Technology
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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Although I still have Feedly on my phone, and open it occasionally, RSS readers are not as useful as they used to be. That is not due to the way RSS inherently works, but in the past 15 years, websites no longer make their entire articles available on the feed. What you usually get is a small excerpt with a link to the website. They do that because RSS does not allow for the same level of engagement and advertising they would have on their website. As it is, RSS readers are, technically, link aggregators. Which makes them much less convenient.
Even as a link aggregator that would be perfectly fine for me personally.
What really bugs me is that many news sites don't keep their feeds clean, so you often have duplicates and most importantly: if you have multiple sources, you'll get multiple copies of the same information packaged slightly differently - often I'm not even interested in one copy.
For example, all news outlets had some Grammy/Taylor Swift crap in their feeds. Each outlet had like three different articles, all regurgitating the same information. I would love to have something like topic clusters, so that I could discard all articles I'm not interested in in bulk.
I even tried building it myself, but wasn't very successful.
This right here.
The heyday of RSS is long, long gone. Everything has become a walled garden where platforms want you ON their platform, not reading a feed, or using third-party clients, etc. They want your eyeballs there on their site/service. So many sites don't even offer RSS feeds anymore, and when you get full text, you get piles of ads.
It's the same issue with so many sites/services either shutting down API access or severely restricting it.
I tried really, really hard recently to put together a good list in an RSS reader and tried to make it work. but it just doesn't. It's a miserable experience and you have to fight for every feed you get. It's not worth it. It's sad and extremely frustrating, but unless we can push sites to do a 180 on their strategies, RSS is essentially dead.
There's no way I'd be able to keep track of all the stuff I want without an RSS reader.
Does anybody have any recommendations for FOSS RSS readers with actual content surfacing features? So many RSS feeds are full of junk (this is particularly a problem with feeds with wildly disparate posting frequencies) and I've always felt they'd be a lot more useful if people were putting more effort into a modern way to sort through extremely dense feeds.
For those who wanna #selfhost I hear
is pretty good. I kinda gave up on RSS when all artists moved from Tumblr and websites with RSS to the disgusting social networks ...
One question. Why do we need a web app for something that was designed to work locally?
Lemmy moderators: I strongly encourage you guys to subscribe to the RSS of your communities. It's considerably quicker this way to notice and address problematic posts.
On the article: I've been using Liferea since forever. I wish that it had access to blacklists though; some of my sources have quite a lot of rubbish that I'd rather not bother with.
I used to follow a TON of webcomics via RSS, first on Feedly, then on Inoreader, but a few years ago I've stopped opening my feed for certain reasons (and now I'm afraid to even think of the backlog). I've started getting into RSS again about a year ago, followed some blogs and small news websites, and I've been loving it! currently using my Nextcloud provider's RSS option with the official Nextcloud News app on Android and RSS Guard on PC (I haven't found one that integrates better with Plasma desktop yet).
Indeed. I installed FreshRSS on my local server and haven't looked back. Man, did I ever miss the web of the google reader era.
I just wish RSS readers could properly parse the webpages instead of only having the first paragraph and getting cut off
That's actually not the RSS reader's fault. It's the rss feed you import that behaves like that. It's on purpose, to make you go to their website and ingage in their traffic.
This is an important criteria for me. If I can't read the full article without leaving the reader and without a WebView, I won't keep the RSS feed.
This is exactly the case.
In a lot of CMSes that offer RSS feed generation, there's a setting you can frob - either put the entire article in each RSS entry, or just the first X words in the <summary></summary> block. A lot of them default to the latter and folks never turn on the former.
I dunno what you guys are on. RSS is crap. If the outlet actually offers it at all, all you get is a title and a thumbnail most of the time.
Lemmy communities are glorified RSS feeds, you can even subscribe to them through RSS and not care whether your instance is down for maintenance to read the posts.
Cool. What practical value does that provide me?
What I've said already: once the RSS client gets the feed, it's on your device. Meaning you can access the items off-line, filter and sort by whatever criteria you wish (and your client allows), delete them, mark to read later, etc.
Catered feeds, for example.
You can create a feed that only includes Lemmy communities dedicated to a specific topic - like only those related to video games in some broad sense. Or a news-only feed.
It's much more convenient that just subscribing to everything you're interested in and then trying to filter out on our own (good luck not forgetting stuff), as you're basically on the algorithm's mercy as well.
RSS never developed into anything that an email blast couldn't do.
Some useful services:
- https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ (Generates email addresses that expose received messages over RSS)
- https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge (Scrapes websites and creates RSS feeds for them)
Your post is missing the most important information that you wanted to share
What RSS feeds (preferably without needing an account like NY Times) would people like to recommend? I recently set up Feeder on my phone and have been curating it
And is there a way to bypass soft-paywalls with an app like feeder?
Why should people stop telling other people what they should do in 2024...
Problem is that the whole concept of advertising is "telling other people what to do".
- People use Google.
- Google tells people to use Chrome
- Chrome becomes most popular browser
- Chrome removes the " this site has RSS" icon from URL bar
- People forget that RSS is a thing
- People now rely on Google News and other biased sites to get information
- biased sites tell people what to do
RSS is freedom
go tell other people to use it
also Lemmy RSS community
@[email protected] a few people in this thread have mentioned using Kbin or Mbin as something of an RSS curration tool. I'd like to learn more about that.
The Drupal community maintains an aggregate of feeds from 200+ sources with posts about the CMS. In the last year or so, the quality of the content is noticeably worse. Some community members are blaming Ai generated content...
Chat GPT, write a 1000 word blog post about Agile that mentions Drupal
I think the problem has more to do with how Google rewards "fresh" content that repeats keywords with higher page rank than a better written article posted 2 years earlier.
Regardless of the cause, a small group already running drupal.community for Mastodon has been discussing using up voting as a way to let the community curate the feed.
Would love any advice or examples on using Kbin or Mbin to empower a small community to curate RSS content.