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.
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.
You can however subscribe to your home feed in Lemmy, just like on Reddit, in which case it takes you to the post on your instance. That’s the main function I lack in kbin.
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 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.
I’m fine with ads in my RSS. Content creators need to get paid.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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!
Love RSS. I personally really like Feeder from F-Droid
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.
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.
There’s also audiobookshelf for a self-hosted approach to audiodooks and podcasts, although the podcast functionality does still need some work.
Did you mean: Aurora Store
I do not use the Aurora Store, no experience either way. I have used F-Droid and and like it. My phone though I do not side load. I get from Google Play Store only. Also makes stuff easy to recommend if it is there. Bad part of Google Play Store is almost impossible to find FOSS stuff. Have to know what your looking for.
Yeh, I already installed miniflux again and selfhost it for my RSS needs.
Doing the same since maybe a year ago. Runs like a charm and is quite lightweight but with all the necessary features. Also quite easy to set up using Docker :)
I’ve been using Bazqux Reader since it’s a single guy and seems to work well. I also know that Tiny Tiny RSS is a super cool self hostable one.
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.
