With the decline of twitter and reddit, it's time to take a look at RSS again if you haven't already.
With the decline of twitter and reddit, it's time to take a look at RSS again if you haven't already.
It's always good to be in control of your own content sources.
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
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.
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.
There's a great piece of software called Kill the Newsletter that converts email newsletters into RSS feeds. Each feed gets a unique email address, and all emails to that address go into its RSS feed. It's open-source so you can self-host it. It's a good way to clean up your email inbox a bit.
Love RSS. I personally really like Feeder from F-Droid
Check out AntennaPod for Android in the Play Store. It is a great podcast RSS client and it comes with a database of podcasts you can search. You can add your own too. For textual stuff I use Flym, but I do not know if that is still in development or not so verify either way.
So yes RSS is still great. Biggest issue is some sources have discontinued in favor of walling content in their own apps which is not exactly user friendly.
I had actually just been starting to build up an RSS roster prior to reddit's API meltdown. Perfect timing!
Just been getting tired of the internet being basically a small few sites, and wanting to get back to reading articles and blogs, particularly ones written by individuals (i.e., not part of a larger site / company where there's going to be lots of ads and stuff, just like, people talking about stuff that they care about) more.
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.
Yeh, I already installed miniflux again and selfhost it for my RSS needs.
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!
FreshRSS is cools. The way mamma used to make.
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.
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 run a self-hosted copy of Commafeed, which is a seamless and fast replacement (both workalike and lookalike) for the late Google Reader. The main issue, really, is the long term decline of the blogosphere, which has severely decreased the number of interesting RSS feeds for me.
I recently revived my netvibes account, which had been laying dormant for a few years, since everything I followed had slowly gone extinct. Webcomics concluded, blogs closed...
I also installed FreshRSS on a subdomain of my website and might just be moving to that entirely.
RSS hasnt gone away. Webcomics, podcasts, lemmy... A ton of stuff has feeds. It was cool to be on social media and read the reactions to the content, but I'm old enough to have done without before and it isn't half bad.
I use RSS every single day to collect the 500+ tech articles I scan every day. My blog is actually powered by its RSS feed to then push out to 8 other social networks. Don't know what I'd do without RSS.
I use self-hosted FreshRSS (after having tried a few other self-hosted ones - I did a video at https://youtu.be/nBdLgRSR04o which compares FreshRSS to Tiny Tiny RSS) and I paired it with Full-Text RSS Feed (see https://github.com/Dither/full-text-rss) to return the full content of posts.
On desktop, I found Fluent Reader to be very good, and I did a blog post at https://gadgeteer.co.za/cross-platform-open-source-fluent-reader-is-my-current-best-choice-for-an-offline-rss-news-aggregator about why I ended up with it. Note I've gone back to FreshRSS after sorting out an issue on my hosting, because a desktop reader is really limited to that one device.
I've been using Bazqux Reader since it's a single guy and seems to work well. I also know that Tiny Tiny RSS is a super cool self hostable one.
I’ve been enjoying NewsBlur since Google Reader went offline.
I'm making use of a self-hosted Nextcloud instance for this purpose actually. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend it just for the purposes of RSS, it's a nice addition to the platform for someone who happens to be running an instance for other reasons already. Most of the web-based RSS reader solutions I've come across relied on advertising or other premium membership models to support the service, so an alternative would have to be pretty damn compelling for me to transition away from Nextcloud and start subjecting myself to ads again.
Yeah, and this also applies to the fediverse as I've recently realized. X instance on a whim de-federating with W, Y and Z is just as bad. It just makes it a PITA to be a user. Plus one would think NSFW on an open platform would be better adopted but everyone avoids it like the plague. Only lemmynsfw is out there, and blocked from many places.
I'm setting up RSS to pull all the content I want from any place.
Because of how many sites don’t use RSS feeds as much anymore, I’ve found it hard to adjust to them. I’ve been trying out the app Artifact as a sort of replacement but it’s not ideal (and everything has ads when I click through).
Still looking for a good solution for up to date, aggregated info on some of my favourite topics. This site comes pretty close but is still missing some things (for now).
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.
It seems I've been missing out and I have a few more services to stand up over the weekend and try out. It's been refreshing this week avoiding reddit.
After the closing of Google Reader and years of searching I settled a few years ago with Inoreader. I fully recommend it. They offer subscription discounts throughout the year where you can save ~40% of the cost.
Their webpage app is really good and the Android app is also extremely good and usable.
A great feature that I make use of is their option to create feeds from sites that don't offer RSS. Also I have connected Youtube so I have a feed with an update in my subscriptions
Completely recommended.
Anyone have any good suggestions for blogs to follow? I just downloaded inoreader and followed some of the suggested ones on there, but I used RSS so long ago I don't remember anything I used to really follow outside of my current interests.
I have over 100 RSS feeds I've organized into different categories. It lets me get the latest updates from many websites all in one place. Even though some feeds now only supply a headline or partial article, it's still a much faster and comfortable experience than relying on Twitter or Reddit to do the same thing.
Feedly has been a decent RSS service for me. While not self hosted it has been worlds better that TTRSS. That said, it has been roughly a decade since I assessed the space so I am open to alternatives.
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.)
The fun thing is, I never left it. Even when people wanted to convince me that it was unusable, no sites used it or Google reader being killed meant there was no point anymore.
Flym works well enough.
ya but I dont want active control. I want passive control. I'm lazy. :(
Does anyone have any tips on setting up RSS for twitter so it shows more content than what is just on the first page through the https://nitter.net/{{ twitter_account }}/rss method?
I've been using fritter but there's no longer a way to combine feeds from all accounts at once. And when it comes to setting up a regular RSS I run into the feed quantity limitation for each account.
I switched to feedbro, because the feeds started to fill with anxiety driven news. So i needed something with good filtering.
It's a browser plugin. Very modifiable, looks fine and behaves well. All that it misses is a way to sync to a service. Has manual backups for feeds and filter-rules.
Tip. It can handle youtube channels and twitter users feeds.
I've been using the nextcloud RSS reader for a while now. Not the most feature rich, but it does the job for me.
I use snownews in Linux, and had just figured out how to subscribed to RSS feeds of Reddit subs a week and a half ago. Whoops.
I self host FreshRSS and among the many sites I subscribe to, I also subscribe to quite a few hashtags on Mastodon which I'm aware isn't highly publicised so not everyone knows you can do that.
If someone reads this comment that didn't know you could do that -
Instance/tags/hashtag.rss
Eg:
https://mastodon.social/tags/introduction.rss
You are welcome.
(Set your purge limits aggressively, because despite people suggesting otherwise, you will very quickly have thousands of unread articles to trawl through)
I keep freshrss open in a smallish window on one of my monitors at all time. It alike a scrolling feed of all the news and things of the day and I can glance at it or check it as needed.
I'm honestly tempted to start looking into RSS, I've never used it before but now without reddit it would be nice to have a centralized location to view absolutely everything relevant to my interests.
Feeder is a great Android app. It even fetches the full content from Paywalled sites
I was using Feedly for a long time but just discovered and paid for NewsBlur and it’s amazing. The killer feature is being able to easily see new posts as they come in as part of the Ui rather than having to refresh.