> And that's also where the magic lies because it's that very process of engaging with content and deciding whether or not it has value to you that makes using an RSS reader a better experience and one where you own your attention.

Back when RSS was more popular, the tyranny of never-ending backlogs was a topic that was discussed somewhat regularly, but it gets glossed over a little these days since RSS talk is naturally enclosed within a layer of nostalgia

For a few years now my approach has basically been "read it now or read it never" - this means that my RSS feeds are typically empty and I never save anything to "read it later" queues

If it's something I'm supposed to read, it'll probably be resurfaced one way or another (or maybe it won't, and that's fine too) at a later time when I'm immediately ready to pick up what is being put down

It takes effort indeed. Just as putting up a little homepage, writing articles, essays or short tidbits, and publishing an RSS feed for that.

What I do with my self-built reader (link in bio) to have it not function as a newsfeed from regular social media, is to only get the latest posts from randomly selected feeds. I don't need all of the unread posts from all of the sources (there are 1415 now in my list) every time. This is also nicer for the publishers (that may be you, fellow HNer!), since every request to your feed is actually read.

In the beginning of using my own reader I was really craving the dopamine shot from regular social media, it literally took me two years to get used to my self-inflicted info diet. Now it's really a calm blessing, especially because I read stuff posted by yet another internet fellow who has a blog. Way more human.

Using RSS is different and should be different. Wanting RSS and the social open web, and then transforming it to regular social media with notifications and a firehose of news is the same as building a new barebones electric pickup truck and then wanting it to connect to an app.

I don't think this is just about RSS:

> So, how do we decide and filter for ourselves? My favored approach is fairly old fashioned: Chains of trust. We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we're looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention.

This goes for any form of social media beyond just blogs. Find people who have good taste, good judgement and demonstrate their credibility in the subjects that matter to you. Collect those people - follow them on social media, hang out with them on Discord, attend events that they go to, subscribe to their blogs and their newsletters, read their papers (for academia), pay attention to the people THEY respect.

Repeat that a bunch of times and you can become incredibly well informed on almost any topic.

You don't have to read everything you're subscribed to. I'll wake up and have, say, 150 or so unread items in my feed reader, and I'll just take 5 minutes or so hitting the next button and marking them as read, and if there's something I care to actually read I'll mark it unread and move on. Then once I've actually found everything I want to read I'll go back and actually read those. A Eurogamer article on a game I don't care about? Skipped. A Eurogamer article about an interview with the devs of a game I love? Mark unread and come back to it after filtering.

The benefit of RSS is that it presents everything as a purely chronological feed. An algorithmic feed tries to figure out what you want and present it to you; a chronological feed you have to do that filtering yourself. RSS isn't a way of getting around that, it's a way of doing it better

I adore RSS. Some gems I've found:

https://hnrss.org/

https://rsshub.app/twitter/user/{username} for twitter accounts

Append .rss to any subreddit URL you want updates on

YouTube also has an RSS feed for channels

There is a misunderstanding about RSS and escaping algorithms. Sure, you are not under the social media control but you certainly are under the publisher control. Now you have to see everything that they publish. Which makes it the absolutely worst way to consume news. It becomes overwhelming and if you want inbox zero it’s another digital burden. The result is that I pretty much lost interest on following some websites through RSS because even though I do like some of the articles, it’s another way of doomscrolling when searching for the one thing that will give you the dopamine hit.

So after excluding the vast majority of websites, I was left with 10-20 websites that I did enjoy ~60% of the content they put out and I've subscribed to their newsletter. Which in most cases is full of tracking links but that’s a case for another topic.

This is perfectly reasonable, but I think it is a bit general. The notion of a chain of trust leading to a curated feed can equally apply to YouTube if you stick to the subscribed channels view.

There are also specific skills I've picked up from being subscribed to the Hacker News "top" RSS feed. Namely judicious use of the "mark all as read" button.

I use RSS since ages. I would categorize the usefulness in two dimensions:

A) News feed consumption in a more structured way, avoiding shifting placements of articles on websites, layout nightmares, ....

B) Follow blogs and other once in a while publications.

At least for A) I hope to get / find some AI support that helps to consume the "firehose". I have subscribed to multiple news outlets that typically have significant overlap in their coverage.

I'm thinking about:

- Duplicate removal from the RSS feed. Same article (slightly modified) published multiple times or intentionally republished at a different time (typical on e.g Business Insider).

- Aggregate (list together) all articles to a certain topic, that are more or less similar, so getting away from sorting (only) by feed to more by topic. I realized a while back, that it's easier for me to consume "similar" stuff than constantly switching dimensions. For me I have my feed groups sep. by language. It was too hard to have articles in a wild language mix order.

- Better distinguish between "Hot topic" vs. "Isolated, but valuable pieces".

- Self defined "Summary function" for articles I'm currently reading to get to the core of the news.

Seeing many posts here talking about how their feed reading experience is overwhelming cause it is a firehose of things they might not be interested in. So I wrote a little post about alternative experiences in RSS reading:

https://andregarzia.com/2025/04/rss-doesnt-necessarily-means...

You can have feed readers that provide a calmer UX. My own feed reader, BlogCat, lets you configure how many posts per website you want to see in the reader page and how often to fetch each site (with the default being daily). Without notifications or background fetching, you're in control of how often and when you want to see the posts from a website.

My problem with RSS is that I tend to subscribe to too many things and then it's too much. Also I wanted a solution that was free or self hosted, but I realized it's much better if someone manages the complexity for me, so I just ended up going with the paid hosting for miniflux (https://miniflux.app/).

Now I've just subscribed to a few things I care about, I open the website from time to time, quickly mark as "read" stuff I'm not interested in, and when I have more time I just go through everything that is still unread, because it's been "filtered in". Seems to work!

A good RSS reader/feed is nice to curb over consumption. I use it for youtube channels and blogs. As long as I can consume the content via my reader, I don't need to visit youtube and fall down any rabbit holes.

> We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on.

I do this, but then to avoid echo chambers I do occasional fault injection where I pick someone that one of my feed is at an opposite pole to in some salient, on some axis, and inject them to my feed for a while. Maybe I have something to learn from them, maybe I don’t, maybe they stay on the feed or maybe they are removed. I hope this helps me avoid groupthink.

The way I have addressed this is using my own tool [1] which creates daily digests instead (MD files with date). This removes the stress to check everything or having hundreds of unread, I care only about the current day. If I get some time, say on the weekend, I could go in previous days and check if I skipped. I think its a better trade off than having so many unread stories that grow over time.

[1] https://github.com/piqoni/matcha

I keep coming back to the idea of curating my own reading through RSS.

I missed the first wave: mostly stuck to aggregators and blogs, but eventually set up a Feedly account. Like others here, I found maintaining a meaningful list takes real energy. It's easy to over-subscribe and end up with a second inbox.

Still, I think the effort is worth it. The best systems I've worked on always rewarded small, regular maintenance over trying to automate everything away. Feels like curating information works the same way.

I think self curation is a theme not directly discussed.

The recurring problem is other people trying to tell you what information you should see, resulting in suboptimal aggregations. If you don't curate your own stuff, you'll slide into whatever state of mind your curator wants you to slide into.

Algorithmic feeds are widely accepted to cause doomscrolling, and my experience with RSS is similar to the author: it goes well, but then whenever an aggregate source of any kind is added, it drowns out everything else. This wouldn't be a problem if everything from the source was a good read. The issue is any aggregation by someone who isn't you isn't going to be perfect for you.

My brain wants to make a link between collateralised debt obligations causing the recession, and aggregate info sources and algo feeds causing the collapse of the modern internet. Basically, everyone realises 90% of what they have in their feed/inbox is actually worthless and we only have it because the people who we get stuff from mixed it with a few good/relevant pieces of information so we trusted/assumed the rest would be good/relevant.

Life takes effort, if you outsource the effort, your life requires less effort but is less likely to be what you want. The same applies to curating the content you consume. It's easy to accidentally outsource.

People here seem to fall into two camps:

(A) Studiously prune your feeds like a bonsai. As the author suggest, follow the chain of trust to a small number of voices (for me, something like Stratechery, Simon Willison, Inner Ring).

(B) Realise that RSS is another form of 'tyranny', this time at the hands of the publisher instead of the platform, where the composition of your feeds, and therefore what uses your attention, doesn't correlate highly with what matters to you.

I can feel the pickaxes being unsheathed as I type this but...I have reason to believe my (and others') LLM/embeddings-driven products are a good solution.

Position (A) isn't tenable if FOMO matters. Paraphrasing another comment here: 'Following arXiv is part of the job'.

So let's say you adopt position (B). You recognise that everything that matters to you is distributed across some set of feeds. But only a small proportion of the total material in those feeds matters to you. If you can articulate what matters then you can let an LLM or embeddings model use their attention, instead of yours, on the low-relevance items by filtering them out.

Some options:

- https;//scour.ing

- https://feeds.fun

- https://zacusca.net (disclosure: mine, and still pretty janky)

I also find myself wanting to go back to RSS for the exact same reasons of 1st paragraph. You own your content and host it. Unfortunately all the RSS readers are too raw and I think one of them has to port over Twitter features, things like: more ephemeral feed instead of an inbox, reply, quote tweet, retweet, like, follow, and new: LLM-driven customizable algorithmic feed.

I can still funnel most stuff I want to read into one place, a RSS reader, that's the main advantage for me. Whether I can read everything I've subscribed to is another question. I've had to cull a number of sources to reduce the amount of reading, but sadly I'm still skim reading a lot of it.

Media theory and critical thinking are sorely lacking in public education, and the lack of media literacy has never been more apparent. It sounded absurd, taking precious time away from teaching math to watch movies? But this is the first generation coming of age right now to have been exposed to mass communications in ways/amounts that have never existed--I suppose that's been true of each of the last several dozen generations, but it's crossed a threshold that I believe necessitates special care in raising adults who can better discern trustworthy sources, interpret and think critically about what they see/hear/read, and do precisely as this article recommends and filter your incoming information in a thoughtful and intentional way.

One thing I highly miss from using RSS is never having to rescan over items I’ve already decided I’m not going to read. The occasional post about RSS usually gets me back on the wagon.

This is a really cool idea. I'm a fan of RSS, and the biggest challenge with RSS is curating a good list of feeds. I joined up on 'follow.it'!! Is there a place to have discussions about this site and concept? Like on Reddit or Twitter/X? Because I have my own Social Media apps that I'd like to integrate into this ecosystem, and would love to discuss ideas with others, and I don't trust this HN thread as a legit place to host said in-depth discussion.

I recently figured out a good way to handle having more subscriptions than I feel like reading in Newsblur.

I have one group (“0-front”) for feeds that I usually read immediately (such as favorite comics) and many more groups of feeds that seemed interesting at the time. I will catch up with the first group, but only read the rest when I feel like it.

I hope that at some point I can use AI to filter my RSS feed for me. It knows the kind of content I want and the stuff I always skip. Sure it won’t be perfect, but it would let me subscribe to more high volume feeds without having to manually filter everything.

I just filter my RSS subs through a locally running LLM trained on my journal to judge my interests, it then decides what to curate for me based on a prompt (sometimes something totally left field, this stuff always, etc)

s/the internet/youtube, facebook, instagram, twitter, reddit/ s/twitter/x/

Youtube subscriptions generally work fine, it isn't worth my time maintaining rss feeds for channels. Just make sure you click the button that says subscriptions. I don't use any of the other sites so I can't comment.

The real reason for frustration with personalization algorithms is that nobody is willing to go all the way because of the belief that the individual is evil and any creators that target individuals are promptly banned usually with no reason given at all, breaking some unspoken social rule.

For HN summaries via RSS I've been using gophersignal.com which is FOSS and been pretty happy with it and the dev is adorable.

https://gophersignal.com/

funny, I am revisiting rss as a means to escape social media algorithms and doomscrolling. there are lots of good resources in the comments to even further fine tune RSS beyond just being careful about what I subscribe to.

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> We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed...

...and in no time at all, these "someones" will be made offers not all of them will refuse to parlay their trusted judgements into income by marketing agencies. It seems trust will not only need to be gained but also somehow maintained.

Oh Lord. I miss the hell out of bloglines and wish we could go back to the glory days of RSS but this headline reads like a guy tipping his Trilby before explaining Rock and Mirty.