Cool RSS

fraidycat

link

instead of having 1 big feed full of everyone’s posts, it has a list of of rss feeds you’ve added. it shows ones that have had items recently added. it has a summary of those changes in a like or two. you click to expand and see those entries. you click on an entry to view it on the original page.

it also has tags, and you can view them with a tabbed bar at the top. you can also select an importance that says how often fraidycat should check it.

cohost had a following view that worked similarly. it didn’t have tags. it let you pin users.

it’s hard to do this sort of thing on mastodon, apparently. see this post about pillbug

feedbro

feedbro has a rules engine. when it sees a post and when you view a post, it can check if it matches rules (such as containing text in the body, not containing something in the title, etc) and then do an action based on that, such as adding a tag, notifying you, deleting an item, highlighting words etc etc.

outlook has a rules engine. you can filter emails, sort them into folders, etc. it’s like that.

pillbug also has a rules engine. hard to find docs on it. original post by viv, post on the pillbug account

why im not using any of them

they’re browser extensions and also i want to use both of these things at once lmao. i suppose i will have to write my own…

my ideal rss reader

it has a mode like fraidycat as the default, where you are seeing the list of feeds instead of a list of all posts. it orders the feeds by date someone last posted in it. when you view a feed, it then shows a chronological list of its posts/items. feeds can have 0 or more tags, manually applied. you have multiple tabs. these tabs are used to filter based on various things, such as what text is/isnt present, matching/not matching a regex, the tags on the feed, and labels on the post that can be applied manually or with the rules engine below.

its both an app and some kind of pc or web client. it COULD be a web extension. this probably means 2 separate implementations but whatever. if youre in the app, swiping down (instead of refreshing) brings up a text box that does 2 things: if you post a link, it adds it as a feed. if youre viewing a tab, and that tabonly shows tags with specific feeds, it automatically applies those tags to the feed you just added. otherwise, there’s a list of commands there. typing something in does a fuzzy search for commands. some of them are “view (name of feed)”. you can pin commands. ideally you should be able to navigate to any part of the ui via text. and it should be navigable with keyboard on pc. somehow there is a way to draw gestures, and those map to commands.

there is a rules engine (again, like outlook) can use certain criteria (same as the filters above) to change how a post is displayed. instead of showing the whole post, it could:

• not show up in the feed
• show up collapsed and require a click through - this allows you to make your own content warning filters
• show text but not embedded media - useful if someone posts nsfw art
• show details under a read more

all of these should say why they were applied. it would have ways to quickly add rules. e.g. in that command drop down you select “add collapsed rule”, then you type some text, and then it adds a rule that auto collapses posts that contain that text. easy content warnings! these rules could also add labels to posts (not feeds), which shouldn’t be permanent: the checks should be done every time you view the rule (you could cache it if there weren’t any changes since last time). the automatically applied labels should say what rule applied them and why they were applied.

if the rss item links to a web page, it gets the image from its open graph. it can be extended via lua to fetch info about the page at the link and embed more information such as images, audio, further text. for example, you could write a lua script that will take a bluesky link, look up the post via the api, get the images, download them, and embed them within the rss item. also you can put non-rss sites in the reader and it will just remind you to check them every so often. all of this is client-side. of course you can’t only do it in a browser tab with javascript because of CORS, you WOULD need to write some API that a page could call, but you shouldn’t NEED to use an external service or to chuck it in a web extension for it to work. is this feasable? im sure there are reasons so many of these are extensions. it’s something that automatically outputs its config and list of feeds in text whenever it changes. same with OMPL whenever you add or change qualities of a feed. why not.