Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The RSS feed reader landscape

lighthouseapp.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 206 posts

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#171

Post by OisinMoran »

HanClinto wrote: post #28

I still miss Google Reader. I loved the social aspects, where I could repost my favorite articles (with comments about them), and friends could easily subscribe to my feed and comment on my shares. It was a really great social network for sharing blog posts and articles. I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web. Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on th…

Shameless plug but you might enjoy the site I've been working on for the past few years: lynkmi.com

It's very much inspired by the earlier web and more recently especially catalysed by the trend you note of the big sites punishing doors to elsewhere. I remember a time when Facebook actually had a "links" section where you could see a list of all the cool stuff you had posted, so it's sad they've strayed so far.

Join the resistance! Every tag and profile automatically has an RSS feed too, and I just recently added internal backlinks which I'm enjoying a lot.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#172

Post by AJ007 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #145
HanClinto wrote: post #28

I still miss Google Reader. I loved the social aspects, where I could repost my favorite articles (with comments about them), and friends could easily subscribe to my feed and comment on my shares. It was a really great social network for sharing blog posts and articles. I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web. Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on th…

Decentralized social RSS feed / article recommendations could totally happen if the community came up with a standard way to implement it. Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content: People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralize…

What if all we need is for bloggers to post a recommended feed with links to external posts in a separate RSS feed? The feed readers ingest the recommendation feeds and count them. I've been following ActivityPub and other protocols, by damn that stuff becomes a mess quick. The absolute simplest approach is probably the right one for now.

The fundamental problem with recommendation engines are the platforms are forcing content on the users based on what increases engagement (and possibly ad $) on their platform -- not what is valuable to the user.

If I'm following a particular blogger, and their signal to noise ratio is 9:1, if they recommend an article it would be vrey likely I am also interested in it. If I'm following a larger group of people, I may be interested, in aggregate, what they are interested in. All very basic stuff that seems to have been abused and forgotten. Other than e-mail, rss is the odd man out in 2025 which also makes it so much more valuable.

Any third party RSS feed service could ingest these feeds and spit out whatever other type of recommended feed they want. The could just view a hn/reddit style feed solely with counts of the people they want to follow along with "vote" counts and some decay algorithm. They could have a chronological feed that just shows everything. The users are in control again, not Meta/Facebook/IG, Reddit, Bytedance, or etc.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#173

Post by ubermonkey »

simonw wrote: post #11

If you're in the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iPhone) NetNewsWire is an absolute delight. It's not a commercial product any more, Brent Simmons runs it as a (very serious) passion project. Here's a recent post by him explaining part of his philosophy for it: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-we... Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.

I used NNW for a LONG LONG TIME. It's great software.

There was a period when it was not as useful, though, and I migrated away, but I still think of it very fondly.

My current RSS consumption toolchain uses Feedbin as the back end / syncing host, and their web app is good enough that I no longer use a native tool on my Mac. On my phone and iPad I use Reeder.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#174

Post by ubermonkey »

perardi wrote: post #19
simonw wrote: post #11

If you're in the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iPhone) NetNewsWire is an absolute delight. It's not a commercial product any more, Brent Simmons runs it as a (very serious) passion project. Here's a recent post by him explaining part of his philosophy for it: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-we... Crucially, it syncs feed read state between my laptop and phone.

I have used NetNewsWire since 2003. Really. It’s flawless. It just works. There are no gimmicks, there is no weird effort to gamify it into a social media play, it’s just a user-focused news reader. And that’s great.

That's about when I started, if memory serves. GREAT software.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#175

Post by ubermonkey »

jonpurdy wrote: post #78

Going to shill for Feedbin ( https://feedbin.com ). I switched to this in 2012 when Reader blew up and it has remained a consistently excellent product since then. I use the web client, and on iOS I use Reeder app to access Feedbin. Ben even published the a Feedbin API¹, which I wrote a Feedbin client for vintage computers (I called Mosaicbin)². I even use it for YouTube subs as of this year and it ingests them perfe…

We're mostly on the same page. I moved to Feedbin after GR went away.

I also use Reeder on iOS but am happy with the Feedbin web app on my Mac.

Feedbin is a service I'm 100% happy to pay for.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#177

Post by lukasschwab »

After about a decade of experimentation (NetNewsWire, Feedbin, Miniflux...), I'm self-hosting a feed reader I wrote myself, running on a free hosted LibSQL db.

- NetNewsWire was slick, but wouldn't work on my phone.

- Feedbin was excellent, but eventually I decided to do some subscription cost-cutting.

- Miniflux worked fine, but 1) I found it a pain to set up with remote hosted Postgres and 2) it burned through the Neon free-tier usage limits in a couple days.

So I built one myself and run it on a Raspberry Pi home server.

Made a great little weekend project. The feed standards are known quantities, so a little AI assistance with boilerplate goes a long way.

Deciding you need a new feature and just adding it is refreshing — e.g. I wanted a "read it later" feature like Feedbin's (something missing from Miniflux), and now I have it.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#178

Post by lukasschwab »

AJ007 wrote: post #172
EvanAnderson wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized social RSS feed / article recommendations could totally happen if the community came up with a standard way to implement it. Re-posting / paraphrasing a comment I made in a discussion about decentralized recommendation algorithms for RSS feed content: People used to post a "blogroll" (and sometimes an OPML file) to their personal blogs showing the feeds they followed. That was one way to do decentralize…

What if all we need is for bloggers to post a recommended feed with links to external posts in a separate RSS feed? The feed readers ingest the recommendation feeds and count them. I've been following ActivityPub and other protocols, by damn that stuff becomes a mess quick. The absolute simplest approach is probably the right one for now. The fundamental problem with recommendation engines are the platforms are forci…

Basically linkblogging. I'm not sure this needs to be a separate feed; JSON Feed has a dedicated `external_url` field:

> If `url` [optional] links to where you’re talking about a thing, then `external_url` links to the thing you’re talking about.

I'd be shocked if Atom/RSS didn't have equivalents.

This kind of "repost"-ish behavior may just be obscured in the tools people use to construct feeds, so they remain obscure features of the standards. The designers had syndication in mind, very much like what you're describing — ingesting feeds, reprocessing/mixing/extending them, and exposing the result as another feed.

Re: The RSS feed reader landscape

#180

Post by sunaookami »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #118
sunaookami wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tt-rss was discontinued a few days ago: https://community.tt-rss.org/t/the-end-of-tt-rss-org/7164

The code still works.

Yeah but it won't get updates, security fixes, etc. if no one maintains it. You don't want to run an ancient PHP version that parses arbitrary input.
Post reply on HN