Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024

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Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ginerel@kbin.social⁩ to ⁨technology@beehaw.org⁩

https://lifehacker.com/tech/the-best-rss-reader-apps-in-2024

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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po_tay_toes@lemmy.sambands.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I use RSS feeds to subscribe to YouTube channels without a google account.

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- UmbraTemporis@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Piped is good too btw
  
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- helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  LibreTube works better.
  
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- smeg@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I use RSS feeds to subscribe to Lemmy communities! (well, specifically my own one)
  
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SpectralPineapple@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Although I still have Feedly on my phone, and open it from time to time, 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.

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- CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m kind of sad I’ve entirely missed the RSS golden era, then.
  
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  - SpectralPineapple@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - monkeyflower@infosec.exchange ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    @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.
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tal@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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 intereating 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.

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- awmire@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - tal@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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 Threadiverse.
    
    lemmyverse.net/communities
    
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  - petrescatraian@libranet.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    @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.
    @tal
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spaduf@slrpnk.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- smeg@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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!
  
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  - spaduf@slrpnk.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Posted elsewhere: Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS
    
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- sourov@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Fluent Reader
  
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keet@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I dunno what you guys are on. RSS is crap. If the outlet actually offers it at all, all you get is a title and a thumbnail most of the time.

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- wargreymon2023@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Blame the website, not rss
  
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  - helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Why does it matter whose to blame?
    
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- HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  RSS never developed into anything that an email blast couldn’t do.
  
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noodlejetski@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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).

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originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
mbin is my rss reader. fediverse instance + bot

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- mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Which RSS bot do you use? I was going to make one but if there already is one...
  
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  - originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    for lemmy, its pretty straight forward with this bot
    
    https://github.com/programming-dot-dev/rss-bot
    
    for the 'bins, there doesnt exist a direct-to-mbin bot yet (i've been workin on it.. i suck at logins), in the meantime youd use a lemmy instance as intermediary:
    
    you setup a non-public, localized lemmy instance, have the bot configured for your needs to grab feeds into communities, then subscribe from your 'bin instance.
    
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kreynen@kbin.melroy.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@ginerel a few people in this thread have mentioned using Kbin or Mbin as something of an RSS curration tool. I'd like to learn more about that.

The Drupal community maintains an aggregate of feeds from 200+ sources with posts about the CMS. In the last year or so, the quality of the content is noticeably worse. Some community members are blaming Ai generated content...

Chat GPT, write a 1000 word blog post about Agile that mentions Drupal

I think the problem has more to do with how Google rewards "fresh" content that repeats keywords with higher page rank than a better written article posted 2 years earlier.

Regardless of the cause, a small group already running drupal.community for Mastodon has been discussing using up voting as a way to let the community curate the feed.

Would love any advice or examples on using Kbin or Mbin to empower a small community to curate RSS content.

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MrShankles@reddthat.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
What RSS feeds (preferably without needing an account like NY Times) would people like to recommend? I recently set up Feeder on my phone and have been curating it

And is there a way to bypass soft-paywalls with an app like feeder?

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Engywuck@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Why should people stop telling other people what they should do in 2024…

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- testman@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Problem is that the whole concept of advertising is “telling other people what to do”.
  
  People use Google.
  
  Google tells people to use Chrome
  
  Chrome becomes most popular browser
  
  Chrome removes the " this site has RSS" icon from URL bar
  
  People forget that RSS is a thing
  
  People now rely on Google News and other biased sites to get information
  
  biased sites tell people what to do
  
  RSS is freedom go tell other people to use it also /c/rss@lemmy.ml
  
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  - Engywuck@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    go tell other people to use it
    
    I’m not going to tell anyone what they should do, sorry. And every site is biased, no matter what.
    
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pineapplelover@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Every since I started my blog, I’ve been using RSS feeds to follow other blogs. It’s been pretty useful. Alligator and Thunderbird has been nice.

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