- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
Yes RSS came back strong in my life after Reddit and Twitter shit the bed.
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
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.
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.
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 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.xmlFeeder 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?
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
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.
I use an RSS reader but I’m just using it as a clunky reddit client for my city’s subreddit 😅
I might try that, city subreddit is a huge resource
Does the RSS feed from Reddit actually work? I tried it on my RSS reader and got error messages after a day.
deleted by creator
Yes, I use RSS feeds for all my news/blogs, but before the Reddit migration when I tried to incorporate my subreddits into my RSS feed many of them would stop updating after a day or just return errors.
Another commenter said to try old.reddit instead, so hopefully that works!
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
Glad it’s working for you! :)
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.
NetNewsWire for Apple devices.
When Google Reader shut down, Feedly had an “import from Google” feature on their sign up page. Been using it for free ever since.
Thunderbird will do RSS.
Feedly
Are you sure that Feedly is open source? I can’t find any mention of it on their website.
Sorry didn’t parse that part.
OK, no worries.
(Also, I didn’t downvote your comment btw)
It would have been justified.
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. :-/
Google Reader died more than a decade ago? oh my jeebus, I feel ooooooooollllld
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’ve heard of piped a lot so I’ll have a look at it. Thanks for pointing it out.
Newpipe has a feed button on the channel page and thats how i got mine. There is probably a simpler way, but I just don’t know it.
Ok thanks. I’ll have a look.
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.
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)
Just wanted to say that I like your username :)
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.
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.
That’s the way to go! Plus, feedly syncs among app and website
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.
Awesome thanks. I’ll start doing this as it seems easier to manage.
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’ll see what iOS equivalent I can find. Thanks for the pointers.
Overcast lets you import from RSS
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.
Thanks. This is second mention for that. I’ll see if the iOS version exists.
