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Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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Technology
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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 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.
It's possible by analyzing the title and subtext (and the article snippet, if it exists). I tried to have an AI model estimate the likeness of articles. Worked relatively well, but I lack the motivation to build it out into a usable app.
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.
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.
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.
@CanadaPlus @SpectralPineapple Ive been using Plenary on Android which does a pretty good job of pulling full articles when available. Don't think its FOSS but its seems to be focused on privacy to a certain extent. I love that it can create a custom widget that can replace the google surveillance oriented click bait feed.
I've been experimenting with a few different options on desktop. @thunderbird has been the go to for me for a long time. Since playing with Google Reader lifetimes ago.