One of the main benefits is having the title and (usually) an overview/description or excerpt.
It makes it so much easier to prioritise and filter content before (and often instead of) having to deal with the modern web experience directly.
I talk about NNTP in the last section. Yes NNTP is still in use (and even FIDO net) but they’re mostly used for distributing binaries.
I focus on RSS because it’s still used A LOT .. and even though a lot of end-users don’t use RSS readers, the feeds are everywhere in every piece of software. They’re used by scrapers, robots and lots of other indexing software. Professors use feeds for their journal articles, news desk editors use them to see what all their competitors are reporting on, etc. So they’re an important part of the web ecosystem and end users should take more advantage of them.
I love RSS and blogging. They are probably among my favourite aspects of the web and a huge part of my daily routine. Those here that haven’t got a a favourite feed reader yet but are using Thunderbird for reading their mail, might benefit from knowing how to read blogs with Thunderbird (this is a past post from my own blog which explains how).
I have been using the YouTube RSS feed for the past year. I like this a lot because of the problem mentioned in the article. I just hope Google doesn’t break the feed in the future.
You can use https://invidio.us which has a more accessible RSS feed than YouTube itself. It’s just a different frontend to YouTube with less adds, and more “liberating” options.
I use this if I absolutely “must” use youtube. The performance is generally pretty bad for me, I think they might proxy all videos through their server? I’ve been tempted to self-host it if that helps the performance, but I honestly don’t use it enough yet to justify the extra effort to set up/maintain it..
Personally, I don’t follow blogs or podcasts without a direct feed - using the general term here as this also applies to Atom. Being on iTunes, etc. does not count!
There are a couple great RSS feed readers for Android in the F-droid ‘store’ that I use/used in the past: Feeder, Handy News Reader. My current favorite is Handy, since it allows you to download the entire article, which works pretty well in most cases.
I use Newsblur. It’s open source and can be self hosted, but I just use the hosted one because I am lazy. They have an Android app which is quite good, although nothing flashy.
I used to sync feeds locally with newsboat among others, but it would just take too long with hundreds of them. It really sucks on low bandwidth so I much prefer having a server now.
I’ve been using Inoreader both on web and Android for the last two weeks for most feeds. So far so good. For feeds where I just want some bits and pieces occasionally, I add them to Flipboard and let the algorithms choose what to show me.
I use https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rss2email and email feed updates to myself. My email is the only “rss reader” that makes it easy to read feeds from mobile, emacs, web browser, etc, without a bunch of additional setup work and (flaky) synchronization
I still use RSS
Me too. I love it.
One of the main benefits is having the title and (usually) an overview/description or excerpt. It makes it so much easier to prioritise and filter content before (and often instead of) having to deal with the modern web experience directly.
Me too. Instead of “still” I would also say that I use RSS more than ever. All the news sources I read I subscribe to via RSS, Atom or JSON Feed.
Wouldn’t that be NNTP?
USENET predates the Web by a good decade and a half or more, doesn’t it?
I talk about NNTP in the last section. Yes NNTP is still in use (and even FIDO net) but they’re mostly used for distributing binaries.
I focus on RSS because it’s still used A LOT .. and even though a lot of end-users don’t use RSS readers, the feeds are everywhere in every piece of software. They’re used by scrapers, robots and lots of other indexing software. Professors use feeds for their journal articles, news desk editors use them to see what all their competitors are reporting on, etc. So they’re an important part of the web ecosystem and end users should take more advantage of them.
I love RSS and blogging. They are probably among my favourite aspects of the web and a huge part of my daily routine. Those here that haven’t got a a favourite feed reader yet but are using Thunderbird for reading their mail, might benefit from knowing how to read blogs with Thunderbird (this is a past post from my own blog which explains how).
Wow thank you so much for this tip! I had absolutely no idea Thunderbird contained a RSS reader! It has a very nice user interface on top of that.
I have been using the YouTube RSS feed for the past year. I like this a lot because of the problem mentioned in the article. I just hope Google doesn’t break the feed in the future.
Now if Twitter we just put up a feed as well…
You can use https://invidio.us which has a more accessible RSS feed than YouTube itself. It’s just a different frontend to YouTube with less adds, and more “liberating” options.
I use this if I absolutely “must” use youtube. The performance is generally pretty bad for me, I think they might proxy all videos through their server? I’ve been tempted to self-host it if that helps the performance, but I honestly don’t use it enough yet to justify the extra effort to set up/maintain it..
Personally, I don’t follow blogs or podcasts without a direct feed - using the general term here as this also applies to Atom. Being on iTunes, etc. does not count!
I personally gave up on RSS, but NewsBlur continues to run as a modern Google Reader that is both open source and fully hosted: https://newsblur.com/
Love RSS too. Pro-tip for Flipboard – any feed you can read in in a web browser will have an RSS feed – just add
/rssto the end. E.g. https://flipboard.com/@dzc/flipbooks-mc76pk0fy has https://flipboard.com/@dzc/flipbooks-mc76pk0fy/rssWhat (web) apps for browser and Android are you using?
There are a couple great RSS feed readers for Android in the F-droid ‘store’ that I use/used in the past: Feeder, Handy News Reader. My current favorite is Handy, since it allows you to download the entire article, which works pretty well in most cases.
I use Newsblur. It’s open source and can be self hosted, but I just use the hosted one because I am lazy. They have an Android app which is quite good, although nothing flashy.
I used to sync feeds locally with newsboat among others, but it would just take too long with hundreds of them. It really sucks on low bandwidth so I much prefer having a server now.
I’ve been using Inoreader both on web and Android for the last two weeks for most feeds. So far so good. For feeds where I just want some bits and pieces occasionally, I add them to Flipboard and let the algorithms choose what to show me.
Read all the reply and setup feed2toot (https://gitlab.com/chaica/feed2toot/) to get RSS in my fedi timeline.
I use https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rss2email and email feed updates to myself. My email is the only “rss reader” that makes it easy to read feeds from mobile, emacs, web browser, etc, without a bunch of additional setup work and (flaky) synchronization