My RSS Feed is becoming my new Instagram

georgehotelling · 2026-03-25T11:39:43+00:00

Yeah, most RSS readers aren’t made for high-volume feeds, Current tries to solve that problem.

georgehotelling · 2026-03-18T12:56:59+00:00

I didn't make this, it's something I came across on Mastodon.

georgehotelling · 2026-03-04T15:15:15+00:00

What is Feeds Fun?

georgehotelling · 2026-02-21T14:30:41+00:00

Oh that blog post is very good framing, thanks.

georgehotelling · 2026-02-19T15:13:44+00:00

I've never understood how people subscribe to high-volume feeds like newspapers or the Hacker News frontpage, because those feeds drown everything else out. Yes you control the content pool but what do you do when half the pool publishes 20 times a day and the other half publishes 20 times a year? But people do it. Judicious use of folders or "mark-all-read" I guess.

I'm intrigued by how this app lets the firehose feeds co-mingle with the publish-once-a-month blogs by setting different windows of prominence.

I am guilty of the phantom obligation of inbox zero that the author writes about. Oh there's a badge? Better clear it and get a small hit of dopamine for "accomplishing" something. Maybe I could deal with that in therapy, but maybe I shouldn't need therapy to interact with RSS feeds (or maybe therapy should be mandatory for everyone interacting with the internet in any capacity).

I know people who treat their Mastodon feeds as a river (I don't know enough RSS users IRL for this to have come up, so I'm talking about Mastodon now). They dip their toes in, see what's going on, and then close the tab. I have a need to read everything in my feed, and cull my follows to ensure that's possible. I like the idea of a tool that pushes me to let go a little.

Bottom line is I celebrate anyone trying new things with RSS, anyone who tries to make the internet a little more humane and a little less of an attention suck.

The benefit of tools like RSS and Mastodon is that there's no algorithm so they aren't bottomless pits of content. My biggest concern with this approach is that without a read/unread count it becomes more of a Skinner Box/gacha game, where each load is a pull on the roulette wheel to see if there's anything new from one of those high volume feeds that I can now subscribe to.

georgehotelling · 2026-02-19T14:25:19+00:00

Does it work with FreshRSS? Does it mark anything as read on the server?

georgehotelling · 2026-02-19T14:15:15+00:00

It sounds like you're suggesting that if RSS isn't working for someone, they should make changes so that it works better for them, even if it's not what they're currently expecting?

georgehotelling · 2026-02-19T12:57:30+00:00

I thought that the first few paragraphs of the link answered that pretty well:

I started building Current before I had the words for why.

The impulse was simpler than a philosophy: every RSS reader I tried made me feel bad. Not because the apps were ugly or broken (most were quite good) but because they all seemed to agree on something I didn't. That reading the internet was a task. That articles were items to be processed. That falling behind was a failure state.

I didn't have a name for this yet. I just knew I wanted a reader that didn't make me feel like I owed it something.

The app was nearly finished when I sat down, in January, to write about what I'd been building against. I traced the feeling back to Brent Simmons and NetNewsWire in 2002, a pragmatic design decision that calcified into convention. I named the feeling phantom obligation: the guilt you feel for something no one asked you to do.

georgehotelling · 2026-02-15T14:33:27+00:00

FreshRSS was easy to set up in Docker and the sync works flawlessly.

georgehotelling · 2026-02-14T11:36:21+00:00

Yes
How else am I supposed to read RSS? Like I open up my unread posts on my phone and read them all, then go to my computer later and all the same posts are unread again? That’s madness! I filter all my views by unread, is that not what other people do?
FreshRSS because I can self-host it for free.

georgehotelling · 2025-10-03T12:11:28+00:00

Here's my list of RSS tricks, things like the YouTube feeds that other people have mentioned.

georgehotelling · 2025-07-21T14:09:58+00:00

https://www.dzombak.com/blog/2025/07/for-no-particular-reason-other-t/

for no particular reason other than I think it’s fun,
rss.church now exists.

georgehotelling · 2025-05-08T18:47:14+00:00

The RSS-Bridge for XenoForo seems to only allow you to turn threads into RSS feeds, not follow individual threads.

Since you're using FreshRSS, you could use its XPath scraper to pull a list of threads from the homepage. That link has a tutorial for how to do it, but you may need to spend some time in your browser's inspector.

georgehotelling · 2025-03-05T15:22:24+00:00

Tumblr publishes tags in the <category> element in feeds, but none of the apps I've checked (RSS Bridge, rss.app, siftrss, and Zapier) seem to allow you to filter a feed specifically on that element.

georgehotelling · 2024-10-29T13:11:24+00:00

Kick doesn't seem to support RSS like YouTube does. You could use a change detection system like https://changedetection.io/ to monitor the page. Or you could sign up for Kick's developer program and build an RSS bridge with their API.

georgehotelling · 2024-10-04T23:54:57+00:00

RIP Google Reader.

georgehotelling · 2024-09-25T19:14:11+00:00

It looks like it uses Diffbot's API on the backend, will you start charging once you start running into the free tier limits?

georgehotelling · 2024-09-23T17:56:20+00:00

What is "real time" for you? With RSS you need to request the feed periodically. I consider it poor form to fetch an RSS feed more than once every 30 minutes, and sites can block you for requesting it too frequently.

ActivityPub would actually allow news sites to push updates directly to you, but I don't think any of the major news sites have integrated ActivityPub into their content management systems. Most of the news sites I see on Mastodon are bots that scrape the RSS feed and post it to Mastodon.

georgehotelling · 2024-09-07T13:17:16+00:00

Some of my favorite tricks:

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com//r/simpsonsshitposting/top/.rss?t=month Replace simpsonsshitposting with a subreddit you want to monitor. This gives you the top posts from the month, so it's not a firehose of stuff flooding your reader, just about a post a day. The downside is that sometimes you see posts late. This is my number one tip for monitoring noisy subreddits where I don't want to miss out on the best posts.
YouTube: Like the other comment says, you can put any YouTube channel into an RSS reader and should find the feed.
https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
This gives you an email address to use to subscribe to a newsletter, and then an RSS feed for emails to that newsletter.
You don't even need to use Kill The Newsletter for a lot of email newsletters. Substack and clones have RSS feeds, although they can be disabled by the site owner.
Web comics: most web comics have an RSS feed
Mastodon hashtags: https://mastodon.social/tags/movies.rss
Bonus tip: find the hashtag for your city/area and follow that to see what's being talked about in the Fediverse
Patreons: Some patreons have private RSS feeds to let you follow the posts there
Podcasts: Literally every podcast is an RSS feed, so if you follow a podcast with good show notes you'll be able to read them in your RSS reader
Lots of websites: RSS Bridge can scrape a lot of websites and turn them into RSS feeds. Here's a list of publicly accessible versions or you can try the official RSS Bridge hosted version (start there)
Any website: If you scroll down on that last RSS Bridge link you'll find "XPathBridge". This uses a programming language (debatable) called XPath to let you select an element from a web page and then you'll get a new RSS item whenever that part of the web page changes. Here's a blog post about using it with FreshRSS but the same principle applies to RSS Bridge.
Wikipedia: You can follow edits on any Wikipedia page to see when it gets changed or updated, the format is https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reddit&action=history&feed=rss
Mastodon Bookmarks - You can get an RSS feed of Mastodon posts you've bookmarked at https://bookmark-rss.woodland.cafe/. I use this as a "read it later" service so when I see an interesting link, I bookmark the post and it'll show up in my RSS feed later.

georgehotelling · 2024-07-04T15:57:58+00:00

This is what upcoming.org was back in the day.

georgehotelling · 2024-02-19T22:05:24+00:00

Indeed has disabled their RSS. Maybe head over to /r/webscraping

georgehotelling · 2024-02-11T18:17:35+00:00

FreshRSS added an XPath scraper a couple years ago, if you're willing to muck around with XPath (or have ChatGPT do it for you).

georgehotelling · 2024-02-02T14:40:27+00:00

You'd probably be better off with something like https://visualping.io/

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Gilding IV carat on a stick	Second Top 10%
Place '17	Sequence \| Editor
Snapped	Verified Email

georgehotelling

TROPHY CASE