When adding a new personal website feed to your feed reader, do you want all the past posts from a website to appear in your feed reader as unread, or would you prefer to see only the most recent ones, say the last 10-20 posts from the past two years?
For a webcomic, I want it to represent my progress in reading at any given point in time.
For news, there’s a “mark as read older than one week” button I can use.
For evergreen stuff like r/aww I’ll leave it unread.
3 Likes
Take my website for example, do you want to see all 160 posts dating back to 2003 when you add my feed?
1 Like
I would say I expect to see just the most recent posts, probably about 20 of them. (For a news website, probably more, but it’d depend on how many articles they post a day. More than one day’s worth of posts, anyway.)
But that’s assuming a general blog or news context, where I wouldn’t be expecting to catch up on the entire archive. (If I do love a blog so much that I read the whole archive, I do that on the website itself, haha.) I don’t really use RSS for other things, but I guess if you used it to subscribe to serialised fiction, let’s say, you’d probably want the whole feed.
2 Likes
Updated the original post with the context of a personal website (seeing that’s why we’re all here right :))
1 Like
for subscribing to a personal site’s feed, i only want to see the most recent/new updates post-subscribing. for something like a webcomic like memo said, then i would be ok with seeing all past updates, though i’d still get a little overwhelmed seeing my feed suddenly flooded all at once.
2 Likes
I definitely prefer the most recent posts but as long as there aren’t hundreds of posts included it doesn’t matter that much to me.
2 Likes
i want to see them all, no matter how many! it’s interesting to see an archive, and it takes two clicks for me to mark them all as read if i’m bothered by the number. even if i don’t have the time or desire to read every update, i might look at someone’s very first post to see how it compares to today. i like having the option!
1 Like
I’m not sure if it’s a quirk of FreshRSS or how all RSS readers work, but when I add a feed the backlog gets added to the current day. If there’s a lot of posts, that kind drowns out anything else that got posted that day. So I prefer 5-10.
1 Like
oh! this might explain why my answer is so different from everyone else’s… i use QuiteRSS and there’s no central feed, just a sidebar listing every feed i’ve added, which i open one at a time.
2 Likes
I like only the most recent 10 posts or so. Anything else is overwhelming and I’ll “mark all as read” anyway until I start catching up 
2 Likes
Well I guess I’m in the minority here, but I like to see them all! Mostly for when I really feel like doing a lot of reading, but also I can configure things on my end to not show everything, so given the choice, I’d rather have a full list.
2 Likes
I’m the same as @BinaryDigit. 10 is the perfect number. If it’s that, I’ll skim the headlines and see if there’s something in there I need to read at once. If there’s anything more, I’ll mark all as read immediately and just happily await new posts. If I’m honest that’s what I usually end up doing even if it’s just 10 posts, too.
3 Likes
I get this too 
1 Like
I think I prefer seeing everything? It only takes a second to mark everything as read, and then I can have an easy list to look through to see if there’s anything in particular that’s older that I want to read instead of having to manually search it out.
1 Like
I currently limit my feed to the 10 most recent posts. I also have a filter setup that it won’t display anything before 2022 as I’ve been restoring old posts over time and didn’t want to spam my 2004 archive to the feed as they’d look wildly out of place compared to what people have signed up to read
I’m going to keep this moving forward.
1 Like
I’m a fan of 10 because it gives me enough posts to get a sense of the writers style and scope of typical topics without giving me pieces that are so old they might not reflect the author presently.
2 Likes
I’m going to resurect this thread because I’m currently facing the same dilemma. And in my case the question is also a technical one and not just a matter of preference.
My site is burning through between 600 to 800Gb of bandwidth a month and that’s because I serve my entire archive via RSS and there are A LOT of automated tools out there that constantly ping my server at the RSS endpoints.
Just as a reference, i grabbed the most recent server log from my site (December 13th to today)
28Gb of bandwidth consumed by the RSS, that’s almost 95% of the total bandwidth used. That to me seems like a waste of resources and so I’m wondering what to do.
Should I cap it at a reasonable number (10? 15?) and then let people know the full archive is on my site?
First I would look at my headers to see if I could increase the number of NOT MODIFIED responses.
That’s a reasonable suggestion actually. Will look into that.
EDIT: Tweaked a few things, will see if it makes any difference. Thanks for the suggestion!