Making RSS More Fun (opens in new tab)

I prefer the inbox to the river. It's not that difficult to scan my (categorised) inbox and “mark all as read” for a given feed.

But then again, I don't subscribe to too many things, and quickly unsubscribe from feeds that publish too often. There is a blog for fathers that publishes every day. No, thanks, I need to digest what I've read last week.

I went through this thought process of creating a mechanical system to find interesting content all across the web for me based on my preferences that it learned.

And I started thinking about the supreme importance of high quality data sources... realizing there's a power law there, where I could just subscribe to a few high quality people... and ended up reinventing RSS from first principles.

And then instead of embeddings we have tags...

Honestly I think we nailed it in 2005 :)

This is an insight I realized several years ago: I want RSS, but I don't want to track what I've read and haven't. I solved my problem by writing a bot for each RSS feed - it would mirror posts in Diaspora. I would then subscribe to those bots.

These days it's Mastodon, but same idea. I just scroll and browse a bit, with nothing in the system telling me I have 573 unread posts.

Twitter was . Not is . And I'm not talking about the name change.

> But if someone will is actually going to implement a feed, should it be (actual) RSS, or Atom (or JSON Feed)?

I’ve been doing JSON feeds exclusively since it came out. Support in readers is pretty good (Universal? Near universal?) and they’re super simple to generate and consume programatically with standard tools in current mainstream programming languages.

When adding to my feed reader, I’ll take whatever and don’t care¹. When generating it myself or consuming via a script, 100% JSON feed.

¹ In practice that means RSS or JSON. I’ve been using RSS for some two decades and never cared for Atom. I don’t have anything against it, I just never saw the need.

To praise TikTok it has a highly effective recommendation engine precisely because it is showing you one piece of content at a time and registering your engagement on that.

YouTube's interface gives people a feeling of agency because it tempts you with 10 or so videos on the side and you can choose one, it also means YouTube does not get information about the 9 you didn't click, maybe you would have liked 5 of them and hated 4 of them but it can at best guess about that. I read about negative sampling in the recommender literature to address this issue and never felt I understood it or believed in it -- the literature clearly indicates that it sorta-kinda works but I think it does not work very well.

So far as hating on algorithmic feeds it is not the algorithms themselves that are bad but how they are chosen. If there is any characteristic of the content that can be quantified or evaluated a feed can be designed to privilege that. A feed could be designed to be highly prosocial, calming and such or designed to irritate you as much as possible. It's possible that people get bored with the first.

My own reader works like TikTok in that it shows one content piece of the time but it is basically the stuff that I submit to HN and it is scientific papers and articles about LLMs and programming languages and social psychology and political science and sports and and advanced manufacturing and biotech and such. You might say my world view is unusual or something but it is certainly not mindless lowest common denominator stuff or outrage (e.g. to be fair I post a few things to HN because YOShInOn thinks they are spicy -- YOShInOn has a model that can predict if y'all are going to comment on an article or not and I felt it was a problem that my comments/submission ratio was low before I had YOShInOn)

> I get the impression this person is using RSS reader wrong. Or is there really a culture of people you are using RSS like a youtube-channel, consuming everything from beginning to end? For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest. This means there is a limited list of items to check each day, and a finishing line.

Why would the author's use be the wrong one? And why should YouTube be different, in principle? (Maybe you are using YouTube wrong...)

I think at some point there was a shift in the way we consume online content, from "I'll read whatever is up now" to "I have my list of things to catch up with". RSS is older, so it is natural to connect it with the older way of consuming content. But there is no reason we can't do the same with YouTube channels, for example.

When I used RSS, a hundred years ago, I certainly got anxiety from my NetNewsWire badge showing 10, then 100, then 10,000 unread articles. If I used it today, I would simply turn off the badge and tell it to mark everything 2+ days old as read. But certainly, at a time I did approach it as a "I should read everything on these websites". I was also young and an idiot, some of that has changed now.

I'm using a heavily customized 2005-era fork of tt-rss.

Early on in my use I recognized some feeds I wanted to read end-to-end (often individual blogs). Others (Hackaday, other aggregators) I dip into periodically. To keep the UI uncluttered I use naming of the feeds to differentiate. I could easily see adding some schema and UI to handle segregating the feeds, too.

I've thought about adding an algorithmic feed driven from the various feeds I only dip into.

I had some discussion on here re: feed readers that might publish a feed of "starred / tagged" articles. I would love to drive my algorithmic feed from a recommendation system based in part on the subscribing to these "starred" articles from the authors of feeds I already read. A decentralized system that drove recommendations like this would be awesome to play with.

Google Reader would present it almost like an inbox, where "unread" items are bold and read items are not.

To me, this caused a "not caught up on the inbox" reaction because I also use Gmail.

I know this is only one particular feed reader but this is just an example of how it could cause this. Looking at the screen felt like it was "work to be done" not "skimming headlines".

What I do is go through all the new titles from beginning to end and just open anything I want to read in a tab, FreshRSS supports this workflow well. Then it sits in that tab for however long and I read them in the order I want to, sometimes they grouped and stored while I do something else.

I also have sites I filter their RSS as well, they produce really large amounts of articles and I am only interested in certain topics. Took me a while to get around to this, for the most part I did not want a mainstream news site firehosing into my RSS but I have filtered it based on keywords.

That is about it. Takes a bit of effort to slowly build it up but I hate it when sites don't have RSS, I rarely read sites that don't now.

Same here. I more or less open feedly each day, go through 100-200 article titles and open those which seem interesting in new tabs. Then, after I'm done, I read the articles. I never read them inside feedly.

Why am I using it wrong when I only subscribe to interesting feeds? I read everything because I subscribe to stuff I want to read.

And I've been using RSS since the days when there were fights over atom vs RSS.

Can confirm. I subscribe to every feed that remotely interests me. So the aim is not to read everything end to end. The aim is to just glance the headlines, choose the interesting ones to check out later, and archive or delete the rest. Therefore, the feature that interests me in an RSS reader is its ability to sort the articles by my interests.

There are two wildly different models: subscribe only to a few people/channels/things and read or deliberately skip nearly everything, or subscribe to a large number of people/channels/things and let them wash over you while watching a small subset. The people seeking the former are also often the people who want "just give me reverse-chronological", the people who do the latter often like algorithms to help them deal with the firehose.

Personally, I subscribe to a few channels on YouTube and only follow social accounts of people I know well enough to want to read everything from, and deliberately avoid high-volume posters. As a result, I want reverse-chronological and I read/watch almost everything I subscribe to, with things I skip still being noticed and just deliberately skipped over. I know many others who do the same, and I often see that preference expressed here and elsewhere.

But I also know people who follow thousands of accounts and channels and similar, who just let the firehose wash over them, curated by an algorithmic feed. I don't understand that preference, but I know it exists, and I know it's why not everyone agrees with the preference of "just give me reverse-chronological, not an algorithm!".

> For me the purpose of RSS is to get the newest headlines, choose the interesting articles and skip the rest.

That's the only way I ever conceived of it.

What the author describes is unappealing to me. I choose my RSS feeds deliberately. I sort them into five categories, only two of which are must-view. Around half the articles from those two will be worth reading and I want to know that I didn't miss anything from either one. The rest is there for when I have extra time to kill while standing in line at the store, waiting for an elevator, etc.

If everything is random, I'll never know if I missed the one article that would have been the most important to me.

Too true. Not that every user has to be some sort of power user but its rather telling when a reader can hardly scale to a modest amount of articles, has no filtering mechanisms, or methods for organizing otherwise.

I use https://karakeep.app/ to subscribe to RSS feeds; not only can I view the content in the app, but it also captures the content and stores an archive of it. It uses generative AI to create tags (but also supports full text search of everything archived). You can also create RSS feeds with criteria, with it acting as a bus for your content; perhaps it can enrich your RSS feeds while you continue to use your existing RSS reader. I hope this is helpful for your problem statement.

I have a few different types of content on my website and wanted to offer both individual feeds and a combined feed, so I was disappointed that nothing seems to support the category tag. I settled for prefixing the titles in the combined feed, e.g. "[Blog]" for blog posts.

Very cool! Is there a way to blacklist some feeds?

What about email?

Email is a cousin to RSS - everyone has their email feed.

Senders push to an email inbox, rather than readers pulling feeds into an inbox.

Totally agree. Very much a throwback to StumbleUpon in the best way. And more directed given that we get to choose the focus of the content.

Digg has recently re-launched. It’s in beta currently. I got in a couple weeks ago.

> I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.

Seems to me your problem lies in this part:

> giant collection

Don’t add so much that you can’t deal with it. Concentrate on infrequently updated sources. Any news website, for example, is too much and shouldn’t be in your reader. A small creator or YouTube channel from whom you want to see (almost) everything does go in.

If you ever feel overwhelmed, you have too many feeds and should remove every single one you don’t feel is absolutely valuable. Exceptions can be made if e.g. you were on vacation and never checked the reader. In that case, mark as read instead of removing.

If you ever find yourself regularly skipping the content from a feed without reading, remove it then and there. If you’re not consuming at least 80% (made up number, adapt to yourself) of posts, it does not belong in your feed reader.

> I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.

RSS subscriptions aren't like Pokemon. You don't have to catch them all. One of the major selling points of RSS is that you can subscribe to sites that update infrequently so you get notified when they have a new update instead of checking the site manually and being disappointed that it hasn't updated in three weeks or whatever.

Adding a bunch of sites that update hundreds of times a day is a great way to DDOS your own attention span

could potentially build it as an Atproto appview, everybody publishes their blog feed url on their PDS and the appview pulls updates from the firehose based on your recommendation preference.

What is this? I can't find any information about the site

The dream of consuming free content is really a throwback to the 90's way of thinking about an open web as a public space where anyone can freely access files that are published, as "published" meant "freely available." When YouTube made publishing something monetizable and guarded by DRM (look at all the trouble yt-dlp has been going through lately), that open web lost a lot of steam. Social media companies monetized discovery and surfacing through user data collection, and also undercut some of the desire to publish—once your basic info was on Facebook, having a personal web page became much less important. As having personal hosting became less and less the norm, publishing power concentrated in the hands of fewer companies (like YouTube) that were set up to monetize content and built the expectation of pecuniary compensation for "content creation," where the 1990's open web publishers were happy just being noticed and appreciated. The 1990's were a long time ago and are never coming back, because the past exists only as memory.

You are putting words in their mouth. There is no reason why such an RSS app wouldn’t link to the original source instead of scraping it.

The app doesn’t need to be a central source of monetization for the creators either, that’s usually the source of all these problems. The app can monetize their aggregation and curation services as they wish, and the individual creators sites can monetize their contribution as they wish. Be it ads, subscriptions, donations or anything else, as usual.

AI companies hoover up the data, dump it in a giant pile and never tell you the source of it.

This extension literally just redirects you to the website. If the small creator has ads on that website, they're going to get paid. They're going to get the exposure.

Are you complaining about this project or RSS in general? Because your complaint applies to both. I loved the era of RSS readers. Maybe I never sent anyone money but it was never the point. That was a way to feel properly connected to an Internet stranger, to stay up on what was going on and what they thought. It doesn’t have to be financial remuneration at the end of every flow chart. "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.

When I run a red light it's wrong, but when a fire truck does it it's ok?

Really makes you think.