RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.
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Piped is good too btw
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I use RSS feeds to subscribe to Lemmy communities! (well, specifically my own one)
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.
I’m kind of sad I’ve entirely missed the RSS golden era, then.
It was pretty great to receive dozens of full articles everyday without any bloat or ads. Just text and maybe a few images. I suppose it is possible to subscribe to apps that aggregate several sources in a practical manner, but then you’ll be restricted to their selection.
@CanadaPlus @SpectralPineapple Ive been using Plenary on Android which does a pretty good job of pulling full articles when available. Don’t think its FOSS but its seems to be focused on privacy to a certain extent. I love that it can create a custom widget that can replace the google surveillance oriented click bait feed.
I’ve been experimenting with a few different options on desktop. @thunderbird has been the go to for me for a long time. Since playing with Google Reader lifetimes ago.
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.
Feedbro, it’s a browser extension.
do you recommend any fediverse instances (or even subreddits) that might share informative/fun/interesting articles or websites of any kind? i feel the quality on reddit has really tanked in the last couple years.
I mean, that kind of heavily depends on the area of your interests; I don’t think that it’s really possible to say “forum X is interesting” in a vacuum. I’d add that I still think that there are interesting subreddits on Reddit, though I agree that the front page isn’t very appealing these days, at least to me.
On the Threadiverse, though, I would say that as things stand, lemmy is not really good at helping one find existing communities. There’s the newcommunities announcement community at !newcommunities@lemmy.world, but those, by definition, don’t have a userbase when announced, and some of the creators don’t do the work of regularly posting content until they catch on. Kbin reccomends random posts in the sidebar, but that’s a pretty shotgun way to find things.
What I’d probably do is use the Lemmy Explorer’s community search, which as things stand is the only way I’m aware of to search all of the communities across all of the instances on the Threadiverse.
That is a good way indeed, although I’m yet to find a way to filter after new or active communities.
Look at the drop-down menu next to the search field, which lets you sort via different criteria.
I think “newest publish time” is the date of community creation; new communities at the top.
For activity, it has number of active users in various given periods of time.
@tal thank you!
thanks a bunch that helps! in terms of reddit, i’ve been using it for almost 15 years and the subreddits i liked seem to have changed recently, or maybe gotten “too big”. i think the API changes last year really shook things up too. hence why i’m on beehaw now! anyway, i’ll take a look at the lemmy verse communities, thanks!
@awmire Friendica supports RSS if you’re into that. You might already know it is mostly a Facebook alternative (although it has many more features than Facebook). You can paste the website link into the search bar and it gets the RSS feed for you if it has one.
I do like RSS feed readers that have a magazine view though, so I couldn’t really move all my feeds here.
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.
Fluent Reader
Don’t know what you mean by “actual content surfacing features”, but I’m quite happy with Feeder, it’s pretty basic but it’s FOSS and the notifications work!
Posted elsewhere: Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters and grouped feeds. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS
Fair enough, I’m not aware that Feeder has any of that. I don’t even want filtering or groups, I just want a notification of every new post on a community or website!
Would you happen to mean readers with filtering tools? If so I’m interested as well.
I know Thunderbird technically has them, but I’ve had trouble making them work as effectively as I’d like. RSSOwl had some that were easier to work with, but stopped being updated. There’s now a fork of it called RSSOwlnix, but I haven’t taken the time to see whether it still works as well or not. May be worth looking into though…
Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS
I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters.
Sounds like an opportunity to integrate some AI… 🙈
We don’t need to use that word here
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?
To sync across different devices maybe?
Do you need that? You only need to sync the feed. There are formats like OPML for that. At worst you need a file sync tool like syncthing. The feed contents seen by the readers are all the same.
I’m yet to see a good reason why feed readers need to be web apps. This is worse than the case of git - a decentralized tool is taken and made centralized.
When you have 100+ feeds you really want to avoid reading twice the same entry. It’s the single most important feature in an RSS reader for me.
Agreed. The syncing can be managed other ways. The only thing I’m left with is using on a work computer for some reason, where one’s own devices aren’t available/permitted? But that’s probably not a common usage case.
So the OPML file does handle the read status as well? isn’t it just a format to export and import feeds inside a reader?
Depends on your use-case obviously, for me it’s very nice to have all feeds and read status on all devices (laptop, phone, tablet) and don’t need to add a new feed to all devices or set it up again when I change phone, reinstall Linux etc. It also has user-management, so you could have accounts for friends and family and even expose it to the internet (which I wouldn’t at this point) or but it on a private mesh / vpn like Tail-/Headscale.
Edit: Whoops, I was talking about self-hosting. Having it as a web service has the same benefits if you don’t wanna tinker with tech, obviously, (with the caveat that people from that service know what you read …)
Anyone interested can find (usually free) externally hosted freshRss and TinyRss hosts on the chatons website. Select one of those in the “based on” drop down menu.
I’ve tried both and like neither. As far as I can tell, they only have a small number of apps. And none of them work offline. With a regular RSS reader you can refresh it when you have internet access, then everything is available when you do not. Like an email client or any other such software.
But it might be suitable to you. So check out the chatons.
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.
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.
Not a solution for everyone, but I am selfhosting and using FreshRSS. One of the extensions is Readable which will fetch the entry’s URL and parse it using either Readability or Postlight Parser to replace the content of the entry and make all of it available in the reader.
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.
Best way around that I’ve found is with feedme on android. It’s got a mobilizer with a customizable css selector. Just set the app to load the feed in web view and to use the mobilizer and you’re good to go.
There are some that do. Inoreader as host and Reeder as client both support that. Not perfect, but working well enough
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Lemmy communities are glorified RSS feeds, you can even subscribe to them through RSS and not care whether your instance is down for maintenance to read the posts.
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What I’ve said already: once the RSS client gets the feed, it’s on your device. Meaning you can access the items off-line, filter and sort by whatever criteria you wish (and your client allows), delete them, mark to read later, etc.
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Catered feeds, for example.
You can create a feed that only includes Lemmy communities dedicated to a specific topic - like only those related to video games in some broad sense. Or a news-only feed.
It’s much more convenient that just subscribing to everything you’re interested in and then trying to filter out on our own (good luck not forgetting stuff), as you’re basically on the algorithm’s mercy as well.
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Lemmy, too, has algorithms that determine what you see - how many upvotes a post has, how many comments, how recent, etc. The communities you subscribe to may have some high-quality, niche posts that you’re very likely to miss because they’re overshadowed by bigger, more active communities where posts simply gain more traction - RSS lets you circumvent that.
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I get a push notification when there’s a post in a specific community
Blame the website, not rss
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The site configures what shows up in the RSS or ATOM feed. It’s not a feature or a flaw in RSS or ATOM inherently.
In other words, complain to whomever runs the site in question.
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@drwho yep, that is correct. I also have feeds in all my readers that are displayed completely, while others are just back links to the article in question.
RSS never developed into anything that an email blast couldn’t do.
Never stopped.
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I think the key here is that it’s a feed managed by the user. There’s not enough commercial potential in that. As a tech company, you want to be the one curating the feed, and you want the user to believe you’re doing it in their best interest so they don’t notice how you’re making money by subtly feeding them ads.
RSS is simply too good for the contemporary internet.
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
I think some kind of anti-HTML measure yeeted my angle bracketed link :(. Fixed.
