A retired tire engineer and 48,933 other feeds — Chovy's Blog

2026-08-17, by Anthony “chovy” Ettinger. How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from my own notes, then edited by me. back to my blog postings Everyone keeps saying the web is dead and the search results are all generated now. Fine. Here is the counter-argument, and it is mostly a list of numbers. RSS Amplifier is an open feed directory we run. This morning it holds 51,960 feeds, 48,934 of them still fetching cleanly, and 1,447,855 items pulled out of them. 44,131 of those items were published in the last seven days. None of it comes from a platform API. It is people running their own sites. What is actually in there The split is 48,017 blogs, 2,722 music feeds, 631 video, 360 comics, 194 podcasts and 36 live streams. The blog descriptions are the best part, because people write their own. Three from one random sample: Barry's Tire Tech: "A retired tire engineer talks about the only thing he knows about - tires!!" 90 posts and still going. knoxnotes: "The public notebook of a 27 year old man in legal practice. An art project of sorts." lzrd.dev: "I am writing about my experiences as a naval navel-gazer." No SEO team wrote those. You will not find them by searching either, because nobody is optimising for a keyword that does not exist. Comics and free music The comics category is small and deeply weird in the right way. Hero Oh Hero has 4,834 strips in its feed. Tamberlane has 476. People have been drawing these for years, publishing RSS the whole time, no app required. Of the 2,722 music feeds, 521 are Internet Archive netlabel collections. That is free, licensed, human-made music with a feed URL on it. How far back it goes The oldest dated item in the index sits at 1990-01-01: a note about "Are Your Lights On?" by Gause and Weinberg, on v01.io. People stamp imported archives with the date of the thing, not the day they posted it, so that is a book date. The archive is still there and it is still in a feed, which is the point. How to dig through it There is /discover, /topics and full text search. /opml exports the lot into your own reader, and /llms.txt is there if you would rather an agent read the directory than do it yourself. The honest part 2,533 feeds are in an error state right now. 23,079 carry no language tag at all, and the ones that do use at least ten different spellings of English (en, en-US, en-us, en-GB, en-gb, en-AU, en-au, en-CA, en-ca, en-uk). The indie web does not validate. That is sort of the charm. Got a feed? rssamplifier.com/submit. back to my blog postings