RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    11 months ago

    The thing that stops me from moving to rss is that I don’t follow any news sites or blogs. I’ve tried but they all kinda suck to me. The only thing I follow is youtube creators and lemmy communities. Lemmy is my rss feed pretty much.

    • variants@possumpat.io
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      11 months ago

      I follow my lemmy community with my rss and I tossed in a few other sites I felt interested in but always forget to look at like the local paper, that said my server has been collecting months of info but I haven’t setup the link to my mobile app out of laziness so it has all been going to waste

    • sab@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      I figured there are interesting people out there who don’t really blog often, but who might post something online a few times ever year and whom I’d like to stay updated on. So I started trying to collect some of these relatively inactive personal feeds.

      It’s not ass noisy as following blogs or social media, which is what I like about it. The only drawback is of course that so few people maintain an RSS feed.

  • SpectralPineapple@beehaw.org
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    11 months ago

    Although I still have Feedly on my phone, and open it occasionally, RSS readers are not as useful as they used to be. That is not due to the way RSS inherently works, but in the past 15 years, websites no longer make their entire articles available on the feed. What you usually get is a small excerpt with a link to the website. They do that because RSS does not allow for the same level of engagement and advertising they would have on their website. As it is, RSS readers are, technically, link aggregators. Which makes them much less convenient.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Even as a link aggregator that would be perfectly fine for me personally.

      What really bugs me is that many news sites don’t keep their feeds clean, so you often have duplicates and most importantly: if you have multiple sources, you’ll get multiple copies of the same information packaged slightly differently - often I’m not even interested in one copy.

      For example, all news outlets had some Grammy/Taylor Swift crap in their feeds. Each outlet had like three different articles, all regurgitating the same information. I would love to have something like topic clusters, so that I could discard all articles I’m not interested in in bulk.

      I even tried building it myself, but wasn’t very successful.

      • SpectralPineapple@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        I don’t see how RSS could identify, prioritize, and remove duplicates between different sources in the same category. Unless you are talking about a more complicated system or manual curation, I don’t think that is possible. I don’t believe I had much trouble with duplicates within the same feed, maybe I never subscribed to many feeds that do that.

        • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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          11 months ago

          It’s possible by analyzing the title and subtext (and the article snippet, if it exists). I tried to have an AI model estimate the likeness of articles. Worked relatively well, but I lack the motivation to build it out into a usable app.

    • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      This right here.

      The heyday of RSS is long, long gone. Everything has become a walled garden where platforms want you ON their platform, not reading a feed, or using third-party clients, etc. They want your eyeballs there on their site/service. So many sites don’t even offer RSS feeds anymore, and when you get full text, you get piles of ads.

      It’s the same issue with so many sites/services either shutting down API access or severely restricting it.

      I tried really, really hard recently to put together a good list in an RSS reader and tried to make it work. but it just doesn’t. It’s a miserable experience and you have to fight for every feed you get. It’s not worth it. It’s sad and extremely frustrating, but unless we can push sites to do a 180 on their strategies, RSS is essentially dead.

      • SpectralPineapple@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        It was pretty great to receive dozens of full articles everyday without any bloat or ads. Just text and maybe a few images. I suppose it is possible to subscribe to apps that aggregate several sources in a practical manner, but then you’ll be restricted to their selection.

      • @CanadaPlus @SpectralPineapple Ive been using Plenary on Android which does a pretty good job of pulling full articles when available. Don’t think its FOSS but its seems to be focused on privacy to a certain extent. I love that it can create a custom widget that can replace the google surveillance oriented click bait feed.

        I’ve been experimenting with a few different options on desktop. @thunderbird has been the go to for me for a long time. Since playing with Google Reader lifetimes ago.

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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      11 months ago

      Even if I only get the first few paragraphs, it’s still the best way to aggregate articles and determine what I want to read. I’d rather find out that a headline wasn’t as engaging as the story without loading the actual site. And for those that I wish to read, I’ll click through.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    There’s no way I’d be able to keep track of all the stuff I want without an RSS reader.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    11 months ago

    RSS is fine for what it is, but it addresses a use case that only rarely applies to me – wanting to see all or nearly all of the content put out from some feed.

    There are a few sources for which I’ll do that – I look at The War Zone, for example. But for the great majority of sources, any feed has a mix of content that I want to see mixed with content that I don’t want to see. I think that link aggregators like Reddit or the Fediverse do a better job of picking up interesting content and filtering out the uninteresting.

    I’ll use RSS to obtain podcast feeds. But for webpages, I just usually don’t want to see all the content that a given source is putting out.

    • Tarte@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      I‘m using a RSS reader with rule based filters to remove uninteresting articles (to me) and upvote or downvote articles with certain keywords (for me). That way I can aggregate lots of media and have my own personal feed.

      It takes some time to set up and fine-tune, though.

    • awmire@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      do you recommend any fediverse instances (or even subreddits) that might share informative/fun/interesting articles or websites of any kind? i feel the quality on reddit has really tanked in the last couple years.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        11 months ago

        I mean, that kind of heavily depends on the area of your interests; I don’t think that it’s really possible to say “forum X is interesting” in a vacuum. I’d add that I still think that there are interesting subreddits on Reddit, though I agree that the front page isn’t very appealing these days, at least to me.

        On the Threadiverse, though, I would say that as things stand, lemmy is not really good at helping one find existing communities. There’s the newcommunities announcement community at !newcommunities@lemmy.world, but those, by definition, don’t have a userbase when announced, and some of the creators don’t do the work of regularly posting content until they catch on. Kbin reccomends random posts in the sidebar, but that’s a pretty shotgun way to find things.

        What I’d probably do is use the Lemmy Explorer’s community search, which as things stand is the only way I’m aware of to search all of the communities across all of the instances on the Threadiverse.

        https://lemmyverse.net/communities

        • petrescatraian@libranet.de
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          11 months ago

          @tal

          Lemmy Explorer’s community search

          That is a good way indeed, although I’m yet to find a way to filter after new or active communities.

          I like the fact that I can filter the instances that I don’t like or that my server has blocked, so I can see actual relevant content for me. 😁

          @awmire

          • tal@lemmy.today
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            11 months ago

            That is a good way indeed, although I’m yet to find a way to filter after new or active communities.

            Look at the drop-down menu next to the search field, which lets you sort via different criteria.

            I think “newest publish time” is the date of community creation; new communities at the top.

            For activity, it has number of active users in various given periods of time.

        • awmire@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          thanks a bunch that helps! in terms of reddit, i’ve been using it for almost 15 years and the subreddits i liked seem to have changed recently, or maybe gotten “too big”. i think the API changes last year really shook things up too. hence why i’m on beehaw now! anyway, i’ll take a look at the lemmy verse communities, thanks!

      • petrescatraian@libranet.de
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        11 months ago

        @awmire Friendica supports RSS if you’re into that. You might already know it is mostly a Facebook alternative (although it has many more features than Facebook). You can paste the website link into the search bar and it gets the RSS feed for you if it has one.

        I do like RSS feed readers that have a magazine view though, so I couldn’t really move all my feeds here.

        @tal

    • 4dpuzzle@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      One question. Why do we need a web app for something that was designed to work locally?

        • 4dpuzzle@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          Do you need that? You only need to sync the feed. There are formats like OPML for that. At worst you need a file sync tool like syncthing. The feed contents seen by the readers are all the same.

          I’m yet to see a good reason why feed readers need to be web apps. This is worse than the case of git - a decentralized tool is taken and made centralized.

          • kfet@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            When you have 100+ feeds you really want to avoid reading twice the same entry. It’s the single most important feature in an RSS reader for me.

          • DrinkMonkey@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            Agreed. The syncing can be managed other ways. The only thing I’m left with is using on a work computer for some reason, where one’s own devices aren’t available/permitted? But that’s probably not a common usage case.

          • ginerel@kbin.socialOP
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            11 months ago

            So the OPML file does handle the read status as well? isn’t it just a format to export and import feeds inside a reader?

      • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        Depends on your use-case obviously, for me it’s very nice to have all feeds and read status on all devices (laptop, phone, tablet) and don’t need to add a new feed to all devices or set it up again when I change phone, reinstall Linux etc. It also has user-management, so you could have accounts for friends and family and even expose it to the internet (which I wouldn’t at this point) or but it on a private mesh / vpn like Tail-/Headscale.

        Edit: Whoops, I was talking about self-hosting. Having it as a web service has the same benefits if you don’t wanna tinker with tech, obviously, (with the caveat that people from that service know what you read …)

    • crank@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Anyone interested can find (usually free) externally hosted freshRss and TinyRss hosts on the chatons website. Select one of those in the “based on” drop down menu.

      I’ve tried both and like neither. As far as I can tell, they only have a small number of apps. And none of them work offline. With a regular RSS reader you can refresh it when you have internet access, then everything is available when you do not. Like an email client or any other such software.

      But it might be suitable to you. So check out the chatons.

  • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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    11 months ago

    Does anybody have any recommendations for FOSS RSS readers with actual content surfacing features? So many RSS feeds are full of junk (this is particularly a problem with feeds with wildly disparate posting frequencies) and I’ve always felt they’d be a lot more useful if people were putting more effort into a modern way to sort through extremely dense feeds.

    • smeg@feddit.uk
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      11 months ago

      Don’t know what you mean by “actual content surfacing features”, but I’m quite happy with Feeder, it’s pretty basic but it’s FOSS and the notifications work!

      • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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        11 months ago

        Posted elsewhere: Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters and grouped feeds. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS

        • smeg@feddit.uk
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          11 months ago

          Fair enough, I’m not aware that Feeder has any of that. I don’t even want filtering or groups, I just want a notification of every new post on a community or website!

    • ALostInquirer@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Would you happen to mean readers with filtering tools? If so I’m interested as well.

      I know Thunderbird technically has them, but I’ve had trouble making them work as effectively as I’d like. RSSOwl had some that were easier to work with, but stopped being updated. There’s now a fork of it called RSSOwlnix, but I haven’t taken the time to see whether it still works as well or not. May be worth looking into though…

      • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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        11 months ago

        Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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    11 months ago

    Lemmy moderators: I strongly encourage you guys to subscribe to the RSS of your communities. It’s considerably quicker this way to notice and address problematic posts.

    On the article: I’ve been using Liferea since forever. I wish that it had access to blacklists though; some of my sources have quite a lot of rubbish that I’d rather not bother with.

  • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    I used to follow a TON of webcomics via RSS, first on Feedly, then on Inoreader, but a few years ago I’ve stopped opening my feed for certain reasons (and now I’m afraid to even think of the backlog). I’ve started getting into RSS again about a year ago, followed some blogs and small news websites, and I’ve been loving it! currently using my Nextcloud provider’s RSS option with the official Nextcloud News app on Android and RSS Guard on PC (I haven’t found one that integrates better with Plasma desktop yet).

  • keet@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    Indeed. I installed FreshRSS on my local server and haven’t looked back. Man, did I ever miss the web of the google reader era.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Lemmy communities are glorified RSS feeds, you can even subscribe to them through RSS and not care whether your instance is down for maintenance to read the posts.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          What I’ve said already: once the RSS client gets the feed, it’s on your device. Meaning you can access the items off-line, filter and sort by whatever criteria you wish (and your client allows), delete them, mark to read later, etc.

        • noobdoomguy8658@feddit.de
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          11 months ago

          Catered feeds, for example.

          You can create a feed that only includes Lemmy communities dedicated to a specific topic - like only those related to video games in some broad sense. Or a news-only feed.

          It’s much more convenient that just subscribing to everything you’re interested in and then trying to filter out on our own (good luck not forgetting stuff), as you’re basically on the algorithm’s mercy as well.

            • noobdoomguy8658@feddit.de
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              11 months ago

              Lemmy, too, has algorithms that determine what you see - how many upvotes a post has, how many comments, how recent, etc. The communities you subscribe to may have some high-quality, niche posts that you’re very likely to miss because they’re overshadowed by bigger, more active communities where posts simply gain more traction - RSS lets you circumvent that.

        • smeg@feddit.uk
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          11 months ago

          I get a push notification when there’s a post in a specific community

  • kib48@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    I just wish RSS readers could properly parse the webpages instead of only having the first paragraph and getting cut off

    • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      That’s actually not the RSS reader’s fault. It’s the rss feed you import that behaves like that. It’s on purpose, to make you go to their website and ingage in their traffic.

      • Shamot@jlai.lu
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        11 months ago

        This is an important criteria for me. If I can’t read the full article without leaving the reader and without a WebView, I won’t keep the RSS feed.

      • The Doctor@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        This is exactly the case.

        In a lot of CMSes that offer RSS feed generation, there’s a setting you can frob - either put the entire article in each RSS entry, or just the first X words in the <summary></summary> block. A lot of them default to the latter and folks never turn on the former.

    • thegreekgeek@midwest.social
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      11 months ago

      Best way around that I’ve found is with feedme on android. It’s got a mobilizer with a customizable css selector. Just set the app to load the feed in web view and to use the mobilizer and you’re good to go.

    • phlaym@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      There are some that do. Inoreader as host and Reeder as client both support that. Not perfect, but working well enough

    • testman@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Your post is missing the most important information that you wanted to share

      • brie@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        I think some kind of anti-HTML measure yeeted my angle bracketed link :(. Fixed.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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      11 months ago

      Which RSS bot do you use? I was going to make one for my RSS feeds, but if there already is one…

      • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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        11 months ago

        for lemmy, its pretty straight forward with this bot

        https://github.com/programming-dot-dev/rss-bot

        for the 'bins, there doesnt exist a direct-to-mbin bot yet (i’ve been workin on it… i suck at logins), in the meantime youd use a lemmy instance as intermediary:

        you setup a non-public, localized lemmy instance, have the bot configured for your needs to grab feeds into communities, then subscribe from your 'bin instance.

        • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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          11 months ago

          Are you comfortable sending your work so far on the mbin bot? I did the same thing you did; I picked it up but then ran into the OAuth stuff and got confused. I actually have an RSS mbin bot that was going for a while that was based on just local database access, but working out the OAuth stuff seems like a better way and I’m happy to take another crack at it.

          • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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            11 months ago

            ha, i dont because were in the same place… was playing with awesomebot, but then started attempting to hack the pangora bot starting with the login first, but i got roadblocked at the login and havent really had time to sort it.

        • kreynen@kbin.melroy.org
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          11 months ago

          @originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com is there an issue/branch/fork where bins support is happening? I’d like to help with that if I can.

          @ginerel@kbin.social @mozz@mbin.grits.dev