> My main idea here is that every reading app should let you create shareable links where people can subscribe to an RSS feed and sign up for the reading app at the same time. If I want to invite people to join my community or subscribe to my social feed, I give them one of these shareable links.

> For example, give this here link a click: https://feedrabbit.com/?url=https://meta.discourse.org/posts...

This is close to the way podcasts work now, and it kind of sucks. I was just looking at a show on the Apple Podcasts site (because it was the first result that showed up in the search results), and it has social media sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter and an icon to copy some markup to embed an iframe-based player. If you are not Facebook or Twitter or looking to embed an iframe, too bad. The reverse sucks as well: when I'm on the site of the podcast itself, and it gives me a bunch of options to subscribe using Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or watch on YouTube. If you use something else to consume podcasts, your best bet is to copy the link to the bare RSS feed and put that in. Problem is, some sites omit that one.

This is one thing that the fediverse is getting right, in comparison. If I use Mastodon and want to touch someone's post (i.e. react to it—by replying, starring it, or whatever), then I can trivially refer to that post with its URL. If I copy the link from my browser toolbar and then paste it into Mastodon, it works. (This isn't amazing. The workflows around it could use some polishing up, but the fact that it is at minimum possible is awesome.) For comparison, when I copied the Apple Podcasts show page URL and pasted it into the Google Podcasts search bar, it returns a message: "No podcasts found".

Related: Please make your products work with URLs (2020) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038065>