I ditched the algorithm for RSS • Hacker News Board

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#21

Post by saltysalt » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

patmorgan23 wrote: post #13

saltysalt wrote: post #7

Yes 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.

You're right I like their protocol, especially how they use domain name ownership for profile verification.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#22

Post by therealfiona » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:14 PM UTC

I've been meaning to get back on the RSS wagon. I ran TT-RSS some years ago and it fell apart at one time due to my lack of time to maintain it.

Is TT-RSS still the go-to, or is there something else I should take a look at?

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#23

Post by superkuh » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

DearNarwhal wrote: post #14

freetonik wrote: post #10

Apologies 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!

Like planting a tree, the best time to start collecting feeds is 10 years ago. And the second best time is now. For those without time travel machines, here's my categorized list of ~1700 feeds in HTML and opml.

http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/rss-feeds-2025.opml http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/feeds13.html

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#24

Post by mnls » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

RSS is a fantastic way of getting new articles, videos, updates etc from various sources that post 1-2 times per day at max. Getting news from News websites is hell, I had to do a LOT of filtering on Freshrss to make the news category less overwhelming. And if you wanna get to "inbox zero" you’ll spend a lot of time scrolling.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#25

Post by bsnnkv » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

freetonik wrote: post #10

Apologies 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 really like this project, such a beautiful design carefully executed on!

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#26

Post by sureglymop » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

freetonik wrote: post #10

Apologies 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

This is honestly awesome! And I love the design as well. Is it open source?

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#27

Post by bsnnkv » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

I am a big proponent of RSS, but I think that it suffers from a lack of imagination these days, for example, the "quality filter" approach mentioned in this article is not very useful imo.

The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these days don't provide anything useful in the body to make a determination on this, and others just dump the entire contents in the body, which means you're wasting a bunch of time reading N% of something until you realize you're not interested in it and it can be skipped.

In addition to this, RSS feeds tend to be structured to just throw everything at you, regardless of the topics you are interested in.

For a few years I have been publishing my own topic-specific feeds[1] for others to consume where I fill the body with my own personal highlights from the source, with a link through to the source (ie. the things I found interesting, the "hooks" that give a quick signal to a consumer if this might be something they want to invest time in reading). They have a couple of die-hard consumers, but ultimately this really a case of a niche within a niche.

I wish there were more feeds like this for me as a consumer, but unfortunately I get the feeling that this idea will never really become popular enough to catch on widely as RSS becomes less and less relevant to the mainstream.

[1]: my software development topic RSS feed for example: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#28

Post by freetonik » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

sureglymop wrote: post #26

freetonik wrote: post #10

Apologies 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

This is honestly awesome! And I love the design as well. Is it open source?

Almost! :) I'm cleaning up the repo and about to release it under AGPL-3.0.

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#29

Post by Olshansky » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

Wanted to share a repo I created last week to help add support for new RSS feeds: https://github.com/olshansk/rss-feeds/

Add support for Paul Graham's outdated RSS Feed. OpenAI research. Etc...

Leave a request or a star!

Also wrote a full blog post about it here: https://olshansky.substack.com/p/no-rss-feed-no-problem-usin...

Re: I ditched the algorithm for RSS

#30

Post by slightwinder » Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

Newsfeeds are really nice, I utilize them now 20 Years or so (RIP old Bloglines). But it's a bit sad that there is no really good newsreader for it. I also used to use Usenet in the 90s and early 2000, so my view on this is a bit different, maybe. But all the feedreaders I know are either very limited in abilities, or very cumbersome to use for more advanced features. It's really strange how there seem many technophile people are using and advocating for RSS, yet all the tools are more barebone and very simple.