[timf]

There are a lot of feeds now with titles and maybe a short paragraph of text, like the beginning of the article or a summary.

There is a world of difference between sites maintaining those feeds vs. nothing at all. Having a signal that an article is there with even the slightest amount of context is so much better than the alternative.

It's mildly annoying to visit a site for the full text (with your ad blocker), but signing up for newsletters etc. from each site one-by-one is really painful.

If I'm going to take 5+ minutes to really read something, it's OK to visit the site. That means something is interesting or relevant enough to invest my time in. That signal can usually be gleaned from a title and short paragraph. Compared to the number of new things published every day, it's relatively rare to find things worth those 5+ minutes.

From what I can gather, many people use RSS readers to follow 5-10 feeds, and they slowly look through and read most of the articles. It serves as a convenient way to follow their top few sites and maybe a few aggregators like HN. Other people track 100s of feeds and quickly scan what's happening, only diving into something if it's interesting or important.

I'm building a service for the second type of person (mainly because I'm that type of person, TBH). No idea what the ratio of "completionists" vs. "scanners" is. Having title-only feeds is not ideal for the latter group, but it's usually fine.

[tourmalinetaco]

I’ve found some respite in email-to-RSS, but its still not great.

I’m definitely interested in a (hopefully FOSS) service for us “scanners”. I average around 300~ articles in my RSS daily, and I’m always hungry for more information. Though I should probably see about re-organizing it all so I’m not as consistently overwhelmed.

[timf]

I want to make a FOSS reader that we can run on our own machines. It would poll on demand and be really good at archiving sites/posts. A combination of feed reader and scraping/archiving from residential IPs (at a low rate) where it will almost always be successful.

I want to pair that with an (opt-in) service for syncing feed subscriptions and handing off a stream of things worth archiving (it's often not urgent that this happens, you just want to make sure it happens soon so the content is not lost in a few years). That service could be a very low cost monthly subscription thing plus a FOSS option that you could run on a cheap VPS, etc.

24/7 services are also essential for generating notifications when something in a filter is spotted, being able to have an email gateway, doing things like POSTing items to other sites automatically, etc.

Making that "full" service FOSS is not in the near term plans, though. This is a distributed system that has run 100s of millions of jobs already, has a very specific security and monitoring setup, uses a number of queues and databases, etc. From my past experience, it's really hard to support people with on-premises distributed systems software like this (FOSS or not). I couldn't do this part alone (bootstrapping and can't afford to hire anyone yet).

[Tyr42]

I'm definitely in the completionist group and that keeps me off twitter or other stream sites, (and large slack groups)

I need to read the things in my feed, or maybe skip, or maybe save for later and maybe come back to it.