
RSSHub: Everything Is RSSible - searchableguy
https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub
======
genmon
I'm pleased to see renewed interest in RSS (web feeds generally). But my
concern is that, for first time users, the onboarding process is too complex.
There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear.

A plug for my own answer to this:

I recently launched [https://aboutfeeds.com](https://aboutfeeds.com) \-- a one
pager "getting started" guide aimed at first-time users of web feeds/RSS. The
goal is to have it linked next to every "RSS subscribe" button out there.

~~~
kev_da_dev
I completely agree genmon! RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the
average user.

My belief is that, in order for RSS / ATOM to really catch on, we need to
completely abstract those concepts for the end-user.

In my opinion, getting people to care about RSS / ATOM is like getting them to
care about HTTP. They do not care about the actual mechanisms - only the end
result. That being said, I think all we're missing is GREAT product design.
Too many pipes are still exposed and it scares away the average user.

Make webfeeds as intuitive as social media giants and we have a revolution on
our hands :p

PS: would love to build this with someone if there's any takers :)

~~~
smichel17
> RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user.

I think basically you want reddit's early marketing, "the front page of the
web". Except it's _your_ front page. It's a feed where you can go to see the
latest stuff from everywhere you're interested in, rather than having to check
each site individually. Like how one's reddit home page shows posts from all
the different subreddits to which one is subscribed.

I think the best entry point is probably the browser, like Firefox's "top
sites" on about:home. The browser is uniquely positioned to know what sites
you frequent. If it also knows where to find those sites' rss feeds, it could
automatically suggest adding them (also on the home page or similar). Once
you've got that -- people actually using it -- you're over the hump, and it's
easy enough to for users to transition to curating their feeds, using a
different application, etc

~~~
genmon
Browsers used to have RSS built in — I forget when Safari removed its reader.
But you’re right about that button... something that glows when a feed is
present.

The current UX, at least on my iPhone, is that I go to a site that looks like
it _probably_ has a feed, and then I use the share sheet to push that URL to
NetNewsWire. Then RSS auto-discovery takes over.

But there are a growing number of sites that look like they _should_ have
feeds (posts on the front page arranged chronologically) but don’t. And the
user experience is simply terrible when you attempt to subscribe with auto-
discovery and it silently fails.

The problem is getting that in-browser glowing button on mobile. Browsers are
too locked down.

~~~
kev_da_dev
I think history has shown us that there's no use in hoping from change on the
browser or OS side. Unless new competitors come in, it seems the majority of
people are stuck with Chrome / Firefox / Safari.

On top of that, a big problem with they are walled gardens as well. Some
support exporting easy enough, but we've seen firsthand what happens when big
readers (google reader, etc) go down.

That being said, I think our best hope is to create an open-source, web-based
reader.

raw feeds are one of the last bastions of freedom on the internet, and we
can't afford to keep building them on bad foundations.

If I had to imagine it from the ground up, I'm picturing a desktop-esque
environment running straight from the browser. almost like google's
environment, to be honest. There could be full-blown search, email, news, etc;
but they are all intertwined by the ability to 'subscribe' to any of these
results, and have them piped right into your homepage.

Sort of like smichel said above, a true front page of the internet, but _your_
front page.

------
phre4k
I just love that Asian developers finally 'discovered' the English speaking
FOSS community.

A lot of the software I use and contribute to has gained many contributors
from China, Singapore and Japan through the last 1-2 years.

It really warms my heart to see that FOSS knows less and less borders :)

~~~
mindfulhack
It especially does because people think that being against 'Chinese apps' like
TikTok is 'sinophobia', when really we love Chinese _people_ it's just the
government we don't trust. So it really does makes it special to see those
Chinese characters in that README. I want to see more of that.

But I also immediately feel concern. I hope this Shanghai developer is not
targeted, bullied, or persecuted in any way like having their money seized.

Damn. Just donated to their PayPal because I feel so encouraged by it.

~~~
altindag
I think this is bullshit. It's like saying, "I'm not racist, my friend Bob is
black."

You don't get a "get outta jail free" card for saying "I love CHinese people"
and "oorah for China devs" and then heaping shit all over their country's
achievements the rest of the time.

Do people who say this think they understand China or Chinese people even a
little bit?

~~~
mindfulhack
> and then heaping shit all over their country's achievements the rest of the
> time.

I didn't say that anywhere. China's achieved a lot, in amazing ways. My
comment said nothing about that.

> Do people who say this think they understand China or Chinese people even a
> little bit?

\- Have you been to China, invited by their government in an official
delegation and seen first-hand the mob-like lack of distinction between
business and government, the nepotism, and the opaque vista of corruption,
like I have?

\- Have you had more than one Chinese national as a romantic partner, like I
have?

\- Have you worked and studied extra-curricularly with Chinese people for much
of of your life, like I have?

\- Have you learned Mandarin at age 18, like I have?

I think I "understand China or Chinese people" more than the average non-
Chinese person.

But even that I think doesn't count for much. Chinese people don't share their
real cultural opinions with people in the West much, including my ex-partners.

I still have lots more to learn about the very contrasting popular opinions
there and slowly understand some of it. I respectfully listen to pro-
government Chinese people who occasionally appear on HN, and engage with them
with an open mind, though with no concession granted in regards to expectation
of intellectual honesty. Recently in my comment history, there's one such
conversation. I gave a very unforgiving rebuttal to their comment, but I
respected them by not just downvoting, but engaging. We really should talk
more.

It appears you're a non-Chinese person who's been triggered by my comment
based on other experiences. I really invite you to not 'other' individual
people like me as faceless "people" like you just did. In contrast, it would
have been great to hear from a thoughtful Chinese person.

~~~
browsergap
Triggered sounds like irrational and unhinged so...if it's what you need to
say about other people's views to (in your mind) censor them and protect your
own views, I get it, but I'm afraid it makes you a less trustworthy assessor!

It sounds like you've confused "identity" with opinion. I wasn't saying, "you
are bullshit", and I'm sorry that you seem to have taken it like that. I was
saying "I think that (view you write) is bullshit". I wasn't trying to offend
you.

But also, to assume that had I had the experiences you list, I would arrive at
your conclusion is incredibly narrow minded (and, to be honest, arrogant), and
makes me trust even less that you would be able to see beyond the nose of your
existing biases and consider others with different views... Because it's a big
world out there, plenty of room for differences of opinion and experience.

The false dichotomy between "the Chinese state/government and the Chinese
people" is a common Western propaganda tactic I've noticed to, exactly as I
said, seem like you're not being racist when you are. And, unfortunately for
you, god bless you, you've done exactly as I predicted, "I'm not racist
because look at all the connections I have"

You didn't go on to criticize anything beside saying you don't "trust" the
government, but I'm great at reading between the lines, and reading people and
I know the type of argument you're hinting at and where it goes.

It reminds me that people don't hold these anti-China views from ignorance,
simply because they've carried a Western-propaganda mindset into their own
affairs. It seems like in your jaunts you forgot to check your pre-existing
biases at the door/luggage-check counter.

Which, so far, has meant, _not_ that you don't have enough experiences to
think about and understand China, but only that you've so far failed to
properly think about them, being blinded by your biases. So far, you've wasted
those experiences you have by not yet thinking clearly about them. I'm not
sure where you're from (and I don't care here because it doesn't matter, like
it doesn't matter where I'm from or who I am, what matters is the quality of
my thought and my ability to think clearly, critically and for myself, as I
hope you can too), but here's a video of a white dude saying something that is
mostly correct. I don't know him nor anything else about him but this is about
right:

[https://twitter.com/chinascio/status/1299172383027200001](https://twitter.com/chinascio/status/1299172383027200001)

~~~
browsergap
Now to everyone else, because it sounds like you will find this very hard to
listen to right now, I think a good antidote to the fake narrative that "the
Chinese government does not represent the Chinese people" is history. China in
20C had the bloodiest most awfully brutal civil war for the last 400 years. It
was a popular revolution overthrowing a corrupt, lazy, anachronistic,
incompetent dynasty (and then republic) and basically stretched from 1911 to
the end of the cultural revolution. Then, the governing system they created
out of this, has gone about in the last 70 years lifting more people out of
poverty than anywhere else, and building something truly amazing. I hope
you'll, you know, give the Chinese and their system some credit. Anyway...my
point is, that if the Chinese people are not happy with their government,
there's no other place on earth where the government would be more afraid of
their people's wrath than China. Just look at the history. Look at the hunger
they have for creating a better life. Look at how the government is forced to
deliver. And look at the complacent stagnation and lazy woolly propagandist
rest-on-yer-laurels thinking that has metastasized in most of the Western
world.

So, contrary to the popular, but incorrect anti-China notion that you can't
trust the Chinese government, I think you can trust them more than any other
place on Earth right now to deliver as they say, and to deliver results for
their citizens. Simple as that, really. And I think most Chinese are proud and
happy to have such a system.

This shrieking Western hysteria smacks (to me, anyway) of bitter nostalgia for
imperial glory-days where we could pull off stunts like "the treaty of
Nanking" and "the Opium War", the "United East India Company" and wiping out
native populations of N and S American, and Australian aborigines.

I'm not anti-West. I'm just balanced between both places. And speaking up
against the river of fake and negative opinion, which, in my view, only serves
to hasten the West's demise by blinding them to what they could learn, and
giving them the fake pay off of feeling good by (doing that old colonial
thing) of putting other people down and pretending they're better.

But to bring it back to you finally... if you want to make it about identity,
then sure, I'm just more cosmopolitan than you are. In your future jaunts, I
hope you're able to see beyond the veil and check those implanted biases with
other stuff you don't need. So you can finally see clearly. Best of luck! :P
;) xx

------
rozab
I have genuinely found that open source projects by people with anime girls as
their profile pic tend to be excellent

~~~
gilrain
Those may be correlated with a lack of family and, thus, more free time for
personal projects. Not that one outgrows an appreciation of anime once
married, but that the tendency toward cute girl avatars probably decreases.

~~~
prophesi
I was going to counter that it could instead just be that they're not
employed, in education, or in training. But personally, I'm employed and can
devote entire weekends and evenings to side projects. Family would certainly
take up the rest of that time.

Edit: Actually just noticed your comment was about anime girl avatars, and not
the project quality. I have no opinions on that matter.

------
chrismorgan
I’m curious: why is this using RSS? RSS is uniformly technically inferior to
Atom, and all feed reader apps that I know of support Atom, and libraries are
available for both (some RSS-only, some Atom-only, some general). The only
place I’d ever use RSS now is podcast feeds, because podcast feeds haven’t
caught up up with 2007 yet.

~~~
erikrothoff
Most likely: RSS has better brand recognition than Atom feeds. There’s
probably not a single RSS reader that doesn’t support Atom too.

~~~
avian
RSS is basically a synonym for Atom at this point.

------
usrme
Maybe someone else will benefit from my experience as well: I recently wanted
to create an RSS feed for
[https://www.apmreports.org/](https://www.apmreports.org/) as they didn't seem
to offer one, nor did Feedly (my preferred RSS reader) manage to find one that
was up-to-date. I ended up using
[http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/](http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/)
instead because there wasn't an existing route in RSSHub that I could use, and
it didn't seem trivial to set one up for this particular case; I hope someone
will prove me wrong though.

With the Feed Creator feed URL I'm not able to see the content within Feedly
(it just says "no content"), but it does relay new posts to me, which I can
open directly, and it was amazingly quick to get a functional feed URL, so I'm
very happy nonetheless.

------
dewey
This is interesting, I was building something similar for my personal use case
a while ago but there I have to build a plugin for each website I want to
support which is not ideal
([https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge](https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge)).
I'll have to check it out, community maintained integrations make a lot more
sense.

~~~
cstuder
There is RSS-Bridge which is doing exactly that: A plugin per website, common
libraries.

A pragmatic approach. Trying to build a generalized framework handling each
and every edge case promises endless complexity.

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

~~~
searchableguy
> Dear so-called "social" websites.

> Your catchword is "share", but you don't want us to share. You want to keep
> us within your walled gardens. That's why you've been removing RSS links
> from webpages, hiding them deep on your website, or removed feeds entirely,
> replacing it with crippled or demented proprietary API. FUCK YOU.

> You're not social when you hamper sharing by removing feeds. You're happy to
> have customers creating content for your ecosystem, but you don't want this
> content out - a content you do not even own. Google Takeout is just a
> gimmick. We want our data to flow, we want RSS or Atom feeds.

> We want to share with friends, using open protocols: RSS, Atom, XMPP,
> whatever. Because no one wants to have your service with your applications
> using your API force-feeding them. Friends must be free to choose whatever
> software and service they want.

> We are rebuilding bridges you have wilfully destroyed. Get your shit
> together: Put RSS/Atom back in.

From that readme. Nice project!

I wish someone would make a social rss reader. It would be pretty neat.
Although, activitypub might be better protocol for that.

~~~
beagle3
Check out NewsBlur. It’s a social feed reader.

------
acidburnNSA
Nice! I am excited by this. I decided to go back to trying RSS after a blogger
I enjoy got deplatformed from where I usually found their stuff. I installed a
firefox rss reader and it was fine. But today after seeing this I realized I
wanted more centralized RSS to have it synced on difference devices. So I went
and installed FreshRSS over the past 30 mins on my webserver, added a MariaSQL
db and user, added a Apache subdomain, directed my DNS to it, ran letsencrypt,
fired up the web config, added my feeds, and we're up and running in 30 mins
flat.

Next I guess I have to install this thing to RSS-ify other channels I like.

This is kind of exciting.

------
monkeydust
What might be the best way to aggregate multiple RSS feeds onto a webpage? So
have been recently thinking about density of information and I want to create
a webpage with as much information as possible and park it on a large 55inch
screen I have in my home-office.

------
pembrook
Is there a list of available routes somewhere?

I’m trying to create a personal clone of mailbrew to send myself a newsletter
of all my favorite sources.

~~~
xzyaoi
It's here. [https://docs.rsshub.app/en/](https://docs.rsshub.app/en/)

By the way, I've been using this for a while and it is superb.

------
rmetzler
Someone at my company wanted to use RSShub for turning Instagram into an RSS
feed. This kept breaking, because rsshub just scrapes Instagram profiles on
the web and Instagram pushes its users to the app.

It’s probably more Instagrams fault than rsshub’s that it was breaking. Just
be aware of these limitations.

~~~
edsimpson
No affiliation, but check out InstaFeed. Allows you to authenticate and
generate an rss feed for an Instagram profile.

[https://github.com/falzm/instafeed](https://github.com/falzm/instafeed)

------
thedz
I've started using IFTTT to sent RSS feed updates over to my email, and I
think I've finally found my preferred way of consuming feeds.

My email client is actually much more powerful than most readers in letting me
capture read status and labels / sorting.

~~~
Seirdy
You might be interested in feed2maildir [1], which saves feeds in maildir
format so you can use all your favorite mail clients and index with notmuch.
That way, you aren't dependent on another centralized privacy-invasive
proprietary SaaS walled garden being online and running without major changes.

I've been planning on transitioning from my current TUI RSS reader (Newsboat)
to a maildir-based CLI with notmuch filters for a while; I might give it a
shot next weekend and post some of my notmuch filters for RSS.

[1]:
[https://github.com/sulami/feed2maildir](https://github.com/sulami/feed2maildir)

------
laike9m
I've been using RSSHub and it's GREAT.

It surprises me that people here fount it out so late. The project has been
quite popular for years.

------
jokz
if privacy matter for use use this [https://privacytoolslist.com/#feed-
reader](https://privacytoolslist.com/#feed-reader) open source rss readers and
tools to manage your feeds

