Comment by Entangled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Entangled | Hacker News Reader

The problem with RSS is that I don't want to subscribe to blogs that have only one lucky post in a decade, I want a curated list of topics on a daily/weekly fashion and for that newsletters are the best. Unfortunately email is not the best platform for delivering content so I came up with an idea to offer a news reader that consumes newsletters you can subscribe/unsubscribe at any time. It's just like an email client but just for newsletters.

Lo and behold, opened a gmail account specifically for newsletters, subscribed to my swift, kotlin, design, UX and AI newsletters and I'm now using Apple Mail to have the time of my life consuming all the content I need, delivered to my inbox daily, with no spam, no friends, no follow, no ads, no nothing.

Of course there is still the possibility to provide a nice client rich in features for the common user so the idea for a startup is still in the air.

RSS is dead, long live newsletters.

That is not dead which can eternal lie.

I still derive significant value from Usenet.

People keep saying that IRC is dead (because Slack) or that Jabber is dead (because Slack) but I use both of those daily.

It's a big Internet, there's room for lots of stuff.

Newsblur (a web-based RSS reader) added a newsletter feature a while back that's pretty useful if you want to mix RSS & newsletters in the same place. Set up an email rule to automatically forward your newsletters to a custom address and Newsblur will show them as if they're another site you've subscribed to via RSS.

I'm not a big fan of newsletters myself, but it's nice to be able to include those few sites that only offer newsletters in my regular news reading workflow.

It's interesting, because that has really nothing to do with email or RSS as protocols, it's purely a social convention that daily/weekly aggregations get sent as newsletters rather than published as RSS feeds.

As a counterexample, I follow Leah Neukirchen's Trivium, which is a feed that publishes a weekly post with a bunch of interesting links (mostly tech related). http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/intro

And of course, there are tools to display emails inboxes as RSS feeds.

Having a separate email for newsletters is a brilliant idea.

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