[HN Gopher] I ditched the algorithm for RSS
___________________________________________________________________
I ditched the algorithm for RSS
Author : DearNarwhal
Score : 677 points
Date : 2025-01-16 12:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (joeyehand.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (joeyehand.com)
| throw0101c wrote:
| Happy user of NetNewsWire on macOS for many, many years
| (including following HN, and a number YT channels).
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Does it sync across machines? If so that would be amazing
|
| Edit: as in like, subscribed feeds. Obviously the feeds would
| update on both machines but would I need to add each feed to
| the app twice is what I meant to ask.
| karimdaghari wrote:
| Yes it does.
| Tomte wrote:
| And the read/unread state of posts syncs, as well. Between
| MacOS, iPadOS and iOS.
| clean_send wrote:
| same. it's a great product and the guy who runs it wants it to
| exist solely in the world to combat the algo.
| artooro wrote:
| Yep NetNewsWire all the way. It syncs to iCloud. I use it to
| subscribe to important GitHub project releases, blogs, news,
| and even some YouTube channels.
| treetalker wrote:
| I use it too, and like it very much. My only complaint is the
| inability to filter content (say, by keyword or regex). But
| it's free, it's solid, and it syncs across all my devices. Big
| ups.
| throw0101c wrote:
| For those implementing feeds, "RSS" seems to get a lot of
| mentions, but how much of it is RSS-as-such and how much is "RSS"
| as a generic term for "feed", with Atom also perhaps being
| implemented:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
| kevincox wrote:
| > but how much of it is RSS-as-such
|
| Almost all of it. RSS is just a much more specific term than
| "feed" as many people talk about their Twitter or Facebook
| "feed". I have yet to see a reader that couldn't handle both
| RSS and Atom and you will see a mix of formats being produced.
|
| I wrote a bit more detail about this in the past:
| https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#form...
| ttepasse wrote:
| One exceptions are sadly podcast feeds and clients. Although
| technically the additional podcast elements or just a basic
| "non-funky" podcast feed shouldn't be a hard problem, the
| podcast ecosystem mostly ignored Atom and produced and parsed
| only RSS 2. Even Apple's iTunes/Podcasts.app which launched
| in 2005 with support for both, gave up official support for
| Atom some years ago.
| orblivion wrote:
| I remember the period where I switched from the Something Awful
| forums to Reddit. Back in the day, you had to dig through a bunch
| of stuff that was bad to get to the "comedy gold". But even the
| bad stuff was sometimes comically bad. On Reddit, all the "gold"
| was always at the top, so there's always something "good", but it
| was generally lackluster and not quite it. Still it made me lazy
| and I switched (not that I read Reddit today).
| digb wrote:
| It's because you are not an Average Human and so averaging
| everyone's humor doesn't really work for you. I think this is
| precisely why Instagram and tiktok are actually more addictive,
| they give you these personalized algos that are powered by your
| personal engagement stats, vs Reddit which just sort of sorts
| by other people's opinions
| chis wrote:
| I've been meaning to give this a shot. I wonder if anyone has
| figured out how to fit Twitter into RSS? It's obviously not a
| natural fit since there are many more posts but the average
| quality and length is lower. But if I could figure it out, then
| similar to what this article says, it would help permanently
| break the habit of endlessly scrolling a feed.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| We used to have nitter and that supported making profiles of a
| feed. Used this alot in Gnus until it was all gone. Fwiw I
| believe mastadon has native rss support, and if bluesky
| doesn't, I bet it's coming one day.
| saltysalt wrote:
| Yes please, RSS is the true federated Internet for content
| distribution.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Bluesky made some interesting choices in the design of the AT
| Protocol. It reminds me a bit of RSS. At least in the aspect of
| having separate content and aggregation layers.
| saltysalt wrote:
| You're right I like their protocol, especially how they use
| domain name ownership for profile verification.
| freetonik wrote:
| Apologies for promoting my project again (did this in at least 2
| other threads related to RSS), but I'm weirdly proud of it: I'm
| curating a list of human-written blogs on my blog
| reader/discovery/search engine called Minifeed:
| https://minifeed.net/blogs/
|
| There's an OPML export available as well:
| https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml
| DearNarwhal wrote:
| I was looking for more feeds to subscribe to. Thanks for
| sharing!
| superkuh wrote:
| Like planting a tree, the best time to start collecting feeds
| is 10 years ago. And the second best time is now. For those
| without time travel machines, here's my categorized list of
| ~1700 feeds in HTML and opml.
|
| http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/rss-feeds-2025.opml
| http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/feeds13.html
| deivid wrote:
| I keep a blogroll[0] mostly on computing/programming
|
| [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html
| ikesau wrote:
| There's also https://ooh.directory/ and https://blogscroll.com/
| khet wrote:
| and https://boredreading.com/
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I really like this project, such a beautiful design carefully
| executed on!
| freetonik wrote:
| Thank you! I went through multiple iterations of designing
| the visuals, wanted to keep it very clean and "texty", but
| not overly brutalist at the same time.
| sureglymop wrote:
| This is honestly awesome! And I love the design as well. Is it
| open source?
| freetonik wrote:
| Almost! :) I'm cleaning up the repo and about to release it
| under AGPL-3.0.
| nwellinghoff wrote:
| When you "open original to view full content" and then use
| browser back to get to your page, the back history is removed
| and you can't click back again to get to your main page. Makes
| it hard to navigate. Love the site.
| freetonik wrote:
| Not sure I understand. The "open original.." is a plain link
| with target="_blank", and Minifeed is a pure classic HTML web
| app with zero JS shenanigans. There is nothing which can
| manipulate the history.
|
| Since the link opens in a new tab by default (because of
| target="_blank"), that new tab naturally does not have a
| "back" history. Is this what you mean?
| encom wrote:
| I wish target="_blank" had never been invented. I'll decide
| for myself if I want a new tab, thank you very much. I've
| never found an extension that filters out this garbage
| properly. There's one appropriately called "Death To
| _blank", but so much still slips through.
| nwellinghoff wrote:
| On ios it does not do that. When I click on the original
| source link it replaces minifeeds page in the current tab.
| I can the ln click back and it does take me back to
| minifeed but then I cant click back again to get back "one
| more" to the minifeed index.
| arjie wrote:
| Another good repo is Kagi's small web repository of Github
| feeds https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Nice. I think a search engine that only crawls RSS feeds is a
| great idea. My own selfishness wants such a project to not get
| too popular so the slop media doesn't go back to publishing
| feeds.
| freetonik wrote:
| At least my project has manual curation and strict
| eligibility criteria, so I don't crawl all RSS feeds, but
| instead focus on personal blogs.
| safog wrote:
| This is great! Thank you. I'm trying to figure out where I can
| stash the link so I don't forget about it.
| freetonik wrote:
| Funnily enough, I'm working on a link-blog feature on
| Minifeed. Kind of like del.icio.us or pinboard; at first, I
| implemented an ability to add blog posts to favorites and to
| lists, but there are so many blogs/sites without RSS, that I
| decided to allow users to save arbitrary links. Example:
| https://minifeed.net/l/rakhim
| openrisk wrote:
| Indeed owning the filter algorithm is the killer functionality.
| There is a torrent of RSS feeds still out there (pun), but they
| are not usable in firehose form. For example KDE's Akregator is
| an otherwise capable desktop feed reader that can handle large
| feed collections but its filtering capabilities are zero.
| Abandonware quiterss used to have at least some basic
| functionality. This is an area where a community open source
| project could have huge impact.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| It should be easy to run a filter locally, so no one "owns" it
| but you. LLMs could help with that, so it seems.
| dsiemon wrote:
| Ditch the algorithm by using or building a custom feed in
| BlueSky. I'm interested in networking stuff so I built a BlueSky
| feed that anyone can use.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/coverfire.com/feed/networking
| quantadev wrote:
| When BlueSky was being designed I was involved in the developer
| discussions and continually urged them to make simple RSS be
| the least common denominator of their entire spec, and build on
| top of RSS rather than trying to replace RSS. They listened to
| a lot of what I said, including my "Repository" concept where
| every user basically has a big repository of IPFS content
| addressable elements, and incorporated that into their design,
| which I was glad to see, but BlueSky failed miserably on the
| "KISS" principle, because they made every detail super
| complicated. It could've been RSS-compatible, and that would've
| changed the world, and revived RSS, which is badly needed, but
| sadly they were unable to see the wisdom in that.
|
| EDIT: And most of them (BlueSky devs) indeed were far left-
| leaning progressives who were much more concerned with
| censorship than freedom of information (this being around 2020
| to 2022 Silicon Valley mindset), so they continually wanted to
| impose lock-downs and controls on the flow of information,
| rather than fostering principles of openness and freedom like
| what RSS is all about.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Mastodon supports RSS.
| quantadev wrote:
| Yeah, I've written an ActivityPub implementation of my own.
| Very familiar with Mastodon too of course. RSS is such low
| hanging fruit and so obvious a thing to use as the basis
| for social media posts.
| bentt wrote:
| I love the idea of owning my own feed very much. These days it
| feels like a local and/or private LLM that had some web crawling
| ability would be able to do a better job than RSS.
|
| That seems like such an obvious project that someone's working on
| it, but the trick is that I would NOT subject myself to a
| monetized AI that is injecting content into my eyeballs that
| isn't in my best interest. So it's not necessarily something that
| fits current models of "the user is the product".
| bflesch wrote:
| > it feels like
|
| You're correct - it's a feeling. But far from reality.
| 65 wrote:
| I've done this. Built a whole RSS app, where I can use RSS feeds
| to serve me the web page itself, then customize the web page with
| my own styling if I want. I can also use non-RSS pages in my RSS
| reader and show once a day or however often I want.
|
| The problem is with discovery, though (e.g. getting new
| information you wouldn't get with an RSS feed, such as YouTube
| videos). I still think you'd need to make your own algorithm
| based on your own parameters so you can get the benefits of
| discovery while also controlling what you see.
| sewalsh wrote:
| Feedly (paid service though) does a good job of discovery on
| their search tool.
| therealfiona wrote:
| I've been meaning to get back on the RSS wagon. I ran TT-RSS some
| years ago and it fell apart at one time due to my lack of time to
| maintain it.
|
| Is TT-RSS still the go-to, or is there something else I should
| take a look at?
| worble wrote:
| I'm a big fan of miniflux, although I'm still looking for a
| mobile client that ticks all my boxes
| reyqn wrote:
| I just use the pwa, it works quite well.
| monksy wrote:
| No, fresh RSS is heck of a lot better.
| mnls wrote:
| RSS is a fantastic way of getting new articles, videos, updates
| etc from various sources that post 1-2 times per day at max.
| Getting news from News websites is hell, I had to do a LOT of
| filtering on Freshrss to make the news category less
| overwhelming. And if you wanna get to "inbox zero" you'll spend a
| lot of time scrolling.
| sewalsh wrote:
| Completely disagree. I mainline RSS feeds from news
| publications. The ability to glance at 300 headlines that'll
| take a couple minutes and being able to selectively open
| whenever one looks interesting. That's the power of RSS when
| you've a properly config'd setup (much love to Feedly, RIP
| Google Reader).
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I am a big proponent of RSS, but I think that it suffers from a
| lack of imagination these days, for example, the "quality filter"
| approach mentioned in this article is not very useful imo.
|
| The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out
| whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these days
| don't provide anything useful in the body to make a determination
| on this, and others just dump the entire contents in the body,
| which means you're wasting a bunch of time reading N% of
| something until you realize you're not interested in it and it
| can be skipped.
|
| In addition to this, RSS feeds tend to be structured to just
| throw everything at you, regardless of the topics you are
| interested in.
|
| For a few years I have been publishing my own topic-specific
| feeds[1] for others to consume where I fill the body with my own
| personal highlights from the source, with a link through to the
| source (ie. the things I found interesting, the "hooks" that give
| a quick signal to a consumer if this might be something they want
| to invest time in reading). They have a couple of die-hard
| consumers, but ultimately this really a case of a niche within a
| niche.
|
| I wish there were more feeds like this for me as a consumer, but
| unfortunately I get the feeling that this idea will never really
| become popular enough to catch on widely as RSS becomes less and
| less relevant to the mainstream.
|
| [1]: my software development topic RSS feed for example:
| https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development
| mawise wrote:
| There is a lot of interesting work in this space by the
| IndieWeb community. They've got a vision of (and lots of a spec
| for) a social reader[1] that uses RSS for lots of the things
| people got in the habit of with Web2 social media (comment,
| repost, etc)
|
| [1] https://indieweb.org/social_reader
| ttepasse wrote:
| (Although the IndieWeb community has this weird thing against
| "side files" and prefer having the content inside the HTML,
| marked up with Microformats2 special attributes. A social
| reader then polls the HTML and parses it additionally with
| the Microformats2 algorithm. I suspect this cultural
| preference is a result of the usage of static site builders
| of the early IndieWeb pioneers like Tantek.)
| mawise wrote:
| Yeah, I don't really grok the focus on MF2 given the wide
| adoption of RSS/Atom, but the social reader concept isn't
| one I've seen anyone else advocating for. It also suffers
| from the same spam problem of anything else that allows
| public submission of content. I've been exploring it more
| in the context of _private_ blogging were you already have
| a layer of access control.
| basscomm wrote:
| > The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring
| out whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these
| days don't provide anything useful in the body to make a
| determination on this, and others just dump the entire contents
| in the body, which means you're wasting a bunch of time reading
| N% of something until you realize you're not interested in it
| and it can be skipped.
|
| I think a big problem with this is that commercial websites
| believe that they have to update a million times a day to Feed
| the Algorithm(tm), which bloats their RSS feeds and any RSS
| reader you might have checking on it. Similarly, subscribing to
| a particularly active subreddit or three would also fill up
| your reader with trash.
|
| I get a lot more use out of my RSS reader to check smaller,
| personal sites that don't update as often
| subract wrote:
| The post proposes a solution to the overload of subscribing
| to subreddits by subscribing to a search for only the top
| posts from the subreddit.
| basscomm wrote:
| I don't use reddit, so I'm probably missing something, but
| subscribing to only the 'best' posts doesn't sound like a
| way to find the 'hidden gems', it sounds more like a way to
| subscribe to whatever the users of the subreddit have
| collectively voted up that particular day.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Which does not contain pictures. Seems like a way to gain
| high signal to noise rating. You'll always miss out,
| there's FOMO for you.
|
| I am grateful for the suggestion, gonna give it a whirl.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| You might find this interesting:
| https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti
|
| Here's how its algo works
| https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti/-/issues/28
| BeetleB wrote:
| Back when I heavily used RSS feed readers, the solution was
| simple:
|
| 1. Unsubscribe from feeds that put out too much content.
|
| 2. Optionally put them in their own category and ensure the
| main "view" doesn't include those items.
|
| 3. Realizing that overoptimizing for consuming the _best_
| content is (or at least should be) a sign of suboptimal mental
| health.
|
| 4. Timeboxing: Decide you'll spend no more than 30 minutes
| (even less is better) on them per day, and be OK missing out on
| everything you couldn't catch up on.
|
| 5. Ponder seriously about the _value_ you are getting from
| doing this vs what else you could be doing. Do you want to
| spend this much time (whatever it is) daily when you are 50?
| 60? At some point, you may realize there are diminishing
| returns to keeping this up.
|
| As I learned in the last year or two, consuming offline content
| is significantly superior than consuming blogs and news:
|
| https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/the-unexpected-benefit...
| nottorp wrote:
| In order of importance I'd put them exactly in reverse :)
|
| And I'd add:
|
| 6. Stop thinking of yourself as a consumer. A consumer
| blindly ingurgitates whatever's fed to them. You're a
| customer. With tastes and personal opinions. They depend on
| you to make a living, not you on them. And an unhappy
| customer moves their business elsewhere, doesn't stay on
| forever like being a consumer implies.
| domysee wrote:
| > The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring
| out whether something is worth reading
|
| I'm working on an RSS feed reader, and it has a feature that
| solves that problem. For every subscribed feed, it shows the
| percentage of items that you actually bookmark and read. So if
| there are feeds that you subscribed to but don't read, you can
| easily find out which they are and unsubscribe from them.
|
| It's called https://lighthouseapp.io
| bsnnkv wrote:
| The issue is that it's not possible to separate feeds from
| items. Even if some feeds are largely unread, I subscribed to
| them because I liked something they posted on a specific
| topic, and I still want to get updates whenever there is
| another feed item related to that specific topic. Ultimately
| the "feed" is the mechanism of delivery, but I don't think it
| should be the primary mode of categorizing item consumption.
|
| I've worked on this issue a little in a different context,
| where you can follow posts from people on Bluesky related to
| specific topics, and this is ideally what I would like to be
| able to do more of with RSS.[1]
|
| [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/lgug2z.com/post/3lc47yru7vc2k
| Olshansky wrote:
| Wanted to share a repo I created last week to help add support
| for new RSS feeds: https://github.com/olshansk/rss-feeds/
|
| Add support for Paul Graham's outdated RSS Feed. OpenAI research.
| Etc...
|
| Leave a request or a star!
|
| Also wrote a full blog post about it here:
| https://olshansky.substack.com/p/no-rss-feed-no-problem-usin...
| slightwinder wrote:
| Newsfeeds are really nice, I utilize them now 20 Years or so (RIP
| old Bloglines). But it's a bit sad that there is no really good
| newsreader for it. I also used to use Usenet in the 90s and early
| 2000, so my view on this is a bit different, maybe. But all the
| feedreaders I know are either very limited in abilities, or very
| cumbersome to use for more advanced features. It's really strange
| how there seem many technophile people are using and advocating
| for RSS, yet all the tools are more barebone and very simple.
| sewalsh wrote:
| Reeder if you're on MacOS/iOS. Most beautiful RSS client on the
| market. Feedly for a web client (paid sub required though)
| openplatypus wrote:
| Reeder indeed looks beautiful.
|
| Feedly on the other hand makes me puke. Slow AF. AI plastered
| all over. Despite trying Pro+ tons of paywalled option which
| you learn require upgrade after you did feed setup.
|
| Feedly is horrible.
| SeanKilleen wrote:
| In case it's helpful / relevant for folks, wanted to share a few
| things I do:
|
| * OPML is a format that bundles feeds together to share with
| others.
|
| * I publish an automated list of the feeds I'm subscribed to on
| my blog. [1]
|
| * I pay for Feedly ($50/year and I don't regret it) which has API
| access, and I use an Azure function to produce it. I have a blog
| post if you're interested in setting something like that up for
| yourself. [2]
|
| [1]: https://seankilleen.com/reading-list/
|
| [2]: https://seankilleen.com/2019/01/tutorial-reading-list-
| feedly...
| arjie wrote:
| I'm a fan of RSS too. Some people I know use substack to write. I
| would ideally like to use kill-the-newsletter for that but I had
| trouble with delivery with substack. Fortunately, these days LLMs
| are quite quick so I was able to whip up a little tool that does
| this for myself: https://github.com/roshan/superheap
|
| It's incomplete but sufficient. LLMs drop the cost of software to
| near zero. I barely had to learn anything.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > I would ideally like to use kill-the-newsletter for that but
| I had trouble with delivery with substack.
|
| Substack does indeed seem to have kill-the-newsletter banned,
| but (at least for free posts) it actually provides an RSS feed
| out of the box, so you should be able to just chuck the address
| of the blog's home page into your RSS reader and have it figure
| things out for you. I haven't seen this capability advertised
| anywhere (and the days of the RSS icon in your address bar are
| sadly long gone), but it does exist.
|
| (Incidentally, Buttondown also has RSS feeds built in.)
| arjie wrote:
| Haha that's funny. It was already built-in! Well that saves
| me some trouble :)
|
| Thank you. I only have one subscription. I wonder if there's
| a way to get the auth in there.
| ourguile wrote:
| I use inoreader - https://www.inoreader.com/ as a feed aggregator
| and I absolutely love it. I use it every day to highlight, tag
| and search for information. I'd recommend it to anyone.
| roldie wrote:
| Another happy Inoreader user here!
| Yhippa wrote:
| I forgot I had an account there. Just logged in and this is
| great! Way less click-bait headlines unlike my Google Discover
| feed.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| I started using RSS in ~2007, and I haven't stopped. I think i
| used thunderbird first, then google reader, then feedly, then a
| self-hosted freshrss for the last few years.
|
| I have a graveyard of old blogs and webcomics whose URLs I can't
| bear to delete. I have a crapton of feeds still happily churning
| out articles.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| A lot of folks say the worst thing to happen to RSS was the
| shutting down of Google Reader.
|
| I say the worst thing to happen to RSS was Google Reader in the
| first place.
|
| Native apps! Forever!
| LorenDB wrote:
| My modus operandi for finding a non-obvious RSS feed is to check
| the Wayback Machine's list of saved URLs and search for "RSS",
| "feed", or "XML". That normally will find the feed as long as it
| exists.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| If I remember correctly "the algorithm" as a concept of feed
| curation has been introduced by facebook ( or youtube?), long
| after RSS was used by blogs and podcasts. Heck, even Twitter used
| to have an RSS feed they killed a looong time ago [1]
|
| I also remember that in the beginning I was chuckling to myself
| "who on earth would want to have their feed curated by a black
| box whose target function cannot be checked? If I wanted that, I
| could just keep reading a single newspaper." - turns out I was
| very wrong and lots of people seem to prefer just getting washed
| in a steady stream of somewhat internally consistent worldview.
|
| Would be really nice to see RSS make a comeback
|
| [1] https://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/
| zahlman wrote:
| >turns out I was very wrong and lots of people seem to prefer
| just getting washed in a steady stream of somewhat internally
| consistent worldview.
|
| If you're putting together an RSS feed from creators you like,
| isn't that liable to happen anyway?
| dartos wrote:
| I think the "washed in a steady stream" part is missing from
| RSS feeds.
|
| You'd need to join like meta rss feeds.
| criddell wrote:
| Meta et al have an infinite feed. You can scroll forever.
|
| My news reader had 6 articles in it yesterday and that's
| it. I can reload as many times as I want and that won't
| change.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| little "m" meta, as in "rss feeds about rss feeds" rather
| than big "M" Meta the company
| dartos wrote:
| Yes, I realize now that it was a little confusing.
|
| Meta is still Facebook in my mind.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| Interesting point. Yes, if you pick too narrow a set of
| feeds, they might not even prompt you to engage with other
| sources, leading to our good old filter bubble effect. I'd
| still posit the risk of that happening is way higher when you
| only have a centralized platform like, say, twitter,
| controlling the push-factor based on payment. With RSS, I can
| still adjust my feed exactly to my preferences once I notice
| a bias or degradation in quality of certain feeds. This
| cannot be done if my feed is controlled by a machine
| optimized for maximizing engagement/advertisement $.
| aaronax wrote:
| Some people seems to prefer just getting washed in a steady
| stream of _whatever gambling /flashing lights/gacha stuff_ too.
| nzach wrote:
| >I could just keep reading a single newspaper
|
| Completely unrelated, but this is the strategy I use. I try to
| keep out of the news but about once a week I go to the
| newspaper site to read what happened.
|
| The obvious downside is that I get an extremely biased view on
| reality, so I try to account for that when reading the news.
|
| But this gives me the advantage of consistency. I know how they
| generally report things and this makes spotting 'anomalies' a
| little easier.
| oidar wrote:
| AP, Reuters, and UPI are all pretty center for the politics -
| and free.
| dleeftink wrote:
| > lots of people
|
| Depends, as all things. See for instance the Twitter (increased
| engagement) study [0] or the more recent Facebook study (little
| effect) [1]. For more recent investigations on user perceptions
| see [2] and [3].
|
| [0]:
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2023.2...
|
| [1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp9364
|
| [2]:
| https://jsb.journals.ekb.eg/index.php/FAQ/journal/journal/ar...
|
| [3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3687046
| wussboy wrote:
| Many people do not have the technical expertise to set up an
| RSS feed and so fell into the algo by default.
| stonogo wrote:
| This is partly because the ad-funded browser hegemony removed
| all the features that made them easy to use, via the common
| "break it, wait for usage to drop off, then claim nobody uses
| it and delete it" project management path.
| sewalsh wrote:
| Shout out to any share bro's out there! Long live RSS!
| thought_alarm wrote:
| I never left RSS.
|
| After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before
| switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org)
|
| I'm not a web guy and I detest all forms of system
| administration, but I had no trouble setting it up on my host.
| I've got it configured to update its feeds one per hour from 6AM
| to 8PM. It just does its thing, and works fine on both desktop
| and mobile.
| danudey wrote:
| I've been using Feeeed[0] for a while, and it's pretty great. It
| sort of has the 'algorithmic selection' vibe, but it's
| fundamentally a feed (!) of content/articles from sources you
| select.
|
| Mostly mind is video games related, so I have sites like Polygon,
| Nintendo Life, IGN, Rock Paper Shotgun, etc., but I've also added
| a few subreddits like /r/pcgaming and /r/dragonage. It also
| occasionally suggests other sources to me; it might suggest
| Gematsu because I seem to be interested in industry news, it's
| suggesting /r/gaming right now "because you follow eurogamer",
| and it's suggested a few YouTube channels as well. All of the
| suggestions have been relevant, all of them have been small cards
| sat in my feed being relatively unobtrusive and easy to scroll
| past or look into.
|
| It also supports adding other random stuff into your feed, like
| your Birthdays calendar from your contacts, and a few other
| things that I don't remember because they're not relevant.
|
| Techcrunch link because the website seems to be down.
|
| [0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/feeeed-is-a-reader-app-
| tha...
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I will say something that's potentially controversial, but -- the
| problem with current times is the abundance of content. RSS
| worked for me in 2000s, because more or less, there were less
| interesting content/people writing things for public. Most decent
| things would get into people's feeds, and generally everyone was
| happy. I can't really see it being feasible nowadays, unless
| something (reads: algo) filters things that I'm definitely not
| interested in. Which, obviously, creates a whole different
| problem of siloed echo chambers. It becomes even a bigger problem
| when you try to move the conversations to the real world, because
| your friends wouldn't have read the same things as your tailored
| algo recommended to you.
|
| There's also assumed-financial-incentives, which ruins most of
| blogs/content for me. That's probably my cynicism, and maybe I
| just grew up, but every time I see any write up, my first
| question is how this person gets financial benefits from it. I
| just never thought that far until 2015.
|
| Sorry for ranting, and obviously I have no solution to this
| problem.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I will say something that's potentially controversial, but
| -- the problem with current times is the abundance of content._
|
| FWIW, there's never _not_ been an overabundance of content in
| the timeframe occupied by RSS, and RSS was created to allow one
| to aggregate the information one was specifically interested in
| in a standards-based way.
|
| It sounds like you prefer "For You" algorithms, which is fine
| to the extent that you trust the filterer, and very convenient
| for a "sit back" consumption experience. The way that I enjoy
| some of that experience using RSS is by aggregating thoughtful
| aggregators like Kottke, MetaFilter, the Waxy.org linkblog,
| etc.
| abhi9u wrote:
| RSS seems to be making a come back. Just a couple of days back
| saw this post going viral on X about RSS
| https://x.com/0xglitchbyte/status/1878495012800897229
| baggachipz wrote:
| > saw this post going viral on X about RSS
|
| /irony meter explodes/
| simonw wrote:
| I use and like RSS, but the problem with RSS is that it mostly
| only exposes you to voices you already know about.
|
| (Ideally you can subscribe to people who deliberately amplify
| other voices - a reason I like link blogs - but it's hard to find
| dedicated curators like that.)
|
| That's why I actively seek out algorithmic discovery. It's one of
| the things I like about Bluesky over Mastodon: Bluesky has a
| "discover" feed (and the ability to add more custom feeds too).
| It's good.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| News Explorer on iOS/iPadOS/MacOS is great if you want a one-time
| purchase app that syncs your RSS feeds across your devices.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Feedly is decent, too.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Talking of clients, Telegram RSS bot is very convenient.
| j2kun wrote:
| One thing I wish I could easily augment with RSS is the ability
| to send and discover webmentions. I would love to read something
| in my RSS feed, respond to it, and post a webmention back to the
| original author. I'd also like to be able to see in the RSS feed
| what other pages have posted webmentions to the page I'm reading.
| pluc wrote:
| You are describing Postbacks:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postback
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I don't think this Wikipedia page is describing the thing you
| think it is. Maybe it's the wrong link?
| sltkr wrote:
| He's probably thinking about:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I think you're right.
|
| It's a shame that this was so vulnerable to abuse.
| Webmentions as a concept is such a great idea. Maybe the
| more recent implementation is better, but it doesn't seem
| like many people (relatively speaking) are familiar with
| the idea.
| pluc wrote:
| Correct! Thanks for correcting
| mawise wrote:
| I have opinions[1] on Webmentions. It sounds like such a great
| approach, but it also opens up the original author to hosting
| mountains of spam and other low-quality comments, and
| moderation is a lot of work. Arguably, we see the same problem
| today on sites that let you post comments.
|
| [1] https://havenweb.org/2023/04/10/private-comments.html
| j2kun wrote:
| True, but mostly what I want is to see what other _articles_
| are written in response, less about comments.
| mxuribe wrote:
| What you're referring to @j2kun is named a *social reader*.
| See: https://indieweb.org/social_reader I'm sure there other
| examples of software/clients besides those portrayed on
| indieweb.org too.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Note that (US) governments in particular offer tons of RSS feeds.
|
| Want to keep tabs on what Congress is up to?
| https://www.govinfo.gov/rss/bills.xml
|
| Want to follow SEC press releases?
| https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases.rss
|
| In WA state and want to follow bills related to schools?
| https://app.leg.wa.gov/bi/report/topicalindex/?biennium=2025...
|
| The federal government has a big list at
| https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds. Your county might also have one
| (e.g. Spokane has https://www.spokanecounty.org/rss.aspx).
| nfriedly wrote:
| Indeed, my local government of Troy, Ohio (~25k population)
| offers RSS feeds with useful info about things like holiday
| closures, road construction, christmass tree pickup, etc.
| https://www.troyohio.gov/RSSFeed.aspx?ModID=1&CID=All-newsfl...
| There's also a calendar feed with city council meetings and
| such.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| (Hello Troy (and Overfield) neighbor... >smile<)
|
| CivicPlus, the hosting company for Troy's site, does a fairly
| decent job. (They're rather pricey, in my opinion, though.)
|
| Miami County government uses them to host some of the various
| County websites. We expose some RSS feeds, send email
| notifications, etc. The biggest problem with the platform is
| getting elected officials and departments to see the value in
| using the platform (versus just posting scanned PDFs, Excel
| files, and doing things "the old way"). The City has a little
| easier job because there aren't so many independent elected
| offices.
| nfriedly wrote:
| Hey, fancy meeting you here! Send me an email sometime -
| nathan@[username].com
| dergachev wrote:
| Worthy to note that 3 of those sites are powered by Drupal.
| Sometimes dated open-source monolithic solutions are quite
| helpful.
| unforswearing wrote:
| Just discovered a few US gov feeds yesterday, great resource.
| The Bureau of Labor Statistics also has quite a few feeds
| available: https://www.bls.gov/feed/
| pferde wrote:
| So does the European Parliament:
| https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/stay-infor...
| verisimi wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of rss, bemoan Google's evil actions, etc.
|
| I'll add my recommendation after looking for an rss reader for
| the longest time - Feeder. Free, open source and excellent.
| nfriedly wrote:
| I have my own little instance of FreshRSS and I love it. Both the
| software itself - any time I discover and report an issue, it
| gets taken seriously and fixed fairly quickly - and also my
| collection of feeds:
|
| * High quality blogs (Bartosz Ciechanowski, Bits about Money,
| etc.)
|
| * Local government announcements
|
| * OpenWRT updates (subscribed to the releases/announcements
| forum)
|
| * Price trackers for things I want to buy eventually but can wait
| until they go on sale (keepa, appagg)
|
| * The Money Stuff newsletter (via kill-the-newsletter)
|
| * Comics like XKCD
|
| * Book authors I like (mostly via RSSBridge + goodreads)
|
| * etc.
| DavideNL wrote:
| Same here... FreshRSS is great.
|
| Other than the web interface, on Apple devices i'd recommend
| checking out the NetNewsWire (free) and Reeder clients to use
| with it.
| m4r1k wrote:
| What client do you use on mobile and on desktop? I like very much
| Reeder Classic but perhaps there are better alternatives.
| xenodium wrote:
| On the blogging side, I'm doing my bit for the web and built a
| new service minus the yucky bits of modern web (tracking, ads,
| paywalls, bloat...) https://lmno.lol does rss too. Full content
| of course.
|
| For example, my blog https://lmno.lol/alvaro and
| https://lmno.lol/alvaro/feed
| kevinsundar wrote:
| The one thing holding RSS back is that finding RSS feeds and
| subscribing to them in another app is frankly time consuming.
|
| I built a free service for people who specifically want to track
| updates / features / releases to SaaS tools, services, and GitHub
| repos. https://www.getchangelog.com . It effectively is an RSS
| search engine + email digest
|
| I think its unique because it uses a combination of LLM based web
| scraping to find rss feeds and I am working on a solution to
| generate RSS feeds from any blog / api changelog right now to
| expand the set of sources. I really wish RSS was more widespread
| and there was a better discovery solution.
| Klonoar wrote:
| This is tangential but maybe some of the crowd here has wisdom:
| are there any apps (iOS or Android) that are built for RSS but
| have a _good experience_ for _just_ photos? What I mean by this
| is an app that is more or less Instagram-esque in browsing
| behavior, but just backed by RSS feeds with no comments
| /likes/etc.
|
| I've been meaning to write about this but I recently found that I
| missed having one central place to share photos with people when
| I travel/build things/etc. When I thought about it further, I
| realized that I don't want the social media bits there - I just
| wanted the photos, self hosted, in something I could brand
| myself. This also solved for another problem I had, which is that
| I wanted to share my stuff across n platforms and got very tired
| of having to constantly provide any text context when doing so.
| Open graph tags work really well for "write once, share
| anywhere".
|
| I have a working prototype up at https://photos.rymc.io/ and so
| far it's been great. I'll probably open source the stuff this
| year. It's not necessarily groundbreaking but I do think it's a
| decent approach; uploading auto-scrubs specific metadata, handles
| generating various previews, etc. Very easy to customize and just
| tries to do one thing well.
|
| Notably, any page on it can be "followed" via RSS by just
| requesting it in the right format, e.g:
|
| JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=json Atom:
| https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom RSS:
| https://photos.rymc.io/?format=rss
|
| It can be tag-specific too, so if someone's only interested in my
| travel photos, e.g:
|
| JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/tag/travel/?format=json
|
| Back to the original point of the comment though: I'd like to
| find an app that I could give to e.g my dad and just let him
| browse things and see what I'm up to. None of the RSS apps I've
| tried fit well here though, with ReadKit on iOS coming somewhat
| close but it's a clunky experience.
|
| If need be I'll just build my own at some point, it's not exactly
| rocket science... but it is time I could be doing other things.
| Anyone got any recs?
| uncertainquark wrote:
| Most introductions to RSS assume that people want to know about
| RSS! And so here's a more people-centric explainer instead:
| https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/
| netghost wrote:
| The one thing that kills me is the number of "modern" blogs/sites
| that don't offer rss or atom is really frustrating. If I really
| like your site, please let me be an engaged reader and let me
| know when you have something valuable to say again!
|
| I've even resorted to adding features in my personal feedreader
| to seek out common feed locations or APIs that common blogging
| tools leave on mostly unnoticed.
| bbkane wrote:
| My SSG (Zola) offers an RSS generation option, so I turned it
| on. Several months later I realized it was broken for some
| reason and I hadn't noticed.
|
| Nobody emailed me or anything (I'm not a popular blogger), so I
| just turned the RSS generation off
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| No blog is worth the hassle and honestly there is always a
| feed broken somewhere showing up in our reader we just wait
| for them to fix it. If they don't fix it then at some point
| it will just get deleted. That is just the reality of
| maintaining your own feed websites remove feeds sometimes and
| all you can do is go back see if its changed address and if
| not remove it.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| But it's so little hassle: just send the blog author an
| email saying vaguely what the problem is!
|
| Someone emailed me about an issue with my RSS feed once. I
| don't remember what the issue was anymore, but I was
| grateful and I fixed it. Being the author of a tiny blog,
| it was just really nice to know that someone wanted to read
| what I wrote enough to care that my RSS feed was borked.
| ttepasse wrote:
| I'm carrying my feed subscription list from reader to
| reader since 2002 - and every few years I'm thinking of
| thinning the list of long defunct blogs or at least look
| where they are now. Then I do something different instead.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Back like 15 to 20 years ago when I ran or helped manage some
| hobbyist websites, I added RSS functionality if only because it
| was "popular" back then.
|
| I can confidently tell you not a single bloody soul used it, at
| the height of adoption no less.
|
| If I run a website again I definitely won't bother, it's
| additional maintenance for a feature nobody uses. The cost-to-
| benefit ratio makes no sense because the benefit is zero.
| numinix wrote:
| In an effort to bypass Google News and broaden my media
| bubble - I tried to find RSS feeds from our national
| newspapers. Most had RSS at some point, but almost none still
| had it running.
| Avamander wrote:
| It heavily depends on the target audience, I'd say.
| Especially if it's not ubiquitous.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The audience was hobbyist game developers and people
| generally interested in computers, so if they didn't use
| RSS then frankly I don't know who will (and clearly,
| speaking now in the future, noone has).
| sneak wrote:
| I regularly get emails from people asking where my RSS feed is
| on my site (or why I don't have one) when every page on it has
| the link tags in the header that allow it to be autodiscovered.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Autodiscovery pretty much died when browsers removed RSS.
| It's a shame, really.
|
| I do use an RSS reader but because of the nature of the
| modern internet, it's a separate app.
| dwwoelfel wrote:
| If you want an RSS feed of your YouTube video subscriptions, I
| made an app for that:
|
| https://yt-better-subs.web.app/
|
| I went through quite the hassle to get the app's oauth scopes
| approved with Google so that it can keep your subscriptions up-
| to-date as you add or remove YouTube channel subscriptions.
| danielspace23 wrote:
| RSS and the lack of algorithms may sound nice, until you
| subscribe to the feed of a couple of media outlets, and see the
| content of the independent creators that post less often get
| buried under a truckload of "stuff you're vaguely interested in".
|
| BlueSky kinda addresses this issue with Feeds. I follow the
| people that post at a frequency that I know won't flood my main
| feed, then I have pinned a separate feed for news, another for
| photos of foxes and one for photos of cats. The app randomly
| inserts posts from those feeds into the main one (if you have
| enbaled "Show samples from your saved feeds" in
| https://bsky.app/settings/following-feed), so as I'm scrolling my
| "Following" feed, I also get some of that content, while keeping
| the main usable.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| A lot of feeds are useless, they don't allow you to select more
| about what you are interested in and they fire a huge amount of
| content on a daily basis. Those aren't worth following.
| ComposedPattern wrote:
| I just use separate folder for the low-frequency feeds that I
| intend to keep up so they don't drown in everything else.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| This is a rate limiting problem
| mrtz wrote:
| The thing that annoys me with RSS is the lack of paging. It's
| great to get updates, but most pages only have the last x
| articles in their feed. Which means a lot of older, still
| valuable content is not discoverable anymore.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Discoverable? The older content is still in the same place as
| always. The entire purpose of RSS is to alert you when new
| content is published. You discover the old content by reading
| it.
| remram wrote:
| If you treat your RSS feeds as reading lists, it is useful to
| have the full list in there. Of course you can track your
| unread entries another way (browser bookmark, etc) but it's
| not as convenient.
| ttepasse wrote:
| There is an extension for Atom for Paging and Archiving. And
| because it's just namespaced elements those elements also could
| by used by RSS. But Feedreader support is mostly inexistent.
|
| RFC 5005: Feed Paging and Archiving
|
| https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005.html
| bluGill wrote:
| A good algorithm is a good thing. However what a good algorithm
| is for me is often different from what it is for those who
| maintain them. Outrage gets attention and sometimes it is needed,
| but there is a level of too much, and also a lot of outrage
| unfairly represents the issues and so it makes me mad even though
| if I understood the details I wouldn't be mad just concerned.
|
| I want an algorithm that surfaces things of interest to me, then
| says "you have seen it all, go outside" (with an option of if I'm
| confined to a hospital bed to go on). Algorithm maintainers want
| me to keep scrolling for more ad dollars.
| tolerance wrote:
| > I want an algorithm that surfaces things of interest to me,
| then says "you have seen it all, go outside" (with an option of
| if I'm confined to a hospital bed to go on).
|
| [Acquire, or Employ your] good taste, sensibility & discipline.
|
| Edit: For the record, "Employ your..." assumed that it if "good
| taste, sensibility & discipline" was not already acquired, it
| was already _possessed_ and who I was responding to is able to
| put it to use.
|
| Let those characteristics be your algorithm...or rather, your
| natural heuristic for living fair.
|
| Has good faith met the end that it's said that chivalry saw?
| nialv7 wrote:
| You said what I wanted to say.
|
| I think there is a niche market for tools that allow
| individuals to train their own recommendation systems.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| > you have seen it all, go outside
|
| Or "you've seen it all. Bored? Click here to let your friends
| know you're looking for something to do/see who else is bored".
| Or "Bored? X needs volunteers!" Or some other positive
| suggestion to try to prevent a "eh guess I'll doomscroll
| something else" reaction.
| gleenn wrote:
| That would be such a killer feature. And it could find other
| friends in the area and that are also free. Not like Meta
| doesn't have some kind of model for all that data already
| probably.
| miah_ wrote:
| Yes. I'd love to find other nerds into retro computing,
| UNIX, and pottery in my area without wading into groups or
| joining a forum. They know everything about me, match me up
| with some people I'd most likely get along with!
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Isn't this what ancient local BBSs did? Back in the 90's
| when in my teens/twenties that was how I found
| interesting local groups of people/organic raves (i.e.
| not ones organized by promoters) outside my established
| circles in Santa Cruz/the bay area. Also some of the most
| uncomfortable/awkward unsocial/nerdfest social evenings
| so not everything was a hit.
|
| I'm guessing that there are now Discords that fill this
| niche?
| Terr_ wrote:
| > That would be such a killer feature.
|
| "Alice, what if we made a button that improved overall
| human wellbeing, while somewhat reducing our ad-revenue and
| lowering the engagement-metrics we use to sell shares to
| investors?"
|
| "*sigh* We've been over this, Bob: We only build features
| _for customers_ --not cattle."
| zellyn wrote:
| Bluesky is trying to figure out how to outsource algorithms and
| let you decide which to use.
|
| Highly recommended podcast episode: https://oxide-and-
| friends.transistor.fm/episodes/scaling-blu...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'd like to see an RSS item-level recommendation / discovery
| algorithm driven by recommendations made by a cohort of people
| who have similar likes to me. I wish there was a standards-
| based to publish a stream of my "likes" from my feed reader,
| and to "consume" the "likes" of others. When I add somebody's
| blog to my feed reader I'd expect it to pick up their "likes"
| (much like how people used to have a "blog roll" on their own
| site) and begin to consume the "feeds" from the sites they
| "like". It reminds me a bit of PHP's "web of trust".
|
| Hacker News, arguably, functions in this capacity for me now.
| The cohort is the entire population (since we all see the same
| item rankings), though.
| lonk11 wrote:
| What you are describing is similar to how
| https://LinkLonk.com works (my side project) - when you
| "like" a link you get connected to the RSS feeds that posted
| that link and other users that also liked it. Then you get
| content from feeds and users that you are connected to. The
| more links in common you have with a feed or a user the more
| weight their other links have.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| Do any of the web-based readers offer discovery based on
| matching your RSS list to other users' lists? Mine (Feedbin)
| doesn't, but I'd like it as an opt-in option.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| You should read about OPML blogrolls [1], they are gaining
| traction in this space. Personally, I like the idea of manually
| exploring recommendations, so I built a browsable index [2].
| But you can crawl the these as well and build all sorts of
| recommendations engines.
|
| [1] https://opml.org/blogroll.opml
|
| [2] https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-
| network/discover/feed-c550c...
| davewiner wrote:
| Thanks for the blogroll love!
|
| You can also see one in action on my blog's home page.
|
| http://scripting.com/
|
| And on a special site..
|
| https://blogroll.social/
|
| A blogroll is a kind of feed reader.
| WantonQuantum wrote:
| A long long time ago before reddit, facebook, digg, twitter,
| etc, there was usenet. It worked a bit like reddit but
| subreddits were called news groups.
|
| There were many front ends for usenet, called news readers.
|
| My favourite was "nn" short for "no news".
|
| It showed you posts in groups you're subscribed to, allowed you
| to post comments, etc.
|
| When you had finished getting up to date it would EXIT and
| print:
|
| No news. (Is good news)
| grumblepeet wrote:
| Ha! I had forgotten that message.Thank you for reminding me.
| I used to read comp.lang.lisp for the extensive and
| increasingly bizarre flame wars and for the wider
| philosophical discussions. Eventually I got to the point
| where I thought "OK I'm done now" and left and never went
| back.
| RalfWausE wrote:
| The cool thing is: Its still there!
|
| Yeah, it may be not as populated as in the 80s to mid 90s,
| but there are still enough active groups in usenet to waste
| uncounted hours every day...
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| There's been some conversation on Mastodon (and here) about its
| lack of algorithm
|
| I _really_ prefer my feed with no algorithm. I really like that
| it 's just ordered by when it was posted, and if someone spams
| too much I'll remove them, and if my feed gets too much I'll
| curate it down a bit.
| lrem wrote:
| You seem to be behind on English as spoken. From what I can
| reconstruct:
|
| Algorithm (n) - a secretive set of systems, procedures and data
| that Big Tech uses to maliciously manipulate unsuspecting
| general public. Example usage: "Algorithm-free music discovery
| app for DJs"
|
| I'm not joking, that example usage is taken from a live
| example.
| gfiorav wrote:
| I use this method with X. I only follow a few accounts and
| exclusively use the following view (which prevents algorithmic
| content push).
|
| The drawback is that it can become monotonous. However, there's
| the "For You" view and the curated news section to mitigate this.
| ai-christianson wrote:
| Just realized RSS+LLM might be a really nice combo.
|
| Use RSS to get the full take then use a local LLM to filter out
| the noise and customize the feed to one's personal preferences.
| xrd wrote:
| I've been building a site that automatically shows RSS feeds for
| the front page of Hacker News.
|
| https://rss.surf
|
| Very interested in hearing feedback!
|
| If you click on the user icon and then login, I'll add you to the
| list and send you a once a day email with all the RSS feeds it
| found (see the sample by clicking the link inside the login
| dialog).
|
| I have been collecting RSS feeds for the last few weeks using it
| (using self-hosted FreshRSS). Future versions I plan to offer a
| way to tell it to use your own feed reader, but you are welcome
| to create an account on my FreshRSS instance and save them there.
| For example, when I use my mobile phone, I wish it would send it
| to the Android RSS app Readrops using an Android intent. FreshRSS
| has a Google RSS Reader (RIP) compatible feed (?) so it works
| with any phone AFAIK.
|
| I've definitely found it interesting to start my reading using
| RSS instead of randomly browsing. I am fascinated by who
| publishes RSS these days. Substack is pretty great that they
| offer RSS for every site.
|
| I do see that I need an extra "introspection" to curate other
| articles in the feed. Often I'll subscribe and not have interest
| in many of the other articles, but if I subscribe it usually
| means there is at least one other good one. I'm sad the
| Hindenburg Research RSS feed is ending.
|
| RSS is indeed a fun way to get closer to smart people and see
| fewer "advertising" posts.
| cglong wrote:
| I've been trying to get back into RSS recently. The problem I
| keep having is the dramatic weight difference between a news site
| and a personal blog; I'm occasionally interested in what the news
| site posts, but its volume is so overbearing that it's all I see
| in my feed. I just walk away with FOMO every time.
|
| I'm currently thinking about trying Feedly AI as an algorithm
| that could surface good content for me.
| muppetman wrote:
| I use TinyTinyRSS - it has very powerful filters that support
| regex. So I spend the time to write Regex filters that run over
| all the news sites, so as to only surface stuff I'm really
| interested in on the "fresh articles" page. I can still go in
| and look at every article etc.
|
| You can also apply weights etc, so for the small blogs etc I
| follow, I give their new articles a high score they so float to
| the top of the reader.
|
| It works really well and I don't feel like I'm drowning anymore
| - I have a massive amount of content still get imported, but
| only the stuff I want to see is what I'm presented with.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I just put them in separate categories/folders. The small blogs
| get more attention, the news websites I just quickly scroll
| past scanning the titles.
| domysee wrote:
| I'm working on a feed reader that separates articles into Inbox
| and Library.
|
| New content shows up in the inbox, where you can bookmark or
| archive. Bookmarked content shows up in the library.
|
| Going through the Inbox and bookmarking interesting content is
| fast, and in the Library the high volume feeds don't matter as
| much (because you curated before and only have interesting
| content there).
|
| https://lighthouseapp.io
| artisanspam wrote:
| I love RSS. I use RSS daily. I use link-aggregation websites like
| HN to find interesting authors and subscribe to any RSS feeds
| that they have. Highlights from my reader sync automatically into
| my Obsidian vault. It's great.
|
| But I know I, and everyone else posting in this thread, are in
| the minority. It's clear that most people prefer algorithmic drip
| in a walled garden. There's a reason everyone flocks to those
| platforms when RSS superseded them. I don't think I need to re-
| hash why those platforms are bad for the health of the internet
| and society as a whole.
|
| So what can be done at a structural level to fight this? What can
| be done to incentivize people to leave these algorithmic drip
| feeds to reverse this trend?
| cloverich wrote:
| Build tools to make it easy for people to assemble their own
| chronological feeds that have quality UI / UX. IMHO the
| algorithmic feed's principle benefit is how easy it is for a
| user to curate something close to both what they want, and what
| they didn't know they want. We too often view things in terms
| of technical implementations and such, and lose focus on the
| core problems the user is actually having. Algorithmic feeds
| are great, because: - User installs app,
| opens it - User begins scrolling - Within a few
| minutes they have an endless feed of mostly interesting content
|
| That is REALLY hard to do without an algorithmic feed, and
| there are a lot of problems when they subscribe. Not
| insurmountable, just easily underestimated. The motto I keep
| repeating to myself when I fall into a doomerism about the
| inevitability of the algorithm, I just say "Its time to build"
| and hope I can find something on the other side, if I keep
| digging. The principle weapon against the algorithm is, I
| think, not needing an infinite pool of profit. I.e. Facebook
| could build great apps that weren't algorithmic, but it is
| highly likely they would make much less money. So not only
| won't they, they literally _aren't realistically allowed to do
| it_. Its a crazy thing to think through.
| theendisney wrote:
| In my experience beyond some basic filtering you should gaze
| over headlines then dig 2-3 interesting items out of a few
| thousand manually.
|
| After you-ve hoarded a decent amount of feeds You should find
| 2-3 new ones on average per day and unsub 1-2.
|
| Two good articles per day/session is enough if they are good
| enough. If it isnt you dont have enough feeds.
| epicide wrote:
| I don't think that's something that RSS (or any other
| alternative) can fix. I don't think RSS is as toxic as
| algorithmic feeds, but they are still cut from the same hyper-
| connected cloth. If you want to fight the algorithmic drip,
| promote people to connect with others in their community on a
| small scale.
|
| Even if you have to use the internet to do it, making time to
| talk (with your vocal cords) to a friend on a regular basis can
| be much better than mindlessly scrolling or reading endless
| news feeds.
|
| What might be even better are various other social activities
| away from a computer. It doesn't have to be highly social
| either. Just being in a park or library with other people
| silently reading or feeding ducks can be a highly positive
| semi-social experience. Just silently enjoying a common
| experience draws way more connection than the various "social"
| media apps out there.
| theendisney wrote:
| Find long form blogs that publish 1 time every few months.
| The reader will just be empty which is a useful thing to have
| that doesnt consume time
| kmstout wrote:
| RSS is great for this. The vast majority of my 200+ feed
| subscriptions are for rarely updated blogs or YouTube
| channels.
| andrewla wrote:
| I think the walled garden is a flawed metaphor.
|
| I would argue for Twitter over a spotty collection of RSS feeds
| just because there's ironically more of a democratic aspect --
| anyone can start tweeting about whatever. They can go viral and
| disappear, they can gradually build an audience, etc. They can
| interact with followers or reply guys or stay aloof; they can
| recommend content and become a mini content aggregator in their
| own right. People can be anonymous or they can use their real
| world cachet to build a following.
|
| Accomplishing the same thing via publishing an RSS feed is a
| daunting task -- you need to build an RSS feed somewhere, you
| can't interact with others or be easily boosted by bigger
| accounts to start to gain a following.
|
| The "walled" aspect of this is basically the limitations of
| what the platform will allow, which especially under the Musk
| regime is a good balance of only very light touches of
| moderation.
|
| People talk about the feed and the algorithm, but no two people
| have the same feed; the accounts you choose to follow will
| determine what your feed looks like, together with some
| generally popular content.
| janalsncm wrote:
| A lot of people don't like the pay to play aspects of
| Twitter. EM also boosts his own tweets which is the ultimate
| pay to play.
|
| If you're talking about the "following" feed that is also an
| "algorithm" albeit a simple one. But with injected ads it
| seems strictly worse than RSS.
| andrewla wrote:
| My only response to this is that I don't like the even-
| more-pay-to-play aspects of RSS. To even up an RSS feed
| requires a commitment that is an effective bar for 99% of
| individuals that would be interested in participating in
| public discourse.
|
| The "for you" feed is less transparent in its nature than
| the "following" feed, but is still extremely customized. I
| do see content from accounts that I don't follow, but the
| vast majority is from accounts that I do follow (or that I
| can reasonably believe were liked by accounts I follow,
| though that interaction is more hidden now).
|
| I do wish there was a simpler way of "unliking" or
| "downprioritizing" a post or an account short of
| blocking/muting. You can do the "see less of this content"
| but it feels too subtle; I don't know what the actual
| effect of this is.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| > Highlights from my reader sync automatically into my Obsidian
| vault. It's great.
|
| Which RSS reader do you use?
| DavideNL wrote:
| I bet it's Readwise...
|
| - i tried it, and it's okay... however personally i much
| prefer a more private rss reader, where i don't share all my
| personal data with yet another commercial company. Also, it's
| quite expensive.
| artisanspam wrote:
| Readwise Reader. Yes, as another commenter stated it costs
| money, but it has many other features that I find useful such
| as good text-to-speech, integrations with other apps like
| Obsidian, and a good export feature if I want to switch to
| another feed app.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| 1. Mandate that all platforms must have a reverse chronological
| feed as the default. Alternative "algorithmic" feeds must be
| explicitly opted in to (preferably with age verification).
|
| 2. Regulate out of existence the business model where time
| spent on site converts to revenue, and force people to directly
| pay for stuff. Levels of indirection in "payment" for services
| turn the free market into (even more of) a joke (Noam Chomsky
| already highlighted this when advertising was cohort based in
| print- and TV media long before the targeted advertising of
| today).
|
| Would immediately increase the signal-to-noise ratio by many
| orders of magnitude.
| rconti wrote:
| Make it easier, probably. Even in the glory days of RSS I just
| never put in the effort to make it work for me. (sort of like
| how Twitter fans always told me I had to "curate" my feed
| better to make it less of a cesspool, but I actually just
| didn't care about randos yeeting random junk into the void).
|
| Curating your feed requires a LOT of upfront investment, and
| then a nonzero amount of maintenance.
| qudat wrote:
| For anyone looking for an rss-to-email service, check out
| https://pico.sh/feeds
|
| You can manage your email digests completely through the CLI and
| we are constantly making improvements to the service.
| adeptima wrote:
| Not a fan of RSS, but put a serious thoughts why it's useful at
| conceptual level, and came up with two simple apps
|
| - github.com/trending daily, weekly, monthly group by 10
| programming languages i'm familiar with. will add aggregator
| private upvote, hiding and 140 chars comment functionality
|
| - grouped youtube channels by interests and tagged them in a
| cloud tag fashion - got RSS like feeds for ai, databases, c++,
| go, rust, robotics, etc topics, checking them them regularly on
| weekly and monthly, but no more doom scrolling or swipping next
|
| Most interesting videos and repos has very few likes or views,
| and great depth. No way algo will push it up in my feed.
|
| The result - no more time or interest to open up twitter, reddit
| or facebook feeds.
|
| No stress. No feelings on "missing out"
|
| 50% of content correlates with the most trending topic on HN.
|
| Thought to do HN weekly aggregation as a next step ... decided
| not to do
|
| It's just a pleasure to use HN with comments section as its for
| me
| jen729w wrote:
| Why aren't you a fan? That feels like saying 'not a fan of
| newspaper delivery, but...'.
| adeptima wrote:
| Never sticked to me. I guess if I had my own hackable RSS
| feed UI I would have a better experience.
|
| I do love very dense and rich UI functionality with relevant
| enriched information too. Not some sort of list I need to
| click through.
|
| As for cross platform usability. I never wanted anyone to our
| my RSS aggregations. 100% ownership and ability to hack in is
| very important for me.
|
| I should probably reassess my decision as it's clearly much
| easier to turn everything into RSS feed with LLM coding or
| tools like N8n
|
| Any recommendations are greatly appreciated
| robofanatic wrote:
| My biggest complaint with the algorithm is to stop assuming what
| I like and pollute my feed with random irrelevant content.
| digb wrote:
| Been on this tip for 6 months, glad to hear i am not alone
| shw1n wrote:
| I found this particularly true for Twitter/X
|
| I haven't found anywhere else with the same quality of
| content/takes (purely from a philosophy/tech angle, politics
| aside), but there were too many videos in the feed
|
| So I built a chrome extension to remove it, and my experience
| improved by a lot.
|
| If anyone's interested (it's free):
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/remove-twitter-vide...
| mulderc wrote:
| I remember back when people were ditching RSS for twitter and I
| thought it was insane. Looks like I was right!
| dtonon wrote:
| RSS is great, Nostr is potentially greater. A lot of work is
| being put in "transparent" and customizable algorithms for
| discoverability.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Nostr is frustrating. The protocol is indeed pretty awesome--
| partition tolerant in a way that RSS isn't. I want to get to
| know it because that's a property that I want for an app that I
| want to build.
|
| So I started using it, just to get a feel for how it all comes
| together. You can set up a browser extension (or hardware
| device) which holds your signing key and you can configure it
| to auto-sign on your behalf or to prompt you for each required
| signature. So if you leave it in prompt mode you can use the
| apps and see what gets signed by your key (which they don't
| have, supposing you're "doing it right"). It's a really neat
| transparency feature and I felt like it was better helping me
| understand what was going on as well as putting me in more
| fine-grained control over which code I trust to act on my
| behalf. It's a usage mode that I hope becomes more popular,
| though it's inconvenient so I have my doubts.
|
| But the content which happens to move through nostr is on
| average pretty awful. Mostly it's just memes where crypto bro's
| convince each other that they're superior to the rest of us--
| despite the fact that their precious blockchains would totally
| fail in the kind of partitioned-internet scenario which nostr
| is resilient against. The mismatch between its own design
| principles (partition tolerance > consistency) and the
| enthusiasms of the people who use it (consistency > partition
| tolerance) makes me uneasy for the same reasons I'm uneasy
| about Web 2's social media: made by us, for you, but we're not
| you and our agenda is unclear.
|
| I'm still probably going to use it, but until I can get an app
| going that I actually want to use I don't expect to be
| consuming much content from it.
| throwaway0665 wrote:
| redlib supports rss feeds and is a much better ad-free, tracker-
| free, distraction-free frontend for reddit
| latexr wrote:
| > Want a youtube channel in your RSS feed? Just copy the
| channel's URL and subscribe to it in your reader.
|
| You can also subscribe to playlists, by subscribing to
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLAYLIST_ID
|
| Where `PLAYLIST_ID` is the string after `?list=` in a YouTube
| URL. Unfortunately, that feed always contains the top 15 items in
| a playlist and many channels order items in reverse order (i.e.
| they keep the oldest one at the top and add to the bottom),
| unitising the feed.
| Beijinger wrote:
| My buddy will soon offer an RSS reader. I will post it here.
|
| Yes, you can create an RSS feed from a Youtube Channel. You can
| can create an RSS feed from Reddit.
|
| You can't to my best knowledge create an RSS feed anymore from
| Twitter
|
| Newsletter to RSS: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
|
| More stuff:
|
| Blogs & RSS https://rssfeedasap.com/
| https://code.rosaelefanten.org/rssparser.lisp/dir?ci=tip
|
| This one you have to pay. I am considering it. Some RSS feeds
| don't work on my TinyTinyRSS. I think cloudflare, like always, is
| killing it:
|
| https://politepol.com/en/prices
|
| PS: If you have an idea for a RSS reader domain, please suggest.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Rsshub can give you a RSS feed for Twitter but you have to give
| it a web session cookie which kinda freaks me out and probably
| violates the current TOS.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| I've always described (the old) Twitter as an RSS feed but
| for people, which I loved. Is there a way to recreate this
| without all the slop?
| Beijinger wrote:
| I used RSS bridge but AFAIK is has not been working a long
| time.
|
| Maybe is does but looks complicated: https://rss-
| bridge.github.io/rss-bridge/Bridge_Specific/Twit...
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Here are the instructions if you want to try RSSHub. You
| have to self-host it somewhere to really send in the
| authorization config
|
| https://docs.rsshub.app/routes/social-media#x-twitter
| maxglute wrote:
| https://github.com/dimdenGD/OldTwitter
|
| Works fine. Reverse chronological sorting with just who you
| follow.
|
| For automated... apart from self host RSS options or nitter
| instance, neither of which I've tried...
|
| For semi automated I have a manual but not too laborious
| google sheet:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/S5xTlPp
|
| Uses: https://github.com/dimdenGD/OldTwitter
|
| https://github.com/BlackGlory/copycat
|
| TLDR workflow:
|
| 1. open "old" twitter
|
| 2. scroll down multiple pages (autopagination supported)
|
| 3. search for C2 which contains first 20 characters of last
| tweet in the sheet
|
| 4. copyeverything from that point to first tweet (basically
| all new tweets since reverse chronological sorted), use
| copycat to copy the BB code
|
| 5. paste BB code in sheet F4 (yellow column), I have a
| bunch of helper columns in another tab that parses through
| the code to which sorts into date, url, username, tweet
|
| 6. i have another page with list of usernames and next to
| them labels/tag (emoji)
|
| 7. run a script, and it outputs everything into a digest,
| sorted by label/tag, then user, then tweet from oldest to
| newest
|
| I spend a few minutes in the morning finding where i left
| off previous day, copy paste, and run script and it gives
| me a digest of last 24 hours of tweets.Before this, it was
| hooked into nitter list RSS which auto refreshed and did it
| all automatically. Before that there was a nice service
| called streamspigot or something that did it all with API
| access. It is unnessicarily annoying / difficult to just
| get a daily digest of tweets you're interested in.
| nmz wrote:
| What are they going to do? ban you? if so they're doing you a
| favor.
| golergka wrote:
| I'm building a web app which would extract blogs and their RSS
| feeds from all HN stories you've commented, upvoted or added to
| favorites - so that you could easily extract exactly the
| content you want. I plan on expanding it to handle content
| you've interacted from other social networks too.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| There still exist a couple of nitter instances which provide
| RSS feeds for X.
| inopinatus wrote:
| On the rare occasions I still look at Twitter I use lists
| instead of follows, and this avoids both the awful algorithmic
| noise and means I'm not contributing to anyone's bullshit
| engagement KPIs.
|
| I would still prefer an RSS feed, if there was a logged-out
| solution.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| I was a heavy bloglines user back in the day and loved it. It
| was like a custom newspaper people printed for me and worked
| great.
|
| I moved to twitter in 2009 and, for the most part, it was a
| better RSS experience. The udpates were smaller, more
| frequent. It was text only and had a size limit which
| automatically filtered for some level of linguistic ability.
| I used to only see people who I wanted to. It felt like a
| cross between IRC (which I used heavily at the time) and RSS
| and I quite loved it.
|
| Over the years, the experience has degraded. Not just because
| of "the algorithm" but also because of influencers, social
| media marketing, spam, etc. But I had the frog in hot water
| experience and never really felt like moving away. I've
| blocked it on my work machine and use it only my phone via.
| the browser and a monochrome screen which makes it less
| compelling.
|
| I've made a few friends and relationships on the platform and
| I think it peaked in 2015/2016 or so. Especially when you're
| in a city that's mostly on it. You run into people who you
| know "via. twitter". It's been a great ride but I do wish for
| some of the things of the RSS days.
| Axsuul wrote:
| Host your own Nitter instance and you'll be able to get RSS
| feeds
| ozarker wrote:
| That's gotten pretty hard to do recently since Musk cracked
| down on api access
| pickledoyster wrote:
| there are some public instances that I use to check a
| handful of profiles that have yet to migrate elsewhere
| Axsuul wrote:
| It doesn't use the API
| KomoD wrote:
| It's not hard, you just need a Twitter account and put in
| the credentials.
| mattlutze wrote:
| Does the world need another RSS reader/mousetrap? We already
| have so many.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rss+readers
|
| What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new
| reader?
| mro_name wrote:
| yes it does. The world is full of 'another's.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Lol the result I got from your search was "rss readers on
| ebay" ad followed by links all with N top RSS readers for
| varying N, often 7 or 10.
| soapdog wrote:
| Someone doesn't really need a reason to build something
| besides that they want to build it. I built many RSS readers
| and I was not trying to revolutionise anything, I was just
| having fun. This mindset of "revolution" and "disruption"
| will block you from actually just doing the things you want
| sometimes.
| fourside wrote:
| I guess it depends on the goal. If you just want to build
| things then you don't need anyone's permission, but if you
| want people to use it or to make a living off it, it's
| important to know why people would use what you're
| building.
| rollcat wrote:
| > Does the world need another RSS reader/mousetrap? We
| already have so many.
|
| And we also have near-universal OPML import/export, so the
| cost of switching is minimised.
|
| > What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new
| reader?
|
| You don't need a revolution to make your app compelling, you
| just need to improve on status quo. RSS has a lot of
| shortcomings, most importantly discoverability.
|
| Here's a simple idea: crowdsourced discovery. Users could
| opt-in to anonymously share their feed list (whole or parts);
| keyword-based categorisation could group them into topics;
| etc. The reader could use an algorithm (haha, we're coming
| full circle) to suggest interesting topics, feeds, posts.
| Honestly I'd be interested in something like
| <https://kagi.com/smallweb/>.
|
| Extra kudos if the dataset is released publicly.
| Gormo wrote:
| > Yes, you can create an RSS feed from a Youtube Channel. You
| can can create an RSS feed from Reddit.
|
| You don't have to create anything. YouTube and Reddit have
| never stopped publishing RSS feeds. I've personally been using
| RSS continuously for both sites without any issues for the past
| 15 years.
|
| Both sites adhere to the standard link tag structure for
| declaring feed URLs in the headers of applicable pages. You can
| use a browser extension like 'Get RSS Feed URL'
| (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/get-rss-feed-
| url/kf...) to easily expose the feeds associated with a page
| you're visiting without having to look for them in the page
| source.
|
| I personally have all of my feed subscriptions -- blogs,
| podcasts, aggregators (including HN), YouTube channels,
| subreddits, etc. -- synchronized via TT-RSS on my VPS. I then
| use Liferea as my client (https://lzone.de/liferea), pulling
| from TT-RSS, for a high-quality, no-nonsense reading experience
| on the desktop.
| digest wrote:
| We have an X (Twitter) option that does not rely on RSS. I
| think Nitter is dead anyway?
| deegles wrote:
| I still miss Google Reader.
| atmosx wrote:
| In today's world, algorithms are essential. It's similar to
| scrolling through Netflix for a movie - you might spend 90
| minutes, the length of a movie, just searching for the _perfect_
| one you haven 't seen yet. To avoid that, we rely on algorithms
| that automatically tailor suggestions based on our personal
| preferences.
|
| The next logical step, in my opinion for privacy-oriented users
| is to _own_ their algorithms and have the ability to analyse and
| customise them. Who knows, we might even discover something new
| about ourselves. That could make for an interesting side project.
| jaapz wrote:
| > The only step forward IMO is for users to _own_ the algorithm
| and be able to analyse and tune it.
|
| That would directly against the interests of big tech (they
| want to be able to push the stuff they want to push), so that's
| not likely to happen there
| atmosx wrote:
| Yeap. That's why I wrote "side-project".
| hellcow wrote:
| Not a single mention here of FeedFlow, available on F-Droid. An
| absolute gem of an app.
| sigmonsays wrote:
| miniflux is where it's at
|
| what we need next is a way to categorize, group subscribe to
| similar rss
| fuddle wrote:
| > I waste too much time scrolling through social media. It's bad
| for my health, so why do I keep doing it? Because once in a
| while, I'll find a post so good that it teaches me something I
| never knew before, and all the scrolling feels worth it.
|
| Intermittent reinforcement, the technique companies use to get
| people addicted to social media. Similar to how slot machines are
| designed.
| pyromaker wrote:
| I've recently launched Mashups.io - my own Yahoo Pipes tool.
|
| https://www.mashups.io
|
| And using the tool, I've been filtering, changing and tweaking
| various RSS feeds along the way.
|
| I absolutely love RSS and absolutely loved Yahoo Pipes. For me,
| that got me into mashing up stuff on the web.
|
| For devs, RSS feeds also provide a very easy way to source data.
| No need to get API keys and tokens, it gives you real life
| dataset immediately and easily. And from there, you can create
| tools.
| sporkland wrote:
| I use https://theoldreader.com/ it's been reliable and trouble
| free since the death of google reader.
|
| I even use it to catch popular hacker news stories:
| hnrss.org/newest?points=150
| FrostKiwi wrote:
| First time hearing about it, looks good but first impressions
| are mixed.
|
| - Start out subscribed to spam, first messages are
| - `A "Tiny Old Cave" Kitchen Got a $1,221 Makeover That "Feels
| 10 Times Cozier"` - `My Mom Has Been Buying These
| Bath Towels for Years, and They're My Favorite, Too, They're on
| sale!`
|
| - Introduction video is a broken embed, pointing to a non-
| existent video
|
| - Translations are mixed up in the interface. Some words German
| `Registrieren`, some English once you go to the next page `Sign
| Up`
|
| - `Sponsorship opportunities are now available. Learn more.`
| after few minutes.
|
| I understand the need for ads in a free tier, but also it's
| RSS, cmon. The tech cost can't be that high to justify this
| level persistent in your face.
| bullen wrote:
| I made my blog software support all feed types back in the day:
|
| http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss
|
| http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom
|
| http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?json
|
| http://sprout.rupy.se/feed (my own :P)
|
| It's open-source: http://github.com/tinspin/sprout
| gunian wrote:
| Speaking of algorithms definitely a far fetched idea if there was
| a LLM esque tool trained on all digital data produced by humans
| since computers were a thing and had root level access to all
| devices on the planet could it alter shuffling algorithms even on
| self hosted stuff to display items a specific way?
| Axsuul wrote:
| Has anyone been able to figure out how to generate RSS feeds for
| Nextdoor?
| kuringganteng wrote:
| Hi! I'm Aquako. I'm a Business Intelligence Data Analyst with 7+
| years of experience delivering data-driven solutions at McKinsey
| & Company. My expertise lies in blending advanced analytics, data
| engineering, and visualization to solve complex business
| problems. Location : Paris, FR
|
| Remote : Yes (including hybrid)
|
| Willing to relocate : Yes (depending on offer)
|
| Technologies : Python (AI/LLM)
|
| Resume/CV : https://github.com/your-fault-n%6Fw-us-english-
| launches Resume/person : https://github.com/y%6Fur-fault-
| tuya-%6Fn-us-now Resume/CV : https://github.com/now-y%6Fur-fault-
| xyz-%6Fn-us-014 Resume/person : https://github.com/y%6Fur-
| fault-2025-fllmoies Resume/profile : https://github.com/y%6Fur-
| fault-multisubs-%6Fn-us-88
|
| Email : aquakwo112@gmail.com
|
| I am a generalist who loves building digital products Hello, I'm
| Kenny. I think a lot of the posts here are bots and I am not one
| of them.
|
| I'm a software engineer with recent experience working in the
| mobile gaming industry as a UX engineer. I'm open to any junior
| or mid-level opportunities where I can grow as a software
| developer. I have a large range of interests, but especially
| enjoy projects that focus on entertainment and media! Send me an
| email, I'm happy to discuss more about my background.
| grahamj wrote:
| I left most socials years ago. Feedly for aggregation and desktop
| reading, and Reeder as a client for it on iDevices.
| monkaiju wrote:
| Going to be increasingly necessary as search engines continue to
| get worse.
| lucasfdacunha wrote:
| I'm going to plug my personal project here which is a weekly
| curated list of gaming content called The Gaming Pub -
| https://thegamingpub.com
|
| I heavily use RSS to curate most of the content, and I believe
| it's one of the best ways to get news and articles without the
| bias of an algorithm.
| lukevp wrote:
| Could you describe how you find news with rss? Would this work
| for tech content in general?
| purplezooey wrote:
| He gives a few good examples of well-supported RSS feeds, but the
| reality is, in 2025, RSS is dying. So many places have RSS feeds
| that constantly break, suddenly stop updating, get relocated
| without notice, or don't exist at all.
| praveen9920 wrote:
| I used to use Google Reader a lot. I used to love reading through
| the feed but once Google killed it, I did not continue the RSS
| collections. Perhaps its time I get back to finding a new reader.
|
| Heuristics for picking the most valued content is not always
| good. I see some posts on niche subs without much engagement, but
| align with my interests. Perhaps I can let a local LLM prioritize
| the feed based on my history or preference which I can tune as
| per my requirements rather than some black-box algorithm
| due-rr wrote:
| I agree. That's why I created the simplest possible RSS
| reader[1]. I use it daily, but so far I'm the only user :D.
|
| [1]: https://motherfuckingrssreader.com/
| fallinditch wrote:
| You can also gain a lot of utility from your RSS feeds by using
| Hoarder [1] to auto tag items with AI for creating searchable
| archives, also to auto download feed content into a RAG for
| creating knowledge repos.
|
| [1] https://hoarder.app/
| parski wrote:
| I started doing this a couple of years ago. In fact, I found this
| post when going through my RSS after breakfast.
|
| My biggest problem so far is that the RSS data is often very
| lacking (body, images, etc) and that there are still lots of
| content I'd like to filter out by sentiment. Like if I follow a
| technology outlet I don't want to know that there's an absolute
| steal on Sonos Arc on Bestbuy because I'm generally not into
| consuming and I live in northern Europe.
|
| I have high hopes for ML to populate the RSS data and filter
| content like this. I want to experiment with this.
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| Seems like your issue is with your RSS reader not RSS itself.
| You most likely also don't need LLM to filter content a word
| filter would catch...
| domysee wrote:
| If you want to give a word filter a try, you can check out
| https://lighthouseapp.io/.
|
| Rules are supported in the free plan as well, so it's easy to
| try out.
|
| Plus it has a new feature which shows the ratio of bookmarked
| articles for feeds, which makes it easy to know which feeds
| to unsubscribe if it becomes too much.
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| for desktop i use FOSS RSSGuard which has complex filtering
| and proper image support. Also a light version without JS
| or other bloat
|
| https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard
| Avamander wrote:
| I use Feedbin (self-hosted) and it has no difficulty with
| displaying images.
| sjs382 wrote:
| I've used Feedbin since it started (paid user on a
| grandfathered plan) and had no idea it was open source and
| could be self-hosted.
|
| I'm happy to keep paying for the hosted version but I love
| knowing I have the option to self-host if it goes belly-up.
| Thanks for pointing this out!
| openplatypus wrote:
| Just FYI, If you want FREE, synchronizing reader, be sure to
| checkout Vivaldi browser.
| andreasscherman wrote:
| I took the other approach: I ditched the algorithm for
| newsletters: https://redditletter.com
| maxglute wrote:
| I've accepted RSS Not coming back. At this point just waiting for
| headless AI helper that browses through all my regular pages in
| the back ground and assemble into local RSS.
| rldjbpin wrote:
| any advice on how to get the first n posts from the /front page
| of hn as an rss feed? since it keeps on changing, a daily
| snapshot (at midnight UTC for example) could be handy.
| xrd wrote:
| This blog has a really strange RSS feed link
|
| https://joeyehand.com/feed_rss_created.xml
|
| I wonder why.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| I sometimes struggled domains that incorrectly set up RSS feeds.
| Some were blocked behind some walled gardens. Sometimes 403
| status was returned.
|
| While tiny tiny RSS is nice, I also wrote interface to read URLs
| from the net. https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
|
| This gives me clean data of web page, title, description, etc,
| which I can further integrate into my own RSS reader.
| eamag wrote:
| Same! I'm creating telegram channels for topics using
| https://github.com/Rongronggg9/RSS-to-Telegram-Bot
|
| That's how I found out about this post https://t.me/best_hn/99
| solaire_oa wrote:
| I've been using FreshRSS for about 3 years now, with pretty much
| the same sources of feeds as the author.
|
| The main pro is that the signal to noise ratio is incalculably
| better than social media. It's trivial to obtain updates you're
| actually interested in when you control the filters.
|
| The main con is that even though it has replaced social media,
| it's still not fulfilling, in the same way social media wasn't
| fulfilling. It's still a stream of often entertaining but mostly
| irrelevant information.
| lylo wrote:
| Great post. Given me a bunch of ideas to add to my RSS app at
| https://feedgrab.net!
| digest wrote:
| So this is why I built Digest (https://usedigest.com) -- the
| algorithms have stopped showing things of interest (my entire
| Instagram feed is full of memes instead of my friends posts), or
| things that cause you to doom scroll. We use RSS wherever we can
| to fetch data from sources to build your personalized digest, but
| if there is an API available we will use that too.
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