Blogger discovers this cool thing called “RSS”.
I did this too recently. Highly recommend.
Protip: Youtube channels have RSS feeds, they’re just buried in the source of the page. Ctrl-U and then Ctrl-F title=“RSS”
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.
Yeah but the goal here is to escape the algorithm deciding what you consume
You can play YouTube videos in VLC player
If I try to watch over a tor exit node (using tor anonymization technology). It shows me this message. They really want to know my IP-Address?
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Maybe try one of the downloaders
TIL. Gonna have to test this out my FreshRSS feed. Ty 🥰
I never stopped using it. It’s a shame some sites don’t have an rss feed anymore though…
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.
I use RSS but as far as I’m concerned, Lemmy is better, because it is categorized and ranked.
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
I recently rediscovered RSS with Read You on F-Droid (I enjoy it’s UI and bionic reading). I also found something on Github called Follow that I use on my desktop running CachyOS.
People should be rediscovering RSS. It’s news that you tailor to yourself and doesn’t come bundled with the “social” part of social media.
The problem I run into is most news sites optimize for 2 things
- Getting on google
- Getting linked on Twitter or Reddit
So most sites have a fuck ton of noise and carpet bomb ads.
I’d love to go back to the RSS model but it’s hard finding sites worth reading again.
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!
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.
Lemme clarify a bit. I love reader mode too and agree it cuts out a lot of cruft.
My point was that authors and articles spend less time trying to write an engaging article and more time trying to shove SEO keywords and questions into articles. It ruins the article and makes it something not worth reading.
Reader mode is great but if the substance isn’t there then it’s all for naught.
I use it quite often. Chills the eyes when reading. Standardized font(size) and design make this bearable.
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.
Yeah, is there some sort of directory or something? That’d be cool.
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?
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.
never stopped using rss/atom with ttrss 💪
Cool tip.
If you want news for a specific game and they release news on steam… all steam pages have an RSS feed.
Genuinely did not know that, thanks
I was trying to find a solution to have all the news sources I care about in a single app. Then I remembered RSS and was able to do that very easily. I use self-hosted Miniflux and just use that as pwa when on my phone. Ridoculously lightweight and very awesome. I also setup Readeck (a Pocket alternative) where I push longer articles for when I’m up for reading more instead of just checking the latest news. I love it
It’s 2004 again lol The good ol days.
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.
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.
member when all the big cool web 2.0 companies had public facing APIs?
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.
Yep, remember when XMPP was a thing so you could chat with anyone no matter the platform?
It is very much still a thing, and my preferred chat protocol - because it is easy to host and unlikely to enshittify.
Yeah, I meant in the sense that Facebook and Google had also implemented it so you could just talk to anyone with any client.
I member when there was no official reddit mobile app, only third party clients, and they were so good.
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.)
that requires having an account.
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
With bibliogram you can follow instagram pages in rss
good luck finding an instance that works.
Facebook pages used to work with rss bridge
I’m well aware of the RSS Bridge and I use several of them hosted on the main instance, but how does “used to work” help? Facebook used to actually provide RSS feeds for their pages and they used to work, too.
You have to selfhost bibliogram, working for me, I usually get rate limited but get all updates once or twice a week.
There is a facebook bridge in rss bridge, for a long time it worked, I don’t follow its development nowadays, maybe someone with some php knowledge can resurrect it.
For iOS, this one doesn’t collect any data. It’s pretty barebones, but also free. It nags you a bunch at first but eventually stopped
NetNewsWire is the iOS and macOS app for RSS. It has been around since RSS started out and is now open source.
It doesn’t have keyword filters or at least I can’t find them.
How do you all discover new RSS feeds to subscribe to?
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.
Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:
- I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
- 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.
- 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.
My way is simple and stupid. I hit F12, then search for “rss” in the html and copy the link
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.
After spending lots of time trying to find feeds, learning this was super helpful
I use an Browser Addon that searches for RSS feeds, still a bit finiky sometimes but still better than manually guessing URLs
That… seems like such an obvious solution lol, I just spend so much time on my phone I forget extensions are a thing unless I’m actively tinkering with my browser
Thank you so much for sharing! I’ll go take a look at firefox extensions when I next look for RSS feeds ☺️
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.
