Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024

NinjaZ@infosec.pub to Technology@lemmy.world – 838 points – Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024
lifehacker.com

Whatever the linguistic details, one of the main roles of RSS is to supply directly to you a steady stream of updates from a website. Every new article published on that site is served up in a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.

Unfortunately, RSS is no longer how most of us consume "content." (Google famously killed its beloved Google Reader more than a decade ago.) It's now the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what's new. But I think RSS still has a place in your life: Especially for those who don't want to miss anything or have algorithms choosing what they read, it remains one of the best ways to navigate the internet. Here's a primer on what RSS can (still!) do for you, and how to get started with it, even in this late era of online existence.

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Google Reader shutdown has completely changed the way I was ingesting information. It was so convenient, I always had 2-3 days worth of articles, web comics and news for reading.
Another problem was that many sites shifted to providing only parts of articles instead of full versions, and it was still the time when I wasn't always online to finish reading.

Sigh, that was my wake up call to not rely on google products.

The Google Reader shutdown hit me hard also. They offered all of the features in a really great app and many of the competitors shut down in their wake, so when they exited the scene, it left a huge hole.

I jumped to Feedly and have been using that ever since. After they killed reader, I've been very hesitant of using any new Google product, expecting and seeing them all inevitably die.

Seconded. Back when Feedly had a “pay one price” special for Google reader refugees.

Another problem was that many sites shifted to providing only parts of articles instead of full versions

That annoys me so much, that is the number one reason why I use Feeder more than Feedly nowadays (I manually keep them synced, Feedly is multiplatform and Feeder sadly isn't) as it has a feature to download the page and use their native app view, so much better than going to the site (even with Ublock I'd rather not go unless I want to comment or see comments, which sadly isn't a thing for most of the sites nowadays).

Oh, cool, thank you, I'll check Feeder out. I want my stuff to be on my phone. I'm going to the airport right now, and spending 8,5 hours without internet. It's funny that I wouldn't have a problem with that in 2008, but I have now :)

Is that the OSS F_Droid feeder or the other one?

I stopped following sites with dubious commercial tactics like the one you mention. After all, information is not so rare these days.

Reddit and Twitter were my RSS reader replacement. But then they shot themselves in the foot. Mastodon is not there yet. Lemmy is almost there, but still missing the non techy communities.

Lemmy is almost there, but still missing the non techy communities

Thank god, have you seen how the world is out there? Crazy shit /s

Friendica has the RSS feature and it is compatible with most Activity Pub services.

I'm reading some /r/hfy stories. Since I no longer get notifications for reddit pm, I have replaced it with the RSS Feed for "posts by user xxx". RSS also works like a subscription on royal roads, the alternative that a lot of writers switched to.

Works perfectly well, I'm very happy with it.

I've never left RSS. Went to Feedly like a lot of people. These days I'm using a self-hosted instance of miniflux because I got sick of Feedly making "enhanced" feeds and then not letting me get to the real RSS feed anymore.

I went with a self-hosted FreshRSS instance, it has its issues but it works well with the client apps I use.

Which client apps do you use?

NetNewsWire on iOS and the Mac. Pretty great, and it’s FOSS to boot. Still working on a decent front end on other OSes, the web client is okay-fine but could be better.

What is this enhanced feed feature of Feedly that I have never heard of? Is it a premium feature of something?

I ran into a couple of them but the most notable was reddit (before the APIpocolypse). If you try to subscribe to the RSS feed of a sub it will ignore your request and ask you to sign in to Reddit instead. It then uses the API instead of the RSS feed and reports your reading habits back to Reddit.

Oh lol. I wonder how that's going - especially when they had to drop their enhanced feeds for Twitter.

I need this miniflux in my life. I’ve been just putting up with Feedly. I understand they have to make money, but I don’t want to pay for RSS. Especially if I can DIY.

people don't do RSS anymore because websites don't do posts. everything is on some shitty proprietary social media shithole

I have a really intense desire to nibble an attractive mans toes.

Even stranger I have a need to tell someone about it.

Congratulations to you, I guess?

Hope you find something to fulfill your wish!

I'm confused if you're mocking op or this is actually some challenge you're doing

I live a life of whimsical nonsense and was probably horny for a moment so just blurted out what was on my mind. I find it amusing the number of downvotes I got.

I'm guessing most people thought you were mocking OP. Especially that last sentence would be sarcastic-mean, if it made any sense

When I left Reddit I fired up Feedly and did some house cleaning. Still looking for more decent feeds.

Here are some of mine: XKCD, Nature, Slashdot, New Scientist, FactCheck, Neurologica, Science Based Medicine

What else you got?

All youtube channels have their own feeds, but they're not obvious to find. The first part of the URL looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

Go to the channel's home page and search the page source for "channel_id=" (with a long string of numbers and letters after it, often starting with a "U") then paste the ID after the equal sign. The channel id looks something like this: UCtwKon9qMt5YLVgQt1tvJKg

You wouldn't need that if YouTube actually sent notifications like it's supposed to. So this will come in handy.

Hang on, do you or anyone else know if it's possible to add playlists to RSS in this way? There are channels that I overall don't want to watch but that have a specific playlist I want to follow.

This might be useful for their community posts - is there a seperate feed for them or are they included in the videos feed?

I never see the community posts anywhere except for the home page & on the creator's page. Which makes it frustrating because I only stay in the subscriptions page - so I only get updates if they upload a video.

Vivaldi detects these automatically so you can in a couple of clicks. It's great

I started using RSS during the summer. It filled a hole after I quit reddit, since I used to get a lot of my news from the subreddits for my city and my province. There's also the on-going bickering between Meta and Canadian lawmakers/news media groups which means I see way less articles on social media than I used to. Honestly, after adding a couple local news outlets to my RSS apps, I feel better informed than ever before, and I spend a lot less time arguing with people on reddit. Win-win if you ask me.

Anyone looking for good RSS readers, I use Feeder on my phone (Android-only), Fluent Reader on desktop (cross-platform), and I also use the RSS widget of the Renewed Tab addon for Firefox. Both apps I use work locally, and have the ability to fetch full articles in-app (the addon just opens the articles in Firefox).

Something also worth mentioning: you can often find RSS feeds by checking the page's source (on Firefox: right-click and "View Page Source") and using Ctrl+F to search, there's usually a URL somewhere. Keywords to search for: "feed", "RSS", "xml", "atom". For example, if I go to this community's page on lemmy.world, I can Ctrl+F "feed" on the page source to find https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/technology.xml

Feeder on my phone (Android-only)

If you host an RSS aggregator yourself such as FreshRSS, I'd recommend using ReadYou or FeedMe (not Open Source) instead so that you can sync. I use FeedMe on Android and Fluent Reader on Linux. It's nice to have everything synced.

I also recommend rss-bridge if you're self hosting. Helps gets you more RSS feeds from websites that don't have them.

I don't self-host (...yet. I do have a couple of things I'd like to play around with eventually) but honestly, for my use case I don't feel any need to sync RSS. I mostly read articles on my phone, and if I'm on my PC I just remember which articles I've read. I can see how fetching RSS locally on each device might fall apart if one follows a large number of feeds, though.

It seems like a new project/rabbit hole for me.

With FreshRSS would I be able to sync Feeder and Feedly?

The problem with most rss readers IMHO is that they lack a decent filter function. ttrss had great filters, but I stopped using it when they switched their dev process (I think to docker at the time, which I couldn't use with my hoster). Now using rss guard, not too happy but surviving.

RSS is great, but often contains a lot of noise. If you can filter only what you care about, great. Otherwise it's just information overload.

RSS is great, but often contains a lot of noise

I think you nailed it there. Curating is too much of a hassle.

Because if you don't save shit in your RSS feed, you might never ever again find it using google or other search engines.

What, search? Listen, you don't actually want that, you want recommendations from our amazing algorithm and AI based on overall connections between topics and trends and other very complex things. You don't even know what it is you're looking for, but we do, so here are some results that generate revenue for us. //Google

I use an RSS reader but I'm just using it as a clunky reddit client for my city's subreddit 😅

Does the RSS feed from Reddit actually work? I tried it on my RSS reader and got error messages after a day.

I've had issues occasionally but if you use old reddit it seems to always work. Like old.reddit.com/r/example.rss

Ah perfect, I'll try the old style link then. Thank you!

edit: So far it works!! We'll see if it'll update itself, but really thank you so much for the tip! Now I can look at my local subs without having to go to Reddit directly

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Anyone got a favourite open source rss reader? So far I am mostly finding stuff with subscriptions. Even though many have a free plan i'd like to try to find an open one first

I've recommended these a couple of times in this thread, but I use Fluent Reader on desktop (cross-platform) and Feeder on Android. Both are FOSS and load articles locally, so no account/subscription required.

I cannot tell you how much better it feels to click a link to an android app and it opens github and not the play store.

Check out FreshRSS. You can self host, so if you have a home server, this will do the trick. Use your favorite reader app that can connect to it.

I get the subscription fatigue. I’m currently paying for Inoreader because I haven’t fully cut over to FreshRSS. It has good tools that are worth it for many, but all those subscriptions add up fast.

FreshRSS is awesome, I use it with Read You on Android and I love it

When Google Reader shut down, Feedly had an "import from Google" feature on their sign up page. Been using it for free ever since.

I mean, I’m all for it, but I thought the problem was that so many sites stopped offering RSS output options.

Or if they do, it's not the full article. Which I get, them being in the business of selling ads and all.

This is why I stopped using rss. I fucking hate seeing an headline I’m interested in, clicking to expand and then having to click through to the site to read the article, dismiss the goddam email list overlay, fight with the stupid paywall, and then close the tab out of frustration.

I miss the days of actually reading articles in my rss feed reader.

Perhaps I'm just an old 40 year old fart, but the Internet was better before. I miss the 00s and the 10s. Now it's just paywalls, LLM generated bullshit, and search results from SEO orgies

I'm still finding rather many RSS feeds, though there's few buttons these days. Ideally, you want something that auto-discovers feeds on a webpage.

RSS was great. I've still got a deep grudge over the removal of Live Bookmarks from Firefox. That was how I kept up with the various webcomics I was reading at the time. All I had to do was just check on all my little orange drop-down menus to see if any new posts were up, and I was golden. Now I have to keep extra tabs open and try not to bury them under all the other tabs I open up and forget about. >_<

RIP Google Reader too, a perfectly functional app Google killed.

If webcomic sources are still relevant to you and are the usual suspects, you could use Mihon (Android App).

That seems like a lot of work. It would be easier for me to write a bot that will post every article from my favorite sites to technology@lemmy.world. Then I could have another bot summarize it in the body.

Oh, wait…several people already have. :-/

I've tried so many times. I went ahead and checked out feedly right now just to have them change my mind, and they failed miserably. You run into paywall issues right away, they don't list pretty major newspapers I would assume to have rss, and adding something like business insider or the independent gives you so much dung mixed with the things you are actually interested in.

Let's say I'm into business, but don't want car related news? What if I'm into investing yet don't want to hear about Trump?

If there was something like "more like this"/"less like this" function, then maybe, but just at a glance, one of many, I don't see how it could present me with the info I want in the structure I want.

Global events and news
Economical trends on both macro and micro level for specific domains
Exclude entertainment, sports, fashion, drama
Update every hour
Total headlines max 30 per day
Max visible 7 at a time.

I've tried, and it's not worth the hassle even trying to set that up. For me, at least.

Adding any RSS feed is like getting an information enema with raisins sprinkled in.

I suggest you give it another try, it can actually do what you're asking it to do. Sounds like you just added the global feed of crap.

For better results, you typically have to search " rss" and hope they have decent support. It's really hit or miss.

For example, the independent that you were asking for, actually has a huge amount of fine tuning you can do. Go ahead and check their link and add the categories you'd like to read about instead catching all that junk you don't care about:

https://www.independent.co.uk/service/rss-feeds-775086.html

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I want to get into RSS but all the apps I've tried have been lacking. I want to subscribe to the Factorio blog and be able to see their GIFs/videos directly but so far no app has been able to do that. Either they don't load any images (wtf?) or they just load a static preview that I then have to click to actually play. Does anyone know of an RSS app that can load GIFs/videos automatically?

I find RSS is always either too little or too much. It is almost impossible to get it "just right", at least for me, especially taken into account the time and labor it would need to set up "just right".

Have you tried imagus, hoverzoom or thumbnail zoom? It has changed the way I internet. Hover your mouse over almost any image, video, or gif and it automatically opens and shows the full size. I have been using imagus on firefox for ages and quite like it. It doesn't work with some websites or apps, and probably wouldn't work with an installed app, but should work for one of the rss web apps?

Please disregard if this is a silly suggestion, I have always been curious about rss feeds, but have never actually used one.

Got Feeder to try RSS on my PC based on this post, added a bunch of cool sites, was enjoying it, and then quickly got smacked in the face with "upgrade to view more posts".

Anyone recommend an RSS reader that doesn't have stupid "fuck you, pay me" limitations?

Oof. The real Feeder is a FOSS Android app, get it on F-Droid.

On PC, there are two Firefox plugins, one to bring back "live bookmarks" (RSS feeds), and one to bring back the radio-waves-like icon in the address bar of sites with RSS feeds available. Let me check...

Edit: It's just one plugin, Livemarks. If you put the bookmark it creates into the bookmarks toolbar, then it becomes a drop-down menu of the headlines/RSS items. 👍

I use Thunderbird for RSS...however I should also admit I only have two things - xkcd and another comic that hasn't been posted in so long I think it might be dead.

What's the cost?

I downloaded Feedly and they want 8 bucks a month, which seems high considering they don't actually create the content. I'm all for paying developers but that's more than I pay fo other actual new sources

It's for the service. It's not a local rss reader, it works like email. Local/offline ones are usually cheap/free

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The number of sites that still supports RSS is impressive when you think about how niche it is right now. I was surprised when I saw some big comics sites had it.

Is it because of Wordpress?

I doubt webtoon is built on wordpress :D

I was thinking all those websites which persistently ask you to join their newsletter, but still have RSS available too.

Google Reader died more than a decade ago? oh my jeebus, I feel ooooooooollllld

I never had a good way to ingest info, but i setup a self-hosted FreshRSS instance a few months ago and it’s completely changed how i consume information for the better. I spend a lot less time scrolling through shit that never interested me much in the first place

What if I told you that I have never used Google to view RSS news feeds? It seems to me that these stereotypes about people’s attachment to Google services only take place somewhere in the USA and Europe.

I still use it every day to access new content from my YouTube channels that I watch since I don't have a Google account and for tech news.

How do I set this up?

Say I want to get an RSS feed for when Practical Engineering uploads a new video?

I find they just get buried in YouTube and I’d love to set this up for the channels I am really interested so they don’t get lost in the noise.

If you're down to use Piped as a YT front-end, there's an RSS icon on every channel page in the top right corner.

If you want to use YouTube directly, use the following link and append the channel ID of whatever channel you want to follow: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

Another alternative would be using something like FreeTube, which can use RSS to fetch subscriptions (but doesn't by default unless you're subbed to a high number of channels).

I loved RSS feeds. But I’ve given up on them. And it would seem so have many of the sites I used to frequent. I read RSS offline, so right there I have a problem as the vast majority of RSS apps expect an internet connection. Sites used to write content in such a manner that it was easily readable in RSS, now they don’t. The decline in popularity of RSS has meant that after I get comfortable with an app it stops being updated and no longer works as the developer decides it’s not worth keeping up. Sites make RSS feeds harder to find, if they even have one.

I

Assuming you read RSS offline on mobile, Feeder has an option to fetch full articles and stores them for offline reading. It's FOSS and actively-maintained, having received an update just last week.

I've never encountered a site I wanted to follow that didn't have RSS, but I wholly agree it's often needlessly complicated to find the feed links.

Thanks for the rec, but unfortunately I’m on iOS.

Ah, my bad! I should have guessed by your username, which I assume is in reference to the now-defunct reddit app.

I can't personally vouch for it, but NetNewsWire might be a good option for iOS if you haven't tried it. It's also FOSS, updated as recently as June 2023, can read RSS feeds locally and has a reader view to fetch full articles. You'd have to test if it caches fetched articles though, but I don't see why it shouldn't.

Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.

(Yep, it’s the former Reddit app)

Edit: it is offline, but it only pulls in the first paragraph or whatever. You can read a snippet, but it’s not really an offline reader that pulls in the full article to be read.

I will vouch for it. I use it on my iPad constantly and have few complaints. I don’t think it syncs well between iPad and Mac or Phone when using iCloud sync, but I think they have other methods and I don’t really need sync since I do my media consumption on the iPad.

This is my experience too. The sites hosting the articles that I want to read only provide the first parapraph and then a link back to the webpage. News is just headlines. I love that RSS doesn't allow much formating so you end up with an experience focused on the content itself (and no ads). It feels like a long time ago since I really enjoyed my RSS feeds.

I'm gonna shill for FreshRSS and Feed Me. Been a fantastic combination so far.

Self hosting FreshRSS allows me to curate shit I care about. Even better, it's private aggregation. Sometimes though, I miss the conversation around these topics. For that, Lemmy exists.

I'm using Feeder app and it's the best. Others are resource heavy and light apps won't load the whole story instead redirects. Which is a problem. Feeder on the other hand, free open source privacy respecting light app which shows the whole story in the app itself. Very very useful and not a disturbing one.

So I just downloaded feeder (edit okay I made a lite app with Hermit) but does anyone had a good way to setup a default set of feeds?

Just something to get started. I'll play around with it later but maybe someone can save me some time...

Another Feedly user, here. Definitely the way to go after the death of Google Reader.

My only concern with it is that I'd prefer any advertisement revenue to go to the original website with the content I want. Fortunately, if the website's ads aren't intrusive, I just disable ad block on that site and click through to it, giving them the views they need to keep going.

I love TinyTinyRSS (self hosted) and lire for iOS which syncs with it. Very powerful setup. I have issues with overusing social media sites so I have sites like Lemmy do the "Top Week" and so on for areas I'm interested in.

Cool setup, mine is pretty similar, but I use self-hosted FreshRSS instead.

RSS is great. Podcasts and webcomics are easier to follow with RSS.

How do you set it up for podcasts ? Say The Darknet Diaries for instance.

Podcasts are actually typically primarily served by RSS, whatever podcast app you are using just indexes them and manages downloads. So typically you can go to the website of the podcast, e.g https://darknetdiaries.com/subscribe/ and if you scroll down on the subscribe page you'll see a link to their rss feed. Just copy the link from the feed into whatever reader you use and you'll be updated in your reader app when new episodes are released.

The easiest way is to use RSS for podcasts is to use a dedicated app. AntennaPod is what I use (Android) and I can't recommend it enough, it has a search feature to find the RSS feeds for whatever podcast you like and add them to your subscriptions.

Yeah I don't get what he says about using a RSS feed/reader for podcasts.

I use AntennaPod as my client, but you can use anything.

One can do an Internet search for the podcast name and rss to find the RSS feed.

A podcast client already uses RSS under the hood to get updates for your podcast subscription. I recommend AntennaPod if you use Android. Love Darknet Diaries btw!

i remember in high school (2010s) i tried using RSS but increasingly the feed wouldn't even have the article, just the title and the link so you'd have to visit their website. especially obnoxious because my obnoxious school district filtered approx 90% of the internet (for shocking reasons like 'forums' or 'TV/entertainment' or 'sports' or 'media')

Inoreader has an "Load full content" button (and hotkey) that loads the body of text without having to visit the page.

As someone who has only dipped his toe into this tech, and into podcasts, for that matter, what's the best android app to use for this?

I don't really want to use Spotify, etc. Is there a preferred independent and/or FOSS that people like?

Feeder for RSS and AntennaPod or EscapePod for podcast. All three can be retrieved from F-Droid. EscapePod is much simpler than AntennaPod but also lacks a lot of its features on purpose

Thank you. This is exactly the response I'm looking for.

Now I have to decide what the heck I'm interested in following...

I have an instance of freshrss feeding into feedme and it's awesome. I went with feedme because it's got a built in mobilizer that you can customize if the feed doesn't have the whole article content.

Does anyone have a list of sites with good RSS feeds? News sites preferably - I’m having a hard time finding some of them.

Somebody else in this thread linked a Github repo listing "Awesome RSS Feeds", they have categories by country and by topic.

Otherwise, this is the method I use to find RSS feeds from websites that don't have a link/button to their feed (copy/pasted from my other comment in this thread):

You can often find RSS feeds by checking the page’s source (on Firefox: right-click and “View Page Source”) and using Ctrl+F to search, there’s usually a URL somewhere. Keywords to search for: “feed”, “RSS”, “xml”, “atom”. For example, if I go to this community’s page on lemmy.world, I can Ctrl+F “feed” on the page source to find https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/technology.xml

I don't know what client you're using, but Inoreader usually finds the RSS feed even if the webpage does not link to it

I realize you're asking for a list of sites with RSS feeds, but I wanted to highlight an easier method of sometimes finding feeds than that mentioned by Evkob: Feedbro add-on for Firefox.

You can click the icon for it while browsing a site to check for whether or not any feeds are available. Unfortunately it doesn't always find them, I think depending on the part of the site you're browsing or how the feed is being provided, perhaps both, but it's been a pretty useful tool in my experience, especially for sites that seem determined to bury them.

Thank you! This is great! I used to use an RSS feed on a regular basis, but it’s been awhile. I’m definitely getting reacquainted, but it’s just not as easy to find sites with an RSS link at the top like it used to be. These tips are definitely helpful so I appreciate it :)

RSS is my everyday goto, I'm using QuiteRSS with filters for specific words, really neat one.

When I switched from Reddit to Lemmy, I started using Feeder for news to fill that gap. I think my podcast app on Linux also uses RSS.

I also used Feeder with Nitter for a while to keep up with friends posting on Twitter (I never really got into Twitter myself). Though that stopped working at some point.

So yeah, RSS definitely still has uses today.

I started fiddling with a self hosted rss thing but never got around to putting the app on my new phone. I might give a different one a try sometime it was kinda basic.

Definitely try "Read You"! It utilises Material You, has a sick UI and the dev is really nice. I think there are a lot of features, but I've just left almost everything on default.

Downloaded Feeder. It seems like a really good way to read the articles, but I also like looking at the comments, as they often mimic the threads here on Lemmy, and can add information missing in the articles, auxillary information, and cool anecdotes. I'll see if this becomes the way I look at the articles.

Used Google Reader and now use Feedly. I go ahead and pay for Feedly since I like it enough to do so.

I can't imagine not using RSS to consume stuff. It just makes things so much easier.

newsboat is also quite stable as a RSS reader. if you like command line

The example feed in that article is so boring that it makes me want to kill myself.

When Google’s shut down I switched to Feedly. They even imported my Google settings so there was no downtime. I’ve been paying for their Pro version ever since. It’s a really good app!

If anyone is using an apple device, NetNewsWire is open source and is dead simple. No extra features, no premium tier, can sync with iCloud or self hosted servers, and the reader mode can be applied source-wide.

What feeds do you watch? Anything stand out? Thanks for the tip on the app!

Awesome - I’ve been self hosting commafeed for a while and it’s pretty low maintenance but when I’m in front of a computer, too many other things are demanding my attention.

i find it frustrating if i can't immediately tell the poster of a site their content is wrong or sucks or is generally bad. therefore social media is my only option, because the world must know my valuable contributions.....🤌🤌

RSS has always been great! Thankfully I never relied on Google Reader and have been using Newsify for 5+ years. Great app with a great newspaper view as well as an identical web version. Keept me off of Google and don't have to rely on Feedly either.

Newsify also supports Feedly accounts though I've never needed to consider migrating. I think I've had a couple full text issues with certain items but it's been amazing great and I've really enjoyed their product and price point for subscription ($50CAD/yr, I believe)

What did you try to mean by, whatever the linguistic details. What are you talking about when you say linguistic details?

Read the whole article, it is weirdly quoted here.

Does anybody have any recommendations for FOSS RSS readers with actual content surfacing features? So many RSS feeds are full of junk (this is particularly a problem with feeds with wildly disparate posting frequencies) and I've always felt they'd be a lot more useful if people were putting more effort into a modern way to sort through extremely dense feeds.

Not FOSS, but ad free and its been able to find the hidden RSS feeds for things OK. FeedDemon at: http://bradsoft.com/

Probably not what you are after, but maybe someone with a similar question.

Anyone else use NewsBlur Apps or WebApp. They have a free and paid, which works well enough to aggregate the sites I need to get a diverse news collection in an RSS like format.

I still miss google reader and past times, but gotta adapt.

Can I get an RSS feed to show up formatted like Reddit/Lemmy? I played around with it only once way the fuck back in high school and only because I confused it with CSS for altering the look of a site.

I miss Press from TwentyFive Squares. The theme was very e-ink-ish, worked great, felt nice, didn't have any of the annoying garbage that's since become pretty norm for readers.

Still works on older Android OSes, I think. But since Press hasn't updated since 2014, it doesn't have security for new Android, I think.

Wonder if it would work on Graphene or something?

I would I would! But I cannot seem to find a decent one since Google killed theirs! What's a good one?

I could keep up with so much more when I used RSS.

I mean they talk about that in the article. That said, I tried Feedly and IMO it wasn't anywhere near Google Reader.

I always wonder if the sites I'm interested in are using rss, that's why I never really tried it.

I kinda just like going to the site. It doesn't have to be rss or social media.

I seem to remember RSS's main issue being not really being able to tell "recent" from "popular".

Showed a whole lot of nothing much, and not very much of the stuff you wanted to see.

Hah, I consider non-algorithmic sorting to be RSS' killer feature. There are a lot of fantastic stories that get published every week that are too dry, too complex, or just plan too accurate and non-sensationalized to get noticed by social media algorithms.

It does tend to sort by recent, but to me that's its strength. It makes no effort to curate the feed, it gives me all the articles from the sources I choose in order and that's it. So while I still use Lemmy for the "popular", RSS tends to deliver me deep niche content that may not be popular but is very interesting to me.

And also so much content is overlooked by sites like Reddit and Lemmy, that often it is stuff that's popular if I post it, but no one's gotten to it yet. It tends to be more up to date because you don't have to wait for things to get voted to the front page

I tried to use RSS a decade ago and it was too confusing to set up. I gave up pretty quickly.

Why should I expose myself to be force-fed social media stuff?

If RSS is so great why aren't people using it? Why isn't there a dozen readers on the market?

maybe it's just not that useful and that's why nobody is using it.

This is a common logical fallacy known as "argumentum ad populum" (appeal to popularity). You equate the popularity of the idea as a basis for determining its validity.

Compare, "if cars are so great, why is everyone still riding horses?"

But it actually makes sense with technology. If you need help, you want there to be a large community and corpus of knowledge to draw from.

I would argue that you can't do better for help and support than for old niche technologies and frameworks, because things like that always have a vibrant community of enthusiasts ready and eager to help.

Compare eMacs. Why isn't everyone using eMacs? It's basically superpowers for any client you install it on, and it installs on everything. Ridiculously hardcore fanbase, we're talking original flame wars on Usenet levels supporters.

Usenet, apropos, is quite topical on this matter. You should look it up. Fuck it here's the robot for ya:

Usenet is a global discussion system where users can post messages and read responses in subject-based forums called newsgroups. It's decentralized, meaning there's no central server or authority, and it operates across many different servers worldwide. Users can participate in a wide range of discussions, from technology and science to hobbies and arts. It's text-based and functions somewhat like a precursor to modern internet forums and social media, but with a more straightforward, less graphical interface.

Original RSS, from back in the day. Still active.

If you're interested: https://techjury.net/blog/what-is-usenet

Not really. In fact technology is often a great example of good demand but little effort put in to meet it. Open source software is riddled with issues that people are too eager enough to report but not eager enough to fix for everyone . We have an example of Palworld finally filling a niche described in the market for almost 2 decades.

Cassette Beasts? TemTem? Digimon? Saying no attempts to fill it were made is disgenuine

Should have been more clear, I'm talking about a 3D open world Pokemon. So the closest one to that is Digimon, which doesn't have captures. It took until Pokémon themselves created a poor version of what people asked for in this instance for another one to appear.

But everybody isn't riding horses. In order for your analogy to work it would have to like this. "If horses are so great why isn't everybody riding horses to work"