If I read from my mobile using NetNewsWire and then go on my laptop and read with the FreshRSS web client, I don't need to wade through a bunch of articles I already read.
I love RSS. Like all the old web tech the user is in control. If I like a page/site I'll look for an RSS to keep up to date with it, if one doesn't exist I'll likely forget about it. I'm not signing up for email updates.
> As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would flood their pages with multiple posts per day
The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention. That's one of the main reasons fb and other sites implemented algorithmic feeds in the first place. If you take away the time component, posters compete on quality instead.
> The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it adapts to everyone’s taste and interests, but that’s only true until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture.
Yea, exactly, but as emphasized here: The problem is not curation, the problem is the curator. Feed algorithms are important, they solve real problems. I don't think going back to RSS and chronolgical feed is the answer.
I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.
Its all subjective. There is no clear quantification of X Attention consumed = Y Value produced. So saying what the algo does is important is like saying astrology is important. Or HN is important ;) At the end of the day most info produced is just entertainment/placebo. 3 inch chimp brains have upper limits on how much they can consume and how many updates to their existing neural net are possible. Since there is nothing signaling these limits to people, people(both producers and consumers of info) live in their own lala land about what their own limits are or when those limits have been crossed, mostly everyone is hallucinating about Value of Info.
The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.05% of info generated is actually consumed. And that was based on a study 10-15 years ago.
I've patched miniflux with a different sorting algorithm that is less preferential to frequent posters. It did change my experience for the better (though my particular patch is likely not to everyone's taste).
It is a bit strange that RSS readers do not compete on that, and are, generally, not flexible in that respect.
Social media targets engagement, which is not a good target. Even a pure chronological sort is better.
That's nonsense. If the problem truly was spam then the "algorithm" would be a simple and transparent penalty proportional to the frequency of posts. The goal is not that (it's """engagement""") and the algorithm is not that either (it's a turbo-charged skinner box attacking your mind with the might of ten thousand data centres).
But that's a bullshit excuse, just like with email the answer to spam posting is the person gets un-followed/unsubbed.
When its an algorithm, the user is incentivized to produce content in order to increase their chances of getting a hit. Secondarily the loss of visibility increases value of advertising on the platform. It's a lose-lose for users, first they are forced to use the platform more for fear of missing something, second the user has to post more to get any reach. The platform wins on increased engagement, overall content depth, ad revenue, and the ability to sneak in a whole lot of shit the user never was interested in or followed. Facebook & Instagram now are functionally high powered spam engines.
Interestingly the FT has an article today about a drop in social media usage ( https://www.ft.com/content/a0724dd9-0346-4df3-80f5-d6572c93a... ) - one chart titled "Social media has become less social" shows a 40% decline since 2014 of people using social media to "share my opinion" and "to keep up with my friends" In many ways, what is being referred to as social media has become anti-social media.
An algorithmic email feed would be useless, as would any sort of instant messenger, yet that's exactly what social media turned in to. Twitter/X is teetering in that direction. The chronological feed still works and is great. Anyone who posts a lot and doesn't balance out the noise with signal I just unfollow.
I might be wrong about this one, but one outcome of generative AI might be an engagement cliff. Some users will be very susceptible to viewing fake photos and videos for hours (the ones still heavily using FB likely are), but others may just choose to mentally disengage and view everything they see on FB, IG, Tiktok as fake.
I don't necessarily agree with the statement "chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention" - if someone spam-posts, I am very likely to unsubscribe. This would be true both for chronological and algo feeds.
>> I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.
Now that is something I would be interested in. I believe some of the RSS aggregators are trying to offer this too, but mostly the SaaS ones, not self-hostable open-source ones.
I've ditched RSS feeds more than 10 years ago but I'm increasingly wanting to go back to them. Thank you for sharing this blog post, it'll help to get me started.
One thing that I did to kickstart my RSS usage again was to revisit each site I was subscribed to and:
- Remove it if it posted more than once a day. I want thoughtful voices, not other people’s aggregation.
- Remove it if it hadn’t posted in the last few years. Some people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that most blogs that are 5+ years old aren’t coming back.
- Remove it if the overall tone of the blog is too negative.
I then added a bunch of new feeds from people I’m currently actively following on other platforms who are blogging. This was a massive breath of fresh air, that has got me actively engaging with my feed reader for the first time in a few years.
(Related to my second point: I’m not the first person to note this but there’s a real sadness to watching an old and beloved blog nova itself into your feed in a burst of gambling site spam. Better to get out before that happens.)
> - Remove it if it hadn’t posted in the last few years. Some people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that most blogs that are 5+ years old aren’t coming back.
This I don't really understand. Following inactive feeds via RSS comes effectively at no cost for you. How does removing them improve the experience?
Good tips!
I have two busy feeds (which are my country's equivalent of Reuters or AP) but I keep them in a separate folder and if I wanted, I could exclude them from the main feed. Sources that post way too often can be a burden and it feels like you can never catch up.
I have a few of these on FreshRSS, they're all set so that they don't appear on the main feed and they have "Max number of articles to keep unread" set to a non-overwhelming number.
They're basically firehoses of information where I like to tap into now and then.
Some Day I'll do a classifier system that lifts up the ones I might be interested in to the main feed. FreshRSS does have "labels", but the filtering system isn't especially powerful (or easy to use)
If you want to discover personal, human-written blogs with valid RSS feeds, check out the directory I'm building: https://minifeed.net/blogs
(it's also a reader of sorts, and has related discovery and full-text search across those feeds and posts, but the page I linked is just a big list of blogs with some recent posts and RSS links).
I may need to talk to my hosting provider :) Thanks for pointing this out. The site is indeed statically generated (Hugo), so this should not be happening.
I use RSS a lot but it is not without it's own difficulties.
My collection of feeds is naturally geared to my own interests and world views. As a result I do find I miss out on some things I should pay attention to. To counter this I include a fact checking site which brings stories I would otherwise miss to my attention. Not ideal, but it works.
This is very much true, and one of the downsides of RSS is that you need to make effort to discover new sources, or make sure that what you're consuming is at least somewhat balanced. However you have no guarantees of the latter when you use algorithmic feeds.
I love RSS. I literally just bought an app on itch.io, and to my surprise the devlog page for it, which lists all the new updates, supports RSS. I love when it happens. [1]
RSS didn't stick for me until:
1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would miss stuff I actually care about.
2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing. Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles, OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50 unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio.
3. https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs.
I pay for Feedbin, and it's great.
---
1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.
The point 2 is an important one, I used RSS for years but had to stop using it as I was way too anxious trying to read everything.
I started using again, but I have a few rules: all the feeds only refresh once week; and any news feed (like hackers news) that generates too much content is purged also once a week, so I only have the latest one week articles.
In my mind, my RSS feed for me is like an old school weekly magazine. This solve the FOMO feeling of missing something interesting, but I don’t feel like I need to read something as soon as is published.
I'd suggest giving a go to lenns.io (shameless plug). It gives you source prioritisation control + number of items per source control + category prioritisation. In the end, you get exactly what you want without being overwhelmed.
This is an app/service that I've built for myself, but it's up for anyone go give it a go and use it.
My biggest gripe with RSS is that it is a page that is changing continuously. If I want to read what was on that page 6 months ago, I cant seem to find a way to do so. Do you have any ideas how to go about doing this? or find what I can RSS historical data
Shout out to Blogtrottr[1], which allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and have the posts sent to you via email. Great service I've been using for years.
The key with RSS is curation, otherwise it stops being your "controlled feed". FOMO can make you add noisy feeds that basically are putting too much information that will dwarf the relevant feeds. In my case, I follow Hacker News and Slashdot which are ok but also thought it was a good idea to add "The Verge | All posts" to my feed reader and I find myself hitting "Mark all as read" continuosly. It's not The Verge's fault of course, it's my lack of strategy.
I find this to be misguided tech-nostalgia. What you control this way is the way information is brokered to you. It only controls the information reaching you itself to the extent that is reflected in the delivery method.
This is significant if you're a staunch subscriber to the idea that everything, and I really do mean everything, wrong with social and mass media is the "algorithms" (formerly: capitalism, sensationalism, etc.), but I'm not. I find that to be at most half the story.
In the end, you're consuming something someone else produced for you to consume. That's why it's available. So you're relying on that information to be something you don't find inherently objectionable, or at least be filterable in that regard, which is not a given. We consume arbitrary and natural language content. Most you can do is feed it through AI to pre-digest it for you, which can and will fail in numerous ways. And this is to say nothing about content that wasn't produced and/or didn't reach you.
The reason older technologies felt better wasn't necessarily just because of them per se, but also because of their cultural context. These are interwoven of course, but I wouldn't necessarily trust that reverting back to old technology is what's going to steer back this ship to a better course. I'm afraid this is a lot more like undropping a mug than it is like applying negation.
If someone can please figure out how to integrate a purchase/payment system into a similar protocol we would love you forever :)
I would so love to help my many artist/musician friends get set up direct-to-consumer with digital content, subscriptions etc — and with their own shops, that they can run, in whatever funky style.
Great post! Indeed, social media platforms optimize for engagement and ad revenue, not user needs.
Feeds are a user right, not a publisher favor. In that spirit: I recently built RSSible - a tiny tool that lets you turn any webpage into an RSS feed via CSS selectors. I've built this for myself; already using it for HN, Product Hunt, tldr.tech, r/science, IMDb latest shows, RubyOnRemote, and many more.
It's still early, but if anyone here is curious to try or test, I'd love feedback. (You can see live demos on the site)
The root problem here is that a communication channel full of noise is not valuable - but on the other hand if you have a very selective channel - then nobody will subscribe because to subscribe you need repeated good interactions.
I recently made a little RSS feed reader, and its barebones lives on my machine, and is powered by python.
I never could get into any of the RSS reader software it all seemed very happy to put random things in the feed that i didn't care about. A strict timeline of things i want to read is all I want. If there is nothing new there is nothing new and I'm okay with that.
Most people complain about the signal-to-noise ratio in news consumption. I believe the issue isn’t the news sources themselves, but rather the lack of a proper RSS application.
A great RSS app should offer a powerful search function. It should support tagging, bookmarking, scoring or point systems, categories, and a "read later" feature, among other things.
You don’t need to eliminate news sources — just use filters and search tools to surface what matters to you.
An ideal RSS reader should also be smart enough to bypass things like Cloudflare and other unnecessary protections that break RSS functionality. Unfortunately, many mobile RSS apps fall short in this regard — and mobile is king these days.
To get something truly useful, you often need to self-host. But most people won’t go that far.
Personally, I self-host my RSS reader. I even built my own client, since I wasn’t aware of KaraKeep (formerly Hoarder) at the time. I’m still using my custom app because it’s now very versatile, and I’m not sure KaraKeep would meet all my needs.
66 comments
[ 58.0 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] thread[1] https://freshrss.org/index.html
Edit: typo
If I read from my mobile using NetNewsWire and then go on my laptop and read with the FreshRSS web client, I don't need to wade through a bunch of articles I already read.
The causation is opposite, and it's the whole problem with chronological feeds, including RSS - chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention. That's one of the main reasons fb and other sites implemented algorithmic feeds in the first place. If you take away the time component, posters compete on quality instead.
> The story we are sold with algorithmic curation is that it adapts to everyone’s taste and interests, but that’s only true until the interests of the advertisers enter the picture.
Yea, exactly, but as emphasized here: The problem is not curation, the problem is the curator. Feed algorithms are important, they solve real problems. I don't think going back to RSS and chronolgical feed is the answer.
I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.
The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.05% of info generated is actually consumed. And that was based on a study 10-15 years ago.
It is a bit strange that RSS readers do not compete on that, and are, generally, not flexible in that respect.
Social media targets engagement, which is not a good target. Even a pure chronological sort is better.
When its an algorithm, the user is incentivized to produce content in order to increase their chances of getting a hit. Secondarily the loss of visibility increases value of advertising on the platform. It's a lose-lose for users, first they are forced to use the platform more for fear of missing something, second the user has to post more to get any reach. The platform wins on increased engagement, overall content depth, ad revenue, and the ability to sneak in a whole lot of shit the user never was interested in or followed. Facebook & Instagram now are functionally high powered spam engines.
Interestingly the FT has an article today about a drop in social media usage ( https://www.ft.com/content/a0724dd9-0346-4df3-80f5-d6572c93a... ) - one chart titled "Social media has become less social" shows a 40% decline since 2014 of people using social media to "share my opinion" and "to keep up with my friends" In many ways, what is being referred to as social media has become anti-social media.
An algorithmic email feed would be useless, as would any sort of instant messenger, yet that's exactly what social media turned in to. Twitter/X is teetering in that direction. The chronological feed still works and is great. Anyone who posts a lot and doesn't balance out the noise with signal I just unfollow.
I might be wrong about this one, but one outcome of generative AI might be an engagement cliff. Some users will be very susceptible to viewing fake photos and videos for hours (the ones still heavily using FB likely are), but others may just choose to mentally disengage and view everything they see on FB, IG, Tiktok as fake.
I don't necessarily agree with the statement "chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention" - if someone spam-posts, I am very likely to unsubscribe. This would be true both for chronological and algo feeds.
>> I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.
Now that is something I would be interested in. I believe some of the RSS aggregators are trying to offer this too, but mostly the SaaS ones, not self-hostable open-source ones.
- Remove it if it posted more than once a day. I want thoughtful voices, not other people’s aggregation.
- Remove it if it hadn’t posted in the last few years. Some people blog extremely irregularly, but the likelihood is that most blogs that are 5+ years old aren’t coming back.
- Remove it if the overall tone of the blog is too negative.
I then added a bunch of new feeds from people I’m currently actively following on other platforms who are blogging. This was a massive breath of fresh air, that has got me actively engaging with my feed reader for the first time in a few years.
(Related to my second point: I’m not the first person to note this but there’s a real sadness to watching an old and beloved blog nova itself into your feed in a burst of gambling site spam. Better to get out before that happens.)
This I don't really understand. Following inactive feeds via RSS comes effectively at no cost for you. How does removing them improve the experience?
They're basically firehoses of information where I like to tap into now and then.
Some Day I'll do a classifier system that lifts up the ones I might be interested in to the main feed. FreshRSS does have "labels", but the filtering system isn't especially powerful (or easy to use)
the UI is an acquired taste i think, it has a very retro feel to it. i was mainly using it because it let you make nested folders of feeds
they also have an android app and its available in the fdroid store as well if you are into that kind of thing
https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS
https://github.com/jocmp/capyreader
(it's also a reader of sorts, and has related discovery and full-text search across those feeds and posts, but the page I linked is just a big list of blogs with some recent posts and RSS links).
https://blognerd.app/?qry=AI+research+llms&type=sites&conten...
you can search for blogs with feeds, and find blogs by semantic similarity
My collection of feeds is naturally geared to my own interests and world views. As a result I do find I miss out on some things I should pay attention to. To counter this I include a fact checking site which brings stories I would otherwise miss to my attention. Not ideal, but it works.
RSS didn't stick for me until:
1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would miss stuff I actually care about.
2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing. Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles, OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50 unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio.
3. https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs.
I pay for Feedbin, and it's great.
---
1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.
I started using again, but I have a few rules: all the feeds only refresh once week; and any news feed (like hackers news) that generates too much content is purged also once a week, so I only have the latest one week articles.
In my mind, my RSS feed for me is like an old school weekly magazine. This solve the FOMO feeling of missing something interesting, but I don’t feel like I need to read something as soon as is published.
This is an app/service that I've built for myself, but it's up for anyone go give it a go and use it.
That's an interesting tip. Never thought about it this way.
[1] https://blogtrottr.com
This is significant if you're a staunch subscriber to the idea that everything, and I really do mean everything, wrong with social and mass media is the "algorithms" (formerly: capitalism, sensationalism, etc.), but I'm not. I find that to be at most half the story.
In the end, you're consuming something someone else produced for you to consume. That's why it's available. So you're relying on that information to be something you don't find inherently objectionable, or at least be filterable in that regard, which is not a given. We consume arbitrary and natural language content. Most you can do is feed it through AI to pre-digest it for you, which can and will fail in numerous ways. And this is to say nothing about content that wasn't produced and/or didn't reach you.
The reason older technologies felt better wasn't necessarily just because of them per se, but also because of their cultural context. These are interwoven of course, but I wouldn't necessarily trust that reverting back to old technology is what's going to steer back this ship to a better course. I'm afraid this is a lot more like undropping a mug than it is like applying negation.
I would so love to help my many artist/musician friends get set up direct-to-consumer with digital content, subscriptions etc — and with their own shops, that they can run, in whatever funky style.
Feeds are a user right, not a publisher favor. In that spirit: I recently built RSSible - a tiny tool that lets you turn any webpage into an RSS feed via CSS selectors. I've built this for myself; already using it for HN, Product Hunt, tldr.tech, r/science, IMDb latest shows, RubyOnRemote, and many more.
It's still early, but if anyone here is curious to try or test, I'd love feedback. (You can see live demos on the site)
RSSible: https://rssible.hadid.dev/
Github: https://github.com/mhadidg/rssible
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard)
I never could get into any of the RSS reader software it all seemed very happy to put random things in the feed that i didn't care about. A strict timeline of things i want to read is all I want. If there is nothing new there is nothing new and I'm okay with that.
Thanks for the write up and read.
A great RSS app should offer a powerful search function. It should support tagging, bookmarking, scoring or point systems, categories, and a "read later" feature, among other things.
You don’t need to eliminate news sources — just use filters and search tools to surface what matters to you.
An ideal RSS reader should also be smart enough to bypass things like Cloudflare and other unnecessary protections that break RSS functionality. Unfortunately, many mobile RSS apps fall short in this regard — and mobile is king these days.
To get something truly useful, you often need to self-host. But most people won’t go that far.
Personally, I self-host my RSS reader. I even built my own client, since I wasn’t aware of KaraKeep (formerly Hoarder) at the time. I’m still using my custom app because it’s now very versatile, and I’m not sure KaraKeep would meet all my needs.
Links:
https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - my own project
https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS - all about RSS
https://rssisawesome.com/
https://rssgizmos.com/
https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds
It converts any dynamic website to rss feed
It's self-hosted and stateless
https://github.com/Egor3f/rssalchemy
It's however not in active development state, but if there will be some pull requests I'll review them, so it's not abandoned
Demo page is not working now, but if there will be some activity, I'll bring it back up