I've gotten to a point in my privacy journey where it's less about moving towards private options, and more about relaxing and having some fun with what I can do.
I put off messing around with RSS for a while. I simply didn't have a significant need for it. However, after finding no good options to monitor various Lemmy communities without logging in, I decided to try out an RSS reader.
I settled on Feeder as my RSS reader, despite a few missing features I would like. I added my first Lemmy community as a feed, to try it out. I was immediately surprised how well it worked.
I also added other feeds, such as Tails News, and I was happy with that. I could monitor all the communities I needed to.
Then, I noticed one day, there was an RSS button for my Lemmy inbox. This is where I was really pleased: I can view my notifications without the need to log in, all in the same place.
Lemmy and RSS are both incredible, and I truly believe RSS is the hidden backbone of the internet. I love it, and maybe you should give it a try too!
(Ahem P.S. if anyone has an RSS reader as good as Feeder for Android that fixes this issue, please let me know)
I wish more blogs, websites and services would offer RSS feeds. I personally use Thunderbird as my feed reader on PC. Not sure if the Android client has this functionality too.
I've found that a lot of blogs do have RSS feeds even if there is no visible link or mention of RSS anywhere on the website. I often just throw the blog URL into the 'add feed' box on The Old Reader, and it turns out there is feed info hidden in there somewhere.
I've noticed that too and try that also. Sometimes the reader does not find anything, but adding /rss.xml or /feed/ or something manually to the link does work at times. The inconsistency is also a problem. But some blogs just do not have such a functionality at all, or is not tested (wrong dates, therefore unusable). Its often sometimes an afterthought and inconsistent.