Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

rsapkf.org

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I've used RSS to follow all media for the past 2 years (FreshRSS+FeedMe, I have a guide here https://soapstone.mradford.com/hn-rss-guide/). It's been the single best thing I've done to reclaim my attention. Here's a couple of other random thoughts:

- Being able to dismiss articles where the headline is the story is really valuable. For example, I just dismissed "Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun (techcrunch.com)"- it's not worth my attention.

- It's possible to accrue a large backlog of unread "semi-interesting" items that may or may not be valuable. In this sense, there's still a FOMO aspect to RSS, and you have to be aggressive in dismissing articles. For exmaple, a few 2-week-old backlog titles in my feed include "SHA-3 Buffer Overflow", "Show HN: Restfox - Open source lightweight alternative to Postman", and "Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain". These are semi-interesting, but really I should just dismiss them.

I really like your reasoning. The only problem I see is that if everyone did what you propose, we wouldn't have Hacker News at all (upvotes, in the end, must come from somewhere).

So from a Kantian ethical point of view, it doesn't really work. There ought to be a better solution. But on a personal level, I wholeheartedly agree

The majority of users don't comment anyways.

Sometimes it is shocking how few upvotes you need to get to the HN frontpage.

It's shocking on many platforms. I can't find a citation but I swear I read a study (or small experiment, more likely) which showed the first two votes determine the fate of most posts on reddit. You can use bots on twitter to similarly guide "the hivemind", I receny learned the intelligence term for this practice is "consensus cracking". There's even guides on the internet: https://edith.reisen/computers/security/forum_shills.html

Depends on how active is the subreddit and heavily botted it is.

Using wsb as an example, you used to see quality posts with 20 upvotes then the 2020s roll around, bots and scrawlers started inflating the needed numbers and even with thousand of upvotes, some posts were blatant ads after wsb proved it had alot of wealthy eyes.

The main pages of reddit have the same problems full of bots that flood into selected posts almost immediately after it gets posted, this is especially obvious during election years, where billions are burned to "let us discover what the popular concensus is".

I take your point. But note that I'm here upvoting and commenting still!

I saw the link to this article in my RSS feed, and I took the time to open a browser, find the link, and comment because RSS adoption is something that I genuinely want to have a conversation about.

Which means that with RSS, you can still be a part of the community, you just won't reflexively upvote or spend time in the comments section.

Comment sections should have their own feed. Just like sub forums, users and search queries. Each comment could have its own feed of replies.

Sometimes an uninteresting website has a very interesting article. This is specially great for supper niche stuff. An empty feed should not draw much attention in a reader. The single comment posted years later could be really useful.

There is also <comment> https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltcommentsgtSub...

"if everyone did X" should automatically evaluate to "false".

I make heavy use of https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to convert e-mail newsletters into RSS feeds -- IMO the RSS reader context is way better than an email inbox for consuming newslettery content.

Wow! Very cool. Thank you for sharing

feedbin gives you an email address to use for newsletters that will show up in your rss feed. it’s also nice.

I find it hilarious that a bit lower down, someone is discussing https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email to do the opposite of this.

I think people should be able to consume however they want. It seems easier to go RSS to email though.

My conjecture is it’s all about the preferred UI. If you look at something like gnus it really doesn’t draw a distinction between e-mail, rss or nntp.

+1 I support this on Patreon. A nifty open source tool that you can self host if you like, but I’ve run into no issues with the hosted one

that's amazing! Subscribing now.

I'd love to find a "web2rss" for laggards that don't provide their own feeds :)

Maybe try Feed me up, Scotty!

[1]: https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/

Some readers have such option build-in (e.g. FreshRSS). There are also services like:

https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/

https://feed43.com/

https://politepol.com/en/

KillTheNewsletter is essential to my Inoreader set-up, which has hundreds of feeds to fuel my writing. It's an incredible service!

> I have stopped subscribing/following anything/anyone online.

Same. I even wrote a program that allows me to follow people on Twitch without being logged in there. I made a bash alias so I just need to type "f" in the terminal when I want to see who is live. Otherwise I use newsboat for things that have RSS feeds and w3m bookmarks for everything else. W3m has a really nice bookmarks page that is just a list of links that you can access with alt+b; very convenient when you want to quickly go to a page.

Would love to see the Twitch program!

https://github.com/robalni/twitch-shell

All in bash!, well done, neat usage of `nc` in there too.

Not only bash but some of the more readable shell script I've seen. OP, if you're reading this, is that an idiomatic style or did you learn the style from some well known source?

I don't know what you refer to when you talk about the style but it's just how I write code; I try to keep it simple. Some of the simplicity of the code is possible because it's bash, which both means that I can skip parsing the input (since bash already is made for doing that) and use existing programs like curl and nc.

HN is a great place to gather RSS feeds. Any time there's an interesting site I always look for them. These days I usually see articles that appear on the HN front page a day or so before they hit HN. But HN isn't the only place I practice this. Back in the 2010s it was obvious reddit was going under so I did the same there till 2015. I have 1000+ RSS feeds now and very little need for news aggregators on the day to day (except finding new feeds).

QuiteRSS is an excellent native reader that handles my thousands of feeds well. It is so multi-platform it even has an OS/2 version. https://quiterss.org/

I do this too, but only started a few days ago. That's a lot of feeds you've collected, would you be open to sharing a list of them?

I post my list of subscriptions to my blog in OPML format: https://github.com/nathan-contino/nathan-contino.github.io/b... (github link, so you can preview it).

If you like bicycles and simple tech stuff, you might enjoy.

Sure. Here is the opml file and an HTML listing of the feed URLs and their website URL/name organized by categories: http://a.superkuh.com/feeds9.html and http://a.superkuh.com/2022-11-04-feedlist.opml This is my script to convert .opml to html unordered list, http://superkuh.com/regexopmltohtml.pl.txt

Most HN sourced feeds are in the "Computing but not spammy" category.

The first load of the big opml into QuiteRSS (if you try it) might take a while. After that it will be faster. I suggest enabling the "load database to ram" option in QuiteRSS configuration.

Good grief I struggle to keep up with eight feeds in my RSS reader!

I see two use cases of an RSS reader. You can use them as a stream of news and just dive in when you want, or trying to read every article. I personally do a bit of both, mixing feeds, but with good tagging and filtering.

I do the same - I separate "firehose" feeds that have dozens or more updates a day, from feeds that may update once a month. The latter is likely more important and cannot be lost in the noise of the former.

It is a very small microcosm of how we say we want social media feeds to work (chronological) but why algorithms are everywhere.

I think it depends on the type of feeds you subscribe to. Some big news sites have multiple posts an hour whereas many personal blogs don't post in the average month.

Personally I do more of the latter and probably get less than 10 new items a day (and 3 of those tend to be comics which are quick to read over breakfast).

Often the higher-volume feeds that I subscribe to are filtered by author or category to focus on what I am really interested in.

I recently started using RSS again (self-hosted with miniflux). One difficulty I have is that these kinds of RSS feeds in OP are way too high-volume for me. But it can be hard to find good blogs or RSS feeds without relying on Twitter to find them.

Back in the day, more people used to include a list of blogs they follow on their own blogs, I thought this was a great practice. A few still do, like this very interesting blog on statistics: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/blogs-i-read/

+1 for miniflux! It’s great for low-volume, high-quality blogs. It’s got features to keep track of more frequent updates too, if you can be bothered to categorize them.

I set my page length to something long (n>1000) and have a userscript that round-robin sorts the unread posts by feed, and it works pretty nicely for all but the most high-volume (e.g. Boing Boing) https://maya.land/userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/

You can follow twitter feeds in RSS via Nitter instances. Just place /rss after a profile URL.

Feedbin lets you read Twitter as RSS feeds as well. US$5 a month, but well worth it to me.

If you go the self-hosted route you can also put RSS-Bridge on the same host to locally generate RSS feeds for a lot of sources that don't have RSS like Twitter https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge

> I recently started using RSS again (self-hosted with miniflux). One difficulty I have is that these kinds of RSS feeds in OP are way too high-volume for me. But it can be hard to find good blogs or RSS feeds without relying on Twitter to find them

Filter them. For example I have Tested youtube channel on feed but put a filter on titles that gets most of the content Adam Savage makes (as I kinda don't care about anything else they do).

Also, splitting into groups helps a lot, just putting "low volume but I want to see everything" stuff away from "just basically a news feed of on average mildly interesting stuff" hels

> Back in the day, more people used to include a list of blogs they follow on their own blogs, I thought this was a great practice.

I thought the same, and so I built a sort of webring/blogroll functionality in my website project, together with an accompanying OPML file so these lists are easily shareable. I did the same with a microblog/timeline, that had an RSS counterpart. The web is already 'social media', if you ask me.

I keep HN in its own category and not a part of my normal unreads. So i have to go and see out HN threads and not have them clutter up the main feed. But still able to go through them.

If you use a static site generator, there is a nice cli for doing that called openring. It's what is used by people like https://www.jefftk.com/ and https://drewdevault.com/.

Drew wrote the OG version: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring

I also made a little rust version here: https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs

I moved all my feeds to Nextcloud News which is just one of a dozen or so add-ons I setup on my Nextcloud server. The official free mobile app is awesome, and Nextcloud syncs with just about any feed reader.

My only hesitation about Nextcloud is that I don't like to put too many eggs in one basket. It is best in class for cloud services and now my most critical installation. Their innovation and drive as a company is impressive probably because they have real values that align with their people.

+1 for RSS, I leaned on RSS as my protocol-of-choice for Haven[1], and even added a built-in RSS feed-reader. It provides a single chronologically-ordered stream of content from all your feeds which I've found makes it much more pleasant to read through.

[1]: https://havenweb.org

Thank you so much for sharing! I have considered this exact same idea to break my friends and family free from the chains of Facebook and Instagram, but you've packaged this up so nicely, I should really give this a shot.

Is there a way to update my own blog to play nicely with Haven? I like my own styling and hosting setup, and I already have my own RSS reader, so ideally I would like to continue using those, while also making them available to friends and family on Haven.

The only thing special about Haven is that access is restricted for the content you publish. Anything that publishes and consumes RSS (so long as it supports HTTP Basic Auth) will play nicely with Haven.

I have to add that caveat because support isn't universal. NetNewsWire supports it, Thunderbird supports it, and Inoreader supports it on their paid tier, but Feedly doesn't. (for some examples)

Happy to chat directly, drop me a note on the Haven contact page! https://havenweb.org/contact.html

Brilliant! If you ever need help with this, I would love to pitch in. It reminds me of the olden days of social media.

For users who don't know how to self host, and can't stomach the (very reasonable for ad-free social media) $5/mo... have you considered a cloud-hosted option with a sidebar of KTLO ads? Or maybe a "family plan" cloud instance where multiple friends could share a single cloud instance (sharded per person) to save money on the hosted option?

Thank you for the offer! I'll reach out directly and we can chat more.

Hi Matt, we've recently emailed about Haven and HeyHomepage because we both are RSS-based, so to speak. Your software is oriented towards private (group) communication and makes a strong case as an alternative for Facebook. I've a lot of respect for your product! With HeyHomepage I'm more publicly oriented, more Twitter-like if you will. On top of a publicly accessible website.

The beauty of RSS is it's interoperability. So I was wondering, can your built-in newsreader also read my RSS feed, for example? Or only other Haven feeds?

And the other way around, can I follow private feeds from Haven users with my built-in newsreader? Or any other separate newsreader software, for that matter? As long as Haven users would share that link with me, of course.

Yup! RSS is RSS! If you want to follow a Haven feed, you just need to make sure your newsreader can handle HTTP Basic Auth credentials. A Haven feed URL embeds the credentials right in the URL to make it easier.

And Haven's feed reader can read every RSS and Atom feed I've been able to find. The feed reading and publishing are both part of the live demo, so you can do some testing over there! https://havenweb.org/demo.html

If you run into any incompatibilities, let me know and I'll get them fixed!

I can confirm HeyHomepage's newsreader can read and display the Haven demo feed that I just made. The other way around works as well. That's the beauty of the Web and RSS.

The story of RSS is so telling.

I loved Google for the way that promoted it so heavily. I thought that it was conceivable that a corporation need not be evil..... How naive!

But then Google dropped rss! Just when they had everyone there!! Why?

It was by design. It was an attempt to kill a protocol that supported disintermediated information, where the user could get information directly from source.

I've never stopped using rss - it is hands down the best way to get information.

PSA: enable CORS[1] so people can make cross-origin requests without having to run a proxy.

PSA #2: set things up so the author field of your feed includes your email address (e.g. "Alice <alice@example.org>") and not just your bare name, so people can more easily get in touch with you without having to click through to the original post and then hunt around for your contact page; otherwise, you might never find out it's broken[2].

1. <https://enable-cors.org>

2. <https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel...>

Curious why you recommend 1). Personally, I just don't use Javascript in my blog posts. But maybe I'm missing a use-case here?

I should really add my email address to my news feed though.

It's so my domain can request from your domain using client side JS on my page, loading your RSS with a cross origin request.

I don't understand your remark about "Javascript in my blog posts" or how it relates to CORS.

In theory, it should be trivial to make simple, truly "serverless", web-based feed readers like AirSS[1][2]. In practice, many people are prevented from doing this, because the feeds they're interested in are hosted on servers that don't support CORS, which leads to really annoying workarounds (like needing to use a proxy or a separate browser extension, etc.)

1. <https://github.com/derek-zhou/airss>

2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28730630>

Makes sense. I should disable CORS on my blog, then! I normally use a dedicated feed reader, rather than a browser, but it makes sense to accommodate both use cases.

EDIT: I mean enable, not disable.

For those of you wondering if your GitHub Pages site enables CORS: it does by default!

Does anyone use (or know of) software that follows RSS feeds and sends you a single daily/weekly/whatever digest with links to all new posts? TinyTinyRSS has this functionality which I am currently using but it's not very pretty or configurable - I'm wondering if there is anything else that I could look into.

You might be able to get what you need with IFTTT or Zapier. They have email digests and support RSS triggers.

Doesn't do a digest (at least not that I'm aware of), but rss2email[1] does a good job of aggregating feed updates into your email inbox.

[1] https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email

Or if course you can filter the messages into a folder to browse when you have some downtime. For example I have a "Not Important" folder in my email client that doesn't notify but it's always synced to my phone so that I can read some news when I have a spare moment.

I am building something like this! It's oriented specifically towards reading the feeds via a pdf digest on eReaders like the reMarkable/Supernote/etc though.

1. configure your feeds (RSS/Atom, but also Twitter/Reddit) in a simple dashboard 2. connect Google Drive (Dropbox/OneDrive to be supported eventually) 3. on a daily schedule, a pdf file with your feeds' content will be sent to your GDrive account, which can be synced on your tablet device.

If interested, I've got a survey you can fill out to get alpha access: https://forms.gle/qmy6WMgHLxWiEgx4A

I'm also working on a tool to do this: https://github.com/ZacharyTalis/rss-digest-flask/

Though I'm running into a stubborn issue where FreshRSS doesn't parse the date correctly... so your mileage may vary.

I wrote my own program that submits new RSS entries to my todoist account once each night.

Been using https://feedmail.org/ to do exactly this.

Hi, maybe my tool "static feed reader" might be of interest: https://codeberg.org/bitkeks/static-feed-reader

It basically reads a list of feed URLs, with categories, loads and parses them and writes out a simple HTML page with the headlines. Saves me a lot of trouble - just run it on a web server and publish the created HTML files in a directory.

I use Flym, Thunderbird, and a self hosted miniflux for years with success.

RSS is good to read, it does not solve the problem of how to respond.

This is more of a philosophical grouching so stop if you don't want to hear a rant.

Organizations, (I do mean organization as not only corporations do this) ingest or take over a well functioning solution, a FOSS, or standard with the intention to make it better (i give them the benefit of doubt). Often this manifests in merging with their tangential product, or similar solution into the victim. Ultimately, each and every one of these solutions die an agonizing death - death of complete abandonment, or complete destruction of the original spirit (e.g., ICQ, usenet, feedburner, CU-SeeMe, sageTV, silk labs, drop.io, gowalla).

>RSS is good to read, it does not solve the problem of how to respond

    <a href="mailto:comments@myblog.net?subject=my article">comment on this article</a>

with a backend that inserts the received emails into the comment section for the article specified in the subject of the link

I've been self hosting TT-RSS since Newsblut raised prices some years ago (which was what I switched to when Google Reader closed). My list simply grew over time. Whenever I see an interesting article (doesn't matter where, here, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) I check if the others are interesting, and if so, I subscribe. Almost everything worth reading has a feed.

Another happy TT-RSS user here. I moved after the Google Reader debacle.

Switched from TT-RSS to FreshRSS recently, mostly because I don't want to hack on PHP code. It's a good alternative, also light weight.

I tried it and some things didn't work, can't remember what was my issue, though.

I did the same several years back. Mainly because hitting mark as read in a group/ category marked even new articles that came in while you were reading, meaning you never saw them.

Thought I might as well try it again. While it wastes more space than TT-RSS, it’s good enough, and everything else looks nice and works faster, so I switched to FreshRSS as well now ;)

Instagram actively fights to shut down this kind of access. Any solution you find that works now will soon be killed.

I’ve given up. The result is that I simply don’t get to see what my friends and family post there anymore.

This is where I am at too. I've told my friends that if they want me to see what they post they need to use something that isn't so actively user-hostile. Even Facebook will at least email me when selected friends post something.

That being said I'm not sure if there is a great website to recommend for private sharing. Mastodon is maybe the best but I'm not sure I am a huge fan of the "only short messages" medium.

Some instances have larger character limits. It's not configurable, but it's fairly easy to patch.

Does this affect federation? Or does Mastodon accept larger posts anyways for federating with non-Mastodon ActivityPub services?

Mastodon accepts whatever content it receives. The character limit is only for posts created from that instance.

The current situation at Twitter has made me want to go back to the good-old-days of RSS, I'm glad to see I'm not alone.

I'm rusty, though. What's the best Mac desktop RSS client these days?

I highly recommend Reeder. Been using it for years. Solid.

Reeder has also support for Twitter, Youtube and Reddit. Great app indeed

Strongly prefer NetNewsWire, which is free and open source. www.netnewswire.com. Available on Mac and iOS.

Also a great choice and has been around for a while!

Yes the iOS app was rewritten relatively recently and is excellent

Yes, NetNewsWire is great. It works well as a client for Feedbin, too.

For people who willingly live in (or visit) Apple's walled garden, I like News Explorer because it syncs (subscribed feeds and read/unread state of each article) via icloud between iphone, ipad and macOS.

Newsboat

I find RSS has the same problem as to do lists for me. It all gets too much and I dump it. Another inbox to manage where it's a roll of the dice if I get any value or find anything interesting. Certainly beats other news sources but I think I'd prefer to opt into the news stream when I'm in the right headspace and not just to feel "on top of" my feeds. Email is loud enough.

I found this reader recently that you might find meets your consumption preference: https://github.com/georgemandis/bubo-rss

The author discusses the design here: https://george.mand.is/2019/11/introducing-bubo-rss-an-absur...

I think anything like this requires some curation. I regularly unsubscribe from feeds that aren't pulling their weight. This seems very similar to how you would unfollow and block people on Twitter to keep your feed interesting.

This mentions Bibliogram, but in fact it's been discontinued since Instagram has been actively breaking it for quite some time. Another app, Barinsta, died after its author was served a C&D letter.

I have been using RSS-Bridge to generate those feeds, but today it looks like Mark changed the API again. Hopefully next update will fix that. I wish I could get my family and friends to start posting on the Pixelfed instance I setup for them to avoid this cat and mouse game with Meta. ;/

Has anyone got Mozilla Pocket and newsboat working together?

I'd like to bookmark interesting long reads for later to Pocket from newsboat, but also resurface them as an RSS feed, but it seems a little awkward.

If we have a RSS revival, please be Atom 1.0 :) !

What are the differences between RSS and Atom?

Most of my experience with RSS is just for podcasts.

Atom 1.0 is strictly and well defined in https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5023

RSS is a bunch of different "standards" and good practices, its way more difficult to parse and play with.

They both have the same goal, but one is just cleaner and stricter :)

Didn't someone try to start a JSON based RSS standard a while back?

JSON Feed - https://www.jsonfeed.org/

There is nothing wrong with JSON Feed but IMHO it doesn't add enoiover Atom to justify adding a new format into the mix.

That being said the reader I wrote supports it because why not.

I've mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I like the uniformity and simplicity of RSS, its vibe of good old times and the ability to avoid ad-driven ranking algorithms. On the other hand, many media/content sources offer legitimately sophisticated recommendation systems that are more effective than having dozens of unranked high-frequency inputs a day in your RSS inbox. For sources with more curated and low-frequency output there is no trade-off, though.

There's no reason "legitimately sophisticated recommendation systems" can't offer RSS feeds.

Sure they can and probably should, as an alternative. My point is that I sometimes prefer to take advantage of the more advanced capabilities of specialized recommendation systems.

Just earlier this week I went back to rss with my selfhosted aggregator based on FreshRSS docker. What made me go back to rss was partially fueled by the twitter situation since I primarily use twitter for updates from news and tech sites. Moreover, I realized that on twitter I get the "list" of news but then I also spend a lot of time browsing the various sites even if there are no new articles and rss would be ideal to get at the same time a list of new articles, go back to read/old ones and expand only what I wanted in the same interface - with some compromises.

FreshRSS looked to be a more up to date solution compared to ttrss that I self hosted in the past with a BIG plus of going beyond what is available in the rss stream, retrieve full articles AND even just parse normal web pages to retrieve articles when rss is not available. For sure I've spent 2-3 hours to setup all these things, but now I have a curated list of rss feeds + parsed normal sites in a page, rarely needing to go outside of that view directly on the relevant sites and accessible from everywhere with proper user/pass support behind a reverse proxy. AND I spend less time just browsing without reason ;)

Feeder is a great GPL RSS reader for Android. Save you some time fumbling through the Google Play cess pool. Not affiliated just a happy user.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...

Me too, one of the first things I install on a new phone,after fdroid of course.

For iOS I really like Reeder

For iOS folks, I can't recommend NetNewsWire more. I pair NNW on my phone and laptop with Fresh.RSS running on my raspberry pi for most of my news and blog feeds these days.

HN nerds might remember that NNW is very fast, even by native macOS standards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23286362

If you're feeling fatigued by algorithmic nonsense these days, you should seriously give RSS a try.

And if you're looking to move off of the Twitter app, NNW has a built-in tool to ingest Twitter timelines and searches (you still need to sign in to use Twitter's API).

> fatigued by algorithmic nonsense

Let's not participate in the corruption of the word "algorithm" here on HN, too. We wouldn't tolerate people saying "integral" when they mean "derivative", so we shouldn't tolerate this, either. We can afford to abstain from this sort of quick-and-easy but sloppy use of language as a shorthand for generic memetic outrage.

+1 for this: the NetNewsWire Mac and iPhone combo, which syncs state using iCloud, is exactly the right feed reader solution for me. Just works.

If you're inclined to self-host (or can just run a Docker-compose anywhere on your network), MiniFlux is amazing.

Agree. Been using it for a while now after.

Personally I use miniflux. Not app needed for iOS or otherwise. Its pretty nice. You can also host it wherever.

https://miniflux.app/

I pay for Feedly. The big feature I love is that it will generate anonymous email addresses for newsletters that show up as just another feed.

I tried using a local-only RSS reader after ditching Feedly, but I found myself missing the ability to easily switch between devices.

I ended up setting up a FreshRSS[0] instance which I've been quite happy with so far. It provides the Google Reader API, which is still supported by a lot of FOSS mobile RSS readers (I picked Readrops[1]).

[0] https://www.freshrss.org/

[1] https://github.com/readrops/Readrops

Nice to know that YouTube does RSS.

I did not know that YouTube offers RSS feeds for their channels. I can see a lot of good use cases for that information.

They also have feeds for playlists but they are wonky (they only display a limited number of videos so won't contain new items if the new videos are added at the bottom) and not advertised.

It’s one of those features that feels like someone forgot they support it and I fear the day when they remove it.

Indeed; it doesn't feel as though it be in the interest of the website which is why support is dropping.

Youtube wants people to subscribe, which I don't do, I simply add the RSS feed of channels I want to be updated about which is probably not what either Youtube or those channels want given how much they are begging me to subscribe all the time.

That's still a subscription, it's just not attached to a YouTube account. Not my fault if someone generates statistics based on redefining words to suit their business model.

You'll notice I'll never spoke of “fault”. I spoke of what is in Youtube's interest.

I'm not disagreeing; "not my fault" was intended to be read more flippantly. "Not my problem" may have been better.

Yeah this is great once you know about it. It changes how you use YouTube.

Yeah, I've cancelled all my subscriptions on YouTube and use a browser extension that hides recommendations and ads. I follow a lot of channels and there comes a point where I had to do something since I was missing videos constantly. When I want to watch YouTube I don't go to Youtube.com but open my RSS reader that links me directly to the videos.

You can also use https://api.invidious.io/ to get the feeds. I keep the Youtube feed since I just share button to Newpipe. From Newpipe I can send to Kodi for the big screen experience.

I have an idea for a very minor side project. Create a static site generator template which will generate each site I follow as its own section and run it on github actions everyday to fetch newer feeds and publish as a website. This way I can access on my phone and don't have to worry about syncing the feeds regularly.

I use elfeed as my rss and even though I sit at my system for quite long, some days I just would like to go through my feeds on my phone. I would also love to have an archived portable copy of all my sites as well (FOMO) which currently elfeed doesn't seem to support exporting the feeds right now.

Can anybody recommend a RSS program that works on Windows that isn't terrible? Or that literally does the minimum requirement of works?

I don't know what happened, but when I tried to find something earlier this year, it looked like there was nothing that was a simple RSS without extra bloat that wasn't abandonware and that actually literally worked.

Every time I ask this, 90% of the answers just say use X Android app. Or I have to compile it myself from scratch with broken directions (and then find out it has been broken for years). Or it's like a docker image (thus requiring docker) or otherwise requires installing multiple gigabytes of random new languages.

Thunderbird includes an RSS client

I find that instead of using thunderbird's RSS client it is better to use an RSS-to-email service and filter the emails into a folder. The resulting interface in Thunderbird is quite similar but you get sync across your devices.

haven't used a dedicated installed program in ages - as i browse on different machines at different times of day... Newsblur ticked a ton of boxes for me, moved from inoreader.

QuiteRSS for Windows, MacOS, Linux and OS/2.

Flym for Android.

RRSOwlnix

i use Feedbro extension in firefox daily on windows.

For Android I prefer Press (com.twentyfivesquares.press), a discontinued app I asked the creators to open the source code for a few years ago. Got ignored. Probably the only app known to me to categorize starred/read-later entries. Well, a couple of bugs (rare caching issues) and supporting already-dead services are not a big issue even after many years, however kind of reversing and modding it to make it support Inoreader or ttRSS would make me finally get rid of Feedly (seems still to support the original Google Reader API?) whose both web version and the app are you-know-what.

Agree, RSS is great tool for decentralization.

However, I cannot find proper open-source RSS reader for Windows that fits in 2022. Any recommendations? I especially need customization for appearance of text/feed.

Feeder for Android is great.

Perhaps QuiteRSS.

I've enjoyed Fluent Reader

Fluent Reader looks good, however none font/appearance customization.

I'm a big fan of RSS and curate a number of topic-specific feeds of highlights available for people to subscribe to (in my profile for anyone who is interested).

I wish more feeds had this kind of focus- sharing the meat of something in the item body rather than a bland summary or a plain click through to an article.

The feed item should give me a reason to go through to the article/link/comment, not just be a spammy list of things that might be interesting but probably won't be (but I won't know until I click through and find out for myself).

I was a huge fan of RSS for a long time but stopped using it. I found that when I added in multiple feeds of my interests, My feed was littered with the same stories and sometimes even the same content. Also, much of the content had the same ads that were on the sites. So at that point, it was easier to just visit the sites with an ad blocker on.

Some way of grouping things by canonical links would be neat.

Like if HN and lobste.rs (or other link aggregators) both point to a recent news story, then the fact that you've read the url they link to, should be a seperate concept from whether you've 'read' the discussion that points to the link.

And if you seperately have a feed of the originating news site, reading it there would mark it in both places.

This doesn't help if you follow, eg. five different news sites and they all report on the same event with largely the same facts (or even the exact same article copy syndicated)

> My feed was littered with the same stories and sometimes even the same content.

To be fair, this is a big problem everywhere, not just with RSS. Especially on Twitter, and even here with dupes on HN.

It's more of a problem though if you're following a bunch of "news" feeds, as opposed to, say, technical blogs with original content.

Some clients let you dedup a bit

Winds by stream(https://getstream.io/winds/) is now shut down but I did enjoy using it to manage all my RSS feeds. Good thing it's open source been considering self hosting.

I reduced my twitter consumption to nearly zero by simply subscribing to accounts I followed via RSS. I was immediately stunned by how noisy some pundits are and how their posts are laughably low-quality vis-a-vis posts from decent feeds like HN.

I never used RSS until I tried Readwise's Reader (not affiliated with them, just a paying customer). It really relieved all the stress of constantly shuffling through the email inbox thinking I missed something. I read less, but feel more calm.

Highly recommend the newsflash rss reader for linux, wroted in rust and official flatpak so it should work on any distro.

https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk

There are two things I appreciate finding in my low-tech textual browsing. First, an RSS feed listed amongst the commercial links for a site. Secondly, a link to the actual content at the top of the page bypassing all the menu clutter...

I love RSS/atom feeds. One thing I'm wondering though, RSS is is XML based. Most things are/have moved to JSON (RPC really more than REST). My question is why is XML still good for this use case? Genuinely interested.

It's not better or worse, it was just first. I guess having schemas in standard rather than some kind of addon like for JSON is a benefit but not really that relevant, schema doesn't help all that much if you make bad RSS stream anyway.

https://www.jsonfeed.org/

Is an attempt to move these to json.

JSON Feed is a thing, not many websites that support RSS support it however.

Little-known trick:

You can add an `xml-stylesheet` processing instruction at the top of your XML-based feed format to transform it via XSLT into HTML. When viewed in a Web browser, it will look like an ordinary Web page, but in reality it's actually RSS/Atom consumable by anyone's feed reader. Nobody has to hunt for the URL to the RSS/Atom feed, because the URL of the top-level post index for your blog is the URL to the RSS/Atom feed. You also don't have to set up your static site generator to generate a separate feed file. Neat!

Can't do that with JSON.

It exists, it's widely supported, and it's good enough. There's no reason it has to be XML, but there's no good enough argument against it to justify fragmenting an already shaky ecosystem.

Project mentioned in the article is being discontinued unfortunately: https://bibliogram.art/ - Discontinuing Bibliogram (2022-09-01)

I was one of the first avid users of netvibes.com circa 2006. They're still around, if you want a nice web-based RSS aggregator dashboard with a fairly intuitive tabbed interface.

I used to use netvibes and really like the tabs of scrollable boxes-per-feed layout. Does anyone know of similar readers, maybe self-hosted?

Didn’t podcasting start out with self-publishing links via your own website and end up a “platform” owned by various aggregators, and the links are tracked and redirected with maybe a little CDN baked in?

A useful reminder is to configure your RSS reader to poll at a reasonable frequency. I know of at least one popular blog that blocks RSS polls from liferea due to a too-fast default.

Is there a way to get FB posts or FB groups articles to RSS? The only reason why I am still using FB is following some people in a very specific fields or groups.

A good RSS reader is like a DVR for everything else (text, images, audio).

Acshually it's not RSS, it's Atom /j

I use Inoreader. Terrific app. With RSS I am able to add feeds of websites which normally have a paywall.

I've been using INO Reader since Google Reader Death Day and totally agree. Didn't know about the paywall. What does that mean?

Publications that have a paywall on their website often offer the same articles using RSS, and those RSS feeds don’t have any paywall, full article for free. So it’s a good idea to check if a subscription dependent site also offers RSS. But in many cases the paywall exists in RSS article as well, in that case I use 12ft.io (have a iOS shortcut).

Unfortunately it's a website and not a standalone app, so the privacy benefit of using RSS is gone.

lobste.rs/s is a missed oppurtunity

I'm a fan of RSS and interoperability in general. That's why I added full-text RSS on Postcard [1] sites.

Metrics-driven OKRs processes are at odds with privacy-first protocols. The sad reality at most companies is "if we can't measure it, we ain't gonna do it" - even if everybody is asking for it. This is why OKRs suck.

So, I blame OKRs for getting rid of RSS and open protocols in general.

[1] https://updates.postcard.page/posts/new-on-postcard-rss-easi...

I am using FreshRSS and Reeder 5 on iOS for over 2 years now. Its great. Blogs, newsletter, news, youtube, podcasts and twitter all in one app. Although, most of the time I download podcasts and than listen via VLC.

I just don’t understand the obsession with privacy at all cost. What has anyone actually had happen to them as a result of their Reddit or YouTube browsing history?

This just seems like reverse voyeurism, and while that’s fine, it’s odd to assume anyone else shares that fetish with you.

It's a human right to have privacy. If you want to opt in to sharing everything about yourself to Big Tech and everyone else they sell data to then be my guest, but don't try to make it out to be a "fetish" to avoid this totally unnecessary data collection.

I think the point of privacy is, it isn't anyone else's business why someone would care about it.

Privacy is a self-evident and basic human right, like freedom of expression. The principle of this is already acknowledged in law. For example, reading snail mail is very illegal, and nobody questions what harm would come from someone reading Grandmas "merry christmas" letter to you. It is only on the internet that violations of this right are turned a blind eye to, because of regulatory capture and government inertia. Regulators are slowly catching up (see GDPR) but in the meanwhile users are forced to take matters into their own hands.

The data being collected is valuable, evidenced by the fact that an entire industry exists for it. It is collected without the users' consent (beyond the sham of "by using this website you agree to our terms" - by the way, legally speaking individuals cannot agree to give up their rights). The users are not compensated for the valuable information that is harvested from them.

Lastly, many online service providers are cavalier with the security of this data. It is freely shared with hostile state actors (not necessarily western ones), predatory commercial third parties (spammers), and actual criminals. Due to lax security, criminals often gain access to this data and use it for identity theft, phishing and other fraud. People compile it in "social media background check" databases which exposes individuals, without their consent, to stalkers.

There's not enough space in a comment to go over every single instance of privacy violations leading to serious consequences for users, such as those you claim do not exist, so to anyone interested I would recommend doing a web search on privacy related topics.

So nothing; nothing actually happened, and so now we must invent moral outrage to sustain the hate cycle.

Aren’t you exhausted by all of this? Why continue to participate in the flywheel when you can otherwise simply reap the myriad benefits that come with a more connected society?

It just seems like some folks prefer constantly being upset…

For me, the turning point was when I understood that my fairly inoccuous data like browsing history or post likes can be used to infer information that I would not share publicly.

It’s a matter of principle. If everybody were more concerned about their privacy there’d be less dark patterns from the these giant ad companies. Social media, Google, etc…

There are aspects of my life obvious from my Reddit/YouTube history that people I have heard people they say they think should be worthy of death [0]. Is it so unreasonable to be worried about that?

Why make it easier for this to happen? :

  >    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a socialist.

  >    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a trade unionist.

  >    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a Jew.

  >    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

- Martin Niemöller

[0] Most of them wouldn't want to kill me personally. Just the nameless other that happens to match a lot about me.

What happened to me? All the big social media sites send me to an information prison. It makes using the internet not fun anymore if you can't break out of your information bubble to get a different perspective! There's no "common knowledge" anymore and that development is fueled by people giving away their valuable data willy nilly. I just don't want that, I hate it actually and I think it's very dangerous tribalism and it's not has reached its peak yet, though more and more people get annoyed after noticing all these information prisons.

I really don’t think this take survives first contact with incognito mode…

Incognito mode is a lie. You will see different results based on your IP. At best it's random, or rather some fallback information that is still curated by algorithms. Also who uses incognito mode? A common sense of what happens in the world a common baseline and understanding won't just magically appear when you turn on icognito mode. That's an even larger claim imho.

Is reverse voyeurism when you don't want everybody to look at you naked? Because I'm pretty sure most people suffer from that. It's similar to reverse murder and reverse fraud, when you don't kill people, and you tell them the truth.

I'm kind of a JSON maximalist because I find it really simple and haven't put too much thought into it.

I'd also like to shout out

https://www.jsonfeed.org/

https://jsonresume.org/

https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/

https://geojson.org/

It'd be pretty cool to have an ecosystem where you could

```

$ packagemanger init my-site password

$ hostOfChoice deploy

```

Go to the url, auth yourself, then have a list of "plugins" that act as a ~cms for formats like the ones above

Edit: Could you at least tell me why you're downvoting

I don't get why anybody would want a json feed. RSS/Atom are already simple to the point of being trivial, so why introduce more standards?

For me personally, two reasons

1. I find it easier to work with JSON using javascript

2. The stupid reason, I find it more aesthetically pleasing

You're not exactly wrong – I don't serve out a json feed myself, even – but RSS/Atom are terribly underused for cases other than "personal organization of feed reading" when they could handle a lot of weirder poll-for-updates automation, and the json format seems like an attempt to encourage that direction. You don't need a bespoke API if what you have makes sense in a feed like this, but people would really rather work with a json than XML.

JSON is more readable to humans, while still being great for machines

XML is a far more complex format to parse.

I'm a structured data maximalist so in addition to RSS and Atom, I implemented Schema.org metadata on my blog for GoogleBot, and I implemented JSON Feed and h-feed/h-entry markup, even though I've never seen anything that actually uses JSON Feed out in the wild. I'd be interested if there's anyone out there that's actually using these sorts of feeds.