i gotta be real, i don’t get the hype people go on about with RSS, it’s like being hyped about DNS

yeah sure it’s a good protocol that should be used more, but it’s uh, it’s just a feed? i don’t see what’s so amazing about it, do some people just subscribe to 5000 email newsletters and stuff like that?

I personally hate newsletters because

1. my email inbox is already cluttered enough as it is
2. I need to share my email to subscribe, which puts the balance of power into the hands of the sender at the expense of my privacy

I’d rather have newsletters made available through RSS feeds, where I can subscribe and unsubscribe anonymously.

RSS is awesome. My favorite fun fact is that podcasts are RSS-based, which is why you can listen to any of them from any podcast app.

I love RSS.

I run FreshRSS as my server via docker and connect to it via Read You on Android and NewsFlash on Linux

I also run RSS-Bridge in docker. It has been really useful as it can generate RSS feeds for many websites that don’t natively have them.

RSS is great and Google tried to kill it so you’d have to use other services.

I like how I can tell a big event has happened because I see a bunch of articles on it, and that it’s possible to catch up to where you last were in the feed.

That means you’ve caught up on the news, no need to red any more, you can do something else. Algorithms always serve you up new content, so you’re in this constant state of thinking something is always happening.

I think RSS readers would help fix the brains of a lot of boomers if we could ever get them off Facebook

I second that excitement! When I first found RSS, it felt like rediscovering the original intent of the internet. It gives you full flexibility of your sources of information all in one place, without giving your data away to a corporate entity, or signing up for any platform for that matter.

Tbh it is such a breath of fresh air compared to the feeds and platforms we’ve become accustomed to–and RSS has been around longer than them, which is crazy to me.

I just hope websites on the internet continue to support it–as many older, not as common technologies often get phased out.

I was heartbroken when Google killed their Reader service. To this day I can’t fully understand why they did it - many people used and loved it.

Moved to Feedly but things were never the same. I’d like another app or service that lets me read my subscribed feeds and sync their read/unread status (and save them for reading them later in a separate collection, as you can with Feedly) between android and pc - but being visually well designed as Feedly, without the caps it puts to you like that ridiculous cap on searching into your feeds, being completely free and that is no self hosted (don’t have a pc turned on 24/7 nor can afford it)… so yeah maybe this is asking for too much.

However, I absolutely agree RSS is absolutely awesome and wish more people get into it

I wish more blogs, websites and services would offer RSS feeds. I personally use Thunderbird as my feed reader on PC. Not sure if the Android client has this functionality too.

I’ve been happily using RSS feeds for many years. I mostly use them for webcomics. I’ve got a bunch of different webcomic feeds. But I also use RSS to follow a bunch of low-traffic sites that I care about the content of but don’t want to have to manually visit just to see if there’s an update.

Also, I don’t have a google account, but I use RSS to follow a couple of youTube channels that I find interesting. (Again, stuff that rarely updates. eg. hbomberguy.)

It’s cool.
I currently catch up on news with it.

Firefox has RSS radar extensions that can help find rss feeds in websites(that don’t really show/mention it on every page)

RIP Aaron Swartz. You are truely missed…

…Is it just me or does the shooter have the same smile? I’ve heard he’s really smart.

I’m annoyed that a lot of the sites I browse don’t have RSS feeds, and I’ve had to do some really tiresome hacks just to get some to work (for example, even tools like FreshRSS’s HTML parser doesn’t tell you the reason a feed broke, so there’s a dozen different things to adjust blindly until it works).

RSS saves me so much time, I used to waste hours just cycling through pages to see if any updated.

I see another commenter mentioned FreshRSS. While abandoned now, I created https://github.com/Fmstrat/agriget a long time ago when Feedly shut down. It was based on TT-RSS which I do not recommend because of drama with the creator (they are very… bad to contributors (I stupidly ignored that originally). Not to mention, it’s dated now.

All this to say, my recco is to self host with an agregator that saves the content locally. That way, if the article ever goes away, or your phone dies, you always have your saved and read content.

I host my own Lemmy instance, and have been considering making an API not that turns RSS feeds into communities, as the one thing I like about Lemmy is the conversations. So that would give me the best of both worlds.

My only gripe with RSS is the usual dependency on a synchronization server (whether it is a 3rd party server or self-hosted). I have been searching for way too long for a local-first RSS application for both Linux and Android which would store the RSS feeds (as in, the downloaded posts) in a local folder that could be then synchronized between Linux and Android applications using Syncthing or similar. Sadly, still no results. Anyone know about something?

newsboat <3