It’s always good to be in control of your own content sources.
It’s wack how the internet seems to have collectively forgotten about this technology over the past decade, despite it not being the least bit obsolete.
It’s not ad-friendly, and does not force you to create yet another account in yet another walled garden for big-tech to collect your data.
Two major problems:
1: very very few sites offer an rss feed anymore
2: the ones that do either only offer the headline and then just a link to the web story, or if they give a full feed, inject ads into them, where you don’t have an adblocker to stop it
I spent the better part of a month trying to curate an awesome rss feed and in the end, it’s still so actively hostile that it renders it’s barely usable
Don’t get me wrong. I want rss to come back and be as usable as it was years ago. But it’s a shadow of what it used to be, and active hostile
2: the ones that do either only offer the headline and then just a link to the web story, or if they give a full feed, inject ads into them, where you don’t have an adblocker to stop it
Thunderbird mostly solves this since it has a built-in browser and uBlock.
Agreed on 1) the lack of RSS feeds. Lemmy also has a problem that RSS feeds aren’t federated, so commenting on new posts is very clunky.
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.
This has been my experience as well this week. I’m so disappointed, it’s mostly just clickbaits and ads.
I use a self-hosted service called Full-Text RSS Feeds, to which my feed reader connects, and then it gets the full text instead of limited RSS text feed.
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.
I never stopped using RSS even when it supposedly “died”. Right now I have FreshRSS running on my raspberry pi since I like subscriptions and read state to sync between my machines but don’t like to depend on some company for that. I use Reeder for my iOS devices, which can sync with FreshRSS.
For all folks say RSS is dead, I find a lot to fill it with. Blogs (yes I still read blogs like it’s 2005), webcomics (most comics with their own site offer one, and webtoon generates them for its comics, though it looks like tapas doesn’t or at least I can’t find any feeds there), tech news sites, scientific journals, lemmy and mastodon generate feeds for users and communities, even YouTube still generates feeds for individual channels. There’s a lot of feeds still active out there.
RSS is definitively not dead. I threw $99 for a lifetime Feedly subscription about 15 years ago, rather than roll my own aggregation, and it’s been my primary news source since.
Ay I use feedly too, its basically become my replacement for r/gaming news stuff.
I run FreshRSS too and I use Readrops as my client on Android. I prefer reading on the laptop or PC though.
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For some reason, I could never get into RSS readers. I tried, but quickly felt overwhelmed and gave up. I’ve tried to get back into it over and over again, but always get just absolutely rocked by the amount of content that can be pulled in and get discouraged. It’s also hard and daunting to think about getting into it at this point, now, because there’s so much content out there that I don’t even know where to start with adding RSS links of stuff I follow…because sometimes I don’t even know where I get my stuff from (just from all over, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, email newsletters, kbin, Google News, etc.)
A big part of it, I think, is the fact that RSS doesn’t have community curated content. to me, it just seems like such a wave of news content…but a lot of what I enjoyed about Reddit/social media (including kbin) is the community aspect, allowing for more nuanced and popular stuff to be driven to the top of the feed (based on upvotes, retweets, user activity, clicks, or what have you). So the lack of that in RSS stuff really hinders me from fully adopting it.
The trick to enjoy curated content via RSS is to subscribe to sources that curate your content rather than to raw news sources, e.g. subscribe a blog of a person that does important news reviews rather than to a newspaper raw feed. Otherwise the classic mailbox-like RSS reader experience indeed requires you to sift through content on your own and aggressively. That said, some commercial readers do try to algorithmically prioritize content based on your interest or offer discovery functions (a different kind of experience than direct community-based sorting of course, but there’s trade offs here)
I’ve been using RSS for years, but mostly because it’s been a convenient way to get updates for the webcomics I’ve been following for so long.
Hopefully Lemmy picks up in popularity, as the main reason that I used reddit was for the tree-style discussion threads, which RSS can’t replace.
I’ve never stopped using RSS, feedly been good to me.
Same. I was using Google Reader since it launched, and I migrated to Feedly when Reader went tits-up and they offered migration help. For 18 years now I’ve had a few dozen news websites set up for just about every interest I have and I have seen nothing come across Reddit in the last 12 years that I’ve been using it that I didn’t also see on Feedly within an hour of it’s Reddit posting.
Been using rss for years now. It’s always been the best way for me to filter into only the news I care about, way Lee political drama. That being said, I use nextcloud news so I can read and sync on multiple devices, as well as listen to podcasts that use rss feeds.
I 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
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!
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 ad Steam. It can be done on Twitter via rss-bridge, but nut sure how long that’s gonna last.
And YouTube channels. So much better than trying to keep track through any of the interfaces YouTube provides.
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!
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Since you’ve used both, what are your feelings on FreshRSS vs. tt-rss?
Around the death of google reader, I set up a tt-rss instance, imported all my saved stuff, and I’ve been using it continuously since (I’m technically in an unsupported configuration because I set it up long before docker became the preferred then only supported configuration, but it just keeps ticking installed like a normal piece of software on a rented VM).
I’m generally super pleased, and it’s my primary mode of content consumption via browser + Android App, and I use the “note” and “share with note” features pretty extensively to plumb to some other folks with similar setups.Fox (the main tt-rss dev) is clearly an asshole, and there are some geopolitical complications because he’s a Russian national, but he’s made an excellent focused piece of software. I’ve considered looking seriously in to FreshRSS, but have a lot of inertia and at a glance it looks like it’s missing a few features.
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Ah, I’ve had the googlereaderkeys plugin enabled forever so I don’t even know what their default keybinds are. Unless I see something super compelling (or a serious problem with tt-rss and its ecosystem) I’m unlikely to change, but I like to keep my ear to the ground on the space.
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Oh, it is, I just meant my instance has had its keys rebound so I haven’t run into that problem.
Check out miniflux. It works well and is VERY simple. Actively developed too.
When last I looked miniflux wasn’t quite as featured a solution as I’m looking for (I keep a lot of notes and such embedded in my DB), but it is pleasingly simple.
Yeah it definately doesn’t have that.
The only thing I miss from it, personally, is the ability to delete anything older than x days.
I routinely have to manually invert the sort preference and kick the page size up really high to clean out my feeds if I have a few days where I can’t read news.
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?
I miss Google Reader. Is there anything like that now? Also, can anyone recommend an Android app for RSS?
It really blows my mind that it still feels like all alternatives to Google Reader are worse or have less features than Google Reader did. It’s still my most frustrating loss on the internet.
Inoreader is the answer, my fellow lemming
I’m using inoreader on iOS but I’m sure they have an app for Android. It’s pretty good and they have a web interface for desktop which was important to me
I also use Inoreader (on both Android and iOS). They have an app for both platforms as well as a Web interface. You can also usually access your feed with them in third party RSS apps (as long as the app supports it, of course).
One odd/annoying thing about using their native Android app on Samsung phones that have high-rate touch interfaces - the app gets finicky about reading long-press touches (like when long pressing on an article to perform a “mark all above read” or “mark all below read” action). It usually takes me multiple attempts to get my touch to register properly with the app to be able to do those actions. (I contacted them years ago about it and they said they were aware of the issue but didn’t know when they’d get around to fixing it. Given how long it’s now been, I doubt they’re ever going to fix it). :(
I 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 am using FeedMe on Android, and FreshRSS (RSS Aggregator) in Docker on a Raspberry Pi.
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.
