RSS is awesome
79 comments
·August 28, 2025ropable
vanc_cefepime
Preferential to Miniflux myself, but any RSS reader is better than none.
theshrike79
I tried both, but Miniflux was like 15% _too_ bare-bones for me.
FreshRSS hit the sweet spot for me, combined with NetNewsWire as a mobile UI
fzxu22
+1 happy freshrss user here
senectus1
FreshRSS is dabomb! Highly recommend it.
k2enemy
Boy do I feel old if a short, low content PSA about the existence of RSS is considered "hacker news."
user3939382
RSS is the antidote to algorithm feeds. I’m glad for any mention of it. 90% of the tools users need were built 1970-2000 including RSS.
627467
Having restarted using rss in the past months (after probably 10+ years of not using it) i am now starting to remember why I stopped using it: lack of a personal "algorithm" that made hundreds (if not 1000s) of unread daily items to be manageable.
I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work?
Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological.
More readers should have this
lmm
> Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological.
> More readers should have this
Why? If that's what you want you can get it from your social medium of choice. I use RSS because it gives me precisely what I asked for (for better and for worse), and I suspect the vast majority of the userbase feels the same.
rootnod3
Gnus in emacs is a good reader for that due to the scoring system in gnus.
al_borland
The thing that made RSS work for me is to really limit my feeds. Instead of following 10 tech news sites that have a bunch of overlap, I follow 1 that has most of what I want. A few blogs are for apps I use and want to be informed of new information, but they post infrequently, which is good.
Feed with dozens of posts per day turn into noise, especially if you have a lot of them.
By choosing one site I trust, I let the editors edit, instead of the algorithm.
jayd16
Is there still no alternative filling Google reader's void?
akoboldfrying
If you're looking for a project, I think this is something that an LLM, even a dumb local one, would be pretty good at. Give it a list of 50 articles you like, 50 you hate (or however many fit into the context window), and let it read the full text of each post and assign a 1-5 score. Then sort and/or filter by that.
In theory, this is actually a very textbook ML supervised learning problem, and stuffing an already-trained LLM's context window with a small handful of samples like I suggested is a gross hack. But it might be the easier option.
pixxel
[dead]
netule
Not only that, but an ad for their mobile app. Pretty low quality content.
al_borland
It’s not their app. NetNewsWire is developed by Brent Simmons and has been around for over 20 years. It’s free and open source. Last I saw, he didn’t even accept donations.
senectus1
I mean.. it shouldn't be controversial.. but people keep claiming rss is dead.
not in my world it aint.
glenstein
Definitely not dead, thank goodness. I probably read 4-5 articles a day through RSS and skim through dozens.
Even so it's no longer a de facto standard the way it used to be.
senectus1
haha, I skim through about 800 a day and read dozens of them.
Every year around newyears time I trim it back, but it inevitably grows again.
nntwozz
Podcasts needs an RSS feed, that about sums it up how not dead it is.
rufus_foreman
You're one of today's unlucky 10,000.
pseudo_meta
Love rss, but the upside of not having an algorithm determine your content consumption quickly results in a fire hose of content.
Sadly, filtering features seem to be only available for paid subscriptions of online services, or for self-hosted solutions. Or are there solutions I am not aware of?
surprisetalk
Amen! If you're looking to fill out your RSS reader, I maintain a directory of tech blogs (ctrl+f "feed" for rss links):
[0] https://blogs.hn
Other good directories:
nine_k
RSS is terrible as a format (Atom is much better), but RSS is awesome as an idea. If your web site were a database, RSS would be like WAL. If your website were differentiable, it would be like its derivative, or rather a Lagrangian, taken at the moment of last update.
(BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)
pentagrama
I like the general term "Web feed" as an umbrella term, I found about that on this article https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-web-feeds
Also that blog has some other good related articles:
- What is RSS: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss
- What is Atom: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom
- What is JSON feed: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed
- What are feed readers: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers
- What is OPML: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml
rawling
Your site's RSS feed is just another view of the items on your site, no? It's the RSS _reader_ that "differentiates" it for you?
DamnInteresting
We should popularize a JSON-based alternative, we'll call it "Absurdly Simple Syndication."
advisedwang
Because the main content of a blog post is an article, markup actually works really nicely. Although I suppose you could embed HTML in a JSON string
suslik
Does anyone know if there is a self-hosted rss tool which exposes the data over API? I am interested in processing feeds programmatically but ideally would prefer not to bother with writing the update / subscription / parsing logic myself.
theshrike79
Pretty much all of them? They usually implement the Ye Olde Google Reader API and a few more so that mobile applications can connect in a standard way.
- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_A...
- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR...
FreshRSS implements two APIs
righthand
You may be interested in tools that parse XML, I'm sure there are libraries for parsing RSS/Atom specifically. I'm not sure what you're asking exactly. You want a tool that will read RSS feeds then reformat the data to a different (JSON?) format or something and have an API endpoint return that converted format? But then for what purpose of transforming the XML(an already suitable format)?
suslik
Yeah, perhaps I did not explain myself correctly (or, to be precise, explained myself incorrectly - I should not comment right after waking up). I want a tool that would take as input one or more RSS feeds and emits an aggregated RSS which I can then open in an RSS reader. I would then do certain things with the RSS entries (for instance, for some academic journals only the header of the article is emitted, so I can attach the full text or even an AI summary to it).
skeptrune
Ironically just told the founder of my company that it was mission critical our blog had RSS. He had never used it before somehow and didn't know why it would be a big deal lol.
charcircuit
How is it mission critical for the company to have an rss feed?
skeptrune
Blogs should be written to be read and not just for SEO slop. RSS feed helps a lot with that.
blackbear_
Does anybody know if there is a RSS reader with embedded recommendaions based on previous likes and/or user-specified keywords?
theshrike79
Newsblur has some of this, it shows how popular some feeds are and has a "popular with other users" section.
due-rr
RSS is awesome! That’s why I made the simplest RSS reader[1] and a RSS feed of Hacker News classics that’s updated daily[2].
Using this curbed my Reddit usage quite a lot.
[1] https://rssrdr.com [2] https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics
rifty
To some degree this is more a knock on the state of UX on the web than a intrinsic advantage for web feeds, but my favourite thing was my ability to compact list view content feeds, categorize them, and flip between them quickly because everything has been pre-acquired. As soon as I found out I could use Youtube that way, it felt like a 10x better experience for browsing my subscriptions.
Defletter
The only complaint I have about RSS is that it seems antagonistic to edits. It's not usual that, when refreshing my podcast RSS feed, there are multiple versions of the same episodes because they made some edit somewhere in the title or description, etc. I've had five versions of the same episode before. I feel like we should have the technology to fix this by now :P
lwhsiao
We do. Atom feeds have an updated field for this. But, it's up to whoever is generating the feed to know how to handle their metadata.
vhcr
That's what the guid / id field is for.
ajdude
I'm all in on RSS. Matter of fact, I used an RSS reader (netnewswire) to find this post!
I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices.
Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.
I'm sad that a basic description of what RSS consists of makes it onto HN. I still upvoted to help educate the kids :/
FYI FreshRSS is fairly trivial to self-host, and is a really nice option for an RSS reader app.