Slack is a Suboptimal Feed Reader (RSS / Atom)

This is a MySQL Blog, why am I posting about Slack, Feed Readers, RSS and Atom ?  Because blog aggregators, which are usually consumed on their RSS or Atom interface via a Feed Reader, are an important knowledge sharing tool in the MySQL Community (and in other communities, see Valkey below).  I know some people are using Slack as their Feed Reader, and I recently realized Slack is a Suboptimal at this task.  This deserves a post.

Blog / News Aggregator aka Planet

(If you are using Planet MySQL to get your MySQL News, consider reading this section and taking your news from Planet for the MySQL Community)

(If you already know about Planet for the MySQL Community and are using it to read MySQL News, you might want to skip this section and directly go to the section My Experience with Feed Readers)

I find blog aggregators a useful and unknown resource

Above is a quote from a Hacker News post (minimally modified).   Blog Aggregators, also known as Planet, collect posts from a lit of subscriptions and make these available to users in a single unified place.  These news can be consumed via a website or a News Feed (rss or atom).

The original News Aggregator for MySQL was Planet MySQL, it is currently maintained by Oracle (more precisely, Oracle Marketing Department, not the Community Department).  Blogs that promote the use of competitor databases, including some MySQL Forks, are not welcome there.  This led to Planet MySQL being considered Community Unfriendly (link #1, link #2, link #3, link #4) and is the reason I created Planet for the MySQL Community.

Planet for the MySQL Community (and its atom feed) aims at being a Neutral News Aggregator for the MySQL Community / Ecosystem.  My objectives are to be a reliable and close to exhaustive source of information for MySQL Users, and to foster knowledge sharing around MySQL.  I am not restricting this to Oracle/MySQL, I also include MySQL Variants and Forks, including Closed Source Cloud Vendor Products.  Planet for the MySQL Community is managed in the open on GitHub.  If you have comments, feel free to contact me, or to open a GitHub issue.  You can also support my work on Buy Me a Coffee.

For a few months, I have also been maintaining a News Aggregator for the Valkey Community.  It is currently in demo, it will soon be officially in release, more about this in a future post.

My Experience with Feed Readers

As I wrote above, Blog Aggregators are usually consumed via their News Feed (rss or atom).  To display these, a Feed Reader is used.  There are many feed readers, and fully covering this subject is out of scope for this post.  So I briefly share my experience in the next paragraphs.

I have used many Free Feed Readers in the past.  There basic free features are usually enough for me (showing new posts and marking them as read).  But the problem of using free readers is that they sometimes are discontinued.  One of such discontinued feed reader I used in the past is Google Reader.  At the time, this forced me to find another reader, which I did.

I knew some people are using Slack as their Feed Reader, but until recently, I did not consume my news feed with Slack.  I was happy with what I was using, and did not see a need to switch to Slack.  This changed when Netvibes, the free feed reader I used, was retired in April 2025, and I started using Slack as a replacement.  Things were OK at first, but I then started to have a problem with Slack RSS App.

Slack as a Feed Reader

Slack provides an RSS App.  Once configured, new items from a feed are posted as messages in a channel.  As an example, new items from Planet for the MySQL Community are available in the channel #planet_mysql_community of the MySQL Community Slack (Slack link, LeFred link).  But as I wrote above, there is a problem with Slack RSS App.

While I was using Slack as my feed reader, I started to see something strange.  Some MySQL News that were posted on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook were unknown to me.  This is weird as I am regularly (at least once a day) reading news from Planet for the MySQL Community.  I checked on the Website of the News Aggregator, and the blog posts were there.  Double-checking in the matching Slack Channel, these posts were missing.  This is the problem !

New items appearing in the middle of a feed
are not shown by the Slack RSS App

I realized that when an item is not added as the most recent element of a feed, it is not shown by the Slack RSS App.  I mentioned that in a message in MySQL Community Slack (and in the Valkey Slack).  This is an important limitation which makes Slack an unsuitable feed reader to get MySQL News.

A feed for a single blog / website might be "append only", but an aggregated feed can hardly behave this way.  Because the web involves many levels of caching, it is not unusual to crawl blogs out of order.  Also, adding a subscription to an aggregator makes posts appear "in the past", and these are missed by Slack.

I did not have this problem with my previous free feed readers.  These correctly show all posts from a feed.  And this is why I think Slack is a Suboptimal Feed Reader, and this pushed me to find a Good Feed Reader.

Note : I tried to report this, but I did not find a way to open bugs on the Slack RSS App Page.

Good Feed Readers

For me, Good Feed Readers should show posts even if they are not the newest items in a feed.  One such reader that I am currently using is CommaFeed.  I also quickly tried Feeder and Feedly, and they both look OK.

I am not particularly recommending one of these three, you can use whichever you like, even Slack (but you will then miss posts; hopefully, this will eventually be improved).  I mention these three as options that are working for me.  There is a lot of content about feed readers on the web, some of which are:

• The Best RSS Feed Readers for Streamlining the Internet (Inoreader, Feedly, Newsblur, Feedbin)
• The 3 best free RSS reader apps in 2026 (Feedly, NewsBlur, Inoreader)
• Reddit : Your favorite RSS reader ? (Feedly, Feedbin, NewsBlur, CommaFeed, Inoreader, ...)

Now you know why I think Slack should not be used a Feed Reader.  Are you happy with another feed reader not mentioned in this post ?  Please le me know in the comments.