Some RSS feeds only serve excerpts, requiring you to visit the website if you want to read the whole article.
How do you use these sort of feeds? It’s nice to be able to skim the headlines without having to visit a website I suppose. But when I’m out somewhere with spotty or no Internet, it’s rather impractical not being able to tell if this is something that is already downloaded by my RSS reader or not.
Yeah, I hate those. My main reader (Feeder) has an option “fetch full article by default” that I turn on for them. Frustratingly, one of the feeds I follow uses Anubis and so the “full article” that gets fetched is just a warning that I’m not allowed to see it…
If I realize the article isn’t complete, I open it in my browser; if not, I just read as much as is displayed, and that’s it 
Most of the time, I end up removing them from my list — especially if they don’t indicate in the excerpt that it’s one and that I should go to the website to read it.
I travel quite a lot normally and that means I’m offline quite lengthy times at a time and reading articles through RSS is important to me. Full-text RSS is thus a big deal for me.
I got inspired to add a full-text RSS now :) might even erase the newsletter, ppl dont read the emails anyways.
It doesn’t bother me, NetNewsWire usually can fetch the full article and I read it there, or sometimes I open and read in the browser (especially blogs that I know change their appearance often…)
If I want to save something for offline reading I would use the “reading list” feature in the browser.
Interesting perspective. Quoting from your article:
I do understand and respect the reasons people might have for keeping their feeds short and wanting to drive traffic to their site
As someone who doesn’t provide full articles in my newsfeed—I can tell you that driving traffic is not one of the reasons. Main reasons are:
Mind you, I only update my site maybe 6 times a year so if that’s too much effort to click through and visit my site, then so be it (or fetch the page with your newsreader).
I’m curious, a full article feed would be like 100x the filesize, could that become an issue for people with slow connections? Do newsreaders download the images too?
I press spacebar (in FreshRSS) and it opens in a new tab. It’s usually fine.
On my own feeds I serve excerpts because I’d been considering using Anubis to counter AI scrapers or blocking hotlinked images. I also want to freely be able to use scripts, embeds or custom styling as a part of posts.
Reddit is closing down its feeds entirely, citing AI scrapers as a problem. I’d have been OK with it if they just kept titles and links for my personal feed.
If there were AI bots posting on forums making arguments in favor of full text feeds and descriptive alt text that wouldn’t be the strangest AI thing that happened this year.
Offering full-text RSS feeds doesn’t mean you instantly surrender the contents to LLMs (or even every human user). E.g. https://aftermath.site has full RSS feeds for their subscribers. That’s one of the reasons why I subscribed!
It seems like a full-text feed would be much better than an excerpt feed if you’re dealing with scrapers, since they would only make one request instead of hundreds?
I’ve always had a full RSS feed, but then I found out that I shouldn’t have all my posts in my RSS feed because it became too large (>5MB) and a lot of readers reject it at that size. So now I have the 50 most recent posts in full as my default, and an additional RSS feed of every post in full.
Honestly this thread raises some good points, I really hadn’t thought about the load-ahead-of-time use case for RSS readers… I initially switched to excerpt-only because the xml file was getting rather heavy and some SSG-content gets left out, but this has convinced me to tweak rss configuration when I next make some updates.
i dont mind excerpt only blogs that much, but it is a bit annoying to have to read them later when offline :( what i really hate is blogs that put an excerpt and dont indicate that it IS an excerpt since its really hard to tell them apart from just really short articles
I used to have full-text RSS feeds back when I used Jekyll. I assumed this was the case when I switched to Hugo, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized it was only putting excerpts.
Since the switch to my custom SSG I just now have a link for each entry to the website page. Don’t get me wrong, full-text RSS is great, but I’m finding that the way I present my posts is beginning to diverge from what’s expected of RSS readers (notably with the introduction of sidenotes). That divergence will only increase as I put out more stuff.
I personally find excerpts to be more annoying than either having the full text, or not at all. Too much chance of assuming you’ve read the whole article when you actually haven’t.
From the standpoint of following other people’s RSS feeds, well, I don’t do that at the moment. I can’t really comment on that aspect.
I mostly use short hand-written summaries as “excerpts,” and I use those same summaries on the blog’s homepage. Hopefully it isn’t creating confusion. I could add a “read more,” if I overrode the jekyll-feed plugin, but I don’t think there is an option without coding a little.
A technical note about ATOM: it specifies both content and a summary elements, and the content element either contains or links to the content of the entry.
Do feed readers display summaries differently than content or fetch content if it’s specified as a link? My guess would be “no” because none of these XML-isms are ever implemented consistently.
But at least in theory it should be possible to know my feed is providing excerpts because it contains only summary elements.
I just skim-read the article about RSS Feed Best Practices, and it has some interesting options to minimise the downsides of serving full-text feeds that I didn’t know about:
Not sure how well supported this stuff is, but nice to know there are some options.
They don’t bother me in the slightest. I tend to view full-text RSS feeds as a “nice-to-have” sort of thing and never expect that it’s what I’ll get by default when I add a feed to my reader. I always respect the wishes of the person behind the RSS feed. If they want me to click through to their site, that’s their right. Their website, their RSS feed, their rules.
Re: AI scraping, I assume the concern here is more so with scraping the text itself for training than with the traffic burden presented by scrapers. You could use Anubis, Cloudflare, or whatever to severely reduce bot / scraping activity on your website, for instance, but if you’re offering a full text RSS feed, someone wanting to steal your posts for AI training could simply just plug your RSS feed into any old reader and retrieve the data they want that way. If you only offer excerpt-only or headline-only feeds, it becomes harder for scrapers to steal your work.
Oh, I see. So in that case it’s basically super ineffective DRM.
I guess you could frame it that way. I just see it as the feed owner adding in a few layers of friction to try to put a stop to easy content theft. It’s not 100% effective, no, but it does make the feed less attractive to people who are only interested in it insofar as it’s an easy source of tasty training data.
Sucks that people who would use the feed appropriately get caught up in that, of course, but such is the state of the Internet today. You either let your site (and your RSS feed) function as a free for all for every data scraper out there to plunder at will, or you enforce some boundaries that may mildly inconvenience legitimate visitors who aren’t looking to capitalize off what you’re putting out there. I completely empathize with anyone who chooses to mildly inconvenience me. I don’t care about having to click on post titles in my feed reader if it means the blogger feels comfortable enough to keep posting.