The use case I have in mind: say for example, I read a lot of articles about a certain topic, such as Linux or chemistry or whatever. I want to combine the articles I write into a singular feed, and for others to be able to follow it. Call it “Alex’s Linux Feed”.
Another use case: Suppose I follow a news source (like washington post), but maybe I dont like the formatting of their feed. Maybe it does not have the full article, or maybe it is not organized right (sports news is mixed with political news, and I want to separate them right). So I create my own feed where I organize those same posts better.
The reason this would be a platform because the user should not be burdened with hosting it (even if it is not difficult), and it should be searchable.
Is there any platform like this of user created RSS feeds?
Pretty much all of the activitypub services out there offer RSS feeds, so if you want user-created RSS content you can subscribe to the Feed of a community or user on Lemmy, or a user on Mastodon.
More or less Lemmy can do that. Communities offer RSS feeds generated by their users.
While I love the idea, many RSS users may not use Lemmy, and I would not want to restrict the use of this to lemmy users only. But for now, this seems to be the best existing option. Thank you!
You don’t have to use Lemmy to use it. You just have to copy the URL. Then as people create new posts in the community they will show up as entries in the RSS feed. You don’t need to be logged in or subscribed to a community.
You would need to use lemmy to publish the feed, right?
I mean yeah, that applies with any service that uses an RSS feed. RSS is just a syndication protocol, it’s meant to only broadcast. If you want to contribute, you’ll need to be a part of the service which is broadcasting i.e. Lemmy or Mastodon.
Well yes that’s true. To publish yes. But not to follow etc. About the only other option. Considering how obscure RSS is unfortunately. Is the old-fashioned way. Get a free linode basic server. Edit the RSS and upload it to the server. Someone might be able to slap together a basic GUI to handle the simple XML. Appending to the top and then sending it via FTP. But then that’s just a lot of work to not use Lemmy.
I may be mistaken, but I think most activity pub services offer RSS. Kbin/Mbin Mastodon etc.
Yes, but you don’t need to use Lemmy or go to Lemmy to read items of the feed (if said item is a link outside lemmy, ofc). It’s called a link aggregator for a reason.
For creating an RSS feed, WordPress will certainly get the job done.
This does not address the searchability issue, or the complexity and cost of self hosting. I want less friction for the user who is only focused on publishing and does not care much to own their infrastructure.
This does not address the searchability issue
Search will always be a challenge, but my understanding is that WordPress is as well or better optimized for search than any thing else that exists.
or the complexity and cost of self hosting.
WordPress is the single most hosted app in existence, I think.
I want less friction for the user who is only focused on publishing and does not care much to own their infrastructure.
You just described WordPress.
Edit: I don’t even like WordPress. Lol. But I still think you’re dismissing a likely 80% or better solution to your problem, if you don’t look into WordPress.
An RSS feed is basically just a blog but formatted in XML. So the correct answer is some kind of fediversal blogging platform.
Hey wait this sounds like a great idea! Someone please get onto this!
In the meantime, not what you’re looking for but since the subject is RSS, here’s a tool I’ve found useful. Just getting it out there.
I randomly thought about converting all my “feeds” into RSS, but wasn’t really sure where to start. Stumbling across your post came at just the right time!! This is an awesome tool. Thanks for sharing!
https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli ?
Or just a blog ? 🤔I alluded in my post to why a blog would not work, but I will describe more clearly here:
- if this is done via blog, the searchability issue is not addressed. I want it possible to search through all of these feeds
- This creates large friction. I want it to be possible for the user to publish a feed without the complexity of hosting
Oh ok,
Maybe you should try logseq ? With syncthing that can do the job to sync it,You can use tags, search options, create your own pages, etc.
You can embed code, use markdown or html, etc.
That’s a great tool,
I recently made a tool that let’s you export your saved posts and comments as a RSS feed. The info is here. Might fit your use case - you could create a new user and save only the posts that interest you.
Edit: Additionally, these seem like they might fit:
- https://www.inoreader.com/
- https://politepol.com/en/
- https://rss.app/
- https://freshrss.org/
- https://tt-rss.org/
Note that as far as I can tell, your use case is not the primary use case of those platforms but they seem they might be able to be used like that.
It sounds like you want a way to collect articles, including full text offline, and organize them in a searchable way. Why do you need RSS for this? Just use a blogging platform where you can organize each post, list/sort/filter by date or topic or original source, and use the search functionality in the actual blog platform.
Not exactly. I want this to be a place where many users post their different feeds, so I can browse through them and subscribe to the ones I like. RSS is a great candidate for this.
