In one of my recent blog posts, I talked at length about the virtues and advantages of building personal information intake system around RSS feeds. You get privacy and ownership over the distribution of information without any black box algorithms deciding what to show you (which inevitably ends up focusing on ads or engagement bait at some point). However, no system is perfect, and building your beautiful garden of RSS feeds is no different.
One of the major downsides of your little private feed garden is that it is isolated and static; therefore it requires active effort to discover new sources. Algorithmic feeds largely avoid this problem, which is something that everyone who shuns them should consider for their own benefit. In this article, I will share several ways how to keep your feeds fresh and interesting over time.
Disclaimer: I am a big fan of the so-called small web (or indie web), and much of my discovery is aimed at finding cool new small-web sites and blogs. However, the approaches listed below are mostly applicable to finding new sources of reading pleasure of any size and kind.
Ranked feeds and algorithms
Despite my apprehension towards algorithmic feeds, I actually do think they can be useful for growing your collection of RSS feeds. There are many websites and services that offer curated lists and recommendations based on your interests, tags or user signals like upvotes. The advantage is that you can target specific areas of interests.
Picking up 3D printing? Gardening? Birding? There are probably numerous blogs and sites you can relatively easily discover by looking up relevant categories, tags or search terms on RSS and news aggregators like Feedly, Inoreader, Flipboard or even Google News. These platforms will help you identify relevant feeds for individual categories or areas of interest - just visit a few links, get a feel for whether they’re for you, and if so, add it to your RSS aggregator of choice.
Another option is to utilize community platforms where users submit and upvote links. Prime examples of such sites are Reddit, which is of course full of subreddits for any and every hobby and area of interest, or if you want to get a little more IT-specific, Hacker News, Lobste.rs or Scour. On Reddit in particular, a lot of the posts may be simply questions or discussions with no links, and filtering for link-only posts isn’t universally available, so for the purposes of discovering new sites to subscribe to, you may have to dig a little. Hacker News and Lobsters, on the other hand, focus on links, but won’t be the best places to learn about woodworking or hiking or mountain biking.
Blog platforms also typically have some sort of a discovery mechanism, e.g., a “trending” or a “discovery” feed. You can find those on Bear blog, Wordpress, Ghost and many more. I particularly like the Bear blog’s trending page, as Bear itself is a great experience for both writers and readers, and you can actually subscribe to the trending RSS feed, which removes a lot of the friction from continuous discovery.
Curated lists and newsletters
For hand-picked recommendations, you can turn to various curated lists. First, there are lists of “notable” blogs, such as ooh.directory, Feedspot or Blogorama. They typically let you browse by categories or tags to narrow the recommendations down to your interests. However, it’s not always clear what the selection criteria for inclusion are, and if you are looking for blogs on specific topics, you might be better off simply searching the internet for something like “best <insert your interest> blogs”.
Second, I have seen abstractions over the blog ecosystem, such as weblogs.ai, which combines curation of blogs with some AI-based classifications, summaries and scoring. If you prefer to avoid AI-driven tools or want to try something akin to a blog-speed-dating experience, you can fire up Cloud Hiker. powRSS is also worth mentioning specifically because it focuses on curation of blogs posts from the “open, independent web”.
Last but definitely not least, newsletters. Most newsletters have an archive page with an RSS feed, meaning you could subscribe to them directly from your RSS feed, without going through your email client (my preferred way). But even without an RSS feed, a newsletter in your mailbox is a very potent source of new feeds. There are numerous newsletters that serve you curated lists of links, for example TLDR, Hacker Newsletter or Sentiers. For a list of tech/business newsletters, check out the Awesome newsletters list. For everything else, you could check out Letterlist or Ghost.
Searching using LLMs
If you do not shy away from LLMs, using them to find relevant blogs and sites (especially if you’re just starting) is a viable choice. Modern LLMs that can use web search are very good at coming up with search keywords and will typically cycle through several searches and collate the results for you. One of the real advantages of this approach is that you don’t have to know the lingo of the industry or the area of interest.
For example, when I asked an LLM to find guitar modification blogs (but intentionally used simplistic phrases like “making guitars sound better” or “changing parts”), it automatically refined my prompt with the niche-appropriate terms (“guitar mods”) and performed multiple targeted searches. The resulting list was definitely a good starting point.
Of course, this approach won’t cut very deep through the internet to pick up true “small web” gems, and some of the recommendations may be for defunct blogs or SEO spam. But if you’re not sure where to start in the category-based curated lists or subreddits, it may nudge you in the right direction.
Blog rolls
I have saved my favourite way of discovery as the last one: blog rolls. I won’t blame you if you haven’t heard of it, since it never really made it into everyday language and its popularity has definitely seen better days. A blog roll is simply a list of other sites or blogs that the author recommends (and likely subscribes to themselves).
Personally, I consider blog rolls quintessential to the small web and blogosphere, and I believe it is one of the best ways of discovering new blogs. A lot of the times, blogs can’t really be easily categorized beyond the vague “personal blog” label, which makes it complicated to find them in category-based lists or algorithms. Perhaps more importantly, there is something authentic and almost personal about finding a new interesting blog through an author you already follow. It’s almost like a recommendation from a friend.
If you have a blog of your own that does not sport a blog roll, go and create one! If you’re already deep in using RSS feeds, it will be minimal effort, and your readers will appreciate it. And if you are a reader, check the blogs you like for their own blog rolls. Mine is here.
How to grow your feeds in a healthy way
I already shared some tips on growing and maintaining your feeds, but here are a few more that are relevant to discovery:
- If you subscribe to multiple newsletters, sites and blogs that tend to cover current events or share trending links, you will face some amount of duplication. Some articles may get viral on social media, and links from sites like Hacker News often get reposted elsewhere. I believe some level of duplication may be inevitable, but you should prune your feeds if it starts bothering you.
- Don’t go on a huge subscribing spree if you get excited about finding new stuff to read. I recommend spacing it out, as subscribing to too many new feeds at once can be disorienting and can sour your reading sessions if you make a few bad judgement calls.
- It can be easy to misjudge how much you’ll like a blog or a site based on one article that you liked. The more trigger-happy you are to subscribe to new sources, the more trigger-happy you should be unsubscribing from the feeds that you no longer find interesting. It can take some time and reflection to realize you’ve been just scrolling past / marking as read specific feeds, and that it’s time to say goodbye.
- Don’t make reading your RSS a chore and don’t beat yourself up if you can’t quite catch up. Seeing a high number of unread posts after you got sick or got back from vacation can be daunting, but you don’t owe anyone anything. Your attention is your time, and we all have a limited supply of both, so we should use it judiciously.
Thank you for making it all the way through the article! I hope this helps you find amazing new stuff to read, and if you have not discovered the joy of the small web, I hope you will give it a chance. Happy reading!