Tag: rss

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A guy I follow on micro.blog, after having to go through four or five steps just to read a Substack post, posted “Substack? What are you for?” To which I replied: “As near as I can tell, it’s there to monetize the writing of Nazis, with enough non-Nazis to provide some cover for the firm.”

My brother chimed in to point out, “You can subscribe to nazistack blogs with an RSS reader,” which is something that I hadn’t really thought about.

I’ve been avoiding any newsletter on Substack for a couple of years now, because of the “Nazi bar” problem. Even so, I’ve ended up with a couple of subscriptions to Substack newsletters, because a couple of non-Substack newsletters I subscribed to moved there, and Substack let them just subscribe me without asking. And because I wouldn’t have subscribed if I wasn’t interested, I didn’t unsubscribe from every one of those.

Now, though, based on Steven’s good idea, I’ve gone in and added those newsletters to my RSS feed. Now I can unsubscribe from those newsletters, and still see their content—in my feeds, which is the best place to see it anyway!

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My toot reminding people about RSS feed readers got some attention, so I thought I’d re-up this thing I wrote thirteen years ago:

“Finding a great writer is way better than finding a great post.”

Source: Great writers versus great posts | Philip Brewer

However wonderful it is to find a great post, it’s much better to find a great writer. Back in the day when more people used RSS feed readers, it was perfectly ordinary to find a great post, and then click on the writer so you could add their feed to your feed reader.

I’d like to see the return of those days. Use an RSS feed reader again, and when you find a great post, you too can check out what else the writer writes, and if you like their other stuff too, go ahead and follow them.

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I’d like an app that could take my various social media feeds, the RSS feeds I used to follow (until my feed reader broke), and the various news sources that I subscribe to, and find all the articles that I really want to read, and present them to me in a useful order.

Of course it needs to do a lot more than that. It should watch me read them, pay attention to which posts I linger on, which ones I follow internal links in, etc., and try to learn what I actually want to read. (And then give me more of that stuff in the future.)

It would also be nice if it noticed when I read something by a new person I don’t follow (because it was boosted by someone I do follow), and consider following that person as well.

And by “in a useful order,” I mean the AI should understand which articles are full of background information versus covering the latest breaking news, and present the background information first—unless it’s background information that I already know. In that latter case, it should just offer a link to the background information, in case I feel like I need a refresher. It should also present the information grouped by topic (so, news first, then economics/business news, then science news, then the very narrow sorts of cultural news that I want to read).

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As Twitter swirls around the plug hole, I thought I’d mention that I’m philipbrewer@micro.blog. I encourage you to follow me there.

I am also on Mastodon, but my first account there is for my Esperanto stuff, and is all in Esperanto. I’m looking to establish another Mastodon account specifically for my English-language writing-related stuff, but I need to pick a server first. Any suggestions?

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I use tt-rss, which provides a mechanism to produce an RSS feed of “shared” posts, and optionally include an “article note” for each. I point my micro.blog at the produced feed (as well as my WordPress blog), which works great, except that the article note sometimes shows up on my micro.blog feed and other times does not.

If @help (or anybody who can parse an RSS feed) could look and see what the difference is, I’d be very interested: my feed of shared items.