alt.hn

8/1/2026 at 4:52:41 PM

A directory of people who love RSS

 https://andrewshell.org/2026/07/i-%e2%99%a5-rss/

by speckx

8/1/2026 at 5:50:53 PM

Wow, what timing. Not to shill, but I'm also nearly done building a directory of RSS feeds. It stemmed from a frustration of outdated and broken RSS feed collections, and the long slow death of the orange RSS subscribe button across the web. I'm not officially launched yet but I would love some feedback and maybe some of the RSS feeds that land in your directory can be added to mine.

https://rssvault.org

Password is vaultearly644988

Pardon the dust. There's an app tie-in that I'm almost done with too, a widget-first app that shows your RSS feed collections on your phone's home screen. It would really be great if we could start to bring about an RSS renaissance!

by jjordan

8/1/2026 at 8:26:06 PM

I generally want a posts/day count on any feed I subscribe to. Many of these are content mills with 20+ posts per day I have no intention in sifting through.

by eleventen

8/2/2026 at 7:07:33 AM

As far as I know, only Downread (disclaimer: my beta app) has that: https://feeds.downread.com/signup?i=hn-c-32513232

You can select a max number of posts per feed, max age and enable/disable tracking of unread posts on a per-feed basis.

by tjansen

8/1/2026 at 8:34:13 PM

Yeah I'm focused on including more of the Indie Web. I include BBC, NYT, etc. because people expect it, but the directory already has some real depth worth exploring. And each feed details page has a cadence rating to tell you how often they post. So grouping a firehose with a specialty blog that posts 6 times a year probably isn't a good idea, but an OPML full of blogs that post ~monthly would be a delight, IMO.

by jjordan

8/2/2026 at 9:17:48 PM

This is great. RSS is springing back to life. All it need was for people to reject the hype that came largely from big companies that wanted to and did takeover,

by davewiner

8/1/2026 at 6:22:19 PM

Nice.

I have sneaked in.

Suggestions:

White or almost white text would be better.

Make “Add” button visible on homepage.

Make a possibility to batch suggest feeds - a lot of people have opml xml exports from Google Reader so they can give it to you. Processing info would be nice so I as a supplier would immediately know how useful I was.

Move explanatory part of RSS to some other part than homepage.

by sixtyj

8/1/2026 at 7:12:39 PM

Hey thanks for taking the time.

"White or almost white text would be better." -- There is some white text, headers and headlines mostly. Did you find the lack of contrast difficult to deal with?

"Make “Add” button visible on homepage." -- you mean like in the search results? That's a fine idea.

"Make a possibility to batch suggest feeds" -- I've been toying with how to handle OPML imports. Definitely a feature to come on the app, but I fear with mass submission on the vault I would be inundated with feeds, and the curation aspect would suffer. I want quality over quantity. But maybe there's a happy middle ground somewhere.

"Move explanatory part of RSS to some other part" -- yeah I guess this might be helpful to someone who doesn't know what RSS is, but then they probably aren't visiting anyway lol I'll give it some thought.

Appreciate it. Thanks again.

by jjordan

8/1/2026 at 7:00:47 PM

Claude?

(Not judging, just testing my radar)

by dd8601fn

8/1/2026 at 7:15:47 PM

Yes, with several months of iteration. I've wanted to build this for years but to get it to the point where it's a quality destination is an effort beyond the time I would have been able to contribute.

by jjordan

8/1/2026 at 8:30:03 PM

Sure. I have a few projects like that, myself. Good luck with it.

by dd8601fn

8/1/2026 at 8:35:40 PM

Thank you

by jjordan

8/1/2026 at 5:24:45 PM

I love RSS but what I love more than RSS are people who blog about stuff: high concept stuff, day-to-day stuff and just what they did yesterday.

I wish people would blog more like in the old days.

by mickeyp

8/1/2026 at 5:31:50 PM

Im going to be doing this again without an agenda. I am recovering from using AI to write thoughts because now I see and hear the patterns which are becoming obnoxious.

by mathgladiator

8/1/2026 at 7:48:29 PM

Indeed! I have a selfbuilt RSS reader and interesting blogs without a feed are just saved as a bookmark basically.

I care more about the stories (people call it 'content' nowadays) than about the tech, as long as the tech is open.

by rambambram

8/1/2026 at 5:19:57 PM

seeing an emoji in a title on HN really surprised me, I didn’t even know you could do that. Shows how much emotion we use on here lol.

by ninjahawk1

8/1/2026 at 6:18:02 PM

And... it's gone. I guess mods don't like emoji in titles.

Can't blame them; it draws a bit more attention than normal.

by guiambros

8/1/2026 at 5:40:56 PM

The last time I tried to use one in a comment, it got stripped out. I guess that doesn't apply to submission titles.

by RattlesnakeJake

8/1/2026 at 7:48:55 PM

It's generally does!

by dgellow

8/1/2026 at 9:42:12 PM

I really need to finish the blog post for my emoji domain. What are mods gonna do when the emoji is literally in the domain?

by basilikum

8/1/2026 at 6:07:08 PM

i guess that only works cause it's a text glyph and not a unicode emoji

by dudefeliciano

8/1/2026 at 5:59:03 PM

It's great to see someone else using FeedLand. While it has some quirks, is has some clever ideas, like that blogroll feature.

My favorite part of FeedLand is that you can see who subscribes to a blog and where else they subscribe. This makes RSS feel social, without the algorithmic tricks of traditional social media. Here's the listing for my blog, for example: https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...

by 8organicbits

8/1/2026 at 6:04:58 PM

It was designed that way, patterned after social media, where you share all that info. I wanted to see if it would work in RSS, and it came out pretty good.

We're going to have a new version pretty soon, hooking it up with RSS.chat.

by davewiner

8/1/2026 at 7:49:24 PM

Thanks for RSS, sir.

by rambambram

8/1/2026 at 5:02:19 PM

If you love RSS, embrace Atom 1.0 :) Its the final modern form of RSS.

by edhelas

8/1/2026 at 5:20:05 PM

Yeah, I've been writing software that provides feeds for RSS, but I exclusively use Atom. It's just a better format. It does create ambiguity when using a site like this because I'm not sure if my sites will qualify as having an RSS 2.0 feed or not.

by rpdillon

8/1/2026 at 5:07:06 PM

Atom's problem is that RSS is also the final modern form of RSS.

by CharlesW

8/1/2026 at 8:26:23 PM

Atom was killed by podcasts. Tbh RSS 2.0 is good enough

by culi

8/2/2026 at 9:19:53 PM

I was expecting that they would support podcasts almost immediately and couldn’t believe that they never did. It was so easy, nothing to it.

by davewiner

8/1/2026 at 5:20:00 PM

Why is Atom better?

by graemep

8/1/2026 at 6:18:49 PM

There might be other reasons, but chrismorgan linked a nice write-up in a sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49136685

by F3nd0

8/1/2026 at 7:03:41 PM

Thanks, good points there.

by graemep

8/1/2026 at 8:26:12 PM

Atom was killed by podcasts

by culi

8/1/2026 at 5:42:17 PM

Nice! The entire https://pico.sh constellation of services are built off rss for notifications.

https://pico.sh/feeds is an ssh app that is an rss-to-email service.

by qudat

8/1/2026 at 5:01:26 PM

HN renders emojis in color?! I’m reading that on an iPad and see a red heart. That’s a first

by dgellow

8/1/2026 at 5:08:29 PM

I only have a fairly basic understanding of encodings, but is this one by any chance in one of the smaller “standard” character sets and not in the huge Unicode “emoji” set?

by clickety_clack

8/1/2026 at 5:59:45 PM

UTS #51 is your friend.

There's not really a "standard" character set and an "emoji" one. There is an emoji block (U+1F600 to U+1F64F), and this heart (U+2665) is not in that. But this heart is an emoji, in that the data file emoji-data.txt for contains `Emoji=Yes` ("=Yes for characters that are emoji", —UTS #51) for this character. However, this heart has `Emoji_Presentation=No`, which "=Yes for characters that have emoji presentation by default" (—UTS #51).

So basically, it should present, by default, in its non-emoji appearance. (Though there seem to be a number of readers for whom that isn't true. I think that's macOS being badly behaved.) There are some characters that can flip/flop between a "text" (normal monochrome) presentation and an emoji presentation; all of the card suit characters are. Unadorned (e.g., just U+2665 alone) then, you have to follow the emoji default presentation rules. In some contexts, such as web pages, that's "just do what that Emoji_Presentation flag says" for those characters, but see [§Presentation Style](https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/proposed.html#Presentat...) for exceptions to the rule. (HN is not an exception.) But you can also follow the character with a variation selector, to try to force either text (U+FE0E) or emoji (U+FE0F) presentation.

There are a number of what I'd call "yeah that's definitely an emoji" outside the Emoji block, too. Like U+2705 "white check in green box" (which HN disallows me posting); that one is Emoji=Yes but also Emoji_Presentation=Yes)

(IDK if Emoji=Yes Emoji_Presentation=Yes is HN's filter … but that'd be what I would do, if I wanted to filter out emoji like HN does.)

UTS #51: https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/proposed.html#Emoji_Pro...

(Also, note that the title was changed; the original HN title was "I ♥ RSS")

by deathanatos

8/1/2026 at 5:16:00 PM

Yep, that seems to be the case!

by dgellow

8/1/2026 at 5:15:22 PM

yes, exactly:

♠♡♢♣♤♥♦♧

by culi

8/1/2026 at 5:54:10 PM

♚ ♛ ♜ ♝ ♞ ♟ ♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♘ ♙

Chess pieces too. I think you could technically play a chess game here pretty easily if you were so inclined.

by smalltorch

8/1/2026 at 5:17:32 PM

Funny, I see the 1st, 4th, 6th and 7th in color. The outlined ones look like standard font characters

by dgellow

8/1/2026 at 5:25:05 PM

To me they are (correctly) rendered as black

by culi

8/1/2026 at 5:45:46 PM

Joke on me for using Apple devices :(

by dgellow

8/1/2026 at 6:36:42 PM

On iOS, the filled-in ones are all in colors set by the font but in macOS Safari they inherit the text `color`.

by extra88

8/1/2026 at 6:59:17 PM

I'm on Mac but on Firefox

by culi

8/1/2026 at 5:02:57 PM

Not up to HN, it’s up to your font and font rendering.

by pkulak

8/1/2026 at 5:37:57 PM

It is not an emoji but a unicode character and HN doesn't render it, your OS does.

by prmoustache

8/1/2026 at 5:55:25 PM

It may not be in the Emoji character block formally, but casually speaking it’s not wrong to call it an emoji, since emoji is basically just a picture character, and this is no less a picture character than what’s formally codified as ‘Emoji’ in the Unicode standard.

by F3nd0

8/1/2026 at 7:46:20 PM

In addition to this, what I meant to convey is that it does show exactly like the iOS/iPadOS emojis, in color, with details, etc. Not the non-emoji font unicode character

by dgellow

8/1/2026 at 5:02:32 PM

this is the first emoji I see on HN at all, they’re filtered out in comments.

by dijit

8/1/2026 at 5:11:15 PM

It's because it's not actually an emoji (though your OS/font might decide to render it like one)

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2665

It's part of the card suite icons

♠♡♢♣♤♥♦♧

by culi

8/1/2026 at 5:08:14 PM

I don't remember ever seeing one before either. Will the floodgates now open?

by tom_

8/1/2026 at 5:05:23 PM

first time also! depending on iOS for me.

by cyptus

8/1/2026 at 5:02:23 PM

that's specific to your os it renders in os emoji colors iirc.

by minraws

8/1/2026 at 5:03:13 PM

I’ve always seen emoji being stripped on HN, so it’s very surprising to see colors for once

by dgellow

8/1/2026 at 5:10:29 PM

They've always been stripped for me as well. This "emoji" actually appears black for me however.

I think the reason its not stripped is because it's actually "U+2665 : BLACK HEART SUIT {valentine}" which predates the emojis. Lots of fonts and OSes will render these older unicode symbols as emojis

by culi

8/1/2026 at 5:10:56 PM

Well, in theory, with proper UTF-8 support you don't need to filter out anything.

Unsupported unicode code points are just rendered using a place holder.

by sylware

8/1/2026 at 5:58:18 PM

Surprisingly cool site. I've seen lots of sites for RSS feeds but they aren't any good because they just dump their mountain of every feed that was ever known to exist, and there's not really any aspects of curation or discovery. RSS feeds themselves embody the exact way I think the internet should work, where the internet itself is the platform. However it's very nice to get some help finding new stuff.

by pooploop64

8/1/2026 at 5:51:31 PM

I hate RSS. It’s a bad format that developed organically in all the worst ways, and it should have died completely in favour of Atom by about twenty years ago. I started a draft describing some of the problems that actually matter (thing that can’t be represented reliably in RSS, and such) in <https://chrismorgan.info/atom%3Erss>.

And so I wish people would stop calling feeds RSS, because it continues to compound the problem. Let RSS die! More than once I’ve seen people implement RSS feeds, at great pain and often with errors, simply because they hadn’t heard of Atom.

(I still need to decide which spec I hate more, RSS or OpenGraph. Hmm… RSS had more excuses for being bad, OpenGraph was just a spectacularly bad thing thrown over the wall by a company that should have known better. I drafted something examining how comprehensively bad it was some years ago, I should put it onto my new site and continue it at some point.)

by chrismorgan

8/1/2026 at 5:57:38 PM

Having structured feeds of any kind is already a niche and much appreciated when it happens. How to call them correctly technically based on some specs is not the hill to die on.

We call them RSS feeds, RSS reader apps even if it might be implemented as an Atom feed.

by dewey

8/1/2026 at 6:16:04 PM

The reason I think it matters is that, because people keep on using the name of the wrong format, people keep on using that wrong format when they want to implement feeds. Where if they had known about Atom, or that podcast feeds are the only reason not to use Atom, they would gladly have used Atom.

by chrismorgan

8/1/2026 at 6:39:52 PM

Flashback to a memorable bug report complaining that "the JPEGs I'm uploading don't work" but upon further investigation, they were trying to upload HEIC photos. The field was explicit about the formats supported, but to this user, "JPEGs" just meant "images".

by sjs382

8/2/2026 at 1:38:11 PM

Yeah, or people/websites calling short looping MPEG4 videos (even with audio) GIFs.

by panzi

8/1/2026 at 6:15:13 PM

I have trouble seeing how that helps anyone. It’s not like ‘RSS’ is a widespread term the way ‘Word’ or even ‘Mastodon’ are (and even there I’d argue it’s worthwhile to use technically more correct terms). Why not just use ‘news feed’ as the general term? If you don’t care about the protocol in the first place, that’s far more descriptive and correct, no?

by F3nd0

8/1/2026 at 6:18:25 PM

Because if you say "News feed" people are thinking Facebook or Twitter feed. RSS is widely known as it was already integrated in browsers before as a "RSS" button if the site advertised that in the html head.

by dewey

8/1/2026 at 6:24:19 PM

I should think that’s a pretty niche memory among people who browse the internet nowadays, but then I only have anecdotal evidence, so I could be underestimating it. Even so, I think conflating a general type with a format specification is not a good idea overall.

by F3nd0

8/1/2026 at 7:47:49 PM

RSS is the only widespread enough name for this thing. Where you're correct is that it's silly to argue about the name of the format used by approximately three people.

I'm not too serious here but even many news media publications are just dropping it, or separate into dozens of unconnected feeds.

by ymolodtsov

8/1/2026 at 11:19:50 PM

If you think that's esoteric, there's also a JSON feed standard. I have found one thus far while building out an RSS directory of over 1,000 entries.

by jjordan

8/2/2026 at 1:10:49 PM

What's esoteric is not the format specifically but whether people are knowingly using it.

RSS lost when browsers dropped its native support. Would be interesting to see a world where Chrome/Safari still had clients for it.

by ymolodtsov

8/1/2026 at 6:55:28 PM

I don't think this is helpful. The last statistic I saw put RSS at 77% of the web feed market share, higher than Atom. In the web feed market it isn't a protocol on the way out, its the dominant protocol.

While RSS is tricky to parse in practice, many of the challenges are due to invalid feeds, which Atom is not invulnerable to. Its very likely that there is a well-tested feed parser for your favorite programming language, so most developers using feed programmatically don't need to handle those challenges themselves.

For concerns like title encoding or summary vs full text description, you can handle those using namespaces. If you don't like any of the existing namespaces that do that you can create your own.

by 8organicbits

8/2/2026 at 1:36:18 PM

Things that I noticed when I had a look at it: Atom supports multiple authors, RSS doesn't. Some say just separate them with commas, but readers don't understand that and it's all broken. Also Atom supports archive links for pagination to older entries. Some use the atom namespace inside of RSS to use archive links. No idea if there are feed readers that don't support Atom, but do support Atom tags inside of RSS.

by panzi

8/2/2026 at 7:05:45 AM

I get your distaste, but RSS is the more famous wording of the technology. I would frame it as "people who love RSS - but technically these are Atom feeds". RSS is the word that stuck and I think we should keep promoting it and on a technical front I am with you - sure, let's use the Atom format "for RSS feeds".

by moontear

8/1/2026 at 6:08:59 PM

Thank you; that was a fun read! I had read that Atom was generally regarded as the technically superior format, but your article (and the links you helpfully provided therein) made it much more apparent why that is the case. :-)

by F3nd0

8/1/2026 at 6:43:53 PM

I think they are alive just because they are rough and weired

by Arshad-Talpur

8/1/2026 at 5:59:41 PM

I'm always surprised how many people who read my blog do so over RSS. It's probably one of my biggest traffic sources. (Definitely due to my niche topic and small reach, but still)

I don't really use RSS myself anymore, though; not since I stopped using Google Reader a few months before they pulled the plug. Wouldn't even know where to start nowadays.

by nicole_express

8/1/2026 at 6:28:53 PM

I'm quite happy with NetNewsWire.

by oalders

8/1/2026 at 5:27:09 PM

Maybe you love being the consumer of RSS feeds, but you certainly wouldn't love being the poor bastard who has to parse them.

Even though it's a simple standard that's been around for decades, there are still many sites which serve their feeds with a subtly wrong format. When something doesn't work, users come knocking on your door saying "it works in X reader but not in yours", so now you have to handle that and contribute to the ever growing list of out of spec edge cases that feed readers need to account for.

by smarkov

8/1/2026 at 5:08:08 PM

I love self hosting my own RSS feed with miniflux!

by bolt012

8/1/2026 at 5:27:45 PM

What sort of punishment should the monopolist google execs who destroyed blogs undergo? A fair punishment might be clawback of all wages and stock options and about five years in a minimum security prison with a permenant felony on their record. I think that's fair.

by paradoxyl

8/1/2026 at 5:29:22 PM

How much money do you need for a class action lawsuit on this?

I think we should take Google to court over destroying blogs and force them to add back RSS support.

by colesantiago

8/1/2026 at 5:15:16 PM

Nowadays I see these sites as nothing else but mining grounds for personal profiling by big tech. Nothing can be a cutesy show-off anymore.

by poisonborz

8/1/2026 at 5:20:34 PM

Why not for small tech and individuals?

Is there a law or something? :)

by listic

8/1/2026 at 5:28:12 PM

Small tech and individuals will never be able to take as much advantage of these standards as a multi-billion dollar data center is. 99% of them wouldn't ever even find these feeds

by culi

8/1/2026 at 7:48:57 PM

What does this mean exactly?

by ymolodtsov

8/1/2026 at 8:54:42 PM

Would be nice if it was explained how to actually manage a RSS.

by 3dedb728-3f77

8/1/2026 at 8:02:28 PM

the format wars ended and the prize was that nobody won and we all just use a different feed reader for the rest of our lives

by luciana1u

8/1/2026 at 5:51:30 PM

I ♥ JSONFeed

by pKropotkin

8/1/2026 at 6:27:41 PM

What do you like about JSON Feed?

One of the downsides I saw when evaluating JSON Feed was that it doesn't use GUIDs, which can cause problems when the same post is present in multiple feeds (I.E. syndication).

When I last looked I found that every feed reader supporting JSON feeds also supported RSS/Atom and every website with a JSON feed also had an RSS or Atom feed, so it seems easiest to ignore the JSON Feed format.

by 8organicbits

8/2/2026 at 11:37:56 AM

Add me there

by dSebastien

8/1/2026 at 5:16:47 PM

Please add me

by theanonymousone