I use RSS to watch YouTube videos. I collect the ULRs of the videos I want to watch in a text file using my feed reader (Newsboat). In the evening a script transfers the file to my TV computer and fetches the videos with yt-dlp.
To play the videos I use another script, which plays and then trashes the video files in a loop.
Pros: no ads, no buffering videos during playback, plays videos without interaction (like TV), can collect video URLs over day, don't have to bother with YouTube's user interface, cookies etc.
I just wrote down simplified versions of my scripts. Then I clicked the wrong button to exit the markdown preview and now it's all gone. I'll have to drink a beer now, sorry.
If you have any specific questions, I'll answer them gladly.
Parent's is more complicated, but this simple script may be a good place to start. In this case, I follow a channel that posts new music videos for discovery. This automatically downloads (just the audio) using yt-dlp to a local directory. It could easily be modified to download the video (just change the -f flag). I run this with cron once a day.
Nothing special, just WaPo, NPR, NYT, etc. I just prefer aggregating all those sites instead of going to them individually when I some that kind of news.
after Google shut down Reader, I took my OPML (list of subscriptions), and switched to a FOSS local RSS reader; import my OPML and carry on. I've switched software occasionally; right now I'm happy with Feeder (from f-droid).
Getting my news is something I care about too much to entrust to someone's server; I'm happy with it purely local.
My use is not foss because I didn't find something that fits my needs better than Inoreader. There is the android app which works fine and also a very nice web interface that I can use at work because without thumbnails it looks like a 'boring' list of stuff.
Never used Inoreader, but recently switched to Newsblur which is open source (app installable via F-Droid) and selfhostable. If you don't want to self host they have a freemium model to use their hosted service, couldn't tell you what free vs paid gets you but I haven't bumped into any limits yet. You can also log in to their site to browse via web browser.
So far the app looks better than other open source readers I've tried and thumbnails generally load so the lists are a bit livelier.
Youtube channels (I unsubscribed from everything on my YouTube account, hardly ever login, and only use RSS to follow the channels I want)
This is the way to do it. I can't stand youtube's interface and its recommendations, auto play, and other anti-features frustrate me. I find that on youtube, when I go look at a channel, I often can't figure out which video is the most recent, and really struggle to see figure out what I've watched and what I haven't.
Using RSS let's me see when there is a new video posted just from the channels I am interested in. I don't have to go hunting. FreshRSS will watch it through youtube-nocookie.com, but I often find using yt-dlp is better experience, especially for anything longer than 5 minutes.
Blogs, local news sources, weather sources. Some gov.uk reports. Although I've tried several clients I keep falling back to Thunderbird and Aggregator (simple Android client).
I have never used RSS until literally this week lol. I added the AWS health RSS. I have no idea how it works. Like, I get the idea but not how to practically use it.
Instead of going to blogs, YouTube, podcast etc. you subscribe to them and feetch news from them via RSS in a web or local client. IMHO the way things should work 🙂
I've been using RSS since before Google Reader was a thing. It's a fantastic way to monitor new papers in journals as almost all journals have been providing a feed since forever. I could go with a self-hosted option but I just ended up using Inoreader although I will probably migrate again. They used to have some entry level plans at some $20/yr but it looks like they are on their way out.
Since I can't stand twitter, and since so many of my local groups use twitter, I use FreshRSS (self-hosted) to list new posts via Nitter's RSS feature.
I also use RSS for Lemmy content and a few Reddit communities I still follow (until they show up on Lemmy) via old.reddit.com.
And some updates from YouTube channels or software release notes.
Really, my goal is to consolidate things, so I'm not checking 10 different sources every day.
I use it for recipes! I use the iOS app Mela for recipe storage and it has a built-in RSS feed system to follow recipe blogs so you can easily add new recipes to your collection without having to visit all the sites separately.
Yes. I use it on my phone. I use AntennaPod for pod casts, and Flym for textual news feeds. Antenna pod in particular is really nice. I finding having this sort of content on a mobile device best.