Show HN: Collaborative RSS Reader

LinkLonk is a novel mechanism to subscribe to RSS feeds and discover content - upvote or submit a link to anything you liked and you will get connected to RSS feeds that posted this content. The more content you upvote from the same feed - the higher other content from that feed will show up in the For You page. This helps you see content from feeds with the highest signal-to-noise ratio first.

In addition to RSS feeds, you connect to other users who upvoted the same content as you. This way other users help highlight great content from feeds you are already connected to and discover other feeds that they are connected to.

To sum up: upvote content => connect to RSS feeds and users => discover great new content => repeat.

This is my hobby project that I am building in my spare time. My stack is: PostgreSQL + Golang server (sqlc, pgx, gorilla/mux) + Angular client + Firebase for auth. It runs on a small VPS instance on OVH that costs ~$12/month. I am planning to run it for years to come and I will be happy to have you as a user.

I did a Show HN for linklonk.com 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643), but I think I over complicated the title and the description, as exemplified by this comment I received: https://linklonk.com/item/8281929870071398400?comment=173480.... That’s why I’m reposting it.

I appreciate this and I understand your concern that a project that does not have a sustainable income is likely to be stop working one day.

At this scale the project doesn't cost much to run. The best motivator for me to develop it further would be your feedback and any help spreading the word to bring in more users. After all, in order for the "collaborative" effects to kick in we need more users.

It's going to be hard to detect and prevent bot spam (if the site's user base becomes worth the spammers' time).

If you really don't want to accept donations, you could perhaps consider a 'support LinkLonk' page or section that explains as you did above, encouraging to share it or provide feedback.

The page with your personalized recommendations does not have an RSS feed itself. The recommendations are prioritized based on how strongly you are connected to sources that posted it - RSS feeds and users. This prioritized list does not have an obvious way to be translated to a chronological RSS feed.

If such RSS feed includes content from all sources that you are connected to - then your RSS feed would have too much noise. The only way I can think of converting it to an RSS feed is if you choose how many top recommendations you would like to see in that feed per day.

This is how the email newsletter works today (you can subscribe here: https://linklonk.com/profile) - you choose when (daily/weekly and at what time) and how many top recommendation you want to delivered to your email inbox. And you can rate items from the email.

> Can it be seeded with known liked feeds or content?

Yes, you can seed your recommendations - simply submit (https://linklonk.com/submit) links to content that those feeds posted or directly submit links to those feeds. If you use RSS readers then you can the list of feeds you are subscribed to as an OPML file. I haven't built an automatic way to import OPML files, but if you send your OPML file to me by email, I would be happy to import it for you.

> And can you 'pin' liked feeds in some way, to say 'I always want to see content from here'?

To soft-pin a feed that you liked you need to upvote content from that feed. That will cause your connection to the feed to be stronger than to others and items from that feed will show up at the top for you.

There is no explicit pinning functionality - something that would effectively set the connection weight to infinity. The value proposition of LinkLonk is that it keeps track of how useful the content from each feed and user has been for you and prioritizes new content accordingly. I know this is very different from a traditional way of subscribing to RSS feeds, where you are either subscribed or not (boolean). On LinkLonk your subscription has a weight (float). In the days of Google Reader, there was something similar I think if you sorted your content "by magic". Only on LinkLonk, there is no magic - the mechanism that connects you to feeds and users is transparent and controlled by your upvotes.

> Is this a reader, or another source? It is a different kind of reader - one that automatically manages your subscriptions.