Comment by Beijinger

I was a heavy bloglines user back in the day and loved it. It was like a custom newspaper people printed for me and worked great.

I moved to twitter in 2009 and, for the most part, it was a better RSS experience. The udpates were smaller, more frequent. It was text only and had a size limit which automatically filtered for some level of linguistic ability. I used to only see people who I wanted to. It felt like a cross between IRC (which I used heavily at the time) and RSS and I quite loved it.

Over the years, the experience has degraded. Not just because of "the algorithm" but also because of influencers, social media marketing, spam, etc. But I had the frog in hot water experience and never really felt like moving away. I've blocked it on my work machine and use it only my phone via. the browser and a monochrome screen which makes it less compelling.

I've made a few friends and relationships on the platform and I think it peaked in 2015/2016 or so. Especially when you're in a city that's mostly on it. You run into people who you know "via. twitter". It's been a great ride but I do wish for some of the things of the RSS days.

Someone doesn't really need a reason to build something besides that they want to build it. I built many RSS readers and I was not trying to revolutionise anything, I was just having fun. This mindset of "revolution" and "disruption" will block you from actually just doing the things you want sometimes.

> Does the world need another RSS reader/mousetrap? We already have so many.

And we also have near-universal OPML import/export, so the cost of switching is minimised.

> What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new reader?

You don't need a revolution to make your app compelling, you just need to improve on status quo. RSS has a lot of shortcomings, most importantly discoverability.

Here's a simple idea: crowdsourced discovery. Users could opt-in to anonymously share their feed list (whole or parts); keyword-based categorisation could group them into topics; etc. The reader could use an algorithm (haha, we're coming full circle) to suggest interesting topics, feeds, posts. Honestly I'd be interested in something like <https://kagi.com/smallweb/>.

Extra kudos if the dataset is released publicly.

Lol the result I got from your search was "rss readers on ebay" ad followed by links all with N top RSS readers for varying N, often 7 or 10.

yes it does. The world is full of 'another's.

That’s gotten pretty hard to do recently since Musk cracked down on api access

What are they going to do? ban you? if so they're doing you a favor.

I've always described (the old) Twitter as an RSS feed but for people, which I loved. Is there a way to recreate this without all the slop?