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Hey, this is a great contribution. Thank you for making it.

I run one of the more popular readers and I have to ask why wasn't NewsBlur included in your list. It's the oldest on that list for one. It's also got its own native client on all of the platforms. Plus, I'm a HNer and NewsBlur launched on HN as well.

As somebody who has been introducing people, in person, to the concept of RSS for exactly a decade now, I'll mention that for those who really haven't heard of it, which is 10% of folks in tech and 90% of everybody else, my strategy has been to compare it to an inbox for websites with filtering and sharing. Really hits home on the idea that every story shows up unlike the dominant competitor to RSS which is FB/twitter.

95% of the people who leave RSS, and I ask everybody who cancels why they're canceling, leave it because they get their news from social media. Social filtering provides a higher signal than the manual process. I don't blame them.

Personally I built in that serendipity into my reader because I think it belongs in a news reader, but as its own feed among many.



> 95% of the people who leave RSS, and I ask everybody who cancels why they're canceling, leave it because they get their news from social media. Social filtering provides a higher signal than the manual process. I don't blame them.

I wonder if it would make sense for RSS readers to include ActivityPub support (or vice versa). Obviously most people's friends aren't on Mastodon or whatever, but it would be cool to see the social feed alongside RSS updates.


Mastodon supports ATOM natively actually. I'm subscribed to one guy's feed that way right now!


curious, how does one go about "subscribing" to a person's feed via mastodon? Isn't the subscription input value normally someUser@someInstance.net (or https://someInstance.net/someUser)??


You just add .atom to the web address (often referred to as the "full profile" page in Mastodon UI). So https://some-instance.net/some-user.atom

The full profile page itself also has the usual RSS Auto-Discovery META tags so that most feed readers will accept the profile page address itself and figure out the ATOM feed from that.

The only other twist would be for feed readers to add WebFinger support which would allow them to auto-discover the "full profile" page from the @some-user@some-instance.net style address. I don't think any feed readers have added that yet.


Well, just copy+paste their base user URL into your feed reader. I believe the feeds are in the header tags, so your reader will find them and present you with the options.

For example, copying

https://mastodon.social/@b_cavello (the URL for the main Mastodon artist)

will allow you to subscribe to either

https://mastodon.social/users/b_cavello.atom

or

https://mastodon.social/users/b_cavello.rss

in your reader.


Thanks!

Ah, I did send you an email on the 5th of this month, asking for a logo, screenshot and preferred description. (As for why I skipped you in the end - I might have had issues importing my OPML to get a good comparative screenshot for Newsblur? I can't quite remember, it was late at night a few weeks ago.) Happy to add you though!

That's a good idea - I should alter the front page copy under the pictures to talk about that.


Oh I saw that! I just started grad school so I’m batching low priority emails for the end of the month.


Thank you for creating NewsBlur!!! I use it every day, some of my colleagues switched to it, hope to become more successful in future!


Ditto, I ended up helping feed the dog because Newsblur replaced the missing void that Google Reader left behind. It's probably one of my favorite daily apps.


Social filtering of feeds was great when friendfeed did it.




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