I use fluent reader with the following rss feeds (though I really need to expand

Yes

Yeah, of course. How else will I know when my various serialized content updates? Like, are people out there just checking a list of blogs and comics by hand every few days? I used to do that before RSS, and it suuuuuucked.

Yeah. I run my own FreshRSS server and use FeedMe to access it. It's mostly just a bunch of UK newspapers and tech news sites because I realised I was getting all my news from Twitter and I wanted to cut back my use of Twitter. It's fine. The great thing about getting my news from social media was that I'd follow a load of people with similar interests to me so I'd mostly just see articles that interested me regardless of the source. Now it takes more scrolling to get past the articles I don't care about to find the ones I want to read. It means I get a broader overview of news that isn't effectively curated for me, either by other people or by algorithm, but it's not as engaging. It is the right choice though if you're looking to see more outside of what you're usually shown, as you say.

RSS is great! I use it for Slashdot, Youtube, some webcomics.

Yup! I use Feeder as my RSS aggregator of choice

I subscribe to technology news sites and lgbtq+ news sites using it, since it's waaay better than going into each site and finding an article that interests me, opposed to opening feeder and finding my links categorized by site

Yep! There's a community here for recommendations related to RSS too! !rssfeeds@lemmy.world

I've recently realized that I may also want a different desktop app (so not necessarily involving a server) for reading RSS feeds than what I've been using. Was trying to use Thunderbird for this for the convenience of email/calendar/RSS, but I have this feeling that it may not be able to adequately handle some of the variations I've seen cropping up with some sites' RSS (which may be those sites mucking it up more than anything to do with Thunderbird tbh but not sure).

I have a hosted rss reader/aggregate set up. But I only occasionally check it and read or go through a few.

Yep, I use Read You on Android / LineageOS!

https://github.com/Ashinch/ReadYou

About 50% of what I read ~~online~~ is just RSS. For cli fans, newsboat lets you extend the RSS feeds really easily. So far, I have:

• gemini translation, to get gemini feeds, and a hotkey to open them.
• a hotkey to open things in w3m (most articles work fine in the terminal, many are easier to read)
• a hotkey to open youtube videos
• another to download them and watch later

Absolutely. I use Miniflux and clients on various devices to get the sync feature. I mostly have tech and game news there, though.

Before hosting my own FreshRSS instance I used TheOldReader (and Google Reader before that). It's a great way of focusing you're attention and keep track of sites. It does hurt them though, since it won't load their ads.

I stopped using RSS around when I started using Reddit, so around 2008-2009!
I'm surprised to see that it's still so popular, or has it gained traction again recently?
I didn't hear much about RSS in between 2010-2022 TBH.

I have been an RSS user for the past 20 years. I use it for all sorts of stuff including current news, keeping up with technology, health, classified listings (craigslist), site updates, forums, etc.

I used GoogleReader for a long time (RIP), now I use Feedly which is amazing. I hit the ALL button so I get a firehose of news feeds which are sorted by timestamp, NOT some dumb algorithm choosing when and what I see.

As I tell everyone, whenever a current event happens in the world, I see 20+ different headlines from different sites spinning the same story. This lets me cut through the BS and see the real story about what's happening.

I subscribe to a few hundred RSS feeds including a bunch of random useless ones. Here's a few I picked that might be beneficial (note that some of these sites have multiple rss feeds depending on specific topics - be sure not to subscribe just to the main "top stories" feeds) :

ABCNews , InvestorPlace, Associated Press, Ars Technica, The Nation, BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Hill, LA Times, New York Times, MSNBC, Mother Jones, NBC News, NPR, Newsweek, Politico, Time, Scientific America, Slashdot, Techcrunch, TechRadar, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, The Independant, Motley Fool, Google News Top Stories, USA Today, Vox, Wired, Yahoo News, Cnet, Men's Health, TechRepublic, WallStreetJournal, TheStreet

I'd also love to hear some other news sources I can add to my subscriptions, because I know I'm missing a bunch of good ones

I follow a couple of blogs via RSS, I use https://www.newsblur.com

Yes. Self-hosted FreshRSS, which can pull the full articles, reading either via FreshRSS or feedme on android. I basically never visit websites if I'm not searching something specific.

Yes, I use feedly. Newsblur is restricting a lot of things in their free version, but I find Feedly more open.