RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.

Whatever the linguistic details, one of the main roles of RSS is to supply directly to you a steady stream of updates from a website. Every new article published on that site is served up in a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.

Unfortunately, RSS is no longer how most of us consume “content.” (Google famously killed its beloved Google Reader more than a decade ago.) It’s now the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what’s new. But I think RSS still has a place in your life: Especially for those who don’t want to miss anything or have algorithms choosing what they read, it remains one of the best ways to navigate the internet. Here’s a primer on what RSS can (still!) do for you, and how to get started with it, even in this late era of online existence.

  • udon@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    9 months ago

    The problem with most rss readers IMHO is that they lack a decent filter function. ttrss had great filters, but I stopped using it when they switched their dev process (I think to docker at the time, which I couldn’t use with my hoster). Now using rss guard, not too happy but surviving.

    RSS is great, but often contains a lot of noise. If you can filter only what you care about, great. Otherwise it’s just information overload.

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      9 months ago

      RSS is great, but often contains a lot of noise

      I think you nailed it there. Curating is too much of a hassle.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
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    9 months ago

    I seem to remember RSS’s main issue being not really being able to tell “recent” from “popular”.

    Showed a whole lot of nothing much, and not very much of the stuff you wanted to see.

    • realitista@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      9 months ago

      It does tend to sort by recent, but to me that’s its strength. It makes to effort to curate the feed, it gives me all the articles from the sources I choose in order and that’s it. So while I still use Lemmy for the “popular”, RSS tends to deliver me deep niche content that may not be popular but is very interesting to me.

      And also so much content is overlooked by sites like Reddit and Lemmy, that often it is stuff that’s popular if I post it, but no one’s gotten to it yet. It tends to be more up to date because you don’t have to wait for things to get voted to the front page

    • Corgana@startrek.websiteEnglish
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      9 months ago

      Hah, I consider non-algorithmic sorting to be RSS’ killer feature. There are a lot of fantastic stories that get published every week that are too dry, too complex, or just plan too accurate and non-sensationalized to get noticed by social media algorithms.

  • _number8_@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    9 months ago

    i remember in high school (2010s) i tried using RSS but increasingly the feed wouldn’t even have the article, just the title and the link so you’d have to visit their website. especially obnoxious because my obnoxious school district filtered approx 90% of the internet (for shocking reasons like ‘forums’ or ‘TV/entertainment’ or ‘sports’ or ‘media’)

  • set_secret@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    9 months ago

    i find it frustrating if i can’t immediately tell the poster of a site their content is wrong or sucks or is generally bad. therefore social media is my only option, because the world must know my valuable contributions…🤌🤌

  • t0fr@lemmy.caEnglish
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    9 months ago

    Google Reader died more than a decade ago? oh my jeebus, I feel ooooooooollllld

  • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    9 months ago

    I mean, I’m all for it, but I thought the problem was that so many sites stopped offering RSS output options.

    • nadir@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      9 months ago

      Or if they do, it’s not the full article. Which I get, them being in the business of selling ads and all.

      • harsh3466@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        9 months ago

        This is why I stopped using rss. I fucking hate seeing an headline I’m interested in, clicking to expand and then having to click through to the site to read the article, dismiss the goddam email list overlay, fight with the stupid paywall, and then close the tab out of frustration.

        I miss the days of actually reading articles in my rss feed reader.

    • CurlyMoustache@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      9 months ago

      Perhaps I’m just an old 40 year old fart, but the Internet was better before. I miss the 00s and the 10s. Now it’s just paywalls, LLM generated bullshit, and search results from SEO orgies

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      9 months ago

      I’m still finding rather many RSS feeds, though there’s few buttons these days. Ideally, you want something that auto-discovers feeds on a webpage.

  • harmsy@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    9 months ago

    RSS was great. I’ve still got a deep grudge over the removal of Live Bookmarks from Firefox. That was how I kept up with the various webcomics I was reading at the time. All I had to do was just check on all my little orange drop-down menus to see if any new posts were up, and I was golden. Now I have to keep extra tabs open and try not to bury them under all the other tabs I open up and forget about. >_<

  • abies_exarchia@lemm.eeEnglish
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    9 months ago

    I never had a good way to ingest info, but i setup a self-hosted FreshRSS instance a few months ago and it’s completely changed how i consume information for the better. I spend a lot less time scrolling through shit that never interested me much in the first place

  • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    9 months ago

    The number of sites that still supports RSS is impressive when you think about how niche it is right now. I was surprised when I saw some big comics sites had it.