Can someone explain how to read such a feed where a new article appears every couple of minutes? I'm trying to make it easier to find new articles from personal blogs on weblogs.ai and am surprised by the attention to rss.social, even though it's objectively inconvenient to use.
I tried building an RSS library feature for a side project (https://beavergrow.com), mostly as a way to curate feeds I actually enjoy reading. It quickly highlighted how fragile the RSS ecosystem has become Feedburner gone, Google slowly de-emphasizing RSS, and discovery being the hardest part now.
RSS still feels like one of the few genuinely user-controlled ways to follow the web, but keeping it usable today seems to depend almost entirely on community curation. Curious how others here handle feed discovery now.
The kagi smallweb site has an alternative feed that is less high traffic that only includes appreciated (liked) articles. It's not ideal for a lot of people since it's still pretty high traffic and not a lot of users use the main site with the button to appreciate things.
https://kagi.com/smallweb/appreciated
You can find a few alt feeds for the kagi small web by going to the site and clicking the top right rss button. There are ones for videos, code and comics and a link to the full opml file.
https://kagi.com/smallweb
That alt feed has a lot less gristle - nice! Kagi should update their Github page because I don't see any documentation for it.
I've had a few requests for rss feeds but alas I've been focusing on comments-related features. Is anyone else interested in an rss feed for HN x smallweb? I may get the ball rolling if there's some more interest.
Good to see more projects plugging into Kagi Small Web.
It has been a passion project of mine since inception and just recently reached over 2000 commits, adding about 10 new websites every day (around 29,000 total at the moment).
It is also the first thing open in my browser every morning.
You can view these blogs visually at https://kagi.com/smallweb and content from all of them is surfaced high in Kagi search results (when relevant).
I think the idea is great, but look at services like Gmail. Sure everyone can setup their own email service, and client. But most people just go on gmails web UI. We've had XMPP and other similar IM services for centuries, but Discord and Slack are more popular. People like simplicity.
People use Discord and Slack because they have to, not because they want to. Having to keep 10 chat apps to somewhat keep in touch with people is a sign that something is very, very wrong.
People use gmail because it was free and in the right place at the right time with the right features. The web UI sucked when it came out, now it sucks even worse, but all email UI sucks.
None of these things are simple or good or the best solution, they're just free and people need to keep in touch somehow.
> People use Discord and Slack because they have to
I disagree that anyone HAS TO use Discord. Slack on the other hand, yeah I can see how that would be the case. However, the industry would have not adopted Slack if it wasn't good as it was, the landscape was ripe for something new. Sadly Slack barely updates with anything meaningful.
This is really cool, but what on earth do you do with it? It would be a full time job to read all the posts from this stream, and their titles are not editorialized like on HN, so it's much harder to filter by title.
Not a wide in the number of sources (yet), but I'm curating a directory/reader/search engine of personal blogs, and the "Global" view shows the latest posts across 1300+ feeds: https://minifeed.net/global
Super cool, I might want to connect this to my swipe engine [1] (see comment below). Since you have already curated so many feeds this is the source I was looking for (and trying to build myself [2]). I’ll shoot you an email.
I had a Journalism Innovation class in uni in which we had to come up with a news startup idea, and this is exactly what I pitched! Nice to see someone's made it.
Nice! Was also thinking about how this could be a way to bring more people back to “traditional” media. But with the current paywalls it’s really hard to implement. Once you click on an article you potentially like your currently unable to read it…
I was considering it at the time, my idea was to offer a subscription that would redistribute revenue to publishers in exchange for skipping the paywall. This was all a hypothetical plan for a class, of course, and other attempts at bundling news subscriptions have failed. Most existing news aggregators just show a headline and standfirst, and that seems to work.
Another concern was reinforcing bias. You'd need to show people articles about things they care about, but at the same time, you don't want to put people in bubbles. It's a pretty tough balance to strike.
Yes makes sense probably easier said than done, you would need at least one big publisher on your side to begin with.
Regarding bias, I’m current using a 70/30 exploitation/exploration split and add time weighting onto that. So you should always have ~3 new articles outside your “bubble” per 10 articles you swipe.
Neat, stuff that makes it easier to find small, independent content is great!
Others in the comments also linked aggregators.
I think what's missing a bit in the indie web, is a bit of curation. I think, it'd be great if we had something like music labels, or book publishers, that have a certain taste, and publish certain things. Or on spotify, there are these playlists where new music gets listed, but hand curated by someone with a particular taste.
I want something like that. I want something like a digital magazine, sourced from blog posts, about a particular topic. Hand curated! Not with automatic topic extraction or whatever. That would be cool to have.
It's nice to have a lot of small web content laid out like this! Some suggestions to make discovery more palatable:
- 1-2 sentence summaries for the content. most titles are not sufficiently descriptive and clicking on something un-interesting a few times is a sure fire way to get folks to churn
- checks for included feeds that they are correctly configured and the resources load in-browser (not download a random file to my computer)
I was surprised to find my blog there. I did a git blame on https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb and it was in the initial commit, so I guess I'll never find out...
I really like it! Sometimes I just want to read something random and sampling from small personal websites is a great way to discover new people to follow.
This could be an interesting answer to "what sites are like Hacker News but with more diverse topics". All you'd need is a upvotes/downvotes and a comments section.
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