Who Reads My RSS Feed?
The author explores the traffic to their RSS feeds after moving their site to Cloudflare Pages. They discovered a diverse range of feed readers and user agents accessing their content, including both popular hosted services and self-hosted solutions. The findings highlight the unique characteristics of the feed reader ecosystem compared to traditional web browsing.
- ▪The author moved their site to Cloudflare Pages to gain access to proper server logs.
- ▪Over 700 unique user agent strings were identified, representing tens of thousands of requests.
- ▪The traffic included both well-known feed readers like Feedly and self-hosted options like Miniflux and Bubo Reader.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | George Mandis |
| Canonical URL | https://george.mand.is/2026/05/who-reads-my-rss-feed/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 19:49:06 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T20:04:56.984Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T20:04:56.984Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YpqghumiJnwp |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Who Reads My RSS Feed?May 18th, 2026 • ~4,000 words • 20 minute readI recently moved my site from Netlify to Cloudflare Pages, partly to consolidate the services I'm using and partly to finally have proper server logs. Plausible is great for getting the gist of who's visiting and where they're coming from, but sometimes I'm curious about things like:Who is actually using my RSS feeds?What weird bots are sniffing around?Which home-rolled projects are people running against my site?I have an RSS feed, a JSON feed, and an experimental plain-text feed. I wanted to see who or what was actually pinging them.I've been able to collect these logs for about a week now—a week that happened to include one of my posts hitting the front page of Hacker News.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at George Mandis.
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