15 ms·

I ditched the algorithm for RSS

744 points by DearNarwhal 2y ago

digb 2y ago
Been on this tip for 6 months, glad to hear i am not alone
throw0101c 2y ago
Happy user of NetNewsWire on macOS for many, many years (including following HN, and a number YT channels).
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Yes it does.
    - Tomte 2y ago
      And the read/unread state of posts syncs, as well. Between MacOS, iPadOS and iOS.
- clean_send 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
- kevincox 2y ago
  > 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/#formats https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#form...
  - ttepasse 2y ago
    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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
Yes please, RSS is the true federated Internet for content distribution.
- patmorgan23 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    You're right I like their protocol, especially how they use domain name ownership for profile verification.
freetonik 2y ago
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/ https://minifeed.net/blogs/ There's an OPML export available as well: https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml
- DearNarwhal 2y ago
  I was looking for more feeds to subscribe to. Thanks for sharing!
  - superkuh 2y ago
    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/rss-feeds-2025.opml http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/feeds13.html http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/feeds13.html
  - deivid 2y ago
    I keep a blogroll[0] mostly on computing/programming [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html
- ikesau 2y ago
  There's also https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ and https://blogscroll.com/ https://blogscroll.com/
  - khet 2y ago
    and https://boredreading.com/ https://boredreading.com/
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
openrisk 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 https://bsky.app/profile/coverfire.com/feed/networking
- quantadev 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Mastodon supports RSS.
    - quantadev 2y ago
      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.
      - timbit42 2y ago
        I should have mentioned the entire Fediverse supports RSS.
bentt 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > it feels like You're correct - it's a feeling. But far from reality.
65 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Feedly (paid service though) does a good job of discovery on their search tool.
therealfiona 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I'm a big fan of miniflux, although I'm still looking for a mobile client that ticks all my boxes
  - reyqn 2y ago
    I just use the pwa, it works quite well.
- monksy 2y ago
  No, fresh RSS is heck of a lot better.
mnls 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development
- mawise 2y ago
  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 https://indieweb.org/social_reader
  - ttepasse 2y ago
    (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.)
Olshansky 2y ago
Wanted to share a repo I created last week to help add support for new RSS feeds: https://github.com/olshansk/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-using-claude https://olshansky.substack.com/p/no-rss-feed-no-problem-usin...
slightwinder 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Reeder if you're on MacOS/iOS. Most beautiful RSS client on the market. Feedly for a web client (paid sub required though)
  - openplatypus 2y ago
    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 2y ago
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/ https://seankilleen.com/reading-list/ [2]: https://seankilleen.com/2019/01/tutorial-reading-list-feedly-azure-functions/ https://seankilleen.com/2019/01/tutorial-reading-list-feedly...
arjie 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
I use inoreader - https://www.inoreader.com/ 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 2y ago
  Another happy Inoreader user here!
- Yhippa 2y ago
  I forgot I had an account there. Just logged in and this is great! Way less click-bait headlines unlike my Google Discover feed.
webscout 2y ago
[dead]
hprotagonist 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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/ https://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/
- zahlman 2y ago
  >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 2y ago
    I think the “washed in a steady stream” part is missing from RSS feeds. You’d need to join like meta rss feeds.
    - criddell 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        little "m" meta, as in "rss feeds about rss feeds" rather than big "M" Meta the company
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sewalsh 2y ago
Shout out to any share bro's out there! Long live RSS!
thought_alarm 2y ago
I never left RSS. After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org 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 2y ago
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-that-goes-beyond-tracking-rss-feeds/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/feeeed-is-a-reader-app-tha...
tokioyoyo 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
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 https://x.com/0xglitchbyte/status/1878495012800897229
- baggachipz 2y ago
  > saw this post going viral on X about RSS /irony meter explodes/
simonw 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Feedly is decent, too.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    Talking of clients, Telegram RSS bot is very convenient.
j2kun 2y ago
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 2y ago
  You are describing Postbacks: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postback https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postback
  - yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
    I don't think this Wikipedia page is describing the thing you think it is. Maybe it's the wrong link?
    - sltkr 2y ago
      He's probably thinking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
      - yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        Correct! Thanks for correcting
- mawise 2y ago
  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 https://havenweb.org/2023/04/10/private-comments.html
ndriscoll 2y ago
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 https://www.govinfo.gov/rss/bills.xml Want to follow SEC press releases? https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases.rss 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=2025-26&topic=SCHOOLS%20AND%20SCHOOL%20DISTRICTS https://app.leg.wa.gov/bi/report/topicalindex/?biennium=2025... The federal government has a big list at https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds. Your county might also have one (e.g. Spokane has https://www.spokanecounty.org/rss.aspx https://www.spokanecounty.org/rss.aspx).
- dergachev 2y ago
  Worthy to note that 3 of those sites are powered by Drupal. Sometimes dated open-source monolithic solutions are quite helpful.
- nfriedly 2y ago
  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-newsflash.xml https://www.troyohio.gov/RSSFeed.aspx?ModID=1&CID=All-newsfl... There's also a calendar feed with city council meetings and such.
  - EvanAnderson 2y ago
    (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.
verisimi 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
What client do you use on mobile and on desktop? I like very much Reeder Classic but perhaps there are better alternatives.
xenodium 2y ago
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 https://lmno.lol does rss too. Full content of course. For example, my blog https://lmno.lol/alvaro https://lmno.lol/alvaro and https://lmno.lol/alvaro/feed https://lmno.lol/alvaro/feed
kevinsundar 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
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/ 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 https://photos.rymc.io/?format=json Atom: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom RSS: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=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 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 2y ago
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/ https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/
netghost 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      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.
dwwoelfel 2y ago
If you want an RSS feed of your YouTube video subscriptions, I made an app for that: https://yt-better-subs.web.app/ 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 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  This is a rate limiting problem
mrtz 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005.html
bluGill 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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.
gfiorav 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
I've been building a site that automatically shows RSS feeds for the front page of Hacker News. https://rss.surf 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 https://lighthouseapp.io
artisanspam 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
qudat 2y ago
For anyone looking for an rss-to-email service, check out https://pico.sh/feeds https://pico.sh/feeds You can manage your email digests completely through the CLI and we are constantly making improvements to the service.
adeptima 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Why aren't you a fan? That feels like saying 'not a fan of newspaper delivery, but...'.
  - adeptima 2y ago
    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 2y ago
My biggest complaint with the algorithm is to stop assuming what I like and pollute my feed with random irrelevant content.
deleted 2y ago
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shw1n 2y ago
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-videos/gegnmhhldelndhpdhgjadnaiiofhjfei?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/remove-twitter-vide...
mulderc 2y ago
I remember back when people were ditching RSS for twitter and I thought it was insane. Looks like I was right!
dtonon 2y ago
RSS is great, Nostr is potentially greater. A lot of work is being put in "transparent" and customizable algorithms for discoverability.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  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 2y ago
redlib supports rss feeds and is a much better ad-free, tracker-free, distraction-free frontend for reddit
latexr 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
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/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ More stuff: Blogs & RSS https://rssfeedasap.com/ https://rssfeedasap.com/ https://code.rosaelefanten.org/rssparser.lisp/dir?ci=tip 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 https://politepol.com/en/prices PS: If you have an idea for a RSS reader domain, please suggest.
- acidburnNSA 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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/TwitterV2.html https://rss-bridge.github.io/rss-bridge/Bridge_Specific/Twit...
    - acidburnNSA 2y ago
      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 https://docs.rsshub.app/routes/social-media#x-twitter
    - 2y ago
deegles 2y ago
I still miss Google Reader.
atmosx 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    Yeap. That's why I wrote "side-project".
hellcow 2y ago
Not a single mention here of FeedFlow, available on F-Droid. An absolute gem of an app.
sigmonsays 2y ago
miniflux is where it's at what we need next is a way to categorize, group subscribe to similar rss
fuddle 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
I've recently launched Mashups.io - my own Yahoo Pipes tool. https://www.mashups.io 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.
- OrangeMusic 2y ago
  Just tried it, unfortunately creating a new project and clicking on Save doesn't do anything. The loader in the save button animates forever and nothing happens.
- spintin 2y ago
  [dead]
sporkland 2y ago
I use https://theoldreader.com/ 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
I made my blog software support all feed types back in the day: http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?json http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?json http://sprout.rupy.se/feed http://sprout.rupy.se/feed (my own :P) It's open-source: http://github.com/tinspin/sprout http://github.com/tinspin/sprout
gunian 2y ago
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 2y ago
Has anyone been able to figure out how to generate RSS feeds for Nextdoor?
deleted 2y ago
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kuringganteng 2y ago
[flagged]
grahamj 2y ago
I left most socials years ago. Feedly for aggregation and desktop reading, and Reeder as a client for it on iDevices.
monkaiju 2y ago
Going to be increasingly necessary as search engines continue to get worse.
lucasfdacunha 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
  Could you describe how you find news with rss? Would this work for tech content in general?
purplezooey 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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/ https://motherfuckingrssreader.com/
fallinditch 2y ago
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/ https://hoarder.app/
parski 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    If you want to give a word filter a try, you can check out https://lighthouseapp.io/ 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 2y ago
      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 https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard
- Avamander 2y ago
  I use Feedbin (self-hosted) and it has no difficulty with displaying images.
  - sjs382 2y ago
    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 2y ago
Just FYI, If you want FREE, synchronizing reader, be sure to checkout Vivaldi browser.
andreasscherman 2y ago
I took the other approach: I ditched the algorithm for newsletters: https://redditletter.com https://redditletter.com
maxglute 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
This blog has a really strange RSS feed link https://joeyehand.com/feed_rss_created.xml https://joeyehand.com/feed_rss_created.xml I wonder why.
renegat0x0 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
Same! I'm creating telegram channels for topics using https://github.com/Rongronggg9/RSS-to-Telegram-Bot https://github.com/Rongronggg9/RSS-to-Telegram-Bot That's how I found out about this post https://t.me/best_hn/99 https://t.me/best_hn/99
solaire_oa 2y ago
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.
dhfgdufyge 2y ago
[dead]
lylo 2y ago
Great post. Given me a bunch of ideas to add to my RSS app at https://feedgrab.net https://feedgrab.net!
digest 2y ago
So this is why I built Digest (https://usedigest.com 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.
jenkings 2y ago
To stop myself scrolling hacker news multiple times a day I created https://rssby.email https://rssby.email and I’ve been using it successfully since 2020.
manuu80 2y ago
HN rss Feed on /best is not working anymore since around a month, any alternative?
kschaul 2y ago
I love RSS, but I often want to create a feed from websites that don’t offer RSS support (or the right features). So I built a little web service that, given a URL and a CSS selector, returns an RSS feed of those items. Figured it might be useful for others too. Code -> https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker Hosted version -> https://feedmaker.fly.dev/ https://feedmaker.fly.dev/

744 points by DearNarwhal 2y ago

digb 2y ago

Been on this tip for 6 months, glad to hear i am not alone

throw0101c 2y ago

Happy user of NetNewsWire on macOS for many, many years (including following HN, and a number YT channels).

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Yes it does.
  - Tomte 2y ago
    And the read/unread state of posts syncs, as well. Between MacOS, iPadOS and iOS.
clean_send 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)

kevincox 2y ago
> 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/#formats https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#form...
- ttepasse 2y ago
  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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

Yes please, RSS is the true federated Internet for content distribution.

patmorgan23 2y ago
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 2y ago
  You're right I like their protocol, especially how they use domain name ownership for profile verification.

freetonik 2y ago

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/ https://minifeed.net/blogs/ There's an OPML export available as well: https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml

DearNarwhal 2y ago
I was looking for more feeds to subscribe to. Thanks for sharing!
- superkuh 2y ago
  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/rss-feeds-2025.opml http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/feeds13.html http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/feeds13.html
- deivid 2y ago
  I keep a blogroll[0] mostly on computing/programming [0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html
ikesau 2y ago
There's also https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ and https://blogscroll.com/ https://blogscroll.com/
- khet 2y ago
  and https://boredreading.com/ https://boredreading.com/
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

openrisk 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 https://bsky.app/profile/coverfire.com/feed/networking

quantadev 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Mastodon supports RSS.
  - quantadev 2y ago
    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.
    - timbit42 2y ago
      I should have mentioned the entire Fediverse supports RSS.

bentt 2y ago

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 2y ago
> it feels like You're correct - it's a feeling. But far from reality.

65 2y ago

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 2y ago
Feedly (paid service though) does a good job of discovery on their search tool.

therealfiona 2y ago

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 2y ago
I'm a big fan of miniflux, although I'm still looking for a mobile client that ticks all my boxes
- reyqn 2y ago
  I just use the pwa, it works quite well.
monksy 2y ago
No, fresh RSS is heck of a lot better.

mnls 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development

mawise 2y ago
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 https://indieweb.org/social_reader
- ttepasse 2y ago
  (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.)

Olshansky 2y ago

Wanted to share a repo I created last week to help add support for new RSS feeds: https://github.com/olshansk/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-using-claude https://olshansky.substack.com/p/no-rss-feed-no-problem-usin...

slightwinder 2y ago

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 2y ago
Reeder if you're on MacOS/iOS. Most beautiful RSS client on the market. Feedly for a web client (paid sub required though)
- openplatypus 2y ago
  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 2y ago

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/ https://seankilleen.com/reading-list/ [2]: https://seankilleen.com/2019/01/tutorial-reading-list-feedly-azure-functions/ https://seankilleen.com/2019/01/tutorial-reading-list-feedly...

arjie 2y ago

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 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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago

I use inoreader - https://www.inoreader.com/ 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 2y ago
Another happy Inoreader user here!
Yhippa 2y ago
I forgot I had an account there. Just logged in and this is great! Way less click-bait headlines unlike my Google Discover feed.

webscout 2y ago

[dead]

hprotagonist 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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/ https://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/

zahlman 2y ago
>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 2y ago
  I think the “washed in a steady stream” part is missing from RSS feeds. You’d need to join like meta rss feeds.
  - criddell 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      little "m" meta, as in "rss feeds about rss feeds" rather than big "M" Meta the company

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sewalsh 2y ago

Shout out to any share bro's out there! Long live RSS!

thought_alarm 2y ago

I never left RSS. After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org 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 2y ago

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-that-goes-beyond-tracking-rss-feeds/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/11/feeeed-is-a-reader-app-tha...

tokioyoyo 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago

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 https://x.com/0xglitchbyte/status/1878495012800897229

baggachipz 2y ago
> saw this post going viral on X about RSS /irony meter explodes/

simonw 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
Feedly is decent, too.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  Talking of clients, Telegram RSS bot is very convenient.

j2kun 2y ago

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 2y ago
You are describing Postbacks: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postback https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postback
- yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
  I don't think this Wikipedia page is describing the thing you think it is. Maybe it's the wrong link?
  - sltkr 2y ago
    He's probably thinking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
    - yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      Correct! Thanks for correcting
mawise 2y ago
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 https://havenweb.org/2023/04/10/private-comments.html

ndriscoll 2y ago

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 https://www.govinfo.gov/rss/bills.xml Want to follow SEC press releases? https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases.rss 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=2025-26&topic=SCHOOLS%20AND%20SCHOOL%20DISTRICTS https://app.leg.wa.gov/bi/report/topicalindex/?biennium=2025... The federal government has a big list at https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds. Your county might also have one (e.g. Spokane has https://www.spokanecounty.org/rss.aspx https://www.spokanecounty.org/rss.aspx).

dergachev 2y ago
Worthy to note that 3 of those sites are powered by Drupal. Sometimes dated open-source monolithic solutions are quite helpful.
nfriedly 2y ago
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-newsflash.xml https://www.troyohio.gov/RSSFeed.aspx?ModID=1&CID=All-newsfl... There's also a calendar feed with city council meetings and such.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  (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.

verisimi 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

What client do you use on mobile and on desktop? I like very much Reeder Classic but perhaps there are better alternatives.

xenodium 2y ago

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 https://lmno.lol does rss too. Full content of course. For example, my blog https://lmno.lol/alvaro https://lmno.lol/alvaro and https://lmno.lol/alvaro/feed https://lmno.lol/alvaro/feed

kevinsundar 2y ago

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 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 2y ago

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/ 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 https://photos.rymc.io/?format=json Atom: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom RSS: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=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 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 2y ago

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/ https://journal.jatan.space/why-use-rss/

netghost 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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.

dwwoelfel 2y ago

If you want an RSS feed of your YouTube video subscriptions, I made an app for that: https://yt-better-subs.web.app/ 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 2y ago

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 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
This is a rate limiting problem

mrtz 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005.html

bluGill 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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.

gfiorav 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

I've been building a site that automatically shows RSS feeds for the front page of Hacker News. https://rss.surf 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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 https://lighthouseapp.io

artisanspam 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.

qudat 2y ago

For anyone looking for an rss-to-email service, check out https://pico.sh/feeds https://pico.sh/feeds You can manage your email digests completely through the CLI and we are constantly making improvements to the service.

adeptima 2y ago

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 2y ago
Why aren't you a fan? That feels like saying 'not a fan of newspaper delivery, but...'.
- adeptima 2y ago
  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 2y ago

My biggest complaint with the algorithm is to stop assuming what I like and pollute my feed with random irrelevant content.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

shw1n 2y ago

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-videos/gegnmhhldelndhpdhgjadnaiiofhjfei?hl=en https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/remove-twitter-vide...

mulderc 2y ago

I remember back when people were ditching RSS for twitter and I thought it was insane. Looks like I was right!

dtonon 2y ago

RSS is great, Nostr is potentially greater. A lot of work is being put in "transparent" and customizable algorithms for discoverability.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
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 2y ago

redlib supports rss feeds and is a much better ad-free, tracker-free, distraction-free frontend for reddit

latexr 2y ago

> 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 2y ago

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/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ More stuff: Blogs & RSS https://rssfeedasap.com/ https://rssfeedasap.com/ https://code.rosaelefanten.org/rssparser.lisp/dir?ci=tip 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 https://politepol.com/en/prices PS: If you have an idea for a RSS reader domain, please suggest.

acidburnNSA 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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/TwitterV2.html https://rss-bridge.github.io/rss-bridge/Bridge_Specific/Twit...
  - acidburnNSA 2y ago
    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 https://docs.rsshub.app/routes/social-media#x-twitter
  - 2y ago

deegles 2y ago

I still miss Google Reader.

atmosx 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  Yeap. That's why I wrote "side-project".

hellcow 2y ago

Not a single mention here of FeedFlow, available on F-Droid. An absolute gem of an app.

sigmonsays 2y ago

miniflux is where it's at what we need next is a way to categorize, group subscribe to similar rss

fuddle 2y ago

> 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 2y ago

I've recently launched Mashups.io - my own Yahoo Pipes tool. https://www.mashups.io 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.

OrangeMusic 2y ago
Just tried it, unfortunately creating a new project and clicking on Save doesn't do anything. The loader in the save button animates forever and nothing happens.
spintin 2y ago
[dead]

sporkland 2y ago

I use https://theoldreader.com/ 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 2y ago
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 2y ago

I made my blog software support all feed types back in the day: http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?json http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?json http://sprout.rupy.se/feed http://sprout.rupy.se/feed (my own :P) It's open-source: http://github.com/tinspin/sprout http://github.com/tinspin/sprout

gunian 2y ago

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 2y ago

Has anyone been able to figure out how to generate RSS feeds for Nextdoor?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kuringganteng 2y ago

[flagged]

grahamj 2y ago

I left most socials years ago. Feedly for aggregation and desktop reading, and Reeder as a client for it on iDevices.

monkaiju 2y ago

Going to be increasingly necessary as search engines continue to get worse.

lucasfdacunha 2y ago

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 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 2y ago
Could you describe how you find news with rss? Would this work for tech content in general?

purplezooey 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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/ https://motherfuckingrssreader.com/

fallinditch 2y ago

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/ https://hoarder.app/

parski 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  If you want to give a word filter a try, you can check out https://lighthouseapp.io/ 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 2y ago
    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 https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard
Avamander 2y ago
I use Feedbin (self-hosted) and it has no difficulty with displaying images.
- sjs382 2y ago
  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 2y ago

Just FYI, If you want FREE, synchronizing reader, be sure to checkout Vivaldi browser.

andreasscherman 2y ago

I took the other approach: I ditched the algorithm for newsletters: https://redditletter.com https://redditletter.com

maxglute 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

This blog has a really strange RSS feed link https://joeyehand.com/feed_rss_created.xml https://joeyehand.com/feed_rss_created.xml I wonder why.

renegat0x0 2y ago

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 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 2y ago

Same! I'm creating telegram channels for topics using https://github.com/Rongronggg9/RSS-to-Telegram-Bot https://github.com/Rongronggg9/RSS-to-Telegram-Bot That's how I found out about this post https://t.me/best_hn/99 https://t.me/best_hn/99

solaire_oa 2y ago

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.

dhfgdufyge 2y ago

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lylo 2y ago

Great post. Given me a bunch of ideas to add to my RSS app at https://feedgrab.net https://feedgrab.net!

digest 2y ago

So this is why I built Digest (https://usedigest.com 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.

jenkings 2y ago

To stop myself scrolling hacker news multiple times a day I created https://rssby.email https://rssby.email and I’ve been using it successfully since 2020.

manuu80 2y ago

HN rss Feed on /best is not working anymore since around a month, any alternative?

kschaul 2y ago

I love RSS, but I often want to create a feed from websites that don’t offer RSS support (or the right features). So I built a little web service that, given a URL and a CSS selector, returns an RSS feed of those items. Figured it might be useful for others too. Code -> https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker https://github.com/kevinschaul/feedmaker Hosted version -> https://feedmaker.fly.dev/ https://feedmaker.fly.dev/