[HN Gopher] In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information
___________________________________________________________________
In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information
Author : curioussquirrel
Score : 329 points
Date : 2025-10-03 05:13 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.burkert.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.burkert.me)
| runningmike wrote:
| Simple is use your thunderbird mail to read RSS feeds. Check
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...
| ggeorgovassilis wrote:
| I'm self-hosting FreshRSS [1] with Docker on a Hetzner VM. Fast,
| clutter-free, has everything I need.
|
| [1] https://freshrss.org/index.html
|
| Edit: typo
| nextzck wrote:
| I just bought a reseller plan from verpex host for $5/month.
| Can host unlimited domains and bandwidth with WHM. Access
| everything through cPanel and ftp. SSH on occasion.
|
| Installed freshRSS in 1 min with softaculous
| senectus1 wrote:
| freshrss is excellent.
| lknuth wrote:
| I built my own reader because I didn't want unread items to
| accumulate. It just shows what was published the last X days.
|
| The result is that there is no need for persistent storage, so
| its real easy to host. If you're interested, its here:
| https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly
| timeon wrote:
| What the purpose of hosting whole reader instead of local app?
| Or is that something else/more than reader?
| ggeorgovassilis wrote:
| Runs 24/7. Also, I already host other things on the server,
| so there is no added cost.
| buu709 wrote:
| Allows you to check your feeds from multiple devices. For
| example I usually read from my phone, but sometimes would
| like to check my feeds from my desktop.
|
| You could just subscribe to the same feeds from multiple
| devices/apps, but then you have to manually keep track of
| what's already been read and that will quickly get out of
| hand.
| hn-ifs wrote:
| I love RSS. Like all the old web tech the user is in control. If
| I like a page/site I'll look for an RSS to keep up to date with
| it, if one doesn't exist I'll likely forget about it. I'm not
| signing up for email updates.
| panstromek wrote:
| > As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would
| flood their pages with multiple posts per day
|
| The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with
| chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds
| incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get
| attention. That's one of the main reasons fb and other sites
| implemented algorithmic feeds in the first place. If you take
| away the time component, posters compete on quality instead.
|
| > The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it
| adapts to everyone's taste and interests, but that's only true
| until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture.
|
| Yea, exactly, but as emphasized here: The problem is not
| curation, the problem is the curator. Feed algorithms are
| important, they solve real problems. I don't think going back to
| RSS and chronolgical feed is the answer.
|
| I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which
| would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal
| goals.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with
| chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds
| incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get
| attention.
|
| That doesn't make any sense. Quantity might make you more
| prominent in a unified facebook feed, but an RSS reader will
| show it like this: Sam and Fuzzy (5)
| Station V3 (128)
|
| They've always displayed that way. You never see one feed mixed
| into another feed. This problem can't arise in RSS. There is no
| such incentive. Quantity is a negative thing; when I see that
| I've missed 128 posts, I'm just going to say "mark all as read"
| and forget about them. (In fact, I have 174 unread posts in
| Volokh Conspiracy A+ right now. I will not be reading all of
| those.)
|
| + Volokh Conspiracy is hosted on Reason. Reason provides an
| official feed at http://reason.com/volokh/atom.xml . But Volokh
| Conspiracy also provides an independent feed at
| http://feeds.feedburner.com/volokh/mainfeed . Some of their
| posts go into one of those feeds, and the rest go into the
| other. I can't imagine that they do this on purpose, but it is
| what they do.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > They've always displayed that way. You never see one feed
| mixed into another feed. This problem can't arise in RSS.
|
| All readers I know have the option to display all feeds
| chronologically, or an entire folder of feeds
| chronologically. In most, that's the default setting when you
| open the app/page.
|
| I always use it like that. If I'd want to see all new posts
| from a single author, I might as well just bookmark their
| blog.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > All readers I know have the option to display all feeds
| chronologically, or an entire folder of feeds
| chronologically. In most, that's the default setting when
| you open the app/page.
|
| The option might exist. It was certainly not the default in
| mainstream readers in the past and it still isn't now. I
| never encountered it in Google Reader (as mainstream as it
| gets), or in Yoleo (highly niche), or in Thunderbird (also
| as mainstream as it gets).
|
| Whether a bunch of unused projects make something strange
| the default doesn't really have an impact on the user
| experience. This is not something you can expect to
| encounter when using RSS.
|
| > If I'd want to see all new posts from a single author, I
| might as well just bookmark their blog.
|
| That approach will fail for two obvious reasons:
|
| 1. The bookmark is not sensitive to new posts. When there
| is no new post, you have to check it anyway. When there are
| several new posts, you're likely to overlook some of them.
|
| 2. Checking one bookmark is easy; checking 72 bookmarks is
| not.
| akho wrote:
| > I never encountered it in Google Reader
|
| It was the default view in Google Reader, the "All Items"
| view.
|
| A mix of all feeds, ordered chronologically, is the
| default view in tt-rss, miniflux, inoreader, feedly,
| netnewswire, and all RSS readers I've ever seen.
|
| It's also what "syndication" means.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| For your weirdest claim:
|
| > syndication _noun_
|
| > syn*di*ca*tion
|
| > the act of selling something (such as a newspaper
| column or television series) for publication or broadcast
| to multiple newspapers, periodicals, websites, stations,
| etc.
|
| >> the _syndication_ of news articles and video footage
|
| ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/syndication
| )
|
| The "syndication" in RSS refers to distributing the same
| content to many different readers.
|
| Here's MDN:
| https://devdoc.net/web/developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/RSS/...
|
| > This article provides a simple guide to using RSS to
| _syndicate_ Web content.
|
| Note that this is a guide to creating an RSS feed from
| the publisher's perspective. It is not possible for two
| feeds to be displayed together, or at all, on the
| publisher's end. How do you interpret the verb
| _syndicate_?
| HankStallone wrote:
| If you bookmark Dave's blog, you have to check his blog
| every day to see if there's something new, even if Dave
| only posts monthly. Or you check less often, and sometimes
| discover a new post long after the discussion in the
| comments has come and gone.
|
| If you put Dave's blog in your RSS reader, one day "Dave
| (1)" shows up in your list of unread sources and you can
| read his new post immediately, and you didn't need to think
| about Dave's blog any other day.
|
| I _could_ use the "all articles" feed in my RSS reader
| (TT-RSS), but I would never do such a thing unless all the
| blogs I follow had similar posting frequencies that would
| mesh well together, which they don't. I never use the front
| page of Reddit for the same reason: the busy subs would
| drown out the ones that get a post a week.
| panstromek wrote:
| Yea, dismiss a whole argument based on your specific
| experience with your specific reader and your specific taste.
| Not to mention your argument proves the point - you already
| got their attention even when you didn't read the post and
| even shared the name of the blog here. However is the feed
| arranged, posters who compete on attention will optimize for
| it and eventually bubble up. That's why "the algorithms" are
| complicated in practice, you're always fighting against
| Goodhart's law.
| mixcocam wrote:
| > I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service,"
| which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your
| personal goals.
|
| RSS is just a protocol. You could make a reader now with any
| algorithm you want that displays feeds. In fact, I can't
| imagine that no one is using the AI boom to say they will build
| a decentralized Twitter using rss plus ai for the algorithm
| jasode wrote:
| _> RSS is just a protocol. You could make a reader now with
| any algorithm you want that displays feeds._
|
| Your proposal to filter on the client side where the RSS
| reader runs can't do what the gp wants: _algorithmic
| suggestions on the _server_ side_.
|
| The issue of an AI algorithm applied to client-side-RSS is
| it's limited to the closed set items of the particular
| feed(s) that RSS happened to download of whatever websites
| the user pre-defined in the white-list.
|
| Example of inherent client-side limitation would be how
| Youtube works:
|
| - a particular Youtube channel about power tools : can use
| RSS to get a feed of that channel. Then use further
| customized client filtering (local AI LLM) to ignore any
| videos that talk about politics instead of tools.
|
| - the Youtube algorithm of suggested and related videos to
| _discover unknown channels or topics_ : RSS can 't subscribe
| to this so there's no ability to filter on the client side.
| Either Youtube itself would have to offer a "Suggested Videos
| as RSS feed" -- which it doesn't -- or -- a 3rd party SaaS
| website has to constantly scrape millions of Youtube videos
| and then offer it as a RSS feed. That's not realistic as
| Google would ban that 3rd-party scraper but let's pretend it
| was allowed... getting millions of XML records to filter it
| client-side to throw away 99% of it is not ideal. So you're
| still back to filtering it on the server side to make the RSS
| feed managable.
|
| In the "explore-vs-exploit" framework, the "explore" phase is
| more efficiently accomplished with server-side algorithms.
| The "exploit" phase is where RSS can be used.
|
| - "explore" : use https://youtube.com and its server-side
| algorithms to navigate _billions of videos_ to find new
| topics and content creators. Then add interesting channel to
| RSS whitelist.
|
| - "exploit" : use RSS to get updates of a particular channel
| jcgl wrote:
| GGP _does_ express interest in Algorithm-as-a-Service
| (AaaS), but I don 't see why AaaS or server-side anything
| would be required to have non-chronological feed
| algorithms. Client-side is perfectly suitable for the near-
| univeral case where feed servers don't overwhelm the client
| with spam (in which case you remove the offending server
| from your feed).
|
| To your points about YouTube-style algorithmic discovery, I
| do agree that that would require the server to do things
| like you describe. So I think that there could be both
| client-side and server-side algorithms. In time, who knows?
| Maybe even some client-server protocol whereby the two
| could interact.
| jasode wrote:
| _> , but I don't see why AaaS or server-side anything
| would be required to have non-chronological feed
| algorithms._
|
| You assume gp's idea of "non-chronological" feed means
| taking the _already-small-subset-downloaed-by-RSS_ and
| running a client-side algorithm on it to re-order it. I
| 'm not debating this point because this scenario is
| trivial and probably not what the gp is talking about.
|
| I'm saying gp's idea of "non-chronological" feed (where
| he emphasized "curation is not the problem") means he
| wants the _huge list of interesting but unknown content_
| filtered down into a smaller manageable list that 's
| _curated by some ranking /weights_.
|
| The only technically feasible way to do
| curation/filtering algorithm on the unexplored vastness
| out on the internet -- trillions of pages and petabytes
| of content -- _is on servers_. That 's the reasonable
| motivation for why gp wants Algorithm-as-a-Service. The
| issue is that the companies wealthy enough to run
| expensive datacenters to do that curation ... want to
| serve ads.
| jcgl wrote:
| Maybe you're right about what they meant. I'll not debate
| that.
|
| I _will_ say that, for my purposes, I would definitely
| like an RSS reader that has more dynamic feed
| presentation. Maybe something that could watch and learn
| my preferences, taking into account engagement, time of
| day, and any number of other factors.
|
| What's more, with primarily text-oriented articles, the
| total number of articles can be extremely high before
| overwhelming the server or the client. And a sufficiently
| smart client needn't be shy about discarding articles
| that the user is unlikely to want to read.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > Example of inherent client-side limitation would be how
| Youtube works: > ...
|
| I thought about this problem a long time ago but never did
| anything substantive with it. I guess I'll articulate it
| here, off-the-cuff:
|
| People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML
| file) to their personal blogs describing feeds they
| followed. That was one way to do decentralized
| recommendations, albeit manually since there was no well-
| known URL convention for publishing OPML files. If there
| was a well-known URL convention for publishing OPML files a
| client could build a recommendation graph. That would be
| neat but would only provide feed-level recommendation.
| Article-level recommendation would be cooler.
|
| One of the various federated/decentralized/whatever-
| Bluesky-is "modern" re-implementations of Twitter/NNTP
| could be used to drive article-level recommendations. I
| could see my feed reader emitting machine-readable
| recommendation messages based on ratings I give while
| browsing articles. I would consume these recommendations
| from others, and then could have lots of fun weighting
| recommendations based on social graph, algorithmic summary
| of the article body, etc.
| emschwartz wrote:
| Scour lets you add feeds and topics that you're interested in
| and then sorts posts by how similar they are to your
| interests.
|
| It also works well for feeds that are too noisy to read
| through manually, like HN Newest.
|
| https://scour.ing (I'm the developer)
| nickdothutton wrote:
| > I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service,"
| which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your
| personal goals.
|
| I thought about this back in 2017 (within the context of
| LinkedIn signal to noise) [1]. I hap hoped for a
| marketplace/app store for algos. For example:
|
| "What if the filter could classify a given post as 30%
| advertorial 70% editorial, and what if you could set a
| threshold for seeing posts of up to 25% advertorial but no
| more?"
|
| and
|
| "What if the filter could identify that you'd already received
| 25 permutations of essentially the same thing this month, and
| handle it accordingly."
|
| [1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I think these are good points, and also a reason why I never
| understood people wanted digg and reddit to supply them with
| RSS feeds back in the heydays of RSS.
| latexr wrote:
| > If you take away the time component, posters compete on
| quality instead.
|
| That is verifiably false simply by looking at the state of
| social media. What they compete on is _engagement bait_ , and
| the biggest of them all is rage.
|
| By your logic, social media would be a panacea of quality posts
| by now, but it's going to shit with fast-paced lies. Quick
| dopamine hits prevail, not "quality".
|
| > I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service,"
| which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your
| personal goals.
|
| So, another service dedicated to tracking you and mining your
| data. I can already smell the enshittifaction.
| panstromek wrote:
| I meant quality as in a sense of quality-vs-quantity dillema,
| not objective quality. In other words, posters will start
| optimizing individual posts instead of optimizing their
| amount.
|
| [edit] and indeed, this only solves the problem of excessive
| posting, this is just the begining.
| joules77 wrote:
| Its all subjective. There is no clear quantification of X
| Attention consumed = Y Value produced. So saying what the algo
| does is important is like saying astrology is important. Or HN
| is important ;) At the end of the day most info produced is
| just entertainment/placebo. 3 inch chimp brains have upper
| limits on how much they can consume and how many updates to
| their existing neural net are possible. Since there is nothing
| signaling these limits to people, people(both producers and
| consumers of info) live in their own lala land about what their
| own limits are or when those limits have been crossed, mostly
| everyone is hallucinating about Value of Info.
|
| The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.05% of info
| generated is actually consumed. And that was based on a study
| 10-15 years ago.
| akho wrote:
| I've patched miniflux with a different sorting algorithm that
| is less preferential to frequent posters. It did change my
| experience for the better (though my particular patch is likely
| not to everyone's taste).
|
| It is a bit strange that RSS readers do not compete on that,
| and are, generally, not flexible in that respect.
|
| Social media targets engagement, which is not a good target.
| Even a pure chronological sort is better.
| andrepd wrote:
| That's nonsense. If the problem truly was spam then the
| "algorithm" would be a simple and transparent penalty
| proportional to the frequency of posts. The goal is not that
| (it's """engagement""") and the algorithm is not that either
| (it's a turbo-charged skinner box attacking your mind with the
| might of ten thousand data centres).
| panstromek wrote:
| This is not the ONLY problem, it's just the first problem.
| AJ007 wrote:
| But that's a bullshit excuse, just like with email the answer
| to spam posting is the person gets un-followed/unsubbed.
|
| When its an algorithm, the user is incentivized to produce
| content in order to increase their chances of getting a hit.
| Secondarily the loss of visibility increases value of
| advertising on the platform. It's a lose-lose for users, first
| they are forced to use the platform more for fear of missing
| something, second the user has to post more to get any reach.
| The platform wins on increased engagement, overall content
| depth, ad revenue, and the ability to sneak in a whole lot of
| shit the user never was interested in or followed. Facebook &
| Instagram now are functionally high powered spam engines.
|
| Interestingly the FT has an article today about a drop in
| social media usage (
| https://www.ft.com/content/a0724dd9-0346-4df3-80f5-d6572c93a...
| ) - one chart titled "Social media has become less social"
| shows a 40% decline since 2014 of people using social media to
| "share my opinion" and "to keep up with my friends" In many
| ways, what is being referred to as social media has become
| anti-social media.
|
| An algorithmic email feed would be useless, as would any sort
| of instant messenger, yet that's exactly what social media
| turned in to. Twitter/X is teetering in that direction. The
| chronological feed still works and is great. Anyone who posts a
| lot and doesn't balance out the noise with signal I just
| unfollow.
|
| I might be wrong about this one, but one outcome of generative
| AI might be an engagement cliff. Some users will be very
| susceptible to viewing fake photos and videos for hours (the
| ones still heavily using FB likely are), but others may just
| choose to mentally disengage and view _everything_ they see on
| FB, IG, Tiktok as fake.
| cxr wrote:
| What's an algorithm?
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| Heya, author here.
|
| I don't necessarily agree with the statement "chronological
| feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to
| get attention" - if someone spam-posts, I am very likely to
| unsubscribe. This would be true both for chronological and algo
| feeds.
|
| >> I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service,"
| which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your
| personal goals.
|
| Now that is something I would be interested in. I believe some
| of the RSS aggregators are trying to offer this too, but mostly
| the SaaS ones, not self-hostable open-source ones.
| nesk_ wrote:
| I've ditched RSS feeds more than 10 years ago but I'm
| increasingly wanting to go back to them. Thank you for sharing
| this blog post, it'll help to get me started.
| pbmonster wrote:
| The best thing about modern RSS is that you can retire entire
| accounts.
|
| I don't have YouTube or Twitter accounts, I use RSS to
| subscribe to channels/users/tags.
| nofunsir wrote:
| Shhh - they'll hear you!
|
| Surely it will be deleted as soon as some manager remembers
| it exists.
| latexr wrote:
| The day YouTube removes RSS feeds is the day I stop
| watching entirely.
| barrenko wrote:
| This is the key imho, adapting stuff to yourself / your
| needs, when and where the GloboHomoCorp allows you to.
|
| E.g. I don't use Twitter directly due to toxicity and
| overwhelmingness of the central feed (thank you Nikita), and
| due to, for me, the biggest issue - how shit it is for
| reading / following individual user feeds - when you find
| someone who's really interesting, and you don't want to miss
| posts.
|
| So I use nitter and bookmark each person's profile I find
| interesting and I have that in a separate folder. Then at my
| pace, daily or weekly I read through people's posts and can
| really keep up like God intended me to.
|
| At first it was less engaging than just having Twitter (as
| it's less adictive), and I've paced from deleting / using
| actual Twitter back and forth, but due to recent changes and
| events I've actually come to a place where through my
| bookmarks I _discover_ new profiles / people / interests /
| niches at an organic pace that I can only compare to how I've
| used to use RSS or web in the older times. It's quite cool.
| Kye wrote:
| I prefer FreeTube for YouTube since it maintains the good
| parts of YouTube's interface while giving you something to
| point a backup program at. At least, when it works. There's
| currently a major blocking bug the devs are aware of.
| robin_reala wrote:
| One thing that I did to kickstart my RSS usage again was to
| revisit each site I was subscribed to and:
|
| - Remove it if it posted more than once a day. I want thoughtful
| voices, not other people's aggregation.
|
| - Remove it if it hadn't posted in the last few years. Some
| people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that
| most blogs that are 5+ years old aren't coming back.
|
| - Remove it if the overall tone of the blog is too negative.
|
| I then added a bunch of new feeds from people I'm currently
| actively following on other platforms who are blogging. This was
| a massive breath of fresh air, that has got me actively engaging
| with my feed reader for the first time in a few years.
|
| (Related to my second point: I'm not the first person to note
| this but there's a real sadness to watching an old and beloved
| blog nova itself into your feed in a burst of gambling site spam.
| Better to get out before that happens.)
| lou1306 wrote:
| > - Remove it if it hadn't posted in the last few years. Some
| people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that
| most blogs that are 5+ years old aren't coming back.
|
| This I don't really understand. Following inactive feeds via
| RSS comes effectively at no cost for you. How does removing
| them improve the experience?
| robin_reala wrote:
| See my follow-on note at the end of the post, but also it's
| just a psychological out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new
| point that marks a change.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| It may come at a cost in some SaaS RSS readers (which may
| allow a limited number of feeds on the free plan, for
| example).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It can be preventative against spam for when old domains
| expire/get sold and/or old blog service passwords get hacked.
|
| I think about doing that sort of proactive cleanup sometimes.
| There's nothing quite as disappointing as seeing an old
| friend's blog show a new post for the first time in years
| only for it to be some spammer that just hacked their old
| password or some expired domain squatter saw RSS logs and
| decided to sell advertising on it or a once major blog host
| was sold to a Russian oligarch who purged the user database
| so more Russians could have good usernames (LiveJournal,
| lol).
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| Good tips! I have two busy feeds (which are my country's
| equivalent of Reuters or AP) but I keep them in a separate
| folder and if I wanted, I could exclude them from the main
| feed. Sources that post way too often can be a burden and it
| feels like you can never catch up.
| fjghajkhdfgjlk wrote:
| Any recommendations for a self-hosted RSS reader with a good
| companion android app (or at least a decent mobile website)?
| freetonik wrote:
| Miniflux is lovely, and the mobile website is decent
| https://miniflux.app/
| cpbotha wrote:
| One more vote for miniflux, which I run on a "server" (old
| laptop with linux...) at my house and access from anywhere
| thanks to cloudflare tunnels.
| suckler wrote:
| We must be related, I'm doing the exact same thing.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| I love miniflux. Switched from inoreader when they started
| imposing more and more limits and changing the UI.
|
| With miniflux I have not limits with unread items/feeds. I
| can set check frequency to what I want and I actually don't
| need the app as the www ui is just brillinat!
| mgerb wrote:
| Big fan of miniflux with this dark theme
| https://github.com/catppuccin/miniflux
| 93n wrote:
| Another +1 for miniflux.
|
| Something atypical about my setup is that I wired up miniflux
| webhooks to n8n and gotify so that when I click "save" on an
| entry, I get a notification for it. It's a rudimentary way to
| setup a "read it later" list.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| i was using newsblur for a long while up until recently.
| supposedly they have a self hosted version but i never tried
| it.
|
| the UI is an acquired taste i think, it has a very retro feel
| to it. i was mainly using it because it let you make nested
| folders of feeds
|
| they also have an android app and its available in the fdroid
| store as well if you are into that kind of thing
| conesus wrote:
| I built NewsBlur and it's always interesting to me to hear
| people talk about the UI as a retro feel, but when I look at
| the competitors, I feel they aren't dense enough with
| information. Minimalism has gutted our ability to process
| more than a bit of text at once and I think that's tragic.
| suckler wrote:
| There are a couple of mobile apps for Miniflux, but even on its
| own it is reasonably mobile-friendly. I use Miniflutt on my
| phone.
| sphars wrote:
| Self-hosting freshrss and using CapyReader android app is my
| go-to solution for this
|
| https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS
|
| https://github.com/jocmp/capyreader
| freetonik wrote:
| If you want to discover personal, human-written blogs with valid
| RSS feeds, check out the directory I'm building:
| https://minifeed.net/blogs
|
| (it's also a reader of sorts, and has related discovery and full-
| text search across those feeds and posts, but the page I linked
| is just a big list of blogs with some recent posts and RSS
| links).
| alastairr wrote:
| Love this! Something I've been working on that is a bit similar
|
| https://blognerd.app/?qry=AI+research+llms&type=sites&conten...
|
| you can search for blogs with feeds, and find blogs by semantic
| similarity
| sameline wrote:
| Cool project! I use https://ooh.directory but will check your
| directory out too.
| nake89 wrote:
| Page seems to be hugged to death. Here is an archived version:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251003062648/https://blog.burk...
| 5d41402abc4b wrote:
| This looks like a static page. How much load do you need for a
| server hosting static page to go down?
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| I may need to talk to my hosting provider :) Thanks for
| pointing this out. The site is indeed statically generated
| (Hugo), so this should not be happening.
| beardyw wrote:
| I use RSS a lot but it is not without it's own difficulties.
|
| My collection of feeds is naturally geared to my own interests
| and world views. As a result I do find I miss out on some things
| I should pay attention to. To counter this I include a fact
| checking site which brings stories I would otherwise miss to my
| attention. Not ideal, but it works.
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| This is very much true, and one of the downsides of RSS is that
| you need to make effort to discover new sources, or make sure
| that what you're consuming is at least somewhat balanced.
| However you have no guarantees of the latter when you use
| algorithmic feeds.
| sph wrote:
| I love RSS. I literally just bought an app on itch.io, and to my
| surprise the devlog page for it, which lists all the new updates,
| supports RSS. I love when it happens. [1]
|
| RSS didn't stick for me until:
|
| 1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would
| miss stuff I actually care about.
|
| 2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing.
| Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I
| used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles,
| OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50
| unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow
| personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much
| more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio.
|
| 3. https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that
| doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS
| feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs.
|
| I pay for Feedbin, and it's great.
|
| ---
|
| 1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has
| one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or
| atom or rss to tell.
| latexr wrote:
| > I used to subscribe to (...) the top HN frontpage articles
|
| https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above
| a certain number of points, or other metrics.
|
| > These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or
| atom or rss to tell.
|
| Doesn't your feed service/app auto-detect feeds if you just
| paste the webpage? That's a common feature.
| sph wrote:
| > https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts
| above a certain number of points, or other metrics.
|
| Yes, that's the one I used, but I feel it's still too much
| noise. You don't want a firehose in your RSS feeds.
|
| Just open https://news.ycombinator.com when you want to
| doomscroll through an almost endless stream of information.
| RSS doesn't work well with social media, and that's a
| feature.
| SirFatty wrote:
| "..lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of
| points.."
|
| You prefer to let other people determine what you read?
| qmmmur wrote:
| Considering you define the heuristic seems like a daft
| argument for you to make
| jasode wrote:
| _> You prefer to let other people determine what you read?_
|
| There are multiple levels of delegation to the "wisdom of
| the crowd":
|
| - visiting this HN website by itself is already letting
| people determine what you read. The stories are submitted
| by others.
|
| - reading only the front page of just the top-voted 30
| stories instead of doom scrolling the additional 1000 is
| another level of delegation
|
| - inside of each story, only reading a subset of the most
| upvoted comments is another level
|
| People do all 3 to various degrees because there's _limited
| time_ to read.
| esseph wrote:
| > People do all 3 to various degrees because there's
| limited time to read.
|
| _By far_, the best posts I have ever seen to this website
| were often ones that didn't get many comments, or may
| have even gotten reported.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| I prefer to also hear other people's opinion about an
| article as a sort of a peer review.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think #2 is a great tip. I've tried to use my feed reader to
| segregate by 'frequency' before, but I haven't really given it
| a full trial--it still feels a bit awkward.
|
| > the top HN frontpage articles
|
| I don't even really understand what the HN feed _is_. I looked
| in the FAQ, etc. the other day and couldn 't find an
| explanation. The description ("Links for the intellectually
| curious, ranked by readers.") is nice PR, but it doesn't tell
| me what I'm seeing. Is it every post submitted? Every post that
| made it to the front page? Same, but stayed on the front page
| for a certain amount of time? Received at least X upvotes? I
| have no idea...
| agile-gift0262 wrote:
| > I've tried to use my feed reader to segregate by
| 'frequency' before, but I haven't really given it a full
| trial--it still feels a bit awkward.
|
| I'm in the middle of that myself. I have folders labelled
| rarely, weekly, frequent and social. Rarely and weekly I tend
| to read most of it, as they are the folders I open first. I
| only open frequent once I'm done with the others and I
| usually scroll through the titles and only read very few
| articles. Social is for mastodon and bluesky accounts, which
| I open when I only have 5 minutes to kill and I know I won't
| have time to finish reading long posts/articles.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I liked Newsblur's approach to this when I was using a
| firehose (I dropped most of my firehose-like feeds a couple
| years ago for various reasons including I didn't actually
| like most of them all that much). Newsblur has Focused
| versus Disliked and you can "train" all sorts of things to
| Like or Unlike about an article. You can Like an entire
| feed, but you can also Like things like specific authors or
| tags in a feed or words in a headline. Similarly you can
| use all the same tools to Unlike an article. If an article
| has more Likes than Unlikes it shows up in a Focused view
| and if an article has more Unlikes than Likes it shows up
| only in an "All" view, meaning it disappears from the
| default Unread view. When you have a limited amount of time
| you read Focused, when you have more time you read Unread,
| and if you want to check on spam or topics you dislike you
| can zoom out to "All" and spot-check feeds for Unliked
| articles.
|
| Additionally, Newsblur added an automated "Infrequent Site
| Stories" for things it knows come from feeds that don't
| update all that frequently. (Which you can use in tandem
| with Focused view for even less time.)
| fdgdd wrote:
| Try https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feed-
| preview/
| sph wrote:
| Perfect, thanks!
| wara23arish wrote:
| I've recently quit all social media and been wanting to do the
| same thing. Thank you!
| curiousguy wrote:
| The point 2 is an important one, I used RSS for years but had
| to stop using it as I was way too anxious trying to read
| everything.
|
| I started using again, but I have a few rules: all the feeds
| only refresh once week; and any news feed (like hackers news)
| that generates too much content is purged also once a week, so
| I only have the latest one week articles.
|
| In my mind, my RSS feed for me is like an old school weekly
| magazine. This solve the FOMO feeling of missing something
| interesting, but I don't feel like I need to read something as
| soon as is published.
| stanislavb wrote:
| I'd suggest giving a go to lenns.io (shameless plug). It gives
| you source prioritisation control + number of items per source
| control + category prioritisation. In the end, you get exactly
| what you want without being overwhelmed.
|
| This is an app/service that I've built for myself, but it's up
| for anyone go give it a go and use it.
| rethab wrote:
| Shout out to Blogtrottr[1], which allows you to subscribe to RSS
| feeds and have the posts sent to you via email. Great service
| I've been using for years.
|
| [1] https://blogtrottr.com
| pantulis wrote:
| The key with RSS is curation, otherwise it stops being your
| "controlled feed". FOMO can make you add noisy feeds that
| basically are putting too much information that will dwarf the
| relevant feeds. In my case, I follow Hacker News and Slashdot
| which are ok but also thought it was a good idea to add "The
| Verge | All posts" to my feed reader and I find myself hitting
| "Mark all as read" continuosly. It's not The Verge's fault of
| course, it's _my_ lack of strategy.
| jordyjor wrote:
| Agreed in the general. Though one useful feature in FreshRSS
| that I've made heavy use of (no idea if there are equivalents
| in other readers) is the ability to mark new entries in a feed
| as read immediately upon receiving them. Initially seemed
| counterintuitive when I first saw the option, but I've found
| it's actually quite useful for me. It allows for a separation
| of true feeds coming from a person that I typically will want
| to read and take manual action on. Or more shotgun feeds that
| are continuously putting out stuff that I will choose to dip
| into when I feel like it (HN front page or Slashdot being
| examples of that). Without the ever-increasing counter of
| unread articles to think about.
| pantulis wrote:
| This is a great feature. And I found I can create a similar
| rule with Inoreader, thanks!
| phaser wrote:
| I miss RSS too much, I have decided to start using it again
| today. For those who are in it, what is your favorite client?
| steadicat wrote:
| This app made me fall in love with RSS after years of trying:
| https://feeeed.nateparrott.com/
| latexr wrote:
| Reeder Classic. Not a subscription, looks good, works well. But
| it's only available for Apple operating systems, and the
| developer is not responsive to bug reports (fortunately, there
| aren't many and they are tiny).
|
| News Explorer is a decent alternative (but same OS
| restriction). That developer is responsive.
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| NetNewsWire, great open source client on ios, good for mac too.
|
| Though I feed it via tiny tiny rss with the freshrss api plugin
| so I can have saner filtering and curation before it gets to
| the reader.
|
| The 'awesome tiny tiny rss' docker image is pretty decent setup
| for getting it running if you have any interest, though
| personally I ended up rolling my own static binary using
| frankenphp somewhat based off their setup. The core dev of tiny
| tiny rss is a bit, opinionated lets just say.
| HankStallone wrote:
| I don't use docker, so I stuck with an ancient version of TT-
| RSS for years. But last week I couldn't get it to play nice
| with my new FreeBSD system and its updated PHP, so I
| installed from the git repo with surprisingly little trouble.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| NetNewsWire is a great RSS client and one of the best designed
| apps, both on iOS and OS X.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I find this to be misguided tech-nostalgia. What you control this
| way is the way information is brokered to you. It only controls
| the information reaching you itself to the extent that is
| reflected in the delivery method.
|
| This is significant if you're a staunch subscriber to the idea
| that _everything_ , and I really do mean everything, wrong with
| social and mass media is the "algorithms" (formerly: capitalism,
| sensationalism, etc.), but I'm not. I find that to be at most
| half the story.
|
| In the end, you're consuming something someone else produced for
| you to consume. That's why it's available. So you're relying on
| that information to be something you don't find inherently
| objectionable, or at least be filterable in that regard, which is
| not a given. We consume arbitrary and natural language content.
| Most you can do is feed it through AI to pre-digest it for you,
| which can and will fail in numerous ways. And this is to say
| nothing about content that wasn't produced and/or didn't reach
| you.
|
| The reason older technologies felt better wasn't necessarily just
| because of them per se, but also because of their cultural
| context. These are interwoven of course, but I wouldn't
| necessarily trust that reverting back to old technology is what's
| going to steer back this ship to a better course. I'm afraid this
| is a lot more like undropping a mug than it is like applying
| negation.
| whism wrote:
| I think you almost have a point in that you seem to be
| advocating for something along the lines of unbiased input
| (questioning the presented information because it was
| constructed for presentation, suggesting that an AI could
| somehow assist, presumably to help ground your information in a
| wider context etc)
|
| I think what you may be missing is the role of trust. There is
| much to say about that, but in this instance, a nice thing
| about RSS is that I can trust the algorithm it uses to generate
| my feed. It is very simple, and I, myself choose the sources it
| draws from. With some other systems, this is not the case.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > I think you almost have a point
|
| Thank you for almost granting me the capability of having a
| point. That is very nice of you.
|
| I am not missing the role of trust. I have instead simply had
| that trust betrayed countless of times by now, so I'm seeking
| a little more. It would be a great first step, but far from
| the whole journey. And so I'm wary of people mistaking the
| latter for the former, intentionally or otherwise.
| whism wrote:
| Betrayal of trust is indeed serious, and a hard lesson for
| many of us. Consider also that progress is made one step at
| a time, over a long time. While a desire for sudden,
| wholesale changes is understandable, it may be
| counterproductive. YMMV
| perching_aix wrote:
| That is not what I'm advocating for, nor are incremental
| steps something I'm advocating against.
|
| What I'm advocating for is for people to not lose sight
| of the prize. And what I'm advocating against is
| misleading claims, which is what I consider the title and
| the proclaimed motivation of the post to be.
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| I see now - your issue is with the "controlled feeds of
| information" part? I am not claiming they are "feeds of
| controlled information" (which is how you seem to be
| interpreting it). Of course, all the sources you
| subscribe to will have their own biases and issues, but
| you do not lose agency over what you select for
| consumption. That is the control I am seeking and what I
| like about RSS.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > I see now - your issue is with the "controlled feeds of
| information" part? I am not claiming they are "feeds of
| controlled information" (which is how you seem to be
| interpreting it).
|
| That's my issue, yes.
|
| Now, I don't want to do the Twitter thing where I present
| my headcanon interpretation as some sort of deliberate
| messaging on your part, I 100% expect that this
| understanding of your words hasn't even crossed your
| mind, and maybe even reads like a gross twisting of what
| you intended to convey.
|
| That is indeed how I read it though, even if I then
| recognized it as ambiguous (between those two). I then
| also made the guess that if I can take the "feeds of
| controlled information" interpretation away from this so
| easily, someone who's also as inattentive as me or
| perhaps even biased to interpret it that way, this may
| very well make them get the wrong idea. So I figured I
| should place it into the perspective this topic usually
| comes up in (and present it from the angle it usually
| comes up through).
|
| > Of course, all the sources you subscribe to will have
| their own biases and issues, but you do not lose agency
| over what you select for consumption. That is the control
| I am seeking and what I like about RSS.
|
| Yup, that much is all clear. Nothing to contest on that
| one. It just also didn't run explicitly contrary to the
| "feeds of controlled information", because, well, it
| legitimately just wasn't the perspective you were writing
| from then. I was coming from an angle where I was feeling
| the absence of such a clarification.
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| Author here. I do not necessarily think algorithmic feeds are
| the only thing wrong with social media, but it's certainly one
| of the major problems. More so if the platforms don't even
| allow me to revert to chronological feeds, or make it really
| user unfriendly.
|
| Of course the cultural context has changed, but I think your
| view is quite cynical. I do believe that AI could, in theory,
| be a good steward and curator of news feeds (think Google
| News), but I haven't seen an implementation that would be open
| and customizable enough. I do not like the idea that someone
| could be manipulating what I'm being presented, or what reaches
| me and what doesn't.
|
| Could you elaborate on why you think this is misguided tech-
| nostalgia? Most of your arguments seem to be true regardless of
| how you discover content (RSS, social media, link aggregators,
| ...)
| perching_aix wrote:
| > I do not necessarily think algorithmic feeds are the only
| thing wrong with social media, but it's certainly one of the
| major problems.
|
| We're more on the same page than I assumed then just based on
| the post. I do also think it's a (very) significant issue,
| and I do think there'd be a lot of merit to gain better
| control of it. I often apply chronological sorting where
| possible too, or will at least curate my feed using the
| available features. I've just also come to think that people
| are "clearly" a lot less nice than I thought, and that maybe
| we're getting a bit too interconnected and a bit too well.
|
| > Could you elaborate on why you think this is misguided
| tech-nostalgia? Most of your arguments seem to be true
| regardless of how you discover content (RSS, social media,
| link aggregators, ...)
|
| That's kind of my point. I simply think there's a lot more to
| why social media posts run afoul so often on the internet
| (and why mass media posts are so distorted) than just the
| recommendation algorithms.
|
| I address this under your other reply more, but the "feeds of
| controlled information" interpretation's goal is something
| actually desirable to me (and to most everyone, I believe).
| And for that, this is at most a stepping stone, rather than
| the solution (if such a thing even exists - who knows, I
| might be living in a dream world). It is under that
| interpretation that this post read like "misguided tech-
| nostalgia".
|
| In case you're asking more literally though, what I meant is
| that the general vibe I caught from this all is that this
| old-school-ish thing from when everything was better (a while
| ago), if you switch to it now, things will be better again.
| And so due to the everchanging social context, I disagree
| with that - hence the "undropping a mug" example. That is,
| even if I consider recommendation algorithms as not only just
| a significant issue but e.g. where things went wrong
| outright, removing them alone is imo not going to be enough
| to undo the damage.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| Also shout out to https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ for converting
| email subscriptions to RSS feeds
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| I don't use it personally but have heard good things! Thanks
| for mentioning it.
| whism wrote:
| If someone can please figure out how to integrate a
| purchase/payment system into a similar protocol we would love you
| forever :)
|
| I would so love to help my many artist/musician friends get set
| up direct-to-consumer with digital content, subscriptions etc --
| and with their own shops, that they can run, in whatever funky
| style.
| lou1306 wrote:
| Patreon and Spotify already implement subscription-based
| podcasts, and I am positive they use RSS/Atom under the hood.
| So the tech is already out there, you just need to turn it into
| a self-hosted solution.
| curioussquirrel wrote:
| Indeed, Patreon has private feeds for patrons for exclusive
| content. That's a decent solution but it's platform-specific,
| which is both a bad thing (not easily used elsewhere) and
| good (backwards compatible with good old RSS).
| realityfactchex wrote:
| Why not just set them up with Catbox Spaces [0, 1]?
|
| [0]
| https://blog.catbox.moe/post/774800476681207808/introducing-...
|
| [1] https://catbox.tech
| mustaphah wrote:
| Great post! Indeed, social media platforms optimize for
| engagement and ad revenue, not user needs.
|
| Feeds are a user right, not a publisher favor. In that spirit: I
| recently built RSSible - a tiny tool that lets you turn any
| webpage into an RSS feed via CSS selectors. I've built this for
| myself; already using it for HN, Product Hunt, tldr.tech,
| r/science, IMDb latest shows, RubyOnRemote, and many more.
|
| It's still early, but if anyone here is curious to try or test,
| I'd love feedback. (You can see live demos on the site)
|
| RSSible: https://rssible.hadid.dev/
|
| Github: https://github.com/mhadidg/rssible
| codazoda wrote:
| Impossible for me to read in dark mode.
| mustaphah wrote:
| Never meant to support dark mode. Looks like water.css (the
| CSS lib I'm using) supports it by default. My custom CSS is
| breaking things.
|
| I'll try to force light mode initially and will definitely
| fix the dark mode later. Thanks a lot for flagging this!
| mustaphah wrote:
| It should look better now. I fixed the input text color.
| throw0101d wrote:
| Reminder that Atom exists:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
| latexr wrote:
| As do JSON feeds. But in general "RSS" has become kind of the
| shorthand for all feeds of this type. Most feed readers support
| all formats, so the distinction doesn't really matter that
| much.
| zby wrote:
| The root problem here is that a communication channel full of
| noise is not valuable - but on the other hand if you have a very
| selective channel - then nobody will subscribe because to
| subscribe you need repeated good interactions.
| AlfredBarnes wrote:
| I recently made a little RSS feed reader, and its barebones lives
| on my machine, and is powered by python.
|
| I never could get into any of the RSS reader software it all
| seemed very happy to put random things in the feed that i didn't
| care about. A strict timeline of things i want to read is all I
| want. If there is nothing new there is nothing new and I'm okay
| with that.
|
| Thanks for the write up and read.
| AlfredBarnes wrote:
| Something else i HIGHLY recommend is subscribing to youtube
| channels Via RSS. You ACTUALLY KNOW WHEN SOMETHING IS NEW. I've
| gone way down on my youtube watching rabbit holes since I only
| engage with it when I have a new video.
| brainzap wrote:
| NetNewsWire on macOS
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Most people complain about the signal-to-noise ratio in news
| consumption. I believe the issue isn't the news sources
| themselves, but rather the lack of a proper RSS application.
|
| A great RSS app should offer a powerful search function. It
| should support tagging, bookmarking, scoring or point systems,
| categories, and a "read later" feature, among other things.
|
| You don't need to eliminate news sources -- just use filters and
| search tools to surface what matters to you.
|
| An ideal RSS reader should also be smart enough to bypass things
| like Cloudflare and other unnecessary protections that break RSS
| functionality. Unfortunately, many mobile RSS apps fall short in
| this regard -- and mobile is king these days.
|
| To get something truly useful, you often need to self-host. But
| most people won't go that far.
|
| Personally, I self-host my RSS reader. I even built my own
| client, since I wasn't aware of KaraKeep (formerly Hoarder) at
| the time. I'm still using my custom app because it's now very
| versatile, and I'm not sure KaraKeep would meet all my needs.
|
| Links:
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project
|
| https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS - all about RSS
|
| https://rssisawesome.com/
|
| https://rssgizmos.com/
|
| https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I agree that most rss clients lack true power user features for
| searching and filtering.
|
| I spent a bit of time proving out an idea to use Bleve indexing
| to allow scoring each article with weighted keywords but I
| haven't had time to work on it lately. I'll have a look at your
| links.
| HankStallone wrote:
| It's strange how all these modern communication methods (blogs,
| forums, RSS readers) so often fail to have features that were
| available in Usenet newsreaders 30+ years ago. We had
| threading, searching, killfiling or scoring, marking posts to
| save, all pretty common features then. I'm not sure why there
| isn't more demand for them now.
| asjo wrote:
| This is why I read RSS over NNTP: https://feedbase.org/
|
| (Shameless plug: I made Feedbase.)
| Egor3f wrote:
| I think this post is the best place to "promote" my open-source
| pet project
|
| It converts any dynamic website to rss feed
|
| It's self-hosted and stateless
|
| https://github.com/Egor3f/rssalchemy
|
| It's however not in active development state, but if there will
| be some pull requests I'll review them, so it's not abandoned
|
| Demo page is not working now, but if there will be some activity,
| I'll bring it back up
| NoSalt wrote:
| I am currently working on a [personal use] MagicMirror
| replacement. One of the things I like about MagicMirror is the
| RSS newsfeed at the bottom of the screen, so I have been getting
| into RSS more recently, and really enjoying it. The only
| "problem" is trying to narrow down all the great content.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| I've paid for Feedly for years and use it daily.
|
| One section is "Hacker News People". When I find someone on HN
| who writes well, I subscribe to their comments in a RSS feed, so
| I can read everything they write. Very often they comment on a
| link I don't see on my main HN page, which is useful.
|
| App http://hnapp.com/ converts names to RSS feeds. Example:
| `author:nickjj`
| xorvoid wrote:
| This is a fantastic idea. Do you mind sharing a copy of your
| RSS comment feed?
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Is anyone hooking up RSS feeds to some cheap LLMs to do
| personalized content algorithms? Seems like a useful open source
| project
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Not personalized yet, but categorized:
|
| https://outerweb.org/explore
|
| LLMs are helping with classification right now but in the
| backlog is letting them take a list of favorites and creating
| recommendations.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Social media is the RSS feed and has been for like 15 years.
| Short form posts that link to long form posts. Social posts that
| link to the content you've published wherever. The change in
| recent years is ppl skipping the self-hosting/POS part of the
| POSSE and posting directly on the social media sites because they
| were convinced to do that and the social media sites were
| discouraging users from travelling off-site etc. We just need to
| get away from using social media sites as the hosts of our
| content and back to the POS part.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I tried making an app once that was like RSS but with reposts,
| and each friend only gets to occupy one spot on your feed per
| day. Worked pretty nicely with my friends on it.
|
| Probably a lot of things like that exist.
| 929-367-9958 wrote:
| /tp teleport
| not--felix wrote:
| I Love RSS so much that I started to develop my own RSS reader[0]
| to fix some of the problems I have with it, like: feed discovery,
| podcasts and overload.
|
| [0] https://ivyreader.com
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