RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.
One amazing RSS app I recommend to all Apple users is NetNewsWire. It’s Open Source and works very well. If Apple ever built an RSS reader, it’d be like this. It uses iCloud to sync between devices.
Lets you use a reader mode where it fetches readable content from the URL instead of just reading from the xml file.
And is very simple. If you use something like Feedly, it also works very well as a client for such services. I started using it like that, later just started using iCloud instead of Feedly
It’s Open Source
If Apple ever built an RSS reader, it’d be like this.
nope
You joke. That’s not what I meant and if Apple did make an app it wouldn’t be Open Source.
But Apple does contribute to Open Source. They collaborated with KDE back when Microsoft was making fun of Linux
@ginerel@kbin.social 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
LibreTube works better.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Piped is good too btw
There’s no way I’d be able to keep track of all the stuff I want without an RSS reader.
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!
Why should people stop telling other people what they should do in 2024…
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 Lemmy RSS community
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.
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.
Cool. What practical value does that provide me?
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.
The “algorithm” is why I’m here.
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.
Sure, I might miss something. But if I wanted to manually curate my feed I wouldn’t be here.
I could use RSS and miss high-quality posts too. Much more likely, actually.
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.
I’d much rather just use Voyager. If one server is down I just switch to another or…just wait.
Blame the website, not rss
Why does it matter whose to blame?
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.
Once again, I ask “why does it matter?”. You can blame whoever you want, but the end result is the same.
I didn’t mean RSS as a concept sucks, I mean the modern implementation and user experience of RSS sucks, because companies DONT WANT YOU to be able access things this way.
@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.
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?
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.
Never stopped.
I’m currently trying to retrieve my local gym’s Facebook feed as RSS so I don’t have to be on Facebook. It bites.
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).
