RSS is awesome

Having restarted using rss in the past months (after probably 10+ years of not using it) i am now starting to remember why I stopped using it: lack of a personal "algorithm" that made hundreds (if not 1000s) of unread daily items to be manageable.

I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work?

Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological.

More readers should have this

The thing that made RSS work for me is to really limit my feeds. Instead of following 10 tech news sites that have a bunch of overlap, I follow 1 that has most of what I want. A few blogs are for apps I use and want to be informed of new information, but they post infrequently, which is good.

Feed with dozens of posts per day turn into noise, especially if you have a lot of them.

By choosing one site I trust, I let the editors edit, instead of the algorithm.

If you're looking for a project, I think this is something that an LLM, even a dumb local one, would be pretty good at. Give it a list of 50 articles you like, 50 you hate (or however many fit into the context window), and let it read the full text of each post and assign a 1-5 score. Then sort and/or filter by that.

In theory, this is actually a very textbook ML supervised learning problem, and stuffing an already-trained LLM's context window with a small handful of samples like I suggested is a gross hack. But it might be the easier option.

Is there still no alternative filling Google reader's void?

you could self-host your own rss reader on a server & set it up to automatically update the feeds in the background every now and then, and just check on it whenever you want to read what's new. freshrss seems to be the popular choice.

there's also some subscription services that seem to do the same thing, but i have no experience with them.

Google reader was simple and beautifully designed, free, and online first. There are alternatives but they sacrifice one of the three. Inoreader, the old reader, and newsblur are all pretty good but require a subscription to fully replicate Google reader.

There are various local-first phone apps, desktop apps, and self-hostable apps that are good, completely free and have comprehensive features.

There are some what I would consider bait and switch options like Flipboard and Feedly that pretend to care about RSS but layer on features unrelated to the protocol. I think you can find one that works for you.

The problem with RSS right now is not, imo, the lack of tools to do the reading, thankfully. It's more that the major vote of legitimacy previously extended by Google was revoked and prompted an unwinding from RSS as a universal form of content distribution basically across the whole internet.

I think a company that makes products that last may actually literally be more rare than the discovery of alien life in the universe

(Who makes the incentives at Google?! Seriously)

Gnus in emacs is a good reader for that due to the scoring system in gnus.

> ... Feedly that pretend to care about RSS but layer on features unrelated to the protocol

I've been using Feedly since Google killed reader, and while I like the RSS functionality it offers, I do agree that they've slowly been adding more and more features I don't care for.

Maybe it's time to migrate to something like TFA suggests.

I also agree with your other comments; it's huge a shame.

> Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological.

> More readers should have this

Why? If that's what you want you can get it from your social medium of choice. I use RSS because it gives me precisely what I asked for (for better and for worse), and I suspect the vast majority of the userbase feels the same.

YMMV, but I have been using Flipboard for along time and think that Flipboard is a very nice blend of an RSS reader that gives you precisely what you asked for and a random article curator in one.

Adding RSS feeds to it feels kinda clunky though.

Newsblur was the one I fled to after Reader's death.

Used it for a long time until I switched to a self-hosted FreshRSS instance

Yeah never subscribe to a feed that publishes more than once a day (basically any news website).

Because a local algorithm not dictated by a social media walled garden will probably not optimize for engagement to deliver a large amount of ads.

Yikes. I read THOUSANDS of RSS headlines on a daily basis. This is exactly why I use RSS. You can easily get a glimpse of headlines and keep browsing.

That's the beauty of RSS, people can tailor it to their needs and wants. If I saw thousands of unread items, I'd shut down and give up. On the flip side, if you had my feed list, you'd probably feel like you were missing a ton of stuff. But we can both make it work for us.

I did have a job where I got 10k email per day for a good 10 years, so I probably have some PTSD from that. I'd feel like I was right back there if I had thousands of items per day in my RSS reader. I've been out of that stage of my job for a good 8 years, and I'm just now starting to get a handle on my email again, after feeling like there was no way to control it for so long.