The kagi smallweb site has an alternative feed that is less high traffic that only includes appreciated (liked) articles. It's not ideal for a lot of people since it's still pretty high traffic and not a lot of users use the main site with the button to appreciate things.
https://kagi.com/smallweb/appreciated
You can find a few alt feeds for the kagi small web by going to the site and clicking the top right rss button. There are ones for videos, code and comics and a link to the full opml file.
https://kagi.com/smallweb
That alt feed has a lot less gristle - nice! Kagi should update their Github page because I don't see any documentation for it.
I've had a few requests for rss feeds but alas I've been focusing on comments-related features. Is anyone else interested in an rss feed for HN x smallweb? I may get the ball rolling if there's some more interest.
Good to see more projects plugging into Kagi Small Web.
It has been a passion project of mine since inception and just recently reached over 2000 commits, adding about 10 new websites every day (around 29,000 total at the moment).
It is also the first thing open in my browser every morning.
You can view these blogs visually at https://kagi.com/smallweb and content from all of them is surfaced high in Kagi search results (when relevant).
I think the idea is great, but look at services like Gmail. Sure everyone can setup their own email service, and client. But most people just go on gmails web UI. We've had XMPP and other similar IM services for centuries, but Discord and Slack are more popular. People like simplicity.
People use Discord and Slack because they have to, not because they want to. Having to keep 10 chat apps to somewhat keep in touch with people is a sign that something is very, very wrong.
People use gmail because it was free and in the right place at the right time with the right features. The web UI sucked when it came out, now it sucks even worse, but all email UI sucks.
None of these things are simple or good or the best solution, they're just free and people need to keep in touch somehow.
> People use Discord and Slack because they have to
I disagree that anyone HAS TO use Discord. Slack on the other hand, yeah I can see how that would be the case. However, the industry would have not adopted Slack if it wasn't good as it was, the landscape was ripe for something new. Sadly Slack barely updates with anything meaningful.
I tried building an RSS library feature for a side project (https://beavergrow.com), mostly as a way to curate feeds I actually enjoy reading. It quickly highlighted how fragile the RSS ecosystem has become Feedburner gone, Google slowly de-emphasizing RSS, and discovery being the hardest part now.
RSS still feels like one of the few genuinely user-controlled ways to follow the web, but keeping it usable today seems to depend almost entirely on community curation. Curious how others here handle feed discovery now.
Not a wide in the number of sources (yet), but I'm curating a directory/reader/search engine of personal blogs, and the "Global" view shows the latest posts across 1300+ feeds: https://minifeed.net/global
Super cool, I might want to connect this to my swipe engine [1] (see comment below). Since you have already curated so many feeds this is the source I was looking for (and trying to build myself [2]). I’ll shoot you an email.
I had a Journalism Innovation class in uni in which we had to come up with a news startup idea, and this is exactly what I pitched! Nice to see someone's made it.
Nice! Was also thinking about how this could be a way to bring more people back to “traditional” media. But with the current paywalls it’s really hard to implement. Once you click on an article you potentially like your currently unable to read it…
I was considering it at the time, my idea was to offer a subscription that would redistribute revenue to publishers in exchange for skipping the paywall. This was all a hypothetical plan for a class, of course, and other attempts at bundling news subscriptions have failed. Most existing news aggregators just show a headline and standfirst, and that seems to work.
Another concern was reinforcing bias. You'd need to show people articles about things they care about, but at the same time, you don't want to put people in bubbles. It's a pretty tough balance to strike.
Yes makes sense probably easier said than done, you would need at least one big publisher on your side to begin with.
Regarding bias, I’m current using a 70/30 exploitation/exploration split and add time weighting onto that. So you should always have ~3 new articles outside your “bubble” per 10 articles you swipe.
It's nice to have a lot of small web content laid out like this! Some suggestions to make discovery more palatable:
- 1-2 sentence summaries for the content. most titles are not sufficiently descriptive and clicking on something un-interesting a few times is a sure fire way to get folks to churn
- checks for included feeds that they are correctly configured and the resources load in-browser (not download a random file to my computer)
Neat, stuff that makes it easier to find small, independent content is great!
Others in the comments also linked aggregators.
I think what's missing a bit in the indie web, is a bit of curation. I think, it'd be great if we had something like music labels, or book publishers, that have a certain taste, and publish certain things. Or on spotify, there are these playlists where new music gets listed, but hand curated by someone with a particular taste.
I want something like that. I want something like a digital magazine, sourced from blog posts, about a particular topic. Hand curated! Not with automatic topic extraction or whatever. That would be cool to have.
This is really cool, but what on earth do you do with it? It would be a full time job to read all the posts from this stream, and their titles are not editorialized like on HN, so it's much harder to filter by title.
I have a personal site that is listed in there, and it polls my site much more frequently then it needs to (like multiple times a day, compared to when I blog about once a week).
The user-agent includes a link to https://rss.social/bot but it says coming soon, which I think is a shame.
I was surprised to find my blog there. I did a git blame on https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb and it was in the initial commit, so I guess I'll never find out...
Can someone explain how to read such a feed where a new article appears every couple of minutes? I'm trying to make it easier to find new articles from personal blogs on weblogs.ai and am surprised by the attention to rss.social, even though it's objectively inconvenient to use.
I really like it! Sometimes I just want to read something random and sampling from small personal websites is a great way to discover new people to follow.
This could be an interesting answer to "what sites are like Hacker News but with more diverse topics". All you'd need is a upvotes/downvotes and a comments section.
Using HN as a filter for Kagi's Small Web list[0] works really well: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
I find the small web feed too noisy without it.
[0]: https://kagi.com/api/v1/smallweb/feed
The kagi smallweb site has an alternative feed that is less high traffic that only includes appreciated (liked) articles. It's not ideal for a lot of people since it's still pretty high traffic and not a lot of users use the main site with the button to appreciate things. https://kagi.com/smallweb/appreciated
You can find a few alt feeds for the kagi small web by going to the site and clicking the top right rss button. There are ones for videos, code and comics and a link to the full opml file. https://kagi.com/smallweb
Btw is there an rss feed for the hn smallweb one?
That alt feed has a lot less gristle - nice! Kagi should update their Github page because I don't see any documentation for it.
I've had a few requests for rss feeds but alas I've been focusing on comments-related features. Is anyone else interested in an rss feed for HN x smallweb? I may get the ball rolling if there's some more interest.
I did not know about that feature - thanks a lot for sharing!
weird, my site: jonpauluritis.com is listed in the small web but the filter doesn't show it.
Hi jp, try opening the settings and set it to "Top 50". You should see your page there!
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Good to see more projects plugging into Kagi Small Web.
It has been a passion project of mine since inception and just recently reached over 2000 commits, adding about 10 new websites every day (around 29,000 total at the moment).
It is also the first thing open in my browser every morning.
You can view these blogs visually at https://kagi.com/smallweb and content from all of them is surfaced high in Kagi search results (when relevant).
Oh this is neat. Explains why I’ve seen a few Kagi referrals in my analytics.
Thanks for your work on this. It’s appreciated!
Shameless plug: for randomly discovering IndieBlogs check out https://indieblog.page/
Isn't this the opposite of RSS? Isn't the point that instead of going to one centralized server to get feeds you subscribe to the actual source feeds?
Make it an RSS feed of RSS feeds. That's still kind of contrary to the spirit of RSS because you are centralizing.
I think the idea is great, but look at services like Gmail. Sure everyone can setup their own email service, and client. But most people just go on gmails web UI. We've had XMPP and other similar IM services for centuries, but Discord and Slack are more popular. People like simplicity.
People use Discord and Slack because they have to, not because they want to. Having to keep 10 chat apps to somewhat keep in touch with people is a sign that something is very, very wrong.
People use gmail because it was free and in the right place at the right time with the right features. The web UI sucked when it came out, now it sucks even worse, but all email UI sucks.
None of these things are simple or good or the best solution, they're just free and people need to keep in touch somehow.
> People use Discord and Slack because they have to
I disagree that anyone HAS TO use Discord. Slack on the other hand, yeah I can see how that would be the case. However, the industry would have not adopted Slack if it wasn't good as it was, the landscape was ripe for something new. Sadly Slack barely updates with anything meaningful.
Ok, yeah, not quite a HAS TO, but if I want to get that patch, or find out info about that open source project, or join some fun group... I have to.
I tried building an RSS library feature for a side project (https://beavergrow.com), mostly as a way to curate feeds I actually enjoy reading. It quickly highlighted how fragile the RSS ecosystem has become Feedburner gone, Google slowly de-emphasizing RSS, and discovery being the hardest part now.
RSS still feels like one of the few genuinely user-controlled ways to follow the web, but keeping it usable today seems to depend almost entirely on community curation. Curious how others here handle feed discovery now.
Bring back Pingback!
But seriously, Mastodon, etc. are cool, but there's gotta be a way we can augment RSS to get most of what we want?
Not a wide in the number of sources (yet), but I'm curating a directory/reader/search engine of personal blogs, and the "Global" view shows the latest posts across 1300+ feeds: https://minifeed.net/global
Super cool, I might want to connect this to my swipe engine [1] (see comment below). Since you have already curated so many feeds this is the source I was looking for (and trying to build myself [2]). I’ll shoot you an email.
[1] https://philippdubach.com/standalone/rss-tinder/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602227
Feel free to grab the ones I have collected over at https://blogroll.org. There's an OPML export option that only has the ones with an RSS feed filed.
Is there a feed of your global feed? A meta feed? If I download an opml it will just go out of date right?
A feed of the posts of the global feed or the feed of newly added blogs?
Either way I was thinking to implement those.
A feed of the posts from the global feed
How can one submit their blog?
https://minifeed.net/suggest
Love this! RSS is alive and well! Going to try and integrate this into my personal RSS Tinder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680013
I had a Journalism Innovation class in uni in which we had to come up with a news startup idea, and this is exactly what I pitched! Nice to see someone's made it.
Nice! Was also thinking about how this could be a way to bring more people back to “traditional” media. But with the current paywalls it’s really hard to implement. Once you click on an article you potentially like your currently unable to read it…
I was considering it at the time, my idea was to offer a subscription that would redistribute revenue to publishers in exchange for skipping the paywall. This was all a hypothetical plan for a class, of course, and other attempts at bundling news subscriptions have failed. Most existing news aggregators just show a headline and standfirst, and that seems to work.
Another concern was reinforcing bias. You'd need to show people articles about things they care about, but at the same time, you don't want to put people in bubbles. It's a pretty tough balance to strike.
Yes makes sense probably easier said than done, you would need at least one big publisher on your side to begin with.
Regarding bias, I’m current using a 70/30 exploitation/exploration split and add time weighting onto that. So you should always have ~3 new articles outside your “bubble” per 10 articles you swipe.
[dead]
It's nice to have a lot of small web content laid out like this! Some suggestions to make discovery more palatable:
- 1-2 sentence summaries for the content. most titles are not sufficiently descriptive and clicking on something un-interesting a few times is a sure fire way to get folks to churn
- checks for included feeds that they are correctly configured and the resources load in-browser (not download a random file to my computer)
Neat, stuff that makes it easier to find small, independent content is great!
Others in the comments also linked aggregators.
I think what's missing a bit in the indie web, is a bit of curation. I think, it'd be great if we had something like music labels, or book publishers, that have a certain taste, and publish certain things. Or on spotify, there are these playlists where new music gets listed, but hand curated by someone with a particular taste.
I want something like that. I want something like a digital magazine, sourced from blog posts, about a particular topic. Hand curated! Not with automatic topic extraction or whatever. That would be cool to have.
Agreed. There’s a missing layer of curation/discovery that I’d love to see some experimentation on. The small web needs a small structure.
This is really cool, but what on earth do you do with it? It would be a full time job to read all the posts from this stream, and their titles are not editorialized like on HN, so it's much harder to filter by title.
Would be lovely to have a RSS feed for all the posts from RSS.social but it doesn't seem to exist? I don't see it in the source code.
I created something like this a while ago [1] for HN. I can easily add another feed to it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602227
I have a personal site that is listed in there, and it polls my site much more frequently then it needs to (like multiple times a day, compared to when I blog about once a week).
The user-agent includes a link to https://rss.social/bot but it says coming soon, which I think is a shame.
There's also no way to opt-out.
Since "best" is subjective maybe give a description of the kind of content you hope to feature and why you think it's important.
I was surprised to find my blog there. I did a git blame on https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb and it was in the initial commit, so I guess I'll never find out...
It is explained on that very page :)
It's kind of amazing we've forgotten the rest of the web exists
Everything now is either facebook.com, google.com or cnn.com (not exactly specifically that, but you know)
It used to be this wild, almost untamed thing. Or what I'm trying to say is it's boring now
We don't have a RSS Feed yet, but the alivenet will welcome your visit - https://vvesh.de
I've allegedly been blocked by Cloudflare, despite accessing from an Australian residential IP..
Unless you're geoblocking?
This goes really well with my RSS reader Tuvix :D https://tuvix.app/
I've been doing something similar with https://greatreads.dev/.
It's mostly focused on tech-related blogs, though. A place to find good articles from fellow developers.
There are some extra features on top of it. Like semantic search, remixing rss feeds into a single one are some of my favorites.
I like the concept of RSS.Social but the author forgot to create a RSS feed link for RSS.Social it's self.
Can someone explain how to read such a feed where a new article appears every couple of minutes? I'm trying to make it easier to find new articles from personal blogs on weblogs.ai and am surprised by the attention to rss.social, even though it's objectively inconvenient to use.
Great! And funny too, just posted about my personal take on the same topic: https://squeaki.sh/p/i-turned-my-website-into-my-feed-reader...
I really like it! Sometimes I just want to read something random and sampling from small personal websites is a great way to discover new people to follow.
.social domain has a negative connotation nowadays.
I don't think that's universal, I don't have a negative association with it.
I like it the concept of RSS.Social but one thing that someone forgot was the RSS feed link for RSS.Social it's self.
Link for rss.social is broken
Do not know what the issue was exactly but the link is working now.
Love this, bookmarked.
This could be an interesting answer to "what sites are like Hacker News but with more diverse topics". All you'd need is a upvotes/downvotes and a comments section.
... and an amazing full-time moderator like @dang