Microsub support for the RSS miner
I know the RSS miner is not used outside of the inactive gnome-news these days, but I still wanted to open the discussion there, in case this changes someday.
The traditional use of RSS/Atom is to plug one client to multiple feeds. However a new usage became more frequent in the past years. That is to use a "personal" aggregator in the cloud, and then synchronize multiple clients with the aggregator. This allows to share the state of the feed items between all the clients (read or not, starred or not etc.). Personnaly, I use this intensively: I host my feeds on a nextcloud news instance, then I start reading the feeds at my office, continue on my phone while I am in the train, then finish the reading back at home.
The communication between clients and aggregators is chaotic: each aggregator has its own API, and each client must implement all the connections with the aggregators it wants to support. This adds work for everybody. And there are tons of aggregators (nextcloud news, tiny-tiny rss, newspipe, freshrss, miniflux, newsblur, inoreader etc.)
Luckily some guys are working on a specification that should standardize all of this, that is microsub. The specification is still a draft (in June 2022) but there are already clients and servers using it.
Instead of supporting API connections for all the aggregator in the word, I suggest we study the pertinence of giving the ability to the RSS miner to synchronize with a microsub server. I suppose this would require work on libgrss too.
What do you think?