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It's wack how the internet seems to have collectively forgotten about this technology over the past decade, despite it not being the least bit obsolete.
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.
RSS is definitively not dead. I threw $99 for a lifetime Feedly subscription about 15 years ago, rather than roll my own aggregation, and it's been my primary news source since.
The problem isn't that I don't know about RSS, it's more that I don't really have any content sources that use it
You may be interested to know that any Lemmy community can become an RSS feed. Look for the little RSS icon to the right of the Sort Type drop down, click that and it takes you to the RSS feed. That URL can then be pasted into just about any RSS reader and you will see a list of the latest topics. I use ProtoPage as my browser home page and have widgets that show me Beehaw Technology, News, etc. I clicked on one of those stories to come to this post. (By the way, Reddit works this way by just putting an ".rss" at the end of the subreddit's URL. I used that a lot and am ecstatic that Lemmy allow a similar thing!)
How come?
I get the top hacker news from an RSS feed (https://hnrss.github.io/), individual blogs, YouTube channels, twitter accounts (getting the RSS feeds from nitter), etc
Most websites will have RSS hidden underneath.
Have been using RSS feeds almost 20 years now, since Google Reader and with Feedly since Reader was deprecated.
I don't think I've seen a single piece of news come across Reddit in any of the interests I follow that I haven't also seen via rss feeds +/- an hour of it's posting.
I stopped using RSS feeds when google reader went down. There aren't a lot of RSS feeds I'm interested in anymore. That being said, I hope RSS makes a comeback.
How do you know who to follow? For example, if I were interested in software architecture, I would need to follow 40 blogs, no? And how would I know if new ones pop up?
That's the hard part. It takes some time to curate a good list. One of the nice things about ttrss is that you can drop any url into the subscribe field and it'll search the page for RSS feeds. I'm sure other readers probably do something similar.
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.
The trick to enjoy curated content via RSS is to subscribe to sources that curate your content rather than to raw news sources, e.g. subscribe a blog of a person that does important news reviews rather than to a newspaper raw feed. Otherwise the classic mailbox-like RSS reader experience indeed requires you to sift through content on your own and aggressively. That said, some commercial readers do try to algorithmically prioritize content based on your interest or offer discovery functions (a different kind of experience than direct community-based sorting of course, but there's trade offs here)
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.
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.
I have no idea if it's possible or not, but some sort of service that allows for users who have the same RSS feeds be able to comment on things happening... sort of like magazines lol
NewsBlur does this. Something like this that uses the fediverse would be interesting though!
should be fairly trivial to set up a bot that takes an RSS feed input and then posts the items to a fediverse community
that would require users to subscribe to the specific fediverse community instead of the source RSS feed though
in fact, I follow a Mastodon bot that does exactly this with Steam Deck release notes RSS feed and it works well!
@steamdeckupdate@hometech.social
I mean that's what a link aggregator is. HN and Lemmy are link aggregators.
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.
Love RSS. Best way to read stuff online.
I use Feedbin, which also provides a bespoke email you can use for newsletters so they’re also pulled into your feed. Very handy.
If anyone wants a nice RSS reader for iOS, Reeder is great.
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.
Can somebody explain RSS Feeds to me like I was 5? Yes I know I am late to the party as I saw somebody say they have used them for 20+ years. Thank you!
It's just a way to subscribe directly to content sources rather than subscribing to a creator's social media account or a subreddit or something. So if there's a blog you like and you use your RSS reader to subscribe to that blog, any new posts will be fed directly to your reader. Obviously, the benefit then is that you have a central portal with a direct connection to all of your selected content sources.
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.
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.
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.
Been using rss for years now. It's always been the best way for me to filter into only the news I care about, away from 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.
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!
I been using the feeder app and its really good to get tech news , just add the RSS links and you have news that choose to read and not recommended bullshit.
I miss Google Reader. Is there anything like that now? Also, can anyone recommend an Android app for RSS?
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 use RSS every day- it's my primary source of news- but there are many sites I'd love to follow which don't have a feed. My reader, Inoeader, claims to have a workaround for it, but only on their paid version, which is stupid expensive.
I selfhost freshrss and it's amazing. If the reddit privacy frontends go down due to the api changes, I'll lose those feeds but I already replaced them with lemmy feeds anyways :)
I have been using Feedly which is pretty much dead due to the reddit situation. Are there other similar tools that's Lemmy friendly?
What do we mean Feedly is dead due to Reddit? I have been using it since Google Reader left without issue.
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.
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.)
Understandable. RSS is fantastic for news and such, but lacks the community of comments which is what drives a lot of people to content they normally wouldn't read.
Bro same. It's almost like FOMO. There's just so much content out there that I feel overwhelmed just trying to parse through what I'd actually want in an RSS feed and terrified i'm missing actual important stuff.
I loved iGoogle. I had my feeds set up just how I liked them. Then I moved to protopage when that went to the graveyard. Then a bunch of things (not everything) stopped updating.
I went back to check it out a few weeks ago and even fewer things were updating. A lot of places just let RSS fall by the wayside.
Pour one out for Google Reader.
Fired up a FreshRSS instance for myself when the reddit API notifications came about. Reminds me of my Google Reader days - quite happy with it thus far. Any of the decent quality news sites seem to have an RSS option, at least in my experience so far.