I (re)discovered RSS a few months ago via NetNewsWire, and it’s so calming and empowering to curate one’s own feed.
Rumors of RSS’ death are greatly exaggerated.
Personally I keep it syncing off TTRSS for filtering and automatic actioning on certain feed entries, but that aint everyone's cup of tea. I'd like to think NNW at least covers most people's use cases whether standalone or relying off another service to aggregate.
So if you want to make news feed from news sites, you have to use parsing their html code, and ofc everybody has its own structure. JS powered sites are painful ones.
It may be a reflection of where you get your news.
New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Radio Free Europe, Mainichi, and lots of other legitimate primary source Big-J journalism news sites have RSS.
Rando McRepost's AI-Generated Rehash Blog? Not so much.
edit: provide an example please
I have a whole collection of feeds alread, which I have no knowledge of at all. Many I've never even heard of. Is this a default thing, or was I accidentally bookmarking RSS feeds or something years ago and never knew?
Just look at it, NNW is still using the same great design.
I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.
Now in the process of slowly making RSS my only social feed. Have a hard time of leaving Youtube, but once I embedded the videos of the channels I follow in my RSS reader I see a way of not getting annoyed by the recommendation algorithm on their website anymore.
For example, the RSS feed for the defunctland channel is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVo63lb....
However 2 days ago google marked my page as harmful, so probably not that many will be able to access it.
There are few options but mostly proprietary and expensive. And no normal person will want to play the CSS tricks to extract feed that something like FreshRSS support.
It does everything I need with no fuss.
It’s still a work in progress, so treat this as an early preview before I submit it to Show HN. Feedback and criticism are welcome.
Personally, I'm not a fan of the feed-per-column style as I like to subscribe to personal blogs which post a handful of times per year. Maybe 100 feeds which average 2-5 posts per year. Is there a way to merge columns? But may not be the intended audience.
I suggest OPML import to make it easier for people to move subscriptions. Feed discovery tools also like to integrate with feed readers, can you add an API like https://agglu.com/subscribe?url=https://example.com/feed.xml
I have many more ideas, but I don't have that much free time to implement all of it (even with Claude Code). But it serves me very well for now
I do feel like RSS feeds are one of the easier things to do DIY, custom to people's specific taste of how to list data of this sort. All the 'off the shelf' RSS feeds that I see feel contrived, cluttered and bloated.
I used to use Reeder pretty religiously but as websites started to lock down their feeds and charge subscriptions, it became less useful over time. As readership declines, publishers are rightly concerned to protect their remaining revenue by charging subscriptions. I would love for a new protocol to exist which could compensate providers appropriately and allow for consumer choice in reading with whatever app
Been toying with that and concluded you basically have to use a service. From a random VPS between 60-90% gets blocked
Non-RSS feeds like bluesky as well
