Blogger discovers this cool thing called “RSS”.
I was trying to find a solution to have all the news sources I care about in a single app. Then I remembered RSS and was able to do that very easily. I use self-hosted Miniflux and just use that as pwa when on my phone. Ridoculously lightweight and very awesome. I also setup Readeck (a Pocket alternative) where I push longer articles for when I’m up for reading more instead of just checking the latest news. I love it
I frankly hate those posts in which people tells me what I should do. Just write “Hey, look, this is cool!” and let me judge it and decide.
Same. I’m guessing the clickbait algorithm favors the “should” phrasing, which is annoying.
To OP and the few other comments sarcastically dunking on the blogger for just discovering RSS: why? It’s not exactly drowning in advocates today, and there’s basically a whole generation that wasn’t around when Google killed off Reader. What if we treated advocacy like this like the good thing it is?
You make my heart hurt, you’re so right. It’s getting harder and harder to find RSS or Atom links on sites. The more people rediscover these technologies, the more chance there is that site developers will continue to provide them.
It would be fantastic if more people would rediscover Usenet, and IRC, and ditch the shitty knock-offs like Discord. There’s a pretty big contingent advocating for Jabber, which I’m ambivalent about, having been there when it started and when it (effectively) died and being very conscious of its flaws and limitations… but, still, these are all open standards and old-school internet - sometimes pre-web! - and they’re often still better than the commoditized successors.
Embrace and encourage the new infusion of youth! Gate keeping is a very post-eternal-September behavior.
Pretty much everyone who has an RSS feed has it accidentally.
What’s the first rule of Usenet? 😬
I’d be interested in ditching Discord, anything you recommend?
Element (over the Matrix protocol). As someone who grew up on IRC, it is in no shape or form a replacement for Discord.
Revolt Chat. Only problem is they limit you to 25mb unless you’re self hosted.
It makes the most sense to get off discord by being platform agnostic in my opinion, just going to wherever you can find clusters of the types of connections you want in whatever format works for you as long as the format meets your requirements like privacy or whatever else, if you can find the bulk of it in a single place that’s great but not necessary.
IRC
AFAIK it can’t reach feature parity with Discord, it only does text FFS! No video, no voice, not even simple text formatting and emojis! Not to mention plenty of clients are ugly, which can’t be said about Discord.
Agree about features (pplus the fact that you’d need a bouncer or an always-on client to receive all messages), but the clients are just better than Discord. Discord just feels bloated.
there’s basically a whole generation that wasn’t around when Google killed off Reader.
🥺 😭
I don’t think “dunking” is the right word. It’s just funny that people are still discovering RSS 30 years later. Myself included.
Cool tip.
If you want news for a specific game and they release news on steam… all steam pages have an RSS feed.
Genuinely did not know that, thanks
Shot out to freshness, been using that for years! Self hosting it
FreshRSS for those playing along at home…
Unfortunately a lot of sites have ditched support for RSS over the past 10 years requiring tedious work arounds if you can get it to work at all.
I hope it can make a comeback but I’m dubious.
I use it, as both a reader and a publisher, but rss (in particular) could do with an update.
How do you all discover new RSS feeds to subscribe to?
I use Feedly for discovery, they have a crap load of websites you can subscribe to even if the websites don’t explicitly advertise RSS.
And then use the Feedly desktop website to get the actual RSS URL and put it in the client of your choice 🙃
My way is simple and stupid. I hit F12, then search for “rss” in the html and copy the link
Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:
- I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
- Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I’m already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.
I use an extension that searches the code on the page to find them. It puts a little number up, then when you click it you can copy the link.
Kagi Small Web, personally. Also a lot of people who blog on the Fediverse have RSS feeds, so discovery via Mastodon and such is good too.
Wordpress sites publish an rss feed by default at site.com/rss or site.com/feed, so there’s a good chance a site you want an rss feed for has one even if they didn’t intend to.
After spending lots of time trying to find feeds, learning this was super helpful
I use an Browser Addon that searches for RSS feeds, still a bit finiky sometimes but still better than manually guessing URLs
I’ve recently rediscovered RSS and I’m in love with it. I just wish Meta wasn’t a piece of fuck and let you add Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. there are some workarounds for the latter, but they’re really finicky.
Not an RSS solution, but in IG if you tap the “Instagram” logo at the top/right, a menu will pop up. You can select “following” to (mostly) see the accounts you’re following (and in reverse chronological order.)
With bibliogram you can follow instagram pages in rss: https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
Facebook pages used to work with rss bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
With bibliogram you can follow instagram pages in rss
good luck finding an instance that works.
Facebook pages used to work with rss bridge
I’m well aware of the RSS Bridge and I use several of them hosted on the main instance, but how does “used to work” help? Facebook used to actually provide RSS feeds for their pages and they used to work, too.
You have to selfhost bibliogram, working for me, I usually get rate limited but get all updates once or twice a week.
There is a facebook bridge in rss bridge, for a long time it worked, I don’t follow its development nowadays, maybe someone with some php knowledge can resurrect it.
member when all the big cool web 2.0 companies had public facing APIs?
I member when there was no official reddit mobile app, only third party clients, and they were so good.
That was just for the growth and acquisition phase, using the network effect to capture consumers and businesses, get them addicted and dependent on the product, and then build a wall around them to lock them into your platform.
It’s a classic bait and switch, and if we didn’t live in corporate dictatorships masquerading as “democracy” it’d be illegal.
Yep, remember when XMPP was a thing so you could chat with anyone no matter the platform?
It is very much still a thing, and my preferred chat protocol - because it is easy to host and unlikely to enshittify.
Yeah, I meant in the sense that Facebook and Google had also implemented it so you could just talk to anyone with any client.
Google Reader was my goto and when they killed that I tried a bunch of others and none quite hit the same. Gutted that one hit the Google graveyard.
Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish move.
I just saw this article last week! I love RSS feeds and set up a bunch through my work email outlook client. They been there since like 2010 (yes I still have the same job…) and I barely touch them these days due to time, and some sites died, but it’s still the quickest way to catch up on the news you want. Wherever I saw this posted last I saw a recommend for FeedFlow and have been messing with that phone app to try and make some ultimate new feed for myself.
Wait until I show them my PHP BB.
We gotta bring back usenet servers and dare I say IRC and Telnet
SSH over telnet but IRC is still alive and kicking
I’ve been interested in trying out RSS again but I don’t want to self-host. Can anyone recommend a RSS client (hosted, local, or whatever) that they like?
there are some publically available FreshRSS instances that you can make an account with, I personally use hostux. you can access it with the browser and any apps that support FreshRSS (in my case, Read You or Capy Reader on Android, and sometimes RSS Guard on desktop).
It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it’s easy to learn and use.
I’ve also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet because I’m still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti’s. It’s also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.
If it’s open source, you could perhaps tinker with the algorithm. My main desires for rss feeds are:
- a way to filter out fluff affiliate link articles (e.g., 8 best gadgets on sale for prime day)
- a way to cluster articles on the same topic (i don’t really need to read 5 articles about the same news item)
Any clue if nunti could do that?
Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.
The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn’t really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.
Oh wow, they really did a good job of explaining it. It’s not too complex. I think it probably would be able to filter out some of the fluff.
The fact that it’s only available through fdroid is actually a good thing in my opinion.
Thunderbird has RSS integrated, which could be quite neat once that synchronizes.
If you’re on iOS, feeeed is kinda slick :)
I needed this, thanks! For the lazy, it’s here.
I’ve had some decent times with inoreader.
inoreader seems very ergonomic, thanks!
On android i like ReadYou on fdroid
I prefer the Feedbro browser extension in Firefox. I think it is available for chrome/edge as well.
I am using RSS and I love it
