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I think it's little appreciated that planets solve many of the practical problems of feed crawling.

If you wanted to follow 2000 blogs yourself you'd find it is really a hassle. You can follow one planet and its easy.

For that matter, if 2000 people want to follow your blog (and many other blogs) they are going to generate 2000 requests per polling period. It is not wonder why people like [1] get so exasperated. There are three kinds of polling periods: (1) too fast, (2) too slow, (3) both at the same time. Instead of having 2000 people poll your blog too often, one planet can poll your blog. It improves the scalability and economics of the system dramatically.

(e.g. the difficulty of finding a good polling regime is one of 10 or 20 or so unappreciated reasons why RSS has remained nerdcore)

[1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/



And her RSS feed doesn’t work at all


Why do you say that?


Try it. I’ve tried it with NetNewsWire


I subscribe. It does work. Did you read the linked post of hers? Perhaps your client is throttled or blocked.


Data point 3: does not work for me. Also using NetNewsWire. “Throttled or blocked” changes nothing, if it’s down for half of visitors then it’s down for half of visitors. I highly doubt NetNewsWire is breaching spec or poorly behaved. I bet rachelbythebay is just throttling by IP address and really has a 24 hour limit of exactly 1, so only one person per IP per day can subscribe.




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