NewsBlur Blog

"RSS industry"?!

I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them.

One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor.

Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emergence of social networks to the point that it doesn't make economic sense for them to keep maintaining it?! I don't’ think so.
Neither is it a commentary on standards, it’s merely a company that is acting in its own perceived interests, something companies are wont to do.

As for the “Industry” part, last I checked those who are actually building a Reader replacement are delighted with opportunity:

http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-with-full-width-support/

http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur

http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader

When a writer this associated with Microsoft starts framing this situation as yet another flimsy accusation of anti-competitive behaviour, I tend to be skeptic.

I mean, there was this story[0] ("How a Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur's MongoDB database") about how the Docker rules allowed a hacker to delete someone's database.

>Turns out the ufw firewall I enabled and diligently kept on a strict allowlist with only my internal servers didn’t work on a new server because of Docker. When I containerized MongoDB, Docker helpfully inserted an allow rule into iptables, opening up MongoDB to the world. So while my firewall was “active”, doing a sudo iptables -L | grep 27017 showed that MongoDB was open the world. This has been a Docker footgun since 2014.

Story was previously discussed on HN[1]. Sure, you could argue the author should have done more to secure the endpoint, but this was 100% a failure mode due to how Docker prioritizes convenience over security.

[0] https://blog.newsblur.com/2021/06/28/story-of-a-hacking/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27670058

I am very excited to see how you grow NewsBlur. It's a really great looking take on RSS feeds.

As someone who had a large social group sharing items on Reader before their last round of changes, I would love to hear what your plans/timeline on adding social features are.

(fyi, Samuel mentioned adding social features in his 2011 year-in-review blog post, http://blog.newsblur.com/post/15993667293/2011-year-in-review, and there is a social branch on github, https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/tree/social)

I'm not entirely sure how the Newsblur youtube feeds work, but here's an older blog post on switching to API v2,

https://blog.newsblur.com/post/117767869761/a-real-solution-to-the-deprecated-youtube-api

I have about 20 youtube channels in Newsblur and watch them almost always within Newsblur itself, so it works well enough.

For regex filtering, Newsblur has training features. You can curate a feed based off specific attributes, like author, topic, keywords, etc.

RSS readers that manage mailing lists:

Inoreader: https://www.inoreader.com/blog/2020/02/declutter-your-inbox-subscribe-to-email-newsletters-straight-into-inoreader.html

Newsblur: https://blog.newsblur.com/2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-newsblur/ (open source and self-hostable)

Feedly: https://feedly.com/i/pro

Also, Kill the Newsletter (https://kill-the-newsletter.com/) converts newsletters to RSS feeds, and is open source/self-hostable.