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
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.
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.
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.
I run FreshRSS too and I use Readrops as my client on Android. I prefer reading on the laptop or PC though.
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.
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.
I use something similar called Slick Inbox, but I like the idea of selfhosting, so may need to give Kill the Newsletter a look.
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 :)
Sweet! Thank you so much for sharing this. I’m excited to learn more about it and hopefully try it out! That’s such a cool feature
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)
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 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.
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 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.
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
NewsBlur does this. Something like this that uses the fediverse would be interesting though!
should be fairly trivial to set up a bot that takes an RSS feed input and then posts the items to a fediverse community
that would require users to subscribe to the specific fediverse community instead of the source RSS feed though
in fact, I follow a Mastodon bot that does exactly this with Steam Deck release notes RSS feed and it works well!
@steamdeckupdate@hometech.social
This is a good idea!
I mean that’s what a link aggregator is basically. HN and Lemmy are link aggregators.
Seems like the main difference would be you’re not sourcing links from other people, it’s links from specific places you’ve chosen
… since it joins these users together like a karabiner, maybe we could use that as a name for this kind of thing… Maybe karbin or something?
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!
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!
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.
Great explanation. Thank you! I guess I will have to give them a shot.
As a starter reader, I recommend feedly. It’s easy to use, and has a phone app as well.
Some extra tips, with RSS you can subscribe to YouTube channels, and twitter too (the last one you can grab the feeds from nitter).
@GhostCowboy76 Check this video:
♲ tilvids.com/videos/watch/a428d…@petrescatraian Thank you for the video! I will give it a watch and go from them! I appreciate it.
@GhostCowboy76 you’re welcome! 😁
@petrescatraian I am setting up my NewsBlur right now and very excited, thanks again!
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.
