I’ve recently started using RSS, and I love it.
General news, tech news, release notes of certain apps I use, peertube uploads of channels I like, notifications about limited-time free games, and all of that in one place.
Pretty cool if you ask me
Same, I just started using it recently. Facebook was dropping Canadian news in response to new legislation, and while I wasn’t getting news from there I thought I’d explore. I actually really liked the process and subscribed to some areas I was interested in. I haven’t cleaned it up yet, and I want to try FreshRSS but it’s a start.
It’s actually how I get a lot of the content for Lemmy! I found feeds for a few key medical / Canadian health news things and I go off that.
Using FeedBro on web FireFox, and Feeder on Android
If I wanted to try RSS out on my PC and mobile device, how would I do this.
First you’d need to get the address of the feeds you want. If a page provides a feed, it should have the little RSS icon somewhere. That should hold the address.
The URLs come in different shapes, some may look like this:
https://noyb.eu/en/rssOthers have the word feed in their name:
https://archlinux.org/feeds/news/And so on and so forth. You’ll see when you get a few together.
Then you add those addresses to your RSS app of choice, and that’s pretty much it. There’s really not much to it, it’s rather simple, and that’s precisely why I like it. You can then have your RSS app only load the actual content, without all the unnecessary jazz that the website it comes from would show.
I use Fluent Reader on Linux, and Feeder on Android.Try Feedly. As best I can tell, it’s the only spiritual successor to Google Reader from years ago (I’m still salty Google killed it). It’s about the only worthwhile non-self-hosted RSS reader online. Being online, it will sync between devices.
If you’re a little more technically inclined, you could also look into self-hosting your own feed reader. That’s beyond my abilities, so I don’t know where to point you for that.
Thanks
Feedly has a mobile app, website, and browser extension. I use it across all devices.
Thanks
Been using RSS for 15, 20 years? 150-ish feeds? Feedly.com is my reader of choice.
Out of curiosity, how do you manage to follow so many feeds? I’ve been using RSS for probably 20 years now, and feel like I easily get overwhelmed when I get over a dozen feeds or so.
It’s a challenge, indeed. There’s a whole lot of headline scanning, to be honest.
Yup. It’s incredibly convenient, I have no idea why people stopped using it. I follow a bunch of youtube channels, webcomics, podcasts, blogs, and apps in development. If there’s some way other than RSS to have all those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.
I think people used social media (Reddit, Twitter even Instagram) as a replacement. As those started going to shit, people probably migrated back to rss
I use it regularly with newsboat as a client. It is quite useful to keep up with blogs, software releases, articles on sites like LWN, security announcements, press releases,…
It can be a bit overwhelming when subscribing to too many or too active feeds so I feel it is best used for things with a relatively low posting frequency (less than a few posts per day) or where each post is quick to read or for sites where you know the posts are high quality and you want to at least actively consider reading every single one.
The advantage over something like Lemmy is that you are not tempted to waste time on comments and can also reliably get every post from a source as long as you update the feeds often enough, even if you don’t read them every time you update.
Been using it since the days of Google Reader, but it’s been discouraging to see some places stop supporting it. And the accumulation of sites that just stop posting one day always make me sad to look at.
Any good recs to add to my dwindling feed?
RSS feeds are my main way of staying up to date. I mainly subscribe to blogs and tech news sites. I’m also subscribed to my local subreddit so I don’t miss out on local events even though I don’t use Reddit otherwise.
I was using Feedly for years after Google Reader shut down, but they started doing stuff I don’t like (E.g you can’t subscribe to reddit RSS feeds any longer, you have to sign in to reddit and set up some link between them). So I switched to Miniflux a few months back.
Without RSS I’d stop following the vast majority of online content. I’m not checking all these different websites individually, where their follow options have substantially less functionality.
I currently have 121 feeds. Podcasts, youtube channels, TV show releases, some blogs, a surprising number of reddit searches, etc. I used to have substantially more feeds but I trimmed it heavily a couple of years ago - mostly I stopped follow the news so closely for my sanity.
It might sound kind of overwhelming but I create pretty strict filters so I get maybe a dozen updates on a busy day.
I use it heavily and daily. I have over a hundred feeds now. The main thing I am using it for is YouTube. Every, I think public, playlist and every channel has its own RSS feed. You can install a Firefox extension of whom I forgot the name to expose the feed to you or you can use for example miniflux to directly subscribe to the channel by URL. The feeds aren’t subjected to the engagement algorithm AFAIK. So from my subjective perspective you get the unfiltered content. Other than that I also follow a lot of blogs, news and a few webcomics.
I’ve been using RSS daily for more than a decade. Looking at the stats, I’m subscribed to 342 feeds, but 131 of these haven’t been updated in at least a year, and 100 feed URLs are no longer reachable. So it’s more accurate to say I’m actively subscribed to 111 feeds.
It’s a mix of blogs, a bunch of podcasts, some curated news and also some YouTube channels.
Daily. Pretty much all of my news, regardless of topic, of delivered via RSS. If’s fast, lightweight to search, and makes it really easy to see what topics are really trending hot.
I use it for some podcasts. Their releases to podcatchers might lag behind but their own RSS is always up to date.
Yes, and have for years going to back to the Google Reader days. (I will NEVER forgive them for shutting it down. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to giving up everything Google, but in the end it was too much of a hassle and I didn’t have the time to move everything to new services.)
When I lost GReader, I tried every one I could to find a replacement, and I settled on NewsBlur. It was the one that was most like what I was I used to, had the best features, and is a one man operation. So I’m supporting an independent dev, who’s very responsive on the forum. It’s not free, but well worth the money, and I’ve been with it ten years now. I have a number of news, tech, and general feeds that I check most every day. Everything I need to stay up to date in one place!
Second newsblur it’s fantastic.
RSS is the way.
I just wish major newspapers would keep their feeds up to date. Toronto Star, for instance, does not. And yet it posts to vulture social media while complaining about how they are being picked clean… Just silly.
I use RSS for newspapers mostly. Good way to get a bead on what’s being reported chronologically as opposed to being explicitly sorted after the fact by outrage quotient.
The same as what many have said (blogs, news sites), but my best use case is YouTube! Deleted my account and get my subscriptions through RSS. The best part is it’s actually much more reliable than the YouTube sub box, which is notorious for randomly not sending notifications or not showing new videos.
Showrss.info, the news, some comics from Reddit and a few YouTube channels and some blogs.
