Reddit appears to have neutered RSS feeds
Reddit appears to have neutered RSS feeds
I use NetNewsWire on my iPad and Feeder on my Android phone to read RSS feeds from multiple sites (including Lemmy and Kbin). I also use it to monitor niche sub-reddits so I can give Reddit as little traffic as possible.
I guess it was inevitable that Reddit would know many are doing this and begin to kill RSS feeds. I’ve noticed the past few days that my feeds were not being updated very often, if at all, even though the feed appears to still be there.
This started a few weeks ago, apparently:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/14z44nw/rss_feeds_are_broken_for_most_subreddits/
Ironically Aaron Swartz helped develop RSS. Feels symbolic.
Can someone explain what an RSS feed is? Sorry im not super technically literate 😅
RSS is a standardized protocol that allows you to get updates from websites when new content gets published. Using a RSS client, you can follow multiple websites in a single interface.
Really Simple Syndication is a format that allows a program or user to download a bunch of stuff as a simple list of titles, content and tags. RSS readers can also combine different sources into one feed, so you can grab articles from many different RSS capable sites and combine them into one cohesive list.
The great thing Reddit had was the ability to turn any subreddit into an RSS feed by just putting .rss on the end of the URL in place of the "/"
Thankfully RSS is built into Lemmy - every community includes an RSS feed.
It's a good way to see a quick list of all posts in a reader that supports RSS.
In a very simple manner, is a file that contains all the content that a website (in this case a subreddit, but it can be a blog for example) publishes. For each publication, the RSS file contains an entry and each entry contains information like the author of the publication, date, content, summary, media links and so on.
You can use an rss reader to aggregate different RSS feeds from different sources and read them from a single app.
I was wondering why I haven't had anything new in my 2 niche subreddits for 2 days. Using Feeder too.
Seriously. Fuck. Reddit.
@skepticalifornia can confirm. I still have a subreddit in my RSS feeds and nothing is showing up for a while now...
It's a shame since there are subreddits that are not moving to any new platform...Hopefully it's not intentional, I've been using Geddit to browse some subs that still don't have active communities on Lemmy.
What does Reddit gain?
I very much doubt that anyone who uses RSS will install their app.
I think it's all part of their assault on open APIs - I have to believe that a tiny percentage of users use RSS, so the traffic can't be that big unless scrapers use RSS.
I suspect scrapers began using RSS to bypass the api pricing.
Update on this issue. Reddit has apparently started to enforce login requirements for RSS feeds. Since most newsreaders have elected to not pay Reddit for API access, most of them will likely stop working.
However, there is a workaround for now - you can use old.reddit as the feed url, so something like https://old.reddit.com/r/technews.rss will work, for now.
I expect Reddit to also kill old.reddit at some point as they still have a couple of bullets in their gun to shoot off the rest of their foot.
Hmm, I'm still getting my reddit RSS feeds.
Are they updating? Mine are there but nothing new in a couple of days.
Yeah, I have 6 or 7 subreddit feeds and they have been updating, I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary.