I went to https://selfh.st/ because someone posted a link to a github repo that had some tracking appended to the URL (?ref=selfh.st). OK your marketing worked on me I’m a mark.
I still have an aversion to this kind of tracking. Maybe considering how old-fashioned it it compared to the undetectable and nearly impossible to evade tracking methods currently deployed, that’s wrong. Maybe this is just charming and quaint.
Disregarding the above, I liked the site enough to subscribe to their RSS feed https://selfh.st/rss/. Well that was pointless, as there is no content in the feed. Each entry like this:
Self-hosted news, updates, launches, and content for the week ending Friday, August 1, 2025
Continue reading on selfh.st…
I kind of expect a meaningful RSS feed these days. It sign of participating in the Libre internet.
Workaround: I have used Kill the Newsletter! (which kicks ass) to convert the email newsletter to an Atom feed which appears to work. Got the confirmation email, now need to wait for a post to be made.
What do you all think?
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Link tracking: yay or nay?
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Placeholder RSS: Rude or acceptable?
The ?ref doesn’t bother me at all. Most of the target sites don’t even recognize it and if they do, I’m not sure what they’d do with it. Most of the links are to Github anyway and what is that going to mean to them?