Open Source @lemmy.ml The 8232 Project @lemmy.ml 3 wk. ago

RSS pleasantly surprised me

I've gotten to a point in my privacy journey where it's less about moving towards private options, and more about relaxing and having some fun with what I can do.

I put off messing around with RSS for a while. I simply didn't have a significant need for it. However, after finding no good options to monitor various Lemmy communities without logging in, I decided to try out an RSS reader.

I settled on Feeder as my RSS reader, despite a few missing features I would like. I added my first Lemmy community as a feed, to try it out. I was immediately surprised how well it worked.

I also added other feeds, such as Tails News, and I was happy with that. I could monitor all the communities I needed to.

Then, I noticed one day, there was an RSS button for my Lemmy inbox. This is where I was really pleased: I can view my notifications without the need to log in, all in the same place.

Lemmy and RSS are both incredible, and I truly believe RSS is the hidden backbone of the internet. I love it, and maybe you should give it a try too!

(Ahem P.S. if anyone has an RSS reader as good as Feeder for Android that fixes this issue, please let me know)

53 comments

I personally hate newsletters because

my email inbox is already cluttered enough as it is

I need to share my email to subscribe, which puts the balance of power into the hands of the sender at the expense of my privacy

I'd rather have newsletters made available through RSS feeds, where I can subscribe and unsubscribe anonymously.
- You can turn newsletters into RSS feeds anonymously through Kill the Newsletter.
  
  I've been using it for over a year and it works flawlessly. Highly recommend!
- Am I blind.. Where does OP mention newsletters?
  
  Nowhere, just one of the use-case I think RSS feeds could cover in a more privacy-respecting way.
RSS is awesome. My favorite fun fact is that podcasts are RSS-based, which is why you can listen to any of them from any podcast app.
- I always get angry when a "podcast" is spotify or yt exclusive. Such a downgrade compared to RSS!
I love RSS.

I run FreshRSS as my server via docker and connect to it via Read You on Android and NewsFlash on Linux

I also run RSS-Bridge in docker. It has been really useful as it can generate RSS feeds for many websites that don't natively have them.
- Thanks for the tip on Read you, I've tried a few RSS readers and not been entirely happy but this one seems nice!
- Freshrss is great :) wish there was an offline iPhone app
  
  The freshrss GitHub has a list of supported iphone apps and indicates some of them work offline. https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS?tab=readme-ov-file#apis--native-apps
RSS is great and Google tried to kill it so you'd have to use other services.

I like how I can tell a big event has happened because I see a bunch of articles on it, and that it's possible to catch up to where you last were in the feed.

That means you've caught up on the news, no need to red any more, you can do something else. Algorithms always serve you up new content, so you're in this constant state of thinking something is always happening.

I think RSS readers would help fix the brains of a lot of boomers if we could ever get them off Facebook
I second that excitement! When I first found RSS, it felt like rediscovering the original intent of the internet. It gives you full flexibility of your sources of information all in one place, without giving your data away to a corporate entity, or signing up for any platform for that matter.

Tbh it is such a breath of fresh air compared to the feeds and platforms we've become accustomed to--and RSS has been around longer than them, which is crazy to me.

I just hope websites on the internet continue to support it--as many older, not as common technologies often get phased out.
I was heartbroken when Google killed their Reader service. To this day I can't fully understand why they did it - many people used and loved it.

Moved to Feedly but things were never the same. I'd like another app or service that lets me read my subscribed feeds and sync their read/unread status (and save them for reading them later in a separate collection, as you can with Feedly) between android and pc - but being visually well designed as Feedly, without the caps it puts to you like that ridiculous cap on searching into your feeds, being completely free and that is no self hosted (don't have a pc turned on 24/7 nor can afford it)... so yeah maybe this is asking for too much.

However, I absolutely agree RSS is absolutely awesome and wish more people get into it
- To this day I can't fully understand why they did it.
  
  One word: ads.
  
  With RSS, you have content from various sources in one place, stripped of the ads, without any cookielicious tracking. How are you supposed to monitize that?
- The Old Reader supports 100 feeds on the free tier. And they have a nice list of apps that support syncing to your account:
  
  https://www.theoldreader.com/en/apps/
  
  Might work for you if you don’t syndicate many feeds.
- I recently started self hosting this one https://github.com/Athou/commafeed
  
  I don't know if it's the best or anything, but it works fine for me.
I wish more blogs, websites and services would offer RSS feeds. I personally use Thunderbird as my feed reader on PC. Not sure if the Android client has this functionality too.
- I've found that a lot of blogs do have RSS feeds even if there is no visible link or mention of RSS anywhere on the website. I often just throw the blog URL into the 'add feed' box on The Old Reader, and it turns out there is feed info hidden in there somewhere.
  
  I've noticed that too and try that also. Sometimes the reader does not find anything, but adding /rss.xml or /feed/ or something manually to the link does work at times. The inconsistency is also a problem. But some blogs just do not have such a functionality at all, or is not tested (wrong dates, therefore unusable). Its ~~often~~ sometimes an afterthought and inconsistent.
- Not sure if the Android client has this functionality too.
  
  Nope for now
I've been happily using RSS feeds for many years. I mostly use them for webcomics. I've got a bunch of different webcomic feeds. But I also use RSS to follow a bunch of low-traffic sites that I care about the content of but don't want to have to manually visit just to see if there's an update.

Also, I don't have a google account, but I use RSS to follow a couple of youTube channels that I find interesting. (Again, stuff that rarely updates. eg. hbomberguy.)
It's cool.
I currently catch up on news with it.

Firefox has RSS radar extensions that can help find rss feeds in websites(that don't really show/mention it on every page)
- Fun fact: this feature used to be built-in to Firefox itself.
  
  Really? Why'd Firefox remove such a useful feature?
  Security concerns? Or no one maintaining it?
RIP Aaron Swartz. You are truely missed...

...Is it just me or does the shooter have the same smile? I've heard he's really smart.
I'm annoyed that a lot of the sites I browse don't have RSS feeds, and I've had to do some really tiresome hacks just to get some to work (for example, even tools like FreshRSS's HTML parser doesn't tell you the reason a feed broke, so there's a dozen different things to adjust blindly until it works).

RSS saves me so much time, I used to waste hours just cycling through pages to see if any updated.
I see another commenter mentioned FreshRSS. While abandoned now, I created https://github.com/Fmstrat/agriget a long time ago when Feedly shut down. It was based on TT-RSS which I do not recommend because of drama with the creator (they are very.. bad to contributors (I stupidly ignored that originally). Not to mention, it's dated now.

All this to say, my recco is to self host with an agregator that saves the content locally. That way, if the article ever goes away, or your phone dies, you always have your saved and read content.

I host my own Lemmy instance, and have been considering making an API not that turns RSS feeds into communities, as the one thing I like about Lemmy is the conversations. So that would give me the best of both worlds.
newsboat <3
Maybe a dumb thought but I just realised if Lemmy does RSS maybe I could add Lemmy feeds to my Friendica account. ??
- I got this post by rss so YES,
  But do not friendica allow you to join community by Activity pub? (Benefit is you can reply directly from there)
  
  Yes, friendica shows Lemmy communities as regular friendica groups.
  
  Oh hmm Ill try and find out .
How do I get started with RSS? Android.
- Install an RSS reader and add the feeds from sites you want to follow.
  
  Most people like feeder: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
My only gripe with RSS is the usual dependency on a synchronization server (whether it is a 3rd party server or self-hosted). I have been searching for way too long for a local-first RSS application for both Linux and Android which would store the RSS feeds (as in, the downloaded posts) in a local folder that could be then synchronized between Linux and Android applications using Syncthing or similar. Sadly, still no results. Anyone know about something?
- There's always decsync but despite the author claiming it isn't dead, I say it's dead. 😥
  
  Exactly. Otherwise, DecSync would be perfect (and I even used DecSync in the past).
- Newsboat on pc and newsboat in termux 😅
  
  Aha, I haven't thought about using the same Linux application. This approach might be worth investigating. Thank you for the idea.
- It's audio-specific but I use Audiobookshelf's RSS feed
  
  I have a local folder where I put downloaded youtube audio and the RSS feed updates automatically when new files are placed there. Then, I access it through Lissen or the official audiobookshelf app.
  
  It is definitely worth looking at. I am working with mostly blog posts RSS feeds, but this might come useful one of these days, too. Thank you for the suggestion.
I've used 'KillTheNewsletter' a lot. And then it hit me. Most email clients have features I want for my feeds (filtering, auto-sorting into folders by keywords, etc.)

So far, only emacs (forgot extension name) and feedbro (firefox extension) have similar festures to these...

Hence, I'm yet to try it, but might create an account only for feeds. And then use rss2email (pypi)

Is anyone else using this tool? I'd love to hear it...
@Charger8232 It seems it does.. Oh this is cool!
It's a bit tricky to setup. Are there any relatively updated guides to help point out the best settings/tweaks? How do you go about which communities to include without getting overwhelmed? I also worry about creating too much of a self-enclosed echo-chamber with this aggregation tool approach, but maybe it's just my paranoia showing
I like RSS, i think it can improve the information diet people have by getting high quality content. kinda an alternative to more popular content (meaning possibly low effort) pushed to us using algorithms or just created to appeal to the masses because it is more economical.

It does have a UX problem, i think we need some open source project where you click on a button and it will show you the RSS address but also give you the option to set up RSS while it coaches you to do it in a way that is kinda pleasant and easy.
Do you have a recommendation for a website that lets me subscribe to RSS feeds and display them publicly (without needing account or JavaScript to see the combined feed)?

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