
Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS - tschellenbach
https://getstream.io/blog/winds-2-0-its-now-time-to-revive-rss/
======
begriffs
Why has this become so complicated? I use Newsboat
[https://newsboat.org/](https://newsboat.org/) to read RSS, and follow about
100 very interesting authors that way.

I just put the RSS urls into a text file and the self-contained 1.7mb program
does the rest. Somehow it gets by without using a combination of Electron,
Mongo, Algolia, Redis, machine learning (!), and Sendgrid.

Maybe the comparison with a text-based RSS reader isn't fair and Winds does
some crazy cool stuff, but it's hard to see what that is exactly.

~~~
calanya
How does Newsboat support non-Latin scripts? Seems like a pretty basic
requirement.

E.g., this blog is in Hebrew, you can see the expected text layout on its
website: [https://workaround.blog/](https://workaround.blog/)

I wonder if Newsboat can replicate that layout. Here is the RSS feed:

[https://workaround.blog/feed/](https://workaround.blog/feed/)

~~~
SanderSantema
As you can see here:
[https://imgur.com/a/Ikff2LX](https://imgur.com/a/Ikff2LX) Newsboat handles
Hebrew as it's supposed to. That is fetching the article and sending the
output to the terminal. It is after all a terminal program and therefore only
displays text trough the terminal. You can set the text width though. So I
suspect newsboat supports the Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and other non latin
scripts which are of a decent size. The rest is all dependant on how you
configure your terminal/ the font you use.

------
bad_user
N.B. this isn't fully open source because it relies on the Stream API:
[https://getstream.io/](https://getstream.io/)

They have a free quota of 3 million feed updates (not sure if total, I'm
guessing per month?). Important to keep in mind because the app may be open
source, but they can pull the plug on it by shutting down the web service. And
so you can't self host it independently.

It might be nice, not saying otherwise, but for example something like
Newsblur.com is open source and hosted, so you can pay a yearly fee for the
service, while having the peace of mind that you can fork it and self host it
yourself should the product die, which is what many of us want after Google
pulled the plug on Reader ;-)

~~~
tschellenbach
NewsBlur is a great project. Winds relies on Stream, Algolia and Mercury API.
NewsBlur supports Mercury. You can run both Winds or Newsblur on your own
server.

I wonder if we could do a project together with Newsblur where we list if
sites properly support RSS. Similar to how the Python 3 ready sites popped up.

------
skrause
> _I love using RSS to follow the programming and tech news I care about.
> Unfortunately, the number of sites supporting RSS has been in rapid decline
> over the last few years. The reader ecosystem is slowly degrading as well._

After that introduction I was hoping Winds would be some kind of proxy that
creates an RSS for sites that don't have one. But well, it's just another RSS
reader. Those have actually never gone way, I'm using Inoreader every day.

~~~
jessriedel
For reasons I don't understand, it remains incredibly difficult to scrape a
well-organized blog and turn it into something I can consume like RSS or a
kindle book.

Note that many/most WordPress RSS feeds aren't that useful because they only
show a snippet rather than the entire post. This dreary state of affairs is
due in part to the fact that "checking" an RSS just means downloading the
entire file containing all posts the author would like to make public,
regardless of how many are new to the reader. This insanely unnecessary
bandwidth usage penalizes sites that have long (>10) feeds with complete
posts. (The single RSS file on my blog takes up the majority of my bandwidth
costs.)

RSS needs to be replaced, not revived.

~~~
gkya
For your RSS issue, you can safely truncate your RSS feed to the latest N
articles, where N is a random reasonable number you choose (10 is good,
because it's so decimal). RSS reader software will know how to deal with it.

WRT scraping, it is getting harder because funny websites w/ no static content
where everything is generated via Angular or Perpendicular or sth. are really
hard to deal with. Recently my uni switched from an army of Wordpress websites
to an homegrown AJAX-MVC-Reactive abomination where the links are
reimplemented via some funny black magic where the actual link items (which
are not anchors btw) don't have encoded in them the link targets, but only an
onclick event that knows somehow where to go. And because they just killed all
the RSS feeds, I wrote up sth. to revive them for me via phantomjs, but could
not figure how to find the link targets, I cannot link the RSS items to
anywhere but the main announcements page, and I can't add any description from
the link target.

RSS should be kept, those who don't know the job they are doing should be
replaced.

~~~
ChristianBundy
> ... where N is an arbitrary number you choose (12 is good, because
> [https://dozenal.org](https://dozenal.org)).

FTFY ;)

~~~
progval
> because [http://dozenal.org](http://dozenal.org)

FTFY

------
unicornporn
I don't understand why you would ever want this to be a desktop app. Try
FreshRSS[1], it's awesome. It works well on shared hosting and it runs on
SQLite.

TTRSS only gave me trouble. Threw all kinds of strange errors at unexpected
times. I don't know how many times it died on me after an upgrade. I
eventually gave up and found FreshRSS. Been running (and updating) it over a
year, without a single problem.

One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.

Every and service that I use has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use
[https://twitrss.me/](https://twitrss.me/) to follow users. If you don't find
a feed, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the
most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).

[1] [https://freshrss.org](https://freshrss.org)

~~~
allanbreyes
100% agree with self-hosting an RSS aggregator. It's awesome.

Personally, I gave tt-rss and FreshRSS a shot, but went back to Miniflux[1].
One binary to run (written in Golang) and plugs into Postgres. Easy to set up,
but I prefer Miniflux for the same reasons I prefer Hacker News'
website—simple and functional.

[1] [https://miniflux.net/](https://miniflux.net/)

~~~
zaarn
Since I'm considering to switch from TTRSS to something else, may I drill a
bit? (the website is a tad short)

I heavily rely on nested categories in TTRSS (Youtube -> News for news
channels for example), while the website says it has categories, can they be
nested?

And most importantly, does miniflux handle about 700 feeds well? It would help
a lot if I could lower the update rate of some feeds that only update once a
month...

~~~
allanbreyes
No nested categories. They're all flat. Miniflux is ultra minimalist and
"opinionated," which I ended up preferring to all the others. YMMV! If you're
looking for a ton of features or customization, look elsewhere.

It's also wicked fast, resource-light, and the code is really easy to grok if
you want to hack in anything. But, the update rate is a single global
setting[1]. I wouldn't be surprised if it could handle far more than 700
feeds... you'll hit bottlenecks from bandwidth or the DB before anything with
the app.

[1]:
[http://docs.miniflux.net/en/latest/configuration.html](http://docs.miniflux.net/en/latest/configuration.html)

~~~
zaarn
>YMMV! If you're looking for a ton of features or customization, look
elsewhere.

I don't need much customization, I simply rely on a lot of features for daily
convenience. Either way, it seems good enough and I might be able to work
around it (or submit a patch if I'm not lazy).

Update rate is merely a concern because I don't want to spam some hosts with
repetitive updates for no reason, might be worth another patch.

------
xpil
Two words: News. Blur. I have been using
[https://newsblur.com](https://newsblur.com) for years now (ever since Google
Reader died) and am not switching to anything else soon.

RSS is not dead.

~~~
Groxx
Yea, I'm thrilled with NewsBlur. Significantly happier than I even was with
Google Reader, plus it's open source, plus the dev is fairly steadily
introducing well-thought-out features (like highlighting articles from
infrequent posters).

Glad to pay for it to keep it running.

------
k1ns
Just a friendly PSA that WordPress comes with RSS feeds enabled by default.
Since an overwhelming majority of content websites use WordPress, I think it's
safe to say RSS is still widely available. Try going to your favorite blog and
append "?feed=rss2" to the end of the URL. Like so:

[http://example.com/?feed=rss2](http://example.com/?feed=rss2)

~~~
catach
Related: Firefox still offers an RSS button that you can place in a toolbar.
Lights up when a site has a feed available.

~~~
Jaruzel
Chrome also has an official extension (by Google) to do the same:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-
subscription-e...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-
extensio/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd?hl=en)

It can be configured to send the selected feed URL to your (online) aggregator
of choice.

------
lylo
For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com
(which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the
web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly.

For iOS I use Reeder ([https://reederapp.com](https://reederapp.com)) but for
Mac (which Reeder also supports) I use the excellent ReadKit
([https://readkitapp.com/](https://readkitapp.com/)).

Most blogs still appear to support RSS but you do get the odd one now and
again that doesn’t, but that’s their loss as far as I’m concerned.

~~~
masklinn
> For years (since the demise of Google Reader) I’ve been using feedly.com
> (which is free) as the source for my RSS feeds but I never actually use the
> web client. I use native clients that integrate with Feedly.

Interesting, I also migrated to feedly but I do use the web application on the
desktop, though the feedly app on my phone. On desktop, the webapp works
really well for my purposes — which is mostly going through all updates (all
sorted by oldest, "j" for next), and once in a while opening one in a full
browser window ("v") or sending the page to instapaper.

------
jeffreyrogers
Did RSS ever go away? Almost all of the blogs I follow still have RSS feeds.
Maybe I'm just in a bubble. I think the decline in relative importance of RSS
is certainly real, but that's more an effect of people getting their
information from more centralized sources (like HN).

~~~
pchristensen
I don't think many sites _removed_ RSS, but many new sites and services in the
last ~5 years, never implemented or served it in the first place. The typical
share icons now are FB, Instagram, and Twitter. Email is less common (although
usually there's an email newsletter signup). For a while, there wouldn't be
link to RSS on the page, but you could still find the .rss or .atom link in
the HTML header. But a lot of times that's not there anymore either.

It makes me sad to have to settle for Liking a company's FB page, since it's
up to FB whether or not I ever see it.

~~~
jake_the_third
Youtube is like this. They don't advertise rss feeds but include them in the
page source of youtube channels. In the one or two times I couldn't find the
link in the source, I'd just copy the channel id of the channel and use the
feed url from another channel. Works like a charm!

~~~
allanbreyes
A surprising amount of services have this. You can even turn your Gmail inbox
into an (authenticated) RSS feed[1]. Small warning: it uses an outdated XML
feed namespace, but most readers should handle it fine.

[1]:
[https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/feed/atom/](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/feed/atom/)

------
dismal2
Why is this a downloadable app instead of a web app? It's built entirely using
web technology. I think RSS belongs in my browser, so I can easily access it
from whatever computer I might be using.

~~~
nparsons08
This is a great point; however, we wanted to bring the user experience to the
desktop. You are more than welcome to submit a PR to make this application web
compatible.

~~~
kart22
Why do you require users to make an account? I personally would rather have
all my settings stored locally, and export them if I needed to. An option for
this would be great.

~~~
rorso
Yeah I installed it, saw you need an account, and uninstalled it.

I quite like desktop programs still, but I expect everything to be stored
locally and not to need an account. I had hoped for a KeePass style db file
that I could sync on Dropbox or something, but the last thing I need is more
accounts and my data on some randoms server that could be taken down when they
get bored, or run out of money/motivation.

------
_wmd
(deleted useful feedback but ultimately neggy comment -- sorry, these guys are
launching an app, I don't want to shit on that in a top comment where it's the
reader's first experience).

~~~
wyclif
I'd like to know why I should download and install this when I can use Feedly.
Maybe it's uncool to like Feedly nowadays, but it does everything I want it to
do. Before that I used Google Reader until it was retired.

~~~
_wmd
I hate Feedly's UI. Sorry

~~~
spacemonkey92
I had the same opinion. So few months back I made an iOS app to read all my
favourite sites in one place [https://7web.co](https://7web.co)

------
jeena
I like #ReviveRSS but:

> Powered By: Stream, Algolia, MongoDB, SendGrid, AWS

My feed reader is an old PHP script running on a NUC.

~~~
gizzlon
Any recommendations for cross-platform, light RSS readers? PDF export would be
_great_, but not necessary

~~~
joeseeder
Tiny tiny rss, all the way, you have great web based desktop ui and good
mobile apps

~~~
ekianjo
Yes, agree, this is my choice of reader too.

------
jeffbax
I'm not sure what this non-native application is offering me over plenty of
Mac (and presumably Linux & Windows) native versions using way less memory and
having platform-native UI controls.

RSS's challenge has never been apps, it's support from publishers to keep
using open formats.

~~~
jammi
I'd also say a large part of its issue is lack of internal consistency of the
format itself. Firstly there are the various official RSS versions, then there
are all those Atom things and probably others as well, and then there's the
thing about how you're supposed to render the things correctly. XML as the
content format is also pretty much antiquated.

A modern format would no doubt have to be JSON- or YAML-based and have its
human-readable content in plain text or markdown, so it'd have to be pretty
much readable with a plain text http client, like curl.

So, just let RSS die the slow death it's been going through for good reasons
and bring something consistent and straight-forward into its place. Something
that you could easily generate and parse from any modern language without
specific libraries.

Bringing RSS back is like trying to bring SOAP as a RPC system back; it just
won't fly anymore no matter how much hot air you try to pump into it. We know
better now and have better ways to do the things.

~~~
jeena
[https://jsonfeed.org/](https://jsonfeed.org/)

------
kav2k
To "revive" RSS, wider support from content providers is needed, not from
software to consume feeds.

Can't display a feed that doesn't exist!

~~~
Alex3917
We did our part. As of a couple weeks ago, you can now syndicate your
published email conversations as an RSS feed:

[https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=Alex391...](https://api.fwdeveryone.com/user/inbox.atom?username=Alex3917)

~~~
kav2k
Don't forget an important part of the picture — feed autodiscovery tags. See
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-atompub-
autodiscovery...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-atompub-
autodiscovery-01)

------
keithnz
I'm still angry (ish) at google for killing google reader, it met my RSS needs
really nicely.

I use feedly now. Which is pretty good. For me having it has a web site is
most useful, rather than a device oriented thing that manages feeds.

~~~
BigChiefSmokem
The thing that bugs me about the Feedly website is that it doesn't really feel
like a RSS reader, at least on the free service. Maybe the paid version is
(much) more customizable but I doubt it. It reminds me more of Flipboard.

Edit: It's tailored to marketing people so I think that's why.

~~~
greenyoda
You might want to try NewsBlur.com - it's quite similar to how Google Reader
used to be. It has a free version (64 RSS feeds) and a paid version (unlimited
feeds).

(I remember trying Feedly when Google Reader died, but ended up going with
NewsBlur instead.)

------
tw1010
The whole rss is dead -> long live rss narrative has been an eye-opening
experience for me in terms of practically illustrating just how powerful and
influential the news is on technological development. Engineers can
apparantely be a lot more easily manipulated than what I previously thought.
(I'd argue we never knew whether or not RSS was dead because it was based on
small and skewed sampling biases.)

~~~
byproxy
the tide of sentiment rises and falls. the glow of opinion waxes and wanes.
the wave of reaction ebbs and flows.

~~~
tw1010
and the question persists; how can this insight earn me profit?

------
Groxx
Of course it's an Electron app. :|

That said, pleasantly speedy! Nice work. There are a fair number of minor UI
glitches (suggestions list frequently flickers when going to/from it,
follow/unfollow can sometimes escape bounds of window and cause scrollbars,
etc) but overall it feels pretty nice. I'll give it a try for a while.

If you're taking recommendations though:

\- It'd be really awesome if I could paste a URL into the search field and
have one of the options be "add a new feed" rather than clicking the +.

\- And the "featured" section is probably a decent intro to new users (keep
it!), but I'm unlikely to ever use it, and it's taking up a LOT of real-
estate. Maybe an option to hide it / make it able to scroll away, to give more
room for the stuff you already follow below.

------
CharlesW
For a company who wants to "#ReviveRSS", the Stream site seems to avoid the
word "RSS" like the plague except in this new blog post.

Do they support RSS in their service, and if so does this product use their
service for RSS feed polling, etc.?

~~~
tschellenbach
Stream is an API for building activity feeds. You use it when you want to
follow things in your application. Another use case is notification feeds. RSS
readers are a tiny fraction of our customer base, but it's something we care
about. API tour is here:
[https://getstream.io/get_started/](https://getstream.io/get_started/)
Currently Stream powers the feeds for over 300 million end users, Stackshare
did a nice post about our tech: [https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-
news-feeds-for-ov...](https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-news-feeds-
for-over-300-million-end-users)

------
dlbucci
Question: why am I constantly hearing about RSS and never Atom? Isn't Atom
newer and supposedly better? Are the two basically interchangeable, or did
Atom never catch on enough that people want to revive it?

~~~
icc97
It seems that RSS just caught on as the name everyone remembers. Atom is
indeed better [0].

[0]:
[http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared](http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared)

------
pixelrevision
Lack of a good client is not the issue here. RSS needs to either add a
standard way to serve ads or some sort of revenue model. Otherwise it doesn’t
make sense for most publishers to adopt or maintain it.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
Why does RSS need "a standard way to serve ads"? Feed content can easily
include ads.

~~~
nie
So 'we' can block it. NLP for ads detection would be disastrous as a problem
to tackle. And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads
from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
The comment to which I was replying claimed that it was necessary for
_publishers_ to adopt RSS. I'm pretty sure they were thinking that, if RSS had
some kind of standard way to _increase_ the probability of ads being seen,
publishers would adopt it more widely (and that's probably true).

My point is that feed content can already include ads as regular text or
images or whatever. Feed readers and aggregators complicate ad-tracking, but
not ads themselves (like what newspapers and magazines have used for decades
[or centuries]). Some of my favorite feeds are sites with plain ads and the
advertisers seem to be targeting the site's audience instead of individuals.
That seems to work well enough given that it's existed in its current form for
several years now at least.

> And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from
> actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs.

We're probably writing past each other. I _think_ you're imagining a _much_
more widespread adoption of RSS in which this would be a real problem. Or
maybe I'm just weird. But I don't see the problem with, e.g. following a feed
of someone's Twitter activity that includes an (obvious) ad every _n_ feed
items for some suitable value of _n_. And my imagined world wouldn't require
any changes to RSS.

------
oelmekki
I've been using rss again for a few months, and it's been really nice. It's
like twitter without the noise.

The "wow" moment for me was when I discovered google alerts allows to get
alerts as a rss feed (individually for each alert). So this means content
discovery through RSS is now possible (the main reason why I started to
replace RSS with twitter). Alerts have two modes, one "main articles only"
where google applies some blackbox magic to limit the amount of items talking
about the same thing, and "all articles".

I'm seriously thinking about using this to build my own privacy oriented clone
of google feed. I could have a browser extension performing keyword extraction
from my web history to detect my interests, then have google alerts set up on
those keywords and a local app chewing all similar content from items through
textrank to produce a "news", with a list of sources, maybe sorted through
alexa rank. Sounds like quite a job, but worth it.

------
russellbeattie
I'm amazed RSS has lasted this long.

In terms of technology, it's a dog. Beyond the problems associated with
malformed XML, and crazy namespaces (I once went through several hundred
thousand feeds and found over 100 different tags), the process of polling for
new content is inefficient and wasteful. I recently moved my personal blog
from one server to another and was _amazed_ at the amount of bot traffic I get
- over 5 years after I stopped blogging regularly.

In terms of business sense - why would a publisher ever want to create an RSS
feed in the first place? I'm still surprised they bother. RSS feeds don't
drive sufficient traffic to justify their existence, and allows easy
copying/republishing. There's zero financial incentive.

I'm a news junkie and loved blogs in their heyday, but those days are over and
they aren't coming back.

------
josefresco
I recently unfollowed most "media" on my Twitter, and transitioned those
sources to RSS / Feedly app on iOS. Feedly works good enough, and my Twitter
feed is now much quieter, and I feel good about spending less time on Twitter
(for various reasons).

I have found that finding an RSS feed for a website/brand can sometimes be
difficult. Feedly does a good job making this easy, but sometimes I need to
resort to Google, to find the proper feed.

I also find it rewarding to follow (on Twitter) journalists, instead of the
paper/website/org they work for. You get more personal tweets, story follow
ups, and can engage them in conversation, unlike most media feeds which are
managed by staff uninterested in engaging.

------
wolololo33
I use Liferea. It used to work well 6 years ago and still works good. I don't
need to share my feeds with the "cloud" and I don't need to run yet another
instance of Chrome and have yet another copy node_modules. Pricing: 0$/month.

------
boardwaalk
I'm surprised rss2email (or something similar) has hardly been mentioned.
Getting your RSS in your email makes a surprising amount of sense. You can
filter, organize and archive it. You can search it. You can mark it read or
put flags on it. You can forward it to friends if that's your thing. And it
works everywhere you have an email app.

I also have small scripts that run as cron jobs and scrape a few Twitter feeds
and a few subreddits and email new items to me.

Having all my updates in one place I can consume in one place when I want is
just great.

I'm not sure what I'd get out of Winds looking at it.

~~~
wbillingsley
The thing I most hated about RSS readers was they treated it like email (or
even old-style newsgroups), assuming you cared how many articles you hadn't
read.

Nope, most of it's _news_ (whether tech or some other kind), and the social
media stream kind of access (where you care about what's current, but if you
missed it so what) seems a lot more appropriate.

~~~
boardwaalk
I mean, if you want to support that kind of view, you could certainly just
purge anything more than 10 articles old or whatever from the RSS feed from
your inbox.

We probably just use these things differently though. Like, if a product I'm
interested in gets reviewed I want to see that -- I don't want to have to go
search the website later because maybe it was reviewed but I wasn't hovering
over my RSS feed the hour or two it was the top story.

Basically, it completely replaces the website's front page for me, and if I
have to go there I've failed.

------
grappler
That looks like a nice desktop app, and that's certainly a start.

If other users are anything like me, then to really revive RSS you have to
think more multi-device.

Assume the user will want to get to their feed of stuff to read from their
phone, tablet, or laptop.

Assume the user will want to listen from their phone most of the time (iphone
or android), but maybe their watch while exercising, their car stereo while
driving, and through speakers like Echo or Sonos at home.

Get these things to sync up nicely and I bet people wouldn't mind a bit that
RSS is underneath somewhere, making it go.

------
eridius
Does this app support RSS syncing services like Feedbin? I don't see any
mention of that in the description, which suggests that it doesn't. If so,
that's a pretty big missing feature.

------
Zhyl
Is there an app/service that does the following?:

* Has a feed a la RSS readers

* Allows items on that feed (from all the sources) to be earmarked

* At the end of reviewing the unread items of the feed, summarise a 'checkout' of earmarked items

* Sends a payment to each of the publications for the content earmarked

* Compiles the content into a consumable format such as kindle, PDF or download for mobile

I can only think of instapaper/pocket type services that don't allow for
payment, or for browsers like Brave that use blockchainy things that seem new
and scary. Or are just RSS readers.

~~~
usrusr
Pretty much my thoughts: if you want RSS to live, turn it into the platform
for content micropayment. If you just want it to be a better adblocker, don't
act surprised if nobody wants to play along.

------
devang1707
Why can't I upload OPML file? App does nothing when I upload it.

~~~
aspett
Same problem here

~~~
tschellenbach
It's bugged, the team is pushing a release, but it will take 24h before it's
in the app store.

------
yoz-y
RSS never died. Many sites (at least those of interest to me) still release
feeds. It's just that they are not advertised as much and the RSS logo kind of
disappeared.

------
tambourine_man
Is that another Electron app? If so, no thanks

~~~
tschellenbach
Web and React Native are coming soon

~~~
tambourine_man
Sorry, but I’m very skeptical it can compete with a truly native Cocoa app
such as NetNewsWire on UX.

It’s such an unfornutate trand.

------
SnowingXIV
I’m still looking for a reader that can crawl the web and find articles based
on specific keywords and exclude sites of my choice. I want to follow certain
topics in a particular niche but the best solution is setting weekly roundup
with google alerts in their news which only includes those that are part of
“google news.”

~~~
jhund
Shameless plug: This is exactly what we built
[https://contentgems.com](https://contentgems.com) for. It is entirely driven
by feeds (both RSS/Atom as well as Twitter home timeline). You can filter by
content (Lucene query), by feed, by domain (suffix) and a few other
parameters.

~~~
SnowingXIV
I gave it a try, it wasn't able to find anything related to the keywords I'm
trying to track but this seems to be useful if it did hah.

------
dlutcat
I didn't find any more cool features in Winds than in other Google Reader
clone products. I have been using
inoreader([https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/)) since
Google Reader was shutdown, and it works very well for me.

------
se7entime
Thunderbird Feeds feature is enough for me and i don't see if i want another
rss reader client

email + feeds?

Thunderbird!

------
rado
RSS came back to light after privacy concerns and Winds requires registration
to work?

------
h43z
For websites I want to follow that don't provide an RSS feed I wrote a 30 line
python script which runs in daily cronjob and creates me an an XML feed that I
can import locally in my reader (newsboat). Easy and it works great.

~~~
hypocrazybr
do you have this python script in some kind of github/bitbucket repo? would
you mind to share it? Newsboat is awesome!

~~~
h43z
Yes I have. Here you go
[https://github.com/h43z/rssify](https://github.com/h43z/rssify)

------
orschiro
I like these two open source readers:

1\. [https://www.feedbunch.com](https://www.feedbunch.com) 2\.
[https://www.commafeed.com/](https://www.commafeed.com/)

:-)

------
pickypickle
How about everyone gives the creators of Winds some credit instead of bitching
about RSS, the interface, the desktop experience, etc. I would imagine they
put months of effort into building out such a complex application.

------
kchr
I don't the problem is a lack of clients or interest from consumers; it's that
publishers want more control of the content and how it is consumed (for
example by forcing you to use their own platform).

------
garganzol
Winds 2.0 was easy to setup but it immediately asks to register an account
upon the first app launch. Why? I prefer to store my settings locally or in
Dropbox. I uninstalled the app without moving any further.

------
tschellenbach
Thanks for all the feedback, this is awesome. Sounds like a lot of people
would like a web and mobile version.

What other problems do you currently have with your RSS readers and Podcast
apps?

Anything in particular that you're missing?

~~~
forapurpose
I have far too many feed items to read. I'd like to review ~1,000 items in 20
minutes, as a start. (Review means: Read the headline, possibly read the
summary, decide whether to read the full story, do whatever is needed to open
full story, move to next item; I'll read the full stories after I've gone
through all the feed items.)

* Deduplication: Which might remove ~5% of my feed items

* Grouping: This would be by far the most important feature. I need something to group articles covering the same story (e.g., all the news publications' stories on the big game or big speech or big calamity last night). Then I can quickly choose one and ignore the rest.

* Speed: UI that responds at the speed of thought and maximizes throughput when reviewing feed items. A keyboard interface is essential.

* Complex filters: So I can automatically process items as desired.

* EDIT: Automate handling of broken feeds: On one hand, I want to spend as little time on broken feeds as possible; perhaps the reader can retry for x hours, then try obvious alternative addresses (perhaps Stream can maintain a db of the new addresses, saving each user from redundantly solving the problem themselves), then notify me with an efficient interface for resolving the problem.

* Micropayments: Maybe over-ambitious, but it would be a great way to support the authors. A possibly world-changing feature.

------
vladimir-y
It's built on Electron.js, so for Desktop only, how is it useful then?

[https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/) is still working well
by the way.

------
aaronbrethorst
I pay a couple bucks every month for Feedbin and couldn't be happier:
[http://www.feedbin.com](http://www.feedbin.com)

~~~
luag
Only a couple? How? I pay 5 / month :/

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Judging by my billing history, it looks like I signed up the same day it was
announced back in 2013. I must be grandfathered in. I'd happily pay $5/mo for
Feedbin if the grandfathered plans were removed. In terms of cost per hour of
use, it's probably the service I pay the least for.

------
triplee
Revive? How do you think I got here in the first place?

RSS isn't all that dead since some of us olds never stopped using it.

------
grizzles
Since we're on the topic, are there any new-ish open source alternatives to
pump & stream-framework?

------
andrepd
Sadly, instead of Flatpak or Appimage, they decided to use Ubuntu Snap for
packaging their Linux app.

~~~
favadi
Why it is sad?

~~~
jake_the_third
Not the guy, but one reason to avoid ubuntu snaps is that it is designed not
to allow users to have complete control over software updates. With snaps, the
developer controls the update process, not the user.

Some people believe that the user should have the final say in what his or her
system does. Snap goes against this. It's a great project otherwise.

See: [https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-
for...](https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for-snap-
from-store/707)

~~~
andrepd
I'd add to that a general dislike of the "splitter" attitude taken by Ubuntu.
Unity vs Gnome, Mir vs Waylaid, now Snap vs Flatpak. The latter works well,
the former doesn't improve in any meaningful way. Why fragment?

~~~
oblio
Gnome 3 was quite widely disliked by a big part of the community. I'm not sure
Unity was necessarily a bad idea.

------
hd4
When I read the headline, I immediately knew this was some RSS reader built on
Electron.

------
advanced__pizza
plug: [http://flatreader.com/](http://flatreader.com/)

Idea is to be super simple. Unlimited feeds in beta.

Will post the github if anyone is interested in helping out. Sinatra / Ruby,
Postgres.

~~~
unicornporn
> Unlimited feeds in beta.

That isn't a great selling point to me. That means I might become locked into
a service with bad terms.

------
tasubotadas
How about Feedpresso? Would anyone be willing to give it a go?

------
burtonator
It won't ever come back because there's no monetary incentive for people to
share content. Just the opposite in fact.

~~~
trophycase
I've never used an RSS reader so correct me if I'm wrong, but RSS can
basically allow you to read the content without advertising? Sharing is fine,
but I think they would prefer sharing in a way that can make money.

~~~
yorwba
I use RSS/Atom to keep up-to-date on the 100+ webcomics I read, and the
content in those feeds can vary wildly. Some include the full comic page, some
only a thumbnail, some contain an accompanying blog post, others are empty and
you need to follow the link to see the post.

If you want to read everything in your feed reader, those "incomplete" feeds
are disappointing, but I just use it as a kind of newsletter to get notified
of updates. I even use Thunderbird's built-in feed support.

------
zahreeley
RSS in JSON format? Or may be yaml

~~~
unicornporn
Please, no. RSS works pretty well as is. Few users would care about the data
format. [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

------
jaequery
if someone comes up with RSS in a pure JSON format, I'd think we may see a
revival.

~~~
yoz-y
[https://jsonfeed.org](https://jsonfeed.org)

Already supported in Feedly and Feedbin, probably more.

------
paulcole
I’ll disagree. It’s been however many years since Google Reader shut down and
I haven’t replaced it with anything.

Don’t really feel the need to add RSS back into my life.

~~~
josefresco
How do you consume / aggregate the content you previously consumed via Google
Reader?

~~~
paulcole
Found out I could live without most of it. Now I visit Reddit and HN more.

~~~
josefresco
Same here - I use Feedly less often than I used Twitter when my media feeds
were housed there. I also find this same behavior after we recently ditched
cable TV. Those TV shows and networks that were "important" to me before are
not nearly as much now that I've broken free.

