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In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information

runningmike 1y ago
Simple is use your thunderbird mail to read RSS feeds. Check https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feeds-and-blogs https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...
ggeorgovassilis 1y ago
I'm self-hosting FreshRSS [1] with Docker on a Hetzner VM. Fast, clutter-free, has everything I need. [1] https://freshrss.org/index.html https://freshrss.org/index.html Edit: typo
- nextzck 1y ago
  I just bought a reseller plan from verpex host for $5/month. Can host unlimited domains and bandwidth with WHM. Access everything through cPanel and ftp. SSH on occasion. Installed freshRSS in 1 min with softaculous
- senectus1 1y ago
  freshrss is excellent.
- lknuth 1y ago
  I built my own reader because I didn't want unread items to accumulate. It just shows what was published the last X days. The result is that there is no need for persistent storage, so its real easy to host. If you're interested, its here: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    My specific need for RSS is the accumulation. There are people who post once a week and I don't want to miss the posts because I was offline at the time.
- timeon 1y ago
  What the purpose of hosting whole reader instead of local app? Or is that something else/more than reader?
  - ggeorgovassilis 1y ago
    Runs 24/7. Also, I already host other things on the server, so there is no added cost.
  - buu709 1y ago
    Allows you to check your feeds from multiple devices. For example I usually read from my phone, but sometimes would like to check my feeds from my desktop. You could just subscribe to the same feeds from multiple devices/apps, but then you have to manually keep track of what's already been read and that will quickly get out of hand.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    Synced read state. If I read from my mobile using NetNewsWire and then go on my laptop and read with the FreshRSS web client, I don't need to wade through a bunch of articles I already read.
hn-ifs 1y ago
I love RSS. Like all the old web tech the user is in control. If I like a page/site I'll look for an RSS to keep up to date with it, if one doesn't exist I'll likely forget about it. I'm not signing up for email updates.
panstromek 1y ago
> As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would flood their pages with multiple posts per day The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention. That's one of the main reasons fb and other sites implemented algorithmic feeds in the first place. If you take away the time component, posters compete on quality instead. > The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it adapts to everyone’s taste and interests, but that’s only true until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture. Yea, exactly, but as emphasized here: The problem is not curation, the problem is the curator. Feed algorithms are important, they solve real problems. I don't think going back to RSS and chronolgical feed is the answer. I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention. That doesn't make any sense. Quantity might make you more prominent in a unified facebook feed, but an RSS reader will show it like this: Sam and Fuzzy (5) Station V3 (128) They've always displayed that way. You never see one feed mixed into another feed. This problem can't arise in RSS. There is no such incentive. Quantity is a negative thing; when I see that I've missed 128 posts, I'm just going to say "mark all as read" and forget about them. (In fact, I have 174 unread posts in Volokh Conspiracy A† right now. I will not be reading all of those.) † Volokh Conspiracy is hosted on Reason. Reason provides an official feed at http://reason.com/volokh/atom.xml http://reason.com/volokh/atom.xml . But Volokh Conspiracy also provides an independent feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/volokh/mainfeed http://feeds.feedburner.com/volokh/mainfeed . Some of their posts go into one of those feeds, and the rest go into the other. I can't imagine that they do this on purpose, but it is what they do.
  - pbmonster 1y ago
    > They've always displayed that way. You never see one feed mixed into another feed. This problem can't arise in RSS. All readers I know have the option to display all feeds chronologically, or an entire folder of feeds chronologically. In most, that's the default setting when you open the app/page. I always use it like that. If I'd want to see all new posts from a single author, I might as well just bookmark their blog.
nesk_ 1y ago
I've ditched RSS feeds more than 10 years ago but I'm increasingly wanting to go back to them. Thank you for sharing this blog post, it'll help to get me started.
- pbmonster 1y ago
  The best thing about modern RSS is that you can retire entire accounts. I don't have YouTube or Twitter accounts, I use RSS to subscribe to channels/users/tags.
  - nofunsir 1y ago
    Shhh - they'll hear you! Surely it will be deleted as soon as some manager remembers it exists.
    - latexr 1y ago
      The day YouTube removes RSS feeds is the day I stop watching entirely.
  - barrenko 1y ago
    This is the key imho, adapting stuff to yourself / your needs, when and where the GloboHomoCorp allows you to. E.g. I don't use Twitter directly due to toxicity and overwhelmingness of the central feed (thank you Nikita), and due to, for me, the biggest issue - how shit it is for reading / following individual user feeds - when you find someone who's really interesting, and you don't want to miss posts. So I use nitter and bookmark each person's profile I find interesting and I have that in a separate folder. Then at my pace, daily or weekly I read through people's posts and can really keep up like God intended me to. At first it was less engaging than just having Twitter (as it's less adictive), and I've paced from deleting / using actual Twitter back and forth, but due to recent changes and events I've actually come to a place where through my bookmarks I discover new profiles / people / interests / niches at an organic pace that I can only compare to how I've used to use RSS or web in the older times. It's quite cool.
  - Kye 1y ago
robin_reala 1y ago
One thing that I did to kickstart my RSS usage again was to revisit each site I was subscribed to and: - Remove it if it posted more than once a day. I want thoughtful voices, not other people’s aggregation. - Remove it if it hadn’t posted in the last few years. Some people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that most blogs that are 5+ years old aren’t coming back. - Remove it if the overall tone of the blog is too negative. I then added a bunch of new feeds from people I’m currently actively following on other platforms who are blogging. This was a massive breath of fresh air, that has got me actively engaging with my feed reader for the first time in a few years. (Related to my second point: I’m not the first person to note this but there’s a real sadness to watching an old and beloved blog nova itself into your feed in a burst of gambling site spam. Better to get out before that happens.)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- lou1306 1y ago
  > - Remove it if it hadn’t posted in the last few years. Some people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that most blogs that are 5+ years old aren’t coming back. This I don't really understand. Following inactive feeds via RSS comes effectively at no cost for you. How does removing them improve the experience?
  - robin_reala 1y ago
    See my follow-on note at the end of the post, but also it’s just a psychological out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new point that marks a change.
    - account42 1y ago
      It would be cool if you could somehow be notified when the ownership of a domain changes so you could take that action when it makes sense instead of preemptively killing subscriptions.
  - 1y ago
fjghajkhdfgjlk 1y ago
Any recommendations for a self-hosted RSS reader with a good companion android app (or at least a decent mobile website)?
- freetonik 1y ago
  Miniflux is lovely, and the mobile website is decent https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/
  - cpbotha 1y ago
    One more vote for miniflux, which I run on a "server" (old laptop with linux...) at my house and access from anywhere thanks to cloudflare tunnels.
    - suckler 1y ago
      We must be related, I'm doing the exact same thing.
  - ktosobcy 1y ago
    I love miniflux. Switched from inoreader when they started imposing more and more limits and changing the UI. With miniflux I have not limits with unread items/feeds. I can set check frequency to what I want and I actually don't need the app as the www ui is just brillinat!
  - mgerb 1y ago
    Big fan of miniflux with this dark theme https://github.com/catppuccin/miniflux https://github.com/catppuccin/miniflux
  - 93n 1y ago
    Another +1 for miniflux. Something atypical about my setup is that I wired up miniflux webhooks to n8n and gotify so that when I click "save" on an entry, I get a notification for it. It's a rudimentary way to setup a "read it later" list.
- 1y ago
freetonik 1y ago
If you want to discover personal, human-written blogs with valid RSS feeds, check out the directory I'm building: https://minifeed.net/blogs https://minifeed.net/blogs (it's also a reader of sorts, and has related discovery and full-text search across those feeds and posts, but the page I linked is just a big list of blogs with some recent posts and RSS links).
- alastairr 1y ago
  Love this! Something I've been working on that is a bit similar https://blognerd.app/?qry=AI+research+llms&type=sites&content=&time= https://blognerd.app/?qry=AI+research+llms&type=sites&conten... you can search for blogs with feeds, and find blogs by semantic similarity
- sameline 1y ago
  Cool project! I use https://ooh.directory https://ooh.directory but will check your directory out too.
nake89 1y ago
Page seems to be hugged to death. Here is an archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20251003062648/https://blog.burkert.me/posts/in_praise_of_syndication/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251003062648/https://blog.burk...
- 5d41402abc4b 1y ago
  This looks like a static page. How much load do you need for a server hosting static page to go down?
- curioussquirrel 1y ago
  I may need to talk to my hosting provider :) Thanks for pointing this out. The site is indeed statically generated (Hugo), so this should not be happening.
beardyw 1y ago
I use RSS a lot but it is not without it's own difficulties. My collection of feeds is naturally geared to my own interests and world views. As a result I do find I miss out on some things I should pay attention to. To counter this I include a fact checking site which brings stories I would otherwise miss to my attention. Not ideal, but it works.
- curioussquirrel 1y ago
  This is very much true, and one of the downsides of RSS is that you need to make effort to discover new sources, or make sure that what you're consuming is at least somewhat balanced. However you have no guarantees of the latter when you use algorithmic feeds.
sph 1y ago
I love RSS. I literally just bought an app on itch.io, and to my surprise the devlog page for it, which lists all the new updates, supports RSS. I love when it happens. [1] RSS didn't stick for me until: 1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would miss stuff I actually care about. 2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing. Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles, OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50 unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio. 3. https://fetchrss.com/ https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs. I pay for Feedbin, and it's great. --- 1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.
- latexr 1y ago
  > I used to subscribe to (…) the top HN frontpage articles https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points, or other metrics. > These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell. Doesn’t your feed service/app auto-detect feeds if you just paste the webpage? That’s a common feature.
  - bluebarbet 1y ago
    Alternative: https://hnrss.org/ https://hnrss.org/ PS: it's just a shortcut
  - sph 1y ago
    > https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points, or other metrics. Yes, that's the one I used, but I feel it's still too much noise. You don't want a firehose in your RSS feeds. Just open https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com when you want to doomscroll through an almost endless stream of information. RSS doesn't work well with social media, and that's a feature.
rethab 1y ago
Shout out to Blogtrottr[1], which allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and have the posts sent to you via email. Great service I've been using for years. [1] https://blogtrottr.com https://blogtrottr.com
pantulis 1y ago
The key with RSS is curation, otherwise it stops being your "controlled feed". FOMO can make you add noisy feeds that basically are putting too much information that will dwarf the relevant feeds. In my case, I follow Hacker News and Slashdot which are ok but also thought it was a good idea to add "The Verge | All posts" to my feed reader and I find myself hitting "Mark all as read" continuosly. It's not The Verge's fault of course, it's my lack of strategy.
- jordyjor 1y ago
  Agreed in the general. Though one useful feature in FreshRSS that I've made heavy use of (no idea if there are equivalents in other readers) is the ability to mark new entries in a feed as read immediately upon receiving them. Initially seemed counterintuitive when I first saw the option, but I've found it's actually quite useful for me. It allows for a separation of true feeds coming from a person that I typically will want to read and take manual action on. Or more shotgun feeds that are continuously putting out stuff that I will choose to dip into when I feel like it (HN front page or Slashdot being examples of that). Without the ever-increasing counter of unread articles to think about.
  - pantulis 1y ago
    This is a great feature. And I found I can create a similar rule with Inoreader, thanks!
phaser 1y ago
I miss RSS too much, I have decided to start using it again today. For those who are in it, what is your favorite client?
- steadicat 1y ago
  This app made me fall in love with RSS after years of trying: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com/ https://feeeed.nateparrott.com/
- latexr 1y ago
  Reeder Classic. Not a subscription, looks good, works well. But it’s only available for Apple operating systems, and the developer is not responsive to bug reports (fortunately, there aren’t many and they are tiny). News Explorer is a decent alternative (but same OS restriction). That developer is responsive.
- miladyincontrol 1y ago
  NetNewsWire, great open source client on ios, good for mac too. Though I feed it via tiny tiny rss with the freshrss api plugin so I can have saner filtering and curation before it gets to the reader. The 'awesome tiny tiny rss' docker image is pretty decent setup for getting it running if you have any interest, though personally I ended up rolling my own static binary using frankenphp somewhat based off their setup. The core dev of tiny tiny rss is a bit, opinionated lets just say.
  - HankStallone 1y ago
    I don't use docker, so I stuck with an ancient version of TT-RSS for years. But last week I couldn't get it to play nice with my new FreeBSD system and its updated PHP, so I installed from the git repo with surprisingly little trouble.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  NetNewsWire is a great RSS client and one of the best designed apps, both on iOS and OS X.
perching_aix 1y ago
I find this to be misguided tech-nostalgia. What you control this way is the way information is brokered to you. It only controls the information reaching you itself to the extent that is reflected in the delivery method. This is significant if you're a staunch subscriber to the idea that everything, and I really do mean everything, wrong with social and mass media is the "algorithms" (formerly: capitalism, sensationalism, etc.), but I'm not. I find that to be at most half the story. In the end, you're consuming something someone else produced for you to consume. That's why it's available. So you're relying on that information to be something you don't find inherently objectionable, or at least be filterable in that regard, which is not a given. We consume arbitrary and natural language content. Most you can do is feed it through AI to pre-digest it for you, which can and will fail in numerous ways. And this is to say nothing about content that wasn't produced and/or didn't reach you. The reason older technologies felt better wasn't necessarily just because of them per se, but also because of their cultural context. These are interwoven of course, but I wouldn't necessarily trust that reverting back to old technology is what's going to steer back this ship to a better course. I'm afraid this is a lot more like undropping a mug than it is like applying negation.
- whism 1y ago
  I think you almost have a point in that you seem to be advocating for something along the lines of unbiased input (questioning the presented information because it was constructed for presentation, suggesting that an AI could somehow assist, presumably to help ground your information in a wider context etc) I think what you may be missing is the role of trust. There is much to say about that, but in this instance, a nice thing about RSS is that I can trust the algorithm it uses to generate my feed. It is very simple, and I, myself choose the sources it draws from. With some other systems, this is not the case.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    > I think you almost have a point Thank you for almost granting me the capability of having a point. That is very nice of you. I am not missing the role of trust. I have instead simply had that trust betrayed countless of times by now, so I'm seeking a little more. It would be a great first step, but far from the whole journey. And so I'm wary of people mistaking the latter for the former, intentionally or otherwise.
buzzy_hacker 1y ago
Also shout out to https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ for converting email subscriptions to RSS feeds
- curioussquirrel 1y ago
  I don't use it personally but have heard good things! Thanks for mentioning it.
whism 1y ago
If someone can please figure out how to integrate a purchase/payment system into a similar protocol we would love you forever :) I would so love to help my many artist/musician friends get set up direct-to-consumer with digital content, subscriptions etc — and with their own shops, that they can run, in whatever funky style.
- lou1306 1y ago
  Patreon and Spotify already implement subscription-based podcasts, and I am positive they use RSS/Atom under the hood. So the tech is already out there, you just need to turn it into a self-hosted solution.
  - curioussquirrel 1y ago
    Indeed, Patreon has private feeds for patrons for exclusive content. That's a decent solution but it's platform-specific, which is both a bad thing (not easily used elsewhere) and good (backwards compatible with good old RSS).
    - lou1306 1y ago
      Did not know Patreon's tech was lock-in. I subscribe to a podcast on Spotify and they give you a private URL that you can feed to any app. If you are worried about malicious customers sharing the URL you may likely enable some form of rate limiting (e.g. the server may only serve up to x MiB/month on this URL)
- realityfactchex 1y ago
  Why not just set them up with Catbox Spaces [0, 1]? [0] https://blog.catbox.moe/post/774800476681207808/introducing-catbox-spaces-server-upgrades https://blog.catbox.moe/post/774800476681207808/introducing-... [1] https://catbox.tech https://catbox.tech
sicariomoon 1y ago
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mustaphah 1y ago
Great post! Indeed, social media platforms optimize for engagement and ad revenue, not user needs. Feeds are a user right, not a publisher favor. In that spirit: I recently built RSSible - a tiny tool that lets you turn any webpage into an RSS feed via CSS selectors. I've built this for myself; already using it for HN, Product Hunt, tldr.tech, r/science, IMDb latest shows, RubyOnRemote, and many more. It's still early, but if anyone here is curious to try or test, I'd love feedback. (You can see live demos on the site) RSSible: https://rssible.hadid.dev/ https://rssible.hadid.dev/ Github: https://github.com/mhadidg/rssible https://github.com/mhadidg/rssible
- codazoda 1y ago
  Impossible for me to read in dark mode.
  - mustaphah 1y ago
    Never meant to support dark mode. Looks like water.css (the CSS lib I'm using) supports it by default. My custom CSS is breaking things. I'll try to force light mode initially and will definitely fix the dark mode later. Thanks a lot for flagging this!
  - mustaphah 1y ago
    It should look better now. I fixed the input text color.
throw0101d 1y ago
Reminder that Atom exists: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
- latexr 1y ago
  As do JSON feeds. But in general “RSS” has become kind of the shorthand for all feeds of this type. Most feed readers support all formats, so the distinction doesn’t really matter that much.
zby 1y ago
The root problem here is that a communication channel full of noise is not valuable - but on the other hand if you have a very selective channel - then nobody will subscribe because to subscribe you need repeated good interactions.
AlfredBarnes 1y ago
I recently made a little RSS feed reader, and its barebones lives on my machine, and is powered by python. I never could get into any of the RSS reader software it all seemed very happy to put random things in the feed that i didn't care about. A strict timeline of things i want to read is all I want. If there is nothing new there is nothing new and I'm okay with that. Thanks for the write up and read.
- AlfredBarnes 1y ago
  Something else i HIGHLY recommend is subscribing to youtube channels Via RSS. You ACTUALLY KNOW WHEN SOMETHING IS NEW. I've gone way down on my youtube watching rabbit holes since I only engage with it when I have a new video.
brainzap 1y ago
NetNewsWire on macOS
renegat0x0 1y ago
Most people complain about the signal-to-noise ratio in news consumption. I believe the issue isn’t the news sources themselves, but rather the lack of a proper RSS application. A great RSS app should offer a powerful search function. It should support tagging, bookmarking, scoring or point systems, categories, and a "read later" feature, among other things. You don’t need to eliminate news sources — just use filters and search tools to surface what matters to you. An ideal RSS reader should also be smart enough to bypass things like Cloudflare and other unnecessary protections that break RSS functionality. Unfortunately, many mobile RSS apps fall short in this regard — and mobile is king these days. To get something truly useful, you often need to self-host. But most people won’t go that far. Personally, I self-host my RSS reader. I even built my own client, since I wasn’t aware of KaraKeep (formerly Hoarder) at the time. I’m still using my custom app because it’s now very versatile, and I’m not sure KaraKeep would meet all my needs. Links: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS - all about RSS https://rssisawesome.com/ https://rssisawesome.com/ https://rssgizmos.com/ https://rssgizmos.com/ https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds
- ghostpepper 1y ago
  I agree that most rss clients lack true power user features for searching and filtering. I spent a bit of time proving out an idea to use Bleve indexing to allow scoring each article with weighted keywords but I haven’t had time to work on it lately. I’ll have a look at your links.
- HankStallone 1y ago
  It's strange how all these modern communication methods (blogs, forums, RSS readers) so often fail to have features that were available in Usenet newsreaders 30+ years ago. We had threading, searching, killfiling or scoring, marking posts to save, all pretty common features then. I'm not sure why there isn't more demand for them now.
  - asjo 1y ago
Egor3f 1y ago
I think this post is the best place to "promote" my open-source pet project It converts any dynamic website to rss feed It's self-hosted and stateless https://github.com/Egor3f/rssalchemy https://github.com/Egor3f/rssalchemy It's however not in active development state, but if there will be some pull requests I'll review them, so it's not abandoned Demo page is not working now, but if there will be some activity, I'll bring it back up
vamosg 1y ago
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NoSalt 1y ago
I am currently working on a [personal use] MagicMirror replacement. One of the things I like about MagicMirror is the RSS newsfeed at the bottom of the screen, so I have been getting into RSS more recently, and really enjoying it. The only "problem" is trying to narrow down all the great content.
john-tells-all 1y ago
I've paid for Feedly for years and use it daily. One section is "Hacker News People". When I find someone on HN who writes well, I subscribe to their comments in a RSS feed, so I can read everything they write. Very often they comment on a link I don't see on my main HN page, which is useful. App http://hnapp.com/ http://hnapp.com/ converts names to RSS feeds. Example: `author:nickjj`
- xorvoid 1y ago
  This is a fantastic idea. Do you mind sharing a copy of your RSS comment feed?
andrewmutz 1y ago
Is anyone hooking up RSS feeds to some cheap LLMs to do personalized content algorithms? Seems like a useful open source project
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  Not personalized yet, but categorized: https://outerweb.org/explore https://outerweb.org/explore LLMs are helping with classification right now but in the backlog is letting them take a list of favorites and creating recommendations.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Social media is the RSS feed and has been for like 15 years. Short form posts that link to long form posts. Social posts that link to the content you've published wherever. The change in recent years is ppl skipping the self-hosting/POS part of the POSSE and posting directly on the social media sites because they were convinced to do that and the social media sites were discouraging users from travelling off-site etc. We just need to get away from using social media sites as the hosts of our content and back to the POS part.
929-367-9958 1y ago
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morshu9001 1y ago
I tried making an app once that was like RSS but with reposts, and each friend only gets to occupy one spot on your feed per day. Worked pretty nicely with my friends on it. Probably a lot of things like that exist.
929-367-9958 1y ago
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929-367-9958 1y ago
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929-367-9958 1y ago
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929-367-9958 1y ago
/tp teleport
not--felix 1y ago
I Love RSS so much that I started to develop my own RSS reader[0] to fix some of the problems I have with it, like: feed discovery, podcasts and overload. [0] https://ivyreader.com https://ivyreader.com
_trigrou_ 1y ago
This piece perfectly captures why I built and still enjoy using my personal proof of concept a custom solution designed just for me. It’s essentially a self-generated newspaper, curated from RSS feeds and read on my e-ink tablet for a peaceful experience. If you’re curious about how it works, I’ve detailed the entire process here: https://cedricpinson.com/updates.html#morning-nerds https://cedricpinson.com/updates.html#morning-nerds

Simple is use your thunderbird mail to read RSS feeds. Check https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feeds-and-blogs https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...

ggeorgovassilis 1y ago

I'm self-hosting FreshRSS [1] with Docker on a Hetzner VM. Fast, clutter-free, has everything I need. [1] https://freshrss.org/index.html https://freshrss.org/index.html Edit: typo

nextzck 1y ago
I just bought a reseller plan from verpex host for $5/month. Can host unlimited domains and bandwidth with WHM. Access everything through cPanel and ftp. SSH on occasion. Installed freshRSS in 1 min with softaculous
senectus1 1y ago
freshrss is excellent.
lknuth 1y ago
I built my own reader because I didn't want unread items to accumulate. It just shows what was published the last X days. The result is that there is no need for persistent storage, so its real easy to host. If you're interested, its here: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly
- theshrike79 1y ago
  My specific need for RSS is the accumulation. There are people who post once a week and I don't want to miss the posts because I was offline at the time.
timeon 1y ago
What the purpose of hosting whole reader instead of local app? Or is that something else/more than reader?
- ggeorgovassilis 1y ago
  Runs 24/7. Also, I already host other things on the server, so there is no added cost.
- buu709 1y ago
  Allows you to check your feeds from multiple devices. For example I usually read from my phone, but sometimes would like to check my feeds from my desktop. You could just subscribe to the same feeds from multiple devices/apps, but then you have to manually keep track of what's already been read and that will quickly get out of hand.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Synced read state. If I read from my mobile using NetNewsWire and then go on my laptop and read with the FreshRSS web client, I don't need to wade through a bunch of articles I already read.

hn-ifs 1y ago

I love RSS. Like all the old web tech the user is in control. If I like a page/site I'll look for an RSS to keep up to date with it, if one doesn't exist I'll likely forget about it. I'm not signing up for email updates.

panstromek 1y ago

> As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would flood their pages with multiple posts per day The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention. That's one of the main reasons fb and other sites implemented algorithmic feeds in the first place. If you take away the time component, posters compete on quality instead. > The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it adapts to everyone’s taste and interests, but that’s only true until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture. Yea, exactly, but as emphasized here: The problem is not curation, the problem is the curator. Feed algorithms are important, they solve real problems. I don't think going back to RSS and chronolgical feed is the answer. I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention. That doesn't make any sense. Quantity might make you more prominent in a unified facebook feed, but an RSS reader will show it like this: Sam and Fuzzy (5) Station V3 (128) They've always displayed that way. You never see one feed mixed into another feed. This problem can't arise in RSS. There is no such incentive. Quantity is a negative thing; when I see that I've missed 128 posts, I'm just going to say "mark all as read" and forget about them. (In fact, I have 174 unread posts in Volokh Conspiracy A† right now. I will not be reading all of those.) † Volokh Conspiracy is hosted on Reason. Reason provides an official feed at http://reason.com/volokh/atom.xml http://reason.com/volokh/atom.xml . But Volokh Conspiracy also provides an independent feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/volokh/mainfeed http://feeds.feedburner.com/volokh/mainfeed . Some of their posts go into one of those feeds, and the rest go into the other. I can't imagine that they do this on purpose, but it is what they do.
- pbmonster 1y ago
  > They've always displayed that way. You never see one feed mixed into another feed. This problem can't arise in RSS. All readers I know have the option to display all feeds chronologically, or an entire folder of feeds chronologically. In most, that's the default setting when you open the app/page. I always use it like that. If I'd want to see all new posts from a single author, I might as well just bookmark their blog.

nesk_ 1y ago

I've ditched RSS feeds more than 10 years ago but I'm increasingly wanting to go back to them. Thank you for sharing this blog post, it'll help to get me started.

pbmonster 1y ago
The best thing about modern RSS is that you can retire entire accounts. I don't have YouTube or Twitter accounts, I use RSS to subscribe to channels/users/tags.
- nofunsir 1y ago
  Shhh - they'll hear you! Surely it will be deleted as soon as some manager remembers it exists.
  - latexr 1y ago
    The day YouTube removes RSS feeds is the day I stop watching entirely.
- barrenko 1y ago
  This is the key imho, adapting stuff to yourself / your needs, when and where the GloboHomoCorp allows you to. E.g. I don't use Twitter directly due to toxicity and overwhelmingness of the central feed (thank you Nikita), and due to, for me, the biggest issue - how shit it is for reading / following individual user feeds - when you find someone who's really interesting, and you don't want to miss posts. So I use nitter and bookmark each person's profile I find interesting and I have that in a separate folder. Then at my pace, daily or weekly I read through people's posts and can really keep up like God intended me to. At first it was less engaging than just having Twitter (as it's less adictive), and I've paced from deleting / using actual Twitter back and forth, but due to recent changes and events I've actually come to a place where through my bookmarks I discover new profiles / people / interests / niches at an organic pace that I can only compare to how I've used to use RSS or web in the older times. It's quite cool.
- Kye 1y ago

robin_reala 1y ago

One thing that I did to kickstart my RSS usage again was to revisit each site I was subscribed to and: - Remove it if it posted more than once a day. I want thoughtful voices, not other people’s aggregation. - Remove it if it hadn’t posted in the last few years. Some people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that most blogs that are 5+ years old aren’t coming back. - Remove it if the overall tone of the blog is too negative. I then added a bunch of new feeds from people I’m currently actively following on other platforms who are blogging. This was a massive breath of fresh air, that has got me actively engaging with my feed reader for the first time in a few years. (Related to my second point: I’m not the first person to note this but there’s a real sadness to watching an old and beloved blog nova itself into your feed in a burst of gambling site spam. Better to get out before that happens.)

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lou1306 1y ago
> - Remove it if it hadn’t posted in the last few years. Some people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that most blogs that are 5+ years old aren’t coming back. This I don't really understand. Following inactive feeds via RSS comes effectively at no cost for you. How does removing them improve the experience?
- robin_reala 1y ago
  See my follow-on note at the end of the post, but also it’s just a psychological out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new point that marks a change.
  - account42 1y ago
    It would be cool if you could somehow be notified when the ownership of a domain changes so you could take that action when it makes sense instead of preemptively killing subscriptions.
- 1y ago

fjghajkhdfgjlk 1y ago

Any recommendations for a self-hosted RSS reader with a good companion android app (or at least a decent mobile website)?

freetonik 1y ago
Miniflux is lovely, and the mobile website is decent https://miniflux.app/ https://miniflux.app/
- cpbotha 1y ago
  One more vote for miniflux, which I run on a "server" (old laptop with linux...) at my house and access from anywhere thanks to cloudflare tunnels.
  - suckler 1y ago
    We must be related, I'm doing the exact same thing.
- ktosobcy 1y ago
  I love miniflux. Switched from inoreader when they started imposing more and more limits and changing the UI. With miniflux I have not limits with unread items/feeds. I can set check frequency to what I want and I actually don't need the app as the www ui is just brillinat!
- mgerb 1y ago
  Big fan of miniflux with this dark theme https://github.com/catppuccin/miniflux https://github.com/catppuccin/miniflux
- 93n 1y ago
  Another +1 for miniflux. Something atypical about my setup is that I wired up miniflux webhooks to n8n and gotify so that when I click "save" on an entry, I get a notification for it. It's a rudimentary way to setup a "read it later" list.
1y ago

freetonik 1y ago

If you want to discover personal, human-written blogs with valid RSS feeds, check out the directory I'm building: https://minifeed.net/blogs https://minifeed.net/blogs (it's also a reader of sorts, and has related discovery and full-text search across those feeds and posts, but the page I linked is just a big list of blogs with some recent posts and RSS links).

alastairr 1y ago
Love this! Something I've been working on that is a bit similar https://blognerd.app/?qry=AI+research+llms&type=sites&content=&time= https://blognerd.app/?qry=AI+research+llms&type=sites&conten... you can search for blogs with feeds, and find blogs by semantic similarity
sameline 1y ago
Cool project! I use https://ooh.directory https://ooh.directory but will check your directory out too.

nake89 1y ago

Page seems to be hugged to death. Here is an archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20251003062648/https://blog.burkert.me/posts/in_praise_of_syndication/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251003062648/https://blog.burk...

5d41402abc4b 1y ago
This looks like a static page. How much load do you need for a server hosting static page to go down?
curioussquirrel 1y ago
I may need to talk to my hosting provider :) Thanks for pointing this out. The site is indeed statically generated (Hugo), so this should not be happening.

beardyw 1y ago

I use RSS a lot but it is not without it's own difficulties. My collection of feeds is naturally geared to my own interests and world views. As a result I do find I miss out on some things I should pay attention to. To counter this I include a fact checking site which brings stories I would otherwise miss to my attention. Not ideal, but it works.

curioussquirrel 1y ago
This is very much true, and one of the downsides of RSS is that you need to make effort to discover new sources, or make sure that what you're consuming is at least somewhat balanced. However you have no guarantees of the latter when you use algorithmic feeds.

sph 1y ago

I love RSS. I literally just bought an app on itch.io, and to my surprise the devlog page for it, which lists all the new updates, supports RSS. I love when it happens. [1] RSS didn't stick for me until: 1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would miss stuff I actually care about. 2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing. Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles, OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50 unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio. 3. https://fetchrss.com/ https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs. I pay for Feedbin, and it's great. --- 1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.

latexr 1y ago
> I used to subscribe to (…) the top HN frontpage articles https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points, or other metrics. > These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell. Doesn’t your feed service/app auto-detect feeds if you just paste the webpage? That’s a common feature.
- bluebarbet 1y ago
  Alternative: https://hnrss.org/ https://hnrss.org/ PS: it's just a shortcut
- sph 1y ago
  > https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points, or other metrics. Yes, that's the one I used, but I feel it's still too much noise. You don't want a firehose in your RSS feeds. Just open https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com when you want to doomscroll through an almost endless stream of information. RSS doesn't work well with social media, and that's a feature.

rethab 1y ago

Shout out to Blogtrottr[1], which allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and have the posts sent to you via email. Great service I've been using for years. [1] https://blogtrottr.com https://blogtrottr.com

pantulis 1y ago

The key with RSS is curation, otherwise it stops being your "controlled feed". FOMO can make you add noisy feeds that basically are putting too much information that will dwarf the relevant feeds. In my case, I follow Hacker News and Slashdot which are ok but also thought it was a good idea to add "The Verge | All posts" to my feed reader and I find myself hitting "Mark all as read" continuosly. It's not The Verge's fault of course, it's my lack of strategy.

jordyjor 1y ago
Agreed in the general. Though one useful feature in FreshRSS that I've made heavy use of (no idea if there are equivalents in other readers) is the ability to mark new entries in a feed as read immediately upon receiving them. Initially seemed counterintuitive when I first saw the option, but I've found it's actually quite useful for me. It allows for a separation of true feeds coming from a person that I typically will want to read and take manual action on. Or more shotgun feeds that are continuously putting out stuff that I will choose to dip into when I feel like it (HN front page or Slashdot being examples of that). Without the ever-increasing counter of unread articles to think about.
- pantulis 1y ago
  This is a great feature. And I found I can create a similar rule with Inoreader, thanks!

phaser 1y ago

I miss RSS too much, I have decided to start using it again today. For those who are in it, what is your favorite client?

steadicat 1y ago
This app made me fall in love with RSS after years of trying: https://feeeed.nateparrott.com/ https://feeeed.nateparrott.com/
latexr 1y ago
Reeder Classic. Not a subscription, looks good, works well. But it’s only available for Apple operating systems, and the developer is not responsive to bug reports (fortunately, there aren’t many and they are tiny). News Explorer is a decent alternative (but same OS restriction). That developer is responsive.
miladyincontrol 1y ago
NetNewsWire, great open source client on ios, good for mac too. Though I feed it via tiny tiny rss with the freshrss api plugin so I can have saner filtering and curation before it gets to the reader. The 'awesome tiny tiny rss' docker image is pretty decent setup for getting it running if you have any interest, though personally I ended up rolling my own static binary using frankenphp somewhat based off their setup. The core dev of tiny tiny rss is a bit, opinionated lets just say.
- HankStallone 1y ago
  I don't use docker, so I stuck with an ancient version of TT-RSS for years. But last week I couldn't get it to play nice with my new FreeBSD system and its updated PHP, so I installed from the git repo with surprisingly little trouble.
carlosjobim 1y ago
NetNewsWire is a great RSS client and one of the best designed apps, both on iOS and OS X.

perching_aix 1y ago

I find this to be misguided tech-nostalgia. What you control this way is the way information is brokered to you. It only controls the information reaching you itself to the extent that is reflected in the delivery method. This is significant if you're a staunch subscriber to the idea that everything, and I really do mean everything, wrong with social and mass media is the "algorithms" (formerly: capitalism, sensationalism, etc.), but I'm not. I find that to be at most half the story. In the end, you're consuming something someone else produced for you to consume. That's why it's available. So you're relying on that information to be something you don't find inherently objectionable, or at least be filterable in that regard, which is not a given. We consume arbitrary and natural language content. Most you can do is feed it through AI to pre-digest it for you, which can and will fail in numerous ways. And this is to say nothing about content that wasn't produced and/or didn't reach you. The reason older technologies felt better wasn't necessarily just because of them per se, but also because of their cultural context. These are interwoven of course, but I wouldn't necessarily trust that reverting back to old technology is what's going to steer back this ship to a better course. I'm afraid this is a lot more like undropping a mug than it is like applying negation.

whism 1y ago
I think you almost have a point in that you seem to be advocating for something along the lines of unbiased input (questioning the presented information because it was constructed for presentation, suggesting that an AI could somehow assist, presumably to help ground your information in a wider context etc) I think what you may be missing is the role of trust. There is much to say about that, but in this instance, a nice thing about RSS is that I can trust the algorithm it uses to generate my feed. It is very simple, and I, myself choose the sources it draws from. With some other systems, this is not the case.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  > I think you almost have a point Thank you for almost granting me the capability of having a point. That is very nice of you. I am not missing the role of trust. I have instead simply had that trust betrayed countless of times by now, so I'm seeking a little more. It would be a great first step, but far from the whole journey. And so I'm wary of people mistaking the latter for the former, intentionally or otherwise.

buzzy_hacker 1y ago

Also shout out to https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ for converting email subscriptions to RSS feeds

curioussquirrel 1y ago
I don't use it personally but have heard good things! Thanks for mentioning it.

whism 1y ago

If someone can please figure out how to integrate a purchase/payment system into a similar protocol we would love you forever :) I would so love to help my many artist/musician friends get set up direct-to-consumer with digital content, subscriptions etc — and with their own shops, that they can run, in whatever funky style.

lou1306 1y ago
Patreon and Spotify already implement subscription-based podcasts, and I am positive they use RSS/Atom under the hood. So the tech is already out there, you just need to turn it into a self-hosted solution.
- curioussquirrel 1y ago
  Indeed, Patreon has private feeds for patrons for exclusive content. That's a decent solution but it's platform-specific, which is both a bad thing (not easily used elsewhere) and good (backwards compatible with good old RSS).
  - lou1306 1y ago
    Did not know Patreon's tech was lock-in. I subscribe to a podcast on Spotify and they give you a private URL that you can feed to any app. If you are worried about malicious customers sharing the URL you may likely enable some form of rate limiting (e.g. the server may only serve up to x MiB/month on this URL)
realityfactchex 1y ago
Why not just set them up with Catbox Spaces [0, 1]? [0] https://blog.catbox.moe/post/774800476681207808/introducing-catbox-spaces-server-upgrades https://blog.catbox.moe/post/774800476681207808/introducing-... [1] https://catbox.tech https://catbox.tech

sicariomoon 1y ago

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mustaphah 1y ago

Great post! Indeed, social media platforms optimize for engagement and ad revenue, not user needs. Feeds are a user right, not a publisher favor. In that spirit: I recently built RSSible - a tiny tool that lets you turn any webpage into an RSS feed via CSS selectors. I've built this for myself; already using it for HN, Product Hunt, tldr.tech, r/science, IMDb latest shows, RubyOnRemote, and many more. It's still early, but if anyone here is curious to try or test, I'd love feedback. (You can see live demos on the site) RSSible: https://rssible.hadid.dev/ https://rssible.hadid.dev/ Github: https://github.com/mhadidg/rssible https://github.com/mhadidg/rssible

codazoda 1y ago
Impossible for me to read in dark mode.
- mustaphah 1y ago
  Never meant to support dark mode. Looks like water.css (the CSS lib I'm using) supports it by default. My custom CSS is breaking things. I'll try to force light mode initially and will definitely fix the dark mode later. Thanks a lot for flagging this!
- mustaphah 1y ago
  It should look better now. I fixed the input text color.

throw0101d 1y ago

Reminder that Atom exists: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)

latexr 1y ago
As do JSON feeds. But in general “RSS” has become kind of the shorthand for all feeds of this type. Most feed readers support all formats, so the distinction doesn’t really matter that much.

zby 1y ago

The root problem here is that a communication channel full of noise is not valuable - but on the other hand if you have a very selective channel - then nobody will subscribe because to subscribe you need repeated good interactions.

AlfredBarnes 1y ago

I recently made a little RSS feed reader, and its barebones lives on my machine, and is powered by python. I never could get into any of the RSS reader software it all seemed very happy to put random things in the feed that i didn't care about. A strict timeline of things i want to read is all I want. If there is nothing new there is nothing new and I'm okay with that. Thanks for the write up and read.

AlfredBarnes 1y ago
Something else i HIGHLY recommend is subscribing to youtube channels Via RSS. You ACTUALLY KNOW WHEN SOMETHING IS NEW. I've gone way down on my youtube watching rabbit holes since I only engage with it when I have a new video.

brainzap 1y ago

NetNewsWire on macOS

renegat0x0 1y ago

Most people complain about the signal-to-noise ratio in news consumption. I believe the issue isn’t the news sources themselves, but rather the lack of a proper RSS application. A great RSS app should offer a powerful search function. It should support tagging, bookmarking, scoring or point systems, categories, and a "read later" feature, among other things. You don’t need to eliminate news sources — just use filters and search tools to surface what matters to you. An ideal RSS reader should also be smart enough to bypass things like Cloudflare and other unnecessary protections that break RSS functionality. Unfortunately, many mobile RSS apps fall short in this regard — and mobile is king these days. To get something truly useful, you often need to self-host. But most people won’t go that far. Personally, I self-host my RSS reader. I even built my own client, since I wasn’t aware of KaraKeep (formerly Hoarder) at the time. I’m still using my custom app because it’s now very versatile, and I’m not sure KaraKeep would meet all my needs. Links: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS - all about RSS https://rssisawesome.com/ https://rssisawesome.com/ https://rssgizmos.com/ https://rssgizmos.com/ https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds

ghostpepper 1y ago
I agree that most rss clients lack true power user features for searching and filtering. I spent a bit of time proving out an idea to use Bleve indexing to allow scoring each article with weighted keywords but I haven’t had time to work on it lately. I’ll have a look at your links.
HankStallone 1y ago
It's strange how all these modern communication methods (blogs, forums, RSS readers) so often fail to have features that were available in Usenet newsreaders 30+ years ago. We had threading, searching, killfiling or scoring, marking posts to save, all pretty common features then. I'm not sure why there isn't more demand for them now.
- asjo 1y ago

Egor3f 1y ago

I think this post is the best place to "promote" my open-source pet project It converts any dynamic website to rss feed It's self-hosted and stateless https://github.com/Egor3f/rssalchemy https://github.com/Egor3f/rssalchemy It's however not in active development state, but if there will be some pull requests I'll review them, so it's not abandoned Demo page is not working now, but if there will be some activity, I'll bring it back up

vamosg 1y ago

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NoSalt 1y ago

I am currently working on a [personal use] MagicMirror replacement. One of the things I like about MagicMirror is the RSS newsfeed at the bottom of the screen, so I have been getting into RSS more recently, and really enjoying it. The only "problem" is trying to narrow down all the great content.

john-tells-all 1y ago

I've paid for Feedly for years and use it daily. One section is "Hacker News People". When I find someone on HN who writes well, I subscribe to their comments in a RSS feed, so I can read everything they write. Very often they comment on a link I don't see on my main HN page, which is useful. App http://hnapp.com/ http://hnapp.com/ converts names to RSS feeds. Example: `author:nickjj`

xorvoid 1y ago
This is a fantastic idea. Do you mind sharing a copy of your RSS comment feed?

andrewmutz 1y ago

Is anyone hooking up RSS feeds to some cheap LLMs to do personalized content algorithms? Seems like a useful open source project

cosmicgadget 1y ago
Not personalized yet, but categorized: https://outerweb.org/explore https://outerweb.org/explore LLMs are helping with classification right now but in the backlog is letting them take a list of favorites and creating recommendations.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Social media is the RSS feed and has been for like 15 years. Short form posts that link to long form posts. Social posts that link to the content you've published wherever. The change in recent years is ppl skipping the self-hosting/POS part of the POSSE and posting directly on the social media sites because they were convinced to do that and the social media sites were discouraging users from travelling off-site etc. We just need to get away from using social media sites as the hosts of our content and back to the POS part.

929-367-9958 1y ago

[flagged]

morshu9001 1y ago

I tried making an app once that was like RSS but with reposts, and each friend only gets to occupy one spot on your feed per day. Worked pretty nicely with my friends on it. Probably a lot of things like that exist.

929-367-9958 1y ago

[flagged]

929-367-9958 1y ago

[flagged]

929-367-9958 1y ago

[flagged]

929-367-9958 1y ago

/tp teleport

not--felix 1y ago

I Love RSS so much that I started to develop my own RSS reader[0] to fix some of the problems I have with it, like: feed discovery, podcasts and overload. [0] https://ivyreader.com https://ivyreader.com

_trigrou_ 1y ago

This piece perfectly captures why I built and still enjoy using my personal proof of concept a custom solution designed just for me. It’s essentially a self-generated newspaper, curated from RSS feeds and read on my e-ink tablet for a peaceful experience. If you’re curious about how it works, I’ve detailed the entire process here: https://cedricpinson.com/updates.html#morning-nerds https://cedricpinson.com/updates.html#morning-nerds