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.
> 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.
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 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 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.
I still don't know what the problem is you're complaining about.
I find things I like, I add them to RSS reader. I don't have thousands or hundreds of things in there, maybe a few dozen.
"Make it easy for users to find things" - if they can find a website, they can find an RSS feed. I'm sure any LLM with Deep Research would be great for that.
> 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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I had a similar though with newspapers. There are quite a few I like. Yet, there are more articles in one that I can read - especially when I want to have other sources as well. So yeah, if there were only a handful of good blogs, it would be the case. But there is a long tail of interesting stuff there.
Anyway, even for the Hacker News, I would like to filter a bit, so to have feed like the hackernewsletter (which I like a lot), but profiled more to my tastes.
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
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.
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.
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.
Not a lot left from those long ago days but I did find one slightly-cringy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45DSrU23sPI
:)
> 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.
My recollection from that era is that sadly it was immediately abused
I had a very similar idea. I’m glad someone implemented 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've tried a few solutions and have landed on just storing them in an unordered list in a markdown file
I sometimes use reeder but its UI isn’t quite right for me. But there’a a fair amount of options out there.
> If I add the blog to my RSS reader I would only read future content.
Why? All the old articles are there as well.
Instapaper and Feedly work for me. Instapaper is the main thing and Feedly a thing I check occasionally for the blogs I love.
i’ve tried a paid Instapaper plan a few times but always end up leaving because their reader view very regularly misses entire sections of articles
Try Readwise Reader
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 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.
I'm sure this has been done, why did it fail?
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.
Yeah, there is a delicate balance between endless content and "hey, this is probably valuable to you".
Maybe you could even set "I only want to see a maximum of 5 new posts a day" or something like that.
I wonder with the right incentives if this could be run as a distributed open-source service.
I'm just speaking for myself here...
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?????
Nobody is telling you that you have to use it.
How do you overcome the discoverability problem with RSS.
It isn't a "product", it's a solution to a problem.
I still don't know what the problem is you're complaining about.
I find things I like, I add them to RSS reader. I don't have thousands or hundreds of things in there, maybe a few dozen.
"Make it easy for users to find things" - if they can find a website, they can find an RSS feed. I'm sure any LLM with Deep Research would be great for that.
"I find things I like" is the discoverabity problem right there. Where do you find them?
> 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.
I'd argue RSS more relevant and mostly void of the abuse of other systems and platforms.
The social component is exactly the problem for many.
> 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!
https://kill-the-newsletter.com is a great way to turn email newsletters into RSS.
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
In case you are interested: https://appsec.space
> What about monetization?
> 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.
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.
Love it. Here's my "Blog feed": https://www.contraption.co/blogroll/
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.
Or, as we call it, a "Follow" button.
Who is "we"?
Whoever "we" is doesn't seem to see the distinction between what is being described here & above and a follow button.
This could be done using RSS and feed:// uri scheme if it was more popular.
https://notes.zachmanson.com/feed-uri-scheme/
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.
It's so nice and personal, unlike a social media notification. It feels like having a pen pal.
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 don't mean this to sound snarky, but if a blog doesn't have a good ratio of signal to noise, you just unsubscribe from the feed.
The solution is to be okay with missing some things instead of trying to drink from the firehose.
Maybe it is one way to go.
But I had a similar though with newspapers. There are quite a few I like. Yet, there are more articles in one that I can read - especially when I want to have other sources as well. So yeah, if there were only a handful of good blogs, it would be the case. But there is a long tail of interesting stuff there.
Anyway, even for the Hacker News, I would like to filter a bit, so to have feed like the hackernewsletter (which I like a lot), but profiled more to my tastes.
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.
This is like taking responsibility then claiming you don't really want it.
That's a great way to promote blog discovery. And fairly hands-off.
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
Exactly.
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.
This is sort of what Substack is! It is a proprietary platform, but on the other hand i don't think most of us will get around to making a blog.
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 wish it mentioned WebMentions in the comment section.
What year was this written?
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.
Please replace social media