Ghost founder John O’Nolan is working on a new RSS reader called Alcove:

I wish it were just all in one place. Without all the noise and engagement farming. Just a quiet little spot where I could catch up with things I care about.

I wonder which existing RSS reader he’s using that has noise and engagement farming? Anyhoo, we should probably accelerate our plans for a Micro.blog-based RSS reader. You can follow blogs in Micro.blog, but a full reader outside the social timeline has been a missing piece.

@manton That would be cool.

@manton Reading his post, his issue is newsletters coming to his inbox and sitting alongside the spam issue he’s dealing with. How about he manage his inbox and use something like Feedbin that already supports newsletters and clean up his Gmail Inbox?

@manton oh…. That would be really interesting for sure… would complete the whole picture IMO. Currently using Inoreader but I’m curious about your plans for sure.

@manton but sharing news about Alcove, on Twitter? The founder of Ghost posting on… Twitter? What am I missing?

@manton oh, and being able to create a link post from within a MB-integrated RSS reader would be so handy and cool!

@numericcitizen Yeah, @iChris brought up the same point. For a blogging platform, Ghost actually hasn’t been very quick to embrace open APIs, until the fediverse this year. Perhaps he simply thinks he can reach more people on Twitter and get them excited about it.

@manton Would love that. Separate app, or maybe a service that since with NetNewsWire and others.

@lukemperez Yep. I use NetNewsWire with Feedbin sync currently, so sync is still essential for me.

@manton @numericcitizen My hunch is that he simply just wants something that isn’t part of Ghost for a break from it and try other stuff. It looks like he’s using Framer to host the site for now so there’s nothing Ghost related to it at this point.

@iChris Good catch noticing Framer. That’s a little surprising to me too, but I guess Ghost is overkill for single-page sites.

@numericcitizen because most of the world still uses it. here we’re in these very small bubbles where we think real people actually use Bluesky or Mastodon.

@jkratz you probably won’t like my take on this: people are lazy.

@numericcitizen Not lazy. Focused on other things. Living their lives.

@manton It’s always interesting to me when people are “promoting” a thing, so clearly want eyes on it, but then also don’t care if you can’t see a thing. I dunno. To each their own. share.cleanshot.com/VxMhqm1VZ…

@iChris Thanks for sharing that. Sadly there’s still so many people who treat Twitter / X as the default, in the WordPress community too.

@manton I was just thinking about this – I love the embedded feed reader and blogroll at Feedland and would love a micro.blog plugin.

@numericcitizen hence why there are still 200+ million a day using X ;)

@MitchWagner honestly I think it’s both. lazy in the sense that they’ve got better things to do than worry about social media. it works. they use it.

@jkratz how many are bots?

@manton Ayyyy, now that’s service! Take all my money.

@numericcitizen I could ask the same question on Bluesky. No idea but the accounts I interact with there aren’t bots unless the NFL, etc. are running bots now.

@manton that would be really nice indeed. I’d love to be able to subscribe to individual feeds, not just the primary domain.

@jkratz “If it works, use it,” is a great attitude in most things in life, social media included.

@jkratz I’m just a regular person and I use BlueSky and Mastadon and CounterSocial as well as X and Threads

@numericcitizen over time, bots seem to get everywhere and it’s becoming harder to detect some of them for the average person.

@MitchWagner @jkratz @numericcitizen I think X does a very proactive job to try and purge bot accounts. From personal experience and following a few of the accounts there that work on the platform.

@manton Why does everyone want to reinvent the RSS experience? Combine newsletters and YouTube and Twitter? I don’t find any allure in that promise. For that matter, I don’t even want a web version of an RSS reader anymore. Give me something local, not something backed by a server.

@manton a thought — would there be a potential to partner with an amazing service like Feedbin? Yeah, you probably have built a lot of what would be needed but there is an incredible amount of power in rules and other feed work that a service like Feedbin does so well. Plus, the ability to subscribe stuff like YouTube channels easily?

In general, I think it would be cool to see more partnering in the IndieWeb space in the hopes of raising the boats of many services.

I would think this could look like “Follow these tags from Feedbin in Micro.blog” and with the right API integration could be very seamless.

I also think there is so much surface area to micro.blog and while y’all do an amazing job of adding more value, you can only put your investments in so many areas. 🤷‍♂️

@amit I do like a server for syncing between devices, although I guess some apps can sync via iCloud. I agree that this doesn’t need to be reinvented, though.

@jthingelstad I’m a huge fan of Feedbin and more integration would be good!

@manton in general I think there is so little revenue and so few companies creating value in the open web I think anything that helps more succeed is good and keeping focus is always important.

@jthingelstad I wonder if there’s a middle-ground, where we could expand our RSS reading with a default that synced with Feedbin. There would be a way to keep things only on Micro.blog, but advanced features used Feedbin. I do worry about bloat.

@flotisserie I’ve finished the first version of the FeedLand plug-in. It lets you embed a blogroll on a standalone page. Adding to your sidebar requires fiddling with the theme templates… I’d like to make that easier. Also looking to further optimize, because it has to load a lot of extra CSS/JS from FeedLand’s servers.