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

  • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Two major problems:

    1: very very few sites offer an rss feed anymore

    2: the ones that do either only offer the headline and then just a link to the web story, or if they give a full feed, inject ads into them, where you don’t have an adblocker to stop it

    I spent the better part of a month trying to curate an awesome rss feed and in the end, it’s still so actively hostile that it renders it’s barely usable

    Don’t get me wrong. I want rss to come back and be as usable as it was years ago. But it’s a shadow of what it used to be, and active hostile

    • PixTupy@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      This has been my experience as well this week. I’m so disappointed, it’s mostly just clickbaits and ads.

    • GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I use a self-hosted service called Full-Text RSS Feeds, to which my feed reader connects, and then it gets the full text instead of limited RSS text feed.

    • LaggyKar@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      very very few sites offer an rss feed anymore

      I’m gonna have to disagree. It’s mostly the big social medias that don’t have them, (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) but other blogs and news sites usually do have them.

  • slartibartfast42@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    It’s wack how the internet seems to have collectively forgotten about this technology over the past decade, despite it not being the least bit obsolete.

    • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      It’s not ad-friendly, and does not force you to create yet another account in yet another walled garden for big-tech to collect your data.

  • edo@beehaw.org
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    1 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@beehaw.org
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      1 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!

  • Evolone@beehaw.org
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    1 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@beehaw.org
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      1 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)

  • tsl@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I think it would make sense to remind about the existence of rss-bridge for many sites that do not have an RSS feed.

    I’ve been using this for a few years and it’s really good.

  • lowleveldata@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I have been using Feedly which is pretty much dead due to the reddit situation. Are there other similar tools that’s Lemmy friendly?

  • Riyria@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Anyone have any good suggestions for blogs to follow? I just downloaded inoreader and followed some of the suggested ones on there, but I used RSS so long ago I don’t remember anything I used to really follow outside of my current interests.

  • flatbield@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Check out AntennaPod for Android in the Play Store. It is a great podcast RSS client and it comes with a database of podcasts you can search. You can add your own too. For textual stuff I use Flym, but I do not know if that is still in development or not so verify either way.

    So yes RSS is still great. Biggest issue is some sources have discontinued in favor of walling content in their own apps which is not exactly user friendly.

    • jursed@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Thanks for showing us that app, I was thinking about getting back into podcasts one of these days and it looks really nice

  • YourHeroes4Ghosts@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I use RSS every day- it’s my primary source of news- but there are many sites I’d love to follow which don’t have a feed. My reader, Inoeader, claims to have a workaround for it, but only on their paid version, which is stupid expensive.

    • paletochen@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I have a paid subscription in Inoreader for years and never paid full price, more around %60 of the amount. Keep an eye to days like Black Friday or so, they announce every year big discounts.

      You can also queue those discounts if they appear before your subscription ends so you can keep benefiting from them for even longer

  • GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I use RSS every single day to collect the 500+ tech articles I scan every day. My blog is actually powered by its RSS feed to then push out to 8 other social networks. Don’t know what I’d do without RSS.

    I use self-hosted FreshRSS (after having tried a few other self-hosted ones - I did a video at https://youtu.be/nBdLgRSR04o which compares FreshRSS to Tiny Tiny RSS) and I paired it with Full-Text RSS Feed (see https://github.com/Dither/full-text-rss) to return the full content of posts.

    On desktop, I found Fluent Reader to be very good, and I did a blog post at https://gadgeteer.co.za/cross-platform-open-source-fluent-reader-is-my-current-best-choice-for-an-offline-rss-news-aggregator about why I ended up with it. Note I’ve gone back to FreshRSS after sorting out an issue on my hosting, because a desktop reader is really limited to that one device.

  • Mikelius@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Been using rss for years now. It’s always been the best way for me to filter into only the news I care about, way Lee political drama. That being said, I use nextcloud news so I can read and sync on multiple devices, as well as listen to podcasts that use rss feeds.

  • paletochen@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    After the closing of Google Reader and years of searching I settled a few years ago with Inoreader. I fully recommend it. They offer subscription discounts throughout the year where you can save ~40% of the cost.

    Their webpage app is really good and the Android app is also extremely good and usable.

    A great feature that I make use of is their option to create feeds from sites that don’t offer RSS. Also I have connected Youtube so I have a feed with an update in my subscriptions

    Completely recommended.