this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology

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It's always good to be in control of your own content sources.

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[–] davehtaylor@beehaw.org 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Two major problems:

1: very very few sites offer an rss feed anymore

2: the ones that do either only offer the headline and then just a link to the web story, or if they give a full feed, inject ads into them, where you don't have an adblocker to stop it

I spent the better part of a month trying to curate an awesome rss feed and in the end, it's still so actively hostile that it renders it's barely usable

Don't get me wrong. I want rss to come back and be as usable as it was years ago. But it's a shadow of what it used to be, and active hostile

[–] eri@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

2: the ones that do either only offer the headline and then just a link to the web story, or if they give a full feed, inject ads into them, where you don’t have an adblocker to stop it

Thunderbird mostly solves this since it has a built-in browser and uBlock.

Agreed on 1) the lack of RSS feeds. Lemmy also has a problem that RSS feeds aren't federated, so commenting on new posts is very clunky.

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[–] slartibartfast42@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's wack how the internet seems to have collectively forgotten about this technology over the past decade, despite it not being the least bit obsolete.

[–] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago

It's not ad-friendly, and does not force you to create yet another account in yet another walled garden for big-tech to collect your data.

[–] LynneOfFlowers@midwest.social 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I never stopped using RSS even when it supposedly "died". Right now I have FreshRSS running on my raspberry pi since I like subscriptions and read state to sync between my machines but don't like to depend on some company for that. I use Reeder for my iOS devices, which can sync with FreshRSS.

For all folks say RSS is dead, I find a lot to fill it with. Blogs (yes I still read blogs like it's 2005), webcomics (most comics with their own site offer one, and webtoon generates them for its comics, though it looks like tapas doesn't or at least I can't find any feeds there), tech news sites, scientific journals, lemmy and mastodon generate feeds for users and communities, even YouTube still generates feeds for individual channels. There's a lot of feeds still active out there.

[–] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

RSS is definitively not dead. I threw $99 for a lifetime Feedly subscription about 15 years ago, rather than roll my own aggregation, and it's been my primary news source since.

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[–] IncidentalIncidence@feddit.de 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The problem isn't that I don't know about RSS, it's more that I don't really have any content sources that use it

[–] skepticalifornia@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You may be interested to know that any Lemmy community can become an RSS feed. Look for the little RSS icon to the right of the Sort Type drop down, click that and it takes you to the RSS feed. That URL can then be pasted into just about any RSS reader and you will see a list of the latest topics. I use ProtoPage as my browser home page and have widgets that show me Beehaw Technology, News, etc. I clicked on one of those stories to come to this post. (By the way, Reddit works this way by just putting an ".rss" at the end of the subreddit's URL. I used that a lot and am ecstatic that Lemmy allow a similar thing!)

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[–] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

How come?

I get the top hacker news from an RSS feed (https://hnrss.github.io/), individual blogs, YouTube channels, twitter accounts (getting the RSS feeds from nitter), etc

Most websites will have RSS hidden underneath.

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[–] GeekFTW@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Have been using RSS feeds almost 20 years now, since Google Reader and with Feedly since Reader was deprecated.

I don't think I've seen a single piece of news come across Reddit in any of the interests I follow that I haven't also seen via rss feeds +/- an hour of it's posting.

[–] MaybeFrederick@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do you know who to follow? For example, if I were interested in software architecture, I would need to follow 40 blogs, no? And how would I know if new ones pop up?

[–] tshannon@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

That's the hard part. It takes some time to curate a good list. One of the nice things about ttrss is that you can drop any url into the subscribe field and it'll search the page for RSS feeds. I'm sure other readers probably do something similar.

[–] Stellario@pawb.social 6 points 1 year ago

I stopped using RSS feeds when google reader went down. There aren't a lot of RSS feeds I'm interested in anymore. That being said, I hope RSS makes a comeback.

[–] dan@upvote.au 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There's a great piece of software called Kill the Newsletter that converts email newsletters into RSS feeds. Each feed gets a unique email address, and all emails to that address go into its RSS feed. It's open-source so you can self-host it. It's a good way to clean up your email inbox a bit.

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[–] Evolone@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For some reason, I could never get into RSS readers. I tried, but quickly felt overwhelmed and gave up. I've tried to get back into it over and over again, but always get just absolutely rocked by the amount of content that can be pulled in and get discouraged. It's also hard and daunting to think about getting into it at this point, now, because there's so much content out there that I don't even know where to start with adding RSS links of stuff I follow...because sometimes I don't even know where I get my stuff from (just from all over, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, email newsletters, kbin, Google News, etc.)

A big part of it, I think, is the fact that RSS doesn’t have community curated content. to me, it just seems like such a wave of news content...but a lot of what I enjoyed about Reddit/social media (including kbin) is the community aspect, allowing for more nuanced and popular stuff to be driven to the top of the feed (based on upvotes, retweets, user activity, clicks, or what have you). So the lack of that in RSS stuff really hinders me from fully adopting it.

[–] ira@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago

The trick to enjoy curated content via RSS is to subscribe to sources that curate your content rather than to raw news sources, e.g. subscribe a blog of a person that does important news reviews rather than to a newspaper raw feed. Otherwise the classic mailbox-like RSS reader experience indeed requires you to sift through content on your own and aggressively. That said, some commercial readers do try to algorithmically prioritize content based on your interest or offer discovery functions (a different kind of experience than direct community-based sorting of course, but there's trade offs here)

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 9 points 1 year ago

Love RSS. I personally really like Feeder from F-Droid

[–] SevYote@pawb.social 8 points 1 year ago

I had actually just been starting to build up an RSS roster prior to reddit's API meltdown. Perfect timing!

Just been getting tired of the internet being basically a small few sites, and wanting to get back to reading articles and blogs more.

[–] boingboingsplat@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

I've been using RSS for years, but mostly because it's been a convenient way to get updates for the webcomics I've been following for so long.

Hopefully Lemmy picks up in popularity, as the main reason that I used reddit was for the tree-style discussion threads, which RSS can't replace.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 7 points 1 year ago

Eh, FreshRSS keeps me up to date on my news, updates, and such- but, It doesn't fill the void I get from staring endlessly at reddit/kbin/lemmy/etc!

[–] Mikelius@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Been using rss for years now. It's always been the best way for me to filter into only the news I care about, away from political drama. That being said, I use nextcloud news so I can read and sync on multiple devices, as well as listen to podcasts that use rss feeds.

[–] halictuz@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeh, I already installed miniflux again and selfhost it for my RSS needs.

https://miniflux.app/

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[–] ThePJN@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

FreshRSS is cools. The way mamma used to make.

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[–] GhostCowboy76@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Can somebody explain RSS Feeds to me like I was 5? Yes I know I am late to the party as I saw somebody say they have used them for 20+ years. Thank you!

[–] ConstableJelly@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's just a way to subscribe directly to content sources rather than subscribing to a creator's social media account or a subreddit or something. So if there's a blog you like and you use your RSS reader to subscribe to that blog, any new posts will be fed directly to your reader. Obviously, the benefit then is that you have a central portal with a direct connection to all of your selected content sources.

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[–] edo@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Love RSS. Best way to read stuff online.

I use Feedbin, which also provides a bespoke email you can use for newsletters so they’re also pulled into your feed. Very handy.

If anyone wants a nice RSS reader for iOS, Reeder is great.

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[–] IniNew@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I have no idea if it's possible or not, but some sort of service that allows for users who have the same RSS feeds be able to comment on things happening... sort of like magazines lol

[–] dan@upvote.au 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

NewsBlur does this. Something like this that uses the fediverse would be interesting though!

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[–] randomguy2323@lemmy.fmhy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I been using the feeder app and its really good to get tech news , just add the RSS links and you have news that choose to read and not recommended bullshit.

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[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Check out AntennaPod for Android in the Play Store. It is a great podcast RSS client and it comes with a database of podcasts you can search. You can add your own too. For textual stuff I use Flym, but I do not know if that is still in development or not so verify either way.

So yes RSS is still great. Biggest issue is some sources have discontinued in favor of walling content in their own apps which is not exactly user friendly.

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[–] cyd@vlemmy.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I run a self-hosted copy of Commafeed, which is a seamless and fast replacement (both workalike and lookalike) for the late Google Reader. The main issue, really, is the long term decline of the blogosphere, which has severely decreased the number of interesting RSS feeds for me.

[–] tias@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I miss Google Reader. Is there anything like that now? Also, can anyone recommend an Android app for RSS?

[–] thesilencenoise@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

It really blows my mind that it still feels like all alternatives to Google Reader are worse or have less features than Google Reader did. It's still my most frustrating loss on the internet.

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[–] tsl@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it would make sense to remind about the existence of rss-bridge for many sites that do not have an RSS feed.

I've been using this for a few years and it's really good.

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[–] monerobull@monero.town 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I selfhost freshrss and it's amazing. If the reddit privacy frontends go down due to the api changes, I'll lose those feeds but I already replaced them with lemmy feeds anyways :)

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[–] LibreWorld@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've never stopped using RSS, feedly been good to me.

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[–] paletochen@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

After the closing of Google Reader and years of searching I settled a few years ago with Inoreader. I fully recommend it. They offer subscription discounts throughout the year where you can save ~40% of the cost.

Their webpage app is really good and the Android app is also extremely good and usable.

A great feature that I make use of is their option to create feeds from sites that don't offer RSS. Also I have connected Youtube so I have a feed with an update in my subscriptions

Completely recommended.

[–] GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I use RSS every single day to collect the 500+ tech articles I scan every day. My blog is actually powered by its RSS feed to then push out to 8 other social networks. Don't know what I'd do without RSS.

I use self-hosted FreshRSS (after having tried a few other self-hosted ones - I did a video at https://youtu.be/nBdLgRSR04o which compares FreshRSS to Tiny Tiny RSS) and I paired it with Full-Text RSS Feed (see https://github.com/Dither/full-text-rss) to return the full content of posts.

On desktop, I found Fluent Reader to be very good, and I did a blog post at https://gadgeteer.co.za/cross-platform-open-source-fluent-reader-is-my-current-best-choice-for-an-offline-rss-news-aggregator about why I ended up with it. Note I've gone back to FreshRSS after sorting out an issue on my hosting, because a desktop reader is really limited to that one device.

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[–] Jamoke@lemmy.themainframe.org 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This post got me to try out selfoss but after it being pretty buggy and unable to fetch 50% of the feeds I was interested in, I looked elsewhere. I wanted to install Tiny Tiny RSS but the instructions weren't my thing. Finally, I settled on FreshRSS and I love it. All the feeds work. The only complaint I have is that, at least it seems, you need to manually add labels to each article and instead just put a feed under a category. I wish I could put feeds under any amount of labels or categories I want. Maybe there's an extension for it that I have not seen yet.

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[–] Hexorg@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’m confused… the list provides apps to read rss… But no rss sources?

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[–] YourHeroes4Ghosts@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I use RSS every day- it's my primary source of news- but there are many sites I'd love to follow which don't have a feed. My reader, Inoeader, claims to have a workaround for it, but only on their paid version, which is stupid expensive.

[–] maH_muduL@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I like using Read You. You may also check out:

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