Comment by domysee
1 day ago
> The biggest cost of RSS feed items as a consumer is figuring out whether something is worth reading
I'm working on an RSS feed reader, and it has a feature that solves that problem. For every subscribed feed, it shows the percentage of items that you actually bookmark and read. So if there are feeds that you subscribed to but don't read, you can easily find out which they are and unsubscribe from them.
It's called https://lighthouseapp.io
The issue is that it's not possible to separate feeds from items. Even if some feeds are largely unread, I subscribed to them because I liked something they posted on a specific topic, and I still want to get updates whenever there is another feed item related to that specific topic. Ultimately the "feed" is the mechanism of delivery, but I don't think it should be the primary mode of categorizing item consumption.
I've worked on this issue a little in a different context, where you can follow posts from people on Bluesky related to specific topics, and this is ideally what I would like to be able to do more of with RSS.[1]
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/lgug2z.com/post/3lc47yru7vc2k
If I understand you correctly you want to filter a feed on specific criteria (e.g. topic). Even if the feed publishes a lot of other content, you want to know the ratio of bookmarked content based of the filtered feed, ignoring the other content.
It's a great point, and helps me extend the feature and make Lighthouse better. So, thank you!
Lighthouse actually has that data. It supports rules, and tracks if a rule made an action (e.g. archive an article). So basically the ratio could ignore all articles that were automatically archived by rules.
I need to think more about how the UX of it should be, but it's a good next step for the feature.