Right now I’m working on the idea that people should be able to follow sources directly, without platforms or intermediaries in between. And this is already possible. You can already subscribe to most websites through DirectFlow.

Originally, I built DirectFlow so that a person could paste almost any website URL into a form, and DirectFlow would immediately discover the main flow of that site and subscribe to it. I started using the word “flow” because it felt broader than just “feed.” A feed is more of a technical format. A flow can also represent other machine-readable relationships.

At some point I started thinking: what if a user simply scanned a website QR code, and DirectFlow instantly subscribed them to it? After all, DirectFlow already discovers the main flow of a website just from its URL. The system does not really care how that URL arrives - whether it was pasted into a form, shared from another app, typed manually, or... scanned from a QR code. That was the moment everything clicked.

I realized I had accidentally solved one of the fundamental UX problems of podcasting: subscription. Suddenly, subscribing to a podcast could become as natural and lightweight as following someone on social media for the first time.

Then I started looking around to see who else was thinking about QR codes this way. There were hints of similar ideas, but almost all of them had the same limitation: a QR code always triggered one fixed interpretation or one predefined action.

In my case, the QR code itself stayed completely unchanged, but what applications could discover from it was no longer limited. If a website exposes machine-readable flows in its HTML head or HTTP headers, then different applications can discover completely different things from the exact same URL.

For example, https://example.com may expose a podcast RSS feed in its head metadata. If a podcast player scans that website QR code, it can automatically discover the feed and immediately offer the user a native “Follow podcast” experience. This scenario already works in DirectFlow using the QRX JavaScript SDK. That was the moment QRX became a separate project outside of DirectFlow.

About the name. At first, the working name was QR-UX, because this idea is really about changing the user experience around QR codes without changing the QR code itself or the existing web infrastructure behind it. The QR code, the URL, and the website all stay the same. What changes is the experience applications can provide after scanning. Later the name became QRX. And eventually I realized it could naturally stand for Quick Response Experience, because that is exactly what this approach changes: the experience of interacting with QR codes and URLs.

I’ll continue writing about QRX here. Over the last week I’ve accumulated quite a lot of thoughts, observations, and already a bit of real implementation experience. You can follow my blog directly through DirectFlow: https://directflow.app/follow?url=https://yeldar.org