Social media is easy, yet users commonly need help because they simply can't manage a login/password... I don't think this DIY approach is simple enough to get traction
I could see a service where you paste in a URL of anything you find interesting, then that service going around and finding an RSS feed or newsletter signup and doing it for them... maybe taking off
> The best part about blog feeds? It's just an idea. There's no central authority. There's no platform.
I think this is blessing _and_ a curse. I had an idea that I built a while back that centralizes RSS feeds so you get the centralized benefits of social media while authors can own and control their own content.
If anyone's curious, I built it out here: https://onread.io but I never had the time to really share it out or push it beyond the SUPER basic MVP that it currently is. I was thinking about pivoting it more into a tool that I could turn into an RSS feed for myself, but I haven't found the time, really.
Either way, I don't think RSS feeds as-is are as useful as they once were, and social media still has significant value over feeds due to conversation, sharing of content to folks with similar taste and interests, etc.
if you think this will work, you haven't fully understood why the likes of twitter has become successful, i.e. centrally controlled collaborative filtering, amongst others aspect
The reason social media is so popular is that most social media users have nothing interesting to say, so the only way they can get anyone's attention online is to intrude into other people's replies. They couldn't write a blog post if their life depended on it.
I write on my blog, but I am not sure who I am writing for. Which is fine, because in the end I write for myself. Years ago you would get comments, posts would get linked (remember pingbacks?). Maybe as time progressed I started writing more niche things that reach nobody, or maybe that web started disintegrating. Hope it comes back, but I will not hold my breath. I will keep posting though.
Though, it kind of works that you keep adding blogs and blogs, until it turns out that RSS feed is mess. Maybe no clickbaits or ads, but still density of posts I want to read goes down.
Do you know any good solution, where there is collaborative filtering or RSS (bonus points for open, tweakable algorithm) + some AI with custom prompt to give me top recommendations?
Something where I am in the charge of the algorithm, not the other way around.
The problem with blog feeds is the action required by the user to decide what blogs to follow, and then the desire to go to a different app to read them.
But this strikes me as a problem that can be solved, and potentially already has been.
If I go to a newsreeder the first time, it's empty. I have to decide what to follow.
If you can get me to add a few blogs of interest, you start understanding what I want to read.
I can then subscribe and follow, just like I would on twitter, and you can present new stuff to me, so I'm never showing up without something new.
I suspect this is something like what substack is doing, but that means all the blogs have to be on substack.
I never go to substack to browse, I go there when a link sends me there.
If there was a service that I as a blog-writer can submit my feed to, and that service is managing the promotion of my blog to the right readers, that would be a benefit, and I wouldn't feel locked in.
> RSS is actually already familiar to you if you have ever subscribed to a newsletter [...]
RSS is far better than a (digest) newsletter; you can browse individual posts at your own pace, keep some unread for later, and revisit them across sessions.
With newsletters, you either read the whole thing in one sitting or leave the email unarchived forever.
If only every newsletter had an RSS feed. But of course they don't - can't show you ads!
I thought about a similar problems because I always find really interesting blogs (mostly on HN) but I don't have a real place to store them, so they get lost when I close the tab. I can save them in the favorites but I'm not used to check favorites regularly.
Feeds are a tangent solution because they give you only the new stuff. Feeds transform blogs into social media platforms where what matter is the new fresh content, ready to "feed" the algorithm. But blogs and personal sites are different. High quality content is usually written in a single article, maybe in the past, and it will not be shown on your feed.
Actually I judge a blog on what's already written in there, so I want to read more articles but maybe just not right now. If I add the blog to my RSS reader I would only read future content.
Another patch to this problem is Instapaper. I can save there the most interesting articles and read them later, but the entire-blog view is missing.
I would like to have a way (platform) where I can save a blog and read all/some articles, with a standard formatting (custom blogs are nice but not always comfortable to read) and not having a default sorting for recent articles.
I have the same issue, the chronological nature of feeds kind of breaks this flow. It feels like there’s a missing piece, like a standard to browse older content from a blog. I Wrote a bit about this here: https://olano.dev/blog/web-anthologists/
Why not just bookmark it in your web browser? Or create a Tumblr blog and make a new post for every cool article you find. You can set and edit the tags later if you want for searchability.
I am using a self-hosted instance of https://linkding.link/ which works great for hoarding a bunch of links. I am using multiple machines and different browsers and keeping bookmarks on the cloud is just not my thing.
All for people doing their own sites/blogs. But social media is the RSS feed and has been for like 15 years. Short form posts that link to long form posts. Social posts that link to the content you've published wherever. And the reposting of other curated favorites is the extra feed portion. The change in recent years is ppl skipping the self-hosting/POS part of the POSSE and posting directly on the social media sites because they were convinced to do that and the social media sites were discouraging users from travelling off-site etc. We just need to get away from using social media sites as the hosts of our content and back to the POS part.
I use my blog to mainly write about stuff I do that I really don't want to forget about, like interesting vulnerabilities I found or projects I want to share, reach is ~30k visits/month (still no idea how since I think it's kinda niche) but so far is working.
I consider it also a good way to force myself to keep thoughts in order and to do a recap on the activities I do that most of the time are very chaotic.
I would probably consider integrating messages also to receive feedbacks.
I use hugo with the backend hosted on GitHub Pages, so far is a pretty solid setup that requires minimal effort since I just wrote an action to build pages every time a commit is done on the main branch
I do not think RSS can replace social media, but we need more blogs where people just "reblog" thinks they liked, it would really help with discovering new feeds.
I don’t have any analytics or social trackers on my blog, so I usually don’t know if anyone is really reading it; but occasionally someone will email me in reaction to a post and that’s usually quite nice.
> The idea is to create another page on your blog that has all the RSS feeds you're subscribed to. By keeping this public and always up to date, someone can visit your page, find someone new and follow them. Perhaps that person also has a feeds page, and the cycle continues until there is a natural and organic network of people all sharing with each other. So if you have a blog, consider making a feeds page and sharing it! If your RSS reader supports OPML file exports and imports, perhaps you can share that file as well to make it easier to share your feeds.
This is usually called a "blogroll", which has the advantage of being much less ambiguous/overloaded than "feeds".
We have a very similar feature on https://feedle.world. Every search has its own dedicated RSS feed that can new followed directly, as well as an iframe that can be embedded on other people’s websites. This way, anyone can build accidental blogrolls, based o topics of interest.
P.S. for people whore not really into RSS, we are also Beta testing the option to subscribe to searches and get results in email digests. Same idea, but you don’t need to bother finding an RSS reader.
This is a little triggering :) Reminds me of all the promise back in 2005 when I built my first startup Grazr.
It was:
- a widget that was a mini RSS reader that let visitors to your site read the RSS feeds you subscribed to on your site
- a way to share your collection of RSS feeds dynamically
- a way to copy / remix those collections
- a way to subscribe to those lists dynamically (if they had a dynamic blogroll or whatever)
- a processing and filtering engine to allow merging collections of feeds together into a single stream
- Javascript on the server (in 2005 :) ) run using embedded script tags in the OPML / XML blogrolls to create even more dynamic blogs
The net effect was you could make your own news feeds / timelines and use code to control how they were filtered / combined / etc... It was crazy powerful (for 2005) and I still miss it _today_ since it had the dynamism of the news feed, some of the social aspect, and total control since there was no algorithm other than your and the people's who's list you subscribed to curation and any code you ran against it.
> You certainly can try to find ways to monetize through platforms like Substack, it's truly up to you. The key is building a network of people who want to talk together!
Hmm. This is one of the reasons why this won't take off unless the blog is on Substack and people are making money out of it.
But then again power laws are brutal, which is why Substack has got good discovery, ordinary wordpress/ghost/jekyll/ssg websites and blogs with RSS don't.
There needs to be a way to gate web / RSS content + discoverability behind hit for those who don't want to go onto Substack, especially now with AI crawlers scraping blog content from authors for free.
Otherwise the only way to make money from your writing would be to use Substack.
Wasn't the idea of Yahoo! Pipes[1] the aggregration of RSS feeds? It actually did that and did a really good job of it. I would prefer something visual like Yahoo! Pipes for aggregating RSS feeds - everything else is just another list...
Then we could all share our pipes and build better ones on top of existing pipes. The thing with Pipes was that you could also filter feeds and use Pipes as feeds for other pipes ... Yahoo! Pipes was a great product that was way ahead of its time.
If anyone is interested in actually replicating this, then I would suggest using Node-RED[2] as a stand-in for Pipes.
I was going to ask, is there a standard for this sort of thing? Then I realized that it's just references in the form of text. Hypertext, if you will. We should make a markup language for it.
34 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadI could see a service where you paste in a URL of anything you find interesting, then that service going around and finding an RSS feed or newsletter signup and doing it for them... maybe taking off
I think this is blessing _and_ a curse. I had an idea that I built a while back that centralizes RSS feeds so you get the centralized benefits of social media while authors can own and control their own content.
If anyone's curious, I built it out here: https://onread.io but I never had the time to really share it out or push it beyond the SUPER basic MVP that it currently is. I was thinking about pivoting it more into a tool that I could turn into an RSS feed for myself, but I haven't found the time, really.
Either way, I don't think RSS feeds as-is are as useful as they once were, and social media still has significant value over feeds due to conversation, sharing of content to folks with similar taste and interests, etc.
Do you know any good solution, where there is collaborative filtering or RSS (bonus points for open, tweakable algorithm) + some AI with custom prompt to give me top recommendations?
Something where I am in the charge of the algorithm, not the other way around.
But this strikes me as a problem that can be solved, and potentially already has been.
If I go to a newsreeder the first time, it's empty. I have to decide what to follow.
If you can get me to add a few blogs of interest, you start understanding what I want to read.
I can then subscribe and follow, just like I would on twitter, and you can present new stuff to me, so I'm never showing up without something new.
I suspect this is something like what substack is doing, but that means all the blogs have to be on substack.
I never go to substack to browse, I go there when a link sends me there.
If there was a service that I as a blog-writer can submit my feed to, and that service is managing the promotion of my blog to the right readers, that would be a benefit, and I wouldn't feel locked in.
I'm sure this has been done, why did it fail?
RSS is far better than a (digest) newsletter; you can browse individual posts at your own pace, keep some unread for later, and revisit them across sessions.
With newsletters, you either read the whole thing in one sitting or leave the email unarchived forever.
If only every newsletter had an RSS feed. But of course they don't - can't show you ads!
Feeds are a tangent solution because they give you only the new stuff. Feeds transform blogs into social media platforms where what matter is the new fresh content, ready to "feed" the algorithm. But blogs and personal sites are different. High quality content is usually written in a single article, maybe in the past, and it will not be shown on your feed.
Actually I judge a blog on what's already written in there, so I want to read more articles but maybe just not right now. If I add the blog to my RSS reader I would only read future content.
Another patch to this problem is Instapaper. I can save there the most interesting articles and read them later, but the entire-blog view is missing.
I would like to have a way (platform) where I can save a blog and read all/some articles, with a standard formatting (custom blogs are nice but not always comfortable to read) and not having a default sorting for recent articles.
All for people doing their own sites/blogs. But social media is the RSS feed and has been for like 15 years. Short form posts that link to long form posts. Social posts that link to the content you've published wherever. And the reposting of other curated favorites is the extra feed portion. The change in recent years is ppl skipping the self-hosting/POS part of the POSSE and posting directly on the social media sites because they were convinced to do that and the social media sites were discouraging users from travelling off-site etc. We just need to get away from using social media sites as the hosts of our content and back to the POS part.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250801000000*/https://blogfeed...
Looks like recently in 2025
I consider it also a good way to force myself to keep thoughts in order and to do a recap on the activities I do that most of the time are very chaotic.
I would probably consider integrating messages also to receive feedbacks.
I use hugo with the backend hosted on GitHub Pages, so far is a pretty solid setup that requires minimal effort since I just wrote an action to build pages every time a commit is done on the main branch
In case you are interested: https://appsec.space
This is usually called a "blogroll", which has the advantage of being much less ambiguous/overloaded than "feeds".
P.S. for people whore not really into RSS, we are also Beta testing the option to subscribe to searches and get results in email digests. Same idea, but you don’t need to bother finding an RSS reader.
The net effect was you could make your own news feeds / timelines and use code to control how they were filtered / combined / etc... It was crazy powerful (for 2005) and I still miss it _today_ since it had the dynamism of the news feed, some of the social aspect, and total control since there was no algorithm other than your and the people's who's list you subscribed to curation and any code you ran against it.
Not a lot left from those long ago days but I did find one slightly-cringy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45DSrU23sPI
:)
> You certainly can try to find ways to monetize through platforms like Substack, it's truly up to you. The key is building a network of people who want to talk together!
Hmm. This is one of the reasons why this won't take off unless the blog is on Substack and people are making money out of it.
But then again power laws are brutal, which is why Substack has got good discovery, ordinary wordpress/ghost/jekyll/ssg websites and blogs with RSS don't.
There needs to be a way to gate web / RSS content + discoverability behind hit for those who don't want to go onto Substack, especially now with AI crawlers scraping blog content from authors for free.
Otherwise the only way to make money from your writing would be to use Substack.
And here is my "rss reader": https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/ :)
Although I myself don't have a blog, for past few months I think about starting a new one. We'll see.
Then we could all share our pipes and build better ones on top of existing pipes. The thing with Pipes was that you could also filter feeds and use Pipes as feeds for other pipes ... Yahoo! Pipes was a great product that was way ahead of its time.
If anyone is interested in actually replicating this, then I would suggest using Node-RED[2] as a stand-in for Pipes.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Pipes
[2]: https://nodered.org