In Praise of Rss and Controlled Feeds of Information
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The article praises RSS as a means of controlled information consumption, sparking a discussion on its benefits and various implementation approaches.
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[1] https://freshrss.org/index.html
Edit: typo
The result is that there is no need for persistent storage, so its real easy to host. If you're interested, its here: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly
You could just subscribe to the same feeds from multiple devices/apps, but then you have to manually keep track of what's already been read and that will quickly get out of hand.
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.
Installed freshRSS in 1 min with softaculous
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.
That doesn't make any sense. Quantity might make you more prominent in a unified facebook feed, but an RSS reader will show it like this:
They've always displayed that way. You never see one feed mixed into another feed. This problem can't arise in RSS. There is no such incentive. Quantity is a negative thing; when I see that I've missed 128 posts, I'm just going to say "mark all as read" and forget about them. (In fact, I have 174 unread posts in Volokh Conspiracy A† right now. I will not be reading all of those.)† Volokh Conspiracy is hosted on Reason. Reason provides an official feed at http://reason.com/volokh/atom.xml . But Volokh Conspiracy also provides an independent feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/volokh/mainfeed . Some of their posts go into one of those feeds, and the rest go into the other. I can't imagine that they do this on purpose, but it is what they do.
All readers I know have the option to display all feeds chronologically, or an entire folder of feeds chronologically. In most, that's the default setting when you open the app/page.
I always use it like that. If I'd want to see all new posts from a single author, I might as well just bookmark their blog.
The option might exist. It was certainly not the default in mainstream readers in the past and it still isn't now. I never encountered it in Google Reader (as mainstream as it gets), or in Yoleo (highly niche), or in Thunderbird (also as mainstream as it gets).
Whether a bunch of unused projects make something strange the default doesn't really have an impact on the user experience. This is not something you can expect to encounter when using RSS.
> If I'd want to see all new posts from a single author, I might as well just bookmark their blog.
That approach will fail for two obvious reasons:
1. The bookmark is not sensitive to new posts. When there is no new post, you have to check it anyway. When there are several new posts, you're likely to overlook some of them.
2. Checking one bookmark is easy; checking 72 bookmarks is not.
It was the default view in Google Reader, the "All Items" view.
A mix of all feeds, ordered chronologically, is the default view in tt-rss, miniflux, inoreader, feedly, netnewswire, and all RSS readers I've ever seen.
It's also what "syndication" means.
> syndication noun
> syn·di·ca·tion
> the act of selling something (such as a newspaper column or television series) for publication or broadcast to multiple newspapers, periodicals, websites, stations, etc.
>> the syndication of news articles and video footage
( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/syndication )
The "syndication" in RSS refers to distributing the same content to many different readers.
Here's MDN: https://devdoc.net/web/developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/RSS/...
> This article provides a simple guide to using RSS to syndicate Web content.
Note that this is a guide to creating an RSS feed from the publisher's perspective. It is not possible for two feeds to be displayed together, or at all, on the publisher's end. How do you interpret the verb syndicate?
I note that you haven’t addressed your weirdest claim — that the default presentation of most feed readers isn’t.
As far as I can tell, you're making up non-facts.
If you put Dave's blog in your RSS reader, one day "Dave (1)" shows up in your list of unread sources and you can read his new post immediately, and you didn't need to think about Dave's blog any other day.
I could use the "all articles" feed in my RSS reader (TT-RSS), but I would never do such a thing unless all the blogs I follow had similar posting frequencies that would mesh well together, which they don't. I never use the front page of Reddit for the same reason: the busy subs would drown out the ones that get a post a week.
That is verifiably false simply by looking at the state of social media. What they compete on is engagement bait, and the biggest of them all is rage.
By your logic, social media would be a panacea of quality posts by now, but it’s going to shit with fast-paced lies. Quick dopamine hits prevail, not “quality”.
> I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.
So, another service dedicated to tracking you and mining your data. I can already smell the enshittifaction.
[edit] and indeed, this only solves the problem of excessive posting, this is just the begining.
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 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.
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 thought about this back in 2017 (within the context of LinkedIn signal to noise) [1]. I hap hoped for a marketplace/app store for algos. For example:
"What if the filter could classify a given post as 30% advertorial 70% editorial, and what if you could set a threshold for seeing posts of up to 25% advertorial but no more?"
and
"What if the filter could identify that you’d already received 25 permutations of essentially the same thing this month, and handle it accordingly."
[1] https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
I don't have YouTube or Twitter accounts, I use RSS to subscribe to channels/users/tags.
Surely it will be deleted as soon as some manager remembers it exists.
E.g. I don't use Twitter directly due to toxicity and overwhelmingness of the central feed (thank you Nikita), and due to, for me, the biggest issue - how shit it is for reading / following individual user feeds - when you find someone who's really interesting, and you don't want to miss posts.
So I use nitter and bookmark each person's profile I find interesting and I have that in a separate folder. Then at my pace, daily or weekly I read through people's posts and can really keep up like God intended me to.
At first it was less engaging than just having Twitter (as it's less adictive), and I've paced from deleting / using actual Twitter back and forth, but due to recent changes and events I've actually come to a place where through my bookmarks I discover new profiles / people / interests / niches at an organic pace that I can only compare to how I've used to use RSS or web in the older times. It's quite cool.
- 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?
I think about doing that sort of proactive cleanup sometimes. There's nothing quite as disappointing as seeing an old friend's blog show a new post for the first time in years only for it to be some spammer that just hacked their old password or some expired domain squatter saw RSS logs and decided to sell advertising on it or a once major blog host was sold to a Russian oligarch who purged the user database so more Russians could have good usernames (LiveJournal, lol).
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)
Something atypical about my setup is that I wired up miniflux webhooks to n8n and gotify so that when I click "save" on an entry, I get a notification for it. It's a rudimentary way to setup a "read it later" list.
With miniflux I have not limits with unread items/feeds. I can set check frequency to what I want and I actually don't need the app as the www ui is just brillinat!
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
i personally like the newsblur UI btw, i was just repeating what ive seen other people saying!
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.
https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points, or other metrics.
> These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.
Doesn’t your feed service/app auto-detect feeds if you just paste the webpage? That’s a common feature.
You prefer to let other people determine what you read?
There are multiple levels of delegation to the "wisdom of the crowd":
- visiting this HN website by itself is already letting people determine what you read. The stories are submitted by others.
- reading only the front page of just the top-voted 30 stories instead of doom scrolling the additional 1000 is another level of delegation
- inside of each story, only reading a subset of the most upvoted comments is another level
People do all 3 to various degrees because there's limited time to read.
_By far_, the best posts I have ever seen to this website were often ones that didn't get many comments, or may have even gotten reported.
Yes, that's the one I used, but I feel it's still too much noise. You don't want a firehose in your RSS feeds.
Just open https://news.ycombinator.com when you want to doomscroll through an almost endless stream of information. RSS doesn't work well with social media, and that's a feature.
> the top HN frontpage articles
I don't even really understand what the HN feed is. I looked in the FAQ, etc. the other day and couldn't find an explanation. The description ("Links for the intellectually curious, ranked by readers.") is nice PR, but it doesn't tell me what I'm seeing. Is it every post submitted? Every post that made it to the front page? Same, but stayed on the front page for a certain amount of time? Received at least X upvotes? I have no idea...
I'm in the middle of that myself. I have folders labelled rarely, weekly, frequent and social. Rarely and weekly I tend to read most of it, as they are the folders I open first. I only open frequent once I'm done with the others and I usually scroll through the titles and only read very few articles. Social is for mastodon and bluesky accounts, which I open when I only have 5 minutes to kill and I know I won't have time to finish reading long posts/articles.
Additionally, Newsblur added an automated "Infrequent Site Stories" for things it knows come from feeds that don't update all that frequently. (Which you can use in tandem with Focused view for even less time.)
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.
That's an interesting tip. Never thought about it this way.
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.
Though I feed it via tiny tiny rss with the freshrss api plugin so I can have saner filtering and curation before it gets to the reader.
The 'awesome tiny tiny rss' docker image is pretty decent setup for getting it running if you have any interest, though personally I ended up rolling my own static binary using frankenphp somewhat based off their setup. The core dev of tiny tiny rss is a bit, opinionated lets just say.
News Explorer is a decent alternative (but same OS restriction). That developer is responsive.
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 think what you may be missing is the role of trust. There is much to say about that, but in this instance, a nice thing about RSS is that I can trust the algorithm it uses to generate my feed. It is very simple, and I, myself choose the sources it draws from. With some other systems, this is not the case.
Thank you for almost granting me the capability of having a point. That is very nice of you.
I am not missing the role of trust. I have instead simply had that trust betrayed countless of times by now, so I'm seeking a little more. It would be a great first step, but far from the whole journey. And so I'm wary of people mistaking the latter for the former, intentionally or otherwise.
What I'm advocating for is for people to not lose sight of the prize. And what I'm advocating against is misleading claims, which is what I consider the title and the proclaimed motivation of the post to be.
That's my issue, yes.
Now, I don't want to do the Twitter thing where I present my headcanon interpretation as some sort of deliberate messaging on your part, I 100% expect that this understanding of your words hasn't even crossed your mind, and maybe even reads like a gross twisting of what you intended to convey.
That is indeed how I read it though, even if I then recognized it as ambiguous (between those two). I then also made the guess that if I can take the "feeds of controlled information" interpretation away from this so easily, someone who's also as inattentive as me or perhaps even biased to interpret it that way, this may very well make them get the wrong idea. So I figured I should place it into the perspective this topic usually comes up in (and present it from the angle it usually comes up through).
> Of course, all the sources you subscribe to will have their own biases and issues, but you do not lose agency over what you select for consumption. That is the control I am seeking and what I like about RSS.
Yup, that much is all clear. Nothing to contest on that one. It just also didn't run explicitly contrary to the "feeds of controlled information", because, well, it legitimately just wasn't the perspective you were writing from then. I was coming from an angle where I was feeling the absence of such a clarification.
Of course the cultural context has changed, but I think your view is quite cynical. I do believe that AI could, in theory, be a good steward and curator of news feeds (think Google News), but I haven't seen an implementation that would be open and customizable enough. I do not like the idea that someone could be manipulating what I'm being presented, or what reaches me and what doesn't.
Could you elaborate on why you think this is misguided tech-nostalgia? Most of your arguments seem to be true regardless of how you discover content (RSS, social media, link aggregators, ...)
We're more on the same page than I assumed then just based on the post. I do also think it's a (very) significant issue, and I do think there'd be a lot of merit to gain better control of it. I often apply chronological sorting where possible too, or will at least curate my feed using the available features. I've just also come to think that people are "clearly" a lot less nice than I thought, and that maybe we're getting a bit too interconnected and a bit too well.
> Could you elaborate on why you think this is misguided tech-nostalgia? Most of your arguments seem to be true regardless of how you discover content (RSS, social media, link aggregators, ...)
That's kind of my point. I simply think there's a lot more to why social media posts run afoul so often on the internet (and why mass media posts are so distorted) than just the recommendation algorithms.
I address this under your other reply more, but the "feeds of controlled information" interpretation's goal is something actually desirable to me (and to most everyone, I believe). And for that, this is at most a stepping stone, rather than the solution (if such a thing even exists - who knows, I might be living in a dream world). It is under that interpretation that this post read like "misguided tech-nostalgia".
In case you're asking more literally though, what I meant is that the general vibe I caught from this all is that this old-school-ish thing from when everything was better (a while ago), if you switch to it now, things will be better again. And so due to the everchanging social context, I disagree with that - hence the "undropping a mug" example. That is, even if I consider recommendation algorithms as not only just a significant issue but e.g. where things went wrong outright, removing them alone is imo not going to be enough to undo the damage.
That said, specifically for the type of information you'd typically subscribe to in an RSS reader, I still think the web 1.0 approach has its place. I do believe that if you have something to say, standing up a blog with an RSS feed, writing posts there and then potentially linking on social media is the best way. It's also been trivially easy to set up a blog for years.
Likewise with news - I don't think there's anything better to get them than reading a news site or perhaps subscribing to a video channel. All very RSS-friendly.
I'm mostly interested in longer form content, not shorter or ephemeral types of content. And even there, platforms like Mastodon support RSS feeds natively.
But yeah, as we clarified below, the angle for writing the article was the delivery channel for content and whether it is curated by someone or not. For the quality and provenance of the information, that's still on you and that's a very hard problem with no clear solution - and arguably one that will get better with more AI generated content.
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.
[0] https://blog.catbox.moe/post/774800476681207808/introducing-...
[1] https://catbox.tech
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
I'll try to force light mode initially and will definitely fix the dark mode later. Thanks a lot for flagging this!
* 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
(Shameless plug: I made Feedbase.)
I spent a bit of time proving out an idea to use Bleve indexing to allow scoring each article with weighted keywords but I haven’t had time to work on it lately. I’ll have a look at your links.
One section is "Hacker News People". When I find someone on HN who writes well, I subscribe to their comments in a RSS feed, so I can read everything they write. Very often they comment on a link I don't see on my main HN page, which is useful.
App http://hnapp.com/ converts names to RSS feeds. Example: `author:nickjj`
https://outerweb.org/explore
LLMs are helping with classification right now but in the backlog is letting them take a list of favorites and creating recommendations.
[1] https://blogtrottr.com
If you’re curious about how it works, I’ve detailed the entire process here: https://cedricpinson.com/updates.html#morning-nerds
Probably a lot of things like that exist.
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
[0] https://ivyreader.com
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