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Ask HN: Should a User Subscribe to a Blog

by NieDzejkob on 6/9/21, 9:42 PM with 1 comments

Many platforms have a way in which users can indicate that they would like to be notified about future content of a creator. What is the best equivalent for independent blogs?

I can think of four potential ways to do this, and none are without downsides:

- RSS or Atom: high setup cost for user due to no builtin support in browsers.

- Web Push notifications: at least in Firefox, push notifications only appear for a few seconds and then seem to disappear forever, making it likely that the user will miss the notification. Also requires custom software on the server-side — I'd be curious to know if there is anything ready-made for this.

- Mailing lists: potential concerns about spam — there is no secure way of unsubscribing.

- Relying on a platform, such as Twitter and Mastodon: low specificity. Potentially off-putting due to off-topic or low-effort tweets.

Am I missing something? This seems like an obviously desirable feature, and yet there's no obvious solution. What's your opinion on this problem?

  • by marbu on 6/9/21, 9:58 PM

    Take your audience into account, and consider multiple options to cover most of it with least effort, eg. have rss feed and also a twitter/mastodon bot for people who don't use rss. Having rss/atom feed would also work as a primary data source, which other toos/feed can use (eg. a twitter bot).