There is not enough side-eye in the world for this: Google revives RSS.

Google, some of us remember Google Reader.

And we have not forgotten. And we have not forgiven.

@adders Nice try, @Google. Hope you don’t ruin another generation’s expectations.

@adders I still miss Google Reader! Though Feedly has filled the gap in my reading flow pretty nicely.

@adders Yep, when Google “revives” anything, it’s best not to hold your breath, seeing this is the same company that throws everything at the wall to see what sticks — and half the time those don’t stay up long. They’re probably doing this to see how much data they can milk from users again, before inevitably not having enough uptake and cancelling it once more. 😂

@adders Google Reader was ace! I bloody hated those muppets for quiet sometime. I will never forgive them for that.

@adders I’m with @wearsmanyhats that this sounds like another way for them to latch their tracking onto an open standard as part of their current “advertising and privacy can be friends” push.

@gregmoore And now I have "Oklahoma!" going through my head.

@adders I’m a very satisfied Newsblur user and happily pay for the service. Hell would freeze over before I’d let Chrome near my RSS feeds.

@pimoore @adders Dave Winer is describing is as “Google did so much damage to RSS, the thought of them "reviving" it is analogous to Exxon reviving the site of some huge oil spill, one that they didn't contribute to cleaning up.”

scripting.com/2021/05/1...

@adders

”Do Evil”

@adders This isn’t RSS, just a version of Safari’s reading list. The reality is that RSS doesn’t always work, since most sites of note use ad impressions, not ad-free subscriptions behind a paywall. The web was never open, nor free (as in beer), not in its entirety, RSS ditto.

@duncanhart @adders Yeah I saw Dave’s article, what a perfect analogy to this situation!

@JohnPhilpin Google can FLoC off.

@duncanhart @adders Feedbin for me, very happy with the service and well worth the cost. I’m on iOS, so I guess I can’t use Chrome for RSS…

Oh darn.

@pimoore I don't know Feedbin, but I'll go take a look now that you've mentioned it. Now, more than ever, I'm choosing a modular approach to the services that I use and pay for. That way my lifeflow is resilient if anyone of those services gets deprecated.

@duncanhart Feedbin’s killer feature is its giving you a custom email address that allows you to subscribe to newsletters that don’t already have their own feed, and receive them alongside your regular RSS feeds. And it has a gorgeous web interface to boot should you have to use it that way.

@pimoore email to RSS sounds interesting, I didn't know that that was a thing.

@pimoore I just checked out Feedbin on your recommendation and it seems far too good to be true. That twitter feed integration is incredible and might solve my desire to avoid twitter, but need to follow certain accounts and subjects.

@MindfulGrump @duncanhart Oh yeah, I had completely forgot to mention the Twitter integration before. You can also subscribe to YouTube accounts in it, though I believe that’s not specific to Feedbin.

@pimoore I’m slowly and meticulously seeing which twitter accounts I really like and find inspiring and putting them into the Feedbin feed. Looks ideal.

@pimoore I just found out that you can subscribe to a Mastodon accounts via RSS.

Just add .rss to the end of an account’s URL, e.g. fediverse.partners/@duncanhart dot RSS

(NB I’ve deliberately written ‘dot RSS’ as the editor syntax doesn’t like it if I add .rss as a suffix to an @ identity).

@duncanhart sweet deal, thanks for sharing that! I’m looking into Mastodon more as we speak.

@pimoore there’s a whole fediverse to explorer 🧭