Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds
43 comments
·January 19, 2025jopsen
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.
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)
null
Unearned5161
big fan of feedmail [1] for a "dumb" reader. It just delivers it to your inbox. I have a folder set up called "feed" and I can do all the email things to the items landing in that folder. Every email costs a credit, you can buy 10 000 credits for $10, which works out to $0.001 per article.
The only thing it misses is any sort of highlight saving deal, but for those I just save the article to zotero and annotate it there.
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
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...
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).
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?
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.
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.
azemetre
Why is the goal to appeal to as many people as possible?
meiraleal
Don't underestimate what programmers with too much free time can achieve.
terminaltrove
Try adding our feeds if you're looking for curated terminal tools every week, we have a blog as well with ATOM.
https://terminaltrove.com/feeds/
All our feeds have an easy to see preview of the feed instead of unstyled XML so you know what the feed looks like.
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.
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.
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?
crtasm
As an example, feeds available on every github repo:
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/commits.atom
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.
superkuh
Google (Blogger, etc) pushes Atom feeds. Weather blogger is still relevant is up to perspective.
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!
janice1999
I see PolitePol mentioned. What do people use to run scrapers to generate RSS feeds themselves for sites without them? Do you self host scrapers?
dagurp
I do. Just a raspberry pi with nginx and a cron job that runs python scripts.
I'm not into AI but writing those scripts is boring so chatgpt is perfect for this.
PaulHoule
The hate for algorithms boggles my mind.
Chronological feeds are awful. You'll never see anything from the people who post occasionally because they get drowned out by the people who are posting all the time.
There may be some algorithms that deliberately magnify hate because that's a way to increase engagement, but if you want to create one of those algorithms you can make a training set based on chronological feed + boosting/retweets/reposts.
I'm amazed at how people keep making failing RSS readers that keep failing with the same failing user interfaces that have been failing since 1999; everybody knows RSS has been failing but they never ask why or if we have a choice.
We still see the readers that make you mark things as read, that take their cues from email and newsreaders, that, when you subscribe to N feeds show you N boxes with a list of items, etc.
My RSS reader works like TikTok because I'm not afraid of algorithms.
openrisk
> You'll never see anything from the people who post occasionally because they get drowned out by the people who are posting all the time.
If you control the algorithm there is nothing to prevent you from sorting feeds by volume and adjusting their presentation accordingly.
Actually you can imagine countless other UI adaptations depending on preferences, usage patterns etc.
Ideally RSS readers should offer flexible customizations, e.g., with plugins or even some low-code environemnt.
ahalimah
Which RSS reader do you use in that case?
And is it fair to say there's a middle ground between purely chronological feeds vs algorithms that reward engagement/time spent on the app?
beej71
I prefer time-based feeds, but that's just me.
I don't think people are objecting to suggestive feeds in general; they're objecting to suggestive feeds whose primary objective is to keep you scrolling for as long as humanly possible to maximize company revenue.
That's simply not what I want to do with my day.
I'd train my own if I wanted to go that route.
fevangelou
A handy bookmarklet to find & preview any site's feed (before subscribing):
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.