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.
This has been my experience as well this week. I’m so disappointed, it’s mostly just clickbaits and ads.
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.
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.
I’m fine with ads in my RSS. Content creators need to get paid.
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.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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
I mean that’s what a link aggregator is. 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
NewsBlur does this. Something like this that uses the fediverse would be interesting though!
I’m going to check out NewsBlur, it’s a really interesting concept to me. Thanks!
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!
… 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?
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.
I’ve never stopped using RSS, feedly been good to me.
Same. I was using Google Reader since it launched, and I migrated to Feedly when Reader went tits-up and they offered migration help. For 18 years now I’ve had a few dozen news websites set up for just about every interest I have and I have seen nothing come across Reddit in the last 12 years that I’ve been using it that I didn’t also see on Feedly within an hour of it’s Reddit posting.
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.
Are you me? I did the exact same thing - Google Reader, then NewsBlur, then FreshRSS. I use Readrops on Android though, rather than FeedMe.
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.
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!
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.
I miss Google Reader. Is there anything like that now? Also, can anyone recommend an Android app for RSS?
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.
Inoreader is the answer, my fellow lemming
I’m using inoreader on iOS but I’m sure they have an app for Android. It’s pretty good and they have a web interface for desktop which was important to me
I also use Inoreader (on both Android and iOS). They have an app for both platforms as well as a Web interface. You can also usually access your feed with them in third party RSS apps (as long as the app supports it, of course).
One odd/annoying thing about using their native Android app on Samsung phones that have high-rate touch interfaces - the app gets finicky about reading long-press touches (like when long pressing on an article to perform a “mark all above read” or “mark all below read” action). It usually takes me multiple attempts to get my touch to register properly with the app to be able to do those actions. (I contacted them years ago about it and they said they were aware of the issue but didn’t know when they’d get around to fixing it. Given how long it’s now been, I doubt they’re ever going to fix it). :(
I am using FeedMe on Android, and FreshRSS (RSS Aggregator) in Docker on a Raspberry Pi.
If you happen to have a NextCloud running, there’s a “News” app, which has an Android client and it’s basically just an RSS reader. I’m still testing it out, and it seems to have some refresh issues, but generally it’s fine.
The Old Reader is supposed to be a clone that showed up immediately after GR closure. Not sure how good it is now compared to the alternatives.
I was a Google Reader user since conception and it also hurt me when it was closed. I jumped through many options at the time and a few years ago I settled with Inoreader. I pay the membership, taking advantage of their discounts offered during times like Black Friday, etc.
The platform is great, fully customizable and they have many options to create feeds if RSS is not an option.
I am also an Android user and I use daily and heavily their app, which is really good, on par with the web version.
I would totally recommend Inoreader then
