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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Nontech person here, can someone eli5 rss feeds and how I would set up or use?
it's like podcasts, but for websites. you add websites that you want to follow and get notified when a new post or article appears.
Ouch, the millennials felt that
well that just sounds like a far better way to experience the internet
what's the catch?
You can also organise them into groups. You can view all the new content on a particular blog in order, or you can look at all your webcomic strips like opening up the newspaper to the funny page.
the catch is that lots of the stuff on the internet is now centralised on big platforms that try as hard as they can to steer you into their apps, so that you consume the content the way they want you to rather than the way you personally find convenient. what used to be blogs and small hobby websites has become Facebook fan pages or Instagram accounts, and while both Facebook and Instagram used to offer RSS feeds for public accounts at some point, it hasn't been the case anymore for a decade or so. there are workarounds that let you get RSS for some pages that don't offer it, but not for all of them and they vary in difficulty from "put the name of the account you want to follow and generate a special feed address with one click" through "pay a small monthy subscription for a company to generate a feed for you", to "self-host some software that manages the feed", and all of those can break at some point. still, for me personally there's enough stuff that offers the feeds that are ready easy enough to access to make it worth my time.
No catch, its an extremely simple, old and reliable system. The apps also look great, and have options for different lists, etc.
The only "catch" is that many sites no longer offer a feed, in the past almost all did. Blame Google.
I tried RSS a couple times but I don't get it. There are so many different channels from one of my favorite news site alone. If I fetch them all, my RSS inbox is bursting from that one site. How do I sort through all of it? I can't manage hundreds of new articles per day.
Yeah you want Livemarks on Firefox (add-on) so an RSS feed symbol will pop up when it detects a site has at least one, and any hyperlinks to RSS feeds will open in browser properly instead of showing you some raw text. You can also drop the site's URL itself into an RSS feed such as FluentReader or RSSGuard. I'm gonna have to push Flare Android app here because it threads everything together across RSS and social media, making it a no brained. Also the share button works for adding RSS very much a deal breaker with these apps. Feeder is also good I use it for all of the github and codeberg shit and nerd blogs etc. Shame it doesn't support multiple OPML files well. RSSGuard has the best organization, nexted folders that show their child folders' contents (looking at you Thunderbird ๐๐). Lets you set different rates for each website to update. Which in the age of rate limits should probably be the first thing people do but so far I haven't had problems with that. Maybe when we get into thousands of YouTube music pages.
Stuff like RSSHub is for ppl who want their own cacheing and redistribution and to preprocess the feeds with searches and stuff. I mentioned that here but don't worry abt that, it's for making stuff work that doesn't want to show an RSS feed or it was set up in like 2006 and they think it's not dogshit because technically it gets lots of hits. This is just to be very extensive but I:m making it sound too hard so I'll stop here.