@brainblasted FeedReader definitely looks nice! I might check them out.

My thought was to add a small button to the addressbar if webfeeds are present which when clicked gives a menu of feeds with some apps you can use to subscribe to them with. Ideally that button would also indicate whether you are subscribed.

At the same time I want to make Odysseus capable of previewing webfeeds before you subscribe to them, in part to make those feeds look less technical then they do now.

Thoughts?

@alcinnz @brainblasted
That sounds good? The one thing you'll need that might be easy to forget is subscribing to web apps. In existing browsers I think the web app registers a protocol handler?

I use TT-RSS, and that's his Firefox handles it.

@gcupc @brainblasted I'm not entirely clear what you mean by subscribing to web apps?

Though I do have a partial of implementation of installing websites as apps, and an open issue for that.

@gcupc @brainblasted Ah, you mean subscribing to RSS via a webapp.

That'll take some additional design work both at the UI and technical integration levels. But it is important, and I do have people using online feed readers with Odysseus.

I'll make sure to support it.

@alcinnz I would love to see a healthy ecosystem and good UX around feed subscription management. As far as I can tell, there is no feed reader that works the way I want (starting with the lack of RFC 5005 implementations in the wild and corresponding UI for full-history feeds), so I think it's important that people be able to easily try different options so we can collectively iterate on what these things ought to look like.

@jamey I know what you mean about feed subscription. On elementary, between FeedReader, News, & Vocal all the apps use a prompt dialog for feed subscription. And while the FreeDesktop.Org standards have a spec for controlling music players, they don't for FeedReaders.

And that's a problem as without a protocol to bridge between browsers, etc and feed readers we end up with tight-coupling that discourages competition.

@jamey If you want to encourage this experimentation (at least on the free desktops), you could try drafting and pushing a standard. I could draft it too, but I'm afraid that if I drafted it supporting the standard would be "integrating into Odysseus". And that's not want I want it to be.

If you choose to do that, I'd recommend you take a look at MPRIS: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/mpris-spec/ to get you started.

@alcinnz no but yes

@alcinnz I can't wait until there's an OpenSource browser with RSS and Fediverse fully integrated!

@emerican It's on my TODO-list! Which is why I'm asking.

Though to be clear I'm planning on the viewers to be separate (and preexisting) apps, but to integrate them well-enough that that isn't a hurdle to use.

@emerican @alcinnz with the way YouTube is going with subboxes, I'd love if there was an extension or something that integrated channel RSS feeds to let me better control what I see.

@queernix @alcinnz This is really a critical point. I'm all in favor of putting user experience in control of the user as much as possible!!

@queernix @emerican Yes, this is an important feature.

I probably won't support it immediately, but I'll add it to my TODO-list.

@alcinnz I want all internet services to have RSS support. It used to be the norm, now it's the vast minority.

@h @alcinnz Here's fun fact: you can find the RSS of any Masto user by adding ".atom" to the end of their profile, so for example, your profile's RSS feed would be, https://social.coop/@h.atom.

@h @alcinnz On the topic of RSS, YouTube also has it baked in, for channels and playlists.

It's a little more awkward to work out, but I've made a Neocities page explaining it all. https://chriswere.neocities.org/rssyoutube.html

@ChrisWere @h Thanks, I'll keep that link around. And use it to ensure YouTube feeds show up.

@ChrisWere @h @alcinnz They don't, unfortunately, make those usable for podcasts. (They used to [ https://lifehacker.com/how-to-turn-youtube-channels-into-subscribable-podcasts-496976976 ], but they broke that for whatever reasons, some justifyable some less so.)

However, someone has done the work to undo that limitation.
https://podsync.net/

(And added more features for paysupport, like converting to audio.)

@nixfreak @gaditb @alcinnz @h Unfortunately, I produce too much content to load onto a PeerTube server. It just wouldn't be fair to whoever was hosting the instance.

@ChrisWere @nixfreak @gaditb @h So you won't be fair on Google, then?

Just kidding, I totally understand this situation.

@alcinnz
I'm taking them down from within. But shhhhhh it's a secret.
@nixfreak @gaditb @h

@ChrisWere With the last Mastodon version you can add .rss to any user or tag i.e. https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed.rss & https://mastodon.social/tags/pixelfed.rss

@h @alcinnz

@quimgil @h @alcinnz That's awesome, thanks for the tip.

@alcinnz I think that ultimately it's going to be one of those things like decentralisation, the architecture will have to introduce incentives to make people want to be good netizens.

The "good netizen", at least according to me, would mean people who are all of:

1) good decentralisers
2) good privacy stewards
3) good public data sharers
and
4) good free software coders

The "good public data sharers" bit would mean reusable data including but not limited to data in RSS format.

@alcinnz ** RSS and functionally equivalent Atom and RDF variants.

@h @alcinnz

Wouldn't it make more sense to have protocols that enable good netizenship while making interference with good netizens as a group or subculture, infeasible?

@jankoekepan @alcinnz We've had http for ages. That clearly wasn't enough.

@h @alcinnz True but irrelevant. There's nothing about HTTP that discourages or interferes with misbehaviour.

@jankoekepan

Whatever I decide to be relevant to what I've just explained is relevant.

You are free to come up with a better explanation and look for other discussions to derail.

@h Well then you'll be glad to hear that we've had postal services for ages, and that clearly wasn't enough.

@alcinnz add cookies and HTTP authentication for RSS.

@SoniEx2 @alcinnz Can you not do authentication with RSS by "https://username:randomlygeneratedtoken@website.url/path/to/rss"?
(Possibly a random username, too. Maybe just the random username?)

@gaditb @alcinnz http://plaintextoffenders.com/

@alcinnz @gaditb with HTTP auth + cookies you can do HTTP auth *once* and expect cookies to keep you logged in afterwards.

@gaditb @alcinnz since nobody in RSS uses HTTP auth, it is safe to implement it this way. and MUCH BETTER.

go learn some infosec and stay away from this stuff.

@SoniEx2 @alcinnz What does plaintextoffenders have to do with using a randomly generated token to authenticate the request for the feed.

Cookies are... also passed and checked as plaintext, no?

@gaditb @alcinnz Cookies can be updated. You can literally generate a new session token every time the feed reloads. That would be every 20 minutes in my case.

Good luck refreshing the pseudo-password every 20 minutes.

@alcinnz @gaditb (Additionally, cookies also let you provide accurate deltas and stuff, even without support for RFC 3229!)

@SoniEx2 @alcinnz Point on the updating a new cookie after every reload. My thinking was, App Passwords are a pretty common thing used by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc., and I figured__? But I guess a constantly updating cookie could be better, if it would require new code anyways?

@SoniEx2 It'd be difficult for me not to do so for previewing webfeeds.

But subscribing to webfeeds is an entirely separate issue which I'd like to decouple from web surfing. Probably as a separate app.

@alcinnz Even as a separate app, it should still support HTTP authentication and cookies.

I want mastodon home feed in feed form. How are you gonna do that without authentication?

@SoniEx2 Definitely!

And you're not the first person here who wants feed readers to support more standards. I'll do my part in encouraging it.

@alcinnz i use dreamwidths integrated rss quite a bit (they generate rss and atom feeds for all blogs and also let you subscribe to non-dw blogs via rss) and find it quite useful

Firefoxes live bookmarks are nice if you’re only trying to keep up with a few things, but dont really scale the way a proper feed would

@Satsuma I'll look into DreamWidth to see what inspiration I can get from them.

And yeah, I've never been taken by LiveBookmarks. Bookmarks and feeds are quite different things despite both being about managing a collection of links, because with bookmarks you've explicitly put things there whereas for a webfeed the links come from registered sources.

I think it's best for feeds to have their own dedicated UI, and others on this thread are keen for competition there to spice things up.

@alcinnz its not a perfect setup, to reduce strain on dreamwidths servers they basically create fake accounts for rss feeds and then distribute those to your reading page but from a user experience perspective that doesn’t matter particularly much

Dreamwidths one downside is that they’re not super mobile friendly, which doesnt bother me but can be a sticking point for others

@alcinnz Firefox has always supported RSS feeds via 'Live Bookmarks' (including RDF and ATOM) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks

@david_ross Which is great! I do find it a bit sad though that it's not as easily accessed by default as it used to be.

They used to have it as a default toolbar element and the docs you linked to talked about opening the legacy menu bar.

@alcinnz 1. It is default. If you simply navigate to a feed the imediate choice you're presented with is Live Bookmarks. https://mastodon.social/@david_ross.atom

2. This is correct. By pressing ALT you get the legacy menu bar even in Nightly version 62.

@david_ross I was saying it's sad that the menu of RSS feeds on the page was moved to a legacy menu bar and off the default toolbar. Yes LiveBookmarks is still easily accessible as the default.

@zwol Thanks, it'd be useful to have something to emulate. I'll check it out.

@brainblasted @gcupc @jamey @emerican @queernix @h @SoniEx2 @zwol

Thanks for all the feedback! It's very useful.

@alcinnz I don't think my comment was very clear: YouTube actually already does support RSS, each channel has an RSS feed. I think any in-browser RSS system should handle YouTube RSS in a smoother way than regular RSS though, because video content is much different

@queernix Ah, thanks for correcting me. I'm glad that's the case!

I'll test this works with YouTube, and I'm aware of cases where apps are designed only for specific type of feeds. Case in point podcasts are a special type of feed, and they have their own apps.

So it'll be very nice to allow YouTube (and other video feeds) to have their own UI!