Drop support for RSS & Atom feeds

[jbrooksuk]

Closes #3313

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Firefox has now dropped support for their RSS reader, which leads me to believe that RSS & Atom are (sadly) dead.

I'm happy to leave this around if people still want them, but we'll take a vote.

[jbrooksuk]

Actually, @GrahamCampbell tweeted about this and it looks like the votes were in favour of ditching them! https://twitter.com/GrahamJCampbell/status/1057654707810910208

[GrahamCampbell]

The composer.lock is now invalid.

[GrahamCampbell]

I'll regenerate it.

[jbrooksuk]

Thanks @GrahamCampbell

[Perflyst]

I just read this after switching to 2.4, is there any way to get this back? A lot of librehosters (https://libreho.st) use Cachet for their status page and push new issues via a bot (which depends on this rss feed) to matrix or xmpp rooms.

[GrahamCampbell]

It would be possible to write an RSS feed generating website that hit Cachets API. It shouldn't be too hard.

[muppeth]

TBH I dont understand why this has been done. Especially when the reasoning is web browser. Many poeple use rss feed readers, or post feeds on various other platforms. Currently I post updates from my status page on xmpp, matrix, hubzilla and mastodon (activitypub). Very easily I could plumb it to any other platform/protocol because of the RSS feature which is implemented in virtually everything by now.

instead now one needs to develop an app/bot on per protocol/platform base.

[Edit]
It's weird you base your decision on a vote of 15 people on twitter.

[GrahamCampbell]

It's weird you base your decision on a vote of 15 people on twitter.

The decision was not based on the twitter poll. That was just one of the ways we let people give feedback on the plan to remove it.

[GrahamCampbell]

We'd already decided we wanted to remove it before the poll.

[GrahamCampbell]

instead now one needs to develop an app/bot on per protocol/platform base.

Not true, as I said, one could just develop an rss website that hits cachet's api and outputs an rss feed. The Cachet organization just doesn't want to maintain RSS feeds anymore.

[muppeth]

It's a pity as everyone i know who uses cachet does utilize rss, but its your project so you can do whatever you think is right.

[jbrooksuk]

If the demand is there to return it, then we’ll take that on board and reconsider if it was the right move. For now though, we’ve removed it.

[realitygaps]

I also use RSS from cachet heavily on a number of instances and would like this feature to be returned to the codebase

[muppeth]

@jbrooksuk thanks. I don't know what the burden in keeping it in, so I will respect your decission if you decide to remove it because it prevents you from adding other features, or simply requires lots of resources to keep maintaining it.

It is very good feature to keep (the more ways to announce downtimes the better).

[Perflyst]

There we go, RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge#1034

[GrahamCampbell]

The RSS Bridge project looks like exactly the sort of solution I was suggesting. 👍

[em92]

Firefox has now dropped support for their RSS reader, which leads me to believe that RSS & Atom are (sadly) dead.

Firefox was not leading "rss-reader" ever, 'cos of lack of functionality it gave comparing to other rss-readers (without quotes). Just compare firefox's "rss-reader" in firefox esr 60 and, as example, Tiny RSS reader (screenshort). So telling that RSS/Atom are dead, 'cos Firefox dropped its imperfection feature, is nonsence.

If the demand is there to return it

There is demand. As you see in discussion, there are people who use it.

The RSS Bridge project looks like exactly the sort of solution I was suggesting

There is no rss in instagram, 'cos of some scumbags in instagram organization want more income, which reduces, if user reads posts from their favorite rss-reader, but not official instagram app. See "Rant" section in RSS-Bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge#rant

[GrahamCampbell]

The primary reason for getting rid of RSS feeds from Cachet was because the implementation was horrible, and dependencies were stopping us from upgrading other parts of Cachet. The secondary motivation was because we had assessed that the use of RSS feeds was declining. Clearly people such as yourself are still using them, but the removal of RSS feeds from Cachet's core does not spell the end of RSS feeds from Cachet - think of it more as a "separation of concerns". The RSS-Bridge project can now generate RSS feeds for Cachet sits.

[em92]

the implementation was horrible

No "fixmes" or "todos", type annotated code, simple test on response. What exactly is horrible in implementation?

dependencies were stopping us from upgrading other parts of Cachet

Ye, sure. Especially when using roumen/feed, that abandoned in favour of laravelium/feed. You didn't even think about upgrading dependency. You just carelessly dropped it and didn't think about replacement. Pull request merged in dec 28, 2018 and more than one month later @klimplant made RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge#1034

that the use of RSS feeds was declining.

Baseless statement or "We decline it, 'cos at least we decline it" statement. Firefox issue is described in #3368 (comment). Use of RSS/Atom feeds was declining in favor of what? Github is using feeds, BBC News is using feeds.

[GrahamCampbell]

You just carelessly dropped it and didn't think about replacement.

As I explained, we did consider the options, and decided we should remove RSS feeds from Cachet, because the best implementation strategy would be to have another service generate feeds on behalf of Cachet. We no longer want to deal with RSS dependencies and package upgrades within the core codebase.

[GrahamCampbell]

Also, the implementation we had was not actually complete anyway. Various things were always missing from Cachet's feeds.

[jbrooksuk]

I'm actually going to bring this back, but with a better RSS integration.

[SuperSandro2000]

This sounds like a recent trend to remove functionality and add things no one asked for or wanted.