April 24, 2026 · Ryan X. Charles
The open web still publishes. People are still writing blogs, shipping changelogs, pushing releases, posting essays, uploading videos, dropping papers on arxiv. The shortage isn’t content. The shortage is a good way to read it.
RSS Anyway is an attempt at that good way. It’s a feed aggregator that discovers blogs automatically, generates feeds for sites that don’t have them, and now lets you add anything else you want to follow.
It’s in alpha, live at rssanyway.com.
What it is
RSS Anyway reads Hacker News as a signal layer, classifies every URL it sees, and either finds a native RSS/Atom/JSON feed or generates one by scraping. The result is a hot-ranked homepage of the latest posts from across the open web — a lot of sites you already know, and a lot you don’t. Built on Bun, TanStack Start, and MySQL.
Three things that make it different
It generates feeds for sites that don’t have them
A lot of the open web doesn’t expose RSS at all. RSS Anyway’s classifier handles GitHub repos, YouTube channels, Discourse forums, arxiv authors, and generic static blogs — walking paths, scanning links, extracting sitemaps, reading index pages. If a site publishes on any kind of schedule, we’ll usually find a way to turn it into a feed. Each feed is also re-exported as RSS, Atom, and JSON, so you can read it in any client.
Follow anything, literally
New this week: sign in, hit the + button in the bottom-right, paste any URL.
If we can classify it, you see a preview of the feed and a Follow button. If
we can’t, we’ll tell you exactly why. Either way, the feed joins the aggregator
for everyone — the index is user-extensible by design.
Sign in with KeyPears
No passwords, no OAuth, no signup flow. Type your KeyPears address — something
like [email protected] — sign once with your key, and you’re in. Use the public
keypears.com node or host your own. RSS Anyway discovers
your node via .well-known, verifies the signature, and creates your account on
the spot. Federated identity, cryptographically checked, zero friction.
What you can do right now
- Browse hot (
/) and new (/new) — Reddit-style ranking over the entire index, or reverse-chronological if you just want the firehose. - Follow feeds or whole domains — hover any domain, click follow. Your
subscriptions show up at
/following. - Submit any URL at
/submit— if it’s classifiable, it’s indexed in seconds. - Browse by domain at
/domains/[domain]— see every feed we’ve found for a site, and every recent item.
Why this exists
The big algorithmic feeds optimize for engagement with their own network. RSS Anyway optimizes for access to the open web. The bet is that a decent aggregator of everything-that-publishes is more valuable in the long run than a great curator of a walled garden. And the bet is that giving people a way to add their own sources — instead of asking them to trust a team of editors — is how you get there.
It’s alpha. The classifier will get some sites wrong. The hot ranking will sometimes hot the wrong stuff. The sign-in flow assumes you know what KeyPears is. All of that will get better.
In the meantime: go sign in, follow a few domains, submit your favorite blog. Tell us what we got wrong.
Hack the universe.