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?

  1. Link tracking: yay or nay?

  2. Placeholder RSS: Rude or acceptable?

  • gitamar@feddit.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    I find general source tracking perfectly acceptable. It does not identify me as a user to any of both parties only tells the target site that users originate from another site.

    I find personalized urls or tracking parameters bad. General source channel tracking is harmless for me.

  • illusionist@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Doesn’t ublock strip away the referrer?

    To me, that’s generic and not invasive.

    Selfh.st “just” started. Maybe he didn’t get around setting it up. Did you ask him?

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      The developer and the project have profiles in Mastodon, it should be possible to tag the accounts in this thread directly

  • paradox2011@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Hmm, I’m subscribed to their RSS feed and I get full articles out of each post 🤷 I use Feeder in case that’s helpful for context.

    • Bjornir@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Have you checked recently ? I did get the full articles until 2 or 3 months ago and now it’s the garbage described above. I am also using feeder.

      They even replaced older posts that were complete with the garbage, but if I go far back enough I still have the complete version of older posts.

      • paradox2011@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Try going to the settings for the specific feed and toggle on “fetch full articles by default.” I tried turning that off on mine and I got the same thing that you’re describing. Turned it back on and back to business as usual.