Vore: A new RSS feed reader | Hacker News Reader

Vore: A new RSS feed reader

j3s.sh

168 pointsj3s125 comments

Love the text-first aesthetic of this reader.

I would have liked to have used this, but I've come to the conclusion that the data model for bookmarking and sharing (all metadata being tightly coupled to the URL) doesn't really work in the age of highlights and comments. Taking a look at the sample page[1], there is no way I'm going to click through any of these without a reason.

I've been using a "content-first" data model both for knowledge management and my own RSS feeds[2] for the last few years that I'm very happy with. I think this might just be the kick in the butt that gets me to finally write an article about it.

[1]: https://vore.website/j3s

[2]: https://lgug2z.com/ - scroll down to "recent highlights" for an idea of what this looks like

> I've come to the conclusion that the data model for bookmarking and sharing (all metadata being tightly coupled to the URL) doesn't really work in the age of highlights and comments

could you elaborate on this a bit? it sounds like an interesting idea but i’m afraid i couldn’t grasp it

I'm gonna paste below what I managed to churn out the last time I tried writing an article about this, and then add some fresh commentary after the pasted section:

---

The bookmark itself is tied to a URL, and anything else related to the bookmark, such as the title, the scraped content (if the service scrapes on your behalf), highlights and annotations are stored as additional metadata linked to that URL.

There are some unfortunate restrictions that come with this data model.

Let's take the example of comments.

Comments by their nature are distributed; the same article can be shared on any number of websites for any number of different users and communities to discuss. Especially in the case of tightly focused communities, the commentary on an article is often just as valuable as the article itself.

When the data model is anchored around the URL, highlights become tightly coupled to that URL, and this tight coupling ignores the distributed reality of comments, leaving them with no real place to exist in the data model.

Ideally, highlights made on an article and comments saved about an article should be easy to connect and view together, because it is the article itself, and not the URL, that is the common denominator (the URL is an imperfect proxy for the article).

What if there is nothing of value in the article itself to highlight, but the discussion of the article contains the real information of value that you want to save? This is often the case when a commenter debunks bogus claims published in an article shared on link aggregation websites while simultaneously explaining their method.

If you think about this for long enough, you may also come to the conclusion that I have, that saving comments is also a form of highlighting, and both comments and highlights can be described in a common data model as "content".

---

Now this is definitely a bit more on the "knowledge management" side of things, but I think that people who curate digital gardens of knowledge are in a unique position to be curators of focused streams of knowledge in a post-firehouse digital world, and that this can take the form of RSS feeds.

Think of "firehoses" like RSS feeds of websites that throw any and everything at you, RSS feeds of subreddits, the HN front page etc. They are all impersonal, without context, and without any reason or explanation of _why_ you should spend your time consuming an item.

Our time is increasingly the most valuable thing that we have, and so if I am recommending that someone read something, I want to provide the reason why I think they should read it up-front (ie. one or more highlights or analytical comments in the body of the RSS item); if that clicks with the subscriber, they can go on to click through to the source and spend more time on it.

But just a title (which is unfortunately likely to just be clickbait these days) with no item body? Or with a huge wall of text? (I'm honestly not sure which is less respectful of an individual's time) - I can't consume from feeds like that anymore. And for that reason, I also refuse to produce feeds like that anymore.

wow. thanks for all of this - i'll be noodling about it. the model you've described is interesting & it's clear you've put a lot of thought into it.

If you want to try it out first-hand, I built https://notado.app from the ground-up around this exact content-first data model.

All of the "recent highlights" feeds on my website are built around this idea (I save interesting "content" [with the URL/book/comment permalink being treated as metadata instead of a primary identifying key], categorize it, and based on the categorization, the content is automatically published to topic-specific RSS feeds which can be consumed by individuals with RSS readers, or, in this case, my website!)

There is a 30 day trial and it's pretty cheap after that ($1.99/month), but if you want to try it for longer than 30 days, send me a DM on Mastodon and I can extend your trial for longer as well.

> people who curate digital gardens of knowledge are in a unique position to be curators of focused streams of knowledge

I think you're onto something here. I save and organise articles and have been exploring ways to share them for some time.

There's two ways to organise knowledge - chronologically and topically. They're both important but for different audiences. Organising chronologically means followers can keep up with recent activity. It's simple and works and is the basis for RSS and social media feeds.

Organising by topic is for knowledge management where you can arrange and re-arrange content based on your understanding of the topic. One day you have a list of cool engineering articles then you might split that into articles about data etc.

I'm working on an app that tries to capture both. Each topic has a timeline of updates and each topic can be broken down into other topics.

This sounds really interesting, please drop me a note on Mastodon or Twitter when you have something to share! You can see a video of how I've approached this with Notado feeds here.[1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgtrBdp2AZQ

  > this tight coupling ignores the distributed reality of comments, leaving them with no real place to exist in the data model.

The canonical way to do this is too assign each article a unique identifier, say a primary key, in a table "articles". Then, each comment gets a unique identifier in a table "article_comments" with a foreign key back to the article's unique identifier. This is a well known pattern in databases but could be adapted to any other data structure, even one that is not segmented into tables.

In my never-ending effort to balance consuming too much information vs. focusing on the handful of tasks that are actually important, I have started closing browser tabs more frequently. However I still can't accept "losing" the reference to the page, so I collect the URLs in my personal notes text files.

I often save the URL plus the HN post URL as a single unit, for the comments.

If anyone is interested in how I use Notado to achieve what I've discussed below, I have published a tutorial playlist on YouTube[1] (short videos, ~1m each) that you can refer to in order to get a better idea of how everything looks in practice.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqXD2UoE8Do&list=PLllZnrEJu8...

I follow too many feeds. Getting all incoming posts in a single place is basically worthless for me. Maybe this is a good solution for someone who only follows a few blogs. You need to add categorization/tags and OPML if you want this to gain traction.

Looks okay, very little bloat, way too simple for me though. I'm interested in seeing where this goes in a few months.

FWIW, I subscribe to over 500 feeds and use a tool similar to this to read them. I average several thousand entries per day. Having them all in one combined UI that's lightning fast and entirely based on keyboard input (vi-style 'j', and 'k' to move through them) lets me fly through hundreds of entries at a time in just minutes. I've been using this since Google Reader shut down, experimented with a bunch of different approaches and by far, for me, having everything in one single stream and not having to navigate any kind of categorization is the most efficient way to follow as many feeds as I do.

Only halfway joking, I am (pleasantly) surprised to know there are 500 RSS feeds left in the world. I thought the format was on the way out, and I miss it.

Lots of X-to-RSS has popped up in recent years, and a good portion of websites still support it under the hood.

KilltheNewsletter[0] is a great email-to-RSS generator, for instance. And RSSBridge[1] has all sorts of x-to-RSS bridges available. There’s even a website[2] that allows you to turn public Telegram channels into RSS feeds.

[0] - https://kill-the-newsletter.com/

[1] - https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

[2] - https://tg.i-c-a.su/

I just spent a week almost-pointlessly rebuilding my site with the sole goal of supporting full-content RSS.

I already had a feed, to be clear. Just not full content.

Long live RSS.

Every WordPress or Ghost blog and Mastodon account has an RSS feed.

Any Twitter feed can be changed into an RSS feed. Just use https://Nitter.net

What app do you use at the moment?

Ironically, https://git.j3s.sh/vore doesn't have an RSS feed of the updates. https://git.j3s.sh/vore/log/main would be a perfect use for it, but no.

for those interested, the git server i'm using is legit by icyphox: https://github.com/icyphox/legit

i talk with icyphox sometimes & he's great. i'll bring this up & see if there's interest!!

Thanks. I just googled it and here's an answer: 0 minute ago

ah so that’s where the stars came from :D but yes, i’ve been considering adding feeds, but i’m not sure how best to do it. a separate feed for tags, commits, etc.? all in one? hmmm.

and good to see vore here j3s! :)

Props to the name. I have idly been considering building my own RSS reader if for no other reason to have a Vore RSS.

I use miniflux. Quite like it. I wish there was an easy to to mark all articles older than x days as read. But otherwise it works well

Interesting project, but not my cup of tea. Aside from that, very weird name. Kind of annoying actually and sort of ruins the whole thing anyway.

> Aside from that, very weird name. Kind of annoying actually and sort of ruins the whole thing anyway.

Can you elaborate on this? This seems like a very extreme reaction.

The website shows

> vore (noun combining form) > ˌvō(ə)r, ˌvȯ(ə)r, ˌvōə, ˌvȯ(ə) > : one that eats (something specified)

which seems like something appropriate for an RSS reader if I connect enough nodes of ideas.

It is commonly used as a short form of vorophilia, i.e. sexual pleasure from (the idea of) being eaten/eating somebody, usually only in a fantasy rather than realistic context from what I gather.

If someone goes to that meaning instead of the simple one "to eat", as in carnivore, herbivore it seams that maybe someone has bigger problems that disliking a RSS reader for the name.

Well, many people do have those bigger problems, shouldn't we consider them?

Oooh, a Dave Winer "River of News"-style reader. Neat.

http://news.scripting.com/

Really don’t think you want to name it that. Urban dictionary it. VVVVNSFW

I would assume it was named that knowing exactly what it means. I wouldn't call it VVVVNSFW.

If I google "Vore" what am I going to find

Sexual content related to eating/consuming the body of the other participant

Actualized in fantasy usually in the medium of hentai.

There's a bunch of people into vore on one of my discord servers and I haven't noticed them into the idea of actually being eaten themselves, or eating other people. It's not necessarily a cannibalism fetish. Usually it's tied into a monster porn fetish.

It came up when Armie Hammer was "outed" as a "cannibal". If you read what was actually said, he basically has a vore fetish, though from the secondhand accounts alone it didn't seem like his "accusers" had the right context or vocabulary.

Cannibalism

I took one for the team: Pictures of pregnant women and pictures of furries. That's got to be one of the safest (as in SFW) fetishes in existence.

Lol, incorrect. Sibling reply has it.

I appear to have the same broken google as ksherlock.

Well... I'll spoil that it is most likely not exactly "pregnant". A lot of vore art draws inflated bellies for after the (physically impossible) full-body consumption. Sometimes with a limb or few pushing out against the belly. So I could see how it could easily be mistaken for either pregnant or overweight women.

It is also a common overlap with furries (well- yiff rather) but I guess that makes a bit more sense since animals are more known to eat one another - although it's mostly the anthromorphized ones so idk really.

Also overlaps with the oversized giant women / shrunken male fetishes which I guess makes the act more physically possible if you ignore the impossible sizes of the people involved.

Most vore is "swallowing whole while alive" and not "actually eating", there is often no chewing involved or depicted. If the victim is chewed or killed in the process - that crosses into the less popular guro and snuff categories.

Or perhaps simply scanning the first page of Google image results is not a reliable way to figure out what a weird sex thing on the Internet is actually about.

It does appear to be a reliable way of seeing what one would find by googling a term, however.

Ok, syntactically yes, but I don't think that's what the asker really meant.

https://e621.net/posts?tags=vore [nsfw] [may contain images you Cannot Unsee]

Vore is just a latin root relating to eating. Vorarephilia is just one use of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vore

In common speech it's never used alone, but only as, as you said, a root, e.g. carnivore, omnivore. Just vore alone I've only ever heard to mean exactly one thing, and it's the NSFW one.

Growing up, on the playground, you said, "actually what you just said is a symbol of power of the Roman consuls, so I will take that as a compliment.", didn't you?

Pedo is Just a Greek prefix meaning child. And using it as a name for a project is an equally horrible idea.

My pedometer says otherwise

Different root word (pedi- means foot by way of Latin, and shouldn't be confused with Latin words like pedicare [provocative/aggressive verb meaning 'to buttfuck' (usually bowdlerized as something like 'to bugger')] which are also derived from the Greek pedo-)

I certainly was shocked to see Vore on the HN front page…

I was not, Vore seems like exactly what HN would be into!

(Capitalization matters folks)

Heck, companies vore each other all the time

judging from their webpage this person knows exactly what they are doing and is enjoying every single bit of it. props.

On the contrary, I am absolutely for this naming and it is wonderful and should be cherished and lauded.

Sincerely,

the furry developer that named their project buttplug.io

I thought you were joking until I clicked on your profile

HN and I have had some fun in the past.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094477

Why the hell is it wonderful or should be cherished and lauded?

I say on the contrary, this sounds like some hedonistic bs and it’s shameful and should rejected on the basis that pleasure is not everything and considering it as such has been refuted many times. Look up Experience machine by Robert Nozick.

You’re literally kink-shaming here, so come on, follow through - tell us in your own words what you find ‘shameful’ about vore.

Some kinks should absolutely be shamed and rejected. When talking about sexuality, people seem to stop at consent as if it’s the only important aspect, where in fact consent is only the start. It’s the most basic of requirements and there’s a lot discussion to be had after establishing that most basic of rules.

For now, I don’t care about what people do themselves or in their own home and such, but don’t rub it in other people’s face. If you’re saying that it should be public and it’s all good, we’re on very different levels and there is no actual middle grounds here.

Why should vore be shamed and rejected?

>but don’t rub it in other people’s face.

So.. don't use Vore?

It's still almost entirely about consent and safety, though. Rubbing it in other peoples' faces violates their consent.

It's really not black and white, it's a spectrum. People have a right to have their sexualities safely, and other people have a right to not be exposed to sex they don't want. The extremes on both sides are unfavorable. On one one side, total suppression of all sexualities in any public place; should you be able to make two men in love not hold hands in public, because it bothers you to be aware of their sexuality? On the other, total sexual freedom, and being forcibly exposed constantly to every expression of anybody's libido.

It's not easy, because the actual middle ground does involve compromise on both sides. Some people don't want to have to be aware of sexualities that aren't their own at all, and it's unreasonable. Some people don't want to be made to hide their unusual kinks in public places and feel that it's wrong for them to not be able to sexually signal wherever they want, which is also unreasonable.

Either way, it still is about consent, and the consent of bystanders counts too.

Interesting that instead of answering my question, you just got defensive.

What is shameful about vore? You really don’t have a good answer do you? Does the mere existence of vore just make you feel yucky? Is that all?

It doesn’t matter. Vore is harmless, by definition, it is a purely fantastical kink, totally harmless and without ethical considerations because it cannot physically be acted upon in real life.

Kink-shaming vore is about as ridiculous as kink-shaming tf porn. it’s not real, it can’t hurt you. “I don’t care what people do in their own homes” dissemble all you like, but if you didn’t care you wouldn’t be whining about it online.

If there’s anyone who should be ashamed here it’s you.

When did we decide to set apart a certain set of behaviours, call them "kink," and deem them morally untouchable?

I'm all for people exploring things safely with trusted partners but more and more often I see people use the mask of "kink" to either ignore the roots of their interests or to co-erce other people into accepting situations that are unsafe or uncomfortable for them.

If someone is into vore then by all means, enjoy it safely. But please also consider if there are underlying causes of your sexual interest in cannibalism that are also impacting other aspects of your life and could be better tackled in therapy than in the bedroom.

Final point on the case in hand: Saying the name is inappropriate for a public project is different than saying the person with that sexual interest should be ashamed. Users may find it distressing.

Some pro-sex communities often forget that "consent" doesn't just apply to participants. Bystanders should also have the right to avoid being exposed to sex acts and concepts that they don't want to see. Call people prudes or "kink-shamers" all you want, but as a very pro-kink person, I find it extremely distasteful and disrespectful to shame people for not wanting other people's kinks in their life.

There was some stupid drama recently over people calling a certain emoji the "bottom face" emoji and then being bewildered when people didn't like the sexual signaling. There were names and accusations thrown around based on nothing more than "I don't want to see sexual things in a programming blog".

Sex makes some people uncomfortable. Sexual trauma is a real thing that should be respected. People should have the right to opt out of seeing sex for the sake of their happiness and comfort. Your sexual freedom still needs to respect bystanders.

Edit: That said, I feel that people should name their projects whatever they want to. I don't have a problem with this being called Vore, I just think it's weird to explicitly celebrate it, and I don't like when people are shamed for saying they don't like seeing sex in places they don't expect it. While we should only change so much to accommodate people's comfort, we should at least respect that they aren't necessarily evil, homophobic, or wrong just for being uncomfortable.

cause its funny, that's why.

Explicit sexual references are likely to make some people uncomfortable, and should not be used in project names aimed at a general audience. People have highly variable relationships to sexuality, and the reminder is not always pleasant.

Even weboob, rightly, caved and changed the name. I think they are called woob now, and have dropped the mammory motif.

Seems like libpr0n may still be alive and kicking though.

Buttplug is awesome. You're awesome.

a perfectly cromulent (anticommercial) hacker name

bingo

You know, I don't understand this. Why is this a thing? People are endlessly fascinating.

Interesting name

I almost don't want to know why they chose that name. There's certain corners of the internet that I won't risk going near.

I had the same initial reaction. But after multiple comments saying how good of a name it was I googled it and realized they were going with "vore" as like a suffix(carnivore, omnivore). So this is an RSSvore i.e. it consumes RSS feeds.

Always interesting to see how differently names can come off based upon people's assumptions/first instincts.

I love the idea of a "a minimal, no-bullshit web-based rss/atom feed reader." but...

It's a little too minimal looking to know if I want to try it out. A screenshot or two would be helpful.

A sample URL is provided in the post https://vore.website/j3s

Love the name.

I learned the hard way that if you aren’t hosting or paying someone else to host your rss, you can’t count on it for long.

the good news is that vore is open source & self hosting is trivial - and the config is a list of urls - moving them to a new system would be trivial too.

I hope it can support importing via xml file.

I would be stunned if Vore couldn't ingest OPML.

I was unable to find the feature when setting up a feed

Is anyone still using feeds out there?

Don't get me wrong, I've loved to follow blogs through a feed reader (way better than a freaking email newsletter), but I pretty much stopped because a lot of the stuff I was reading started dropping support for it.

I am, using rss-bridge (https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge) to access feeds on other services (mostly twitter).

I mainly used RSS feeds at this point. The Reddit community has become pretty toxic so decided to move away from it and just follow websites I like and trust via RSS.

Depends on the sub. Some are definitely toxic cesspools, others are very friendly and cool. I've tried to quit Reddit several times, but unfortunately there's some good conversation and important troubleshooting that happens there of all places.

I think it'd be nice if certain subs could disable the karma system as they degenerate into posting pictures of what arrived in the mail today instead of discussing anything meaningful.

> Depends on the sub.

It depends on the size, and your opinions. I don’t like movies and enjoyed the Wheel of Time TV show, people like me are not wanted in /r/fantasy.

But it is a big subreddit (3 million), and that just comes with toxicity. I’d say anything with over 100k subs (probably even less) will have toxicity, it’s just that it tends to stay hidden until someone says the wrong thing (/r/selfhosted with 250k had some crazy drama a while ago).

Depends on the sub. If someone ever asks about joining reddit my first recommendation is to unsub from all the defaults. That's where most of the idiocy of the general public is

Reddit supports RSS by appending .rss to a sub-reddit's URL: eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.rss

i've never run across a blog that i've wanted to follow that doesn't have an rss/atom feed - they are often hidden / in unexpected places though - these days i just ctrl+u (view source in firefox) and ctrl+f for "rss" or "atom" and 99% of the time, there's a hit.

> i've never run across a blog that i've wanted to follow that doesn't have an rss/atom feed

One time only for me. Don’t even remember the site as I couldn’t follow it ;)

> these days i just ctrl+u (view source in firefox) and ctrl+f for "rss" or "atom" and 99% of the time, there's a hit.

I tend to not even do that much, the vast majority of sites have their feeds properly marked up, so pasting the base URL into my reader gives me a list of available feeds.

If you are getting hits for this you are probably finding the auto-discovery <link> tag. You can get browser extensions that find this automatically and put up an icon that you can click to direct you to your favourite reader. Most readers also support just pasting the article URL and it will find the feed for you.

Absolutely, and almost everything I want to follow has a feed.

I run a tiny (Raspberry pi 3) miniflux instance as a web-based reader and have been very happy so far.

If a site doesn't have a feed, and nobody else third-party generates a feed for it, then sometimes I just don't follow that site much. It depends. If you use a competent rss reader like FreshRSS then you can alternatively do web scraping even if there isn't an rss feed per se, if the site seems worth that much effort. Many aren't worth that effort.

What are you using instead of feeds??

what site do you not have a feed for? There are feeds for basically everything short of like... twitter.

eBay dropped RSS a year or so ago. It was handy for getting Buy It Now items before anyone else even got their daily email search results.

Reuters had RSS but dropped it a few years ago. There are a few news sites I'd like to have RSS but don't.

I've found nothing better for keeping track of infrequently updated blogs. You can follow a firehose of news on Twitter as missing a story or ten isn't a big deal. But things that are updated every six months doesn't work at all with social media if you're looking at the feed occasionally.

I even read HN via RSS: https://hnrss.org/newest?count=100

That's how I found this post. RSS is still far too useful.

Webcomics are still fairly good at it. I don't really understand how else I would go about following a webcomic that has plot (i.e. I want to read each episode exactly once, in order).

How else do you follow blogs, or follow webcomics?

I don't think I've ever seen a blog or webcomic that doesn't support RSS. If I ever do, then "oh, this author is interesting, but I guess I will never in my life see anything they do again. That's a shame".

I'm not going to poll someone's blog on the off chance that they posted something.

I used to keep up to date with everything via google reader (especially as it meant I could get round work internet blocks) but when that went down, i switched to Feedly.

But then it just became overload, it was just too much to keep up to date with every blog I found interesting and every news site kept filling their site with ever more blog pieces in the name of "content"

I just gave up. It's much easier to let reddit subs sort the wheat from the chaff and read them instead.

hey, I like this. Lean and clean. I would want only one feature, to mark an article as read / unread. Also, may be an option to hide the read ones.

gotcha - i'll think about this. for me, the links turning purple has been a good enough "read" indicator - but a shared one for when you're cross-device has been on my mind!!

I wonder how possible would it be to build RSS reader running on GitHub actions - commit for feed update, commit for marking as read?

Like this? https://github.com/jamesroutley/news.routley.io

Close enough. Thank you.

RSS would need some kind of social framework around. Then it could have the power to beat Twitter.

what i really want is something like that but with a way to tag certain articles with a way to automatically backup the article, so it is easier to cross-reference links when you need to find/share a specific information

it's on my todo list of things to build

I wrote a short piece on how to export an OPML (from NetNewsWire) and import it into Vore.

The link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35949269

For those interested in new(opinionated) RSS readers, I'd like to know what you guys think about https://lenns.io/?

Please, add support for import OPML/xml file.

terrible name lmao

i love it

You know what makes a damn good reader? Gmail. Setup a script that parses RSSAtom feeds and then email the URLs to a Gmail account. Add the title of the post as the subject and add hashtags after the URL in the body. Then you can use GMail’s search to search on hash tags. Also, your script can add other metadata to the email which can be used to apply Gmail labels. If you’re really ambitious the script can use the readability library and email html content so that you never need to leave Gmail to read feeds.

As far as I know Gmail, it lacks significant basic features of a good feed-reader. Like a button to mark all unread items as read, a function to automatically move to the next category/folder/filter with unread messages. Sure, I could do this manually, but that would be slower, more complicated and thus defeat the purpose of using a dedicated app for this job. And this leaves all the more advanced features, like sharing, different optimized views, all those little details which make a specialized app superior to a specialized app from another domain.

Personally, I would love for Gmail (or some other mail-app) to be customizable enough to serve as a feed-reader AND mail-reader, and any other job we can fit into it. But somehow people are very focused on making apps only for single domains, and don't leak them to others.

Gmail allows you to mark an email as read.

Not with one button. You must select the mails first, then you can mark them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com