[HN Gopher] The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know
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The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know
Author : deanebarker
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-08-12 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
HTML web link (deanebarker.net)
TEXT w3m dump (deanebarker.net)
| kmoser wrote:
| This could be even easier to implement than the author suggests,
| at least for the cited use case of when a new web page is
| published (e.g. Part 2 of an article). The simplest solution--
| assuming you know what the URL will be--is to have your agent of
| choice periodically check whether that URL returns 200. That
| greatly simplifies the protocol since it piggy-backs off the
| existing HTTP protocol, and makes it easy to write your agent (or
| use an existing one). All that's left would be for authors to
| publish what the next URL will be; nothing else on the back end
| is needed.
| SirFatty wrote:
| Isn't this what RSS is for though?
| baruz wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/927/
|
| You know which one.
| kmoser wrote:
| That's an example of the type of existing agent that I was
| alluding to. So you're not wrong, but it doesn't change what
| I was suggesting.
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| It could be implemented as some type of extension to RSS.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| "Would you like to receive notifications from this website?"
|
| No, thank you.
| stormbeard wrote:
| Isn't this just RSS?
| IshKebab wrote:
| No.
| maxbond wrote:
| The thing that's different with this proposal is that it's
| specified to be a one-shot notification. If RSS is a
| channel/topic than "let me know" is a rendezvous. You could
| build it on top of RSS (or ActivityPub, XMPP, webhooks, ...).
| _QrE wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but you can add filters to
| RSS feeds. What is proposed is pretty much just RSS, except for
| one specific item. Yes, it's more work on your side, but asking
| the creator to manage updates for whatever one thing any/every
| random person is interested in is pretty unrealistic, especially
| since the people asking for this are going to be explicitly not
| interested in everything else about the creator.
|
| > There's no AI to this. No magic. No problems to be solved.
|
| Why would you not involve yourself in the new hotness? You _can_
| put AI into this. Instead of using some expression to figure out
| whether a new article has links to the previous ones in the
| series / a matching title, you can have a local agent check your
| RSS feed and tell you if it's what you're looking for, or else
| delete the article. For certain creators this might even be a
| sensible choice, depending on how purple their prose is and their
| preferred website setup.
| rambambram wrote:
| I would prefer to do something like the author described with
| RSS, but nice thinking and interesting concept.
|
| Also a nice blog in general, I subscribed with RSS. ;)
| neilk wrote:
| Seems a bit like webhooks?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook
|
| Although your model is polling rather than making the other
| server push something.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Webhooks are not relevant to this use case.
| oreilles wrote:
| Webhooks would be much closer to a sane solution to this use
| case. Why would you spam a web server asking repeatedly
| wether something has happened or not, instead of just
| providing him with an adress so that he can simply let you
| know in due time ?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Because then you have to maintain a publicly accessible
| server, and he has to maintain a database of everyone who
| has clicked the button. It wouldn't be "spamming", just
| loading a tiny endpoint once a day (or less!) is a trivial
| amount of traffic.
|
| Doing it your way would be completely unworkable.
| SethMLarson wrote:
| Filtered RSS with some automation (ie: to delete the
| subscription) will do this for you.
| octagons wrote:
| I've always used huginn[0] for these types of tasks, though the
| learning curve/implementation is a bit cumbersome for more
| trivial tasks like the proposed scenario.
|
| [0] https://github.com/huginn/huginn
| maxwellg wrote:
| This is conceptually extremely similar to the Web Push API:
| https://web.dev/articles/push-notifications-web-push-protoco...
|
| You'd need something at the browser/UA level to unsubscribe or to
| make the subscription exist for only a single message. Bad
| content publishers have taught us to never allow Web Push
| notifications since they always get inundated with marketing and
| other nonsense - being able to bake protections against that into
| the spec could be interesting.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| I want this to exist, but so few would adopt it that would make
| it mainstream/normal to use because a lot of those places rely on
| getting your email to tell you about other things.
|
| This would be fairly limited to blogs which have no intention of
| writing a newsletter or consistently enough to merit subscribing
| via RSS.
|
| Although I'd love for everything I just said to turn out to be
| false.
| Martin_Silenus wrote:
| RSS for lazy people who can't bother filtering their RSS reader
| is probably a very promising concept.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Overaggressive LLM scrapers have probably destroyed the
| feasibility of this idea, independently of whether the idea
| itself is any good. There are now captchas and other roadblocks
| in front of everything, which stop even tiny amounts of
| automation because of the sites getting hammered by the huge
| gobblers.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Isn't this exactly handled with IFTTT?
|
| I know I've used IFTTT for precisely that because it's the
| simplest and often free (when no major hardware installation is
| needed) off the shelf way to do it
|
| Or is the author asking that a service host user defined
| notifications?
|
| If the latter that's a different design pattern
|
| The http protocols already allow for this, if that's the case
| then the op just seems like he wants other people to instrument
| their systems for his desired interface type (user defined
| notifications)
| cbdumas wrote:
| A few years ago I came across (probably on HN) this little
| Firefox extension that I quite like
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fraidycat/ . Seems
| like it could help you fill this use case although as other
| commenters are saying I'm not sure I understand the distinction
| with RSS
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