It’s always good to be in control of your own content sources.
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.
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.
I’ve never stopped using RSS, feedly been good to me.
I’m a big fan of feedly but the issue I run into is if I miss a few days it takes so long to sift through everything to find what I’m most interested in
My solution to this is to be more stringent with the feeds that I add. In this day and age, there’s so much volume that the important metric is signal-to-noise ratio.
If I find myself skipping the articles from a feed more often than opening them, I just unsubscribe.
Sure they still pile up if I miss a few days, but not nearly as before.
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
very very few sites offer an rss feed anymore
I’m gonna have to disagree. It’s mostly the big social medias that don’t have them, (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) but other blogs and news sites usually do have them.
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.
This has been my experience as well this week. I’m so disappointed, it’s mostly just clickbaits and ads.
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.
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)
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.
I switched to miniflux months ago and I’m pretty happy with it. Supports categories as well.
What I meant was assigning multiple tags (like “tech”, “security”, “foss”, etc) automatically to posts in a feed instead of needing to manually assign them to each article. So if I then want to filter all posts with “security” and “foss” I could choose those two tags to get the filtered results. Can it do that?
I’m confused… the list provides apps to read rss… But no rss sources?
Lemmy is one source. So is Reddit and Mastodon. And most blogs and news sites. And GitHub and Steam. It can be done on Twitter via rss-bridge, but nut sure how long that’s gonna last.
And YouTube channels. So much better than trying to keep track through any of the interfaces YouTube provides.
I self host FreshRSS and among the many sites I subscribe to, I also subscribe to quite a few hashtags on Mastodon which I’m aware isn’t highly publicised so not everyone knows you can do that.
If someone reads this comment that didn’t know you could do that -
Instance/tags/hashtag.rss
Eg:
https://mastodon.social/tags/introduction.rss
You are welcome.
(Set your purge limits aggressively, because despite people suggesting otherwise, you will very quickly have thousands of unread articles to trawl through)
Wow, your comment took me down a rabbit hole. I now too self-host FreshRSS on my NAS using Docker. And, oh boy, this is so good!
Excellent! If you looking for an Android app - although the PWA is pretty good too, Readrops is what I use, because it supports the GoogleReader API that FreshRSS exposes.
Feeder is a great Android app. It even fetches the full content from Paywalled sites
ya but I dont want active control. I want passive control. I’m lazy. :(
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.
Fluent Reader is the best.
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.
Yeah I use RSS feeds for everything. You should check out Open RSS, doing a lot of great stuff.
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.
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?
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.
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.
How does it work? Does it work for any website?
Full list is here
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.)
Understandable. RSS is fantastic for news and such, but lacks the community of comments which is what drives a lot of people to content they normally wouldn’t read.
This for sure. 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.
I loved iGoogle. I had my feeds set up just how I liked them. Then I moved to protopage when that went to the graveyard. Then a bunch of things (not everything) stopped updating.
I went back to check it out a few weeks ago and even fewer things were updating. A lot of places just let RSS fall by the wayside.
Pour one out for Google Reader.
Bro same. It’s almost like FOMO. There’s just so much content out there that I feel overwhelmed just trying to parse through what I’d actually want in an RSS feed and terrified i’m missing actual important stuff.
Glad to know I’m not alone…because of this thread, i downloaded a couple RSS readers (Feedly and Inoreader)…but, yep, that overwhelming/daunting feeling is back!
I’m not currently using RSS, it’s been years. And yes I also felt overwhelmed. I have same problem with Podcasts on my iPhone and honestly email. Just like in most cases I don’t want to be pushed content. My brain feels bad for not keeping up. The best use of RSS that I can imagine for me would be following a small number of original content creators who post erratically in multiple platforms. It’s another reason I love the fediverse so much bc we can slap /feed on the end of many addresses to pull that content elsewhere. And again I’m not currently using RSS lol. I’m just saying that I might use it for passionate follows. I think it’s a useful tool for getting people free of the big bad platforms.
