SIMPLE RSS

Simple. Very personal and private.
A community driven knowledge pool.

TL;DR

Such super popular ultra fantastic veteran hax0r wrote some much mega cool code for himself and then let all you peasants use it?

HISTORY, SOME FACTS, AND FICTION

For real or not, let me be frank from the beginning: This is a personal project that has grown a bit.
I am also old. I like to concentrate and read things. Maybe listen to a podcast or watch a video... I don't need constant notifications and my attention span is more than 30 seconds.
I made this little, extremely simple RSS reader "app" for myself during summer of 2022 because all I wanted was a calm and simple way of reading RSS feeds and staying updated on my favourite topics. No notifications, no ads, just privately read feeds.

Then, I showed it to my family and some friends and a few of them asked if they can has the same thing for themselves. The "app" was only the front-end interface at the time, because I managed my feeds directly in a rudimentary database. This meant I had to sit down and make a back-end interface for people to manage their feeds, develop the database more, write some scripts, and all that crap. It took me a few months and in late 2022 there were a few alpha accounts. From my mum listening to podcasts to a few friends getting news and tech updates.
During the development process I thought of the ranking feature and how it could benefit all users and the public in general (because we live in a society!). Added recommendations, feed ranking, and more features on the way. It all grew quite a bit, a few more people joined, and it became a little community.

In May 2023 I decided to let anyone join because they said it's going to be fun. That's what they said.
And here we are...

OLD SCHOOL INTERNET ALL THE WAY BABY!

I have nothing against AI (yet?), I have a lot against suggestion/advertising algorithms, and as you may have guessed already, I hate social media. I made a deliberate decision not to even think in either direction.
Feeds are recommended and ranked based ONLY on anonymous user inputs.
That is all at work inside. Good things will float, amirite?

Morever, I believe in the power of anonymous communities.

ON PRIVACY

When I made the decision to open up registrations to the public nothing has changed for users either: "A calm and simple way of reading RSS feeds. No notifications, no ads, just privately read feeds."

There are no external scripts, there are no analytics or tracking of any kind in the code. Nothing.
All you need to register is an E-Mail address and if you're Internet savvy just a little bit that can be anonymous too. Moreover, your E-Mail is never saved online or paired with your account in any way.
The only thing I do use is the anonymous data concerning feed recommendations and rankings. That is as far as any kind of "social" aspect of this community goes. I don't care who recommended a feed or its ranking in a specific account. I just get a number paired with a feed URL reflecting its overall rank when someone does something with a feed.

To conclude, there is no Privacy Agreement because there is no need for one. I give you some code to use and host your account, you volunteer some anonymous data in favour of the community. Fair?

And, there will never be any ads too. I can't even begin explaining what capitalism did to the Internet...

PLEASE NOTE: Various entities may try to log your viewing habits and clicks such as Google, Meta, Youtube, or even your ISP. That I cannot avoid for you, do some research, use privacy centric browsers and/or VPN.

ON TERMS OF SERVICE OR EULA

There is only one rule: don't be an ass.
You ARE part of a community here and I will delete your account without a warning or an explanation if you try being one.
Otherwise, there is no censorship here, be creative, feel free to follow any RSS feed you like and recommend it to the community.
That is all.

ON CODE

It changes constantly, and improves. I hope the later is true, because this fucking thing never ends.

Made with PHP and MySQL mainly, a little JS, and HTML/CSS. No heavy frameworks or scripts, just a minimal and local JQuery integration (90K). Works on any device with an Internet connection and a browser. Designed and coded to work fast. That was the main idea, I hope I got that right.
Everything, I mean EVERYTHING is less than 200K of code while I do admit: I am probably far from being an even decent programmer. But, I'm curious, like to make stuff, and have been doing so since 1995 when I first got on the Internet...

ON DESIGN

Again, speed and simplicity were the main ideas here too. Everything is minimal, extremely simple, and has to work on any kind of device.
Still, users have a lot of freedom to play and discover ways of reading RSS feeds.

MAKE RSS SEXY AGAIN

RSS was there before social media. And now, in the aftermath of the social media fiasco RSS is still the sexiest way to get updates on the Internet. It always was.

▪ Private: you can't be tracked for the most part, for example embedded YouTube videos do attempt to track your clicks. But there are ways to block that.
▪ On demand: you are pulling the data you want, when you want it, nobody is pushing anything.
▪ And most importantly: no ads.
The way things should be, nice...

In the end, it seems, making a private, community driven RSS reader may be relevant today, even if I didn't mean it.

ABOUT ME

Finally, I'm that weird guy making and releasing stuff from a one-room basement apartment in Jerusalem. ;)

Got questines?
me [at] altneu [dot] me | PGP

DEVELOPMENT UPDATES

SUPPORT

This is an independent project.
All donations are greatly appreciated.