The View from RSS | Hacker News Reader

The View from RSS

carolinecrampton.com

147 pointsCuriositry51 comments

I’d like to use this space to praise everyone involved in creating and keeping NetNewsWire alive.

I (re)discovered RSS a few months ago via NetNewsWire, and it’s so calming and empowering to curate one’s own feed.

Rumors of RSS’ death are greatly exaggerated.

NetNewsWire is SO good - both the macOS and iPhone apps. Real labor of love. We are very lucky to have it.

I was a NNW user for years and it's why I eventually built my own news reader. NNW had a lot of great features and I wanted to mostly keep them. You might find that NewsBlur takes a similar path but with a different set of opinions.

I agree. I'm just sad that, since I'll personally never upgrade to Liquid (Gl)ass, they stopped updating NetNewsWire for macOS versions before Tahoe.

I believe they just finished or are in beta to release the new version to older OS.

Wow, I've checked and that's true. I'm supper happy, didn't expect that. Thanks!

There is a new version for Sonoma and Sequoia! I am so happy.

Definitely my favorite mobile RSS app.

Personally I keep it syncing off TTRSS for filtering and automatic actioning on certain feed entries, but that aint everyone's cup of tea. I'd like to think NNW at least covers most people's use cases whether standalone or relying off another service to aggregate.

Love it, also shoutout to NewsFire from the days of yore.

https://newsfirex.com

Just look at it, NNW is still using the same great design.

RSS’ death is real - 15 years ago, almost every news site had a RSS feed, some had several ones. Today? RSS feed is rare.

So if you want to make news feed from news sites, you have to use parsing their html code, and ofc everybody has its own structure. JS powered sites are painful ones.

There are feeds of everything. You just have to look harder.

edit: provide an example please

Not exactly a "news" site, but this is still an example site that you'd expect would have a feed:

https://mistral.ai/news/

Mistral used to serve a feed actually up until 6ish months ago I guess? Their admin console used to be built with HTMX too which I found kinda interesting.

Now the news site and admin console is all in Next.js and slow and no feed.

will this do?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xSMW/rss-feeds/main/feeds...

from here

https://github.com/0xSMW/rss-feeds

Here's an example

https://help.abc.net.au/hc/en-us/articles/6147104938383-Why-...

It's all about licensing sadly...

It is somehow less funny today but in the 90's we would say "is there something wrong with your hands?"

A truly funny story: I wrote an rss aggregator and one day I discover some feeds had died without me noticing it. I looked at the feed, it was gone, I look at my aggregate and the headlines were all there?!?!

Since I gather a lot of feeds I couldn't help but noticed that a very large amount isn't wellformed. For example, in xml attributes the & (in urls) is suppose to be &, if you do that however many aggregators won't be able to parse it.

Every other month I wrote little bits of code to address the most annoying issues. 1) if I cant find a <link> or <guide> etc I eventually just gather <a>'s and take the href. 2) if I really cant find a title for the item I had it fail back on whatever is in the <a> since I was gathering those anyway. 3) if I cant even find an <item> I just look for the things that are suppose to go in the <item> 4) if I cant find a proper time stamp ill try parse one out of the url 5) if the urls are relative path complete them.

What was actually going on: The feed was gone, it redirected to the home page. In an attempt to parse the "xml" it eventually resorted to gathering the url and title from the <a>'s and build valid time stamps from the urls.

Uh, they lie about everything?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/feed/51120/rss.xml

I haven't fully examined it but looking at the xml I see it was last build in 2026 and a headline about Women's Asian Cup 2026.

abc.net.au/news/2026-03-05/matildas-iran-asian-cup-quick-hits-hayley-raso-mary-fowler/106413886

Oh that's wild. I guess the system is just on autopilot and nobody knew how to actually act on their policy change.

15 years ago, almost every news site had a RSS feed, some had several ones. Today? RSS feed is rare.

It may be a reflection of where you get your news.

New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Radio Free Europe, Mainichi, and lots of other legitimate primary source Big-J journalism news sites have RSS.

Rando McRepost's AI-Generated Rehash Blog? Not so much.

I don't know, I also only use RSS (with the exception of Reddit I think) so I would not even notice a website that a) provides content I want to get notified about and not actively visit for a reason and b) has no feed.

Reddit also has RSS feeds, add `.rss` to urls.

Seriously. I've been updating NewsBlur with all the pet features people have wanted for years and I'm finding that it's even more enjoyable now with all those AI features built in. Daily briefing, ask AI, story clustering, all of these are AI-flavored improvements to RSS and it's so relaxing to open up my river of news and scroll through all the good stuff without feeling a gross algorithm surfacing endless outrage.

I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.

You jogged my memory and I downloaded it, after a small detour trying to find a version that'll run on my 11YO iMac.

I have a whole collection of feeds alread, which I have no knowledge of at all. Many I've never even heard of. Is this a default thing, or was I accidentally bookmarking RSS feeds or something years ago and never knew?

Nice! I'm also around 2000 feeds in my reader, carefully selected over a couple of years. Only difference: I always click through to the website to read an article.

Now in the process of slowly making RSS my only social feed. Have a hard time of leaving Youtube, but once I embedded the videos of the channels I follow in my RSS reader I see a way of not getting annoyed by the recommendation algorithm on their website anymore.

I forgot to say, most of these 2000 feeds I have from here on HN. Please keep posting on your own website/blog and 'share' with RSS.

YouTube does offer RSS feeds for each channel, you just need the channel id.

For example, the RSS feed for the defunctland channel is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCVo63lb....

I have a list of many youtube channels.

However 2 days ago google marked my page as harmful, so probably not that many will be able to access it.

https://rumca-js.github.io/feeds

I used some strange wording when I read it back, but that's what I meant.

And a little thought to Aaron. We still miss you.

I think the space of RSS feed readers and aggregators are very rich already. The pain point for ordinary users is to have easy way to generate RSS feeds for websites that don't provide organic one.

There are few options but mostly proprietary and expensive. And no normal person will want to play the CSS tricks to extract feed that something like FreshRSS support.

Current setup is freshrss running in a proxmox lxc on prem + tailscale. Big fan of the lire iOS app for interacting on mobile and use the freshrss webui on desktop. killthenewsletter helps patch in some email stuff too. RSS and NNTP are 2 technologies that have been with me for decades and you are gonna have to pry them from me.

I'm using FreshRSS as well, sitting on an OpenBSD VM. I use Capy Reader on Android, as well as the FreshRSS front end on desktop.

It does everything I need with no fuss.

I'd like to share a preview of my RSS (&other sources) feed aggregator: https://aggly.com (designed to look better on desktops)

It’s still a work in progress, so treat this as an early preview before I submit it to Show HN. Feedback and criticism are welcome.

This is cool.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the feed-per-column style as I like to subscribe to personal blogs which post a handful of times per year. Maybe 100 feeds which average 2-5 posts per year. Is there a way to merge columns? But may not be the intended audience.

I suggest OPML import to make it easier for people to move subscriptions. Feed discovery tools also like to integrate with feed readers, can you add an API like https://agglu.com/subscribe?url=https://example.com/feed.xml

Thanks for the feedback. OPML import is already there. I took your suggestion and currently working on merging columns. Also the api should be available shortly, it's a low hanging fruit!

I love RSS but I didn't find good enough online reader that can be customized to my liking, so I built my own: https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/

I have many more ideas, but I don't have that much free time to implement all of it (even with Claude Code). But it serves me very well for now

Here's mine: https://mechaelephant.com/feed

I do feel like RSS feeds are one of the easier things to do DIY, custom to people's specific taste of how to list data of this sort. All the 'off the shelf' RSS feeds that I see feel contrived, cluttered and bloated.

I really like this, did you release the code? Also, I like your micro grant idea

I saw Current Reader (no affiliation) posted on the web a couple days ago. It seems like a nice way to keep up to date with many hundreds of feeds by giving them different priorities, where for example a low priority feed may disappear from view quicker than a higher priority one. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/current-reader/id6758530974

I used to use Reeder pretty religiously but as websites started to lock down their feeds and charge subscriptions, it became less useful over time. As readership declines, publishers are rightly concerned to protect their remaining revenue by charging subscriptions. I would love for a new protocol to exist which could compensate providers appropriately and allow for consumer choice in reading with whatever app

I’ve always thought RSS seemed cool. Hope it has a renaissance with people leaving social media

After many tests I'm on YARR, not super-happy but for my volumes of feeds and time it's the best fit still actively developed, before I was on TT-Rss. I've tried elfeed and RSS2email with notmuch/emacs but while wonderful they demand too much time because they are meant to READ posts, while, well having many I more scroll and pick then going through all. Gnus with scoring maybe better but create the scoring for today news it's challenging...

Also built my own rss reader https://gmnz.xyz/projects/ember-feed/ with an emphasis on code block themes because I mostly follow engineering and developer blogs.

The other issue is that bot detection has gotten pretty good. So fishing out the full content rather than a single sentence summary is getting ever harder.

Been toying with that and concluded you basically have to use a service. From a random VPS between 60-90% gets blocked

I like rss2email sending to a local email box read with evolution or the like.

https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email

Been enjoying this RSS UI recently https://newsagent.fyi/

Non-RSS feeds like bluesky as well

I have been using it for a few weeks, was never really into RSS (I quite like to be oriented to the web site I’m reading), but have found newsagent nice to use

Agree with all that. What about adding a social dimension with OPML publisihing and "subscriptions" ? It s a kind of rss feed of rss feeds.

I've been using Flare on f-droid, which integrates RSS and fedi, it's simple but pretty good.

Self-hosted miniflux is great.

Ok, cool cool, but why not contribute via rss as well?

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