RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.
You know what I wish? That Google would’ve pushed one of their Chrome experiments through more.
For a while, the spam feed that Chrome opens to by default had a hidden setting you could enable, that added a subscribe button to websites. You clicked “Subscribe”, and the websites you subscribed to appeared on your start screen. This should’ve gone even further. It should’ve allowed opening
feed:links, so people could add subscribe buttons to websites.Behind the scenes, this was just “find the top level RSS feed”, but the UI was so much better than whatever RSS looked like the last moments before browsers removed them. Nobody knew what RSS was, “live bookmarks” were confusing to me even though I occasionally read through raw RSS XML, but all it needed was good UX. Instead, the old RSS web seemed determined to make very clear that RSS is its own “thing”, an orange button that wasn’t always there, that most people were afraid to click because nobody knew what it did.
Modern browsers, launchers, and operating systems all come with a list of articles, most of them pre-selected by Some Algorithm. Adding simple, standardised “subscribe” buttons to UX everywhere could’ve integrated with the system so well. I’m sure whatever behaviour analysis Google is doing and whatever ad network trash Microsoft is doing would’ve worked just as well with a feed the user can manage subscriptions for.
I think the key here is that it’s a feed managed by the user. There’s not enough commercial potential in that. As a tech company, you want to be the one curating the feed, and you want the user to believe you’re doing it in their best interest so they don’t notice how you’re making money by subtly feeding them ads.
RSS is simply too good for the contemporary internet.
Never stopped.
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.
Check out Selfoss, a self-hostable Online RSS tool, to browse and manage your feeds from the desktop and mobile
@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.
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
Would you happen to mean readers with filtering tools? If so I’m interested as well.
I know Thunderbird technically has them, but I’ve had trouble making them work as effectively as I’d like. RSSOwl had some that were easier to work with, but stopped being updated. There’s now a fork of it called RSSOwlnix, but I haven’t taken the time to see whether it still works as well or not. May be worth looking into though…
Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS
I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters.
Sounds like an opportunity to integrate some AI… 🙈
We don’t need to use that word here
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
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.
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.
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 instances on the Threadiverse.
That is a good way indeed, although I’m yet to find a way to filter after new or active communities.
Look at the drop-down menu next to the search field, which lets you sort via different criteria.
I think “newest publish time” is the date of community creation; new communities at the top.
For activity, it has number of active users in various given periods of time.
I‘m using a RSS reader with rule based filters to remove uninteresting articles (to me) and upvote or downvote articles with certain keywords (for me). That way I can aggregate lots of media and have my own personal feed.
It takes some time to set up and fine-tune, though.
What RSS reader is this? I’ve been wanting to get back into it for a while but I too need to be able to filter things down to a digestible form.
Feedbro, it’s a browser extension.
I just wish RSS readers could properly parse the webpages instead of only having the first paragraph and getting cut off
Best way around that I’ve found is with feedme on android. It’s got a mobilizer with a customizable css selector. Just set the app to load the feed in web view and to use the mobilizer and you’re good to go.
There are some that do. Inoreader as host and Reeder as client both support that. Not perfect, but working well enough
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.
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.
There’s no way I’d be able to keep track of all the stuff I want without an RSS reader.
Why should people stop telling other people what they should do in 2024…
I use RSS feeds to subscribe to YouTube channels without a google account.
Piped is good too btw
LibreTube works better.
LibreTube straight up does not work for me. Every video throws an error or cannot connect.
That’s a Piped thing. You just have to disable the Piped API unless you run your own server.
Nah the app just doesn’t work. I read about that trick but it didn’t resolve it for me.
It’s really unfortunate since I vastly prefer the LibreTube UI over NewPipe.
Okay well they’ve been having problems for the last couple of months. That’s the risk you take when relying on a 3rd party service. Try GrayJay.
W H A T
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).
Some useful services:
- (Generates email addresses that expose received messages over RSS)
- (Scrapes websites and creates RSS feeds for them)
