
Winds – An Open Source Personalized RSS Reader - tortilla
http://winds.getstream.io/
======
AdmiralAsshat
Do people really want recommendations?

I personally want to just have an RSS reader that gives me the articles from
the sites I freaking asked for. Not what some service _thinks_ I'll like.
Google, Pocket, and other sites are already doing a great job of thumbing
through what I read and trying to sneak in their "suggestions": that's the
kind of invasive data-combing that I want to avoid.

~~~
saulrh
There are a few distinct use cases for RSS readers with _very_ different
requirements for automatic filtering.

I use RSS readers to keep up with infrequently-updated fiction and webcomics.
In this use case, "suggestions" are worse than useless - if I miss a daily or
weekly strip or, worse yet, a chapter being posted, that can cripple my
enjoyment of the story. I check my RSS feeds once ever two or three days and
read exactly every single post in them, all twenty or forty of them.

There are other people (myself about six years ago, for example) that use
their RSS reader as a news firehose. They get a hundred posts an hour and even
checking their _titles_ manually would be difficult. In this case suggestions
are not just a good idea but actually required.

Personally, I'd like an RSS reader that has a per-feed toggle for automatic
filtering. I so far haven't seen that.

~~~
fryguy
And even both at the same time. I have a set of comics and low-frequency
posting blogs that I want to always read every post, _in order_ , and defer
them if I didn't want to read it right now. And then a firehose of other
articles that I may or may not be interested in reading and can skim it to see
if I want to read it, and then open it in a new tab and continue.

I feel like it's challenging to get both of these use cases in the same app. I
could do it in google reader by having categories, but when it closed I
switched to Inoreader and it does the "helpful" thing of only showing the last
30 days if you want to read it in chronological order, and used up my mental
energy switching and basically just gave up RSS after that and haven't read
them in a long time.

------
jklinger410
Sorry I'm not interested in a Feed Reader that tries to give me suggestions. I
like to follow the stuff I like to follow. I do the footwork of finding
quality sources by myself.

Maybe I'm not most RSS users in that regard, I'm not sure, haven't done the
market research.

It feels to me that suggested sources leads to promoted sources leads to paid
content.

~~~
fny
I'd actually bet this isn't going to be monetized that way since Stream is
using the reader to showcase the personalization service they sell.

------
snvzz
Not very fond of their "Try it out" feature, which after making me waste time
on their "select 3" first step, then proceeds to try and cajole me into giving
away my email address.

Wish they posted some screenshots or static pages or something of the sort, so
I could take a look and see if I like it more than stringer, which is the
current solution I'm using.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
A little worse than that: Even once you do all that, the feed is empty. It
seems to only get stories posted after your account creation, rather than
pulling the existing feeds like most RSS readers.

So after doing all this setup, I had to go back to the site later to actually
try out how it arranged content.

~~~
SparkyMcUnicorn
Yeah, a fledged out demo account is a "must have" when showcasing a product.

------
mintplant
In the category of self-hosted stream readers there's also Tiny Tiny RSS [0],
which I use and enjoy. It has a nice Android app and pluggable scrapers for
extracting webcomic images and full content from summary feeds. Although it's
been described as having "the most hostile primary maintainer of a piece of
software I've ever encountered", which I experienced a bit of personally last
time I tried to contribute upstream.

[0] [https://tt-rss.org](https://tt-rss.org)

~~~
jancborchardt
Did you try out Nextcloud News? [https://github.com/nextcloud/news/#nextcloud-
news-app](https://github.com/nextcloud/news/#nextcloud-news-app)

We have a more modern design than Tiny Tiny RSS, are way friendlier, and if
you would contribute that’d be majorly awesome! :)

------
Veen
For work (writer) I go through dozens of feeds every day.

About 90% of what I see is irrelevant, but I need to see it to filter out the
relevant data. I'd pay a decent amount for a service that can tailor itself
and deliver relevant results without much manual intervention. InoReader and
some other RSS readers have decent filtering, but it's all manual.

So this excited me, but without a way to import my existing feeds it's largely
useless to me.

~~~
tschellenbach
This is by far the most commonly requested feature. Top of our list for 0.2!

------
jroblak
It's going to be extremely hard to convert anyone who uses an RSS reader
without import functionality.

There is 0% chance that I'm going to switch no matter how good your
recommendation algorithm is if I can't also keep up with my current feeds.

~~~
djhworld
It wouldn't be so bad if they had like a suggestion box or something at the
side with feeds you might like to add.

~~~
nparsons08
[https://github.com/getstream/Winds/issues](https://github.com/getstream/Winds/issues)

------
hedora
I'm confused. It looks like this won't work unless you use the stream API,
which is (apparently) not open source / self hosted.

The only reasons I can think of to host my own RSS reader are to prevent third
party profiling, editorial transparency, and future proofing against the
provider shutting down or evolving the service in a way that I don't like.
This provides none of those advantages.

Am I missing something?

~~~
irickt
Some part of it is open source: [https://github.com/tschellenbach/Stream-
Framework](https://github.com/tschellenbach/Stream-Framework)

------
Touche
Looks really good! The design is fantastic, well done.

My only criticism would be that the Getting Started page is definitely skewed
towards a specific segment. Like, how is Sports not an option? Music? I
understand that there are only 9 slots in your designs, but please choose some
that are more representative of general interests, not just Palo Alto mid-20s
coffee shop startup founders.

~~~
tschellenbach
We launched this on Product Hunt yesterday so it's currently tailored to that
audience. More topics are coming! Going to need some community help with
curating the feeds for those topics though.

------
tschellenbach
Which features are you looking for in an RSS reader? Some ideas we're
discussing for Winds 0.2.0:

    
    
      - Secondary links (ie comments link for HNews and Lobsters)
      - Batch OPML import
      - Deploy to Heroku button
      - Follow suggestions (we're working on this)
      - Switching between feeds should be easier
      - Lightweight task queuing system for emails and discover endpoint
      - Keyboard shortcuts (vim style)
      - GraphQL style APIs so you have more flexibility for building your own mobile apps
      - Android & iOS apps
      - Support more sites (RSS data quality is pretty poor and often needs custom logic per site/feed)
      - Search article's you've read using Algolia
      - Folders/Groups
      - Sharing support (e.g. Buffer, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

~~~
awowl
hackuser posted a requirement which has my full support: Since you're doing
machine learning, try and apply that to avoid showing me articles with
overlapping content. Often quite a few sites I follow will cover the same
thing, and obviously, I want to read it only once.

~~~
hackuser
To clarify my version of the idea, I would like to see all the articles on the
same subject but grouped together, perhaps in a collapsible outline, so I can
choose which one or more articles I want to read on the subject.

------
webwanderings
Digg RSS Reader has been unbelievably good. The best thing about it (so far -
knock on wood) that they don't tinker or change anything, because everything
is working like it should. I don't really see a reason to try anyone else.

------
arkadiyt
How are people still launching apps with sign-in over http - jesus christ.

------
hackuser
Does anyone know an RSS feed reader with these features?

1) Deduplication

2) Grouping of articles on the same topic. For example, grouping all articles
on Angela Merkel's latest Brexit comments, so I can easily choose one and
ignore the rest.

Grouping would make me an order of magnitude more efficient when reading RSS.
I'd happily pay $100 for that feature.

Also:

3) Efficiently and automatically manage broken feeds: Automatically retry
(over X hours or days), automatically look for a replacement feed, and then
let me know which feeds need my attention.

~~~
soufron
I designed one a few years ago, but it was to help the newsroom of a magazine
who wanted to publish blog articles every week. You can check it online, it
was called "vendredi". It worked well.

~~~
hackuser
Could you provide a link? I looked around and couldn't find it. Thanks. I'd
love to try it.

~~~
soufron
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendredi_(hebdomadaire,_2008)](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendredi_\(hebdomadaire,_2008\))

I am afraid there is not much left online now.

------
tschellenbach
Github Link:
[https://github.com/getstream/winds](https://github.com/getstream/winds)

------
nparsons08
Nick here from GetStream.io (Winds). We didn't expect Winds to see so much
traffic today, so we're experiencing temporary downtime. We'll have everything
back up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for all of your support!

~~~
nparsons08
Back up and running smoothly. Sorry for the delay!

------
tschellenbach
You can also run it as an OSX app:
[https://github.com/GetStream/Winds/tree/master/native](https://github.com/GetStream/Winds/tree/master/native)

------
vsloo
Our team at Reamaze is all trying Winds right now since seeing on Product Hunt
yesterday. Love the machine learning in-progress. I find the content to be
curated quite well for my preference. The main issue I'm having is actually
adding RSS feeds from sources I read on a daily basis. Not sure what the issue
is. Love the two display options since not everything is relevant all the time
and it's just easier to go chronological.

~~~
tschellenbach
Just open a ticket on Github with the RSS feeds in question. We'll gladly add
support.

------
bryanrasmussen
since this is built on top of Getstream.io
[https://getstream.io/](https://getstream.io/) I guess it follows their
pricing structure -
[https://getstream.io/pricing/](https://getstream.io/pricing/) free for 3
million updates...

what defines a feed update:

    
    
       The number of feed updates depends on how many 
       activities you publish via the API and the number of 
       users who follow those feeds. If you add an activity to 
       a feed that is followed by 50 other feeds, this will 
       trigger 51 feed updates. 
    

which sounds to me like if you use them to do stuff you have to control not
just your feeds through their api but also your users - otherwise how will
they know really how many users following the feeds?

------
otto_ortega
The GUI is nice, very well done. It suggested a good website I didn't know, I
will give it a try.

The thing I didn't liked is that, if it's supposed to be "learning" how comes
I can't load new stories after I'm done with the initial set?

------
metellus
This website has absolutely no information about the product it's trying to
display.

------
dpkrjb
This is a bit too full on for me. I'm currently using feedly at the moment but
I'm looking for something I can read without a browser. Does anyone have a
recommendation for a battle tested rss reader with a good cli interface?

------
randomsofr
Does anyone have actual screenshots? I don't want to put my email address.

~~~
rch
Looks like there are a few screenshots on the project site:

[https://github.com/GetStream/Winds](https://github.com/GetStream/Winds)

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tedmiston
It would be nice to be able to try the whole app without signing up with my
email. That's what I thought "Try Winds RSS > Clicking 3 feeds > Continue Now"
would lead to.

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arc_of_descent
I use Feedly pretty much everyday. A recommendation engine for news doesn't
really cut it for me. But of course, it would be a good exercise in ML.

------
randomsofr
It says Node 7, is there any feature that you use on Node 7 that is not
available in previous versions? Just curious.

------
cad
does it support firefox?

