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Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024
(lifehacker.com)
The thing that stops me from moving to rss is that I don't follow any news sites or blogs. I've tried but they all kinda suck to me. The only thing I follow is youtube creators and lemmy communities. Lemmy is my rss feed pretty much.
I figured there are interesting people out there who don't really blog often, but who might post something online a few times ever year and whom I'd like to stay updated on. So I started trying to collect some of these relatively inactive personal feeds.
It's not ass noisy as following blogs or social media, which is what I like about it. The only drawback is of course that so few people maintain an RSS feed.
I follow my lemmy community with my rss and I tossed in a few other sites I felt interested in but always forget to look at like the local paper, that said my server has been collecting months of info but I haven't setup the link to my mobile app out of laziness so it has all been going to waste
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.
There's no way I'd be able to keep track of all the stuff I want without an RSS reader.
RSS is fine for what it is, but it addresses a use case that only rarely applies to me -- wanting to see all or nearly all of the content put out from some feed.
There are a few sources for which I'll do that -- I look at The War Zone, for example. But for the great majority of sources, any feed has a mix of content that I want to see mixed with content that I don't want to see. I think that link aggregators like Reddit or the Fediverse do a better job of picking up interesting content and filtering out the uninteresting.
I'll use RSS to obtain podcast feeds. But for webpages, I just usually don't want to see all the content that a given source is putting out.
I‘m using a RSS reader with rule based filters to remove uninteresting articles (to me) and upvote or downvote articles with certain keywords (for me). That way I can aggregate lots of media and have my own personal feed.
It takes some time to set up and fine-tune, though.
What RSS reader is this? I’ve been wanting to get back into it for a while but I too need to be able to filter things down to a digestible form.
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Lemmy moderators: I strongly encourage you guys to subscribe to the RSS of your communities. It's considerably quicker this way to notice and address problematic posts.
On the article: I've been using Liferea since forever. I wish that it had access to blacklists though; some of my sources have quite a lot of rubbish that I'd rather not bother with.
Does anybody have any recommendations for FOSS RSS readers with actual content surfacing features? So many RSS feeds are full of junk (this is particularly a problem with feeds with wildly disparate posting frequencies) and I've always felt they'd be a lot more useful if people were putting more effort into a modern way to sort through extremely dense feeds.
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For those who wanna #selfhost I hear
is pretty good. I kinda gave up on RSS when all artists moved from Tumblr and websites with RSS to the disgusting social networks ...
One question. Why do we need a web app for something that was designed to work locally?
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I used to follow a TON of webcomics via RSS, first on Feedly, then on Inoreader, but a few years ago I've stopped opening my feed for certain reasons (and now I'm afraid to even think of the backlog). I've started getting into RSS again about a year ago, followed some blogs and small news websites, and I've been loving it! currently using my Nextcloud provider's RSS option with the official Nextcloud News app on Android and RSS Guard on PC (I haven't found one that integrates better with Plasma desktop yet).
Indeed. I installed FreshRSS on my local server and haven't looked back. Man, did I ever miss the web of the google reader era.
I just wish RSS readers could properly parse the webpages instead of only having the first paragraph and getting cut off
That's actually not the RSS reader's fault. It's the rss feed you import that behaves like that. It's on purpose, to make you go to their website and ingage in their traffic.
This is an important criteria for me. If I can't read the full article without leaving the reader and without a WebView, I won't keep the RSS feed.
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This is exactly the case.
In a lot of CMSes that offer RSS feed generation, there's a setting you can frob - either put the entire article in each RSS entry, or just the first X words in the <summary></summary> block. A lot of them default to the latter and folks never turn on the former.
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Some useful services:
- https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ (Generates email addresses that expose received messages over RSS)
- https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge (Scrapes websites and creates RSS feeds for them)
Your post is missing the most important information that you wanted to share
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Never stopped.
What RSS feeds (preferably without needing an account like NY Times) would people like to recommend? I recently set up Feeder on my phone and have been curating it
And is there a way to bypass soft-paywalls with an app like feeder?
I'm currently trying to retrieve my local gym's Facebook feed as RSS so I don't have to be on Facebook. It bites.
Why should people stop telling other people what they should do in 2024...
Problem is that the whole concept of advertising is "telling other people what to do".
- People use Google.
- Google tells people to use Chrome
- Chrome becomes most popular browser
- Chrome removes the " this site has RSS" icon from URL bar
- People forget that RSS is a thing
- People now rely on Google News and other biased sites to get information
- biased sites tell people what to do
RSS is freedom
go tell other people to use it
also Lemmy RSS community
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@ginerel@kbin.social a few people in this thread have mentioned using Kbin or Mbin as something of an RSS curration tool. I'd like to learn more about that.
The Drupal community maintains an aggregate of feeds from 200+ sources with posts about the CMS. In the last year or so, the quality of the content is noticeably worse. Some community members are blaming Ai generated content...
Chat GPT, write a 1000 word blog post about Agile that mentions Drupal
I think the problem has more to do with how Google rewards "fresh" content that repeats keywords with higher page rank than a better written article posted 2 years earlier.
Regardless of the cause, a small group already running drupal.community for Mastodon has been discussing using up voting as a way to let the community curate the feed.
Would love any advice or examples on using Kbin or Mbin to empower a small community to curate RSS content.
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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