I ditched the algorithm for RSS

> 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.

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)

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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

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'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.

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

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

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...

> 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

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

> 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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Which RSS reader do you use?

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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/

> 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...

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).

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

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.