[HN Gopher] RSS.Social - the latest and best from small sites ac...
___________________________________________________________________
RSS.Social - the latest and best from small sites across the web
Author : Curiositry
Score : 225 points
Date : 2026-01-21 02:36 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rss.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (rss.social)
| botacode wrote:
| It's nice to have a lot of small web content laid out like this!
| Some suggestions to make discovery more palatable:
|
| - 1-2 sentence summaries for the content. most titles are not
| sufficiently descriptive and clicking on something un-interesting
| a few times is a sure fire way to get folks to churn
|
| - checks for included feeds that they are correctly configured
| and the resources load in-browser (not download a random file to
| my computer)
| pryncevv wrote:
| We don't have a RSS Feed yet, but the alivenet will welcome your
| visit - https://vvesh.de
| hsx wrote:
| I've allegedly been blocked by Cloudflare, despite accessing
| from an Australian residential IP..
|
| Unless you're geoblocking?
| q-base wrote:
| I really like it! Sometimes I just want to read something random
| and sampling from small personal websites is a great way to
| discover new people to follow.
| splitbrain wrote:
| Learn how it works. -> This page is incomplete
|
| A pity. It's obvious what the "latest" would be, but what is the
| best? How is that decided?
|
| Shameless plug: for randomly discovering IndieBlogs check out
| https://indieblog.page/
| october8140 wrote:
| Since "best" is subjective maybe give a description of the kind
| of content you hope to feature and why you think it's important.
| postalcoder wrote:
| Using HN as a filter for Kagi's Small Web list[0] works really
| well: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
|
| I find the small web feed too noisy without it.
|
| [0]: https://kagi.com/api/v1/smallweb/feed
| q-base wrote:
| I did not know about that feature - thanks a lot for sharing!
| rdmuser wrote:
| The kagi smallweb site has an alternative feed that is less
| high traffic that only includes appreciated (liked) articles.
| It's not ideal for a lot of people since it's still pretty high
| traffic and not a lot of users use the main site with the
| button to appreciate things.
| https://kagi.com/smallweb/appreciated
|
| You can find a few alt feeds for the kagi small web by going to
| the site and clicking the top right rss button. There are ones
| for videos, code and comics and a link to the full opml file.
| https://kagi.com/smallweb
|
| Btw is there an rss feed for the hn smallweb one?
| postalcoder wrote:
| That alt feed has a lot less gristle - nice! Kagi should
| update their Github page because I don't see any
| documentation for it.
|
| I've had a few requests for rss feeds but alas I've been
| focusing on comments-related features. Is anyone else
| interested in an rss feed for HN x smallweb? I may get the
| ball rolling if there's some more interest.
| jppope wrote:
| weird, my site: jonpauluritis.com is listed in the small web
| but the filter doesn't show it.
| markoa wrote:
| Love this, bookmarked.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Love this! RSS is alive and well! Going to try and integrate this
| into my personal RSS Tinder:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680013
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| I had a Journalism Innovation class in uni in which we had to
| come up with a news startup idea, and this is exactly what I
| pitched! Nice to see someone's made it.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Nice! Was also thinking about how this could be a way to
| bring more people back to "traditional" media. But with the
| current paywalls it's really hard to implement. Once you
| click on an article you potentially like your currently
| unable to read it...
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| I was considering it at the time, my idea was to offer a
| subscription that would redistribute revenue to publishers
| in exchange for skipping the paywall. This was all a
| hypothetical plan for a class, of course, and other
| attempts at bundling news subscriptions have failed. Most
| existing news aggregators just show a headline and
| standfirst, and that seems to work.
|
| Another concern was reinforcing bias. You'd need to show
| people articles about things they care about, but at the
| same time, you don't want to put people in bubbles. It's a
| pretty tough balance to strike.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Yes makes sense probably easier said than done, you would
| need at least one big publisher on your side to begin
| with.
|
| Regarding bias, I'm current using a 70/30
| exploitation/exploration split and add time weighting
| onto that. So you should always have ~3 new articles
| outside your "bubble" per 10 articles you swipe.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| .social domain has a negative connotation nowadays.
| fhennig wrote:
| I don't think that's universal, I don't have a negative
| association with it.
| freetonik wrote:
| Not a wide in the number of sources (yet), but I'm curating a
| directory/reader/search engine of personal blogs, and the
| "Global" view shows the latest posts across 1300+ feeds:
| https://minifeed.net/global
| chromehearts wrote:
| How can one submit their blog?
| freetonik wrote:
| https://minifeed.net/suggest
| roomey wrote:
| Is there a feed of your global feed? A meta feed? If I download
| an opml it will just go out of date right?
| freetonik wrote:
| A feed of the posts of the global feed or the feed of newly
| added blogs?
|
| Either way I was thinking to implement those.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Super cool, I might want to connect this to my swipe engine [1]
| (see comment below). Since you have already curated so many
| feeds this is the source I was looking for (and trying to build
| myself [2]). I'll shoot you an email.
|
| [1] https://philippdubach.com/standalone/rss-tinder/ [2]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602227
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Feel free to grab the ones I have collected over at
| https://blogroll.org. There's an OPML export option that only
| has the ones with an RSS feed filed.
| steffoz wrote:
| Great! And funny too, just posted about my personal take on the
| same topic: https://squeaki.sh/p/i-turned-my-website-into-my-
| feed-reader...
| tasuki wrote:
| I was surprised to find my blog there. I did a git blame on
| https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb and it was in the initial
| commit, so I guess I'll never find out...
| freediver wrote:
| It is explained on that very page :)
| fhennig wrote:
| Neat, stuff that makes it easier to find small, independent
| content is great!
|
| Others in the comments also linked aggregators.
|
| I think what's missing a bit in the indie web, is a bit of
| curation. I think, it'd be great if we had something like music
| labels, or book publishers, that have a certain taste, and
| publish certain things. Or on spotify, there are these playlists
| where new music gets listed, but hand curated by someone with a
| particular taste.
|
| I want something like that. I want something like a digital
| magazine, sourced from blog posts, about a particular topic. Hand
| curated! Not with automatic topic extraction or whatever. That
| would be cool to have.
| postalcoder wrote:
| Agreed. There's a missing layer of curation/discovery that I'd
| love to see some experimentation on. The small web needs a
| small structure.
| matthew-craig wrote:
| This could be an interesting answer to "what sites are like
| Hacker News but with more diverse topics". All you'd need is a
| upvotes/downvotes and a comments section.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| ... and an amazing full-time moderator like @dang
| beilabs wrote:
| Would be lovely to have a RSS feed for all the posts from
| RSS.social but it doesn't seem to exist? I don't see it in the
| source code.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| I created something like this a while ago [1] for HN. I can
| easily add another feed to it.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602227
| alex1138 wrote:
| It's kind of amazing we've forgotten the rest of the web exists
|
| Everything now is either facebook.com, google.com or cnn.com (not
| exactly specifically that, but you know)
|
| It used to be this wild, almost untamed thing. Or what I'm trying
| to say is it's boring now
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| This goes really well with my RSS reader Tuvix :D
| https://tuvix.app/
| ilaksh wrote:
| Isn't this the opposite of RSS? Isn't the point that instead of
| going to one centralized server to get feeds you subscribe to the
| actual source feeds?
|
| Make it an RSS feed of RSS feeds. That's still kind of contrary
| to the spirit of RSS because you are centralizing.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I think the idea is great, but look at services like Gmail.
| Sure everyone can setup their own email service, and client.
| But most people just go on gmails web UI. We've had XMPP and
| other similar IM services for centuries, but Discord and Slack
| are more popular. People like simplicity.
| t-3 wrote:
| People use Discord and Slack because they have to, not
| because they want to. Having to keep 10 chat apps to somewhat
| keep in touch with people is a sign that something is very,
| very wrong.
|
| People use gmail because it was free and in the right place
| at the right time with the right features. The web UI sucked
| when it came out, now it sucks even worse, but all email UI
| sucks.
|
| None of these things are simple or good or the best solution,
| they're just free and people need to keep in touch somehow.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > People use Discord and Slack because they have to
|
| I disagree that anyone HAS TO use Discord. Slack on the
| other hand, yeah I can see how that would be the case.
| However, the industry would have not adopted Slack if it
| wasn't good as it was, the landscape was ripe for something
| new. Sadly Slack barely updates with anything meaningful.
| t-3 wrote:
| Ok, yeah, not quite a HAS TO, but if I want to get that
| patch, or find out info about that open source project,
| or join some fun group... I have to.
| freediver wrote:
| Good to see more projects plugging into Kagi Small Web.
|
| It has been a passion project of mine since inception and just
| recently reached over 2000 commits, adding about 10 new websites
| every day (around 29,000 total at the moment).
|
| It is also the first thing open in my browser every morning.
|
| You can view these blogs visually at https://kagi.com/smallweb
| and content from all of them is surfaced high in Kagi search
| results (when relevant).
| ar_turnbull wrote:
| Oh this is neat. Explains why I've seen a few Kagi referrals in
| my analytics.
|
| Thanks for your work on this. It's appreciated!
| oldcoot wrote:
| I like it the concept of RSS.Social but one thing that someone
| forgot was the RSS feed link for RSS.Social it's self.
| oldcoot wrote:
| I like the concept of RSS.Social but the author forgot to create
| a RSS feed link for RSS.Social it's self.
| elcapitan wrote:
| This is really cool, but what on earth do you do with it? It
| would be a full time job to read all the posts from this stream,
| and their titles are not editorialized like on HN, so it's much
| harder to filter by title.
| jp1016 wrote:
| I tried building an RSS library feature for a side project
| (https://beavergrow.com), mostly as a way to curate feeds I
| actually enjoy reading. It quickly highlighted how fragile the
| RSS ecosystem has become Feedburner gone, Google slowly de-
| emphasizing RSS, and discovery being the hardest part now.
|
| RSS still feels like one of the few genuinely user-controlled
| ways to follow the web, but keeping it usable today seems to
| depend almost entirely on community curation. Curious how others
| here handle feed discovery now.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Bring back Pingback!
|
| But seriously, Mastodon, etc. are cool, but there's gotta be a
| way we can augment RSS to get most of what we want?
| lucasfdacunha wrote:
| I've been doing something similar with https://greatreads.dev/.
|
| It's mostly focused on tech-related blogs, though. A place to
| find good articles from fellow developers.
|
| There are some extra features on top of it. Like semantic search,
| remixing rss feeds into a single one are some of my favorites.
| neekp wrote:
| Can someone explain how to read such a feed where a new article
| appears every couple of minutes? I'm trying to make it easier to
| find new articles from personal blogs on weblogs.ai and am
| surprised by the attention to rss.social, even though it's
| objectively inconvenient to use.
| Defo wrote:
| Link for rss.social is broken
| CqtGLRGcukpy wrote:
| I have a personal site that is listed in there, and it polls my
| site much more frequently then it needs to (like multiple times a
| day, compared to when I blog about once a week).
|
| The user-agent includes a link to https://rss.social/bot but it
| says coming soon, which I think is a shame.
|
| There's also no way to opt-out.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-21 23:01 UTC)