from Hacker News

In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information

by curioussquirrel on 10/3/25, 5:13 AM with 149 comments

  • by sph on 10/3/25, 8:40 AM

    I love RSS. I literally just bought an app on itch.io, and to my surprise the devlog page for it, which lists all the new updates, supports RSS. I love when it happens. [1]

    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.

  • by robin_reala on 10/3/25, 6:55 AM

    One thing that I did to kickstart my RSS usage again was to revisit each site I was subscribed to and:

    - 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.)

  • by panstromek on 10/3/25, 6:34 AM

    > As Facebook would push for more engagement, some bands would flood their pages with multiple posts per day

    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.

  • by renegat0x0 on 10/3/25, 2:00 PM

    Most people complain about the signal-to-noise ratio in news consumption. I believe the issue isn’t the news sources themselves, but rather the lack of a proper RSS application.

    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

  • by buzzy_hacker on 10/3/25, 11:32 AM

    Also shout out to https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ for converting email subscriptions to RSS feeds

  • by Egor3f on 10/3/25, 2:08 PM

    I think this post is the best place to "promote" my open-source pet project

    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

  • by ggeorgovassilis on 10/3/25, 6:22 AM

    I'm self-hosting FreshRSS [1] with Docker on a Hetzner VM. Fast, clutter-free, has everything I need.

    [1] https://freshrss.org/index.html

    Edit: typo

  • by pantulis on 10/3/25, 9:51 AM

    The key with RSS is curation, otherwise it stops being your "controlled feed". FOMO can make you add noisy feeds that basically are putting too much information that will dwarf the relevant feeds. In my case, I follow Hacker News and Slashdot which are ok but also thought it was a good idea to add "The Verge | All posts" to my feed reader and I find myself hitting "Mark all as read" continuosly. It's not The Verge's fault of course, it's my lack of strategy.

  • by runningmike on 10/3/25, 6:10 AM

    Simple is use your thunderbird mail to read RSS feeds. Check https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...

  • by nesk_ on 10/3/25, 6:38 AM

    I've ditched RSS feeds more than 10 years ago but I'm increasingly wanting to go back to them. Thank you for sharing this blog post, it'll help to get me started.

  • by john-tells-all on 10/3/25, 3:23 PM

    I've paid for Feedly for years and use it daily.

    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`

  • by hn-ifs on 10/3/25, 6:33 AM

    I love RSS. Like all the old web tech the user is in control. If I like a page/site I'll look for an RSS to keep up to date with it, if one doesn't exist I'll likely forget about it. I'm not signing up for email updates.

  • by andrewmutz on 10/3/25, 4:21 PM

    Is anyone hooking up RSS feeds to some cheap LLMs to do personalized content algorithms? Seems like a useful open source project

  • by rethab on 10/3/25, 9:02 AM

    Shout out to Blogtrottr[1], which allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and have the posts sent to you via email. Great service I've been using for years.

    [1] https://blogtrottr.com

  • by AlfredBarnes on 10/3/25, 1:38 PM

    I recently made a little RSS feed reader, and its barebones lives on my machine, and is powered by python.

    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.

  • by _trigrou_ on 10/7/25, 10:02 AM

    This piece perfectly captures why I built and still enjoy using my personal proof of concept a custom solution designed just for me. It’s essentially a self-generated newspaper, curated from RSS feeds and read on my e-ink tablet for a peaceful experience.

    If you’re curious about how it works, I’ve detailed the entire process here: https://cedricpinson.com/updates.html#morning-nerds

  • by zby on 10/3/25, 12:49 PM

    The root problem here is that a communication channel full of noise is not valuable - but on the other hand if you have a very selective channel - then nobody will subscribe because to subscribe you need repeated good interactions.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 10/3/25, 7:31 PM

    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. 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.

  • by freetonik on 10/3/25, 7:39 AM

    If you want to discover personal, human-written blogs with valid RSS feeds, check out the directory I'm building: https://minifeed.net/blogs

    (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).

  • by beardyw on 10/3/25, 8:27 AM

    I use RSS a lot but it is not without it's own difficulties.

    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.

  • by fjghajkhdfgjlk on 10/3/25, 7:29 AM

    Any recommendations for a self-hosted RSS reader with a good companion android app (or at least a decent mobile website)?

  • by whism on 10/3/25, 11:35 AM

    If someone can please figure out how to integrate a purchase/payment system into a similar protocol we would love you forever :)

    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.

  • by NoSalt on 10/3/25, 3:02 PM

    I am currently working on a [personal use] MagicMirror replacement. One of the things I like about MagicMirror is the RSS newsfeed at the bottom of the screen, so I have been getting into RSS more recently, and really enjoying it. The only "problem" is trying to narrow down all the great content.

  • by not--felix on 10/3/25, 9:51 PM

    I Love RSS so much that I started to develop my own RSS reader[0] to fix some of the problems I have with it, like: feed discovery, podcasts and overload.

    [0] https://ivyreader.com

  • by morshu9001 on 10/3/25, 9:15 PM

    I tried making an app once that was like RSS but with reposts, and each friend only gets to occupy one spot on your feed per day. Worked pretty nicely with my friends on it.

    Probably a lot of things like that exist.

  • by mustaphah on 10/3/25, 12:02 PM

    Great post! Indeed, social media platforms optimize for engagement and ad revenue, not user needs.

    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

  • by phaser on 10/3/25, 10:05 AM

    I miss RSS too much, I have decided to start using it again today. For those who are in it, what is your favorite client?

  • by nake89 on 10/3/25, 7:54 AM

    Page seems to be hugged to death. Here is an archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20251003062648/https://blog.burk...

  • by throw0101d on 10/3/25, 12:34 PM

  • by perching_aix on 10/3/25, 11:14 AM

    I find this to be misguided tech-nostalgia. What you control this way is the way information is brokered to you. It only controls the information reaching you itself to the extent that is reflected in the delivery method.

    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.

  • by brainzap on 10/3/25, 1:58 PM

    NetNewsWire on macOS

  • by 929-367-9958 on 10/3/25, 9:40 PM

    /tp teleport