Who Reads My RSS Feed? • George Mandis<br>I recently moved my site from Netlify to Cloudflare Pages, partly to consolidate the services I'm using and partly to finally have proper server logs. Plausible is great for getting the gist of who's visiting and where they're coming from, but sometimes I'm curious about things like:<br>Who is actually using my RSS feeds?<br>What weird bots are sniffing around?<br>Which home-rolled projects are people running against my site?<br>I have an RSS feed, a JSON feed, and an experimental plain-text feed. I wanted to see who or what was actually pinging them.<br>I've been able to collect these logs for about a week now—a week that happened to include one of my posts hitting the front page of Hacker News. This was great timing! Hacker News is good for bursts of interesting traffic to explore.<br>Across all feeds and the broader site logs I found over 700 unique user agent strings representing tens of thousands of requests. Some were familiar names to me, many were not. A few were genuinely bizarre. Here's a tour of the ones that caught my attention from the feed logs, plus a few highlights from the wider site traffic.<br>Note : this turned out to be a long write-up with a ton of links. There's a CSV at the bottom if all you want is to joylelssly ingest a list of user-agents with references. To each their own!<br>Readers

The core of the traffic is what you'd hope to see: people reading RSS with dedicated feed readers. But the variety is striking. There is a lot of homogeneity in the web browsing world, but the diversity in the feed reader space seems surprisingly strong. I have a hunch this is because the reader space is already quite niche, but it's also pretty easy to roll your own reader compared to your own browser.<br>I counted over 20 distinct reader products, and a significant self-hosted contingent.<br>Big hosted services I've heard of were all present: Feedly, Feedbin, Inoreader, and Feeder. Several of them helpfully report subscriber counts right in their user agent strings. Feedbin told me I have 16 subscribers! Feedly reported 14 on my RSS feed and 3 on my JSON feed. Inoreader said 5. That's a nice touch I didn't know about or expect. A small bit of transparency in an exchange that otherwise gives publishers almost no feedback.<br>The self-hosted readers were the really fun ones. Miniflux appeared in nine different version strings, which I think means at least nine separate installations are polling my feed. That's nine people running their own Go-based feed reader on their own servers. FreshRSS showed up with four versions. CommaFeed, the Java-based Google Reader replacement, was there. So was Bubo Reader, an "irrationally minimal" reader that generates a static HTML page from your feed list—no account, no descriptions, no server-side state—just a webpage full of links. Full disclosure: Bubo Reader is my project. It's open-source and my blog is in the default feed list, so I suspect some of these hits are people who forked the repo, deployed their own instance, and never removed my blog from the defaults. I thank you all for your patronage 🫡.<br>Native apps are still out there too. NetNewsWire, the long-running open-source Mac/iOS reader originally by Brent Simmons, had a strong showing. Unread was a new one to me and completely dominated my JSON feed, accounting for over 40% of all JSON feed traffic (the JSON feed generally is much lower traffic than my traditional RSS feed). It barely appeared in the RSS logs at all. feeeed, an iOS app by Nate Parrott that mixes RSS with Reddit, YouTube, weather, and step counts into a single scroll, showed up too. And AntennaPod, an open-source Android podcast app, was polling my blog feed. Someone has apparently subscribed to my blog as if it were a podcast? Please leave 5 stars.<br>On Android, ReadYou (an open-source Material Design reader) appeared in the wider site logs alongside the charmingly named SpaceCowboys Android RSS Reader. BazQux checked in with exactly 1 subscriber. GoodLinks, a reading-list app for Apple platforms, showed up too. And ReaderDesktop, a native macOS reader, made a single appearance.<br>The terminal readers represent a particular type of person—people after my own heart (I'm actually considering taking Bubo this direction). Newsboat was there, a terminal-based reader popular with the CLI crowd, but the one that really got me was Elfeed—Emacs Elfeed 3.4.2. Someone is reading my blog inside Emacs. Christopher Wellons' tag-based feed reader with Org-mode integration.<br>And then there's Syndicator, a personalized reading app that learns from your behavior and aggregates blogs, news, YouTube, and Substacks. It accounted for 37% of my JSON feed traffic. Between Unread and Syndicator, two apps I'd never heard of make up nearly 80% of all JSON feed requests.<br>The Fediverse<br>Multiple Fediverse platforms showed up in the logs. At least five different Misskey instances and six different Friendica instances were fetching my content—I won't link to any of...