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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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How does RSS work under the hood? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Wasn't quite sure where to ask this question, but figured if anyone, it would be selfhosters who are mostly into RSS.

I've recently been getting into RSS feeds for reading my news, watching YT (via FreeTube) and listening to podcasts - and its been nothing but great! However I was wondering how RSS works under the hood. I couldn't find many good sources on it, so if you have any good reads please hit me up. My main question; is RSS a one-way protocol? Considering when using Freetube or Newpipe, it's able to fetch videos, views and comments etc, but I assume its only a one way thing seeing one cannot comment or like the video? And I guess this applies to podcasts and news sites as well? What happens during podcasts if I skip ads during the podcast? Does that hurt the podcaster, in the sense that I am skipping the ad-section, or does it still count as the RSS feed has already been "pulled" to my device?

If anyone could help clear this up for me I would greatly appreciate it :)

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (2 children)

RSS and ATOM are just a way to format an XML file that can be downloaded from a server. There is nothing special about it otherwise and it is strictly one way as its just downloading a file.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

One important thing if you are building a RSS application is that the server should support conditional requests (the If-Modified-Since header). This way, a client does not have to download the entire feed on every update. It simply sends the last update date with its request and the server returns an empty response if the feed is up to date.

There are some applications (for example YouTube) which dont support this, resulting in higher-than-necessery data usage, especially on mobile.

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