I love RSS because of why everyone on this thread already stated but also because it removes me from commercial social media and I can avoid legacy media propaganda. Some sites don't have RSS enabled but you can always pay for scraping services or build your own scraper as well. FreshRSS has a built in scraper that is useful. I am running a few scrapers on top of the hundreds of feeds I have.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Asklemmy
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RSS feeds are a way to aggregate articles from many websites all in one feed. There's no inherite privacy advantages. The main advantage is you can group many RSS feeds into your preferred categories and see a list of all the articles of your interests, without having to visit each website separately.
You can start here, a currated list of many feeds. I use Feeder on android and FreshRSS as a self-hosted curration tool but also to connect RSS feeds to services of mine.
I'd add that Social Media kind of took over this role for most regular users, but that having your own RSS feed gives you control of what you follow, instead of ceceeding control to the algorithms most social media uses to put whatever it is they want to put in front of you. So in that aspect, I do think there are also some privacy advantages in not having a central algorithm studying up what news stories and links work for you and how they can manipulate you.
I'd add that Social Media kind of took over this role for most regular users
I agree, and that fact scares me tbh. But that's more of a privacy concern with social media and less an adventage of RSS. Some RSS feeds do require you to click through for the full article, having another opportunity for tracking.
Yeah, but this has been 15 years in the making... So many people say that they 'don't use Facebook, it's just where I get my news...'. Which is how we got into this mess in the first place.
I'm not judging anyone for not knowing the risks of algorithmic news, and I get how we got there. Journalism as a whole changed by it, so many news articles are engagement bait now. It's becoming so hard to find uplifting news, that's why I liked reddit and now lemmy too. People make a genuine effort to find uplifting news.
Diversification has always been the answer, proven by a second uprising of RSS.
For me, I saw very little benefit to RSS until I hosted fulltextrss. Most of the feeds I subscribed to, the RSS feed just gave you the headline, and made you load up the full website and all the ads to read the article. They don't really want you just skimming the good stuff and skipping the ads.
Fulltextrss basically loads in the full articles, pictures and all (if you so choose). It means I can read stories from all the sources I want, without really leaving my RSS reader.
I have a couple of hundred RSS feeds. It has worked well past 15+ years.
The internet comes to me rather than the other way around.
Some RSS feeds that are fun:
https://questionablecontent.net/ - very long running comic.
https://www.kevinandkell.com/ - one of the most consistent oldest webcomic.
Royal road also has RSS feed support.
What I use: https://freshrss.org/ it's kinda like Google reader back in the day.
QC was such a fun ride... I encountered it pretty late in the story, then I got on par and I unfortunately dropped it, now it's hard to go back
I think it's the Star Trek of web comics: incredibly progressive, ethical dilemmas everywhere, starting it now is hard for many because of the early graphics!
The most amazing thing is how real its characters feel
QC was such a fun ride…
It clearly had it's moments. There were some weirdly questionable strips. I'm not following it anymore since a few years but I'm happy to see it's still running.
As all the others have said, its about convenience, being able to check just one place for news is nice.
As for feeds. If you feel like your day is too nice, too happy, try https://reliefweb.int/ it itself is an aggregate of news from many humanitarian organizations, which means the stuff that comes in can be a bit grim and miserable.
My rss app combines 44 different news sites into one long feed. It replaced multiple apps and makes checking an assload of news very easy.
I don’t do it for privacy, although that is a benefit.
I use RSS for convenience (all sources like news, YT, link aggregators, etc. are in the same place) and also to escape “the algorithm“. With RSS, I am in more control over what I see rather than what the Apple/Google news algorithm wants me to see.
Also it helps to prevent doom scrolling. When you’re at the end of your feed, that’s it. There’s no more. You find something else to do.
Just generally, a more efficient use of my time.
RSS is a core feature of most content management systems like WordPress (which powers around half of all the web pages on the whole Internet) and many others besides. Most content sites, especially news sites, blogs, discussion forum software, etc. offer RSS by default unless they've disabled it for some reason. One the web, you can often just append /feed after the top level domain (like yourdomain.com/feed) but the easiest way is from within your RSS reader of choice. I like Inoreader and it has great tools for searching for feeds and subscribing.
If you're into watching YouTube: You can add channels as RSS into your reader. The latest 15 videos are offered via the feeds. All you need is the channel ID of the channel whose feed you want to access.
The channel ID is not visible anywhere on the page, but if you look at the DOM in the web browser via the developer console, you will find a meta entry <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID"> in the <head>, where CHANNEL_ID is the required ID. There are also websites that can be found quickly and easily using the appropriate keywords, which read out and return the ID associated with the provided handle.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
If you have a lot of subscriptions, you can use Google Takeout at takeout.google.com and export the YouTube subscriptions as a CSV file. The CSV file contains the subscribed channels with their ID and title for you to parse into whatever format you need for your reader.
For Newsboat you can use this script on the Abos.csv from my Google Takeout archive:
while IFS="," read id url name; do
feedURL="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=%24%7Bid%7D"
[ ! -z "${id}" ] && echo "$feedURL youtube videos \"~${name}\""
done < <(tail -n +2 Abos.csv) >> urls
Edit: Seems like, Lemmy messes up the code formatting, but you get the gist ...
What benefits does RSS have over normal news sites?
Main benefit is that you don't have to visit websites to get the news. And once the news are on your client it is up to you to decide how to work with it. Filter ads from articles, or remove all articles with the word "orange" from your feed, let an AI add a summary at the top, automatically fetch the full version of the text (if it isn't already). RSS means you are in control of what and how you consume.
Are they more privacy-focused?
That depends on your client and configuration. Do you block/filter ads? Do you proxy images? Do you proxy the requests to the rss file?
What feeds would you recommend for a fellow Lemmy user?
This very drastically depends on the user. I have web comics, releases from GitHub, news, porn, tech/cooking/gaming blogs, general News, shopping alerts, my selfhosted change detection, YouTube feeds and more in there.
I'd like to throw a bunch of web comics into my RSS reader so that I could get a steady drip of new comics every day or whatever. But I'd rather start from the beginning for most of them. Especially ones that follow some kind of story. Anyone know of any tools that would convert a long history of comics to an updating RSS feed but start at the beginning?
Ooh I'd be interested in that too. Then again, never a bad time to start some comic series.
This is what stops me from subscribing to a lot of web comics
Why not sort from oldest? Wouldn't that work well enough?
That would work.. if the RSS feed had every post since the beginning.
That's a good point. I forgot about that part.
Lemmy has RSS. You could make a feed of any community here. I've made a feed of all the comms I'm subscribed to show up on my MagicMirror^2^. That way in the morning I can view feeds of what's happening while brushing my teeth.
Here's a screenshot from my profile page. This would be an RSS feed of the overview for my user profile. So any time I made a post or comment, this RSS would update.
This is from my Lemmy homepage. This would show an RSS feed of all posts that are not hidden from communities I've subscribed to, and would show the "Hot" algorithm. As you press buttons to change to comments, local, all, and different types of algorithms, the RSS feed link should change to your desired preferences.
Wow that didnt i know. Any pictures of the mirror? Did you build it your own?
I used an off-the-shelf one made by Vilros with my own already-owned Raspberry Pi. I'm not great at constructing stuff, ha.
I will take a photo and share it here if I can figure out how to do it without me in the mirror?
EDIT: Actually no, looking at the mirror, you won't be able to see half of it because I would have to remove all my personal information. The weather shows my location, the AQI meter shows my location, I have my calendar schedule on there...
Just trust me, it's useful and looks cool but I'd rather not have to black out half of what makes it look cool just to show you the RSS feed and maybe the Now Playing on Plex feed that shows me who is watching what on my server.
Oh i totally understand that. Thats alright
nice! I like this
I know this is kinda tangential, but what apps do you guys use to read RSS feeds?
Feeder, downloaded via F-Droid.
NetNewsWire is open-source, IIRC.
qBitTorrent
Feedly isn't bad.
I used to read RSS feeds from Thunderbird a long time ago, but that required me to set them up again on every reinstallation and every device, so I eventually stopped doing that.
Nowadays I read RSS feeds on Mastodon. There's a service https://rss-parrot.net/ that converts any RSS feed into a fediverse account, so you get RSS feed updates into your feed along with everything else you follow there. Of course it would be even better if blogs and news sites just posted directly on the fediverse, but not all of them do.