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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I use RSS feeds for everything. You should check out Open RSS, doing a lot of great stuff.
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.
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.
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 bitter), 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.
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 used to run FreshRSS and it worked well. I now use an app that just pulls feeds directly and syncs to iCloud. It isn’t quite as good as FreshRSS, but it works fine for me.
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 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
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!
... 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 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 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.
Been using rss for years now. It's always been the best way for me to filter into only the news I care about, away from 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'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.
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!
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).
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.
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 reading
There's also audiobookshelf for a self-hosted approach to audiodooks and podcasts, although the podcast functionality does still need some work.
Thanks for showing us that app, I was thinking about getting back into podcasts one of these days and it looks really nice
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.
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.
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 :)
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 have been using Feedly which is pretty much dead due to the reddit situation. Are there other similar tools that's Lemmy friendly?
What do we mean Feedly is dead due to Reddit? I have been using it since Google Reader left without issue.
8 out of my 12 feeds are Reddit feeds. What feed sources do you use mainly?
You can also use reader clients - I use LiFeRea on linux, it's in the app repository as liferea. It;s free
This post got me to try out selfoss but after it being pretty buggy and unable to fetch 50% of the feeds I was interested in, I looked elsewhere. I wanted to install Tiny Tiny RSS but the instructions weren't my thing. Finally, I settled on FreshRSS and I love it. All the feeds work. The only complaint I have is that, at least it seems, you need to manually add labels to each article and instead just put a feed under a category. I wish I could put feeds under any amount of labels or categories I want. Maybe there's an extension for it that I have not seen yet.
I switched to miniflux months ago and I'm pretty happy with it. Supports categories as well.
What I meant was assigning multiple tags (like "tech", "security", "foss", etc) automatically to posts in a feed instead of needing to manually assign them to each article. So if I then want to filter all posts with "security" and "foss" I could choose those two tags to get the filtered results. Can it do that?
No, there are no tags anything like that, just regular search.
I use RSS every single day to collect the 500+ tech articles I scan every day. My blog is actually powered by its RSS feed to then push out to 8 other social networks. Don't know what I'd do without RSS.
I use self-hosted FreshRSS (after having tried a few other self-hosted ones - I did a video at https://youtu.be/nBdLgRSR04o which compares FreshRSS to Tiny Tiny RSS) and I paired it with Full-Text RSS Feed (see https://github.com/Dither/full-text-rss) to return the full content of posts.
I’m confused… the list provides apps to read rss… But no rss sources?
Lemmy is one source. So is Reddit and Mastodon. And most blogs and news sites. And GitHub and Steam. It can be done on Twitter via rss-bridge, but nut sure how long that's gonna last.
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.
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
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). :(
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 am using FeedMe on Android, and FreshRSS (RSS Aggregator) in Docker on a Raspberry Pi.
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.
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 been using the feeder app and its really good to get tech news , just add the RSS links and you have news that choose to read and not recommended bullshit.
I self host a tiny tiny rss instance, and while I'm not a huge fan of the developer and his behavior, I like the web app in combination with the android app. It's been working great for me for years.
I've been using RSSHub and Miniflux for a while now, self-hosted. It's mainly how I read news.
After the closing of Google Reader and years of searching I settled a few years ago with Inoreader.
I fully recommend it. They offer subscription discounts throughout the year where you can save ~40% of the cost.
Their webpage app is really good and the Android app is also extremely good and usable.
A great feature that I make use of is their option to create feeds from sites that don't offer RSS.
Also I have connected Youtube so I have a feed with an update in my subscriptions
Completely recommended.
If only youtube sill offered a RSS feed from all my subscriptions. It's so annoying that I can't figure out how to get it.
If you inspect the page code in your browser for the YouTube channel you want to add to your rss feed, the rss link is still there. Just control + f and search for rss. I still use rss to manage my YouTube content.
I tried that the other day, found the rssurl link, but it didn't work. I'll try it again with a different RSS reader. It would be nice if it was available for all my subscriptions in one link, but if it works for one I guess it's not really that big of a deal to add them all.
I use Miniflux and I've actually had luck just putting the channel url like youtube[.]com/channel/CHANNEL_NAME_HERE and the rss feed populates from there!
I wrote a quick bash script to one-click the rss feeds out the page source. I'm surprised most rss readers don't do that automatically, it's not an involved algorithm to pick that out.
It's in there if you inspect the source of the page.
Alternatively, feedly is able to detect and parse it, you only have to provide it the URL to the channel.
If you then don't want to use feedly, you can export your subscriptions as a opml file, and import them in another reader.
A bit of a convoluted solution, if you don't want to inspect the source.
I was able to write a quick hacky one liner to parse the source and paste the rssUrl into my reader. It didn't take as long as I was expecting to get the 30-40 channels into my rss reader. I think my previous issue was the rss reader I was using didn't like something about the format. RSS Guard didn't have an issue with it. Thanks.
Edit: I can't believe I didn't do this earlier. newsboat has Vim keybindings and the interface reminds me a lot of mutt. Clear videos through mpv with zero ads. I'm in heaven right now. I haven't looked at RSS in at least a decade.
I've been using the nextcloud RSS reader for a while now. Not the most feature rich, but it does the job for me.
Because of how many sites don’t use RSS feeds as much anymore, I’ve found it hard to adjust to them. I’ve been trying out the app Artifact as a sort of replacement but it’s not ideal (and everything has ads when I click through).
Still looking for a good solution for up to date, aggregated info on some of my favourite topics. This site comes pretty close but is still missing some things (for now).
Fired up a FreshRSS instance for myself when the reddit API notifications came about. Reminds me of my Google Reader days - quite happy with it thus far. Any of the decent quality news sites seem to have an RSS option, at least in my experience so far.
How is the reading experience on an Android phone? Is there an app?
Pretty great on the web browser front-end to be honest - haven't had an issue when I have used it on my phone. Not sure about the app side of things since I've been trying to limit my doom scrolling to when I'm at a computer
I use RSS every day- it's my primary source of news- but there are many sites I'd love to follow which don't have a feed. My reader, Inoeader, claims to have a workaround for it, but only on their paid version, which is stupid expensive.
I have a paid subscription in Inoreader for years and never paid full price, more around %60 of the amount. Keep an eye to days like Black Friday or so, they announce every year big discounts.
You can also queue those discounts if they appear before your subscription ends so you can keep benefiting from them for even longer
This. I'm also paying for Inoreader and I've taken advantage of the black friday sale. BTW I feel like the non-discounted subscription is not that expensive
Yeah, and this also applies to the fediverse as I've recently realized. X instance on a whim de-federating with W, Y and Z is just as bad. It just makes it a PITA to be a user. Plus one would think NSFW on an open platform would be better adopted but everyone avoids it like the plague. Only lemmynsfw is out there, and blocked from many places.
I'm setting up RSS to pull all the content I want from any place.
It seems I've been missing out and I have a few more services to stand up over the weekend and try out. It's been refreshing this week avoiding reddit.
I use miniflux for mine. It’s very simple and works very well
I selfhost freshrss and it's amazing. If the reddit privacy frontends go down due to the api changes, I'll lose those feeds but I already replaced them with lemmy feeds anyways :)
In all of these new-to-me resources, i see a lot of people saying they are self hosting. Do y'all selfhost on like y'all's main PC or do y'all have a home server stack y'all use?
Most people have an extra computer of some sort for these things. An old laptop or PC can run Linux very well, and most self-hostable services are not very resource intensive.
I’ve been enjoying NewsBlur since Google Reader went offline.
I'm honestly tempted to start looking into RSS, I've never used it before but now without reddit it would be nice to have a centralized location to view absolutely everything relevant to my interests.
I've been self hosting miniflux. The UI works great on both desktop and mobile, but I also use NetNewsWire on iOS to connect to it.
Does anyone have any tips on setting up RSS for twitter so it shows more content than what is just on the first page through the https://nitter.net/{{ twitter_account }}/rss method?
I've been using fritter but there's no longer a way to combine feeds from all accounts at once. And when it comes to setting up a regular RSS I run into the feed quantity limitation for each account.
I switched to feedbro, because the feeds started to fill with anxiety driven news. So i needed something with good filtering.
It's a browser plugin. Very modifiable, looks fine and behaves well. All that it misses is a way to sync to a service. Has manual backups for feeds and filter-rules.
Tip. It can handle youtube channels and twitter users feeds.
I'm a big fan of feedly but the issue I run into is if I miss a few days it takes so long to sift through everything to find what I'm most interested in
My solution to this is to be more stringent with the feeds that I add. In this day and age, there's so much volume that the important metric is signal-to-noise ratio.
If I find myself skipping the articles from a feed more often than opening them, I just unsubscribe.
Sure they still pile up if I miss a few days, but not nearly as before.
Anyone have any good suggestions for blogs to follow? I just downloaded inoreader and followed some of the suggested ones on there, but I used RSS so long ago I don't remember anything I used to really follow outside of my current interests.
The fun thing is, I never left it. Even when people wanted to convince me that it was unusable, no sites used it or Google reader being killed meant there was no point anymore.
Flym works well enough.
Feeder is a great Android app. It even fetches the full content from Paywalled sites
After using RSS feeds for a while on my phone, I switched to using them exclusively on my laptop. Having them on something not as easy to whip out as my phone makes me less inclined to compulsively check them.
I've been using NewsBlur (and syncing with Reeder on mobile) ever since Google killed their RSS service. It supports parsing some non-RSS sites and services, as well.
I use NewsBlur as a backend and Unread as a front end and absolutely love it. For whatever reason unread can often pull the entire article when NewsBlur won’t. Works great!
I'm making use of a self-hosted Nextcloud instance for this purpose actually. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend it just for the purposes of RSS, it's a nice addition to the platform for someone who happens to be running an instance for other reasons already. Most of the web-based RSS reader solutions I've come across relied on advertising or other premium membership models to support the service, so an alternative would have to be pretty damn compelling for me to transition away from Nextcloud and start subjecting myself to ads again.
Feedly has been a decent RSS service for me. While not self hosted it has been worlds better that TTRSS. That said, it has been roughly a decade since I assessed the space so I am open to alternatives.
ya but I dont want active control. I want passive control. I'm lazy. :(
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.)
I loved iGoogle. I had my feeds set up just how I liked them. Then I moved to protopage when that went to the graveyard. Then a bunch of things (not everything) stopped updating.
I went back to check it out a few weeks ago and even fewer things were updating. A lot of places just let RSS fall by the wayside.
Pour one out for Google Reader.
Understandable. RSS is fantastic for news and such, but lacks the community of comments which is what drives a lot of people to content they normally wouldn't read.
This for sure. 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.
My number one visited reddit site was r/soccer. Discussion and highlights was half of the draw, but breaking news was the other half. Unfortunately, using RSS to get a collection of news/Twitter updates doesn't really provide value because I never really know the source. On reddit, there was always a bunch of comments or a highly upvoted comment that shared the reliability of the source. Quite often, there were reliable journalists working for shitty publications, so you could generally trust them despite not being able to trust other news on the site. I'll miss that.
Bro same. It's almost like FOMO. There's just so much content out there that I feel overwhelmed just trying to parse through what I'd actually want in an RSS feed and terrified i'm missing actual important stuff.
Glad to know I'm not alone...because of this thread, i downloaded a couple RSS readers (Feedly and Inoreader)...but, yep, that overwhelming/daunting feeling is back!
I’m not currently using RSS, it’s been years. And yes I also felt overwhelmed. I have same problem with Podcasts on my iPhone and honestly email. Just like in most cases I don’t want to be pushed content. My brain feels bad for not keeping up. The best use of RSS that I can imagine for me would be following a small number of original content creators who post erratically in multiple platforms. It’s another reason I love the fediverse so much bc we can slap /feed on the end of many addresses to pull that content elsewhere. And again I’m not currently using RSS lol. I’m just saying that I might use it for passionate follows. I think it’s a useful tool for getting people free of the big bad platforms.
I have tried to go back to RSS once I gave up Twitter. But it lacks the instant notification of breaking news that I got from Twitter. Mastodon has mostly fill that role. So I might give RSS another chance for non-breaking news.
Oddly enough I have a police scanner app that has alerts and it is also a good source for breaking incidents.
Feeder is a really great app on Android. I submitted a bug report, and got a quick response and update within a week.
I self host FreshRSS and among the many sites I subscribe to, I also subscribe to quite a few hashtags on Mastodon which I'm aware isn't highly publicised so not everyone knows you can do that.
If someone reads this comment that didn't know you could do that -
(Set your purge limits aggressively, because despite people suggesting otherwise, you will very quickly have thousands of unread articles to trawl through)
What hashtags in particular are you subscribed to?
#android#fediverse#homeassistant for my interests - and #introduction to make sure that I see and boost plenty of newcomers to get them a good start on the fediverse. It's introduction in particular that requires a very aggressive purge policy! I only keep I think 50 introduction posts across 3 days, but even then - my FreshRSS is typically 1200 articles on a daily basis.
requires a very aggressive purge policy
Was going to say — that looks like it would include a lot of noise. Thank you for your response!
Wow, your comment took me down a rabbit hole. I now too self-host FreshRSS on my NAS using Docker. And, oh boy, this is so good!
Excellent! If you looking for an Android app - although the PWA is pretty good too, Readrops is what I use, because it supports the GoogleReader API that FreshRSS exposes.
Will definitely check out that app. I've used Feedly so far, but was pretty amazed by FreshRSS' PWA.
I use snownews in Linux, and had just figured out how to subscribed to RSS feeds of Reddit subs a week and a half ago. Whoops.
I was using Feedly for a long time but just discovered and paid for NewsBlur and it’s amazing. The killer feature is being able to easily see new posts as they come in as part of the Ui rather than having to refresh.
I keep freshrss open in a smallish window on one of my monitors at all time. It alike a scrolling feed of all the news and things of the day and I can glance at it or check it as needed.
I’ve been using Newsify on iOS for a few years now. It lets me organize and subscribe to rss feeds complete with saving/favoriting, marking read, etc.
I’ve found it a great way to keep up with news. I write an app and an aggregator site a while back that did a similar thing, but this is good enough and I don’t have to do any dev or hosting work!
I have over 100 RSS feeds I've organized into different categories. It lets me get the latest updates from many websites all in one place. Even though some feeds now only supply a headline or partial article, it's still a much faster and comfortable experience than relying on Twitter or Reddit to do the same thing.
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
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.
This has been my experience as well this week. I'm so disappointed, it's mostly just clickbaits and ads.
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.
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.
Yeah I use RSS feeds for everything. You should check out Open RSS, doing a lot of great stuff.
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.
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.
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 bitter), 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.
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 used to run FreshRSS and it worked well. I now use an app that just pulls feeds directly and syncs to iCloud. It isn’t quite as good as FreshRSS, but it works fine for me.
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 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
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!
... 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 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 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.
Been using rss for years now. It's always been the best way for me to filter into only the news I care about, away from 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'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.
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!
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! 😁
@tshannon
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.
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 reading
There's also audiobookshelf for a self-hosted approach to audiodooks and podcasts, although the podcast functionality does still need some work.
Thanks for showing us that app, I was thinking about getting back into podcasts one of these days and it looks really nice
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.
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
Yeh, I already installed miniflux again and selfhost it for my RSS needs.
https://miniflux.app/
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 :)
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.
That's genius! I would love that feature. I'll have to check out Feedbin now, thanks for mentioning it!
I have been using Feedly which is pretty much dead due to the reddit situation. Are there other similar tools that's Lemmy friendly?
What do we mean Feedly is dead due to Reddit? I have been using it since Google Reader left without issue.
8 out of my 12 feeds are Reddit feeds. What feed sources do you use mainly?
You can also use reader clients - I use LiFeRea on linux, it's in the app repository as liferea. It;s free
This post got me to try out selfoss but after it being pretty buggy and unable to fetch 50% of the feeds I was interested in, I looked elsewhere. I wanted to install Tiny Tiny RSS but the instructions weren't my thing. Finally, I settled on FreshRSS and I love it. All the feeds work. The only complaint I have is that, at least it seems, you need to manually add labels to each article and instead just put a feed under a category. I wish I could put feeds under any amount of labels or categories I want. Maybe there's an extension for it that I have not seen yet.
I switched to miniflux months ago and I'm pretty happy with it. Supports categories as well.
What I meant was assigning multiple tags (like "tech", "security", "foss", etc) automatically to posts in a feed instead of needing to manually assign them to each article. So if I then want to filter all posts with "security" and "foss" I could choose those two tags to get the filtered results. Can it do that?
No, there are no tags anything like that, just regular search.
I use RSS every single day to collect the 500+ tech articles I scan every day. My blog is actually powered by its RSS feed to then push out to 8 other social networks. Don't know what I'd do without RSS.
I use self-hosted FreshRSS (after having tried a few other self-hosted ones - I did a video at https://youtu.be/nBdLgRSR04o which compares FreshRSS to Tiny Tiny RSS) and I paired it with Full-Text RSS Feed (see https://github.com/Dither/full-text-rss) to return the full content of posts.
On desktop, I found Fluent Reader to be very good, and I did a blog post at https://gadgeteer.co.za/cross-platform-open-source-fluent-reader-is-my-current-best-choice-for-an-offline-rss-news-aggregator about why I ended up with it. Note I've gone back to FreshRSS after sorting out an issue on my hosting, because a desktop reader is really limited to that one device.
Ty !
Fluent Reader is the best.
I’m confused… the list provides apps to read rss… But no rss sources?
Lemmy is one source. So is Reddit and Mastodon. And most blogs and news sites. And GitHub and Steam. It can be done on Twitter via rss-bridge, but nut sure how long that's gonna last.
I like using Read You. You may also check out:
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 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
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). :(
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 am using FeedMe on Android, and FreshRSS (RSS Aggregator) in Docker on a Raspberry Pi.
Love RSS. I personally really like Feeder from F-Droid
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.
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 been using the feeder app and its really good to get tech news , just add the RSS links and you have news that choose to read and not recommended bullshit.
I self host a tiny tiny rss instance, and while I'm not a huge fan of the developer and his behavior, I like the web app in combination with the android app. It's been working great for me for years.
I've been using RSSHub and Miniflux for a while now, self-hosted. It's mainly how I read news.
After the closing of Google Reader and years of searching I settled a few years ago with Inoreader. I fully recommend it. They offer subscription discounts throughout the year where you can save ~40% of the cost.
Their webpage app is really good and the Android app is also extremely good and usable.
A great feature that I make use of is their option to create feeds from sites that don't offer RSS. Also I have connected Youtube so I have a feed with an update in my subscriptions
Completely recommended.
If only youtube sill offered a RSS feed from all my subscriptions. It's so annoying that I can't figure out how to get it.
If you inspect the page code in your browser for the YouTube channel you want to add to your rss feed, the rss link is still there. Just control + f and search for rss. I still use rss to manage my YouTube content.
I tried that the other day, found the rssurl link, but it didn't work. I'll try it again with a different RSS reader. It would be nice if it was available for all my subscriptions in one link, but if it works for one I guess it's not really that big of a deal to add them all.
I use Miniflux and I've actually had luck just putting the channel url like youtube[.]com/channel/CHANNEL_NAME_HERE and the rss feed populates from there!
I wrote a quick bash script to one-click the rss feeds out the page source. I'm surprised most rss readers don't do that automatically, it's not an involved algorithm to pick that out.
It's in there if you inspect the source of the page.
Alternatively, feedly is able to detect and parse it, you only have to provide it the URL to the channel.
If you then don't want to use feedly, you can export your subscriptions as a opml file, and import them in another reader.
A bit of a convoluted solution, if you don't want to inspect the source.
I was able to write a quick hacky one liner to parse the source and paste the rssUrl into my reader. It didn't take as long as I was expecting to get the 30-40 channels into my rss reader. I think my previous issue was the rss reader I was using didn't like something about the format. RSS Guard didn't have an issue with it. Thanks.
Edit: I can't believe I didn't do this earlier.
newsboathas Vim keybindings and the interface reminds me a lot of mutt. Clear videos throughmpvwith zero ads. I'm in heaven right now. I haven't looked at RSS in at least a decade.I've been using the nextcloud RSS reader for a while now. Not the most feature rich, but it does the job for me.
Because of how many sites don’t use RSS feeds as much anymore, I’ve found it hard to adjust to them. I’ve been trying out the app Artifact as a sort of replacement but it’s not ideal (and everything has ads when I click through).
Still looking for a good solution for up to date, aggregated info on some of my favourite topics. This site comes pretty close but is still missing some things (for now).
Fired up a FreshRSS instance for myself when the reddit API notifications came about. Reminds me of my Google Reader days - quite happy with it thus far. Any of the decent quality news sites seem to have an RSS option, at least in my experience so far.
How is the reading experience on an Android phone? Is there an app?
Pretty great on the web browser front-end to be honest - haven't had an issue when I have used it on my phone. Not sure about the app side of things since I've been trying to limit my doom scrolling to when I'm at a computer
I use RSS every day- it's my primary source of news- but there are many sites I'd love to follow which don't have a feed. My reader, Inoeader, claims to have a workaround for it, but only on their paid version, which is stupid expensive.
rss-bridge might help
Thank for that, I will look into it!
I have a paid subscription in Inoreader for years and never paid full price, more around %60 of the amount. Keep an eye to days like Black Friday or so, they announce every year big discounts.
You can also queue those discounts if they appear before your subscription ends so you can keep benefiting from them for even longer
This. I'm also paying for Inoreader and I've taken advantage of the black friday sale. BTW I feel like the non-discounted subscription is not that expensive
@technology
Yeah, and this also applies to the fediverse as I've recently realized. X instance on a whim de-federating with W, Y and Z is just as bad. It just makes it a PITA to be a user. Plus one would think NSFW on an open platform would be better adopted but everyone avoids it like the plague. Only lemmynsfw is out there, and blocked from many places.
I'm setting up RSS to pull all the content I want from any place.
It seems I've been missing out and I have a few more services to stand up over the weekend and try out. It's been refreshing this week avoiding reddit.
I use miniflux for mine. It’s very simple and works very well
I selfhost freshrss and it's amazing. If the reddit privacy frontends go down due to the api changes, I'll lose those feeds but I already replaced them with lemmy feeds anyways :)
In all of these new-to-me resources, i see a lot of people saying they are self hosting. Do y'all selfhost on like y'all's main PC or do y'all have a home server stack y'all use?
Most people have an extra computer of some sort for these things. An old laptop or PC can run Linux very well, and most self-hostable services are not very resource intensive.
I’ve been enjoying NewsBlur since Google Reader went offline.
I'm honestly tempted to start looking into RSS, I've never used it before but now without reddit it would be nice to have a centralized location to view absolutely everything relevant to my interests.
I've been self hosting miniflux. The UI works great on both desktop and mobile, but I also use NetNewsWire on iOS to connect to it.
Does anyone have any tips on setting up RSS for twitter so it shows more content than what is just on the first page through the https://nitter.net/{{ twitter_account }}/rss method?
I've been using fritter but there's no longer a way to combine feeds from all accounts at once. And when it comes to setting up a regular RSS I run into the feed quantity limitation for each account.
I switched to feedbro, because the feeds started to fill with anxiety driven news. So i needed something with good filtering.
https://nodetics.com/feedbro/
It's a browser plugin. Very modifiable, looks fine and behaves well. All that it misses is a way to sync to a service. Has manual backups for feeds and filter-rules.
Tip. It can handle youtube channels and twitter users feeds.
I'm a big fan of feedly but the issue I run into is if I miss a few days it takes so long to sift through everything to find what I'm most interested in
My solution to this is to be more stringent with the feeds that I add. In this day and age, there's so much volume that the important metric is signal-to-noise ratio.
If I find myself skipping the articles from a feed more often than opening them, I just unsubscribe.
Sure they still pile up if I miss a few days, but not nearly as before.
Anyone have any good suggestions for blogs to follow? I just downloaded inoreader and followed some of the suggested ones on there, but I used RSS so long ago I don't remember anything I used to really follow outside of my current interests.
The fun thing is, I never left it. Even when people wanted to convince me that it was unusable, no sites used it or Google reader being killed meant there was no point anymore.
Flym works well enough.
Feeder is a great Android app. It even fetches the full content from Paywalled sites
After using RSS feeds for a while on my phone, I switched to using them exclusively on my laptop. Having them on something not as easy to whip out as my phone makes me less inclined to compulsively check them.
I've been using NewsBlur (and syncing with Reeder on mobile) ever since Google killed their RSS service. It supports parsing some non-RSS sites and services, as well.
I use NewsBlur as a backend and Unread as a front end and absolutely love it. For whatever reason unread can often pull the entire article when NewsBlur won’t. Works great!
I'm making use of a self-hosted Nextcloud instance for this purpose actually. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend it just for the purposes of RSS, it's a nice addition to the platform for someone who happens to be running an instance for other reasons already. Most of the web-based RSS reader solutions I've come across relied on advertising or other premium membership models to support the service, so an alternative would have to be pretty damn compelling for me to transition away from Nextcloud and start subjecting myself to ads again.
Feedly has been a decent RSS service for me. While not self hosted it has been worlds better that TTRSS. That said, it has been roughly a decade since I assessed the space so I am open to alternatives.
Did you take a look at FreshRSS?
ya but I dont want active control. I want passive control. I'm lazy. :(
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.)
I loved iGoogle. I had my feeds set up just how I liked them. Then I moved to protopage when that went to the graveyard. Then a bunch of things (not everything) stopped updating.
I went back to check it out a few weeks ago and even fewer things were updating. A lot of places just let RSS fall by the wayside.
Pour one out for Google Reader.
Understandable. RSS is fantastic for news and such, but lacks the community of comments which is what drives a lot of people to content they normally wouldn't read.
This for sure. 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.
My number one visited reddit site was r/soccer. Discussion and highlights was half of the draw, but breaking news was the other half. Unfortunately, using RSS to get a collection of news/Twitter updates doesn't really provide value because I never really know the source. On reddit, there was always a bunch of comments or a highly upvoted comment that shared the reliability of the source. Quite often, there were reliable journalists working for shitty publications, so you could generally trust them despite not being able to trust other news on the site. I'll miss that.
Bro same. It's almost like FOMO. There's just so much content out there that I feel overwhelmed just trying to parse through what I'd actually want in an RSS feed and terrified i'm missing actual important stuff.
Glad to know I'm not alone...because of this thread, i downloaded a couple RSS readers (Feedly and Inoreader)...but, yep, that overwhelming/daunting feeling is back!
I’m not currently using RSS, it’s been years. And yes I also felt overwhelmed. I have same problem with Podcasts on my iPhone and honestly email. Just like in most cases I don’t want to be pushed content. My brain feels bad for not keeping up. The best use of RSS that I can imagine for me would be following a small number of original content creators who post erratically in multiple platforms. It’s another reason I love the fediverse so much bc we can slap /feed on the end of many addresses to pull that content elsewhere. And again I’m not currently using RSS lol. I’m just saying that I might use it for passionate follows. I think it’s a useful tool for getting people free of the big bad platforms.
I have tried to go back to RSS once I gave up Twitter. But it lacks the instant notification of breaking news that I got from Twitter. Mastodon has mostly fill that role. So I might give RSS another chance for non-breaking news.
Oddly enough I have a police scanner app that has alerts and it is also a good source for breaking incidents.
Feeder is a really great app on Android. I submitted a bug report, and got a quick response and update within a week.
I self host FreshRSS and among the many sites I subscribe to, I also subscribe to quite a few hashtags on Mastodon which I'm aware isn't highly publicised so not everyone knows you can do that.
If someone reads this comment that didn't know you could do that -
Instance/tags/hashtag.rss
Eg:
https://mastodon.social/tags/introduction.rss
You are welcome.
(Set your purge limits aggressively, because despite people suggesting otherwise, you will very quickly have thousands of unread articles to trawl through)
What hashtags in particular are you subscribed to?
#android #fediverse #homeassistant for my interests - and #introduction to make sure that I see and boost plenty of newcomers to get them a good start on the fediverse. It's introduction in particular that requires a very aggressive purge policy! I only keep I think 50 introduction posts across 3 days, but even then - my FreshRSS is typically 1200 articles on a daily basis.
Was going to say — that looks like it would include a lot of noise. Thank you for your response!
Wow, your comment took me down a rabbit hole. I now too self-host FreshRSS on my NAS using Docker. And, oh boy, this is so good!
Excellent! If you looking for an Android app - although the PWA is pretty good too, Readrops is what I use, because it supports the GoogleReader API that FreshRSS exposes.
Will definitely check out that app. I've used Feedly so far, but was pretty amazed by FreshRSS' PWA.
I use snownews in Linux, and had just figured out how to subscribed to RSS feeds of Reddit subs a week and a half ago. Whoops.
I was using Feedly for a long time but just discovered and paid for NewsBlur and it’s amazing. The killer feature is being able to easily see new posts as they come in as part of the Ui rather than having to refresh.
I keep freshrss open in a smallish window on one of my monitors at all time. It alike a scrolling feed of all the news and things of the day and I can glance at it or check it as needed.
I’ve been using Newsify on iOS for a few years now. It lets me organize and subscribe to rss feeds complete with saving/favoriting, marking read, etc.
I’ve found it a great way to keep up with news. I write an app and an aggregator site a while back that did a similar thing, but this is good enough and I don’t have to do any dev or hosting work!
I have over 100 RSS feeds I've organized into different categories. It lets me get the latest updates from many websites all in one place. Even though some feeds now only supply a headline or partial article, it's still a much faster and comfortable experience than relying on Twitter or Reddit to do the same thing.