this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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Blogger discovers this cool thing called "RSS".

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

To OP and the few other comments sarcastically dunking on the blogger for just discovering RSS: why? It's not exactly drowning in advocates today, and there's basically a whole generation that wasn't around when Google killed off Reader. What if we treated advocacy like this like the good thing it is?

[–] paraphrand 6 points 1 hour ago

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

πŸ₯Ί 😭

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] KnightontheSun 1 points 2 minutes ago* (last edited 2 minutes ago)

What’s the first rule of Usenet? 😬

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

I'd be interested in ditching Discord, anything you recommend?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 29 minutes ago

It makes the most sense to get off discord by being platform agnostic in my opinion, just going to wherever you can find clusters of the types of connections you want in whatever format works for you as long as the format meets your requirements like privacy or whatever else, if you can find the bulk of it in a single place that's great but not necessary.

[–] dukethorion 1 points 43 minutes ago

My local news sites block RSS because they paywall all their articles to force you to buy a newspaper or pay twice as much for online access.

[–] tehWrapper 9 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Cool tip.

If you want news for a specific game and they release news on steam.. all steam pages have an RSS feed.

[–] OpossumOnKeyboard 1 points 22 minutes ago

Genuinely did not know that, thanks

[–] HeyJoe 2 points 1 hour ago

I just saw this article last week! I love RSS feeds and set up a bunch through my work email outlook client. They been there since like 2010 (yes I still have the same job...) and I barely touch them these days due to time, and some sites died, but it's still the quickest way to catch up on the news you want. Wherever I saw this posted last I saw a recommend for FeedFlow and have been messing with that phone app to try and make some ultimate new feed for myself.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Unfortunately a lot of sites have ditched support for RSS over the past 10 years requiring tedious work arounds if you can get it to work at all.

I hope it can make a comeback but I'm dubious.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 minutes ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

We gotta bring back usenet servers and dare I say IRC and Telnet

[–] tehWrapper 3 points 2 hours ago

SSH over telnet but IRC is still alive and kicking

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Google Reader was my goto and when they killed that I tried a bunch of others and none quite hit the same. Gutted that one hit the Google graveyard.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish move.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

How do you all discover new RSS feeds to subscribe to?

[–] plenipotentprotogod 12 points 3 hours ago

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.
[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Cris_Color 3 points 3 hours ago

After spending lots of time trying to find feeds, learning this was super helpful

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I've recently rediscovered RSS and I'm in love with it. I just wish Meta wasn't a piece of fuck and let you add Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. there are some workarounds for the latter, but they're really finicky.

[–] chrash0 28 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] WhatAmLemmy 9 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

That was just for the growth and acquisition phase, using the network effect to capture consumers and businesses, get them addicted and dependent on the product, and then build a wall around them to lock them into your platform.

It's a classic bait and switch, and if we didn't live in corporate dictatorships masquerading as "democracy" it'd be illegal.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago

Yep, remember when XMPP was a thing so you could chat with anyone no matter the platform?

[–] upside431 4 points 3 hours ago

I am using RSS and I love it

[–] farcaster 8 points 4 hours ago (6 children)

I've been interested in trying out RSS again but I don't want to self-host. Can anyone recommend a RSS client (hosted, local, or whatever) that they like?

[–] plenipotentprotogod 7 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] evasive_chimpanzee 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

If it's open source, you could perhaps tinker with the algorithm. My main desires for rss feeds are:

  • a way to filter out fluff affiliate link articles (e.g., 8 best gadgets on sale for prime day)
  • a way to cluster articles on the same topic (i don't really need to read 5 articles about the same news item)

Any clue if nunti could do that?

[–] plenipotentprotogod 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn't really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

[–] evasive_chimpanzee 1 points 22 minutes ago

Oh wow, they really did a good job of explaining it. It's not too complex. I think it probably would be able to filter out some of the fluff.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

The fact that it's only available through fdroid is actually a good thing in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

On android i like ReadYou on fdroid

[–] PartiallyApplied 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 28 minutes ago

I needed this, thanks! For the lazy, it’s here.

[–] 8uurg 5 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] adam_y 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I've had some decent times with inoreader.

[–] farcaster 2 points 4 hours ago

inoreader seems very ergonomic, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] simplejack 11 points 5 hours ago

Wait until I show them my PHP BB.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

Nice webpage there sir. Material for MkDocs right?

[–] Lost_My_Mind -3 points 3 hours ago

Wait until this guy gets to 2012, and discovers Flipboard.....