One of the fun side projects I’ve taken on this year has been powRSS, the public RSS feed aggregator for the Indieweb.

As 2025 comes to a close, I want to put together a summary of the things that went on. I’m a strong believer of building in public, and that includes talking about the goals, successes and failures.

Here is how powRSS did this year, from May 21st when it launched to today, December 14th.

Community Numbers

Costs

Thank you so much to all of you who helped support this project! It’s so rewarding to see the response it has gotten in the eight months it has been running.

I’m excited about what the next year has in store for us!

Origin

On Friday May 21, Fred Rocha wrote a blog post titled Small (web) is beautiful in which he talked about digital gardens, the indieweb, and the challenge of discovering new sites and independent voices to follow.

I replied to him with a blog post where I put together some of the resources I knew about like Andreas Gohr’s Indieplog.page and Viktor Lofgren’s Marginalia Search.

During this time I had been wanting to get back into the Gemini Protocol, as that project was what introduced me to the small and personal web about five years ago. I loved the ethos and the community aspect of it all. When documentation wasn’t available to achieve something, I knew I could ask for help and many kind folks would be glad to offer advice.

That evening I put together a quick proof of concept written in Ruby and launched the following morning. I find that the desire to help and build together remains true today with Indieweb communities, and I’m grateful for the comments, advice, and feedback I’ve received about powRSS since it launched.

This version was a static page, set to rebuild every 12 hours with new posts from its list of known feeds. It’s actually very similar to the way lettrss works to send out each book chapter :-)

Categories

During this time all blog submissions were handled via e-mail. I added my e-mail address to my blog and when people came across the project they’d send me links to their RSS feeds.

About a week later, as more people began submitting their blogs to be added to the feed, I decided to add categories and a dedicated submissions form.

You’ve got mail!

On the afternoon of my birthday, May 31, I came across a post from Joan Westenberg:

Independent sites who don’t have the resources to compete with major platforms in visibility and search rankings, lose traffic and, consequently, viability. As a result, entire categories of information and smaller communities become less accessible, hidden behind the algorithms of the dominant, bloated tech giants.

I took this quote and shared a link to powRSS on Mastodon, and this is where things got even more exciting!

Post by @enocc@mastodon.social

View on Mastodon

Westenberg, who has 30k followers, made powRSS visible to a lot more people, and that meant receiving way more submissions and responding to new kinds of feedback.

One of the first great suggestions came from Alex White who sent me a message suggesting the addition of a “Random site” feature like StumbleUpon. That seemed really fun to implement, so I wrote another blog post announcing the new feature.

With more blogs being added to powRSS, I began spending more time going through submissions. It’s important to me that powRSS remains a space for human creativity, independent voices, and the serendipity of coming across people who, like you, understand that the web is indeed beautiful. The things we read and interact with inform our decisions and strengthen our convictions, so cultivating a space that enables this type of discovery matters.

Today I continue to manually review all submissions. I like knowing that every link on powRSS takes me to the website of another person who took the time and care to build out a space for themselves on the internet. My absolute favorite part of this project has been discovering blogs I would have never come across otherwise and having conversations with those authors.

Design Changes

Around November I wanted to give powRSS a more retro feel to better reflect its mission.

In this design the two-column layout on desktop was important because I wanted those recently-added blogs to also have some discoverability. As you can imagine, some authors write more frequently than others. Some of you write every few months, and if you were to add your blog to powRSS without a recent blog post, it could take a while before others knew about your blog.

The “new to powRSS” column made it easy to find blogs which maybe didn’t have recent posts but you also knew were being actively maintained, since each addition to powRSS requires the manual submission from its author. Indeed, some of you told me you felt more excited about blogging again knowing that your posts were definitely going to be seen by others!

As you can see, powRSS no longer had categories like before. I thought a while before getting rid of them, and I think in retrospect it was a mistake, so I brought them back with a twist. I do want to explain my reasoning though.

By giving blogs a strict category, we end up pigeonholing authors, especially those who have personal sites. I love seeing personal stories along with pictures of a trip or the last book you read even if your blog is mainly about programming or photography or sports. The whole point of the personal blog is to have that freedom.

“Can I still share pictures of my dog if I’m in the Technology category?” was a question I received, so I realized site-wide categories weren’t the way to go. However, there is of course a benefit to knowing about the blog you’re about to visit, so I chose a happy middle ground by adding brief category labels below each blog.

This was added in time for the Winter redesign I launched at the beginning of December.

Here is what powRSS looks like today:

Thank you all for making the web more exciting, more vibrant, and more human. Have an excellent rest of the year!

Grateful,
Pablo Enoc