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Remember when browsers used to display an RSS icon in the URL bar when feeds were available on that website?
After the lost decade in social media, can we please bringt that back now?
341 boosts and 509 likes in 20 hours.
I think I've struck a nerve here. 
There are a lot of recommendations for Firefox plugins in the replies (but that was not the point of the Toot 
).
But on the topic of sharing experiences:
I use a self hosted tiny tiny RSS instance, so I can read my subscribed feed on any device and it keeps track of what i've already seen.
And RSS is awesome!
And people are still telling there is no engagement on Mastodon while my notifications are flowing over 
@sebastianlaube yes please.
although I also remember a time when I had to add that via plugin because it was not standard yet
@sebastianlaube There's an extension for that 
I'd be happy already if the RSS would be advertised visibly on the homepage itself.
For some pages you can guess the URL from the engine powering the site.
@RyunoKi @sebastianlaube We need to put ours up higher! (Right now itʼs at the bottom.) https://lucire.com/
@sebastianlaube 100% agree. I also miss Usenet :(
3946] @tessarakt @sebastianlaube I'm betting it has nowhere near the number and diversity of users it had in 1995 though.
@sebastianlaube yes, please. Who's idea was it to remove those anyway?
@sebastianlaube fear not, the chrome team is hard at work and is giving us this now:
https://blog.google/products/shopping/google-shopping-best-holiday-deals-2023/
@teleclimber hahaha, I wrote about browsers, not corporate marketing and data accumulation tools 
@sebastianlaube yes indeed, it's a feature of the browser itself:
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/14198594
We went from browsers surfacing RSS feeds to built-in consumerism aids.
Agreed as @write_as supprts federation and rss, in fact I think mastodon supports RSS
@sebastianlaube Look for the «Copy RSS button» add on for Firefox. It brings it back. If you want something more complex (similar to thee old Opera's integrated feed reader, look for «FeedBro»
, 
; Soni L. @sebastianlaube we would kinda like to have URLs to RSS feeds that automatically support RSS feed readers.
we think that would be more effective too.
@sebastianlaube I remember when Firefox dropped the feature.
One more "I give up" kind of Mozilla disappointing take.
@hub @sebastianlaube I think the underlying issue for Mozilla was that an application for following RSS feeds requires a local database of last-checked times, read/unread status, folders or other organization, etc.
Those are essentials. But they're much closer to the feature set already needed by email, so "following RSS" got incorporated into Thunderbird instead of Firefox (and thus feature most people never saw). OK technically, but fully divorced from the app where you encounter the feeds.
@n8 @hub @sebastianlaube Not having a full RSS reader would be one thing, but what they also removed was the "this page has RSS feeds, click here to subscribe to them in your (not-integrated) RSS reader" button
@HeNeArXn @n8 @sebastianlaube in the context of "everyone is using GMail" and "we are uncommitting from Thunderbird" I think this was just stabbing RSS.
Not sure what the decision process was internally.
@hub @HeNeArXn @sebastianlaube Even-numbered days, Thunderbird is a vital priority; odd-numbered days, Thunderbird is tossed over the wall to the community. Strategy FTW!
@sebastianlaube you mean like @Vivaldi has to this day?
@sebastianlaube Would love to see that built-in again.
You probably know this already, but there are some simple extensions around that do the job. I use this one:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feed-preview/
@sebastianlaube The @Vivaldi browser shows an RSS icon in the URL bar
@sebastianlaube From personal experience: Be careful with extensions. I once used one, then one day it broke somehow, didn't show my feeds anymore, and the export also didn't work. No support, and my only choice was to copy paste every single one by hand.
For managing my feeds I use Thunderbird now. It is slightly clunky, but I do trust them to not screw my feeds over.
And for the actual topic, I use Vivaldi, which got mentioned already.
@sebastianlaube I like your use of 'lost decade'.
@sebastianlaube @eliasp would be nicer if we actually got that kind of engines back too.
@SergoZar @sebastianlaube I do, many people do. It's a great tool for getting things publisher-neutral, in whatever place and in whatever way you wish.
I probably will never understand the meaning of rss. Yes, it allows you to read the news. But you can just go to the site and read them there.
@SergoZar @sebastianlaube I only want to see articles, not all the ad crap and bloated design they put there. Also it's simply way more convenient to aggregate different sources in one place rather than visiting each one of them individually.
@SergoZar @Noptisun @sebastianlaube All 65 sites? I have 66 at the moment. Even if most of them don’t even post daily, but some do by the dosens…
An RSS reader makes a quick work out of sorting trough tens to hundreds of news items, and only actually reading those you are interested in. It’s amazing, really :)
@SergoZar @Noptisun @sebastianlaube … unless you give RSS a shot :)
It’s not all news, most are blogs, or web comics, or other less frequently updated sites, but the nice thing is I don’t need to remember to check on them, it all happens automatically.
@SergoZar@social.net.ua @Noptisun@twiukraine.com @sebastianlaube@layer8.space it's about keeping up with several websites in one feed, instead of going to each site and seeing their front-pages individually. It's more efficient.
It's also nice for blogs, and you can also sometimes get notifications when a new post is out, if that's something you want.
Mima-sama 
Or just post the site's URL in your favorite feed reader and let it figure things out.
@sebastianlaube And can we stop calling it by its brand and rather say following tool instead?
@sebastianlaube I loved being able to bookmark RSS feeds and have an automagically updating folder of links in my bookmarks bar
miss that :(
@sebastianlaube Before I stopped using Twitter last year, I've been there for 15+ years, had 5k+ followers in the end and never managed in all those years to get as many reactions and meaningful conversations to my tweets than I got here in just a single year. This place seriously rocks.
@sebastianlaube Still mourning the loss of Google Reader here. Feedly was OK until it became clear they were Terrible People. Moved to Raindrop.io which seems fine so far. I do like how it can create a pseudo-RSS feed from sites which look like they should have feeds but don't, but really, no excuse not to have RSS. Oh yeah, adverts. That's why.
@sebastianlaube even with extensions or discovering feed url via view-source, most of the feeds are just snippets and want them to visit their site ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@sebastianlaube what's even more bizarre is the feature Google introduced to 'follow' sites doesn't seem to work that well, and is somewhat hidden. It's almost as if they want people to use their own algorithmic feed
To me it's an obvious thing to put right next to the 'favourite' feature and even implement as part of it. Bookmark a page / site - get a prompt "Would also you like to follow this site?"
But the feed needs to be easy to find and well implemented too.
@sebastianlaube I guess you could say Google / Chrome is a lost cause anyway but it's interesting they pay lip-service to the idea of curating your own feed. I do wonder how much of their deteriorating UX is deliberate and how much is just bad design.
On that theme:
https://ssims.co.uk/personal/blog/The-Search-Engine-A-product-design-lifecycle
@sebastianlaube It's possible to help the browser display it with a link tag in the head element
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My RSS Feed" href="https://yourwebsite.com/somerandomlocation/rss.xml">
This way is massively better than previous times because a) your rss content may not be in the root of your webdir and b) if you have many RSS feeds on your site this way will make them all available
Of course, the website creator needs to implement this, so yes every needs to get back into this habit!
@sebastianlaube Ah... maybe you're talking about Firefox specifically in which case I am not sure, but Vivaldi has this option and it's awesome 
@sebastianlaube I’m using @feedbin since the end of Google Reader (RIP… 
) almost daily (most of the time as a bridge for @NetNewsWire).
RSS is the best way to keep up with websites in an asynchronous way.
And I agree it’s more and and unpopular to actually tell me that feed url(s) and I have to look into the HTML for a feed url
@sebastianlaube
thank you!!
@sebastianlaube 
It seems most sites don't even have an RSS feed or the meta tags linking to it if they do. But let's bring it back
@sebastianlaube YES! Following RSS is now not as simple as it used to be.
The Live bookmark feature especially on Firefox was awesome.
You clicked on the RSS icon, you added it to a bookmark bar/folder and you had the feed as a bookmark.
Now even if you have a RSS feed for your website, users cannot use them easily...
This should change, RSS aggregators and Live bookmarks were already the Home timeline people are looking for on walled gardens social media.
@sebastianlaube@layer8.space vivaldi's got one, and i think seamonkey does too
نزار القرقني 
@sebastianlaube Beside Awesome RSS Firefox extension, there is also https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/
@sebastianlaube There are extensions to do this now, but yes, should be a basic.