What does HackerNews think of river5?

I use River5 (https://github.com/scripting/river5), and pipe the output to a web app (https://readinglist.andysylvester.com/).

> A feed is a set of algorithmically generated content provided to the user without explicit input.

Uhhhhhhhhhhh no? Wrong & harmful, out of the gate. Feeds derive from "RSS Feed", which are non algorithmically generated: they are each blog's, person's or site's semi-realtime "feed" of their individual content. They are not customized algorithmic content. Web feeds[1] are feeds of web sites.

There's some ok ideas in this article, but the very beginning is a hard-stop "no", wrong, incorrect. It uses an incorrect definition that dooms an idea (feeds) much older than what the article is scolding.

Feeds are wonderful things that allow users & their user agents to create views however the user wants. What the author is talking about is something different. Polluting the idea of the feed by associating it with this Big Tech walled-garden "personal feed" or what-not does injury to the remedy, hurts the chances of real actual & good feeds being able to counter-act the social-network-monopoly "feed"/ween that big tech has us on. This article is harmful.

If you want to talk about the consumer point of view, of someone consuming feeds, a bunch of RSS feeds when combined together forms a "river"[2]. That, too, is non-algorithmic, is an in-temporal-order view of all the feeds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

[2] https://github.com/scripting/river5

How is this any different than Dave Winer's River of News which has been around for over five years?

https://github.com/scripting/river5

If I just want to catch up, there're River5[1] and NewsBoat[2], or build-your-own-aggregator apps. The latter is a console app with a UI like Vim's; I like its fast filtering with '/'. The downside of apps is there's no grooming in comments.

[1] https://github.com/scripting/river5 [2] https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat

BTW, for people having trouble getting through to my blog (sorry if you are) here's a link to the GitHub repo.

https://github.com/scripting/river5

Dave