I went to https://selfh.st/ because someone posted a link to a github repo that had some tracking appended to the URL (?ref=selfh.st). OK your marketing worked on me I’m a mark.
I still have an aversion to this kind of tracking. Maybe considering how old-fashioned it it compared to the undetectable and nearly impossible to evade tracking methods currently deployed, that’s wrong. Maybe this is just charming and quaint.
Disregarding the above, I liked the site enough to subscribe to their RSS feed https://selfh.st/rss/. Well that was pointless, as there is no content in the feed. Each entry like this:
Self-hosted news, updates, launches, and content for the week ending Friday, August 1, 2025
Continue reading on selfh.st…
I kind of expect a meaningful RSS feed these days. It sign of participating in the Libre internet.
Workaround: I have used Kill the Newsletter! (which kicks ass) to convert the email newsletter to an Atom feed which appears to work. Got the confirmation email, now need to wait for a post to be made.
What do you all think?
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Link tracking: yay or nay?
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Placeholder RSS: Rude or acceptable?
My RSS reader, Akregator, has an option to open every article in an embedded web browser. I use this feature precisely for these kinds of situations. Most artists that I follow have their own websites with proper RSS feeds, but others only post on Bluesky or similar, that also only show the title and body text. If I can’t follow them through RSS, I just don’t follow them at all. I can’t be bothered to have their newsletter clog up my inbox or use some third-party service that will probably shut down when I least expect it to.