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

  • I never stopped using RSS even when it supposedly “died”. Right now I have FreshRSS running on my raspberry pi since I like subscriptions and read state to sync between my machines but don’t like to depend on some company for that. I use Reeder for my iOS devices, which can sync with FreshRSS.

    For all folks say RSS is dead, I find a lot to fill it with. Blogs (yes I still read blogs like it’s 2005), webcomics (most comics with their own site offer one, and webtoon generates them for its comics, though it looks like tapas doesn’t or at least I can’t find any feeds there), tech news sites, scientific journals, lemmy and mastodon generate feeds for users and communities, even YouTube still generates feeds for individual channels. There’s a lot of feeds still active out there.

    • 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!)

      •  Zoop   ( @Zoop@beehaw.org ) 
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        31 year ago

        That’s awesome, thank you for sharing this information! I’ll have to give it a shot and check out ProtoPage, too - that sounds pretty cool. Thanks again :)

      • the biggest thing that I would use it for would be individual blogs, I just only have 3 or 4 of those that I follow.

        For the others, it doesn’t help me that much to centralize them. Like with the hacker news rss feed, I can’t comment or interact from the rss reader, so I might as well use the website. With twitter, all of my twitter follows are already centralized on twitter; same with youtube, reddit, or lemmy – they already have feeds, and I can’t interact from my feedreader.

  • 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.

  •  Evolone   ( @Evolone@beehaw.org ) 
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    161 year ago

    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   ( @ira@beehaw.org ) 
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      121 year 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)

  •  dan   ( @dan@upvote.au ) 
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    151 year ago

    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.

  •  Sev   ( @SevYote@pawb.social ) 
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    1 year ago

    I had actually just been starting to build up an RSS roster prior to reddit’s API meltdown. Perfect timing!

    Just been getting tired of the internet being basically a small few sites, and wanting to get back to reading articles and blogs, particularly ones written by individuals (i.e., not part of a larger site / company where there’s going to be lots of ads and stuff, just like, people talking about stuff that they care about) more.

    • Same. I was using Google Reader since it launched, and I migrated to Feedly when Reader went tits-up and they offered migration help. For 18 years now I’ve had a few dozen news websites set up for just about every interest I have and I have seen nothing come across Reddit in the last 12 years that I’ve been using it that I didn’t also see on Feedly within an hour of it’s Reddit posting.

  • I have no idea if it’s possible or not, but some sort of service that allows for users who have the same RSS feeds be able to comment on things happening… sort of like magazines lol

  • I’ve been using RSS for years, but mostly because it’s been a convenient way to get updates for the webcomics I’ve been following for so long.

    Hopefully Lemmy picks up in popularity, as the main reason that I used reddit was for the tree-style discussion threads, which RSS can’t replace.

  •  cyd   ( @cyd@vlemmy.net ) 
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    1 year ago

    I run a self-hosted copy of Commafeed, which is a seamless and fast replacement (both workalike and lookalike) for the late Google Reader. The main issue, really, is the long term decline of the blogosphere, which has severely decreased the number of interesting RSS feeds for me.

  •  edo   ( @edo@beehaw.org ) 
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    101 year ago

    Love RSS. Best way to read stuff online.

    I use Feedbin, which also provides a bespoke email you can use for newsletters so they’re also pulled into your feed. Very handy.

    If anyone wants a nice RSS reader for iOS, Reeder is great.

    •  Zoop   ( @Zoop@beehaw.org ) 
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      21 year ago

      I use Feedbin, which also provides a bespoke email you can use for newsletters so they’re also pulled into your feed. Very handy.

      That’s genius! I would love that feature. I’ll have to check out Feedbin now, thanks for mentioning it!