The Many Broken Feeds
Posted4 months agoActive3 months ago
notes.abhinavsarkar.netTechstory
calmmixed
Debate
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Rss FeedsWeb DevelopmentContent Discovery
Key topics
Rss Feeds
Web Development
Content Discovery
The article discusses the issues with broken RSS feeds, and the discussion revolves around the problems faced by users and potential solutions, including the role of CDNs and website maintenance.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Active discussionFirst comment
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Peak period
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Day 4
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- 01Story posted
Sep 16, 2025 at 12:53 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 19, 2025 at 1:23 PM EDT
3d after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
18 comments in Day 4
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Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 25, 2025 at 7:19 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
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Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45264764Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 3:29:00 PM
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The biggest cause of broken feeds for me is actually Cloudflare challenges on the feed URL.
https://github.com/robalexdev/Feeds
Try to find link blogs, since those are more likely to help you discover other things to read.
There are curated lists:
- https://blogroll.org/
- https://minifeed.net/
Community lists (planets)
- https://planet.debian.org/
- https://www.planetpython.org/
Curated themes (like Bluesky starter packs):
- https://minifeed.net/lists
- https://www.youneedfeeds.com/starter-packs
Webrings are cool again:
- https://webring.xxiivv.com/
- https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
This collection of HN blogs is pretty good too:
- https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs
- https://blogs.hn/about
I've been trying to aggregate many of these into a giant list, https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/, which is especially focused on OPML blogrolls: https://alexsci.com/blog/blogroll-network/
I’ve been trying to work out a new approach to newsreaders for a couple years now, and have all but given up on RSS. The standard needs to improve in significant ways — most notably with discoverability — if it ever wants to get back to the Google Reader “glory days”.
I’ve tried reporting bugs to rags like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, each one is a a black hole. Unless you can make a case for helping monetization, they don’t care at all, and I can’t say I blame them.
Or they could just use a modern webserver setup? Manually updating certs on webservers in 2025 is just a massive waste of time.
Also of the opinion many a personal site being dynamic is less than ideal. How many outdated php sites I've seen hijacked, ruined when their hosting service updates things behind their back, run into resource related issues, caching bodges that go wrong, etc. Meanwhile the site maybe gets updates like once a week.
At the very least the RSS feed certainly shouldnt need to be generated on every request unless theres good reason.
Well aware my complaints yelling at the void as many just want a prebuilt solution which 'just works', even if it requires a LAMP stack.