Does it sync across machines? If so that would be amazing
Edit: as in like, subscribed feeds. Obviously the feeds would update on both machines but would I need to add each feed to the app twice is what I meant to ask.
Yep NetNewsWire all the way. It syncs to iCloud. I use it to subscribe to important GitHub project releases, blogs, news, and even some YouTube channels.
I use it too, and like it very much. My only complaint is the inability to filter content (say, by keyword or regex). But it's free, it's solid, and it syncs across all my devices. Big ups.
For 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:
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.
One exceptions are sadly podcast feeds and clients. Although technically the additional podcast elements or just a basic "non-funky" podcast feed shouldn’t be a hard problem, the podcast ecosystem mostly ignored Atom and produced and parsed only RSS 2. Even Apple‘s iTunes/Podcasts.app which launched in 2005 with support for both, gave up official support for Atom some years ago.
I remember the period where I switched from the Something Awful forums to Reddit. Back in the day, you had to dig through a bunch of stuff that was bad to get to the "comedy gold". But even the bad stuff was sometimes comically bad. On Reddit, all the "gold" was always at the top, so there's always something "good", but it was generally lackluster and not quite it. Still it made me lazy and I switched (not that I read Reddit today).
It's because you are not an Average Human and so averaging everyone's humor doesn't really work for you. I think this is precisely why Instagram and tiktok are actually more addictive, they give you these personalized algos that are powered by your personal engagement stats, vs Reddit which just sort of sorts by other people's opinions
I’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.
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.
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/
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.
Thank you! I went through multiple iterations of designing the visuals, wanted to keep it very clean and "texty", but not overly brutalist at the same time.
When you “open original to view full content” and then use browser back to get to your page, the back history is removed and you can’t click back again to get to your main page. Makes it hard to navigate.
Love the site.
Not sure I understand. The "open original.." is a plain link with target="_blank", and Minifeed is a pure classic HTML web app with zero JS shenanigans. There is nothing which can manipulate the history.
Since the link opens in a new tab by default (because of target="_blank"), that new tab naturally does not have a "back" history. Is this what you mean?
I wish target="_blank" had never been invented. I'll decide for myself if I want a new tab, thank you very much. I've never found an extension that filters out this garbage properly. There's one appropriately called "Death To _blank", but so much still slips through.
On ios it does not do that. When I click on the original source link it replaces minifeeds page in the current tab. I can the ln click back and it does take me back to minifeed but then I cant click back again to get back “one more” to the minifeed index.
Nice. I think a search engine that only crawls RSS feeds is a great idea. My own selfishness wants such a project to not get too popular so the slop media doesn't go back to publishing feeds.
Funnily enough, I'm working on a link-blog feature on Minifeed. Kind of like del.icio.us or pinboard; at first, I implemented an ability to add blog posts to favorites and to lists, but there are so many blogs/sites without RSS, that I decided to allow users to save arbitrary links. Example: https://minifeed.net/l/rakhim
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.
When BlueSky was being designed I was involved in the developer discussions and continually urged them to make simple RSS be the least common denominator of their entire spec, and build on top of RSS rather than trying to replace RSS. They listened to a lot of what I said, including my "Repository" concept where every user basically has a big repository of IPFS content addressable elements, and incorporated that into their design, which I was glad to see, but BlueSky failed miserably on the "KISS" principle, because they made every detail super complicated. It could've been RSS-compatible, and that would've changed the world, and revived RSS, which is badly needed, but sadly they were unable to see the wisdom in that.
EDIT: And most of them (BlueSky devs) indeed were far left-leaning progressives who were much more concerned with censorship than freedom of information (this being around 2020 to 2022 Silicon Valley mindset), so they continually wanted to impose lock-downs and controls on the flow of information, rather than fostering principles of openness and freedom like what RSS is all about.
Yeah, I've written an ActivityPub implementation of my own. Very familiar with Mastodon too of course. RSS is such low hanging fruit and so obvious a thing to use as the basis for social media posts.
I 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".
I'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.
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.
Completely disagree. I mainline RSS feeds from news publications. The ability to glance at 300 headlines that'll take a couple minutes and being able to selectively open whenever one looks interesting. That's the power of RSS when you've a properly config'd setup (much love to Feedly, RIP Google Reader).
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.
There is a lot of interesting work in this space by the IndieWeb community. They've got a vision of (and lots of a spec for) a social reader[1] that uses RSS for lots of the things people got in the habit of with Web2 social media (comment, repost, etc)
(Although the IndieWeb community has this weird thing against "side files" and prefer having the content inside the HTML, marked up with Microformats2 special attributes. A social reader then polls the HTML and parses it additionally with the Microformats2 algorithm. I suspect this cultural preference is a result of the usage of static site builders of the early IndieWeb pioneers like Tantek.)
Yeah, I don't really grok the focus on MF2 given the wide adoption of RSS/Atom, but the social reader concept isn't one I've seen anyone else advocating for. It also suffers from the same spam problem of anything else that allows public submission of content. I've been exploring it more in the context of _private_ blogging were you already have a layer of access control.
> 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.
I think a big problem with this is that commercial websites believe that they have to update a million times a day to Feed the Algorithm™, which bloats their RSS feeds and any RSS reader you might have checking on it. Similarly, subscribing to a particularly active subreddit or three would also fill up your reader with trash.
I get a lot more use out of my RSS reader to check smaller, personal sites that don't update as often
I don't use reddit, so I'm probably missing something, but subscribing to only the 'best' posts doesn't sound like a way to find the 'hidden gems', it sounds more like a way to subscribe to whatever the users of the subreddit have collectively voted up that particular day.
Back when I heavily used RSS feed readers, the solution was simple:
1. Unsubscribe from feeds that put out too much content.
2. Optionally put them in their own category and ensure the main "view" doesn't include those items.
3. Realizing that overoptimizing for consuming the best content is (or at least should be) a sign of suboptimal mental health.
4. Timeboxing: Decide you'll spend no more than 30 minutes (even less is better) on them per day, and be OK missing out on everything you couldn't catch up on.
5. Ponder seriously about the value you are getting from doing this vs what else you could be doing. Do you want to spend this much time (whatever it is) daily when you are 50? 60? At some point, you may realize there are diminishing returns to keeping this up.
As I learned in the last year or two, consuming offline content is significantly superior than consuming blogs and news:
In order of importance I'd put them exactly in reverse :)
And I'd add:
6. Stop thinking of yourself as a consumer. A consumer blindly ingurgitates whatever's fed to them. You're a customer. With tastes and personal opinions. They depend on you to make a living, not you on them. And an unhappy customer moves their business elsewhere, doesn't stay on forever like being a consumer implies.
> The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading
I'm working on an RSS feed reader, and it has a feature that solves that problem. For every subscribed feed, it shows the percentage of items that you actually bookmark and read. So if there are feeds that you subscribed to but don't read, you can easily find out which they are and unsubscribe from them.
The issue is that it's not possible to separate feeds from items. Even if some feeds are largely unread, I subscribed to them because I liked something they posted on a specific topic, and I still want to get updates whenever there is another feed item related to that specific topic. Ultimately the "feed" is the mechanism of delivery, but I don't think it should be the primary mode of categorizing item consumption.
I've worked on this issue a little in a different context, where you can follow posts from people on Bluesky related to specific topics, and this is ideally what I would like to be able to do more of with RSS.[1]
If I understand you correctly you want to filter a feed on specific criteria (e.g. topic). Even if the feed publishes a lot of other content, you want to know the ratio of bookmarked content based of the filtered feed, ignoring the other content.
It's a great point, and helps me extend the feature and make Lighthouse better. So, thank you!
Lighthouse actually has that data. It supports rules, and tracks if a rule made an action (e.g. archive an article).
So basically the ratio could ignore all articles that were automatically archived by rules.
I need to think more about how the UX of it should be, but it's a good next step for the feature.
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.
Feedly on the other hand makes me puke. Slow AF. AI plastered all over. Despite trying Pro+ tons of paywalled option which you learn require upgrade after you did feed setup.
In case it's helpful / relevant for folks, wanted to share a few things I do:
* OPML is a format that bundles feeds together to share with others.
* I publish an automated list of the feeds I'm subscribed to on my blog. [1]
* I pay for Feedly ($50/year and I don't regret it) which has API access, and I use an Azure function to produce it. I have a blog post if you're interested in setting something like that up for yourself. [2]
I'm a fan of RSS too. Some people I know use substack to write. I would ideally like to use kill-the-newsletter for that but I had trouble with delivery with substack. Fortunately, these days LLMs are quite quick so I was able to whip up a little tool that does this for myself: https://github.com/roshan/superheap
It's incomplete but sufficient. LLMs drop the cost of software to near zero. I barely had to learn anything.
> I would ideally like to use kill-the-newsletter for that but I had trouble with delivery with substack.
Substack does indeed seem to have kill-the-newsletter banned, but (at least for free posts) it actually provides an RSS feed out of the box, so you should be able to just chuck the address of the blog’s home page into your RSS reader and have it figure things out for you. I haven’t seen this capability advertised anywhere (and the days of the RSS icon in your address bar are sadly long gone), but it does exist.
(Incidentally, Buttondown also has RSS feeds built in.)
I use inoreader - https://www.inoreader.com/ as a feed aggregator and I absolutely love it. I use it every day to highlight, tag and search for information. I'd recommend it to anyone.
I started using RSS in ~2007, and I haven't stopped. I think i used thunderbird first, then google reader, then feedly, then a self-hosted freshrss for the last few years.
I have a graveyard of old blogs and webcomics whose URLs I can't bear to delete. I have a crapton of feeds still happily churning out articles.
My modus operandi for finding a non-obvious RSS feed is to check the Wayback Machine's list of saved URLs and search for "RSS", "feed", or "XML". That normally will find the feed as long as it exists.
If I remember correctly "the algorithm" as a concept of feed curation has been introduced by facebook ( or youtube?), long after RSS was used by blogs and podcasts. Heck, even Twitter used to have an RSS feed they killed a looong time ago [1]
I also remember that in the beginning I was chuckling to myself "who on earth would want to have their feed curated by a black box whose target function cannot be checked? If I wanted that, I could just keep reading a single newspaper." - turns out I was very wrong and lots of people seem to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of somewhat internally consistent worldview.
Interesting point. Yes, if you pick too narrow a set of feeds, they might not even prompt you to engage with other sources, leading to our good old filter bubble effect.
I'd still posit the risk of that happening is way higher when you only have a centralized platform like, say, twitter, controlling the push-factor based on payment.
With RSS, I can still adjust my feed exactly to my preferences once I notice a bias or degradation in quality of certain feeds. This cannot be done if my feed is controlled by a machine optimized for maximizing engagement/advertisement $.
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.
Depends, as all things. See for instance the Twitter (increased engagement) study [0] or the more recent Facebook study (little effect) [1]. For more recent investigations on user perceptions see [2] and [3].
This is partly because the ad-funded browser hegemony removed all the features that made them easy to use, via the common "break it, wait for usage to drop off, then claim nobody uses it and delete it" project management path.
After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org)
I'm not a web guy and I detest all forms of system administration, but I had no trouble setting it up on my host. I've got it configured to update its feeds one per hour from 6AM to 8PM. It just does its thing, and works fine on both desktop and mobile.
282 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 98.8 ms ] threadEdit: as in like, subscribed feeds. Obviously the feeds would update on both machines but would I need to add each feed to the app twice is what I meant to ask.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
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...
There's an OPML export available as well: https://minifeed.net/blogs/opml.xml
http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/rss-feeds-2025.opml http://tuvixdiedforoursins.lol/feeds13.html
[0]: https://blog.davidv.dev/blogs-i-follow.html
Since the link opens in a new tab by default (because of target="_blank"), that new tab naturally does not have a "back" history. Is this what you mean?
https://bsky.app/profile/coverfire.com/feed/networking
EDIT: And most of them (BlueSky devs) indeed were far left-leaning progressives who were much more concerned with censorship than freedom of information (this being around 2020 to 2022 Silicon Valley mindset), so they continually wanted to impose lock-downs and controls on the flow of information, rather than fostering principles of openness and freedom like what RSS is all about.
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".
You're correct - it's a feeling. But far from reality.
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.
Is TT-RSS still the go-to, or is there something else I should take a look at?
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
[1] https://indieweb.org/social_reader
I think a big problem with this is that commercial websites believe that they have to update a million times a day to Feed the Algorithm™, which bloats their RSS feeds and any RSS reader you might have checking on it. Similarly, subscribing to a particularly active subreddit or three would also fill up your reader with trash.
I get a lot more use out of my RSS reader to check smaller, personal sites that don't update as often
I am grateful for the suggestion, gonna give it a whirl.
Here's how its algo works https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti/-/issues/28
1. Unsubscribe from feeds that put out too much content.
2. Optionally put them in their own category and ensure the main "view" doesn't include those items.
3. Realizing that overoptimizing for consuming the best content is (or at least should be) a sign of suboptimal mental health.
4. Timeboxing: Decide you'll spend no more than 30 minutes (even less is better) on them per day, and be OK missing out on everything you couldn't catch up on.
5. Ponder seriously about the value you are getting from doing this vs what else you could be doing. Do you want to spend this much time (whatever it is) daily when you are 50? 60? At some point, you may realize there are diminishing returns to keeping this up.
As I learned in the last year or two, consuming offline content is significantly superior than consuming blogs and news:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/the-unexpected-benefit...
And I'd add:
6. Stop thinking of yourself as a consumer. A consumer blindly ingurgitates whatever's fed to them. You're a customer. With tastes and personal opinions. They depend on you to make a living, not you on them. And an unhappy customer moves their business elsewhere, doesn't stay on forever like being a consumer implies.
I'm working on an RSS feed reader, and it has a feature that solves that problem. For every subscribed feed, it shows the percentage of items that you actually bookmark and read. So if there are feeds that you subscribed to but don't read, you can easily find out which they are and unsubscribe from them.
It's called https://lighthouseapp.io
I've worked on this issue a little in a different context, where you can follow posts from people on Bluesky related to specific topics, and this is ideally what I would like to be able to do more of with RSS.[1]
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/lgug2z.com/post/3lc47yru7vc2k
It's a great point, and helps me extend the feature and make Lighthouse better. So, thank you!
Lighthouse actually has that data. It supports rules, and tracks if a rule made an action (e.g. archive an article). So basically the ratio could ignore all articles that were automatically archived by rules.
I need to think more about how the UX of it should be, but it's a good next step for the feature.
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...
Feedly on the other hand makes me puke. Slow AF. AI plastered all over. Despite trying Pro+ tons of paywalled option which you learn require upgrade after you did feed setup.
Feedly is horrible.
* OPML is a format that bundles feeds together to share with others.
* I publish an automated list of the feeds I'm subscribed to on my blog. [1]
* I pay for Feedly ($50/year and I don't regret it) which has API access, and I use an Azure function to produce it. I have a blog post if you're interested in setting something like that up for yourself. [2]
[1]: https://seankilleen.com/reading-list/
[2]: https://seankilleen.com/2019/01/tutorial-reading-list-feedly...
It's incomplete but sufficient. LLMs drop the cost of software to near zero. I barely had to learn anything.
Substack does indeed seem to have kill-the-newsletter banned, but (at least for free posts) it actually provides an RSS feed out of the box, so you should be able to just chuck the address of the blog’s home page into your RSS reader and have it figure things out for you. I haven’t seen this capability advertised anywhere (and the days of the RSS icon in your address bar are sadly long gone), but it does exist.
(Incidentally, Buttondown also has RSS feeds built in.)
Thank you. I only have one subscription. I wonder if there's a way to get the auth in there.
I have a graveyard of old blogs and webcomics whose URLs I can't bear to delete. I have a crapton of feeds still happily churning out articles.
I say the worst thing to happen to RSS was Google Reader in the first place.
Native apps! Forever!
I also remember that in the beginning I was chuckling to myself "who on earth would want to have their feed curated by a black box whose target function cannot be checked? If I wanted that, I could just keep reading a single newspaper." - turns out I was very wrong and lots of people seem to prefer just getting washed in a steady stream of somewhat internally consistent worldview.
Would be really nice to see RSS make a comeback
[1] https://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/
If you're putting together an RSS feed from creators you like, isn't that liable to happen anyway?
You’d need to join like meta rss feeds.
My news reader had 6 articles in it yesterday and that's it. I can reload as many times as I want and that won't change.
Meta is still Facebook in my mind.
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.
Depends, as all things. See for instance the Twitter (increased engagement) study [0] or the more recent Facebook study (little effect) [1]. For more recent investigations on user perceptions see [2] and [3].
[0]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01972243.2023.2...
[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp9364
[2]: https://jsb.journals.ekb.eg/index.php/FAQ/journal/journal/ar...
[3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3687046
After Google Reader shut down paid for Feedly for a while before switching to self-hosted FreshRSS. (https://freshrss.org)
I'm not a web guy and I detest all forms of system administration, but I had no trouble setting it up on my host. I've got it configured to update its feeds one per hour from 6AM to 8PM. It just does its thing, and works fine on both desktop and mobile.