I ditched the algorithm for RSS

>I could just keep reading a single newspaper

Completely unrelated, but this is the strategy I use. I try to keep out of the news but about once a week I go to the newspaper site to read what happened.

The obvious downside is that I get an extremely biased view on reality, so I try to account for that when reading the news.

But this gives me the advantage of consistency. I know how they generally report things and this makes spotting 'anomalies' a little easier.

The one thing holding RSS back is that finding RSS feeds and subscribing to them in another app is frankly time consuming.

I built a free service for people who specifically want to track updates / features / releases to SaaS tools, services, and GitHub repos. https://www.getchangelog.com . It effectively is an RSS search engine + email digest

I think its unique because it uses a combination of LLM based web scraping to find rss feeds and I am working on a solution to generate RSS feeds from any blog / api changelog right now to expand the set of sources. I really wish RSS was more widespread and there was a better discovery solution.

This is tangential but maybe some of the crowd here has wisdom: are there any apps (iOS or Android) that are built for RSS but have a good experience for just photos? What I mean by this is an app that is more or less Instagram-esque in browsing behavior, but just backed by RSS feeds with no comments/likes/etc.

I've been meaning to write about this but I recently found that I missed having one central place to share photos with people when I travel/build things/etc. When I thought about it further, I realized that I don't want the social media bits there - I just wanted the photos, self hosted, in something I could brand myself. This also solved for another problem I had, which is that I wanted to share my stuff across n platforms and got very tired of having to constantly provide any text context when doing so. Open graph tags work really well for "write once, share anywhere".

I have a working prototype up at https://photos.rymc.io/ and so far it's been great. I'll probably open source the stuff this year. It's not necessarily groundbreaking but I do think it's a decent approach; uploading auto-scrubs specific metadata, handles generating various previews, etc. Very easy to customize and just tries to do one thing well.

Notably, any page on it can be "followed" via RSS by just requesting it in the right format, e.g:

JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=json Atom: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=atom RSS: https://photos.rymc.io/?format=rss

It can be tag-specific too, so if someone's only interested in my travel photos, e.g:

JSONFeed: https://photos.rymc.io/tag/travel/?format=json

Back to the original point of the comment though: I'd like to find an app that I could give to e.g my dad and just let him browse things and see what I'm up to. None of the RSS apps I've tried fit well here though, with ReadKit on iOS coming somewhat close but it's a clunky experience.

If need be I'll just build my own at some point, it's not exactly rocket science... but it is time I could be doing other things. Anyone got any recs?

The one thing that kills me is the number of "modern" blogs/sites that don't offer rss or atom is really frustrating. If I really like your site, please let me be an engaged reader and let me know when you have something valuable to say again!

I've even resorted to adding features in my personal feedreader to seek out common feed locations or APIs that common blogging tools leave on mostly unnoticed.

I have opinions[1] on Webmentions. It sounds like such a great approach, but it also opens up the original author to hosting mountains of spam and other low-quality comments, and moderation is a lot of work. Arguably, we see the same problem today on sites that let you post comments.

[1] https://havenweb.org/2023/04/10/private-comments.html