this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
407 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

42305 readers
171 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

It's always good to be in control of your own content sources.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] slartibartfast42@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's wack how the internet seems to have collectively forgotten about this technology over the past decade, despite it not being the least bit obsolete.

[–] mim 3 points 2 years ago

It's not ad-friendly, and does not force you to create yet another account in yet another walled garden for big-tech to collect your data.

[–] DiscoShrew 1 points 2 years ago

I've been using Bazqux Reader since it's a single guy and seems to work well. I also know that Tiny Tiny RSS is a super cool self hostable one.

[–] KuchiKopi 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm a big fan of feedly but the issue I run into is if I miss a few days it takes so long to sift through everything to find what I'm most interested in

[–] mim 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

My solution to this is to be more stringent with the feeds that I add. In this day and age, there's so much volume that the important metric is signal-to-noise ratio.

If I find myself skipping the articles from a feed more often than opening them, I just unsubscribe.

Sure they still pile up if I miss a few days, but not nearly as before.

[–] imnotneo@vlemmy.net 1 points 2 years ago

ya but I dont want active control. I want passive control. I'm lazy. :(

[–] Evolone@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

For some reason, I could never get into RSS readers. I tried, but quickly felt overwhelmed and gave up. I've tried to get back into it over and over again, but always get just absolutely rocked by the amount of content that can be pulled in and get discouraged. It's also hard and daunting to think about getting into it at this point, now, because there's so much content out there that I don't even know where to start with adding RSS links of stuff I follow...because sometimes I don't even know where I get my stuff from (just from all over, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, email newsletters, kbin, Google News, etc.)

A big part of it, I think, is the fact that RSS doesn’t have community curated content. to me, it just seems like such a wave of news content...but a lot of what I enjoyed about Reddit/social media (including kbin) is the community aspect, allowing for more nuanced and popular stuff to be driven to the top of the feed (based on upvotes, retweets, user activity, clicks, or what have you). So the lack of that in RSS stuff really hinders me from fully adopting it.

[–] ira@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

The trick to enjoy curated content via RSS is to subscribe to sources that curate your content rather than to raw news sources, e.g. subscribe a blog of a person that does important news reviews rather than to a newspaper raw feed. Otherwise the classic mailbox-like RSS reader experience indeed requires you to sift through content on your own and aggressively. That said, some commercial readers do try to algorithmically prioritize content based on your interest or offer discovery functions (a different kind of experience than direct community-based sorting of course, but there's trade offs here)

[–] LibreWorld@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

I've never stopped using RSS, feedly been good to me.

[–] jtn@granitestate.social 0 points 2 years ago

I’ve been enjoying NewsBlur since Google Reader went offline.

[–] halictuz@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeh, I already installed miniflux again and selfhost it for my RSS needs.

https://miniflux.app/

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 0 points 2 years ago

Love RSS. I personally really like Feeder from F-Droid

[–] GhostCowboy76@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Can somebody explain RSS Feeds to me like I was 5? Yes I know I am late to the party as I saw somebody say they have used them for 20+ years. Thank you!

[–] ConstableJelly@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's just a way to subscribe directly to content sources rather than subscribing to a creator's social media account or a subreddit or something. So if there's a blog you like and you use your RSS reader to subscribe to that blog, any new posts will be fed directly to your reader. Obviously, the benefit then is that you have a central portal with a direct connection to all of your selected content sources.

[–] GhostCowboy76@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Great explanation. Thank you! I guess I will have to give them a shot.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] GeekFTW@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Have been using RSS feeds almost 20 years now, since Google Reader and with Feedly since Reader was deprecated.

I don't think I've seen a single piece of news come across Reddit in any of the interests I follow that I haven't also seen via rss feeds +/- an hour of it's posting.

[–] MaybeFrederick@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How do you know who to follow? For example, if I were interested in software architecture, I would need to follow 40 blogs, no? And how would I know if new ones pop up?

[–] tshannon@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago

That's the hard part. It takes some time to curate a good list. One of the nice things about ttrss is that you can drop any url into the subscribe field and it'll search the page for RSS feeds. I'm sure other readers probably do something similar.

[–] Stellario@pawb.social 0 points 2 years ago

I stopped using RSS feeds when google reader went down. There aren't a lot of RSS feeds I'm interested in anymore. That being said, I hope RSS makes a comeback.

[–] ijustlookatpictures@feddit.uk 0 points 2 years ago

I've been using the nextcloud RSS reader for a while now. Not the most feature rich, but it does the job for me.

[–] delcake@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago

I'm making use of a self-hosted Nextcloud instance for this purpose actually. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend it just for the purposes of RSS, it's a nice addition to the platform for someone who happens to be running an instance for other reasons already. Most of the web-based RSS reader solutions I've come across relied on advertising or other premium membership models to support the service, so an alternative would have to be pretty damn compelling for me to transition away from Nextcloud and start subjecting myself to ads again.

[–] agressivearmpit@lemmy.one 0 points 2 years ago

I was using Feedly for a long time but just discovered and paid for NewsBlur and it’s amazing. The killer feature is being able to easily see new posts as they come in as part of the Ui rather than having to refresh.

[–] thejml@lemm.ee 0 points 2 years ago

I’ve been using Newsify on iOS for a few years now. It lets me organize and subscribe to rss feeds complete with saving/favoriting, marking read, etc.

I’ve found it a great way to keep up with news. I write an app and an aggregator site a while back that did a similar thing, but this is good enough and I don’t have to do any dev or hosting work!

[–] IncidentalIncidence@feddit.de 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

The problem isn't that I don't know about RSS, it's more that I don't really have any content sources that use it

[–] skepticalifornia@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You may be interested to know that any Lemmy community can become an RSS feed. Look for the little RSS icon to the right of the Sort Type drop down, click that and it takes you to the RSS feed. That URL can then be pasted into just about any RSS reader and you will see a list of the latest topics. I use ProtoPage as my browser home page and have widgets that show me Beehaw Technology, News, etc. I clicked on one of those stories to come to this post. (By the way, Reddit works this way by just putting an ".rss" at the end of the subreddit's URL. I used that a lot and am ecstatic that Lemmy allow a similar thing!)

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Evolone@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (6 children)

For some reason, I could never get into RSS readers. I tried, but quickly felt overwhelmed and gave up. I've tried to get back into it over and over again, but always get just absolutely rocked by the amount of content that can be pulled in and get discouraged. It's also hard and daunting to think about getting into it at this point, now, because there's so much content out there that I don't even know where to start with adding RSS links of stuff I follow...because sometimes I don't even know where I get my stuff from (just from all over, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, email newsletters, kbin, Google News, etc.)

[–] averagedrunk@lemmy.one 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I loved iGoogle. I had my feeds set up just how I liked them. Then I moved to protopage when that went to the graveyard. Then a bunch of things (not everything) stopped updating.

I went back to check it out a few weeks ago and even fewer things were updating. A lot of places just let RSS fall by the wayside.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] SnowboardBum@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Understandable. RSS is fantastic for news and such, but lacks the community of comments which is what drives a lot of people to content they normally wouldn't read.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] dan@upvote.au 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

There's a great piece of software called Kill the Newsletter that converts email newsletters into RSS feeds. Each feed gets a unique email address, and all emails to that address go into its RSS feed. It's open-source so you can self-host it. It's a good way to clean up your email inbox a bit.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Check out AntennaPod for Android in the Play Store. It is a great podcast RSS client and it comes with a database of podcasts you can search. You can add your own too. For textual stuff I use Flym, but I do not know if that is still in development or not so verify either way.

So yes RSS is still great. Biggest issue is some sources have discontinued in favor of walling content in their own apps which is not exactly user friendly.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›