ITT Post Your Random Thoughts

[Pocket]

The reason everyone gravitated toward social media is that nobody has the money to host their own forum anymore. Or do anything else for that matter. Provide people with a service for free and they will beat a path to your door.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

well that and just social media companies pushing and inserting themselves into everything

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

let's not forget how RSS suddenly stopped being in-vogue despite being very useful, because twitter now exists

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

RSS, the thing that doesn't require on account on a hellsite

[Pocket]

Was RSS ever in vogue? Not for content providers, but actual users. Any time I clicked an RSS link, all I got was a page listing the recent content from that site. What was I supposed to do with that? What I wanted was an app that would intercept clicks on RSS links and add them to a growing list of subscriptions, and then either pop up a notification when it's found something new or just give me an all-in-one feed I can tab back to at my leisure, with each post being a link to the source.

Plus, there was no standard to what a single RSS "post" could contain. It could be anything from a quick blurb and a link to the entire freaking page. I imagine a lot of people shied away from using it because they didn't know what they were supposed to include. And even if you had a notification app, it wouldn't necessarily know how to display bigger posts.

Twitter solved both issues handily. You could get push notifications to your phone by text message before smartphones were even a thing, and third party apps like TweetDeck quickly popped up to be the desktop equivalent. And the character limit meant you were limited to a quick description and a link, perfect for "hey new content" notifications. It was a better RSS than RSS ever was, even though it was never even intended to be used that way.

[Gloomy Rube]

The reason everyone gravitated toward social media is that nobody has the money to host their own forum anymore. Or do anything else for that matter. Provide people with a service for free and they will beat a path to your door.

Forum hosting is free though, or at least has been as long as I've used it (source: ran a few forums back in the day)

If the people that used to host free boards stopped though, that would be an issue

[Gloomy Rube]

anyway I'm not giving up on a BBS just because this is the next page, make it happen

[Fizzbuzz]

What I wanted was an app that would intercept clicks on RSS links and add them to a growing list of subscriptions, and then either pop up a notification when it's found something new or just give me an all-in-one feed I can tab back to at my leisure, with each post being a link to the source.

Browsers used to do exactly this; in fact, Firefox was well-known for being in the RSS vanguard. Chrome never supported it, and while Google Reader was a popular RSS aggregator, Google killed it in 2013 (with rumors suggesting they wanted to force people onto Google+ instead). Usage never recovered and it got to a point where Mozilla removed Firefox's RSS support in December 2018. The only browsers that support it natively are Safari (to a limited extent) and the moribund Internet Explorer.

[Gloomy Rube]

let's go back to netscape navigator

[Gloomy Rube]

more nautical themed browsers please

[Fizzbuzz]

more nautical themed browsers please

How about Waterfox, forked from Firefox?

[Gloomy Rube]

that's not nautical, that's just about water

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

i wonder what it takes to set up a bbs these days, like for real

those things are probably comically small compared to any forum

[Gloomy Rube]

unless the waterfox has a pirate hat or sailor hat, I banish it from my eyes

[Gloomy Rube]

i wonder what it takes to set up a bbs these days, like for real

those things are probably comically small compared to any forum

It would have to be Telnet of some type, I think, as BBS back in the olden days you'd call into them instead of your usual ISP and there you are, Dragon's Dungeon Den of Doom BBS, and Telnet was where most BBS-exclusive programs migrated to after the decline of BBSes, like MUDs n stuff.

[Pocket]

Browsers used to do exactly this; in fact, Firefox was well-known for being in the RSS vanguard.

I never understood how Firefox's RSS thing worked either. Maybe if they made it so that clicking an .rss link took you to this feature instead of just rendering the raw XML file, I'd have used it.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

i used to use opera and it had a good rss system, i remember

[ToastGhost]

I will code the Round Stable Exclusive Members Only but I'll need to be paid in neocash.

[Gloomy Rube]

toast blockchain is like 50 miles away from BBS, do not sully their good name

[ToastGhost]

I never said blockchain but now that you mention it...

[ToastGhost]

I meant neopets points.

I've been thinking about my old neopets a lot.

[Gloomy Rube]

baby fireball is the best petpet

[Gloomy Rube]

I don't remember if that's the name of the type of petpet or just what I named mine tho

[ToastGhost]

Petpets were dumb, it was the neopets that were the star of the show. I had a blue Shoyru that later because a green Pteri and he was rad the whole time.

RIP I guess.

[Gloomy Rube]

Petpets were fine, but petpetpets were stretching things a bit

[Angel Beat]

I never 'got' RSS, so I never used it.

[Gloomy Rube]

I never 'got' RSS, so I never used it.

same

[SlateSlabrock]

I recently fed my RSS list into Thunderbird after having ignored it basically since Google Reader died and boy are there are lot of abandoned Web comics

[Adiwan]

I love RSS. It keeps my news sites separated, keeps me updated, and doesn't pollute my social news stream.
I have 340 RSS sources (most of them are dead like pony ask blogs (need to delete them eventually)).
Most of them are tech news sites, geek/popculture sites, and webcomics.
I also like that my RSS reader doesn't put everything into my face.
Once I tried Twitter on a more regular basis but it was for me too hyperactive and I needed to do more scrolling to gather the information.

[!saak]

I loved Google Reader cuz I'd follow my friends and they'd follow me and we'd share articles to each other

now that's been taken over by Twitter, Discord and Hangouts

[Void Chicken]

I use Feedly as my RSS reader. Does the Google Reader thing of synchronizing between desktop and mobile. Alternatively, I've heard good things about Tiny Tiny RSS, but you need your own webserver to use it.

[Fontra]

Twitter, for real, is the worst site for me to use in anything other than microbursts. It's info overload to the max and filled with people saying the most histrionic garbage about things (sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's just moronic). I don't know why, but it seems like it got aggressively worse over the past 2 years.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

i think the dumbasses from tumblr migrated to twitter after the porn ban and added their brand of stupidity to it

[The Ghost of Ember]

i think the dumbasses from tumblr migrated to twitter after the porn ban and added their brand of stupidity to it

[Mr. Big]

Something I realized. People often parody Peter Griffin by quoting "Holy crap, Lois", but I can't think of any instance where he says that exact phrase (he says "holy crap" a lot, but not with Lois' name).

[Princess Flufflebutt]

It's elementary, dear Lois.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

It's elementary, dear Lois.

[Adiwan]

Beam my crap up, my dear elementary Lois.

[DaikatunaRevengeance]

faaaaaaart

[Fontra]

Beam your Holy Father Luke Up Lois, my dear Watson