I ditched the algorithm for RSS | Hacker News Reader

I ditched the algorithm for RSS

joeyehand.com

744 pointsDearNarwhal273 comments

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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.

Yes. I'd love to find other nerds into retro computing, UNIX, and pottery in my area without wading into groups or joining a forum. They know everything about me, match me up with some people I'd most likely get along with!

Isn't this what ancient local BBSs did? Back in the 90's when in my teens/twenties that was how I found interesting local groups of people/organic raves (i.e. not ones organized by promoters) outside my established circles in Santa Cruz/the bay area. Also some of the most uncomfortable/awkward unsocial/nerdfest social evenings so not everything was a hit.

I'm guessing that there are now Discords that fill this niche?

Just put a chatbox at the end of the feed, that all the locals get dumped into when they also hit the end. Maybe based on IP or something. Grouped based on which articles you clicked on. "Hey, we think you guys will like eachother. Why don't you organize a meetup?"

> That would be such a killer feature.

"Alice, what if we made a button that improved overall human wellbeing, while somewhat reducing our ad-revenue and lowering the engagement-metrics we use to sell shares to investors?"

"*sigh* We've been over this, Bob: We only build features for customers--not cattle."

If you want revenue, send them all to a nearby bar or other venue and work out a deal with that venue. "Hey, there's a bunch of Redditors and Joe's Bar right now! Take this coupon for 20% off and go meet them."

Bluesky is trying to figure out how to outsource algorithms and let you decide which to use.

Highly recommended podcast episode: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/scaling-blu...

I'd like to see an RSS item-level recommendation / discovery algorithm driven by recommendations made by a cohort of people who have similar likes to me. I wish there was a standards-based to publish a stream of my "likes" from my feed reader, and to "consume" the "likes" of others. When I add somebody's blog to my feed reader I'd expect it to pick up their "likes" (much like how people used to have a "blog roll" on their own site) and begin to consume the "feeds" from the sites they "like". It reminds me a bit of PHP's "web of trust".

Hacker News, arguably, functions in this capacity for me now. The cohort is the entire population (since we all see the same item rankings), though.

What you are describing is similar to how https://LinkLonk.com works (my side project) - when you "like" a link you get connected to the RSS feeds that posted that link and other users that also liked it. Then you get content from feeds and users that you are connected to. The more links in common you have with a feed or a user the more weight their other links have.

Do any of the web-based readers offer discovery based on matching your RSS list to other users' lists? Mine (Feedbin) doesn't, but I'd like it as an opt-in option.

You should read about OPML blogrolls [1], they are gaining traction in this space. Personally, I like the idea of manually exploring recommendations, so I built a browsable index [2]. But you can crawl the these as well and build all sorts of recommendations engines.

[1] https://opml.org/blogroll.opml

[2] https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/discover/feed-c550c...

Thanks for the blogroll love!

You can also see one in action on my blog's home page.

http://scripting.com/

And on a special site..

https://blogroll.social/

A blogroll is a kind of feed reader.

A long long time ago before reddit, facebook, digg, twitter, etc, there was usenet. It worked a bit like reddit but subreddits were called news groups.

There were many front ends for usenet, called news readers.

My favourite was "nn" short for "no news".

It showed you posts in groups you're subscribed to, allowed you to post comments, etc.

When you had finished getting up to date it would EXIT and print:

No news. (Is good news)

Ha! I had forgotten that message.Thank you for reminding me. I used to read comp.lang.lisp for the extensive and increasingly bizarre flame wars and for the wider philosophical discussions. Eventually I got to the point where I thought "OK I'm done now" and left and never went back.

The cool thing is: Its still there!

Yeah, it may be not as populated as in the 80s to mid 90s, but there are still enough active groups in usenet to waste uncounted hours every day...

There's been some conversation on Mastodon (and here) about its lack of algorithm

I really prefer my feed with no algorithm. I really like that it's just ordered by when it was posted, and if someone spams too much I'll remove them, and if my feed gets too much I'll curate it down a bit.

You seem to be behind on English as spoken. From what I can reconstruct:

Algorithm (n) - a secretive set of systems, procedures and data that Big Tech uses to maliciously manipulate unsuspecting general public. Example usage: "Algorithm-free music discovery app for DJs"

I'm not joking, that example usage is taken from a live example.

Such an algorithm would require plenty of data to be well trained, and I fear that the same crowd that would value such an algorithm, prioritises privacy too much.

Perhaps malicious algorithms and tracking have driven us too paranoid to even collaborate on an algorithm that actually serves us.

Here's what I do: - six 'links to top posts from the past week' links for subreddits/HN, in rotation. - a collection of RSS feeds from bloggers I've seen enough writing to recognize (and academic journals), which I check weekly

Every day is a focused collection of the most upvoted posts from one of those seven. It's hardly a perfect algorithm, but it at least disengages the worst instincts of FOMO. And the RSS feed can be seen as an escape hatch of sorts. If you really wanted to, you could try browsing /new once in a while as some kind of public penance or panning for gold.

edit: turns out the actual post is pretty close to this, with more RSS as a middleman. I just use Trello cards as rotating bookmarks, having given up on RSS being viable for anything other than the profitability of the RSS publisher.

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/

More stuff:

Blogs & RSS https://rssfeedasap.com/ 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

PS: If you have an idea for a RSS reader domain, please suggest.

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.

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?

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/Twit...

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://github.com/dimdenGD/OldTwitter

Works fine. Reverse chronological sorting with just who you follow.

For automated... apart from self host RSS options or nitter instance, neither of which I've tried...

For semi automated I have a manual but not too laborious google sheet:

https://imgur.com/a/S5xTlPp

Uses: https://github.com/dimdenGD/OldTwitter

https://github.com/BlackGlory/copycat

TLDR workflow:

1. open "old" twitter

2. scroll down multiple pages (autopagination supported)

3. search for C2 which contains first 20 characters of last tweet in the sheet

4. copyeverything from that point to first tweet (basically all new tweets since reverse chronological sorted), use copycat to copy the BB code

5. paste BB code in sheet F4 (yellow column), I have a bunch of helper columns in another tab that parses through the code to which sorts into date, url, username, tweet

6. i have another page with list of usernames and next to them labels/tag (emoji)

7. run a script, and it outputs everything into a digest, sorted by label/tag, then user, then tweet from oldest to newest

I spend a few minutes in the morning finding where i left off previous day, copy paste, and run script and it gives me a digest of last 24 hours of tweets.Before this, it was hooked into nitter list RSS which auto refreshed and did it all automatically. Before that there was a nice service called streamspigot or something that did it all with API access. It is unnessicarily annoying / difficult to just get a daily digest of tweets you're interested in.

Brilliant, thank you !

What are they going to do? ban you? if so they're doing you a favor.

I'm building a web app which would extract blogs and their RSS feeds from all HN stories you've commented, upvoted or added to favorites – so that you could easily extract exactly the content you want. I plan on expanding it to handle content you've interacted from other social networks too.

There still exist a couple of nitter instances which provide RSS feeds for X.

On the rare occasions I still look at Twitter I use lists instead of follows, and this avoids both the awful algorithmic noise and means I'm not contributing to anyone's bullshit engagement KPIs.

I would still prefer an RSS feed, if there was a logged-out solution.

I was a heavy bloglines user back in the day and loved it. It was like a custom newspaper people printed for me and worked great.

I moved to twitter in 2009 and, for the most part, it was a better RSS experience. The udpates were smaller, more frequent. It was text only and had a size limit which automatically filtered for some level of linguistic ability. I used to only see people who I wanted to. It felt like a cross between IRC (which I used heavily at the time) and RSS and I quite loved it.

Over the years, the experience has degraded. Not just because of "the algorithm" but also because of influencers, social media marketing, spam, etc. But I had the frog in hot water experience and never really felt like moving away. I've blocked it on my work machine and use it only my phone via. the browser and a monochrome screen which makes it less compelling.

I've made a few friends and relationships on the platform and I think it peaked in 2015/2016 or so. Especially when you're in a city that's mostly on it. You run into people who you know "via. twitter". It's been a great ride but I do wish for some of the things of the RSS days.

Host your own Nitter instance and you'll be able to get RSS feeds

That’s gotten pretty hard to do recently since Musk cracked down on api access

there are some public instances that I use to check a handful of profiles that have yet to migrate elsewhere

It doesn't use the API

It's not hard, you just need a Twitter account and put in the credentials.

Does the world need another RSS reader/mousetrap? We already have so many.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rss+readers

What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new reader?

yes it does. The world is full of 'another's.

Lol the result I got from your search was "rss readers on ebay" ad followed by links all with N top RSS readers for varying N, often 7 or 10.

Someone doesn't really need a reason to build something besides that they want to build it. I built many RSS readers and I was not trying to revolutionise anything, I was just having fun. This mindset of "revolution" and "disruption" will block you from actually just doing the things you want sometimes.

I guess it depends on the goal. If you just want to build things then you don’t need anyone’s permission, but if you want people to use it or to make a living off it, it’s important to know why people would use what you’re building.

One of my soapboxes is that the world is full of really smart people trying to solve solved problems for the sake of having done something that feels like something. I advocate for people taking that creative energy and pointing it at partially/poorly/un- solved problems.

If that's developing to offer (OP in particualrly said their friend would soon be offering a new service) an RSS Reader because there's something to actually innovate and more fully solve a problem, then it's great. Otherwise, it's just fodder for AdWords and Facebook when they eventually try to build acquisition for a business around it.

> Does the world need another RSS reader/mousetrap? We already have so many.

And we also have near-universal OPML import/export, so the cost of switching is minimised.

> What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new reader?

You don't need a revolution to make your app compelling, you just need to improve on status quo. RSS has a lot of shortcomings, most importantly discoverability.

Here's a simple idea: crowdsourced discovery. Users could opt-in to anonymously share their feed list (whole or parts); keyword-based categorisation could group them into topics; etc. The reader could use an algorithm (haha, we're coming full circle) to suggest interesting topics, feeds, posts. Honestly I'd be interested in something like <https://kagi.com/smallweb/>.

Extra kudos if the dataset is released publicly.

> Yes, you can create an RSS feed from a Youtube Channel. You can can create an RSS feed from Reddit.

You don't have to create anything. YouTube and Reddit have never stopped publishing RSS feeds. I've personally been using RSS continuously for both sites without any issues for the past 15 years.

Both sites adhere to the standard link tag structure for declaring feed URLs in the headers of applicable pages. You can use a browser extension like 'Get RSS Feed URL' (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/get-rss-feed-url/kf...) to easily expose the feeds associated with a page you're visiting without having to look for them in the page source.

I personally have all of my feed subscriptions -- blogs, podcasts, aggregators (including HN), YouTube channels, subreddits, etc. -- synchronized via TT-RSS on my VPS. I then use Liferea as my client (https://lzone.de/liferea), pulling from TT-RSS, for a high-quality, no-nonsense reading experience on the desktop.

We have an X (Twitter) option that does not rely on RSS. I think Nitter is dead anyway?

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

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

(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.)

Yeah, I don't really grok the focus on MF2 given the wide adoption of RSS/Atom, but the social reader concept isn't one I've seen anyone else advocating for. It also suffers from the same spam problem of anything else that allows public submission of content. I've been exploring it more in the context of _private_ blogging were you already have a layer of access control.

> 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.

I think a big problem with this is that commercial websites believe that they have to update a million times a day to Feed the Algorithm™, which bloats their RSS feeds and any RSS reader you might have checking on it. Similarly, subscribing to a particularly active subreddit or three would also fill up your reader with trash.

I get a lot more use out of my RSS reader to check smaller, personal sites that don't update as often

The post proposes a solution to the overload of subscribing to subreddits by subscribing to a search for only the top posts from the subreddit.

I don't use reddit, so I'm probably missing something, but subscribing to only the 'best' posts doesn't sound like a way to find the 'hidden gems', it sounds more like a way to subscribe to whatever the users of the subreddit have collectively voted up that particular day.

Which does not contain pictures. Seems like a way to gain high signal to noise rating. You'll always miss out, there's FOMO for you.

I am grateful for the suggestion, gonna give it a whirl.

You might find this interesting: https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti

Here's how its algo works https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti/-/issues/28

Back when I heavily used RSS feed readers, the solution was simple:

1. Unsubscribe from feeds that put out too much content.

2. Optionally put them in their own category and ensure the main "view" doesn't include those items.

3. Realizing that overoptimizing for consuming the best content is (or at least should be) a sign of suboptimal mental health.

4. Timeboxing: Decide you'll spend no more than 30 minutes (even less is better) on them per day, and be OK missing out on everything you couldn't catch up on.

5. Ponder seriously about the value you are getting from doing this vs what else you could be doing. Do you want to spend this much time (whatever it is) daily when you are 50? 60? At some point, you may realize there are diminishing returns to keeping this up.

As I learned in the last year or two, consuming offline content is significantly superior than consuming blogs and news:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/the-unexpected-benefit...

In order of importance I'd put them exactly in reverse :)

And I'd add:

6. Stop thinking of yourself as a consumer. A consumer blindly ingurgitates whatever's fed to them. You're a customer. With tastes and personal opinions. They depend on you to make a living, not you on them. And an unhappy customer moves their business elsewhere, doesn't stay on forever like being a consumer implies.

> The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading

I'm working on an RSS feed reader, and it has a feature that solves that problem. For every subscribed feed, it shows the percentage of items that you actually bookmark and read. So if there are feeds that you subscribed to but don't read, you can easily find out which they are and unsubscribe from them.

It's called https://lighthouseapp.io

The issue is that it's not possible to separate feeds from items. Even if some feeds are largely unread, I subscribed to them because I liked something they posted on a specific topic, and I still want to get updates whenever there is another feed item related to that specific topic. Ultimately the "feed" is the mechanism of delivery, but I don't think it should be the primary mode of categorizing item consumption.

I've worked on this issue a little in a different context, where you can follow posts from people on Bluesky related to specific topics, and this is ideally what I would like to be able to do more of with RSS.[1]

[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/lgug2z.com/post/3lc47yru7vc2k

If I understand you correctly you want to filter a feed on specific criteria (e.g. topic). Even if the feed publishes a lot of other content, you want to know the ratio of bookmarked content based of the filtered feed, ignoring the other content.

It's a great point, and helps me extend the feature and make Lighthouse better. So, thank you!

Lighthouse actually has that data. It supports rules, and tracks if a rule made an action (e.g. archive an article). So basically the ratio could ignore all articles that were automatically archived by rules.

I need to think more about how the UX of it should be, but it's a good next step for the feature.

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?

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.

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.

I don't think that's something that RSS (or any other alternative) can fix. I don't think RSS is as toxic as algorithmic feeds, but they are still cut from the same hyper-connected cloth. If you want to fight the algorithmic drip, promote people to connect with others in their community on a small scale.

Even if you have to use the internet to do it, making time to talk (with your vocal cords) to a friend on a regular basis can be much better than mindlessly scrolling or reading endless news feeds.

What might be even better are various other social activities away from a computer. It doesn't have to be highly social either. Just being in a park or library with other people silently reading or feeding ducks can be a highly positive semi-social experience. Just silently enjoying a common experience draws way more connection than the various "social" media apps out there.

Find long form blogs that publish 1 time every few months. The reader will just be empty which is a useful thing to have that doesnt consume time

RSS is great for this. The vast majority of my 200+ feed subscriptions are for rarely updated blogs or YouTube channels.

I think the walled garden is a flawed metaphor.

I would argue for Twitter over a spotty collection of RSS feeds just because there's ironically more of a democratic aspect -- anyone can start tweeting about whatever. They can go viral and disappear, they can gradually build an audience, etc. They can interact with followers or reply guys or stay aloof; they can recommend content and become a mini content aggregator in their own right. People can be anonymous or they can use their real world cachet to build a following.

Accomplishing the same thing via publishing an RSS feed is a daunting task -- you need to build an RSS feed somewhere, you can't interact with others or be easily boosted by bigger accounts to start to gain a following.

The "walled" aspect of this is basically the limitations of what the platform will allow, which especially under the Musk regime is a good balance of only very light touches of moderation.

People talk about the feed and the algorithm, but no two people have the same feed; the accounts you choose to follow will determine what your feed looks like, together with some generally popular content.

A lot of people don’t like the pay to play aspects of Twitter. EM also boosts his own tweets which is the ultimate pay to play.

If you’re talking about the “following” feed that is also an “algorithm” albeit a simple one. But with injected ads it seems strictly worse than RSS.

My only response to this is that I don't like the even-more-pay-to-play aspects of RSS. To even up an RSS feed requires a commitment that is an effective bar for 99% of individuals that would be interested in participating in public discourse.

The "for you" feed is less transparent in its nature than the "following" feed, but is still extremely customized. I do see content from accounts that I don't follow, but the vast majority is from accounts that I do follow (or that I can reasonably believe were liked by accounts I follow, though that interaction is more hidden now).

I do wish there was a simpler way of "unliking" or "downprioritizing" a post or an account short of blocking/muting. You can do the "see less of this content" but it feels too subtle; I don't know what the actual effect of this is.

> Highlights from my reader sync automatically into my Obsidian vault. It's great.

Which RSS reader do you use?

I bet it’s Readwise…

- i tried it, and it’s okay… however personally i much prefer a more private rss reader, where i don’t share all my personal data with yet another commercial company. Also, it’s quite expensive.

Readwise Reader. Yes, as another commenter stated it costs money, but it has many other features that I find useful such as good text-to-speech, integrations with other apps like Obsidian, and a good export feature if I want to switch to another feed app.

1. Mandate that all platforms must have a reverse chronological feed as the default. Alternative "algorithmic" feeds must be explicitly opted in to (preferably with age verification).

2. Regulate out of existence the business model where time spent on site converts to revenue, and force people to directly pay for stuff. Levels of indirection in "payment" for services turn the free market into (even more of) a joke (Noam Chomsky already highlighted this when advertising was cohort based in print- and TV media long before the targeted advertising of today).

Would immediately increase the signal-to-noise ratio by many orders of magnitude.

Make it easier, probably. Even in the glory days of RSS I just never put in the effort to make it work for me. (sort of like how Twitter fans always told me I had to "curate" my feed better to make it less of a cesspool, but I actually just didn't care about randos yeeting random junk into the void).

Curating your feed requires a LOT of upfront investment, and then a nonzero amount of maintenance.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Back like 15 to 20 years ago when I ran or helped manage some hobbyist websites, I added RSS functionality if only because it was "popular" back then.

I can confidently tell you not a single bloody soul used it, at the height of adoption no less.

If I run a website again I definitely won't bother, it's additional maintenance for a feature nobody uses. The cost-to-benefit ratio makes no sense because the benefit is zero.

In an effort to bypass Google News and broaden my media bubble - I tried to find RSS feeds from our national newspapers. Most had RSS at some point, but almost none still had it running.

It heavily depends on the target audience, I'd say. Especially if it's not ubiquitous.

The audience was hobbyist game developers and people generally interested in computers, so if they didn't use RSS then frankly I don't know who will (and clearly, speaking now in the future, noone has).

I regularly get emails from people asking where my RSS feed is on my site (or why I don’t have one) when every page on it has the link tags in the header that allow it to be autodiscovered.

Autodiscovery pretty much died when browsers removed RSS. It's a shame, really.

I do use an RSS reader but because of the nature of the modern internet, it's a separate app.

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.

> 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.

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

Want to follow SEC press releases? 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...

The federal government has a big list at https://www.govinfo.gov/feeds. Your county might also have one (e.g. Spokane has https://www.spokanecounty.org/rss.aspx).

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-newsfl... There's also a calendar feed with city council meetings and such.

(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.

Hey, fancy meeting you here! Send me an email sometime - nathan@[username].com

Worthy to note that 3 of those sites are powered by Drupal. Sometimes dated open-source monolithic solutions are quite helpful.

Just discovered a few US gov feeds yesterday, great resource. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also has quite a few feeds available: https://www.bls.gov/feed/

So does the European Parliament: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/stay-infor...

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)

> 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/#form...

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.

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.

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).

I've been building a site that automatically shows RSS feeds for the front page of Hacker News.

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.

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).

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

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

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.

Mastodon supports RSS.

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.

I should have mentioned the entire Fediverse supports RSS.

Yeah, implementing an RSS feed is so trivial, I'm not surprised if many of the fedi apps have added it.

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/

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

I was looking for more feeds to subscribe to. Thanks for sharing!

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/feeds13.html

I keep a blogroll[0] mostly on computing/programming

[0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html

There's also https://ooh.directory/ and https://blogscroll.com/

and https://boredreading.com/

I really like this project, such a beautiful design carefully executed on!

Thank you! I went through multiple iterations of designing the visuals, wanted to keep it very clean and "texty", but not overly brutalist at the same time.

This is honestly awesome! And I love the design as well. Is it open source?

Almost! :) I'm cleaning up the repo and about to release it under AGPL-3.0.

When you “open original to view full content” and then use browser back to get to your page, the back history is removed and you can’t click back again to get to your main page. Makes it hard to navigate. Love the site.

Not sure I understand. The "open original.." is a plain link with target="_blank", and Minifeed is a pure classic HTML web app with zero JS shenanigans. There is nothing which can manipulate the history.

Since the link opens in a new tab by default (because of target="_blank"), that new tab naturally does not have a "back" history. Is this what you mean?

I wish target="_blank" had never been invented. I'll decide for myself if I want a new tab, thank you very much. I've never found an extension that filters out this garbage properly. There's one appropriately called "Death To _blank", but so much still slips through.

On ios it does not do that. When I click on the original source link it replaces minifeeds page in the current tab. I can the ln click back and it does take me back to minifeed but then I cant click back again to get back “one more” to the minifeed index.

Another good repo is Kagi's small web repository of Github feeds https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb

Nice. I think a search engine that only crawls RSS feeds is a great idea. My own selfishness wants such a project to not get too popular so the slop media doesn't go back to publishing feeds.

At least my project has manual curation and strict eligibility criteria, so I don't crawl all RSS feeds, but instead focus on personal blogs.

This is great! Thank you. I'm trying to figure out where I can stash the link so I don't forget about it.

Funnily enough, I'm working on a link-blog feature on Minifeed. Kind of like del.icio.us or pinboard; at first, I implemented an ability to add blog posts to favorites and to lists, but there are so many blogs/sites without RSS, that I decided to allow users to save arbitrary links. Example: https://minifeed.net/l/rakhim

Wanted to share a repo I created last week to help add support for new 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-usin...

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), so as I'm scrolling my "Following" feed, I also get some of that content, while keeping the main usable.

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.

I just use separate folder for the low-frequency feeds that I intend to keep up so they don't drown in everything else.

This is a rate limiting problem

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.

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!

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

> saw this post going viral on X about RSS

/irony meter explodes/

I use inoreader - 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.

Another happy Inoreader user here!

I forgot I had an account there. Just logged in and this is great! Way less click-bait headlines unlike my Google Discover feed.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

I've recently launched Mashups.io - my own Yahoo Pipes tool.

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.

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.

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.

It should be easy to run a filter locally, so no one "owns" it but you. LLMs could help with that, so it seems.

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.

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.

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.

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

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/

>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?

I think the “washed in a steady stream” part is missing from RSS feeds.

You’d need to join like meta rss feeds.

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.

little "m" meta, as in "rss feeds about rss feeds" rather than big "M" Meta the company

Yes, I realize now that it was a little confusing.

Meta is still Facebook in my mind.

Interesting point. Yes, if you pick too narrow a set of feeds, they might not even prompt you to engage with other sources, leading to our good old filter bubble effect. I'd still posit the risk of that happening is way higher when you only have a centralized platform like, say, twitter, controlling the push-factor based on payment. With RSS, I can still adjust my feed exactly to my preferences once I notice a bias or degradation in quality of certain feeds. This cannot be done if my feed is controlled by a machine optimized for maximizing engagement/advertisement $.

Some people seems to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of whatever gambling/flashing lights/gacha stuff too.

>I could just keep reading a single newspaper

Completely unrelated, but this is the strategy I use. I try to keep out of the news but about once a week I go to the newspaper site to read what happened.

The obvious downside is that I get an extremely biased view on reality, so I try to account for that when reading the news.

But this gives me the advantage of consistency. I know how they generally report things and this makes spotting 'anomalies' a little easier.

AP, Reuters, and UPI are all pretty center for the politics - and free.

> lots of people

Depends, as all things. See for instance the Twitter (increased engagement) study [0] or the more recent Facebook study (little effect) [1]. For more recent investigations on user perceptions see [2] and [3].

[0]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2023.2...

[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp9364

[2]: https://jsb.journals.ekb.eg/index.php/FAQ/journal/journal/ar...

[3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3687046

Many people do not have the technical expertise to set up an RSS feed and so fell into the algo by default.

This is partly because the ad-funded browser hegemony removed all the features that made them easy to use, via the common "break it, wait for usage to drop off, then claim nobody uses it and delete it" project management path.

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

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.

Yes it does.

And the read/unread state of posts syncs, as well. Between MacOS, iPadOS and iOS.

same. it's a great product and the guy who runs it wants it to exist solely in the world to combat the algo.

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.

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.

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 Hosted version -> https://feedmaker.fly.dev/

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.

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

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

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

This gives me clean data of web page, title, description, etc, which I can further integrate into my own RSS reader.

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-tha...

I never left RSS.

After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (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.

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/ 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 Atom: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom 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

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?

Same! I'm creating telegram channels for topics using https://github.com/Rongronggg9/RSS-to-Telegram-Bot

That's how I found out about this post https://t.me/best_hn/99

If you want an RSS feed of your YouTube video subscriptions, I made an app for that:

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You are describing Postbacks: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postback

I don't think this Wikipedia page is describing the thing you think it is. Maybe it's the wrong link?

He's probably thinking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback

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.

Correct! Thanks for correcting

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

True, but mostly what I want is to see what other _articles_ are written in response, less about comments.

What you're referring to @j2kun is named a *social reader*. See: https://indieweb.org/social_reader I'm sure there other examples of software/clients besides those portrayed on indieweb.org too.

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

Why aren't you a fan? That feels like saying 'not a fan of newspaper delivery, but...'.

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

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/

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

I use 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

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.

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.

I made my blog software support all feed types back in the day:

http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?rss

http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?atom

http://sprout.rupy.se/feed?json

http://sprout.rupy.se/feed (my own :P)

It's open-source: http://github.com/tinspin/sprout

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.

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...

If you want to give a word filter a try, you can check out 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.

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

I use Feedbin (self-hosted) and it has no difficulty with displaying images.

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!

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-vide...

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

It's incomplete but sufficient. LLMs drop the cost of software to near zero. I barely had to learn anything.

> 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.)

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.

So this is why I built Digest (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.

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".

> it feels like

You're correct - it's a feeling. But far from reality.

> 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.

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

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.

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

News Explorer on iOS/iPadOS/MacOS is great if you want a one-time purchase app that syncs your RSS feeds across your devices.

Feedly is decent, too.

Talking of clients, Telegram RSS bot is very convenient.

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.

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.

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

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?

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/

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

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/

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.

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.

For anyone looking for an rss-to-email service, check out https://pico.sh/feeds

You can manage your email digests completely through the CLI and we are constantly making improvements to the service.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

I'm a big fan of miniflux, although I'm still looking for a mobile client that ticks all my boxes

I just use the pwa, it works quite well.

No, fresh RSS is heck of a lot better.

This blog has a really strange RSS feed link

https://joeyehand.com/feed_rss_created.xml

I wonder why.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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

Yeap. That's why I wrote "side-project".

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

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

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

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 . 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 does rss too. Full content of course.

For example, my blog https://lmno.lol/alvaro and https://lmno.lol/alvaro/feed

miniflux is where it's at

what we need next is a way to categorize, group subscribe to similar rss

I still miss Google Reader.

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/

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

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