I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too

You make my heart hurt, you're so right. It's getting harder and harder to find RSS or Atom links on sites. The more people rediscover these technologies, the more chance there is that site developers will continue to provide them.

It would be fantastic if more people would rediscover Usenet, and IRC, and ditch the shitty knock-offs like Discord. There's a pretty big contingent advocating for Jabber, which I'm ambivalent about, having been there when it started and when it (effectively) died and being very conscious of its flaws and limitations... but, still, these are all open standards and old-school internet - sometimes pre-web! - and they're often still better than the commoditized successors.

Embrace and encourage the new infusion of youth! Gate keeping is a very post-eternal-September behavior.

there's basically a whole generation that wasn't around when Google killed off Reader.

🥺 😭

I don't think "dunking" is the right word. It's just funny that people are still discovering RSS 30 years later. Myself included.

Why is it people flock to server based rss? Wtf? There are native clients galore for all platforms ever created.

Genuinely did not know that, thanks

Wow that's really neat, thanks!

I guess to get actual value from these videos you will still need to visit youtube.com though, in the end giving them valuable data to analyze.

You can also just drop the youtube channel link (ex. https://www.youtube.com/@LinusTechTips ) as well into most readers and it'll sort it out for you, so you don't even have to go digging.

TIL. Gonna have to test this out my FreshRSS feed. Ty 🥰

It's in order if you only use the subscriptions tab too

member when all the big cool web 2.0 companies had public facing APIs?

With bibliogram you can follow instagram pages in rss: https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/

Facebook pages used to work with rss bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

Not an RSS solution, but in IG if you tap the "Instagram" logo at the top/right, a menu will pop up. You can select "following" to (mostly) see the accounts you're following (and in reverse chronological order.)

Some RSS readers have the ability to generate an RSS feed from a site if they don't support it. Some sites don't show they have an RSS feed but they actually do.

Some smaller news sites share RSS feeds or newsletters if you support them on patreon.

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I'm already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.

Kagi Small Web, personally. Also a lot of people who blog on the Fediverse have RSS feeds, so discovery via Mastodon and such is good too.

Wordpress sites publish an rss feed by default at site.com/rss or site.com/feed, so there's a good chance a site you want an rss feed for has one even if they didn't intend to.

My way is simple and stupid. I hit F12, then search for “rss” in the html and copy the link

• Look around in your online communities and see what publications get shared.
• Once you find some sites you like, search the web/communities for alternatives with the same topic/vibe.
• If you find journalists you like, see where else they publish their works, or what publications they used to work at. For bloggers / content creators, see who they collaborate with.

I use Feedly for discovery, they have a crap load of websites you can subscribe to even if the websites don't explicitly advertise RSS.

And then use the Feedly desktop website to get the actual RSS URL and put it in the client of your choice 🙃

I use an extension that searches the code on the page to find them. It puts a little number up, then when you click it you can copy the link.

You can set Google alerts for search terms. You'll get articles when they pop up. Apparently I have the same name as a politician in Canada, so I get to keep up with what's going on with that.

Find one or two sites you regularly like from your usual sources. Then when THOSE sources link to another source, FOLLOW that link. If that site has good content, add it to your list.

It doesn't take long to build a solid RSS feed, just need to spend a little time curating it. The key is to pay attention to who is providing the info.

Don't like the direction a site is going, remove it from your feed.

If you see that one source is commonly the original source for information, or reporting make sure you do what you can to support it. Do they have a patreon? Can you share it out to your other sources?

Also, make sure you're not falling into a bubble, follow national and international news sources.

This is why I legit built my own space news app , because my autistic brain can't handle all the crap they've added to pages. I just need the text, and images. I don't need links to other articles in the body of the article! I'm currently reading this article!! and stop citing your own articles as sources!

Yeah, is there some sort of directory or something? That'd be cool.

I really agree - I've stepped away from reading so much of what's online because it's all clickbaity junk with no substance. I'm not sure where to look for actual content to put in my reader. But I'm making forays.

On Firefox on Android there is a reader mode that gives you just the text and images. It's the little icon next to the url. Sometimes you can bypass a paywall if you press it really quick before the page finishes loading.

I use it, as both a reader and a publisher, but rss (in particular) could do with an update.

I use RSS for sites where I want to read every update. That typically means serial comics; dev-blogs of indie games; other infrequent blogs; and some infrequent youTube channels (I don't visit youTube other than via my RSS feeds);

Whereas I use Lemmy and other sites for skimming and browsing, and discovering new things.

lemmy also supports rss! your inbox can generate a rss feed. Also communities have feeds that update whenever someone posts on them. For example for c/technology sorted after active: https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/technology.xml?sort=Active

Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish move.

Same. I'm guessing the clickbait algorithm favors the "should" phrasing, which is annoying.

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it's easy to learn and use.

I've also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven't actually tried it out yet because I'm still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti's. It's also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

Thunderbird has RSS integrated, which could be quite neat once that synchronizes.

If you’re on iOS, feeeed is kinda slick :)

I've had some decent times with inoreader.

On android i like ReadYou on fdroid

I used Feedly since Google Reader was shut down. Then 1.5 years ago, as Feedly was getting more paywalls and AI-crap, I switched to Newsblur, and have been a happy user ever since. I love its Intelligence Trainer that lets me hide posts with certain tags/authors/keywords.

Unlimited hosted-by-them Newsblur costs 36 USD / year. It has a FLOSS version and a more limited free hosted-by-them version, but the 2.5 GBP / month was worth the QoL increase for me.

there are some publically available FreshRSS instances that you can make an account with, I personally use hostux. you can access it with the browser and any apps that support FreshRSS (in my case, Read You or Capy Reader on Android, and sometimes RSS Guard on desktop).

I prefer the Feedbro browser extension in Firefox. I think it is available for chrome/edge as well.

FreshRSS is nice. You can hook into any client you want on android/ios/etc... or use theirs. Reminds me of google reader and some others. This is what it looks like:

I have mine selfhosted. Pretty easy on yunohost, docker, or other sites. Looks like they have a couple of servers out there if you dont want to self host: https://freshrss.org/cloud-providers.html

SSH over telnet but IRC is still alive and kicking

RSS is back. Forums are back. It's brilliant. Now I just need Musk and Zuck and Bezos to be no longer relevant to anybody's lives.

FreshRSS for those playing along at home...

NetNewsWire is the iOS and macOS app for RSS. It has been around since RSS started out and is now open source.

I skip the RSS and just buy the local paper.