It’s always good to be in control of your own content sources.
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
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.
I use a self-hosted service called Full-Text RSS Feeds, to which my feed reader connects, and then it gets the full text instead of limited RSS text feed.
It’s also worth using an RSS feed detector browser extension, because although sites don’t advertise RSS (or they don’t know what it is), often there are still active RSS feeds.
This has been my experience as well this week. I’m so disappointed, it’s mostly just clickbaits and ads.
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.
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 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.
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.
Ay I use feedly too, its basically become my replacement for r/gaming news stuff.
Yeah I use RSS feeds for everything. You should check out Open RSS, doing a lot of great stuff.
I run FreshRSS too and I use Readrops as my client on Android. I prefer reading on the laptop or PC though.
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)
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.
An interesting idea. The bonus being that if spam starts showing up in your RSS feed, you know who sold your address.
I use a different email address for each site I sign up to, for this reason. I have a “catch all” email meaning everything @ my domain goes to the same email account. I found out about the LinkedIn data breach before I saw news reports about it because I suddenly started getting a lot of spam to my
linkedin@address :)
I use something similar called Slick Inbox, but I like the idea of selfhosting, so may need to give Kill the Newsletter a look.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!)
That’s awesome, thank you for sharing this information! I’ll have to give it a shot and check out ProtoPage, too - that sounds pretty cool. Thanks again :)
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.
the biggest thing that I would use it for would be individual blogs, I just only have 3 or 4 of those that I follow.
For the others, it doesn’t help me that much to centralize them. Like with the hacker news rss feed, I can’t comment or interact from the rss reader, so I might as well use the website. With twitter, all of my twitter follows are already centralized on twitter; same with youtube, reddit, or lemmy – they already have feeds, and I can’t interact from my feedreader.
You could use it as a source for contributing links rather than interacting with existing threads. Which is more important in the early days, particularly for niche communities.
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.
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!
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, particularly ones written by individuals (i.e., not part of a larger site / company where there’s going to be lots of ads and stuff, just like, people talking about stuff that they care about) more.
Been using rss for years now. It’s always been the best way for me to filter into only the news I care about, way Lee 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.
FreshRSS is cools. The way mamma used to make.
And self-hostable which is why I switched to it. I also highly recommend netnewswire if you’re in the apple ecosystem.
I recently got back into RSS with self hosting FreshRSS with NetNewsWire. Great setup. Highly recommend if you are into self hosting.
If you haven’t already joined there are selfhosted communities on the Fediverse.
After Google killed reader I used Newsblur for a while but didn’t really feel like it was worth the price of admission. So I rolled up a FreshRSS server myself. I really like it. I use the FeedMe app on Android.
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.
Thanks for showing us that app, I was thinking about getting back into podcasts one of these days and it looks really nice
Feeder user here. agree with the paywall. not just in-app, a lot of good content is walled if accessed though browsers. of course i can revisit my feeds and remove the walled ones but then it would take a lot of time to check them one by one (added per topic).
such a let-down to be teased by a paragraph or two of good writing only to be stopped by a paywall below.
is like the blueball of readingThere’s also audiobookshelf for a self-hosted approach to audiodooks and podcasts, although the podcast functionality does still need some work.
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.
I use Feedbin, which also provides a bespoke email you can use for newsletters so they’re also pulled into your feed. Very handy.
That’s genius! I would love that feature. I’ll have to check out Feedbin now, thanks for mentioning it!
I recently revived my netvibes account, which had been laying dormant for a few years, since everything I followed had slowly gone extinct. Webcomics concluded, blogs closed…
I also installed FreshRSS on a subdomain of my website and might just be moving to that entirely.
RSS hasnt gone away. Webcomics, podcasts, lemmy… A ton of stuff has feeds. It was cool to be on social media and read the reactions to the content, but I’m old enough to have done without before and it isn’t half bad.
