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I've made quite a few comments before on HN about how I have come to use RSS feeds- essentially as a way to distribute highlights rather than distributing entir

by bsnnkv 4y ago

I've made quite a few comments before on HN about how I have come to use RSS feeds- essentially as a way to distribute highlights rather than distributing entire articles or previews of entire articles with a meaningless blurb in the feed item body. I curate RSS feeds on specific topics[1] and populate them with highlights from what I'm reading from across the internet- this can be a literal highlight from an article, a comment on HN, Reddit etc., a Kindle highlight from a book, anything really, as long as it is on-topic. There is always a link back to the original context for subscribers to dig in deeper if they want to. I think this is a real sweet spot. I cannot go back to feeds of anything and everything, a hodge-podge mixture of bad one-paragraph summaries or overwhelmingly long RSS item bodies. I want to know what exactly grabbed somebody's attention that made them think that something was worth sharing, what gripped them about it, and if it also grips me, I'll gladly go to the original context and read further to my heart's content. But I don't want a never ending queue of things that I have to put an outsized amount of effort into filtering through to even answer the question "is this something that interests me?" With the explosion of Mastodon I also added the ability for my RSS subscribers to comment on RSS items from my feed using their Mastodon accounts. So far, so good! [1]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado https://notado.app/feeds/jado

j45 4y ago
I have used Diigo for a long time in a similar way - bookmarks are useless, and I only remember the sentences in the links I’m after, not the url, plus tagging them. This seems like a much cleaner setup and can feed into indieweb as well. Thanks for sharing, I wouldn’t have gone looking for this.
- factsaresacred 4y ago
  Diigo is great - a web 2.0 sites that has just kept chugging along - and way underrated. The outliner[0] feature allows you create someting similar to notado. [0] https://www.diigo.com/outliner/start https://www.diigo.com/outliner/start
  - s3000 4y ago
    If somebody from Diigo is reading this: Why is there no content on the frontpage? It's a sleeping social network that could generate many more subscriptions. The Organize section could be like https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ The Share section could offer a feed of all content that users are willing to share publicly. There could be support for ActivityPub to make it a worthwhile investment of time. It should be a better sales channel to get new users hooked on good content first instead of forcing them to commit to a new account before trying anything.
    - j45 4y ago
      Diigo is really under rated They went down once in many years and I couldn’t use the web until it was back up.
hedora 4y ago
RSS feeds that don't contain the full article text drive me nuts. Here is a workaround that I've had good luck with: https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/ https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/ In addition to improving usability, it defeats attempts to measure clickbait summary efficacy, etc., since it breaks sites' ability to pull popularity / telemetry info.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
I prefer the substack model personally: full article with a link to the substack at the top and bottom. I feel a bit yanked around otherwise, speaking for myself anyway
s3000 4y ago
>I also added the ability for my RSS subscribers to comment on RSS items from my feed using their Mastodon accounts How does it work? Looking at a feed.rss file, I don't see any links to Mastodon posts. >I curate RSS feeds on specific topics >I think this is a real sweet spot. I cannot go back to feeds of anything and everything, a hodge-podge mixture of bad one-paragraph summaries or overwhelmingly long RSS item bodies. It is the sweet spot when it comes to consuming your feed on its own. In the context of other feeds, and you may have resolved it with Mastodon feedback, it still takes some time to find the best links in your feed. That's a quality on its own, so please don't feel pressured for change. However, these points would make it sweeter for me: * Showing the most popular highlights of the week, month and year, by user vote and by the popularity of the main article on social networks, as well as your personal favorites. * Find like-minded collectors who have included the same highlight or for further drill-down, a set of highlights. * It would also be interesting to see a note from you why you have selected a highlight, when that's appropriate. Further tags that could be used for sorting and ranking would also be nice.
- bsnnkv 4y ago
  > How does it work? It uses a "just in time" model to create a Mastodon post if it doesn't already exist when a user clicks on the "Comment" link (it also does a bunch of other stuff to handle truncation, fitting within the submission limits of the instance, making space for source links etc). I think it's important to try and be a good citizen on Mastodon instances run by volunteers and minimize unnecessary load. The reality is that not everyone is going to want to comment on every single item in a feed, so in my mind there is no point trying to having a 1/1 parity between RSS items and Mastodon points. Comments initiated by subscribers are posted on Mastodon with the "unlisted" visibility so they don't spam the public discoverability features in the instance timeline, but can be boosted by the curator at their discretion. The commenting user can also boost the highlight on their instance if they wish. > It would also be interesting to see a note from you why you have selected a highlight, when that's appropriate. I do this sometimes[1] - curators have an option to post a highlight directly to the public feed of their instance (ie. not unlisted), and then reply to that themselves with notes. I think I'm a little overdue in writing a blog post about this new feature! Stay tuned for a submission on HN hopefully sometime in the next week! [1]: https://hachyderm.io/@LGUG2Z/109479665631086833 https://hachyderm.io/@LGUG2Z/109479665631086833

by bsnnkv 4y ago

j45 4y ago

I have used Diigo for a long time in a similar way - bookmarks are useless, and I only remember the sentences in the links I’m after, not the url, plus tagging them. This seems like a much cleaner setup and can feed into indieweb as well. Thanks for sharing, I wouldn’t have gone looking for this.

factsaresacred 4y ago
Diigo is great - a web 2.0 sites that has just kept chugging along - and way underrated. The outliner[0] feature allows you create someting similar to notado. [0] https://www.diigo.com/outliner/start https://www.diigo.com/outliner/start
- s3000 4y ago
  If somebody from Diigo is reading this: Why is there no content on the frontpage? It's a sleeping social network that could generate many more subscriptions. The Organize section could be like https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ The Share section could offer a feed of all content that users are willing to share publicly. There could be support for ActivityPub to make it a worthwhile investment of time. It should be a better sales channel to get new users hooked on good content first instead of forcing them to commit to a new account before trying anything.
  - j45 4y ago
    Diigo is really under rated They went down once in many years and I couldn’t use the web until it was back up.

hedora 4y ago

RSS feeds that don't contain the full article text drive me nuts. Here is a workaround that I've had good luck with: https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/ https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/ In addition to improving usability, it defeats attempts to measure clickbait summary efficacy, etc., since it breaks sites' ability to pull popularity / telemetry info.

barbariangrunge 4y ago

I prefer the substack model personally: full article with a link to the substack at the top and bottom. I feel a bit yanked around otherwise, speaking for myself anyway

s3000 4y ago

>I also added the ability for my RSS subscribers to comment on RSS items from my feed using their Mastodon accounts How does it work? Looking at a feed.rss file, I don't see any links to Mastodon posts. >I curate RSS feeds on specific topics >I think this is a real sweet spot. I cannot go back to feeds of anything and everything, a hodge-podge mixture of bad one-paragraph summaries or overwhelmingly long RSS item bodies. It is the sweet spot when it comes to consuming your feed on its own. In the context of other feeds, and you may have resolved it with Mastodon feedback, it still takes some time to find the best links in your feed. That's a quality on its own, so please don't feel pressured for change. However, these points would make it sweeter for me: * Showing the most popular highlights of the week, month and year, by user vote and by the popularity of the main article on social networks, as well as your personal favorites. * Find like-minded collectors who have included the same highlight or for further drill-down, a set of highlights. * It would also be interesting to see a note from you why you have selected a highlight, when that's appropriate. Further tags that could be used for sorting and ranking would also be nice.

bsnnkv 4y ago
> How does it work? It uses a "just in time" model to create a Mastodon post if it doesn't already exist when a user clicks on the "Comment" link (it also does a bunch of other stuff to handle truncation, fitting within the submission limits of the instance, making space for source links etc). I think it's important to try and be a good citizen on Mastodon instances run by volunteers and minimize unnecessary load. The reality is that not everyone is going to want to comment on every single item in a feed, so in my mind there is no point trying to having a 1/1 parity between RSS items and Mastodon points. Comments initiated by subscribers are posted on Mastodon with the "unlisted" visibility so they don't spam the public discoverability features in the instance timeline, but can be boosted by the curator at their discretion. The commenting user can also boost the highlight on their instance if they wish. > It would also be interesting to see a note from you why you have selected a highlight, when that's appropriate. I do this sometimes[1] - curators have an option to post a highlight directly to the public feed of their instance (ie. not unlisted), and then reply to that themselves with notes. I think I'm a little overdue in writing a blog post about this new feature! Stay tuned for a submission on HN hopefully sometime in the next week! [1]: https://hachyderm.io/@LGUG2Z/109479665631086833 https://hachyderm.io/@LGUG2Z/109479665631086833