I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS–and You Should Too

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

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Add support for Paul Graham's outdated RSS Feed.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...

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...

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

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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).

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.

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