I’m struggling with RSS feeds. I want to read what everyone is writing beyond their microblogs, but I don’t want to re-read what’s posted here. Has anyone found a solution? I just avoid Feedbin now because it’s overwhelming.
@Aleen I only add micro blogs that frequently write full blog posts to my RSS feed. I think of RSS as almost entirely a “long reads” place.
@Aleen I sympathize. My hope would be for separate RSS feed on blogs that are only for posts with titles, which is what I would follow in the feed reader.
@Aleen oh I’m experiencing this too. Feedbin is great, but then I when I get here it’s a repeat. I’d really love a longer posts feed, or at the very least one without replies.
@manton some sort of feed of longer posts from people you follow on m.b. would be good. I have no idea if such a thing would be possible. Maybe an RSS feed consisting of a feed of all the homesites of all the people you follow on m.b.?
@dgold Interesting idea. We have a feed of everyone you're following, so it would require filtering out the short posts and also downloading the full text in some cases if we don't already have a copy.
@manton I'd love to see this as the MVP of categories. Start with two categories that are not user set, but added by MB that separates micro and macro posts.
@Aleen what you’re running into is something I pondered for a while. Not enough people seem to silo their own content; long form vs short form. When I did cross post, I had three feeds (long, short, both) but it was never easy to make long form feeds known to people.
@pat Thanks! That's similar to what I had back when I used WordPress. The most difficult part is coming up with names for the feed URLs. 🙂 I like your micro.json. For the full posts, leaning to longposts.json but don't love it.
@chrislopez You know... I usually laugh when people call it macro-blogging, but that might actually be a good fit here. Hmm.
@manton It’s tricky, because is it “long posts” or even “full posts”, really? Seems to me what we really mean is “title-less posts”, but even that is… squishy.
Back when Tumblr first came out, one of its distinguishing features to me was that titles were optional, regardless of post length. To me, it made it feel a bit more like a diary, mixed with content sharing/remixing.
Of my subscribers, 4% subscribe to just the full posts feed, 0% to the microblog feed, and the rest to the feed with all posts.
From what I recall, the discussion of multiple feeds stems from the desire users have to not have to read the same thing in two places, once in an RSS reader and once again in their Micro.blog feed. The same complaint was made when Twitter came around, and most people decided to give up RSS and stick with just their Twitter feed. In my opinion, this was a factor in publications giving up their agency to Twitter.
What if instead of solving this problem via the publication side, you solve it from the consumption side? Instead of limiting where I’ll read content to one of two places, you could find a way to let me read all of the content I want to read in one place?
What if Micro.blog was where I could read everything? But instead of forcing publications to publish here, you allow users to add feeds from the publications they want to read to appear in their Micro.blog feed.
Make it kind of a Micro.internet feed.
That way, you get the best of all worlds. You have super simple publishing and reading on an open platform.
If you don’t do it, I might build a Micro.blog + RSS reader myself 😉
@pat I have been wanting a Micro.blog client / RSS reader for months. I almost started working on it a few times, but I always stop because I don’t have a great sense for how I want the content to be organized.
@rosskimes It’s too early to worry about that. My guess is that the problem most Micro.blog users have is not an overwhelming amount of content to read and sift through. Get it to where it does the job of simply consolidating, first, then iterate as needed.
I would personally love to just be able to upload my OPML file and have my RSS and Micro.blog posts appear in one stream. Use favicons or apple-touch-icons to start, and open links in an in-app browser. MVP.
@pat I think that's a good idea. In an early prototype I did allow following any RSS feed, but decided to simplify it around registered accounts. I think opening it up to more sources would be good. But I'd certainly welcome other Micro.blog + RSS reader apps too! 🙂
@manton And narrowing the focus was absolutely the right idea. Still might be. It just seemed to me that jumping to the multiple-feeds solution was a bit hasty, though I realize you’ve probably had the thought for a long time.
Of course, you cannot satisfy everyone all the time, nor should your users expect you too. What you’ve done is build a wonderful platform and have exhibited, here and elsewhere, a desire to see others build on what you’ve created. I think that’s to be commended and acted upon (a key reason why I’m working on building Jekyll themes is the hope that one day you’ll need some more options 😉).
I just wish I had the technical fortitude to make the Micro.rss idea happen myself in a reasonable amount of time. What I could hack together in a year, you could probably do in your sleep.
@pat Thank you. And I was just checking out your new theme! I'd love to add it to Micro.blog when you're ready.
@manton Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap…
Give me about 18 months to test it? 😬
Seriously, though it would be a huge honour. I do want to figure out a way to put it through its paces, though. Any recommendations for getting help testing it out? I’m 110% positive it needs it.
@Aleen My solution is to only read feeds in my RSS reader, because I can never get into the habit of refreshing Social Media apps every X minutes. I have added my Micro.blog feed into it. What I like about it is that I can still read everything even though I go hours or days between having the time to look at it.
@manton this would be great! Also if there was an ability to “pin” specific posts to the top in this list, that would be really neat!
@pat Not sure, other than what you're already doing asking people to try it out. Eventually I hope to build some kind of theme upload/testing into the platform.
@manton Off-topic, but a former classmate of mine used to work for a company in Norway called Macrosoft, before Microsoft HAD them change name…
@pat while I think this is really good point, there are other reasons to set up separate feeds. I earlier recommended this be implemented via categories as an MVP. My reason is I’m very excited for a categories concept on MB. Following people is sometimes what I want, but what I often want is to follow a person-topic combo. This is especially true for personal accounts versus media personality accounts. I see short v. long as similarly along this boundary and a good place for MB to start testing multiple feeds that you can choose which ones to subscribe to.
@jsonbecker I agree, categories would be sweet! But unless I’m not understanding something, my guess is that the same could be accomplished by filtering against the tags key in the json feed.
Either way, I don’t have a strong argument against producing multiple feeds. As I said in my reply, I just don’t believe it’s the best solution to the problem of reading the same thing in two locations.
@Aleen was feeling this before I set up micro.blog. I wish Feedbin could filter out short titleless posts into a separate single feed. They don’t feel like they should be read the way I read other feed content, but I don’t want to just hide them.
