I’ve gotten to a point in my privacy journey where it’s less about moving towards private options, and more about relaxing and having some fun with what I can do.
I put off messing around with RSS for a while. I simply didn’t have a significant need for it. However, after finding no good options to monitor various Lemmy communities without logging in, I decided to try out an RSS reader.
I settled on Feeder as my RSS reader, despite a few missing features I would like. I added my first Lemmy community as a feed, to try it out. I was immediately surprised how well it worked.
I also added other feeds, such as Tails News, and I was happy with that. I could monitor all the communities I needed to.
Then, I noticed one day, there was an RSS button for my Lemmy inbox. This is where I was really pleased: I can view my notifications without the need to log in, all in the same place.
Lemmy and RSS are both incredible, and I truly believe RSS is the hidden backbone of the internet. I love it, and maybe you should give it a try too!
(Ahem P.S. if anyone has an RSS reader as good as Feeder for Android that fixes this issue, please let me know)
How do I get started with RSS? Android.
Install an RSS reader and add the feeds from sites you want to follow.
Most people like feeder: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
I wish more blogs, websites and services would offer RSS feeds. I personally use Thunderbird as my feed reader on PC. Not sure if the Android client has this functionality too.
Not sure if the Android client has this functionality too.
Nope for now
I’ve found that a lot of blogs do have RSS feeds even if there is no visible link or mention of RSS anywhere on the website. I often just throw the blog URL into the ‘add feed’ box on The Old Reader, and it turns out there is feed info hidden in there somewhere.
I’ve noticed that too and try that also. Sometimes the reader does not find anything, but adding
/rss.xmlor/feed/or something manually to the link does work at times. The inconsistency is also a problem. But some blogs just do not have such a functionality at all, or is not tested (wrong dates, therefore unusable). Itsoftensometimes an afterthought and inconsistent.
RSS is great and Google tried to kill it so you’d have to use other services.
I like how I can tell a big event has happened because I see a bunch of articles on it, and that it’s possible to catch up to where you last were in the feed.
That means you’ve caught up on the news, no need to red any more, you can do something else. Algorithms always serve you up new content, so you’re in this constant state of thinking something is always happening.
I think RSS readers would help fix the brains of a lot of boomers if we could ever get them off Facebook
i gotta be real, i don’t get the hype people go on about with RSS, it’s like being hyped about DNS
yeah sure it’s a good protocol that should be used more, but it’s uh, it’s just a feed? i don’t see what’s so amazing about it, do some people just subscribe to 5000 email newsletters and stuff like that?
@Charger8232 @Swedneck For me I kind of finally discovered that Its bloody handy to pull together content from different sources into something like Frendica … you can flip between different groups of feeds.and easily.share stuff from there.
RSS is awesome. My favorite fun fact is that podcasts are RSS-based, which is why you can listen to any of them from any podcast app.
I always get angry when a “podcast” is spotify or yt exclusive. Such a downgrade compared to RSS!
newsboat <3
Maybe a dumb thought but I just realised if Lemmy does RSS maybe I could add Lemmy feeds to my Friendica account. ??
I got this post by rss so YES,
But do not friendica allow you to join community by Activity pub? (Benefit is you can reply directly from there)Yes, friendica shows Lemmy communities as regular friendica groups.
how well does it handle lemmy’s multi-level responses?
As standard replies and sub-replies. It works fine, though the ranking algo didn’t work last I checked.
Oh hmm Ill try and find out .
@abeorch
@checksout @opensource
This is cool . thanks for the tip. I now have my #lemmy, #Mastodon and #Friendica feed almost in one with #Fedilab . I just need to sort out my #privacysettings (and remember to get off the #Madridmetro at #nuevosministerios
I see another commenter mentioned FreshRSS. While abandoned now, I created https://github.com/Fmstrat/agriget a long time ago when Feedly shut down. It was based on TT-RSS which I do not recommend because of drama with the creator (they are very… bad to contributors (I stupidly ignored that originally). Not to mention, it’s dated now.
All this to say, my recco is to self host with an agregator that saves the content locally. That way, if the article ever goes away, or your phone dies, you always have your saved and read content.
I host my own Lemmy instance, and have been considering making an API not that turns RSS feeds into communities, as the one thing I like about Lemmy is the conversations. So that would give me the best of both worlds.
I personally hate newsletters because
- my email inbox is already cluttered enough as it is
- I need to share my email to subscribe, which puts the balance of power into the hands of the sender at the expense of my privacy
I’d rather have newsletters made available through RSS feeds, where I can subscribe and unsubscribe anonymously.
You can turn newsletters into RSS feeds anonymously through Kill the Newsletter.
I’ve been using it for over a year and it works flawlessly. Highly recommend!
Am I blind… Where does OP mention newsletters?
Nowhere, just one of the use-case I think RSS feeds could cover in a more privacy-respecting way.
It’s cool.
I currently catch up on news with it.Firefox has RSS radar extensions that can help find rss feeds in websites(that don’t really show/mention it on every page)
Fun fact: this feature used to be built-in to Firefox itself.
Really? Why’d Firefox remove such a useful feature?
Security concerns? Or no one maintaining it?Mozilla claimed that it was rarely used
One day Mozilla will remove the web browser component of Firefox and go for AI, social media and “most used news” (pre-approved) API interaction only. 😏
“Because that’s what the users want”.
Thanks, Dr. Dystopia.
Do you have a recommendation for a website that lets me subscribe to RSS feeds and display them publicly (without needing account or JavaScript to see the combined feed)?
@Charger8232 It seems it does… Oh this is cool!
RIP Aaron Swartz. You are truely missed…
…Is it just me or does the shooter have the same smile? I’ve heard he’s really smart.
I love RSS.
I run FreshRSS as my server via docker and connect to it via Read You on Android and NewsFlash on Linux
I also run RSS-Bridge in docker. It has been really useful as it can generate RSS feeds for many websites that don’t natively have them.
Thanks for the tip on Read you, I’ve tried a few RSS readers and not been entirely happy but this one seems nice!
Freshrss is great :) wish there was an offline iPhone app
The freshrss GitHub has a list of supported iphone apps and indicates some of them work offline. https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS?tab=readme-ov-file#apis--native-apps
Never knew this. Thank you very much!
I’ve used ‘KillTheNewsletter’ a lot. And then it hit me. Most email clients have features I want for my feeds (filtering, auto-sorting into folders by keywords, etc.)
So far, only emacs (forgot extension name) and feedbro (firefox extension) have similar festures to these…
Hence, I’m yet to try it, but might create an account only for feeds. And then use rss2email (pypi)
Is anyone else using this tool? I’d love to hear it…
