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BCBoy911@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.worldEnglish · 2 days ago

In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information

blog.burkert.me

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In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information

blog.burkert.me

BCBoy911@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.worldEnglish · 2 days ago
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The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful. What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS.
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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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    20 hours ago

    It’s simple and elegant, no matter if RSS or Atom. Easy to parse too.Yet somehow, finding a good rss reader app is like finding a needle in a haystack.

    Edit: i’m satisfied with Capy Reader, but thanks for the recommendation.

    • kazerniel@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      After more than a decade of Feedly, I’ve been using Newsblur for the last couple years. I love its filtering feature where I can set some tags or title keywords and just hide all matching posts from that feed - it’s the only thing that made some feeds usable.

  • gary@piefed.world
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    1 day ago

    I love RSS! For the longest time I used Miniflux, and I still have an instance running, but lately I’ve just been using the Unread app on iOS. That’s one of the many great things about RSS: you’re not tied down to any specific app or platform, you can pack up and take your feeds wherever you want if you wanna try something different.

    • Tehhund@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Seconding Miniflux! It’s my main RSS reader. I pay for the hosted version, it’s super cheap and works great. And since it’s simple HTML I can write Greasemonkey scripts to customize it a bit.

      • gary@piefed.world
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        17 hours ago

        I love it! Even the built in CSS and JavaScript customization goes a long way. I’m not creative enough to figure out anything crazy with Greasemonkey lol

  • Rooty@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Sadly, a lot of sites have started shuttering their RSS feeds and hiding content behind paywalls. I have to periodically clean my feed and remove dead links.Luckily, there are a lot of sites that basically copy AP and Reuters news verbatim.

  • fodor@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    It’s not ironic, is it? The creators of RSS knew exactly what they were trying to create, as did RSS users, and what the bad alternatives would be like. If you are new to the show, welcome!

  • jayjayjay@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    Kill the Newsletter

    Turns newsletter subscriptions into RSS feeds. Helps keep my inbox clean and is helpful on sites that don’t advertise a feed.

  • mesa@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    I love the idea of the internet coming to us rather than us going out to the internet. And RSS is an excellent example.

    I want a system that will cache articles, comics, essentially websites and stay on a system until I am ready to read it. Then it will transform into a queue (RSS clients), email, ebook/pdf format, etc…etc… and ill read it. Its easy for server admins (people are not bombarding their systems), its easy for users (get content how they want it to work) and its better for the internet as a whole. Its one of my favorite tech that has not gone away.

    Ive went from google reader, to thunderbird rss, to freshrss on my own system. My phone queues it all up in the morning and in the afternoon at work, where internet is spotty, ill read my pre-downloaded articles. Its a great system.

    • TechnoCat@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      email is pretty close to the system you mention.

      • mesa@piefed.social
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        2 days ago

        Id rather subscribe to certain entities instead of having ALL entities being able to send me messages. Every time I have my own mailserver, it gets overwhelmed with spam.

        But yes email as a technology is really close to perfect.

        • TechnoCat@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          understood. 👍🏻

    • rezad@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      freshrss doesn’t cache images. how do you do it offline?

      • mesa@piefed.social
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        1 day ago

        Couple different ways.

        It came with my setup script back a year or so ago but https://github.com/FreshRSS/Extensions/tree/master/xExtension-ImageProxy works. Also the caching occurs when it gets transfered over to my phone or client. The client does the heavy lifting. I dont really care after that.

        • rezad@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          I remember that extension but I didn’t user it because it didn’t cleanup after it self (old not needed images stayed in cache).

          what is “your phone”? you mean an app? I know about text caching (I don’t know if frehsrss has an option to get original page for RSSs that has just a simple text that redirects to full page), but even inoreader that had that (if i remember correctly) didn’t have image caching.

          • mesa@piefed.social
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            1 day ago

            TTRSS reader. It has a “cache image” button on it. I assume it works.

            Ive never had any issues even outside of internet. comics come in from what I see.

            • rezad@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              it works with freshrss self hosted?

              • mesa@piefed.social
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                1 day ago

                Yep doing it now! :)

                • rezad@lemmy.world
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                  1 day ago

                  tt-rss and frehsrss are two different self-hosted apps. are you sure using that app doesnt mess with freshrss?

  • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I stopped using RSS a long long time ago. And then when I left Reddit and found Lemmy, I also restarted my RSS feeds and cleaned up the links. I don’t go there everyday but I do enjoy when I get there.

    But I have asked in numerous places for people’s best RSS links and always come up with zero feedback.

    So let’s try it here. What are your best RSS links?

    • Ada@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      its been a while since i checked out mine, but the ones i do still sometimes read are

      hackernews frontpage: https://hnrss.org/frontpage low-tech magazine: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/feeds/all-en.atom.xml xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/rss.xml oglaf (often nsfw): https://www.oglaf.com/feeds/rss/ and k6bd (a long comic, highly recommend starting at the beginning): https://killsixbilliondemons.com/feed/

      they might not be the best for you, though, you should try looking for if the websites you read still have an rss page

    • fodor@lemmy.zip
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      Maybe I’m not understand what you’re asking. You want to build a list of feeds to follow, right? To avoid single point failure or censorship, right?

      So stop asking for one link, and start telling us what topics you care about. There is no point in a non-custom list of RSS feeds. You need to start the process yourself.

      • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        If I asked just for the topics I care about then I’m not helping anyone else reading. I’m looking for the quality sources. The ones that aren’t filled with filler. The ones that have the key news stories and the oddball stuff.

        • kazerniel@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          I follow some of theguardian.com’s topical feeds - each tag and author has their own feed. It’s a UK-based site, but it has international editions and mostly does good quality centre-left journalism.

    • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      I tend to go for the fire hose approach with news agencies AP, democracy now, CCN, RT Al Jazeera, BBC, France 24, Fox, common dreams, NPR, pew research, open source post, and a few geographically local sources. Entertainment pbs has a few, tvline, xkcd. Using capy reader.

      • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        by links?

        • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 day ago

          Exported and cut out the local stuff, not sure on the etiquette so just posted under a spoiler. A couple like AP and Reuters are re-streams from a third party.

          Tap for OPML with links

          <?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?> <!-- OPML generated by Capy Reader --> <opml version=“1.1”> <head> <title>Capy Reader Export</title> </head> <body> <outline text=“Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera” title=“Al Jazeera – Breaking News, World News and Video from Al Jazeera” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.aljazeera.com/” xmlUrl=“https://www.aljazeera.com/xml/rss/all.xml”/> <outline text=“BBC News” title=“BBC News” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world” xmlUrl=“https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml”/> <outline text=“Blog – Hackaday” title=“Blog – Hackaday” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://hackaday.com/” xmlUrl=“https://hackaday.com/blog/feed/”/> <outline text=“CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition” title=“CNN.com - RSS Channel - App International Edition” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.cnn.com/app-international-edition/index.html” xmlUrl=“http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition.rss”/> <outline text=“Common Dreams” title=“Common Dreams” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.commondreams.org/” xmlUrl=“https://www.commondreams.org/feeds/news.rss”/> <outline text=“Consider This from NPR” title=“Consider This from NPR” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510355/considerthis” xmlUrl=“https://feeds.npr.org/510355/podcast.xml”/> <outline text=“Democracy Now!” title=“Democracy Now!” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“http://www.democracynow.org/” xmlUrl=“https://www.democracynow.org/democracynow.rss”/> <outline text=“France 24 - International breaking news, top stories and headlines” title=“France 24 - International breaking news, top stories and headlines” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.france24.com/en/” xmlUrl=“https://www.france24.com/en/rss”/> <outline text=“Latest World News on Fox News” title=“Latest World News on Fox News” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.foxnews.com/world” xmlUrl=“https://moxie.foxnews.com/google-publisher/world.xml”/> <outline text=“Life Kit” title=“Life Kit” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510338/all-guides” xmlUrl=“https://feeds.npr.org/510338/podcast.xml”/> <outline text=“PBS NewsHour - The Latest” title=“PBS NewsHour - The Latest” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.pbs.org/newshour/” xmlUrl=“https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/headlines”/> <outline text=“Pew Research Center” title=“Pew Research Center” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.pewresearch.org/” xmlUrl=“https://www.pewresearch.org/feed/”/> <outline text=“Reuters | Breaking International News & Views” title=“Reuters | Breaking International News & Views” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.reuters.com/” xmlUrl=“https://rss.app/feeds/SdI37Q5uDrVQuAOr.xml”/> <outline text=“RT World News” title=“RT World News” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.rt.com/news/” xmlUrl=“https://www.rt.com/rss/news/”/> <outline text=“Short Wave” title=“Short Wave” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510351/short-wave” xmlUrl=“https://feeds.npr.org/510351/podcast.xml”/> <outline text=“The Open Source Post” title=“The Open Source Post” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://fosspost.org/” xmlUrl=“https://fosspost.org/feed”/> <outline text=“This American Life” title=“This American Life” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/rss.xml” xmlUrl=“https://www.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/rss.xml”/> <outline text=“Top News: US & International Top News Stories Today | AP News” title=“Top News: US & International Top News Stories Today | AP News” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://apnews.com/hub/apf-topnews” xmlUrl=“https://rsshub.app/apnews/topics/apf-topnews”/> <outline text=“TVLine” title=“TVLine” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://tvline.com/” xmlUrl=“https://tvline.com/feed/”/> <outline text=“Up First from NPR” title=“Up First from NPR” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510318/up-first” xmlUrl=“https://feeds.npr.org/510318/podcast.xml”/> <outline text=“Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” title=“Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.npr.org/podcasts/344098539/wait-wait-don-t-tell-me” xmlUrl=“https://feeds.npr.org/344098539/podcast.xml”/> <outline text=“World Cafe Words and Music Podcast” title=“World Cafe Words and Music Podcast” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510008/world-cafe-words-and-music-from-wxpn” xmlUrl=“https://feeds.npr.org/510008/podcast.xml”/> <outline text=“xkcd.com” title=“xkcd.com” description=“” type=“rss” version=“RSS” htmlUrl=“https://xkcd.com/” xmlUrl=“https://xkcd.com/rss.xml”/> </body> </opml>

  • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.world
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    2 days ago

    I set up RSS a few months ago and do enjoy it.

    RSS Guard on PC, Feeder on mobile.

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