
Show HN: You Need Feeds – Introduce friends/family/workmates to RSS and webfeeds - boastful_inaba
Partially inspired by recent discussions on HN and other places.<p>I&#x27;ve made a single-focus site to introduce your friends&#x2F;colleagues&#x2F;neighbours&#x2F;family to RSS and web feeds.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youneedfeeds.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youneedfeeds.com&#x2F;</a><p>The site is meant to give the elevator pitch for feeds, show a newbie what feeds are and how to use them, set them up with a reader, and give them some nice starter content if they want it.<p>So much tastemaking and newsmaking power is concentrated in the hands of Facebook&#x2F;Reddit&#x2F;Twitter, but I&#x27;m convinced it&#x27;s because much of the general populace doesn&#x27;t know about feeds. 
Many people just don&#x27;t know of any other option than the core three social sites for keeping up with what they like!  They&#x27;re forced to endure all the anger and fighting of social media, just to keep up to date.<p>The more people know about feeds, the more they use feeds, the more sites support feeds, and then more people learn about feeds in a virtuous cycle.<p>I hope to create more uptake of feeds amongst the general population, a more decentralised internet, and maybe just make the average user&#x27;s day a bit nicer.<p>Let me know what you think.  Questions, comments, all appreciated.  Spreading the word is <i>very</i> appreciated. :)
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conesus
Hey, this is a great contribution. Thank you for making it.

I run one of the more popular readers and I have to ask why wasn't NewsBlur
included in your list. It's the oldest on that list for one. It's also got its
own native client on all of the platforms. Plus, I'm a HNer and NewsBlur
launched on HN as well.

As somebody who has been introducing people, in person, to the concept of RSS
for exactly a decade now, I'll mention that for those who really haven't heard
of it, which is 10% of folks in tech and 90% of everybody else, my strategy
has been to compare it to an inbox for websites with filtering and sharing.
Really hits home on the idea that every story shows up unlike the dominant
competitor to RSS which is FB/twitter.

95% of the people who leave RSS, and I ask everybody who cancels why they're
canceling, leave it because they get their news from social media. Social
filtering provides a higher signal than the manual process. I don't blame
them.

Personally I built in that serendipity into my reader because I think it
belongs in a news reader, but as its own feed among many.

~~~
panic
_> 95% of the people who leave RSS, and I ask everybody who cancels why
they're canceling, leave it because they get their news from social media.
Social filtering provides a higher signal than the manual process. I don't
blame them._

I wonder if it would make sense for RSS readers to include ActivityPub support
(or vice versa). Obviously most people's friends aren't on Mastodon or
whatever, but it would be cool to see the social feed alongside RSS updates.

~~~
boastful_inaba
Mastodon supports ATOM natively actually. I'm subscribed to one guy's feed
that way right now!

~~~
mxuribe
curious, how does one go about "subscribing" to a person's feed via mastodon?
Isn't the subscription input value normally someUser@someInstance.net (or
[https://someInstance.net/someUser](https://someInstance.net/someUser))??

~~~
WorldMaker
You just add .atom to the web address (often referred to as the "full profile"
page in Mastodon UI). So [https://some-instance.net/some-
user.atom](https://some-instance.net/some-user.atom)

The full profile page itself also has the usual RSS Auto-Discovery META tags
so that most feed readers will accept the profile page address itself and
figure out the ATOM feed from that.

The only other twist would be for feed readers to add WebFinger support which
would allow them to auto-discover the "full profile" page from the @some-
user@some-instance.net style address. I don't think any feed readers have
added that yet.

------
jiggunjer
One problem with feeds is many sites don't have feeds and people blame RSS
rather than the site not implementing it. Another problem is noise: most sites
just offer a single all-or-nothing feed, while they categorize/tag posts on
their site. If they offered a comprehensive set of microfeeds that would help
adoption I think (or include the category metadata).

Another problem is truncated feeds, requiring users to click links and
navigate to the original site to read each item. While some premium readers
claim to offer complete news items, this is probably against the wishes of the
site and may be circumvented similar to the add-blocker arms-race. In my
opinion if a site model requires users to visit it, then they shouldn't offer
feeds at all.

Lastly some feeds are behind logins (e.g. forums), not all readers support
these feeds.

~~~
mwgkgk
Often projects that don't provide RSS do twitter, which can be converted to
RSS via online services.

Also sometimes you have to look harder than usual, because the presence of an
RSS icon only loosely correlates with having actual feeds. Sometimes things
like domain.com/feed, domain.com/rss, domain.com/atom yield success, I suspect
provided by the website engine itself.

Not to take away from your argument

~~~
mercer
It's as simple as:
[https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=<username>](https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=<username>)

------
wruza
Non-social user here (no fb, twitter, other feeds except hn and few forums).

I cannot remember why exactly rss stopped fitting my needs. I was using a
standalone reader before iphone was a thing, then google reader, and then
began to simply check my 3-5 sites at non-busy times. I think that for HN I
miss at least 1/2 of all topics since it is “a fast board”, among others. I
don’t really want to be overwhelmed by all these events and knowing only
things that are top-20 right now is actually okay for me. Rss is instant and
has no “top/discussed” conception.

I’m not your auditory though probably.

~~~
icebraining
In my case, RSS is not for HN or other high-traffic sites, it's for those
blogs that rarely update but which posts are always at least worth looking at.
For example, Oona Räisänen posts just a few times a year, but I read every
single one.

------
ntnn
I think most people don't see the value in RSS feeds because they are used to
the business of forums and social networks - where you don't need (or have the
capability to) process _all_ the information.

RSS feeds are perfectly suitable for stuff like blogs, podcasts, webcomics,
etc.pp. - not for platforms where a new item pops up every few seconds.

For podcasts people use a separate app like PodcastAddict or iTunes - for
webcomics and blogs the author(s) usually also have twitter to announce a new
item or an entirely separate platform like DeviantArt or WebToons.

So RSS is indeed not required to keep track of new submissions. I actually
have a colleague who isn't using RSS feeds and instead keeps bookmarks and
checks each page individually (given he only keeps track of maybe ~30 pages).

In conclusion - I think they don't see a value in RSS feeds because the
existing options they're using already fulfill their needs.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _RSS feeds are perfectly suitable for stuff like blogs, podcasts, webcomics,
> etc.pp. - not for platforms where a new item pops up every few seconds._

I definitely agree; a noisy channel is bad for RSS.

> _So RSS is indeed not required to keep track of new submissions._

Disagree _hard_ here. I have a twitter account, but while it's not a
waterhose, I would 100% miss new comic post announcements - assuming that an
author's twitter account _only_ announced new comics, and didn't just tweet
other things.

Comics are the _perfect_ use case for an RSS feed: they've mostly got a stable
and slow publishing schedule, and not time-sensitive. I can ignore that folder
in my reader for weeks, and then go back and catch up.

Doing that manually by clicking bookmarks seems like insanity to me, now.

------
smilbandit
I had a little project I was working on. every6hours.com, it's a river style
feed reader broken down into various silos. Two things that might be unique, I
can't keep up with all the reader features anymore. First is that it only
updates, as the domain says, every 6 hours because it helps me stay away from
constantly reading my feeds, 12 and 6 am/pm EST. Second is that I pull in
content from twitter, reddit and hackernews as well as your standard rss
feeds. There was a bug 2 weeks ago and I haven't had the time to fix it and
get it up and running again.

------
rapnie
This is a great initiative. Feeds need to be promoted with the wider public,
or they will gradually and silently disappear.

Really like your starter packs.

> Are you sick of big websites trying to decide what you should see, despite
> what you’ve subscribed to? Sick of "the algorithm" shuffling what order you
> get told of things, if at all?

Most people nowadays consume news from social media (Facebook), and are not
truly aware of the issues that arise from this (filter bubble, echo chamber,
targeting, etc.). This could be explained better on the front page, or even
have a sub-page with more detail and examples. Increase the incentive to use
feeds.

Lastly, you present yourself as a not-for-profit initiative. But your About
and whole site does not mention who you are. Be transparent.

If non-profit, you could be open-source as well. Have a crowdsourced place
where people submit and improve starter packs.

(If I have overlooked something, then I stand corrected)

Edit: I just shared your link, on LI, and you seem to lack an open graph image
(og:image) to be added to the link preview.

~~~
boastful_inaba
Yeah, part of what kicked this whole project off was seeing the news of native
RSS support being removed from Firefox. I thought to myself "I _have_ to do
something about this"

Sub-pages not present on the navigation menu might be a good idea. I'll
definitely look into that.

I'm staying anonymous because I want the focus to be on the content, not me.
(That, and I don't want some crazy who wants the enemy half of the Fightbox
eliminated tracking me down.)

EDIT: I think I fixed it. Maybe. What site you you mean by "LI"?

~~~
rapnie
Sorry. LI -> LinkedIn

Edit: According to iFramely your link preview works. Just retried on LinkedIn,
but it does not. Probably LI's fault.. I have that issue more often.

------
netghost
If you want to take it a step further, add some links feed readers that run as
browser plugins. Unlike hosted services, they're not as likely to disappear,
and they have a low barrier to entry since they don't require any sign up.

I've been working on one that runs in Firefox[1], but there are many others
that look promising for Chrome as well.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-
re...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-reader/)

~~~
petecox
You mention a lack of hosting but would it, optionally, browser-sync?

I use a web interface, The Old Reader, to access feeds from 4 devices.
Whichever I'm using at the time knows which articles have been marked as read;
without using a different client for each OS platform.

So a browser extension that syncs to one's Firefox account, like the
bookmarks/history feature would be handy, with no additional hosted service
other than having a browser login.

~~~
netghost
Yeah that's feasible, I haven't experimented with it yet.

Personally, I find that I read very different things on my laptop than I do on
my phone (technical articles vs. news) so I haven't had a huge motivation to
investigate it, but it's an interesting avenue. The only possible stumbling
block is that the size of sync'd data is relatively constrained, about 200k I
think, which is probably enough to hold a user's feed list and track whether
they've viewed/ignored various articles, but it would require some planning.

------
Jaruzel
I'm in the middle of rebuilding my own online feed reader (converting it from
old asp to php) and as such I've been doing a fair bit of online reading about
the current state of RSS.

There are many sites out there promoting RSS, but they are all islands of
their own content. If this initiative of getting RSS more visibility is to
succeed then either someone needs to link to all the sites (like a webring or
index of sorts), or they all need to get together to cross promote themselves.

------
torvald
I use RSS feeds quite extensively, but as others have mentioned, its noisy and
not every site lets you filter on categories and search terms. So I have my
own little python script which fetches, regex filters and pushes to my phone.
[https://torvald.no/rss-regex-reader](https://torvald.no/rss-regex-reader)

------
HHalvi
Loved this a lot :)

Thanks a lot for making this. A couple of small suggestions (do proceed ahead
with them if they make sense):

Add Android feed readers in the navigation menu.

Also allow folks to suggest good sites (Add my site or even a simple trello
board will do) that have good content and also RSS support.

All you have to do now is to curate the site submitted and make more of really
usable starter packs.

~~~
boastful_inaba
Thanks!

[https://www.youneedfeeds.com/news/2018/9/9/you-need-feeds-
is...](https://www.youneedfeeds.com/news/2018/9/9/you-need-feeds-is-looking-
for-android-reader-suggestions)

I don't actually have an android device myself, so I'm not really capable of
evaluating the readers in that ecosystem. I do want to take suggestions
though! (Maybe I should just make the page, but as a stub page redirecting to
the blog post.)

As I mentioned at the end of the starter packs page, I'm taking suggestions
via the About page. I didn't think of a Trello board, though - that's worth
looking into.

------
dewey
This is great, a lot of people don’t know RSS exists but would be technical
enough to use them if pointed in the right direction.

Somewhat related, I built a small tool to scrape sites with no feeds and
generate one:
[https://feedbridge.notmyhostna.me/](https://feedbridge.notmyhostna.me/)

~~~
boastful_inaba
Huh, interesting! How do you think your site compares to say, Feed43?

~~~
dewey
Haven’t heard of them before, I know there are some tools to generate feeds by
selecting elements on the page and then the tool figures everything. One of
the tools I tried didn’t work for the site I needed it for and so I just wrote
it myself, mostly for fun.

~~~
boastful_inaba
Feed43 is based around pattern matching - it mostly assumes a well-structured
HTML document with predictable tags, and it's that method for _every_ site.
You seem to have some sort of custom plugin architecture, I guess?

~~~
dewey
Exactly, mine is really only focused on sites that are either hard to scrape
(login, blocking, not well formatted,...) right now. So either site you want
to integrate requires a custom plugin. It's pretty niche but the repository
can be found here in case anyone is interested:
[https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge](https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge)

------
zaman8040
One problem with feeds is many sites don't have feeds and people blame RSS
rather than the site not implementing it. Another problem is noise: most sites
just offer a single all-or-nothing feed, while they categorize/tag posts on
their site. If they offered a comprehensive set of microfeeds that would help
adoption I think (or include the category metadata). Another problem is
truncated feeds, requiring users to click links and navigate to the original
site to read each item. While some premium readers claim to offer complete
news items, this is probably against the wishes of the site and may be
circumvented similar to the add-blocker arms-race. In my opinion if a site
model requires users to visit it, then they shouldn't offer feeds at all.

Lastly some feeds are behind logins (e.g. forums), not all readers support
these feeds.

------
type0
It's a great initiative, but I'm pessimist about this. I tried to introduce
colleagues to RSS and the reaction I got was "why would I want this, it's
inferior to twitter, non interactive etc etc". So it went over the head of
those whimsical people, it's possible that I could have explained it better
although at that point when they accused me of pushing "obsolete technology" I
did not bother anymore. Even to the point where I said that RSS feed on the
marketing website needs some improvements the reaction was that it would harm
the "social media presence".

My reaction was: "So we are cutting the branch we're sitting on, keep calm and
carry on".

~~~
boastful_inaba
Try pushing the non-intermediation angle, perhaps? Tell your colleagues that
with RSS you don't have to fight Twitter/FB's algorithms to surface your
latest content to users.

Plus, having a proper web feed actually helps with your Google rank as it
convinces googlebot that your site is alive.

------
Shaddox
I recall I stopped using RSS feeds when Google pulled the plug on the reader.
I couldn't find anything that was as convenient and I don't really want to pay
for yet another subscription as I have too many of those as it is.

~~~
guybedo
I built [https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io), a mix between GoogleNews and
GoogleReader, would love to have your feedback if you want to give it a try!

~~~
Shaddox
I just tried your product and I absolutely love it. I like how snappy it feels
and adding feeds of my own is a breeze. I also like how minimalist it is and I
can just look at my feeds without some ads or content I don't care about
bombarding me. With that being said, there are some things that could be done
better:

1\. Adding a new feed or (especially) removing a feed could be a little more
intuitive. Now that I know how to use it it doesn't bother me so much.

2\. An all expand in my articles would be nice.

3\. if I refresh with the button in my articles everything is highlighted
again.

If you don't care about doing more work in it I totally understand where
you're coming from and things are fine the way they are.

------
newman8r
I like the concept.

Here's a repo I put together with an OPML list of the 22 top US newspapers

[https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-
opml](https://github.com/newman8r/us-newspapers-opml) if anyone would find
that useful

feel free to add the list to your site

------
sulexk
Been Experimenting with generation of RSS feeds for over 10k sources for
crypto related stuff, based on google news sources found over the last 2
years. Currently working on automation of the generation of these feeds in
python.

------
jillav
This is a great idea. I don't recall finding a simple source of clear
information about feeds when I started. That could be why so little people
know about them.

And I love the design of the website by the way. Simple and elegant.

~~~
boastful_inaba
Yeah, I wanted to provide a one stop shop for introducing a user to web feeds.
I realised the only main option available was
[http://www.whatisrss.com/](http://www.whatisrss.com/) , and that's not really
user friendly. It even links to My Yahoo, which doesn't support RSS anymore
IIRC!

You'll have to thank the designers of the template I bought, I guess. :)

------
sulexk
Would be awesome to show generation of feeds.

It is possible to generate RSS feeds for any site.

~~~
boastful_inaba
I do mention an option for that here, actually!
[https://www.youneedfeeds.com/your-favourite-site-is-now-
your...](https://www.youneedfeeds.com/your-favourite-site-is-now-your-
favourite-feed/)

------
sulexk
Right now to subscribe to over 250 rss feeds (that update in realtime) there
are services offering this for typically around $250/ month.

Suppose this was decentralised. I think the cost would greatly reduce and RSS
could power a whole new web

~~~
JetSpiegel
I have 86 feeds now (but no hard limit) for free since I self host Miniflux on
a RPi under the TV.

The hosted version is 15 bucks per year.
[https://miniflux.app/hosting](https://miniflux.app/hosting)

------
pinkano
Thank you so much for doing this! RSS FTW

------
tw1010
You Need Donations.

------
kimat
Drop down menus like it's y2k.

------
pixelN
love the starter packs

~~~
boastful_inaba
Thanks! Good to hear it.

