Indeed owning the filter algorithm is the killer functionality. There is a torrent of RSS feeds still out there (pun), but they are not usable in firehose form. For example KDE's Akregator is an otherwise capable desktop feed reader that can handle large feed collections but its filtering capabilities are zero. Abandonware quiterss used to have at least some basic functionality. This is an area where a community open source project could have huge impact.
I ditched the algorithm for RSS
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Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#12I’ve been meaning to give this a shot. I wonder if anyone has figured out how to fit Twitter into RSS? It’s obviously not a natural fit since there are many more posts but the average quality and length is lower. But if I could figure it out, then similar to what this article says, it would help permanently break the habit of endlessly scrolling a feed.
We used to have nitter and that supported making profiles of a feed. Used this alot in Gnus until it was all gone. Fwiw I believe mastadon has native rss support, and if bluesky doesn't, I bet it's coming one day.
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#13Yes please, RSS is the true federated Internet for content distribution.
Bluesky made some interesting choices in the design of the AT Protocol. It reminds me a bit of RSS. At least in the aspect of having separate content and aggregation layers.
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#14Apologies for promoting my project again (did this in at least 2 other threads related to RSS), but I'm weirdly proud of it: I'm curating a list of human-written blogs on my blog reader/discovery/search engine called Minifeed: https://minifeed.net/blogs/ There's an OPML export available as well: https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml
I was looking for more feeds to subscribe to. Thanks for sharing!
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#15Apologies for promoting my project again (did this in at least 2 other threads related to RSS), but I'm weirdly proud of it: I'm curating a list of human-written blogs on my blog reader/discovery/search engine called Minifeed: https://minifeed.net/blogs/ There's an OPML export available as well: https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml
There's also https://ooh.directory/ and https://blogscroll.com/
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#16For those implementing feeds, "RSS" seems to get a lot of mentions, but how much of it is RSS-as-such and how much is "RSS" as a generic term for "feed", with Atom also perhaps being implemented: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
> but how much of it is RSS-as-such
Almost all of it. RSS is just a much more specific term than "feed" as many people talk about their Twitter or Facebook "feed". I have yet to see a reader that couldn't handle both RSS and Atom and you will see a mix of formats being produced.
I wrote a bit more detail about this in the past: https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#form...
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#17Ditch the algorithm by using or building a custom feed in BlueSky. I'm interested in networking stuff so I built a BlueSky feed that anyone can use.
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#18I love the idea of owning my own feed very much. These days it feels like a local and/or private LLM that had some web crawling ability would be able to do a better job than RSS.
That seems like such an obvious project that someone's working on it, but the trick is that I would NOT subject myself to a monetized AI that is injecting content into my eyeballs that isn't in my best interest. So it's not necessarily something that fits current models of "the user is the product".
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#19I've done this. Built a whole RSS app, where I can use RSS feeds to serve me the web page itself, then customize the web page with my own styling if I want. I can also use non-RSS pages in my RSS reader and show once a day or however often I want.
The problem is with discovery, though (e.g. getting new information you wouldn't get with an RSS feed, such as YouTube videos). I still think you'd need to make your own algorithm based on your own parameters so you can get the benefits of discovery while also controlling what you see.
Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS
#20I love the idea of owning my own feed very much. These days it feels like a local and/or private LLM that had some web crawling ability would be able to do a better job than RSS. That seems like such an obvious project that someone's working on it, but the trick is that I would NOT subject myself to a monetized AI that is injecting content into my eyeballs that isn't in my best interest. So it's not necessarily somet…
> it feels like
You're correct - it's a feeling. But far from reality.