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.
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/
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.
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 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.
Some people have been following my blog for over 10 years. The only reason I know is because someone decided to email me on a random Tuesday. You'd be surprised what you find when you look through your logs.
Some of the major hosted feed readers (Inoreader, Feedly, Feedbin) include subscriber count in their user agent. I usually run a filter on requests to the feed links in my access logs to get an idea of how they're changing. Anecdotally, my subcriber count reaches into triple digits with only those counts, but I've never gotten email from readers and generally only get feedback promoting new posts on socials. The counts are about as nebulous as follower counts, which is to say most people probably subscribe/follow and forget.
> 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.
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.
https://feedland.com/?username=robalexdev is the closest variant I know. You can see who else subscribes to feeds that you follow, and see what other feeds they like. The current version doesn't have a recommendation engine, but you could easily build your own.
> so I'm never showing up without something new.
I like a feed I can fully consume and then move on, filling it with endless content would make it less valuable to me.
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 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.
> 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!
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.
Maybe also have a look at my https://www.pipes.digital/ if you want that :) Filtering and merging RSS feeds is the main use case, and I made sure to have some features to enable building on top of other pipes (a prominent fork button for shared pipes and a pipe block).
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
> 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.
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 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.
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
I'm working on something similar, rather than finding an RSS feed it simply finds blog posts (or personal site pages) that are similar to your query. Probably a next iteration would be to create RSS feeds from the dataset.
> 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".
And even better, there used to be a concept of "pingback", back before it was just abused by spammers, where you could connect blog posts together (the OG "react" medium) through a ping mechanism that was at least in Wordpress, not sure about other platforms.
But I found a ton of great blogs just scanning through other people's blogrolls.
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.
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.
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.
I am thiking of adding an algorithm to my reader, but I am still not sure how. For collaborative filtering you need a lot of user to have enough data on small niche blogs.
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
mikepk|4 months ago
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
:)
accrual|4 months ago
silcoon|4 months ago
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.
carlosjobim|4 months ago
Why? All the old articles are there as well.
ghilston|4 months ago
facundo_olano|4 months ago
ekhaliul|4 months ago
AlienRobot|4 months ago
edfig|4 months ago
nicbou|4 months ago
azinman2|4 months ago
kh_hk|4 months ago
firefoxd|4 months ago
AlexAplin|4 months ago
bwilliams|4 months ago
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.
esseph|4 months ago
The social component is exactly the problem for many.
pedalpete|4 months ago
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?
8organicbits|4 months ago
> so I'm never showing up without something new.
I like a feed I can fully consume and then move on, filling it with endless content would make it less valuable to me.
esseph|4 months ago
The last thing I want is another service with an algorithm.
RSS by itself is devoid of that, which is an appealing feature.
Does everything have to be a fucking product?????
lapcat|4 months ago
FrostKiwi|4 months ago
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20251005163816/http://blogfeeds....
[2] https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/ht...
jurakovic|4 months ago
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.
not--felix|4 months ago
mustaphah|4 months ago
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!
sameline|4 months ago
Towaway69|4 months ago
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
onli|4 months ago
_zeta|4 months ago
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
colesantiago|4 months ago
> 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.
ChrisArchitect|4 months ago
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.
johanyc|4 months ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250801000000*/https://blogfeed...
Looks like recently in 2025
m-hodges|4 months ago
nicbou|4 months ago
leakycap|4 months ago
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
cosmicgadget|4 months ago
dist-epoch|4 months ago
re|4 months ago
This is usually called a "blogroll", which has the advantage of being much less ambiguous/overloaded than "feeds".
geerlingguy|4 months ago
But I found a ton of great blogs just scanning through other people's blogrolls.
p5v|4 months ago
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.
soapdog|4 months ago
https://andregarzia.com/2024/05/feed-and-blogrolls-discovery...
Also https://blogcat.org has the same feature but is a full blog reader.
It is cool to surface blogrolls like that.
samesense|4 months ago
Anaminus|4 months ago
philip1209|4 months ago
zaptheimpaler|4 months ago
stared|4 months ago
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.
chrisamiller|4 months ago
The solution is to be okay with missing some things instead of trying to drink from the firehose.
not--felix|4 months ago
esseph|4 months ago
cosmicgadget|4 months ago
clueless|4 months ago
colesantiago|4 months ago
You're more likely to get discovered if your content is on a centralised platform than a decentralised one.
RSS alone doesn't cut it and you cannot know if anyone is reading your content on RSS as there are no interactions or anything.
It feels like this 'solution' is written by someone who just like the 'tech' of RSS and blogs.
lloydatkinson|4 months ago
deadbabe|4 months ago
Velocifyer|4 months ago
yeldar|4 months ago
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