A retired tire engineer and 48,933 other feeds — Chovy's Blog

A retired tire engineer and 48,933 other feeds

2026-08-17, by Anthony “chovy” Ettinger.

How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from my own notes,<br>then edited by me.

Everyone keeps saying the web is dead and the search results are all generated now.<br>Fine. Here is the counter-argument, and it is mostly a list of numbers.

RSS Amplifier is an open feed directory we run.<br>This morning it holds 51,960 feeds, 48,934 of them still fetching cleanly, and 1,447,855<br>items pulled out of them. 44,131 of those items were published in the last seven days.<br>None of it comes from a platform API. It is people running their own sites.

What is actually in there

The split is 48,017 blogs, 2,722 music feeds, 631 video, 360 comics, 194 podcasts and<br>36 live streams.

The blog descriptions are the best part, because people write their own. Three from one<br>random sample:

Barry's Tire Tech: "A<br>retired tire engineer talks about the only thing he knows about - tires!!" 90 posts and<br>still going.

knoxnotes: "The public notebook of<br>a 27 year old man in legal practice. An art project of sorts."

lzrd.dev: "I am writing about my<br>experiences as a naval navel-gazer."

No SEO team wrote those. You will not find them by searching either, because nobody is<br>optimising for a keyword that does not exist.

Comics and free music

The comics category is small and deeply weird in the right way.<br>Hero Oh Hero has 4,834 strips in its<br>feed. Tamberlane has 476. People have<br>been drawing these for years, publishing RSS the whole time, no app required.

Of the 2,722 music feeds, 521 are Internet Archive netlabel collections. That is free,<br>licensed, human-made music with a feed URL on it.

How far back it goes

The oldest dated item in the index sits at 1990-01-01: a note about "Are Your Lights<br>On?" by Gause and Weinberg, on v01.io. People stamp imported archives with the date of the<br>thing, not the day they posted it, so that is a book date. The archive is still there and<br>it is still in a feed, which is the point.

How to dig through it

There is /discover,<br>/topics and full text search.<br>/opml exports the lot into your own reader, and<br>/llms.txt is there if you would rather an<br>agent read the directory than do it yourself.

The honest part

2,533 feeds are in an error state right now. 23,079 carry no language tag at all, and<br>the ones that do use at least ten different spellings of English (en, en-US, en-us, en-GB,<br>en-gb, en-AU, en-au, en-CA, en-ca, en-uk). The indie web does not validate. That is sort of<br>the charm.

Got a feed? rssamplifier.com/submit.