> My main idea here is that every reading app should let you create shareable links where people can subscribe to an RSS feed and sign up for the reading app at the same time. If I want to invite people to join my community or subscribe to my social feed, I give them one of these shareable links.
This is close to the way podcasts work now, and it kind of sucks. I was just looking at a show on the Apple Podcasts site (because it was the first result that showed up in the search results), and it has social media sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter and an icon to copy some markup to embed an iframe-based player. If you are not Facebook or Twitter or looking to embed an iframe, too bad. The reverse sucks as well: when I'm on the site of the podcast itself, and it gives me a bunch of options to subscribe using Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or watch on YouTube. If you use something else to consume podcasts, your best bet is to copy the link to the bare RSS feed and put that in. Problem is, some sites omit that one.
This is one thing that the fediverse is getting right, in comparison. If I use Mastodon and want to touch someone's post (i.e. react to it—by replying, starring it, or whatever), then I can trivially refer to that post with its URL. If I copy the link from my browser toolbar and then paste it into Mastodon, it works. (This isn't amazing. The workflows around it could use some polishing up, but the fact that it is at minimum possible is awesome.) For comparison, when I copied the Apple Podcasts show page URL and pasted it into the Google Podcasts search bar, it returns a message: "No podcasts found".
I think this is the same thing I was trying to address with this paragraph at the end:
> Another suggestion: provide browser extensions and iOS/Android sharing menu items so that it's easy to open an web page in the reading app. If there's one or more RSS feeds detected, throw in a subscribe button with checkboxes for each feed. The "shareable subscribe links" should include a link to the original RSS feed in the page metadata. Then if I click on the subscribe link but want to subscribe with a different RSS reader, I can do so easily.
i.e. we should be sure to provide smooth user experiences both for people who don't yet use a feed reader and for people who do. Agreed that Mastodon does this nicely, and I think adding in some browser extensions/mobile apps would help to automate things a bit more.
Suppose someone registered a vendor-neutral, collectively owned* domain `feedme.example`. A static site would be hosted there. Instead of everyone being compelled to do one-off integrations with the most popular commercial services, they would instead link to their own feed e.g. as <https://feedme.example/#!/https://meta.discourse.org/posts.r...>. The user's preferred reading app would be accessible in client-side storage for the feedme.example origin, and when the user actually lands on <https://feedme.example/#!/https://meta.discourse.org/posts.r...>, it redirects to the appropriate service, assuming the user has already set it up. If they haven't, the feedme.example SPA prompts them to set it up. Client software will be free to hardcode support for this well-known name and provide native equivalence to the purpose that the softcoded feedme.example serves. A sort of lame re-invention of Web Intents; alternatively, basically the same as registering a new URI scheme with IANA, except there's a web-based fallback.
* or collectively managed, at least; in the vein of w3id.org, for example
> For example, give this here link a click: https://feedrabbit.com/?url=https://meta.discourse.org/posts...
This is close to the way podcasts work now, and it kind of sucks. I was just looking at a show on the Apple Podcasts site (because it was the first result that showed up in the search results), and it has social media sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter and an icon to copy some markup to embed an iframe-based player. If you are not Facebook or Twitter or looking to embed an iframe, too bad. The reverse sucks as well: when I'm on the site of the podcast itself, and it gives me a bunch of options to subscribe using Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or watch on YouTube. If you use something else to consume podcasts, your best bet is to copy the link to the bare RSS feed and put that in. Problem is, some sites omit that one.
This is one thing that the fediverse is getting right, in comparison. If I use Mastodon and want to touch someone's post (i.e. react to it—by replying, starring it, or whatever), then I can trivially refer to that post with its URL. If I copy the link from my browser toolbar and then paste it into Mastodon, it works. (This isn't amazing. The workflows around it could use some polishing up, but the fact that it is at minimum possible is awesome.) For comparison, when I copied the Apple Podcasts show page URL and pasted it into the Google Podcasts search bar, it returns a message: "No podcasts found".
Related: Please make your products work with URLs (2020) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038065>