- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.
Check out Selfoss, a self-hostable Online RSS tool, to browse and manage your feeds from the desktop and mobile
There’s no way I’d be able to keep track of all the stuff I want without an RSS reader.
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.
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…
Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS
I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters.
Sounds like an opportunity to integrate some AI… 🙈
We don’t need to use that word here
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!
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
Fluent Reader
Removed by mod
Piped is good too btw
W H A T
LibreTube works better.
LibreTube straight up does not work for me. Every video throws an error or cannot connect.
That’s a Piped thing. You just have to disable the Piped API unless you run your own server.
Nah the app just doesn’t work. I read about that trick but it didn’t resolve it for me.
It’s really unfortunate since I vastly prefer the LibreTube UI over NewPipe.
Okay well they’ve been having problems for the last couple of months. That’s the risk you take when relying on a 3rd party service. Try GrayJay.
mbin is my rss reader. fediverse instance + bot
Which RSS bot do you use? I was going to make one for my RSS feeds, but if there already is one…
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.
@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
@ginerel@kbin.social a few people in this thread have mentioned using Kbin or Mbin as something of an RSS curration tool. I’d like to learn more about that.
The Drupal community maintains an aggregate of feeds from 200+ sources with posts about the CMS. In the last year or so, the quality of the content is noticeably worse. Some community members are blaming Ai generated content…
Chat GPT, write a 1000 word blog post about Agile that mentions Drupal
I think the problem has more to do with how Google rewards “fresh” content that repeats keywords with higher page rank than a better written article posted 2 years earlier.
Regardless of the cause, a small group already running drupal.community for Mastodon has been discussing using up voting as a way to let the community curate the feed.
Would love any advice or examples on using Kbin or Mbin to empower a small community to curate RSS content.
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.
I’m kind of sad I’ve entirely missed the RSS golden era, then.
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.
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.
I don’t see how RSS could identify, prioritize, and remove duplicates between different sources in the same category. If I understand correctly, those are not really duplicates, but rather different articles on the same subject. 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.
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.
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.
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.
I just wish RSS readers could properly parse the webpages instead of only having the first paragraph and getting cut off
There are some that do. Inoreader as host and Reeder as client both support that. Not perfect, but working well enough
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.
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.
Not a solution for everyone, but I am selfhosting and using FreshRSS. One of the extensions is Readable which will fetch the entry’s URL and parse it using either Readability or Postlight Parser to replace the content of the entry and make all of it available in the reader.
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.
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.
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 intereating 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.
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.
What RSS reader is this? I’ve been wanting to get back into it for a while but I too need to be able to filter things down to a digestible form.
Feedbro, it’s a browser extension.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Why should people stop telling other people what they should do in 2024…
Problem is that the whole concept of advertising is “telling other people what to do”.
- People use Google.
- Google tells people to use Chrome
- Chrome becomes most popular browser
- Chrome removes the " this site has RSS" icon from URL bar
- People forget that RSS is a thing
- People now rely on Google News and other biased sites to get information
- biased sites tell people what to do
RSS is freedom
go tell other people to use it
also Lemmy RSS communitygo tell other people to use it
I’m not going to tell anyone what they should do, sorry. And every site is biased, no matter what.
Never stopped.
You know what I wish? That Google would’ve pushed one of their Chrome experiments through more.
For a while, the spam feed that Chrome opens to by default had a hidden setting you could enable, that added a subscribe button to websites. You clicked “Subscribe”, and the websites you subscribed to appeared on your start screen. This should’ve gone even further. It should’ve allowed opening
feed:
links, so people could add subscribe buttons to websites.Behind the scenes, this was just “find the top level RSS feed”, but the UI was so much better than whatever RSS looked like the last moments before browsers removed them. Nobody knew what RSS was, “live bookmarks” were confusing to me even though I occasionally read through raw RSS XML, but all it needed was good UX. Instead, the old RSS web seemed determined to make very clear that RSS is its own “thing”, an orange button that wasn’t always there, that most people were afraid to click because nobody knew what it did.
Modern browsers, launchers, and operating systems all come with a list of articles, most of them pre-selected by Some Algorithm. Adding simple, standardised “subscribe” buttons to UX everywhere could’ve integrated with the system so well. I’m sure whatever behaviour analysis Google is doing and whatever ad network trash Microsoft is doing would’ve worked just as well with a feed the user can manage subscriptions for.
I think the key here is that it’s a feed managed by the user. There’s not enough commercial potential in that. As a tech company, you want to be the one curating the feed, and you want the user to believe you’re doing it in their best interest so they don’t notice how you’re making money by subtly feeding them ads.
RSS is simply too good for the contemporary internet.
Some useful services:
- (Generates email addresses that expose received messages over RSS)
- (Scrapes websites and creates RSS feeds for them)
Your post is missing the most important information that you wanted to share
I think some kind of anti-HTML measure yeeted my angle bracketed link :(. Fixed.