Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2024

Sigh, that was my wake up call to not rely on google products.

The Google Reader shutdown hit me hard also. They offered all of the features in a really great app and many of the competitors shut down in their wake, so when they exited the scene, it left a huge hole.

Another problem was that many sites shifted to providing only parts of articles instead of full versions

That annoys me so much, that is the number one reason why I use Feeder more than Feedly nowadays (I manually keep them synced, Feedly is multiplatform and Feeder sadly isn't) as it has a feature to download the page and use their native app view, so much better than going to the site (even with Ublock I'd rather not go unless I want to comment or see comments, which sadly isn't a thing for most of the sites nowadays).

I stopped following sites with dubious commercial tactics like the one you mention. After all, information is not so rare these days.

Yes RSS came back strong in my life after Reddit and Twitter shit the bed.

Lemmy is almost there, but still missing the non techy communities

Thank god, have you seen how the world is out there? Crazy shit /s

Friendica has the RSS feature and it is compatible with most Activity Pub services.

I'm reading some /r/hfy stories. Since I no longer get notifications for reddit pm, I have replaced it with the RSS Feed for "posts by user xxx". RSS also works like a subscription on royal roads, the alternative that a lot of writers switched to.

Works perfectly well, I'm very happy with it.

I went with a self-hosted FreshRSS instance, it has its issues but it works well with the client apps I use.

What is this enhanced feed feature of Feedly that I have never heard of? Is it a premium feature of something?

I need this miniflux in my life. I’ve been just putting up with Feedly. I understand they have to make money, but I don’t want to pay for RSS. Especially if I can DIY.

I have a really intense desire to nibble an attractive mans toes.

Even stranger I have a need to tell someone about it.

Congratulations to you, I guess?

Feeder is a perfectly functional RSS reader for Android, and the only updated and straight forward one on F-Droid when I decided to set up my feeds, and an app I've seen suggested on Lemmy several times when there's mention of RSS...but why doesn't it have groups? I've got my general news mixed with tech news, cluttered in between the rest of it - it does have grouping and it's called "tags"

this thread made me re-check and there are some new options in there and at least one will let you group the feeds: Read You

EDIT: dumb take

All youtube channels have their own feeds, but they're not obvious to find. The first part of the URL looks like this:

 undefined

        https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=


  

Go to the channel's home page and search the page source for "channel_id=" (with a long string of numbers and letters after it, often starting with a "U") then paste the ID after the equal sign. The channel id looks something like this: UCtwKon9qMt5YLVgQt1tvJKg

arstechnica has a premium RSS for $3 a month that has no ads. I love it.

Feeder on my phone (Android-only)

If you host an RSS aggregator yourself such as FreshRSS, I'd recommend using ReadYou or FeedMe (not Open Source) instead so that you can sync. I use FeedMe on Android and Fluent Reader on Linux. It's nice to have everything synced.

I also recommend rss-bridge if you're self hosting. Helps gets you more RSS feeds from websites that don't have them.

What, search? Listen, you don't actually want that, you want recommendations from our amazing algorithm and AI based on overall connections between topics and trends and other very complex things. You don't even know what it is you're looking for, but we do, so here are some results that generate revenue for us. //Google

RSS is great, but often contains a lot of noise

I think you nailed it there. Curating is too much of a hassle.

I might try that, city subreddit is a huge resource

Does the RSS feed from Reddit actually work? I tried it on my RSS reader and got error messages after a day.

I've recommended these a couple of times in this thread, but I use Fluent Reader on desktop (cross-platform) and Feeder on Android. Both are FOSS and load articles locally, so no account/subscription required.

Check out FreshRSS. You can self host, so if you have a home server, this will do the trick. Use your favorite reader app that can connect to it.

I get the subscription fatigue. I’m currently paying for Inoreader because I haven’t fully cut over to FreshRSS. It has good tools that are worth it for many, but all those subscriptions add up fast.

NetNewsWire for Apple devices.

Thunderbird will do RSS.

When Google Reader shut down, Feedly had an "import from Google" feature on their sign up page. Been using it for free ever since.

Feedly

There's Live Bookmarks extensions for Chromium and Firefox

FF: Live Marks Chromium: Live RSS Bookmarks

RIP Google Reader too, a perfectly functional app Google killed.

If webcomic sources are still relevant to you and are the usual suspects, you could use Mihon (Android App).

Or if they do, it's not the full article. Which I get, them being in the business of selling ads and all.

Perhaps I'm just an old 40 year old fart, but the Internet was better before. I miss the 00s and the 10s. Now it's just paywalls, LLM generated bullshit, and search results from SEO orgies

I'm still finding rather many RSS feeds, though there's few buttons these days. Ideally, you want something that auto-discovers feeds on a webpage.

I find RSS is always either too little or too much. It is almost impossible to get it "just right", at least for me, especially taken into account the time and labor it would need to set up "just right".

Have you tried imagus, hoverzoom or thumbnail zoom? It has changed the way I internet. Hover your mouse over almost any image, video, or gif and it automatically opens and shows the full size. I have been using imagus on firefox for ages and quite like it. It doesn't work with some websites or apps, and probably wouldn't work with an installed app, but should work for one of the rss web apps?

Please disregard if this is a silly suggestion, I have always been curious about rss feeds, but have never actually used one.

What shit app were you trying to use, get feeder and add the proper topic specific rss if you want to categorize like "business". I never even get the time to read through all the news because there are literally hundreds of articles being added to the feed daily.

And AntennaPod for your podcast needs.

I suggest you give it another try, it can actually do what you're asking it to do. Sounds like you just added the global feed of crap.

For better results, you typically have to search "

<newspaper website>

For example, the independent that you were asking for, actually has a huge amount of fine tuning you can do. Go ahead and check their link and add the categories you'd like to read about instead catching all that junk you don't care about:

https://www.independent.co.uk/service/rss-feeds-775086.html

https://www.inoreader.com/ used it for years it's great!

Oof. The real Feeder is a FOSS Android app, get it on F-Droid.

On PC, there are two Firefox plugins, one to bring back "live bookmarks" (RSS feeds), and one to bring back the radio-waves-like icon in the address bar of sites with RSS feeds available. Let me check...

Edit: It's just one plugin, Livemarks. If you put the bookmark it creates into the bookmarks toolbar, then it becomes a drop-down menu of the headlines/RSS items. 👍

I use Thunderbird for RSS...however I should also admit I only have two things - xkcd and another comic that hasn't been posted in so long I think it might be dead.

What's the cost?

I downloaded Feedly and they want 8 bucks a month, which seems high considering they don't actually create the content. I'm all for paying developers but that's more than I pay fo other actual new sources

Is it because of Wordpress?

How do I set this up?

Say I want to get an RSS feed for when Practical Engineering uploads a new video?

I find they just get buried in YouTube and I’d love to set this up for the channels I am really interested so they don’t get lost in the noise.

Assuming you read RSS offline on mobile, Feeder has an option to fetch full articles and stores them for offline reading. It's FOSS and actively-maintained, having received an update just last week.

I've never encountered a site I wanted to follow that didn't have RSS, but I wholly agree it's often needlessly complicated to find the feed links.

This is my experience too. The sites hosting the articles that I want to read only provide the first parapraph and then a link back to the webpage. News is just headlines. I love that RSS doesn't allow much formating so you end up with an experience focused on the content itself (and no ads). It feels like a long time ago since I really enjoyed my RSS feeds.

You can import a bunch of rss feeds at once if they are saved as a .opml file, and you can find a big ol' list of 'em at https://github.com/plenaryapp/awesome-rss-feeds

Cool setup, mine is pretty similar, but I use self-hosted FreshRSS instead.

Inoreader has an "Load full content" button (and hotkey) that loads the body of text without having to visit the page.

How do you set it up for podcasts ? Say The Darknet Diaries for instance.

That's the way to go! Plus, feedly syncs among app and website

Somebody else in this thread linked a Github repo listing "Awesome RSS Feeds", they have categories by country and by topic.

Otherwise, this is the method I use to find RSS feeds from websites that don't have a link/button to their feed (copy/pasted from my other comment in this thread):

You can often find RSS feeds by checking the page’s source (on Firefox: right-click and “View Page Source”) and using Ctrl+F to search, there’s usually a URL somewhere. Keywords to search for: “feed”, “RSS”, “xml”, “atom”. For example, if I go to this community’s page on lemmy.world, I can Ctrl+F “feed” on the page source to find https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/technology.xml

I don't know what client you're using, but Inoreader usually finds the RSS feed even if the webpage does not link to it

I realize you're asking for a list of sites with RSS feeds, but I wanted to highlight an easier method of sometimes finding feeds than that mentioned by Evkob: Feedbro add-on for Firefox.

You can click the icon for it while browsing a site to check for whether or not any feeds are available. Unfortunately it doesn't always find them, I think depending on the part of the site you're browsing or how the feed is being provided, perhaps both, but it's been a pretty useful tool in my experience, especially for sites that seem determined to bury them.

Feeder for RSS and AntennaPod or EscapePod for podcast. All three can be retrieved from F-Droid. EscapePod is much simpler than AntennaPod but also lacks a lot of its features on purpose

I use Feeder for RSS feeds

I have an instance of freshrss feeding into feedme and it's awesome. I went with feedme because it's got a built in mobilizer that you can customize if the feed doesn't have the whole article content.

Definitely try "Read You"! It utilises Material You, has a sick UI and the dev is really nice. I think there are a lot of features, but I've just left almost everything on default.

YES