Random20.net

Principles in brief

Polite by design. Non-commercial by intent. Transparent by principle.

What Random20 is

Random20 pulls a handful of public RSS/Atom feeds from curated list(s) and shows you their latest headlines—twenty at a time, across a few rotating categories. It’s a simple way to bump into writing, art, science, and ideas outside of the big platforms.

Controls & Sharing

• New 20 Generates a fresh random selection of 20 RSS feeds.
• Copy OPML Copies an OPML file of the current feeds for import into your RSS feed reader of choice.
• Share Feeds Copies the current 20 feeds (with their article titles and links) to your clipboard in a human-friendly format. Pasting this block into a chat, blog post, or email shares exactly what Random20 showed you, links and all. Random20 doesn’t edit the original RSS article/post title. We surface what’s in the feed — headlines, dates, and links — with only the lightest cleanup (stripping tags, trimming whitespace) so it renders cleanly.
• About Links to this page.

Note: Your browser keeps a small local memory to avoid immediate repeats. Nothing leaves your device.

How Random20 works (short version)

• We maintain a small JSON file of public feed URLs.
• On each page load, a random but balanced selection is picked; the page fetches each feed and shows the latest post title as it arrives.
• No accounts, no logins, no ads, no tracking pixels.
• On your device only, we use localStorage to avoid immediate repeats and remember per-category shuffles. This never leaves your browser.

Accessibility note: Previews load preogessively as each feed responds, update incrementally and mark the container aria-busy while loading.

Ethics & legality

• Public sources only. We read feeds that publishers deliberately expose for syndication (RSS/Atom).
• Polite by design. We rate-limit requests and honor robots.txt. No scraping behind logins, no bypassing protections, no heavy crawling.
• Non-commercial. Random20 has no ads or monetization.
• Attribution. Links go straight to publishers’ sites.

Privacy & GDPR

• No personal data from visitors. We don’t set analytics cookies or track you.
• Feed data minimized. From feeds we keep only what’s needed: feed URL, title, and our tag/group labels. We ignore author names/emails.
• Right to object / removal. Publishers can opt out at any time (see below). We remove on request.
• Lawful basis (GDPR). Our processing is based on “legitimate interests.”
• If you encounter accessibility issues, please let us know — Random20 is intended to be usable and useful for everyone.

Opt-out for publishers

If you publish a feed and would prefer not to be included:

1. Add a disallow rule in robots.txt that covers your feed paths (e.g. Disallow: /feed).
2. You may also email us at ops@random20.net with your feed URL(s) to request removal from Random20 rss feed list(s).

We aim to process removals promptly.

Transparency (crawler details)

Motivation

Random20 is a tiny nudge toward a nicer web—serendipity over feeds, curiosity over algorithms, small sites over walled gardens. It’s also a practical demo: anyone can build useful, respectful tools with simple tech. Random20 doesn't rank feeds. Random means random. Feel free to refresh your browser, hit New 20 and explore.

Source & remix

Random20 is FOSS-friendly. If you want to host your own, remix the categories, or contribute feed suggestions, get in touch.

• OPML export (copy in the UI) for quick import into readers.
• Feed list is a plain JSON file you can audit or fork.
• Minimal stack (HTML/CSS/JS/RUST) happily running on OpenBSD.

Contact

Email: ops@random20.net

If you see anything inaccurate, over-eager, or broken, let us know. We’ll fix it.

License & Source

Random20 is free software, offered as a commons experiment in internet discovery. It is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

Source code is available at SourceHut (Random20).

Random20.net is a commons experiment: small, respectful, open to all.