An RSS reader that lets me keep things in my task bar as a small popup, and shows notifications, is all I want.
It depends on the use case.
One may use RSS just as preview, to decide what to read and what not, rather than use it as replacement of a website.
Using RSS as preview, actually, while it may seem just an irrelevant layer of indirection, can actually prevent excessive consumption :)
Rather like the HN front page. A similarity underscored by Firefox uses (or at least used last I looked) for RSS feeds.
This sounds like it couldn't possibly matter but it's actually quite easy for a full text RSS feed to be the vast majority of bandwidth for a site.
* newsboat (command line) for desktop: https://newsboat.org/
* Feeder on android (which also scrapes the full article content in most cases): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
Both are definitely not bloated, though I don't know if there is any decent notification functionality in newsboat. It is open source though, so maybe it's not that hard to add. You can configure it to auto refresh so I've just kept it open when I've been following the news obsessively.
You just need the right tools. Miniflux[1], which I will never get tired of recommending at every occasion, has a scraper built-in, so you just need to enter one or two css selectors and it fetches the text for you, ready to be consumed in its excellent, HN-inspired web interface or in your client of choice.
If you can't be bothered to self-host there is a hosted option which is only 15$/year.
Miniflux is the reason I'm a heavy RSS user today (I follow just over 300 feeds at the moment) after years of being intrigued by the possibilities of the standard but ultimately unable to stick to it due to wrong/inadequate tooling. Miniflux was my turning point.
[1]: https://miniflux.app
I have been in love ever since. It’s an amazing rss reader and doesn’t even need an app
There’s definitely some good options on the Mac side. I use Reeder, which does exactly what I want it to and little more, and there’s NetNewsWire which feels like it’s been around for a million years at this point.
> In practice, getting fulltext is rare
This is very true, and unfortunate. The app I use has an option to pull the text from the linked page (much like a browser’s Reader Mode), but it’s not perfect and often totally mangles things like image galleries. It’s a shame, because I find a lot of the feeds I follow have content I want to read but their websites are unreadable; for every three lines of text there’s an embedded video or “articles you may be interested in”. It destroys my ability to take the article in.
The script I use to fetch RSS will optionally perform two extra steps: fetching the full-text (finding the link using a given XPath expression), then de-cluttering that HTML (removing banners, menu bars, etc.).
The result is another RSS feed, which can be published somewhere, subscribed-to in a reader, etc. (I actually transform them to Maildir, since my preferred reader is mu4e)