[new post] rss subscribers

_posts/2023-04-26-estimating-rss-subscribers.md

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+---
+layout: post
+categories: [software-dev]
+tags: [rss, json, nfsn, nearlyfreespeech, web]
+date: 2023-04-26T09:16:39-07:00
+title: Estimating RSS subscribers on NearlyFreeSpeech.net
+---
+
+I recently asked on Mastodon for tips on estimating your total number of RSS subscribers. It turns out it is rather easy to do. While I do have (privacy-aware) [analytics for my site]({% post_url 2020-05-08-simple-private-opensource-analytics-with-goatcounter %}), this only tracks page views.
+
+<!--excerpt-->
+
+Some friends pointed me to [this blog post](https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/) which describes how to do this by simply searching through your web server logs. If you use [NearlyFreeSpeech.net](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net) for hosting, like me, there are some additional steps.
+
+First, logs are _not_ enabled by default on NFSN. You need to navigate to your site settings to turn on logging. Logs are then stored in `/home/logs`. You can find all the information you need about log files on NFSN [in these FAQs](https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/logfiles/-).
+
+You should wait at least a few days or a week after enabling logs before accessing them so that you can collect some data. Then you can `grep` the logs to see the requests for your feeds. I publish an RSS feed as well as a JSON feed.
+
+```bash
+cat access_log | grep feed.xml
+cat access_log | grep feed.json
+```
+
+Unsurprisingly, the number of subscribers to the RSS feed is significantly higher than the JSON feed.
+
+Some centralized services put the number of subscribers in the "user agent" string of their HTTP requests. You'll see log entries like this:
+
+```bash
+"GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Feedbin feed-id:1344882 - 122 subscribers"
+"GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 265 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
+```
+
+I anticipated having at least a few thousand subscribers based on my site analytics, but it appears to be more on the order of a few hundred.  It's a shame that RSS readers are not more popular.
+
+Obviously, decentralized RSS reader apps cannot provide subscriber data. But it was still neat to see what apps people are using. For example, it was nice to see [NetNewsWire](https://netnewswire.com) in the logs!
+
+```bash
+"GET /feed.json HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "NetNewsWire (RSS Reader; https://netnewswire.com/)"
+```
+
+If you are interested in seeing the _total_ number of requests for your feed, you can pipe the output to `wc`.
+
+```bash
+cat access_log | grep feed.* | wc -l
+```
+
+It is important to note that this number **does not** represent _unique_ users, but it was still interesting for me to see. In one week, my feeds were requested over 78,000 times. That was much higher than I expected.