cybercitizen4

Hi everyone,

Today I'm sharing powRSS: a public RSS feed aggregator.

powRSS updates daily with new posts from independent blogs and websites. The list of known sites is curated manually, but the feed is generated automatically by picking new sites each month, giving every site a fair chance to be featured.

This goes without saying but this is a non-commercial, entirely personal project inspired by my own use of CAPCOM in Gemini and Bongusta in Gopherspace, as well as old-school website directories back when the web felt smaller.

You can find the feed here: powRSS.com

And you can learn more about the project and background here: https://enocc.com/2025/05/24/launching-powrss.html

If you have a personal website or blog, I would strongly encourage you to leave a comment or send me an e-mail, as I’d love to add it to the public feed.

I hope some of you may find it useful :-)

Hi everyone!

Yesterday I shared a post here about discovering independent websites. I spent the day working on a small prototype for a larger project I'd been working on called powRSS. It's nothing more than a simple RSS finder, reader, and now aggregator.

If you have a personal website or blog, I would strongly encourage you to leave a comment or send me an e-mail, as I'd love to add it to the public feed.

I hope some of you may find it useful :-)

Hey everyone, today I had a fun interaction with a fellow web developer regarding the discovery of independent websites and blogs.

In the /r/frontend subreddit, a writer named Fred shared a blog post titled "Small web is beautiful". One of the things he said which caught my attention was this:

I dream of a web that fosters healthy conversations, together with personal and intellectual growth. The world is diverse and fascinating, and we can be information explorers together. Whenever I write a longform blog post and share it with the world, I get people recommending me similar reads, which in turn I use to improve the original blog post (and my own personal knowledge). I love it when people challenge my ideas — as that opens my mind to unseen perspectives — and I wish the web was a safe place where this could happen much more often.

Which is pretty much what I love about the web as a medium for communication in the first place!

I left a comment on his blog post saying that the best and most meaningful connections I’ve made on the web have been through finding small independent websites owned by people and emailing them to say hello and thank you if an article was especially helpful or insightful. I also mentioned that I'm a big fan of smallweb search engines and directories like we had back in the day, so he asked me for recommendations.

I ended up writing a blog post on my website collecting some of my favorites and sending the post to him. He looked through my site and saw some of my interests in writing and literature so he sent me a project of his where he's collecting book epigraphs from various authors. Now, here's the fun part: turns out that when he started this project, he had shared and asked for help with the Ruby on Rails community (about 9 months ago) and I had already commented and given feedback on the project! Full circle moment reminding me how small the internet can be 😁

Excerpt:

In an article for Contraption comparing Ruby on Rails and Next.js, Philip I. Thomas writes:

The truth is that the new wave of Javascript web frameworks like Next.js has made it harder, not easier, to build web apps. These tools give developers more capabilities - dynamic data rendering and real-time interactions. But, the cost of this additional functionality is less abstraction.

Using cutting-edge frameworks introduces instability through frequent updates, new libraries, and unexpected issues. Next.js applications often rely on a multitude multiple third-party services like Vercel, Resend, and Temporal that introduce platform risk.

This problem has been exacerbated by developers themselves. I don’t like Vercel, Resend, Temporal, Prisma, or any of the SaaS platforms whose business model seemingly relies on ~~abstracting~~ obfuscating away control of an application by selling their services to new and impressionable developers who hear about them for the first time from their favorite social media personalities. Indeed, all three links in the paragraph I quoted above from Thomas’s article are affiliate links. (This is not to say Thomas is doing what these creators do, I’m just pointing out how deeply rooted this economic model has become).

As an industry, we’ve shifted from the millenial devlog to the YouTube tutorial. And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with video as a format, the incentive for monetizing content makes developers-turned-creators perpetuate this cycle of overcomplicating software through third-party services, because at the end of the day, advertising these services and not architecting software is what pays their bills.

This trend of aggressive advertisement for a fragmented app ecosystem preys on the ever-present FOMO in the industry. If Meta and Netflix and the rest of the FAANG companies are using the latest technology… why not me?! But FAANG companies solve unique problems for their products, and thus write solutions that work for them. See also: Ruby on Rails is slow and doesn’t scale. When your app reaches a large enough amount of users to bring Rails to its knees, you’re not going to regret choosing Rails, you’re going to laugh and feel proud and incredulous that so many people have found value in your work.

Hi all,

I don’t really know how to ask this question. On one of my devices, I downloaded a web browser (Opera) and one of my friends made fun of me, saying that “you better like China knowing all the stuff you do online”.

I read the Opera website and it says it’s a Norwegian company, but on Wikipedia it does say it was bought by a Chinese company.

My question is: what does “China” do with my personal browsing data? Why is it useful for them? (and who are we referring to here, is that the Chinese government, a private company, who?)

I’m looking forward to learn more about digital privacy, but I don’t currently understand the “obviousness” of how it is wrong to use Opera.

I’m a tech enthusiast (hence why I’m here), but I’m cognizant that I have large knowledge gaps in some of these topics.

Thank you in advance.

Some of my coworkers were talking about using RSS to read blogs, which made some of the younger folks in our team ask what it is and why we keep using it.

Some still use iPods to avoid subscriptions and streaming services, my favorite was one of our sysadmins who showed me Gopher.

I’m curious about others though, thanks!

What kind of websites did people visit? Were people friendly?