I’ve seen a lot of people praising RSS feeds over standard news. What benefits does RSS have over normal news sites? Are they more privacy-focused?

What feeds would you recommend for a fellow Lemmy user?

  • @jrubal1462@mander.xyz
    17•4 months ago

    For me, I saw very little benefit to RSS until I hosted fulltextrss. Most of the feeds I subscribed to, the RSS feed just gave you the headline, and made you load up the full website and all the ads to read the article. They don’t really want you just skimming the good stuff and skipping the ads.

    Fulltextrss basically loads in the full articles, pictures and all (if you so choose). It means I can read stories from all the sources I want, without really leaving my RSS reader.

  • @mesamunefire@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13•4 months ago

    I have a couple of hundred RSS feeds. It has worked well past 15+ years.

    The internet comes to me rather than the other way around.

    Some RSS feeds that are fun:

    https://questionablecontent.net/ - very long running comic.

    https://hackaday.com/

    https://www.kevinandkell.com/ - one of the most consistent oldest webcomic.

    Royal road also has RSS feed support.

    What I use: https://freshrss.org/ it’s kinda like Google reader back in the day.

    • @SuluBeddu@feddit.it
      5•4 months ago

      QC was such a fun ride… I encountered it pretty late in the story, then I got on par and I unfortunately dropped it, now it’s hard to go back

      I think it’s the Star Trek of web comics: incredibly progressive, ethical dilemmas everywhere, starting it now is hard for many because of the early graphics!

      The most amazing thing is how real its characters feel

      • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
        3•4 months ago

        QC was such a fun ride…

        It clearly had it’s moments. There were some weirdly questionable strips. I’m not following it anymore since a few years but I’m happy to see it’s still running.

  • TacoButtPlugEnglish
    10•4 months ago

    I love RSS because of why everyone on this thread already stated but also because it removes me from commercial social media and I can avoid legacy media propaganda. Some sites don’t have RSS enabled but you can always pay for scraping services or build your own scraper as well. FreshRSS has a built in scraper that is useful. I am running a few scrapers on top of the hundreds of feeds I have.

  • @tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
    9•4 months ago

    I don’t do it for privacy, although that is a benefit.

    I use RSS for convenience (all sources like news, YT, link aggregators, etc. are in the same place) and also to escape “the algorithm“. With RSS, I am in more control over what I see rather than what the Apple/Google news algorithm wants me to see.

    Also it helps to prevent doom scrolling. When you’re at the end of your feed, that’s it. There’s no more. You find something else to do.

    Just generally, a more efficient use of my time.

  • @TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world
    8•4 months ago

    My rss app combines 44 different news sites into one long feed. It replaced multiple apps and makes checking an assload of news very easy.

  • davel [he/him]English
    4•4 months ago

    I’ve seen a lot of people praising RSS feeds over standard news.

    RSS (and Atom) syndication feeds are not a different news. It’s the same content packaged and delivered differently. It’s just different packaging & delivery system from HTML. A lot of news sites also have syndication feeds.

  • @schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    2•4 months ago

    I used to read RSS feeds from Thunderbird a long time ago, but that required me to set them up again on every reinstallation and every device, so I eventually stopped doing that.

    Nowadays I read RSS feeds on Mastodon. There’s a service https://rss-parrot.net/ that converts any RSS feed into a fediverse account, so you get RSS feed updates into your feed along with everything else you follow there. Of course it would be even better if blogs and news sites just posted directly on the fediverse, but not all of them do.

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
    2•4 months ago

    If you’re into watching YouTube: You can add channels as RSS into your reader. The latest 15 videos are offered via the feeds. All you need is the channel ID of the channel whose feed you want to access.

    The channel ID is not visible anywhere on the page, but if you look at the DOM in the web browser via the developer console, you will find a meta entry <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID"> in the <head>, where CHANNEL_ID is the required ID. There are also websites that can be found quickly and easily using the appropriate keywords, which read out and return the ID associated with the provided handle.

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

    If you have a lot of subscriptions, you can use Google Takeout at takeout.google.com and export the YouTube subscriptions as a CSV file. The CSV file contains the subscribed channels with their ID and title for you to parse into whatever format you need for your reader.

    For Newsboat you can use this script on the Abos.csv from my Google Takeout archive:

    while IFS="," read id url name; do
  feedURL="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=%24%7Bid%7D"
  [ ! -z "${id}" ] && echo "$feedURL youtube videos \"~${name}\""
done < <(tail -n +2 Abos.csv) >> urls

    Edit: Seems like, Lemmy messes up the code formatting, but you get the gist …

  • nighty
    1•4 months ago

    I know this is kinda tangential, but what apps do you guys use to read RSS feeds?