https://blog.3qin.us/feed.xml

W3C has a RSS validator that you can use to validate the RSS file. I also have a blog linter that cross check the consistency between the metadata from the feed and the metadata from the blog posts

https://roastidio.us/lint

Hint: very few blogs pass without warning.

  managingEditor Email address for person responsible for editorial content. geo@herald.com (George Matesky)
  webMaster Email address for person responsible for technical issues relating to channel. betty@herald.com (Betty Guernsey)

It allows you to follow your favorite artists / content creators on instagram (via bibliogram), twitter (via nitter), youtube (via invidious), tiktok (via proxitok) etc. without having an actual account to these services or using obscure apps. You can also follow your favorite news site, subscribe to ebay search terms (if your looking for one specific thing), hacker news, blog posts and much more all following one standard on one platform.

Same thing works well for Twitter, or other sites.

[1]: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas/#opml-sync

I don’t, I want something that can host for users as cheaply as possible. I’d make it open source and be fully transparent about the fat client design and whatever else.

I pretty much want this site, but every user has an RSS feed, can see each other’s, and a front page with rankings.

How else do you expect to make money other than premium services? Even if cheap hosting is not free. And likely the cost of staff is by far the biggest expense of these companies. Premium literally means something that costs. The only other major business model I am aware of than charging your chstomers is to sell their data or attention. Personally I prefer the freemium or paid model.

If you are going for freemium than faster update rate sounds like an incredibly fair compromise if that is increasing the cost of serving a user. Much better than many artificial limitations.

Most of my concern comes from seeing NewsBlur, Feedly, and The Old Reader resort to premium services. Throttling users unless they pay, now that’s not a game I want to be apart of.

I don't see how this would significantly impact the cost. The main cost is that you need to remember all entry IDs to know which you have seen before. However you should probably do this anyway because published dates aren't very reliable. Plus if you are storing user comments then you probably want to keep the entries around for a long time anyways.

> polling or archive retrieval are expensive

Polling isn't very expensive. It is just a HTTP get. Many feeds also support conditional requests so you just get a 304. If you have enough feeds that becomes expensive you can play with the update time, poll feeds of active users more often, slow down polling if a feed doesn't post often...

I also don't know how archive retrieval is expensive. You only really need to do this when a new feed is added (and even then you only need to do it if you want history). Maybe if the full "first page" of the feed is new you can look back a bit into the archive but this is so rare that it probably isn't worth doing.

I guess for pagnated (not archived) feeds you should technically check all pages each time but so few readers even support pagnation at all that I would consider a feed that doesn't put new entries on the first page broken and wouldn't bother support it.

TL;DR I don't think this service would be very expensive to run. If you get enough users and feeds to start being concerned about the cost of polling you will have enough resources to deal with it.

Source: I run a small RSS reader service.

These aren't things users care about, but it's what the publishers care about.

Very few people are out there packaging up-to-date webpage renderers into easy to use libraries. Many times you end up using the one built-in to your UI toolkits and those are often very neglected.

What sacrifice are you talking about? For instance, Substack supports RSS, even for paid items. They just only include the teaser portion in the feed. The paying customers can click though.

The original model never made too much sense to me: why do I depend on every single website to implement something that I want? If a website doesn't implement it, I just don't get to use my RSS client with it at all? Not very compelling.

You can see the same inconsistency in the finger-pointing that comes up on this topic. RSS benefits us, the audience, yet it's {X,Y,Z}s fault for not implementing it for us. And we need to somehow compel them to do it or something.

Nah, an RSS reader in 2022 should be able to create feeds from websites. There are already solutions here.

The main feed would be ranked by most followed sites in an HN like layout with comments. And of course there would be another section for personal feed.

I just don’t know how much server fees would cost, a lot of feeds don’t have pubDates, polling or archive retrieval are expensive. I thought about making a fat client setup so the users machine does that work, whatever it takes to make something clean and simple without an ugly premium package with 100 things no one wants.