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 interesting 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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
thanks a bunch that helps! in terms of reddit, i’ve been using it for almost 15 years and the subreddits i liked seem to have changed recently, or maybe gotten “too big”. i think the API changes last year really shook things up too. hence why i’m on beehaw now! anyway, i’ll take a look at the lemmy verse communities, thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. The syncing can be managed other ways. The only thing I’m left with is using on a work computer for some reason, where one’s own devices aren’t available/permitted? But that’s probably not a common usage case.
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 …)
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.
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!
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…
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).
The thing that stops me from moving to rss is that I don’t follow any news sites or blogs. I’ve tried but they all kinda suck to me. The only thing I follow is youtube creators and lemmy communities. Lemmy is my rss feed pretty much.
I figured there are interesting people out there who don’t really blog often, but who might post something online a few times ever year and whom I’d like to stay updated on. So I started trying to collect some of these relatively inactive personal feeds.
It’s not ass noisy as following blogs or social media, which is what I like about it. The only drawback is of course that so few people maintain an RSS feed.
I follow my lemmy community with my rss and I tossed in a few other sites I felt interested in but always forget to look at like the local paper, that said my server has been collecting months of info but I haven’t setup the link to my mobile app out of laziness so it has all been going to waste
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
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.
Are you comfortable sending your work so far on the mbin bot? I did the same thing you did; I picked it up but then ran into the OAuth stuff and got confused. I actually have an RSS mbin bot that was going for a while that was based on just local database access, but working out the OAuth stuff seems like a better way and I’m happy to take another crack at it.
ha, i dont because were in the same place… was playing with awesomebot, but then started attempting to hack the pangora bot starting with the login first, but i got roadblocked at the login and havent really had time to sort it.
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.
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.
Not a solution for everyone, but I am selfhosting and using FreshRSS. One of the extensions is Readable which will fetch the entry’s URL and parse it using either Readability or Postlight Parser to replace the content of the entry and make all of it available in the reader.
In a lot of CMSes that offer RSS feed generation, there’s a setting you can frob - either put the entire article in each RSS entry, or just the first X words in the <summary></summary> block. A lot of them default to the latter and folks never turn on the former.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
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.
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 interesting 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.
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.
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.
@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
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.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
thanks a bunch that helps! in terms of reddit, i’ve been using it for almost 15 years and the subreddits i liked seem to have changed recently, or maybe gotten “too big”. i think the API changes last year really shook things up too. hence why i’m on beehaw now! anyway, i’ll take a look at the lemmy verse communities, thanks!
@tal
That is a good way indeed, although I’m yet to find a way to filter after new or active communities.
I like the fact that I can filter the instances that I don’t like or that my server has blocked, so I can see actual relevant content for me. 😁
@awmire
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.
@tal thank you!
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.
RSS never developed into anything that an email blast couldn’t do.
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.
@helenslunch
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.
I get a push notification when there’s a post in a specific community
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.
For those who wanna #selfhost I hear
https://www.freshrss.org/
is pretty good. I kinda gave up on RSS when all artists moved from Tumblr and websites with RSS to the disgusting social networks …
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.
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.
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.
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?
Agreed. The syncing can be managed other ways. The only thing I’m left with is using on a work computer for some reason, where one’s own devices aren’t available/permitted? But that’s probably not a common usage case.
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 …)
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.
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.
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!
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
Sounds like an opportunity to integrate some AI… 🙈
We don’t need to use that word here
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).
The thing that stops me from moving to rss is that I don’t follow any news sites or blogs. I’ve tried but they all kinda suck to me. The only thing I follow is youtube creators and lemmy communities. Lemmy is my rss feed pretty much.
I figured there are interesting people out there who don’t really blog often, but who might post something online a few times ever year and whom I’d like to stay updated on. So I started trying to collect some of these relatively inactive personal feeds.
It’s not ass noisy as following blogs or social media, which is what I like about it. The only drawback is of course that so few people maintain an RSS feed.
I follow my lemmy community with my rss and I tossed in a few other sites I felt interested in but always forget to look at like the local paper, that said my server has been collecting months of info but I haven’t setup the link to my mobile app out of laziness so it has all been going to waste
There’s no way I’d be able to keep track of all the stuff I want without an RSS reader.
Check out Selfoss, a self-hostable Online RSS tool, to browse and manage your feeds from the desktop and mobile
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.
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
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
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”.
RSS is freedom
go tell other people to use it
also Lemmy RSS community
I’m not going to tell anyone what they should do, sorry. And every site is biased, no matter what.
mbin is my rss reader. fediverse instance + bot
Which RSS bot do you use? I was going to make one for my RSS feeds, but if there already is one…
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.
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com is there an issue/branch/fork where bins support is happening? I’d like to help with that if I can.
@ginerel@kbin.social @mozz@mbin.grits.dev
Yeah, I’d like to as well; I just messaged them asking about it.
Are you comfortable sending your work so far on the mbin bot? I did the same thing you did; I picked it up but then ran into the OAuth stuff and got confused. I actually have an RSS mbin bot that was going for a while that was based on just local database access, but working out the OAuth stuff seems like a better way and I’m happy to take another crack at it.
ha, i dont because were in the same place… was playing with awesomebot, but then started attempting to hack the pangora bot starting with the login first, but i got roadblocked at the login and havent really had time to sort it.
I use RSS feeds to subscribe to YouTube channels without a google account.
Piped is good too btw
LibreTube works better.
deleted by creator
That’s a Piped thing. You just have to disable the Piped API unless you run your own server.
deleted by creator
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.
I use RSS feeds to subscribe to Lemmy communities! (well, specifically my own one)
deleted by creator
I just wish RSS readers could properly parse the webpages instead of only having the first paragraph and getting cut off
morss.it
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.
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.
This is an important criteria for me. If I can’t read the full article without leaving the reader and without a WebView, I won’t keep the RSS feed.
Not a solution for everyone, but I am selfhosting and using FreshRSS. One of the extensions is Readable which will fetch the entry’s URL and parse it using either Readability or Postlight Parser to replace the content of the entry and make all of it available in the reader.
This is exactly the case.
In a lot of CMSes that offer RSS feed generation, there’s a setting you can frob - either put the entire article in each RSS entry, or just the first X words in the
<summary></summary>block. A lot of them default to the latter and folks never turn on the former.There are some that do. Inoreader as host and Reeder as client both support that. Not perfect, but working well enough