The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know

A few years ago I came across (probably on HN) this little Firefox extension that I quite like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fraidycat/ . Seems like it could help you fill this use case although as other commenters are saying I'm not sure I understand the distinction with RSS

This could be even easier to implement than the author suggests, at least for the cited use case of when a new web page is published (e.g. Part 2 of an article). The simplest solution--assuming you know what the URL will be--is to have your agent of choice periodically check whether that URL returns 200. That greatly simplifies the protocol since it piggy-backs off the existing HTTP protocol, and makes it easy to write your agent (or use an existing one). All that's left would be for authors to publish what the next URL will be; nothing else on the back end is needed.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but you can add filters to RSS feeds. What is proposed is pretty much just RSS, except for one specific item. Yes, it's more work on your side, but asking the creator to manage updates for whatever one thing any/every random person is interested in is pretty unrealistic, especially since the people asking for this are going to be explicitly not interested in everything else about the creator.

> There’s no AI to this. No magic. No problems to be solved.

Why would you not involve yourself in the new hotness? You _can_ put AI into this. Instead of using some expression to figure out whether a new article has links to the previous ones in the series / a matching title, you can have a local agent check your RSS feed and tell you if it's what you're looking for, or else delete the article. For certain creators this might even be a sensible choice, depending on how purple their prose is and their preferred website setup.

Overaggressive LLM scrapers have probably destroyed the feasibility of this idea, independently of whether the idea itself is any good. There are now captchas and other roadblocks in front of everything, which stop even tiny amounts of automation because of the sites getting hammered by the huge gobblers.

This is conceptually extremely similar to the Web Push API: https://web.dev/articles/push-notifications-web-push-protoco...

You'd need something at the browser/UA level to unsubscribe or to make the subscription exist for only a single message. Bad content publishers have taught us to never allow Web Push notifications since they always get inundated with marketing and other nonsense - being able to bake protections against that into the spec could be interesting.

I want this to exist, but so few would adopt it that would make it mainstream/normal to use because a lot of those places rely on getting your email to tell you about other things.

This would be fairly limited to blogs which have no intention of writing a newsletter or consistently enough to merit subscribing via RSS.

Although I'd love for everything I just said to turn out to be false.

I’ve always used huginn[0] for these types of tasks, though the learning curve/implementation is a bit cumbersome for more trivial tasks like the proposed scenario.

[0] https://github.com/huginn/huginn

RSS for lazy people who can’t bother filtering their RSS reader is probably a very promising concept.

Filtered RSS with some automation (ie: to delete the subscription) will do this for you.

Seems a bit like webhooks?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook

Although your model is polling rather than making the other server push something.

I would prefer to do something like the author described with RSS, but nice thinking and interesting concept.

Also a nice blog in general, I subscribed with RSS. ;)

Isn’t this exactly handled with IFTTT?

I know I’ve used IFTTT for precisely that because it’s the simplest and often free (when no major hardware installation is needed) off the shelf way to do it

Or is the author asking that a service host user defined notifications?

If the latter that’s a different design pattern

The http protocols already allow for this, if that’s the case then the op just seems like he wants other people to instrument their systems for his desired interface type (user defined notifications)

"Would you like to receive notifications from this website?"

No, thank you.

Isn't this just RSS?