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.
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 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
> 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 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.
This is actually one of my use cases for vibe coding. Creating and customizing an HTML dashboard from my nginx logs generated hourly via cron.
It’s nice to be able to see a graph of my blog’s popularity over the past year and which posts have the most traction.
It’s also a bit disappointing to see exactly how much traffic is non-human, but the human portion steadily increasing outweighs that disappointment I think.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
> 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.
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.
This is actually one of my use cases for vibe coding. Creating and customizing an HTML dashboard from my nginx logs generated hourly via cron.
It’s nice to be able to see a graph of my blog’s popularity over the past year and which posts have the most traction.
It’s also a bit disappointing to see exactly how much traffic is non-human, but the human portion steadily increasing outweighs that disappointment I think.
> 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!
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?
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?????
That's a great way to promote blog discovery. And fairly hands-off.
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.
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.
This is like taking responsibility then claiming you don't really want it.
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 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.
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.
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
I wish it mentioned WebMentions in the comment section.
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.
Please replace social media