Introducing RSS Anyway | Astrohacker Blog<br>Introducing RSS Anyway<br>April 24, 2026 &middot; Ryan X. Charles<br>The open web still publishes. People are still writing blogs, shipping<br>changelogs, pushing releases, posting essays, uploading videos, dropping papers<br>on arxiv. The shortage isn’t content. The shortage is a good way to read it.

RSS Anyway is an attempt at that good way. It’s a feed aggregator that discovers<br>blogs automatically, generates feeds for sites that don’t have them, and now<br>lets you add anything else you want to follow.

It’s in alpha, live at rssanyway.com.

What it is

RSS Anyway reads Hacker News as a signal layer,<br>classifies every URL it sees, and either finds a native RSS/Atom/JSON feed or<br>generates one by scraping. The result is a hot-ranked homepage of the latest<br>posts from across the open web — a lot of sites you already know, and a lot you<br>don’t. Built on Bun, TanStack Start, and MySQL.

Three things that make it different

It generates feeds for sites that don’t have them

A lot of the open web doesn’t expose RSS at all. RSS Anyway’s classifier handles<br>GitHub repos, YouTube channels, Discourse forums, arxiv authors, and generic<br>static blogs — walking paths, scanning links, extracting sitemaps, reading index<br>pages. If a site publishes on any kind of schedule, we’ll usually find a way to<br>turn it into a feed. Each feed is also re-exported as RSS, Atom, and JSON, so<br>you can read it in any client.

Follow anything, literally

New this week: sign in, hit the + button in the bottom-right, paste any URL.<br>If we can classify it, you see a preview of the feed and a Follow button. If<br>we can’t, we’ll tell you exactly why. Either way, the feed joins the aggregator<br>for everyone — the index is user-extensible by design.

Sign in with KeyPears

No passwords, no OAuth, no signup flow. Type your KeyPears address — something<br>like [email protected] — sign once with your key, and you’re in. Use the public<br>keypears.com node or host your own. RSS Anyway discovers<br>your node via .well-known, verifies the signature, and creates your account on<br>the spot. Federated identity, cryptographically checked, zero friction.

What you can do right now

Browse hot (/) and new (/new) — Reddit-style ranking over the entire<br>index, or reverse-chronological if you just want the firehose.

Follow feeds or whole domains — hover any domain, click follow. Your<br>subscriptions show up at /following.

Submit any URL at /submit — if it’s classifiable, it’s indexed in<br>seconds.

Browse by domain at /domains/[domain] — see every feed we’ve found for a<br>site, and every recent item.

Why this exists

The big algorithmic feeds optimize for engagement with their own network. RSS<br>Anyway optimizes for access to the open web. The bet is that a decent aggregator<br>of everything-that-publishes is more valuable in the long run than a great<br>curator of a walled garden. And the bet is that giving people a way to add<br>their own sources — instead of asking them to trust a team of editors — is how<br>you get there.

It’s alpha. The classifier will get some sites wrong. The hot ranking will<br>sometimes hot the wrong stuff. The sign-in flow assumes you know what KeyPears<br>is. All of that will get better.

In the meantime: go sign in, follow a few domains, submit your favorite blog.<br>Tell us what we got wrong.

rssanyway.com.

Hack the universe.