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Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024

Whatever the linguistic details, one of the main roles of RSS is to supply directly to you a steady stream of updates from a website. Every new article published on that site is served up in a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.

Unfortunately, RSS is no longer how most of us consume "content." (Google famously killed its beloved Google Reader more than a decade ago.) It's now the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what's new. But I think RSS still has a place in your life: Especially for those who don't want to miss anything or have algorithms choosing what they read, it remains one of the best ways to navigate the internet. Here's a primer on what RSS can (still!) do for you, and how to get started with it, even in this late era of online existence.

nullpotential ,
@nullpotential@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Lifehacker is still around? Haven't seen that name in years

harsh3466 ,

It’s a shell of its former self. I miss Gina Tripani era Lifehacker.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Can I get an RSS feed to show up formatted like Reddit/Lemmy? I played around with it only once way the fuck back in high school and only because I confused it with CSS for altering the look of a site.

AnxiousDuck ,

Feeder has a "card" layout if I'm not mistaken

cley_faye ,

The number of sites that still supports RSS is impressive when you think about how niche it is right now. I was surprised when I saw some big comics sites had it.

kilgore_trout ,
@kilgore_trout@feddit.it avatar

Is it because of Wordpress?

cley_faye ,

I doubt webtoon is built on wordpress :D

kilgore_trout ,
@kilgore_trout@feddit.it avatar

I was thinking all those websites which persistently ask you to join their newsletter, but still have RSS available too.

gndagreborn ,
@gndagreborn@lemmy.world avatar

I'm gonna shill for FreshRSS and Feed Me. Been a fantastic combination so far.

Self hosting FreshRSS allows me to curate shit I care about. Even better, it's private aggregation. Sometimes though, I miss the conversation around these topics. For that, Lemmy exists.

FrankTheHealer ,

RSS is fucking amazing.

I use Feeder on Android and QuiteRSS on my laptop and desktop. I use it for everything from local news and tech news, to YouTube subscriptions. It's great. Forget social media with enshitification and profit driven motives. RSS is all you need.

ruplicant , (edited )
@ruplicant@sh.itjust.works avatar

Feeder is a perfectly functional RSS reader for Android, and the only updated and straight forward one on F-Droid when I decided to set up my feeds, and an app I've seen suggested on Lemmy several times when there's mention of RSS...but why doesn't it have groups? I've got my general news mixed with tech news, cluttered in between the rest of it - it does have grouping and it's called "tags"

this thread made me re-check and there are some new options in there and at least one will let you group the feeds: Read You

EDIT: dumb take

boggedgibbon75 ,

I can do groups in feeder.

ruplicant ,
@ruplicant@sh.itjust.works avatar

omg, thank you. i just learnt about the "tags" function that I've always assumed worked differently without even trying it

Dehydrated ,

Read You is great

User79185 ,

RSS is my everyday goto, I'm using QuiteRSS with filters for specific words, really neat one.

Overzeetop ,
@Overzeetop@sopuli.xyz avatar

That seems like a lot of work. It would be easier for me to write a bot that will post every article from my favorite sites to technology@lemmy.world. Then I could have another bot summarize it in the body.

Oh, wait…several people already have. :-/

abies_exarchia ,

I never had a good way to ingest info, but i setup a self-hosted FreshRSS instance a few months ago and it’s completely changed how i consume information for the better. I spend a lot less time scrolling through shit that never interested me much in the first place

t0fr ,
@t0fr@lemmy.ca avatar

Google Reader died more than a decade ago?
oh my jeebus, I feel ooooooooollllld

Blackmist ,

I seem to remember RSS's main issue being not really being able to tell "recent" from "popular".

Showed a whole lot of nothing much, and not very much of the stuff you wanted to see.

realitista , (edited )
@realitista@lemmy.world avatar

It does tend to sort by recent, but to me that's its strength. It makes no effort to curate the feed, it gives me all the articles from the sources I choose in order and that's it. So while I still use Lemmy for the "popular", RSS tends to deliver me deep niche content that may not be popular but is very interesting to me.

And also so much content is overlooked by sites like Reddit and Lemmy, that often it is stuff that's popular if I post it, but no one's gotten to it yet. It tends to be more up to date because you don't have to wait for things to get voted to the front page

Corgana ,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

Hah, I consider non-algorithmic sorting to be RSS' killer feature. There are a lot of fantastic stories that get published every week that are too dry, too complex, or just plan too accurate and non-sensationalized to get noticed by social media algorithms.

FauxPseudo ,
@FauxPseudo@lemmy.world avatar

When I left Reddit I fired up Feedly and did some house cleaning. Still looking for more decent feeds.

Here are some of mine:
XKCD,
Nature,
Slashdot,
New Scientist,
FactCheck,
Neurologica,
Science Based Medicine

What else you got?

thru_dangers_untold ,

All youtube channels have their own feeds, but they're not obvious to find. The first part of the URL looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

Go to the channel's home page and search the page source for "channel_id=" (with a long string of numbers and letters after it, often starting with a "U") then paste the ID after the equal sign. The channel id looks something like this: UCtwKon9qMt5YLVgQt1tvJKg

FauxPseudo , (edited )
@FauxPseudo@lemmy.world avatar

You wouldn't need that if YouTube actually sent notifications like it's supposed to. So this will come in handy.

AgnosticMammal ,
@AgnosticMammal@lemmy.zip avatar

This might be useful for their community posts - is there a seperate feed for them or are they included in the videos feed?

I never see the community posts anywhere except for the home page & on the creator's page. Which makes it frustrating because I only stay in the subscriptions page - so I only get updates if they upload a video.

thru_dangers_untold , (edited )

Yeah, this doesn't include community posts. I haven't tried finding one tho

Plopp ,

Hang on, do you or anyone else know if it's possible to add playlists to RSS in this way? There are channels that I overall don't want to watch but that have a specific playlist I want to follow.

morrowind ,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

Vivaldi detects these automatically so you can in a couple of clicks. It's great

panicnow ,

arstechnica has a premium RSS for $3 a month that has no ads. I love it.

Bangs42 ,
@Bangs42@lemmy.world avatar

And full text!

_number8_ ,

i remember in high school (2010s) i tried using RSS but increasingly the feed wouldn't even have the article, just the title and the link so you'd have to visit their website. especially obnoxious because my obnoxious school district filtered approx 90% of the internet (for shocking reasons like 'forums' or 'TV/entertainment' or 'sports' or 'media')

thru_dangers_untold ,

Inoreader has an "Load full content" button (and hotkey) that loads the body of text without having to visit the page.

RememberTheApollo ,

I loved RSS feeds. But I’ve given up on them. And it would seem so have many of the sites I used to frequent. I read RSS offline, so right there I have a problem as the vast majority of RSS apps expect an internet connection. Sites used to write content in such a manner that it was easily readable in RSS, now they don’t. The decline in popularity of RSS has meant that after I get comfortable with an app it stops being updated and no longer works as the developer decides it’s not worth keeping up. Sites make RSS feeds harder to find, if they even have one.

I

Evkob , (edited )
@Evkob@lemmy.ca avatar

Assuming you read RSS offline on mobile, Feeder has an option to fetch full articles and stores them for offline reading. It's FOSS and actively-maintained, having received an update just last week.

I've never encountered a site I wanted to follow that didn't have RSS, but I wholly agree it's often needlessly complicated to find the feed links.

RememberTheApollo ,

Thanks for the rec, but unfortunately I’m on iOS.

Evkob ,
@Evkob@lemmy.ca avatar

Ah, my bad! I should have guessed by your username, which I assume is in reference to the now-defunct reddit app.

I can't personally vouch for it, but NetNewsWire might be a good option for iOS if you haven't tried it. It's also FOSS, updated as recently as June 2023, can read RSS feeds locally and has a reader view to fetch full articles. You'd have to test if it caches fetched articles though, but I don't see why it shouldn't.

RememberTheApollo , (edited )

Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.

(Yep, it’s the former Reddit app)

Edit: it is offline, but it only pulls in the first paragraph or whatever. You can read a snippet, but it’s not really an offline reader that pulls in the full article to be read.

RIP_Apollo ,

Just wanted to say that I like your username :)

RememberTheApollo ,

Thanks! A kindred soul!

fox2263 ,

Thank you! Awesome app

panicnow ,

I will vouch for it. I use it on my iPad constantly and have few complaints. I don’t think it syncs well between iPad and Mac or Phone when using iCloud sync, but I think they have other methods and I don’t really need sync since I do my media consumption on the iPad.

bazmatazable ,

This is my experience too. The sites hosting the articles that I want to read only provide the first parapraph and then a link back to the webpage. News is just headlines. I love that RSS doesn't allow much formating so you end up with an experience focused on the content itself (and no ads). It feels like a long time ago since I really enjoyed my RSS feeds.

Chocrates ,

Anyone got a favourite open source rss reader? So far I am mostly finding stuff with subscriptions. Even though many have a free plan i'd like to try to find an open one first

Evkob ,
@Evkob@lemmy.ca avatar

I've recommended these a couple of times in this thread, but I use Fluent Reader on desktop (cross-platform) and Feeder on Android. Both are FOSS and load articles locally, so no account/subscription required.

AdmiralShat ,

I cannot tell you how much better it feels to click a link to an android app and it opens github and not the play store.

littlewonder ,

FYI, Fluent Reader appears to have an Android .apk now: https://github.com/yang991178/fluent-reader-lite/releases/tag/v1.0.4%2B11

AllYourSmurf ,

Check out FreshRSS. You can self host, so if you have a home server, this will do the trick. Use your favorite reader app that can connect to it.

I get the subscription fatigue. I’m currently paying for Inoreader because I haven’t fully cut over to FreshRSS. It has good tools that are worth it for many, but all those subscriptions add up fast.

Dehydrated ,

FreshRSS is awesome, I use it with Read You on Android and I love it

pelotron ,

When Google Reader shut down, Feedly had an "import from Google" feature on their sign up page. Been using it for free ever since.

dylanmorgan ,

Thunderbird will do RSS.

FauxPseudo ,
@FauxPseudo@lemmy.world avatar

Feedly

RIP_Apollo ,

Are you sure that Feedly is open source? I can’t find any mention of it on their website.

FauxPseudo ,
@FauxPseudo@lemmy.world avatar

Sorry didn't parse that part.

RIP_Apollo ,

OK, no worries.

(Also, I didn’t downvote your comment btw)

FauxPseudo ,
@FauxPseudo@lemmy.world avatar

It would have been justified.

2xsaiko ,
@2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

NetNewsWire for Apple devices.

Dehydrated ,

Never realized that it's open source. That's great.

DannyMac ,
@DannyMac@lemmy.world avatar

Inoreader, FTW!

ominouslemon ,

YES

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