Show HN: Apricot – because RSS won't come back unless we move it forward

[brianpk]

I’ve been using RSS readers for decades, but they’ve started feeling more and more like a chore. Something about the inbox/to-do list design, counts of unread items, managing teams and complex filtering rules... I realized they add to my stress level instead of reducing it.

I’ve also come to rely on social media for discovery – hearing about new ideas, tools, papers, people, etc., but I’m so tired of the ads, spam, addictiveness, and toxicity.

Apricot is my attempt to distill the best of both worlds. It’s a web app where users subscribe to feeds like an RSS reader then see new items as they come in, in a single, combined, social media-style feed.

Apricot goes beyond traditional RSS readers in a couple other ways:

  * Users can follow TV shows (via TVmaze), Spotify podcasts, Substack newsletters, YouTube channels, and Subreddits (if/when they come back online) in addition to traditional RSS feeds. I’m open to adding other platforms if there’s demand and the content is programmatically accessible.

  * Cross-platform feed search. I know search isn’t hot at the moment but it’s pretty useful in this context. Search for “Star Trek” and find not just the TV shows, but the podcasts and Subreddits too.

  * Items can be sorted chronologically or with an ML-powered recommender system.

  * Users can filter their feed by platform, which is helpful for specific use cases like finding a good podcast episode for a car ride or a good TV episode to watch after dinner.

  * On-demand, GPT-powered content summaries help users see what an article is really about before clicking. (gotta sprinkle some gen AI on there!)

Apricot is free while it’s in beta. I’m still thinking through the pricing model, but it will likely be some form of freemium starting in September. I want to avoid ads if at all possible.

If you’ve got a few minutes (and come on, with Reddit offline, I know you do), check it out and let me know what you think!

App: https://app.theapricot.io

Homepage: https://theapricot.io

Blog: https://blog.theapricot.io

[mikecoles]

Link is to a login page. Might be beneficial to link to an 'About Us' page before asking people to sign-in.

As for AI summaries. Best of luck, but no thank you.

Good luck with your project.

[brianpk]

Good point. The landing page probably makes the most sense, but that's a Show HN no-no, I think.

It's probably time to merge the landing page and app, I'll put that on the to-do list.

[schemescape]

I’d think a landing page is fine as long as you can actually use the thing without signing up or paying anything.

[brianpk]

Yeah, I realize that now, but sadly, I can't edit the link in this post.

[stevenicr]

add an 'about this' to the login page? the apricot is clickable but stays on that page and nothing to get to site home?

[brianpk]

Good idea, just added a paragraph and link to the landing page.

[tuchsen]

I really like you're idea! In fact, I like it so much that I've been working on something very similar at https://lurk.news. I don't have anything released yet though, congrats on getting yours out there, it works pretty well.

I've got a couple of minor bugs to report. The first (very small) bug is that I couldn't sign up with the email address of "accounts (at) lurk.news" because it says that it's invalid. The second bigger issue is that your YouTube search seems to be down? I tried some niche youtubers at first and then just searched for "mr beast" as a sanity check and it doesn't find him.

Are you using the services official API's to find and display content? For Lurk, I wrote an Electron app that opens up websites in the background and then parses the HTML to query for data, then presents that to the user as a unified feed. I figure with it all happening on each client device it'll be very hard for any given website to block it, and that way I can expose an extensions mechanism so that people can scrape whatever they want to get a unified feed of data.

[brianpk]

Thanks! Lurk looks cool too -- similar, but more in a complementary way I think in that users have to click out of Apricot to read/watch/listen to the content vs. how Lurk brings the content into an embedded browser. Looking forward to seeing it in action!

Apricot's search is a mix -- for a couple platforms, I do call the search endpoint. For the others (including YouTube), it's postgres full-text search. It's a starting point, but it doesn't do fuzzy search, even in this limited lexical task. "mr beast" is a good example -- try searching for "mrbeast" (no space) and you should see it.

I like your idea for finding content, I think it makes sense for what you're doing with Lurk. Are you worried about response time, or is it more of an interactive tool for Lurk users?

[tuchsen]

Ah I wish I had more than just a screenshot to show! Lurk works in a very similar way to Apricot from an end users point of view. The scraping of websites happens in the background on the users device, with a bunch of scripts that it ships with to grab data from websites like Reddit and Twitter. You've lit a fire under me to finish though, it's been stuck at that 90% done threshold for too long now. It's just been good enough for me to use, but still way too buggy to release.

If you're scraping Youtube and relying on that index I guess it makes sense that I can't find my niche Youtubers (try "TattooedTraveller"). I don't know how much of an outlier I am in preferring smaller channels, but I would have appreciated a way to add a channel manually. I know that's a big ask though, and hell, don't waste your time on me I've got my own thing anyways :P.

[brianpk]

Oh, you totally can add a YouTube channel (or any other feed) manually - just paste the link into Apricot! For Tattooed Traveler, for example, paste in https://www.youtube.com/@TattooedTraveler.

As you can probably tell, I'm trying the "ship when still a little embarrassed" approach. It stings a bit, but it does get the product out the door...

[tuchsen]

Ah thanks for the tip! And FWIW I think you picked a great time to ship, it's really a great MVP.

[erezsh]

I like the direction you're going!

> * Items can be sorted chronologically or with an ML-powered recommender system.

It doesn't seem to be active right now. What is a realistic timeline for that to happen?

Other things I would like to see -

- Auto-tagging (gpt-powered?)and filter by tags

- Voting, for the recommender system, and as another metric of popularity

- Optional social aspect. Follow other users, maybe even add comments. (if I comment on an item from someone else's feed, maybe he can get a notification?)

I'll be happy to share more ideas if you like. Good luck!

[brianpk]

I love these ideas -- keep 'em coming!

The algorithmic sort is there, it's just a little hidden (and rudimentary, for the current MVP). Go to settings and check the box for "Algorithmically sort items".

[brianpk]

Actually, a question - for the tags idea, what kind of tags are you thinking? I can imagine a lot of different directions, do you have any specific examples in mind?

[erezsh]

True, I can also imagine different directions.

I think it could be useful to have several categories of tag

- topics: science, art, politics, etc.

- purpose: news, opinion, explanation, introduction, humor, etc. (for example, anything from producthunt.com is introduction)

- format: text, audio, video

I think it's good to have wide coverage, because it means much better filtering/sorting, both for manual and automatic.

[chillbill]

You make it sound as if you’re working on RSS3.0 yet it’s only fluff that’s added around your RSS client, which is fine for some people, but has nothing to do with “bring RSS back”. It’s not dead for many people. But for those who don’t want to use it (and wrongly call it dead) GPT won’t bring it back.

[pseufaux]

I see on the blog that the site is intended to be used as a native web app via the "add to Home Screen" share option on iOS; however, I've been unable to figure out how to sign in on the "web app" version. The login link delivered via email opens in safari so the "web app" remains signed out.

[pseufaux]

Never mind, I found the caveats section at the bottom of your blog post (https://blog.theapricot.io/posts/install-on-ios/). Looks like it requires the use of Google sign in rather than relying on an email. As someone without an google account, I'm afraid this means I am stuck using Safari.

[brianpk]

Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I'm starting to look into a native iOS app, but it's going to be a little while. In the meantime, I think Apple did mention something about progressive web apps last week at WWDC -- I'll have to look that up.

[pseufaux]

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Have you thought about just enabling login via user/password? Or better yet passkeys? Overall, the app looks very clean and I love the idea. I'm looking forward to giving it a try!

[brianpk]

I did start with username & password, but it was pretty annoying to have to type the password on the phone. I thought the email magic link would be easier until I hit the problem with iOS progressive web apps.

Now that you mention it, I'll have to re-think -- with the Google option there as the "easy" route, maybe username & password is a better backup option because it's more universal.

[phillipus]

For what it's worth, I use a password manager on my phone (iOS) so username+password logins are also trivial.

[arcbyte]

Very nice! A lot of cool features. I can't wait to playt with it. Maybe it will let me abandon my own project that is a baby version of what you've built: https://glanced.me

[tanishqkanc]

Looks cool! I love rss. Have you considered also letting people publish to their own rss feeds from directly in the app? I wonder if having a basic content creation side is the missing piece of a lot of rss feeder apps

[brianpk]

Thank you! I haven't considered that, but I'm curious to hear more.

Are you thinking a user's Apricot feed could have its own RSS feed so people could follow it, or generating RSS feeds for Apricot users' original content hosted elsewhere?

[quickthrower2]

It is good, well done! One use case I have on the native app is to get notifications on certain feeds. E.g. I have a feed for price changes of a product, so I get alerted when it is cheap. Can this do that too?

[brianpk]

No, not at the moment. How does your current app know the schema of feeds, in general, for the purpose of setting those alerts? i.e. how do you set an alert on price, when other feeds might have nothing to do with currency?

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it seems complex.

[activiation]

Seems odd that nothing happens when you enter your email address on a login page that you don't really know what it's for. Then I realized that I received an email. Otherwise it's pretty neat.

[brianpk]

Thanks! I see what you mean - would you expect more explicit feedback when submit the email, or is it more a question of more content on the login page to explain what's going on?

[eimrine]

I tried and I consider the feedback enough explicit. But maybe he has disabled JS and just do not see that change in browser's DOM.

[activiation]

I don't have JavaScript disabled.. i just didn't notice any change in the page after I submitted (besides my email disappearing from the text field)

[brianpk]

Good to know - there's supposed to be a message to check your email, but it sounds like it got dropped.

I'll blame the AWS us-east outage for now...

[brianpk]

Ah, good point.

[tekeous]

when the apricot has an RSS feed on the homepage

I used the Apricot to subscribe to the Apricot