Hacker News Reader

Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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

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)??

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.

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.