Pity though. RSS / Atom was a fantastic concept and it’s a real pity big tech killed them off.
rambambram•May 4, 2026
Nothing is killed. It still exists, it's an open protocol after all. And I choose to use it, it's pretty fun to calmly follow around 2000 feeds from - mostly - blogs from HN. And cars... I need my car blogs.
geodel•May 4, 2026
Agreed. That nowadays people or even big companies find it outside their core competency to host their blog, have atom/RSS feeds is not because big tech killing it.
holistio•May 4, 2026
Is there any platform for sharing what feeds we follow? Would love to discover some new blogs.
Well, my guess is that OPML is underrated. And I understand that, because it's so different from the social media that we are used to. On my homepage (link in bio) you can find all the feeds that I follow, available as an OPML file. It might be of interest to you, it might not (probably a lot of blogs you know from here, at least half of my 2000 feeds).
One 'dream' of me is to have OPML be the discovery-glue between all kinds of individual personal websites and blogs. But this requires critical mass to have enough to discover and explore, and it needs some fun/interesting software way to do that.
darreninthenet•May 4, 2026
How do you curate and keep on top of so many feeds? I have ~10 on my RSS reader and I sometimes have trouble keeping up if I have a couple of busy days
Basically, I get to see the latest post from a random feed. Nothing else. No lists of unread new posts from all the feeds. If I like the title and short summary, I click through to the website or blog itself where I can read the whole thing. There's no FOMO this way, or an information overload. Just one post a time.
Because the whole list of feeds is curated by myself, I know that everything is at least a little interesting. I even made a category with Youtube channels that I like, so I can skip their annoying recommended videos algo.
Next to this basic functionality, I made what I call 'Newspapers'. These are certain topics with a bunch of selected feeds attached, they get checked automatically in the background. When the Newspaper has enough articles, I see a new Newspaper appear. Otherwise it might take months before a feed is shown in the random selection.
bawolff•May 4, 2026
Meh. Big tech didnt kill it off, it was already dead at that point. Sometimes things just arent popular no matter how much we might want it to be.
lolive•May 4, 2026
Google Reader was uber popular at a time, then Google decided that syndication of articles, with comments, had to be an exclusive feature of their Facebook-esque Google+.
pletnes•May 4, 2026
Lots of sites publish outages, incidents, downtime over RSS/atom. Works great for monitoring, post them into slack with a bot and you can start a discussion thread about that incident where you first hear about it.
mplanchard•May 3, 2026
I hand-rolled an atom feed for my statically generated blog. It’s a reasonable, easy format to work with.
intrasight•May 3, 2026
First iteration of Google's APIs were atom. I do miss XML.
abustamam•May 4, 2026
One of the API providers I use at work returns responses in XML and we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect.
What do you like about XML? I feel like I'm missing something.
refulgentis•May 4, 2026
I don't reach for it often but I've been around the block a bit, CC processors in the iPad point of sale I built circa 2010 used it and it seemed a bit off/unnecessary.
In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries.
> we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect
I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? If JSON is a less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?
abustamam•May 4, 2026
> useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase
Thanks for the insight! Is this what JSDoc/Swagger is now used for?
> I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON?
I'm not sure actually. I haven't personally seen the code, I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML. Maybe it's just their lack of documentation that sucks, but it's become a running joke whenever we get a new partner that the team integrating it jokes that their API is XML.
deaddodo•May 4, 2026
The main benefit of XML over JSON is that it is structured, and can be associated with Schema's for built in validation.
Obviously, that's only a benefit if you care about and utilize those features; most teams doing JSON integrations will just build those into the consumer in lieu of them being provided by the transport. But it is something that some people (especially larger enterprise organizations) value.
dolmen•May 4, 2026
JSON is structured (not plain text to be analyzed by an IA).
JSON has JSON Schema.
In addition, JSON is easier to parse and to map to common data structures of programming languages.
theshrike79•May 4, 2026
XLM had DTDs and Schemas 20 years ago.
JSON is still figuring it out.
tkcranny•May 3, 2026
I’m not clear on the difference between atom and RSS. Atom seemed to be the better spec, but for my Astro blog I ended up sticking to the built in `rss` helper it ships with.
JimDabell•May 4, 2026
In the beginning was RSS 0.x. It was originally intended to be based on RDF. Compromises were made and it ended up dropping the RDF. The spec. wasn’t very good and had several ambiguities.
Some people forged ahead with a cleaned up RDF-based version and called it RSS 1.0, while other people went ahead with the ambiguities but without RDF and called it RSS 2.0. The person publishing RSS 2.0 considered it finished and refused to update it. There was drama.
A bunch of people decided that there was too much to clean up from within that mess and started a new format, Atom. This ended up being a much better spec. with an official RFC, but at this point everybody was calling any type of feed “RSS”, even if it was Atom.
If you have the choice, you should pick Atom.
drob518•May 4, 2026
Well, that’s a blast from the past.
rippeltippel•May 4, 2026
At this point, developers have named so many projects "Atom" that there are officially more Atoms in the world than there are atoms in the universe.
echelon•May 4, 2026
This one is (was) pretty important.
The hyperscalers stopped that timeline from winning, though.
riffraff•May 4, 2026
How is this the hyperscalers fault?
YouTube had atom feeds and I don't think Amazon and Microsoft have relevant syndication.
Meta is surely responsible but that's it, imo.
echelon•May 4, 2026
Google on several occasions took moves to make the web less semantic.
They dumped microformats and standards in favor of soupy error tolerant formats that benefitted their search engine and made it harder for other efforts to make information shareable and accessible.
They wanted it to be easy to get information in, but for you to have to go through them to get information out.
IIRC, Aaron Swartz was one of the contributors to the format. RIP.
eterevsky•May 4, 2026
It was an alternative to RSS from 20 years ago that didn't catch on.
brabel•May 4, 2026
IIRC RSS 2.0 included most of what Atom has, no?
talideon•May 4, 2026
Not really, and it's still more error-prone than Atom.
There's really no good reason to use anything other than Atom.
riffraff•May 4, 2026
I think it caught on well enough, platforms such as Wordpress still support it out of the box (I just checked my blog, it works).
I liked Atom's clean design but it felt it was mostly pushed by Google (I may be misremembering) and in the end the syndicated web faded into obscurity anyway.
ravenstine•May 4, 2026
I thought it did in fact catch on but most people still referred to it as "RSS".
8 Comments
Pity though. RSS / Atom was a fantastic concept and it’s a real pity big tech killed them off.
Or you create a blog for yourself and you make a blogroll.
As for discovering new blogs, couple of options but there are more out there: https://ooh.directory, https://blogroll.org/
One 'dream' of me is to have OPML be the discovery-glue between all kinds of individual personal websites and blogs. But this requires critical mass to have enough to discover and explore, and it needs some fun/interesting software way to do that.
Basically, I get to see the latest post from a random feed. Nothing else. No lists of unread new posts from all the feeds. If I like the title and short summary, I click through to the website or blog itself where I can read the whole thing. There's no FOMO this way, or an information overload. Just one post a time.
Because the whole list of feeds is curated by myself, I know that everything is at least a little interesting. I even made a category with Youtube channels that I like, so I can skip their annoying recommended videos algo.
Next to this basic functionality, I made what I call 'Newspapers'. These are certain topics with a bunch of selected feeds attached, they get checked automatically in the background. When the Newspaper has enough articles, I see a new Newspaper appear. Otherwise it might take months before a feed is shown in the random selection.
What do you like about XML? I feel like I'm missing something.
In retrospect, its useful for creating islands of sanity/enforcement in a codebase. Lightweight way to give type annotations across organizational boundaries.
> we use an XML parser to parse it to JSON and even then it's not perfect
I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON? I assume there's code that's parsing XML and returning a JSON object? What would make this not perfect, other than a poor implementation of the translator? Would them using JSON help? If JSON is a less expressive format than JSON, is it possible to 100% translate their XML to JSON?
Thanks for the insight! Is this what JSDoc/Swagger is now used for?
> I can't quite picture this: how does one parse XML to JSON?
I'm not sure actually. I haven't personally seen the code, I just hear my coworkers always lambasting that API provider for their usage of XML. Maybe it's just their lack of documentation that sucks, but it's become a running joke whenever we get a new partner that the team integrating it jokes that their API is XML.
Obviously, that's only a benefit if you care about and utilize those features; most teams doing JSON integrations will just build those into the consumer in lieu of them being provided by the transport. But it is something that some people (especially larger enterprise organizations) value.
In addition, JSON is easier to parse and to map to common data structures of programming languages.
JSON is still figuring it out.
Some people forged ahead with a cleaned up RDF-based version and called it RSS 1.0, while other people went ahead with the ambiguities but without RDF and called it RSS 2.0. The person publishing RSS 2.0 considered it finished and refused to update it. There was drama.
A bunch of people decided that there was too much to clean up from within that mess and started a new format, Atom. This ended up being a much better spec. with an official RFC, but at this point everybody was calling any type of feed “RSS”, even if it was Atom.
If you have the choice, you should pick Atom.
The hyperscalers stopped that timeline from winning, though.
YouTube had atom feeds and I don't think Amazon and Microsoft have relevant syndication.
Meta is surely responsible but that's it, imo.
They dumped microformats and standards in favor of soupy error tolerant formats that benefitted their search engine and made it harder for other efforts to make information shareable and accessible.
They wanted it to be easy to get information in, but for you to have to go through them to get information out.
Dec 2005
I think at that time it was still ok?
There's really no good reason to use anything other than Atom.
I liked Atom's clean design but it felt it was mostly pushed by Google (I may be misremembering) and in the end the syndicated web faded into obscurity anyway.