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.
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)
https://feed.perfplanet.com for web performance
Also please open a GH issue if I’m missing a blog or 5
https://invent.kde.org/websites/planet-kde-org/-/blob/master...
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/
It'll just be a subscription I forget that I have. I don't need more of those :)
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).
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.
diff.blog tracks over 2000 dev blogs at the moment.
And you can also follow blogs and topics.
It's yahoo pipes clone - so you can mix and filter RSS feeds that you want.
Scaling it to a wider audience than HN is a longshot, as much as I love the idea.
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.
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!
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.
Finds feeds even if they're not RSS autodiscoverable. Everything it does is described here: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/deep-dive-finding-rss-feeds
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.
https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/commits.atom
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.
I'm trying to build a new corner of the old web with my social link sharing site https://lynkmi.com, and every tag automatically has an RSS feed so you don't need to know anything about them to set one up, or even need an account to follow one.
The main idea is instead of following everything a person posts you can just follow a subset of their interests. So if I post about Irish Dairy Innovations [0] and also about Advice [1] you can follow whichever combination of those you like.
If you'd like to sign up, my email is in my bio. And if you don't want to sign up, my email is still in my bio.
[0] https://lynkmi.com/oisin/Irish%2520dairy%2520innovation [1] https://lynkmi.com/oisin/advice
I asked because I didn't know how to get exactly that, so I'm building a site that finds RSS feeds from sites on the front page of HN. Then, at the end of the day it emails me with a summary if I miss one.
If anyone wants to try the daily summary email would love feedback.
I believe the HN feed is available here: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
At socialfixer, options, hide post put everything that should disappear follow reals etc..
I am not on my laptop otherwise I would post my block list here.
I use my own set of domains to find places on the internet [0].
A working example how it could be used is at [1]. It is a domain viewer in javascript.
I also use my own RSS client [2] that stores all links in [3], but don't get me wrong, I also have my storage for bookmarks [4]
Links:
[0] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
[1] https://rumca-js.github.io/quickstart/public/static_lists/vi...
[2] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive
"News" are not actually that easy to automate as in "serialising posts".
Big companies are experimenting with UI all the time for a reason.
Especially because it would involve a lot of heuristics.
If you like your email in mutt, then you'll probably like your feeds in newsboat.
Plus, RSS feeds combines the reg videos + short videos into single feed.
I follow several feeds and Youtube channels.
Reeder have a very smooth experience.
it really is rad to add my most read users to the feed.
https://bsky.app/profile/xavd.id -> https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:fp2izjrrcsbsqphlu7f5sixa/rs...
More info: https://openrss.org/blog/bluesky-has-launched-rss-feeds
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.
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.
In search rankings for instance you night have a document score (like Pagerank) that tries to identify the quality of a document, and you might have a query-document score that identifies the relevance of a document to a query. It's not trivial at all to find a way to blend those that gives you queries that are both relevant and quality as opposed to just one or the other.
The greatest weakness of my current RSS reader is that it's slow, depending on how much I am using it, articles could be delayed anywhere from a day to a week. For certain kinds of articles [1] recency doesn't matter, but other articles [2] have a definite shelf-life and if you repost them too late you look like a total dope.
I'd like to let articles about sports "cut the line" in front of higher quality articles about other topics but it's really hard to find a balance that's right because I don't want to get flooded with lower quality sports articles. It's one thing to say "let people make up their mind about how to balance these things" but when you really try it you find it's pretty hard. Not only do I have to change the whole way my pipeline works (can't be a batch job anymore) but it's not clear to me how to tune up the selection criteria.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S294979062... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2025/01/19/eagles-...
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.
You can read x articles a day; your system ingests y articles a day.
x=y is perfect but requires close-to-perfect balance (if x=0.9y to 1.1y maybe you can adjust your reading habit to your your feed)
if x>y then your system isn't showing you enough, if y<x you are going to miss things you subscribe to based on some arbitrary or random characteristic.
With an algorithmic feed of some kind you choose to read x items a day, your system shows you the best x items a day out of y based on some set of criteria and constraints.
These things are common sense but seemingly nonsensical to a lot of people. For instance our impoverished rights-based discourse (see [1]) about "free speech" presupposes that 100% of people can read 100% of what everybody else posts, realistically platforms can only show people some fraction of what gets posted so one thing is going to get more visibility and other things get less and that's a choice -- it could be random but it's still a choice. (As Rush would put it, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice")
I think the discussion is so impoverished that we never hear that an algorithm could choose to do anything other than maximize profits for a platform, when in fact that is just one thing an algorithm could do out of countless options.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-...
I use inoreader and track basically everything I want in a huge list of feeds.
It's pretty trivial to mark stuff as "always flag this", and then leave the rest of the pile as "scan through and manually tag anything else"
Anything low volume goes on the "always" flag list as it takes one review a day of the new content to decide if it's something I care about.
Ultimately what I want, and what most people want, is the ability to just hook up to various data streams and apply rules to it. From there filtering as desired comes pretty easily.
My preference would be chronological feeds, but following few enough accounts that I can see every single post in it. Then that's not a problem.
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?
My feed reader (that I wrote myself) rewards things that I thumbs up and punishes things that I thumbs down.
Being concerned about that is downright logical.
It's sad the popular perception of a fundamental computer science concept, the great progeny of Al-Khwarizmi Musa, the life work of heroes like Donald Knuth, is sullied and stained with dire B-movie comic-book Bond villainy. Thank the hooligan broligarchs and their manchild ambitions for trashing that bit of computing culture.
Even my mum spits in the dust like a cowboy at the sound of "Algorithm".
