Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds

[boastful_inaba]

Partially inspired by recent discussions on HN and other places.

I've made a single-focus site to introduce your friends/colleagues/neighbours/family to RSS and web feeds.

https://www.youneedfeeds.com/

The site is meant to give the elevator pitch for feeds, show a newbie what feeds are and how to use them, set them up with a reader, and give them some nice starter content if they want it.

So much tastemaking and newsmaking power is concentrated in the hands of Facebook/Reddit/Twitter, but I'm convinced it's because much of the general populace doesn't know about feeds. Many people just don't know of any other option than the core three social sites for keeping up with what they like! They're forced to endure all the anger and fighting of social media, just to keep up to date.

The more people know about feeds, the more they use feeds, the more sites support feeds, and then more people learn about feeds in a virtuous cycle.

I hope to create more uptake of feeds amongst the general population, a more decentralised internet, and maybe just make the average user's day a bit nicer.

Let me know what you think. Questions, comments, all appreciated. Spreading the word is very appreciated. :)

[conesus]

Hey, this is a great contribution. Thank you for making it.

I run one of the more popular readers and I have to ask why wasn't NewsBlur included in your list. It's the oldest on that list for one. It's also got its own native client on all of the platforms. Plus, I'm a HNer and NewsBlur launched on HN as well.

As somebody who has been introducing people, in person, to the concept of RSS for exactly a decade now, I'll mention that for those who really haven't heard of it, which is 10% of folks in tech and 90% of everybody else, my strategy has been to compare it to an inbox for websites with filtering and sharing. Really hits home on the idea that every story shows up unlike the dominant competitor to RSS which is FB/twitter.

95% of the people who leave RSS, and I ask everybody who cancels why they're canceling, leave it because they get their news from social media. Social filtering provides a higher signal than the manual process. I don't blame them.

Personally I built in that serendipity into my reader because I think it belongs in a news reader, but as its own feed among many.

[panic → conesus]

> 95% of the people who leave RSS, and I ask everybody who cancels why they're canceling, leave it because they get their news from social media. Social filtering provides a higher signal than the manual process. I don't blame them.

I wonder if it would make sense for RSS readers to include ActivityPub support (or vice versa). Obviously most people's friends aren't on Mastodon or whatever, but it would be cool to see the social feed alongside RSS updates.

[boastful_inaba → panic]

Mastodon supports ATOM natively actually. I'm subscribed to one guy's feed that way right now!

[mxuribe → boastful_inaba]

curious, how does one go about "subscribing" to a person's feed via mastodon? Isn't the subscription input value normally someUser@someInstance.net (or https://someInstance.net/someUser)??

[WorldMaker → mxuribe]

You just add .atom to the web address (often referred to as the "full profile" page in Mastodon UI). So https://some-instance.net/some-user.atom

The full profile page itself also has the usual RSS Auto-Discovery META tags so that most feed readers will accept the profile page address itself and figure out the ATOM feed from that.

The only other twist would be for feed readers to add WebFinger support which would allow them to auto-discover the "full profile" page from the @some-user@some-instance.net style address. I don't think any feed readers have added that yet.

[boastful_inaba → mxuribe]

Well, just copy+paste their base user URL into your feed reader. I believe the feeds are in the header tags, so your reader will find them and present you with the options.

For example, copying

https://mastodon.social/@b_cavello (the URL for the main Mastodon artist)

will allow you to subscribe to either

https://mastodon.social/users/b_cavello.atom

or

https://mastodon.social/users/b_cavello.rss

in your reader.

[boastful_inaba → conesus]

Thanks!

Ah, I did send you an email on the 5th of this month, asking for a logo, screenshot and preferred description. (As for why I skipped you in the end - I might have had issues importing my OPML to get a good comparative screenshot for Newsblur? I can't quite remember, it was late at night a few weeks ago.) Happy to add you though!

That's a good idea - I should alter the front page copy under the pictures to talk about that.

[conesus → boastful_inaba]

Oh I saw that! I just started grad school so I’m batching low priority emails for the end of the month.

[laza → conesus]

Thank you for creating NewsBlur!!! I use it every day, some of my colleagues switched to it, hope to become more successful in future!

[pavel_lishin → laza]

Ditto, I ended up helping feed the dog because Newsblur replaced the missing void that Google Reader left behind. It's probably one of my favorite daily apps.

[brlewis → conesus]

Social filtering of feeds was great when friendfeed did it.

[jiggunjer]

One problem with feeds is many sites don't have feeds and people blame RSS rather than the site not implementing it. Another problem is noise: most sites just offer a single all-or-nothing feed, while they categorize/tag posts on their site. If they offered a comprehensive set of microfeeds that would help adoption I think (or include the category metadata).

Another problem is truncated feeds, requiring users to click links and navigate to the original site to read each item. While some premium readers claim to offer complete news items, this is probably against the wishes of the site and may be circumvented similar to the add-blocker arms-race. In my opinion if a site model requires users to visit it, then they shouldn't offer feeds at all.

Lastly some feeds are behind logins (e.g. forums), not all readers support these feeds.

[mwgkgk → jiggunjer]

Often projects that don't provide RSS do twitter, which can be converted to RSS via online services.

Also sometimes you have to look harder than usual, because the presence of an RSS icon only loosely correlates with having actual feeds. Sometimes things like domain.com/feed, domain.com/rss, domain.com/atom yield success, I suspect provided by the website engine itself.

Not to take away from your argument

[mercer → mwgkgk]

It's as simple as: https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=<username>

[jefurii → mwgkgk]

Or just View Source and search for "rss" or "atom".

[guybedo → jiggunjer]

i've tried to solve some of these issues with the feed reader i built https://aktu.io :

- sites without feed: These sites usually have a Facebook page so i added a feature to subscribe to a Facebook page. The page posts now appear in your RSS feeds as regular RSS items.

- noise: The content is automatically categorized, with names of people, places, etc... extracted so you can easily filter your feeds. Articles in your feeds are automatically grouped together if they're about the same story, that helps reduce the number of items and at the same time provide different angles on stories.

- truncated content: There's not much to be done for this one i guess, unless you go against the publisher's wishes

[wruza]

Non-social user here (no fb, twitter, other feeds except hn and few forums).

I cannot remember why exactly rss stopped fitting my needs. I was using a standalone reader before iphone was a thing, then google reader, and then began to simply check my 3-5 sites at non-busy times. I think that for HN I miss at least 1/2 of all topics since it is “a fast board”, among others. I don’t really want to be overwhelmed by all these events and knowing only things that are top-20 right now is actually okay for me. Rss is instant and has no “top/discussed” conception.

I’m not your auditory though probably.

[icebraining → wruza]

In my case, RSS is not for HN or other high-traffic sites, it's for those blogs that rarely update but which posts are always at least worth looking at. For example, Oona Räisänen posts just a few times a year, but I read every single one.

[mike-cardwell → wruza]

I wrote a custom RSS reader which supports regular expressions for deciding if I want to see a post. So for hacker news I have the following:

mike@snake:~$ rss --list|grep ycombinator

155. https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

mike@snake:~$ rss --list-grep 155

74. title = (?i)\b((e-?|web)?mail|irc|internet relay chat|grpc|hashicorp|rust|debian|c\+\+|perl|(bit|name)coin|tor|pgp|gpg|gnupg|openpgp|digitalocean|ovh|linode|grepular|email\sprivacy\stester|parsemail|ssl|https|backdoor|apache|exim|distribut|peer (to|2) peer|vpn|secur|anonym|webrtc|torrent|webtorrent|nextcloud|owncloud|graphql)(ity|ous|e?s|ing?|ed?)?\b

I run it from a cron job, and it just emails me new RSS items. Manages state in an sqlite db. I have a sieve filter to filter those emails into a "News" folder in my mailbox. So I can just read them from whatever email client I'm using on whatever device I'm on.

I don't get why people need to use a third party service for feeds, or a special client for it either.

[_kwmj → wruza]

I think I know my reason.

I used RSS to follow some of very niche amateur literary/diary/essays blogs in my native tongue Hindi. Some stopped, some moved to social media, and some “upgraded” to English. That was about it.

[ntnn]

I think most people don't see the value in RSS feeds because they are used to the business of forums and social networks - where you don't need (or have the capability to) process _all_ the information.

RSS feeds are perfectly suitable for stuff like blogs, podcasts, webcomics, etc.pp. - not for platforms where a new item pops up every few seconds.

For podcasts people use a separate app like PodcastAddict or iTunes - for webcomics and blogs the author(s) usually also have twitter to announce a new item or an entirely separate platform like DeviantArt or WebToons.

So RSS is indeed not required to keep track of new submissions. I actually have a colleague who isn't using RSS feeds and instead keeps bookmarks and checks each page individually (given he only keeps track of maybe ~30 pages).

In conclusion - I think they don't see a value in RSS feeds because the existing options they're using already fulfill their needs.

[pavel_lishin → ntnn]

> RSS feeds are perfectly suitable for stuff like blogs, podcasts, webcomics, etc.pp. - not for platforms where a new item pops up every few seconds.

I definitely agree; a noisy channel is bad for RSS.

> So RSS is indeed not required to keep track of new submissions.

Disagree hard here. I have a twitter account, but while it's not a waterhose, I would 100% miss new comic post announcements - assuming that an author's twitter account only announced new comics, and didn't just tweet other things.

Comics are the perfect use case for an RSS feed: they've mostly got a stable and slow publishing schedule, and not time-sensitive. I can ignore that folder in my reader for weeks, and then go back and catch up.

Doing that manually by clicking bookmarks seems like insanity to me, now.

[smilbandit]

I had a little project I was working on. every6hours.com, it's a river style feed reader broken down into various silos. Two things that might be unique, I can't keep up with all the reader features anymore. First is that it only updates, as the domain says, every 6 hours because it helps me stay away from constantly reading my feeds, 12 and 6 am/pm EST. Second is that I pull in content from twitter, reddit and hackernews as well as your standard rss feeds. There was a bug 2 weeks ago and I haven't had the time to fix it and get it up and running again.

[rapnie]

This is a great initiative. Feeds need to be promoted with the wider public, or they will gradually and silently disappear.

Really like your starter packs.

> Are you sick of big websites trying to decide what you should see, despite what you’ve subscribed to? Sick of "the algorithm" shuffling what order you get told of things, if at all?

Most people nowadays consume news from social media (Facebook), and are not truly aware of the issues that arise from this (filter bubble, echo chamber, targeting, etc.). This could be explained better on the front page, or even have a sub-page with more detail and examples. Increase the incentive to use feeds.

Lastly, you present yourself as a not-for-profit initiative. But your About and whole site does not mention who you are. Be transparent.

If non-profit, you could be open-source as well. Have a crowdsourced place where people submit and improve starter packs.

(If I have overlooked something, then I stand corrected)

Edit: I just shared your link, on LI, and you seem to lack an open graph image (og:image) to be added to the link preview.

[boastful_inaba → rapnie]

Yeah, part of what kicked this whole project off was seeing the news of native RSS support being removed from Firefox. I thought to myself "I have to do something about this"

Sub-pages not present on the navigation menu might be a good idea. I'll definitely look into that.

I'm staying anonymous because I want the focus to be on the content, not me. (That, and I don't want some crazy who wants the enemy half of the Fightbox eliminated tracking me down.)

EDIT: I think I fixed it. Maybe. What site you you mean by "LI"?

[rapnie → boastful_inaba]

Sorry. LI -> LinkedIn

Edit: According to iFramely your link preview works. Just retried on LinkedIn, but it does not. Probably LI's fault.. I have that issue more often.

[netghost]

If you want to take it a step further, add some links feed readers that run as browser plugins. Unlike hosted services, they're not as likely to disappear, and they have a low barrier to entry since they don't require any sign up.

I've been working on one that runs in Firefox[1], but there are many others that look promising for Chrome as well.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...

[petecox → netghost]

You mention a lack of hosting but would it, optionally, browser-sync?

I use a web interface, The Old Reader, to access feeds from 4 devices. Whichever I'm using at the time knows which articles have been marked as read; without using a different client for each OS platform.

So a browser extension that syncs to one's Firefox account, like the bookmarks/history feature would be handy, with no additional hosted service other than having a browser login.

[netghost → petecox]

Yeah that's feasible, I haven't experimented with it yet.

Personally, I find that I read very different things on my laptop than I do on my phone (technical articles vs. news) so I haven't had a huge motivation to investigate it, but it's an interesting avenue. The only possible stumbling block is that the size of sync'd data is relatively constrained, about 200k I think, which is probably enough to hold a user's feed list and track whether they've viewed/ignored various articles, but it would require some planning.

[boastful_inaba → netghost]

Interesting. How's this one going to handle the upcoming removal of native feed support from Firefox? Have you written a parser?

[netghost → boastful_inaba]

Firefox's native support going away doesn't really make a big difference, as far as I know you couldn't access it from a plugin anyways.

There are many parsers that are adequate, especially if you don't try to get too fancy. If you're curious, the source is available on github. https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook

[Jaruzel]

I'm in the middle of rebuilding my own online feed reader (converting it from old asp to php) and as such I've been doing a fair bit of online reading about the current state of RSS.

There are many sites out there promoting RSS, but they are all islands of their own content. If this initiative of getting RSS more visibility is to succeed then either someone needs to link to all the sites (like a webring or index of sorts), or they all need to get together to cross promote themselves.

[torvald]

I use RSS feeds quite extensively, but as others have mentioned, its noisy and not every site lets you filter on categories and search terms. So I have my own little python script which fetches, regex filters and pushes to my phone. https://torvald.no/rss-regex-reader

[HHalvi]

Loved this a lot :)

Thanks a lot for making this. A couple of small suggestions (do proceed ahead with them if they make sense):

Add Android feed readers in the navigation menu.

Also allow folks to suggest good sites (Add my site or even a simple trello board will do) that have good content and also RSS support.

All you have to do now is to curate the site submitted and make more of really usable starter packs.

[boastful_inaba → HHalvi]

Thanks!

https://www.youneedfeeds.com/news/2018/9/9/you-need-feeds-is...

I don't actually have an android device myself, so I'm not really capable of evaluating the readers in that ecosystem. I do want to take suggestions though! (Maybe I should just make the page, but as a stub page redirecting to the blog post.)

As I mentioned at the end of the starter packs page, I'm taking suggestions via the About page. I didn't think of a Trello board, though - that's worth looking into.

[dewey]

This is great, a lot of people don’t know RSS exists but would be technical enough to use them if pointed in the right direction.

Somewhat related, I built a small tool to scrape sites with no feeds and generate one: https://feedbridge.notmyhostna.me/

[boastful_inaba → dewey]

Huh, interesting! How do you think your site compares to say, Feed43?

[dewey → boastful_inaba]

Haven’t heard of them before, I know there are some tools to generate feeds by selecting elements on the page and then the tool figures everything. One of the tools I tried didn’t work for the site I needed it for and so I just wrote it myself, mostly for fun.

[boastful_inaba → dewey]

Feed43 is based around pattern matching - it mostly assumes a well-structured HTML document with predictable tags, and it's that method for every site. You seem to have some sort of custom plugin architecture, I guess?

[dewey → boastful_inaba]

Exactly, mine is really only focused on sites that are either hard to scrape (login, blocking, not well formatted,...) right now. So either site you want to integrate requires a custom plugin. It's pretty niche but the repository can be found here in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge

[zaman8040]

One problem with feeds is many sites don't have feeds and people blame RSS rather than the site not implementing it. Another problem is noise: most sites just offer a single all-or-nothing feed, while they categorize/tag posts on their site. If they offered a comprehensive set of microfeeds that would help adoption I think (or include the category metadata). Another problem is truncated feeds, requiring users to click links and navigate to the original site to read each item. While some premium readers claim to offer complete news items, this is probably against the wishes of the site and may be circumvented similar to the add-blocker arms-race. In my opinion if a site model requires users to visit it, then they shouldn't offer feeds at all.

Lastly some feeds are behind logins (e.g. forums), not all readers support these feeds.

[type0]

It's a great initiative, but I'm pessimist about this. I tried to introduce colleagues to RSS and the reaction I got was "why would I want this, it's inferior to twitter, non interactive etc etc". So it went over the head of those whimsical people, it's possible that I could have explained it better although at that point when they accused me of pushing "obsolete technology" I did not bother anymore. Even to the point where I said that RSS feed on the marketing website needs some improvements the reaction was that it would harm the "social media presence".

My reaction was: "So we are cutting the branch we're sitting on, keep calm and carry on".

[boastful_inaba → type0]

Try pushing the non-intermediation angle, perhaps? Tell your colleagues that with RSS you don't have to fight Twitter/FB's algorithms to surface your latest content to users.

Plus, having a proper web feed actually helps with your Google rank as it convinces googlebot that your site is alive.

[robin_reala → type0]

I usually explain that the people that share stuff on Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit, or HN) often get their news through RSS. It might not be used by everyone, but it’s used by the users at the centre of the networks you’re trying to reach.

[Shaddox]

I recall I stopped using RSS feeds when Google pulled the plug on the reader. I couldn't find anything that was as convenient and I don't really want to pay for yet another subscription as I have too many of those as it is.

[boastful_inaba → Shaddox]

https://www.youneedfeeds.com/web-based/

Feedly (and others) have free tiers available. It's worth a shot again - especially for zero dollars.

[guybedo → Shaddox]

I built https://aktu.io, a mix between GoogleNews and GoogleReader, would love to have your feedback if you want to give it a try!

[Shaddox → guybedo]

I just tried your product and I absolutely love it. I like how snappy it feels and adding feeds of my own is a breeze. I also like how minimalist it is and I can just look at my feeds without some ads or content I don't care about bombarding me. With that being said, there are some things that could be done better:

1. Adding a new feed or (especially) removing a feed could be a little more intuitive. Now that I know how to use it it doesn't bother me so much.

2. An all expand in my articles would be nice.

3. if I refresh with the button in my articles everything is highlighted again.

If you don't care about doing more work in it I totally understand where you're coming from and things are fine the way they are.

[newman8r]

I like the concept.

Here's a repo I put together with an OPML list of the 22 top US newspapers

https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml if anyone would find that useful

feel free to add the list to your site

[sulexk]

Been Experimenting with generation of RSS feeds for over 10k sources for crypto related stuff, based on google news sources found over the last 2 years. Currently working on automation of the generation of these feeds in python.

[jillav]

This is a great idea. I don't recall finding a simple source of clear information about feeds when I started. That could be why so little people know about them.

And I love the design of the website by the way. Simple and elegant.

[boastful_inaba → jillav]

Yeah, I wanted to provide a one stop shop for introducing a user to web feeds. I realised the only main option available was http://www.whatisrss.com/ , and that's not really user friendly. It even links to My Yahoo, which doesn't support RSS anymore IIRC!

You'll have to thank the designers of the template I bought, I guess. :)

[sulexk]

Would be awesome to show generation of feeds.

It is possible to generate RSS feeds for any site.

[boastful_inaba → sulexk]

I do mention an option for that here, actually! https://www.youneedfeeds.com/your-favourite-site-is-now-your...

[sulexk]

Right now to subscribe to over 250 rss feeds (that update in realtime) there are services offering this for typically around $250/ month.

Suppose this was decentralised. I think the cost would greatly reduce and RSS could power a whole new web

[JetSpiegel → sulexk]

I have 86 feeds now (but no hard limit) for free since I self host Miniflux on a RPi under the TV.

The hosted version is 15 bucks per year. https://miniflux.app/hosting

[beagle3 → sulexk]

NewsBlur is iirc $36/year and can do 250 easily (20 or so for free)

[pinkano]

Thank you so much for doing this! RSS FTW

[tw1010]

You Need Donations.

[kimat]

Drop down menus like it's y2k.

[pixelN]

love the starter packs

[boastful_inaba → pixelN]

Thanks! Good to hear it.