I ditched the algorithm for RSS

I am a big proponent of RSS, but I think that it suffers from a lack of imagination these days, for example, the "quality filter" approach mentioned in this article is not very useful imo.

The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading. A lot of feeds these days don't provide anything useful in the body to make a determination on this, and others just dump the entire contents in the body, which means you're wasting a bunch of time reading N% of something until you realize you're not interested in it and it can be skipped.

In addition to this, RSS feeds tend to be structured to just throw everything at you, regardless of the topics you are interested in.

For a few years I have been publishing my own topic-specific feeds[1] for others to consume where I fill the body with my own personal highlights from the source, with a link through to the source (ie. the things I found interesting, the "hooks" that give a quick signal to a consumer if this might be something they want to invest time in reading). They have a couple of die-hard consumers, but ultimately this really a case of a niche within a niche.

I wish there were more feeds like this for me as a consumer, but unfortunately I get the feeling that this idea will never really become popular enough to catch on widely as RSS becomes less and less relevant to the mainstream.

[1]: my software development topic RSS feed for example: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development

> The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading

I'm working on an RSS feed reader, and it has a feature that solves that problem. For every subscribed feed, it shows the percentage of items that you actually bookmark and read. So if there are feeds that you subscribed to but don't read, you can easily find out which they are and unsubscribe from them.

It's called https://lighthouseapp.io

The issue is that it's not possible to separate feeds from items. Even if some feeds are largely unread, I subscribed to them because I liked something they posted on a specific topic, and I still want to get updates whenever there is another feed item related to that specific topic. Ultimately the "feed" is the mechanism of delivery, but I don't think it should be the primary mode of categorizing item consumption.

I've worked on this issue a little in a different context, where you can follow posts from people on Bluesky related to specific topics, and this is ideally what I would like to be able to do more of with RSS.[1]

[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/lgug2z.com/post/3lc47yru7vc2k