- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.
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Piped is good too btw
LibreTube works better.
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There’s no way I’d be able to keep track of all the stuff I want without an RSS reader.
Although I still have Feedly on my phone, and open it occasionally, RSS readers are not as useful as they used to be. That is not due to the way RSS inherently works, but in the past 15 years, websites no longer make their entire articles available on the feed. What you usually get is a small excerpt with a link to the website. They do that because RSS does not allow for the same level of engagement and advertising they would have on their website. As it is, RSS readers are, technically, link aggregators. Which makes them much less convenient.
Even if I only get the first few paragraphs, it’s still the best way to aggregate articles and determine what I want to read. I’d rather find out that a headline wasn’t as engaging as the story without loading the actual site. And for those that I wish to read, I’ll click through.
Even as a link aggregator that would be perfectly fine for me personally.
What really bugs me is that many news sites don’t keep their feeds clean, so you often have duplicates and most importantly: if you have multiple sources, you’ll get multiple copies of the same information packaged slightly differently - often I’m not even interested in one copy.
For example, all news outlets had some Grammy/Taylor Swift crap in their feeds. Each outlet had like three different articles, all regurgitating the same information. I would love to have something like topic clusters, so that I could discard all articles I’m not interested in in bulk.
I even tried building it myself, but wasn’t very successful.
I don’t see how RSS could identify, prioritize, and remove duplicates between different sources in the same category. If I understand correctly, those are not really duplicates, but rather different articles on the same subject. Unless you are talking about a more complicated system or manual curation, I don’t think that is possible. I don’t believe I had much trouble with duplicates within the same feed, maybe I never subscribed to many feeds that do that.
This right here.
The heyday of RSS is long, long gone. Everything has become a walled garden where platforms want you ON their platform, not reading a feed, or using third-party clients, etc. They want your eyeballs there on their site/service. So many sites don’t even offer RSS feeds anymore, and when you get full text, you get piles of ads.
It’s the same issue with so many sites/services either shutting down API access or severely restricting it.
I tried really, really hard recently to put together a good list in an RSS reader and tried to make it work. but it just doesn’t. It’s a miserable experience and you have to fight for every feed you get. It’s not worth it. It’s sad and extremely frustrating, but unless we can push sites to do a 180 on their strategies, RSS is essentially dead.
I’m kind of sad I’ve entirely missed the RSS golden era, then.
It was pretty great to receive dozens of full articles everyday without any bloat or ads. Just text and maybe a few images. I suppose it is possible to subscribe to apps that aggregate several sources in a practical manner, but then you’ll be restricted to their selection.
For those who wanna #selfhost I hear
is pretty good. I kinda gave up on RSS when all artists moved from Tumblr and websites with RSS to the disgusting social networks …
One question. Why do we need a web app for something that was designed to work locally?
To sync across different devices maybe?
Do you need that? You only need to sync the feed. There are formats like OPML for that. At worst you need a file sync tool like syncthing. The feed contents seen by the readers are all the same.
I’m yet to see a good reason why feed readers need to be web apps. This is worse than the case of git - a decentralized tool is taken and made centralized.
When you have 100+ feeds you really want to avoid reading twice the same entry. It’s the single most important feature in an RSS reader for me.
Agreed. The syncing can be managed other ways. The only thing I’m left with is using on a work computer for some reason, where one’s own devices aren’t available/permitted? But that’s probably not a common usage case.
So the OPML file does handle the read status as well? isn’t it just a format to export and import feeds inside a reader?
Depends on your use-case obviously, for me it’s very nice to have all feeds and read status on all devices (laptop, phone, tablet) and don’t need to add a new feed to all devices or set it up again when I change phone, reinstall Linux etc. It also has user-management, so you could have accounts for friends and family and even expose it to the internet (which I wouldn’t at this point) or but it on a private mesh / vpn like Tail-/Headscale.
Edit: Whoops, I was talking about self-hosting. Having it as a web service has the same benefits if you don’t wanna tinker with tech, obviously, (with the caveat that people from that service know what you read …)
Anyone interested can find (usually free) externally hosted freshRss and TinyRss hosts on the chatons website. Select one of those in the “based on” drop down menu.
I’ve tried both and like neither. As far as I can tell, they only have a small number of apps. And none of them work offline. With a regular RSS reader you can refresh it when you have internet access, then everything is available when you do not. Like an email client or any other such software.
But it might be suitable to you. So check out the chatons.
Never stopped.
Does anybody have any recommendations for FOSS RSS readers with actual content surfacing features? So many RSS feeds are full of junk (this is particularly a problem with feeds with wildly disparate posting frequencies) and I’ve always felt they’d be a lot more useful if people were putting more effort into a modern way to sort through extremely dense feeds.
Don’t know what you mean by “actual content surfacing features”, but I’m quite happy with Feeder, it’s pretty basic but it’s FOSS and the notifications work!
Posted elsewhere: Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters and grouped feeds. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS
Fair enough, I’m not aware that Feeder has any of that. I don’t even want filtering or groups, I just want a notification of every new post on a community or website!
The thing that stops me from moving to rss is that I don’t follow any news sites or blogs. I’ve tried but they all kinda suck to me. The only thing I follow is youtube creators and lemmy communities. Lemmy is my rss feed pretty much.
I follow my lemmy community with my rss and I tossed in a few other sites I felt interested in but always forget to look at like the local paper, that said my server has been collecting months of info but I haven’t setup the link to my mobile app out of laziness so it has all been going to waste
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mbin is my rss reader. fediverse instance + bot
Which RSS bot do you use? I was going to make one for my RSS feeds, but if there already is one…
for lemmy, its pretty straight forward with this bot
https://github.com/programming-dot-dev/rss-bot
for the 'bins, there doesnt exist a direct-to-mbin bot yet (i’ve been workin on it… i suck at logins), in the meantime youd use a lemmy instance as intermediary:
you setup a non-public, localized lemmy instance, have the bot configured for your needs to grab feeds into communities, then subscribe from your 'bin instance.
I used to follow a TON of webcomics via RSS, first on Feedly, then on Inoreader, but a few years ago I’ve stopped opening my feed for certain reasons (and now I’m afraid to even think of the backlog). I’ve started getting into RSS again about a year ago, followed some blogs and small news websites, and I’ve been loving it! currently using my Nextcloud provider’s RSS option with the official Nextcloud News app on Android and RSS Guard on PC (I haven’t found one that integrates better with Plasma desktop yet).
RSS is fine for what it is, but it addresses a use case that only rarely applies to me – wanting to see all or nearly all of the content put out from some feed.
There are a few sources for which I’ll do that – I look at The War Zone, for example. But for the great majority of sources, any feed has a mix of content that I want to see mixed with content that I don’t want to see. I think that link aggregators like Reddit or the Fediverse do a better job of picking up interesting content and filtering out the uninteresting.
I’ll use RSS to obtain podcast feeds. But for webpages, I just usually don’t want to see all the content that a given source is putting out.
I‘m using a RSS reader with rule based filters to remove uninteresting articles (to me) and upvote or downvote articles with certain keywords (for me). That way I can aggregate lots of media and have my own personal feed.
It takes some time to set up and fine-tune, though.
What RSS reader is this? I’ve been wanting to get back into it for a while but I too need to be able to filter things down to a digestible form.
Feedbro, it’s a browser extension.
do you recommend any fediverse instances (or even subreddits) that might share informative/fun/interesting articles or websites of any kind? i feel the quality on reddit has really tanked in the last couple years.
I mean, that kind of heavily depends on the area of your interests; I don’t think that it’s really possible to say “forum X is interesting” in a vacuum. I’d add that I still think that there are interesting subreddits on Reddit, though I agree that the front page isn’t very appealing these days, at least to me.
On the Threadiverse, though, I would say that as things stand, lemmy is not really good at helping one find existing communities. There’s the newcommunities announcement community at [email protected], but those, by definition, don’t have a userbase when announced, and some of the creators don’t do the work of regularly posting content until they catch on. Kbin reccomends random posts in the sidebar, but that’s a pretty shotgun way to find things.
What I’d probably do is use the Lemmy Explorer’s community search, which as things stand is the only way I’m aware of to search all of the communities across all of the instances on the Threadiverse.
That is a good way indeed, although I’m yet to find a way to filter after new or active communities.
Look at the drop-down menu next to the search field, which lets you sort via different criteria.
I think “newest publish time” is the date of community creation; new communities at the top.
For activity, it has number of active users in various given periods of time.
@tal thank you!
thanks a bunch that helps! in terms of reddit, i’ve been using it for almost 15 years and the subreddits i liked seem to have changed recently, or maybe gotten “too big”. i think the API changes last year really shook things up too. hence why i’m on beehaw now! anyway, i’ll take a look at the lemmy verse communities, thanks!
@awmire Friendica supports RSS if you’re into that. You might already know it is mostly a Facebook alternative (although it has many more features than Facebook). You can paste the website link into the search bar and it gets the RSS feed for you if it has one.
I do like RSS feed readers that have a magazine view though, so I couldn’t really move all my feeds here.
Why should people stop telling other people what they should do in 2024…
Problem is that the whole concept of advertising is “telling other people what to do”.
- People use Google.
- Google tells people to use Chrome
- Chrome becomes most popular browser
- Chrome removes the " this site has RSS" icon from URL bar
- People forget that RSS is a thing
- People now rely on Google News and other biased sites to get information
- biased sites tell people what to do
RSS is freedom
go tell other people to use it
also Lemmy RSS communitygo tell other people to use it
I’m not going to tell anyone what they should do, sorry. And every site is biased, no matter what.
Lemmy moderators: I strongly encourage you guys to subscribe to the RSS of your communities. It’s considerably quicker this way to notice and address problematic posts.
On the article: I’ve been using Liferea since forever. I wish that it had access to blacklists though; some of my sources have quite a lot of rubbish that I’d rather not bother with.
Check out Selfoss, a self-hostable Online RSS tool, to browse and manage your feeds from the desktop and mobile
@[email protected] a few people in this thread have mentioned using Kbin or Mbin as something of an RSS curration tool. I’d like to learn more about that.
The Drupal community maintains an aggregate of feeds from 200+ sources with posts about the CMS. In the last year or so, the quality of the content is noticeably worse. Some community members are blaming Ai generated content…
Chat GPT, write a 1000 word blog post about Agile that mentions Drupal
I think the problem has more to do with how Google rewards “fresh” content that repeats keywords with higher page rank than a better written article posted 2 years earlier.
Regardless of the cause, a small group already running drupal.community for Mastodon has been discussing using up voting as a way to let the community curate the feed.
Would love any advice or examples on using Kbin or Mbin to empower a small community to curate RSS content.