 6 years ago

The replacement for Twitter is a integration service that connects WhatsApp, telegram, signal, iMessage, Facebook messenger, text messaging and let’s people post to these threads/topics with whatever messaging platform they are on.

You can institute the character limit and be done with it. This would be mostly federated and everyone is more or less registered to the platform. Just a whole lot of integration.

Maybe block chain can be used to maintain the whole forum log in a distributed way. Someone run with this concept, what would make it work?

llimos• 6 years ago

And Twitter of course.

You'd have the best chance of success if someone could have a feed of everything they already read on Twitter, with other sources seamlessly integrated in.

Perhaps even have the browser fetch all the data, without going through a server, using each platform's embed code. You'd miss out on discovery, and need to know which channels to subscribe to, but I see that as a plus.

dirtyid• 6 years ago

Feedly RSS integration experience pretty trash. Fraidycat somewhat better. I wish there was service that converts twitter threads into HN / reddit format.

jimmyvalmer• 6 years ago

There's https://github.com/dickmao/nntwitter.

Sent from nnhackernews

darekkay• 6 years ago

As a side note: you can use Nitter, an alternative Twitter client, which provides RSS support out of the box:

https://nitter.net/search/rss?f=tweets&q=from%3Adarek_kay&e-...

pedro1976• 6 years ago

I wonder what part of twitter you would like to replace/keep. I think you can learn a lot from them. I love their subsciption mechanism and the easy engagement. The absence of preassure for producing elaborate content (like in blogs) is great and horrible. It just attracts bad/emotional content.

jjp• 6 years ago

RSS couldn’t do it’s on its own as it’s just a mechanism to distribute content. Less technical content creators would still want somewhere to publish the content to and on the consuming side there would need to be a discovery mechanism.

type02• 6 years ago

If I remember correctly Twitter had RSS functionality and then removed it when they got big enough.

type02• 6 years ago

Yeah, they did it few years ago https://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-puts-rss-on-death-r...

dodgyb• 6 years ago

I get twitter RSS feeds. Find a users profile page and then use your client to search for feeds. It works with twitter lists too.

I use a browser extension called Feedbro. It is really neat because you can read twitter in reverse chronical order, without any of twitters feed optimisations.

VoodooJuJu• 6 years ago

This is what the internet was meant to be. You have your little individual corner of the internet: a personal website on a VPS; your personal space to use however you deem fit. People can listen to or ignore you as they please. There is no higher authority playing arbiter, filtering, controlling your little space, who can visit it, who can't. People can avoid your personal space if they wish, but they cannot shut down or destroy it.

And an RSS feed was and still is a great way to deliver and receive messages/updates from someone's personal corner of the internet. I wish it were more fashionable. But part of the reason it's not fashionable is because it's not profitable, financially, socially, or politically.

Other issues include the technical barrier to getting started with a personal site, and discoverability. I'd like to see more federated search engines to solve the discoverability issue.

So yes, it could be an opportunity for RSS to shine, but it won't catch on.

thebigspacefuck• 6 years ago

I deleted Twitter and use RSS (with Feedly) for the news utility Twitter provided. What I don’t have is the ability to reply, retweet, tweet myself or DM. This is a benefit for me.

There’s also not the ability to have privacy of networks. Maybe you could generate a unique ID for everyone that follows you then only once they’re allowed access by you, publish to that feed. I’d want the ability to host and share my own content with people I know but not people I don’t.

spinchange2• 6 years ago

Maybe Team Maga could bring back Google Reader?

spinchange2• 6 years ago

The people who came the closest to successfully commercializing RSS (before selling that venture to Google) ultimately came to run Twitter for a few years after Ev and Biz but before Jack took it back over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeedBurner?wprov=sfla1

As others have pointed out, web syndication is really cool but it is not a "service" in itself and there are much better mechanisms to build one.

RSS is way to communicate website updates and they need to be delivered to a special reader...

benrapscallion• 6 years ago

NewsBlur has a built-in Twitter client.

toomuchtodo• 6 years ago

Probably not RSS. More likely a mechanism where you spend Bitcoin to inject your posts into the chain, and clients parse the chain to get the messages out. As long as the crypto network persists, writer can write and clients can read without disruption. Humorously, a social medium you’d have to pay to distribute your messages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/gi5syv/messages_fo...

https://gist.github.com/bitbug42/d70db35b600ddfe20723a9bf991...

adrianwaj• 6 years ago

Checkout http://cryptopanic.com/news - it's like a prepopulated RSS reader, but also allows its users to vote and comment. Good luck.

Ask HN: Could plain old RSS be a replacement for Twitter?

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