Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
109 comments
·January 19, 2025jopsen
PaulHoule
I think it's little appreciated that planets solve many of the practical problems of feed crawling.
If you wanted to follow 2000 blogs yourself you'd find it is really a hassle. You can follow one planet and its easy.
For that matter, if 2000 people want to follow your blog (and many other blogs) they are going to generate 2000 requests per polling period. It is not wonder why people like [1] get so exasperated. There are three kinds of polling periods: (1) too fast, (2) too slow, (3) both at the same time. Instead of having 2000 people poll your blog too often, one planet can poll your blog. It improves the scalability and economics of the system dramatically.
(e.g. the difficulty of finding a good polling regime is one of 10 or 20 or so unappreciated reasons why RSS has remained nerdcore)
ssttoo
(Disclaimer: my project)
https://feed.perfplanet.com for web performance
Also please open a GH issue if I’m missing a blog or 5
null
ognarb
Since planet.kde.org is mentioned, it's super easy to create something similar with a bit of python and a static site generator like Hugo :)
https://invent.kde.org/websites/planet-kde-org/-/blob/master...
8organicbits
I have a project that is collecting blogrolls and planets, especially those that publish OPML files. Here's my list of around one hundred planets!
https://github.com/robalexdev/rss-blogroll-network/blob/385d...
These are aggregated and enriched to build this site: https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/
twapi
Thank you for reminding me about planets! I had forgotten about them, and your post has inspired me to explore them again. I appreciate your insights.
gvurrdon
I tried Feedly after Google Reader shut down but eventually settled on Feedbin - that might be worth a look.
jopsen
If I read feeds daily I might spend 5 bucks per month, but I don't.
It'll just be a subscription I forget that I have. I don't need more of those :)
Gualdrapo
I'm on the Feedly train boat too since the sinking of Google Reader. Besides the ai bs it doesn't really let you search something in your feeds without a subscription, so once I tried Feedbin.
But I went back because third world issues (and not a fan of microtransactions either) I could not find a way (if any) to change the layout on desktop. I really like the minimal list view at Feedly (and even on mobile too).
vishnu_ks
Do try https://diff.blog which is an aggregator of developer blogs which I built around 5 years back.
diff.blog tracks over 2000 dev blogs at the moment.
And you can also follow blogs and topics.
edoceo
I love RSS but how can we get more of it? Walled-ish gardens seem to dominate. Many good producers are on platforms that just don't syndicate. What kind of pressure can we, consumers, put on?
ColinWright
Every Mastodon account automatically has an RSS feed ... just append ".rss" to the account name:
tap-snap-or-nap
Request good producers to use platforms that syndicate.
jefurii
If they're not using an RSS-capable platform maybe they're not so great?
pyromaker
Is RSS really coming back? :) (you'll say it was never gone!) Lots of RSS related posts and comments recently. I've released Mashups a few weeks ago.
It's yahoo pipes clone - so you can mix and filter RSS feeds that you want.
RamblingCTO
awesome! good luck
soupfordummies
So many RSS stories this week! I'm sensing a trend (hopefully)
Pooge
I'm sorry to be the pessimist here, but I doubt it. HN users are the most likely to use RSS in the first place. I sincerely doubt that RSS is going to make a comeback this year with all my non-IT friends using it.
bluebarbet
Realism shared. I work with journalists, exactly the type of normies who would most benefit from this technology. Years of evangelism has had no effect whatsoever. Nobody they know is using it, they don't see the logo anywhere, or a big friendly "Get started" button. It's all so unfamiliar and technical-sounding. Even the name itself was a disaster, IMO: a hopelessly geeky and opaque acronym. It should have been called Webfeeds! It's all such a wasted opportunity.
freeAgent
Journalists used to use RSS quite a bit maybe 20 years ago. I guess they just forgot.
azemetre
Why is the goal to appeal to as many people as possible?
alserio
In this case having more people asking for it or expecting it can contribute to expanding the availability of RSS feeds to more websites. While the vast majority of technical stuff I follow uses RSS, the same cannot be said for some other resources I like to read. While some are kind enough to enable them when asked, I don't expect them to want to support them for just a handful of people in their target audience.
Eji1700
Honestly that might be for the best in some ways. I see rss as "allowed to exist" because not enough people use it. There's plenty of ways to subscribe to things that I enjoy right now that could be nuked if suddenly enough people were using it that they weren't seeing the conversion rates they wanted.
fgeiger
I for one am consuming HN through RSS. I find it is incredible.
meiraleal
Don't underestimate what programmers with too much free time can achieve.
coffeefirst
I think there’s a genuine desire amongst people who think about these things to take back control from the algorithms. That’s real.
Scaling it to a wider audience than HN is a longshot, as much as I love the idea.
frobnic
Try Rss-Bridge [1] when the website does not have any feed, it might have an integration already. It also supports custom CSS-selectors to create feeds, or even use SEO-Sitemaps for your advantage to generate a feed from it.
cadamsdotcom
That helps find content to read.
I wish it was easier to find out what my friends have been up to without getting them to sign up for some platform they’ve never heard of, then post in multiple places in perpetuity, and move on again when that platform also goes to shit.
A hard problem but surely not unsolvable. It belongs in a pg “please solve these big problems” essay.
meiraleal
That's an interesting problem. I'm thinking about creating a local-first RSS Reader that syncs using github. It seems doable to create a personal feed based on my feed and publish it also to github.
ashryan
This is so pushing happy buttons for me.
Not that this is novel in any way, but I just started a repo call Subcurrent yesterday for the Astoria Tech Meetup in NYC at our Saturday hack session. Subcurrent aims to provide a feed aggregator page made of our community members' feeds. https://github.com/astoria-tech/subcurrent
I did not know that Meetup.com exposes RSS feeds at all, so I will be adding that to our Subcurrent instance since our group keeps events on Meetup.com.
I had never heard of Kill the Newsletter, but I'm a fan sight-unseen. Substack at least has feeds. You can append `/feed` to the newsletter's URL.
Thanks for writing this!
openrisk
An advanced RSS reader/browser could bring back the magic of the web.
uzerfcwn
For me, that advanced reader is Thunderbird. It has amazing customizability with userchrome.css, web extensions, about:config and developer tools from Firefox.
xrd
What does an advanced reader look like in your mind?
openrisk
1. Convergent desktop/mobile app that syncs between devices (open source and local)
2. Performant for large numbers of feeds
3. Integrated browser and automagical discovery and organization of feeds while you browse
4. Multiple taxonomies and viewing layout options, chronological, by subject etc
5. Advanced filtering by keywords
6. Transparent and pluggable locally runing algorithms to track usage and inform the user of patterns and if desired adjust presentation
In a sense an advanced RSS 'reader' is what the web "browser" should have evolved to. There is really no real boundary between these two clients.
An advanced RSS reader is essentially a more dynamic browser that queries the internet in more ways that the user-initiated visit of a bookmarked url or typing something into a search form.
xrd
Great summary.
I'm using a combination of FreshRSS (self-hosted) and Readrops (for Android).
I feel like #1 is handled by this combination. But, I wonder what convergent means here for you?
I don't notice any performance issues. But, this feels like a simple task for a bunch of RSS feeds. Did you notice performance issues with other readers?
There is something very interesting about what you call "automagical discovery." To me this is the biggest hole in my RSS experience. I want something that gives me magical discovery within the feeds I have based on my reading experiences. I subscribe to a lot of feeds because of one article, and then don't care about 90% of the other articles, but there are 10% that I do really want to read, but don't have the focus to find them. Is that what you mean by automagical?
Why do you want #4?
Filtering by keywords seems interesting.
FreshRSS has a bunch of analytics that comes with the server. I never really use it, but it is interesting. I would be happy to share what I can see based on my limited usage over a few months if this would serve your purposes. I would be interested in understanding what you mean by that.
The one thing I wish I had in my current setup is a way to take notes in a centralized way. When I'm on Android, I suppose I can copy and use a share intent. And, on a browser, I could install an extension to do that. But, it feels like that is an interesting opportunity for someone. I wish FreshRSS could layer a JavaScript app on posts, for example, and then I could build whatever I want. It has an extension API, but strangely documented.
Thanks!
dagurp
Vivaldi ticks some of those boxes at least
fevangelou
A handy bookmarklet to find & preview any site's feed (before subscribing):
domysee
Similar tool here: https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/feed-finder
Finds feeds even if they're not RSS autodiscoverable. Everything it does is described here: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds
vaylian
The article also mentions atom feeds. I've seen plenty of RSS feeds but I have never encountered an atom feed. Are atom feeds still relevant?
giantrobot
Atom and RSS are functionally equivalent despite their technical differences. Effectively no one has ever implemented Atom push capabilities so Atom is primarily only ever used for syndication. The term "RSS" is just a generic term for "XML syndication feed".
progval
Atom push is actually implemented. SWORDv2 (but not v3) is based on Atom Push, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWORD_(protocol) lists a few implementations.
My employer maintains a SWORDv2 server, and we have a handful of clients pushing to us; most of them are not listed on that page.
crtasm
As an example, feeds available on every github repo:
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/commits.atom
superkuh
Google (Blogger, etc) pushes Atom feeds. Weather blogger is still relevant is up to perspective.
domysee
Really great to see so many RSS stories recently.
I'm working on a feed reader, called Lighthouse (https://lighthouseapp.io/). It combines RSS feeds with read-it-later, by putting new content into Inbox, where you can either archive or bookmark. Bookmarked content shows up in Library.
It's fantastic for content curation.
This is missing planets.
A good way to find interesting blogs is to subscribe to a few planets.
These are essentially aggregations of blog related to some project/topic.
https://planet.gnome.org/ https://planet.kde.org/ https://planet.mozilla.org/ https://planet.documentfoundation.org/
PS. If you know any good planets worth skimming, please add to below :)
That said, I don't really have a good RSS reader that syncs across devices. I currently use Feedly, but it tries to be too smart.