Blogger discovers this cool thing called “RSS”.
I did this too recently. Highly recommend.
Protip: Youtube channels have RSS feeds, they’re just buried in the source of the page. Ctrl-U and then Ctrl-F title=“RSS”
It’s in order if you only use the subscriptions tab too
A couple weeks ago I did a poll and it turns out almost 25% of the people who “watch YT daily or almost daily” don’t know about the subscriptions tab.
It’s so weird, but explains so many people claiming to not see new uploads. They only use the home page and never the actual subscriptions
Interesting, whenever I see the home page videos my soul dies a little. Couldn’t handle that regularly
The home page is fine for me, it’s dialed pretty well into my tastes. I always click the don’t reccommend channel or video if I don’t like a recommendation.
The Trending tab, on the other hand… Yikes.
I guess to get actual value from these videos you will still need to visit youtube.com though, in the end giving them valuable data to analyze.
You can play YouTube videos in VLC player
If I try to watch over a tor exit node (using tor anonymization technology). It shows me this message. They really want to know my IP-Address?
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TIL. Gonna have to test this out my FreshRSS feed. Ty 🥰
I never stopped using it. It’s a shame some sites don’t have an rss feed anymore though…
Some RSS readers have the ability to generate an RSS feed from a site if they don’t support it. Some sites don’t show they have an RSS feed but they actually do.
Some smaller news sites share RSS feeds or newsletters if you support them on patreon.
I use RSS but as far as I’m concerned, Lemmy is better, because it is categorized and ranked.
lemmy also supports rss! your inbox can generate a rss feed. Also communities have feeds that update whenever someone posts on them. For example for c/technology sorted after active: https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/technology.xml?sort=Active
I use RSS for sites where I want to read every update. That typically means serial comics; dev-blogs of indie games; other infrequent blogs; and some infrequent youTube channels (I don’t visit youTube other than via my RSS feeds);
Whereas I use Lemmy and other sites for skimming and browsing, and discovering new things.
I recently rediscovered RSS with Read You on F-Droid (I enjoy it’s UI and bionic reading). I also found something on Github called Follow that I use on my desktop running CachyOS.
People should be rediscovering RSS. It’s news that you tailor to yourself and doesn’t come bundled with the “social” part of social media.
The problem I run into is most news sites optimize for 2 things
- Getting on google
- Getting linked on Twitter or Reddit
So most sites have a fuck ton of noise and carpet bomb ads.
I’d love to go back to the RSS model but it’s hard finding sites worth reading again.
I really agree - I’ve stepped away from reading so much of what’s online because it’s all clickbaity junk with no substance. I’m not sure where to look for actual content to put in my reader. But I’m making forays.
On Firefox on Android there is a reader mode that gives you just the text and images. It’s the little icon next to the url. Sometimes you can bypass a paywall if you press it really quick before the page finishes loading.
Lemme clarify a bit. I love reader mode too and agree it cuts out a lot of cruft.
My point was that authors and articles spend less time trying to write an engaging article and more time trying to shove SEO keywords and questions into articles. It ruins the article and makes it something not worth reading.
Reader mode is great but if the substance isn’t there then it’s all for naught.
I use it quite often. Chills the eyes when reading. Standardized font(size) and design make this bearable.
This is why I legit built my own space news app , because my autistic brain can’t handle all the crap they’ve added to pages. I just need the text, and images. I don’t need links to other articles in the body of the article! I’m currently reading this article!! and stop citing your own articles as sources!
Find one or two sites you regularly like from your usual sources. Then when THOSE sources link to another source, FOLLOW that link. If that site has good content, add it to your list.
It doesn’t take long to build a solid RSS feed, just need to spend a little time curating it. The key is to pay attention to who is providing the info.
Don’t like the direction a site is going, remove it from your feed.
If you see that one source is commonly the original source for information, or reporting make sure you do what you can to support it. Do they have a patreon? Can you share it out to your other sources?
Also, make sure you’re not falling into a bubble, follow national and international news sources.
I’d love to take a look at what other people are following and what they like about it. My own followed are kind of random.
Maybe this is one of those Qs a simple web search can answer…
Really hoping I don’t dox myself with this…
I (tried to) remove all the local news sites, but this gives me a pretty decent overview of things I’m interested in, without being overwhelming. You should be able to find some local news sources, and add their LOCAL only feed, so you don’t get hammered with national and international news.
<outline text="ADHDinos" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/adhdinos/rss?title_no=820817" htmlUrl="https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/adhdinos/list?title_no=820817" description="A webcomic about ADHD and the difficulties I've encountered through it. *No permission required for reposts*"/> <outline text="Humon Comics" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Humon-Comics" htmlUrl="http://humoncomics.com" description="The latest issues."/> <outline text="Order of the Stick" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.rss" htmlUrl="http://www.giantitp.com/Comics.html" description="Order of the Stick"/> <outline text="War and Peas" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://warandpeas.com/feed/" htmlUrl="https://warandpeas.com/" description="Funny Comics"/> <outline text="Wondermark" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://wondermark.com/feed/" htmlUrl="https://wondermark.com/" description="An Illustrated Jocularity."/> <outline text="XKCD" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://xkcd.com/atom.xml" htmlUrl="https://xkcd.com/"/> <outline text="AnandTech" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.anandtech.com/rss/" htmlUrl="https://www.anandtech.com" description="This channel features the latest computer hardware related articles."/> <outline text="Ars Technica - Logged In" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://arstechnica.com/feed/?t=d46cb9b3032ca6ca5789738f44a887d740740298" htmlUrl="https://arstechnica.com" description="Serving the Technologist since 1998. News, reviews, and analysis."/> <outline text="BleepingComputer" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/feed/" htmlUrl="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/" description="BleepingComputer - All Stories"/> <outline text="Bloody Disgusting!" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/BloodyDisgusting" htmlUrl="https://bloody-disgusting.com/" description="Horror movie news, reviews, interviews, videos, podcasts and more"/> <outline text="Deeplinks" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.eff.org/rss/updates.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.eff.org/rss/updates.xml" description="EFF's Deeplinks Blog: Noteworthy news from around the internet"/> <outline text="iFixit" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.ifixit.com/News/rss" htmlUrl="https://valkyrie.ifixit.com" description="Fixing the world, one gizmo at a time."/> <outline text="Krebs on Security" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://krebsonsecurity.com/feed/" htmlUrl="https://krebsonsecurity.com" description="In-depth security news and investigation"/> <outline text="NPR Topics: News" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml" htmlUrl="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1001" description="NPR news, audio, and podcasts. Coverage of breaking stories, national and world news, politics, business, science, technology, and extended coverage of major national and world events."/> <outline text="Schneier on Security" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.schneier.com/feed/atom/" htmlUrl="https://www.schneier.com"/> <outline text="Science & Health – FiveThirtyEight" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://fivethirtyeight.com/science/feed/" htmlUrl="https://fivethirtyeight.com" description="FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis — hard numbers — to tell compelling stories about elections, politics and American society."/> <outline text="The 19th" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://19thnews.org/feed/" htmlUrl="https://19thnews.org/" description="The 19th is an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics and policy."/> <outline text="Universe Today" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.universetoday.com/feed/" htmlUrl="https://www.universetoday.com/" description="Space and astronomy news"/>
Yeah, is there some sort of directory or something? That’d be cool.
never stopped using rss/atom with ttrss 💪
To OP and the few other comments sarcastically dunking on the blogger for just discovering RSS: why? It’s not exactly drowning in advocates today, and there’s basically a whole generation that wasn’t around when Google killed off Reader. What if we treated advocacy like this like the good thing it is?
You make my heart hurt, you’re so right. It’s getting harder and harder to find RSS or Atom links on sites. The more people rediscover these technologies, the more chance there is that site developers will continue to provide them.
It would be fantastic if more people would rediscover Usenet, and IRC, and ditch the shitty knock-offs like Discord. There’s a pretty big contingent advocating for Jabber, which I’m ambivalent about, having been there when it started and when it (effectively) died and being very conscious of its flaws and limitations… but, still, these are all open standards and old-school internet - sometimes pre-web! - and they’re often still better than the commoditized successors.
Embrace and encourage the new infusion of youth! Gate keeping is a very post-eternal-September behavior.
What might motivate someone to move away from using Discord?
https://archive.today/1Lfct “Spyware Level: EXTREMELY HIGH”
Usenet and IRC have bad usability and lack features compared to Discord.
IM applications like Jabber and such have been replaced by messenger apps like Telegram.
Pretty much everyone who has an RSS feed has it accidentally.
What’s the first rule of Usenet? 😬
TELL EVERYONE ABOUT USENET
Yeah, there was, and probably still is, a bunch of warez trading on Usenet. But everything that was good and holy was also on Usenet.
Anyway, plebes won’t show up there anymore because nobody runs free nodes anymore, and the worst of us are so used to being products the idea of paying for a service is a foreign concept.
Usenet existed long before the Eternal September. It survived that and the subsequent decades; it’s never been some sort of secret haven - it’s been a haven only because it wasn’t trivial to use, web interfaces for it never caught on, it started costing money to be on, and these are deal breakers for the people you don’t want on Usenet.
Well, that rule has been mostly tongue in cheek as you are probably aware, but perhaps Usenet will once again become useful to more folks. I have never veered away from it since I discovered it in the late 90’s. I suppose that makes me a part of the ES group? I’m quite glad to have discovered it. You do now have to pay to use it, but the cost is mild and the tools are all modernized with plenty of web front-ends out there.
Edited: Booboos
I’d be interested in ditching Discord, anything you recommend?
Matrix is probably the closest; it’s federated, there are a dozen more-or-less actively developed clients, for just about every platform. You can self-host your own server. It has a lot of features.
It’s not perfect; it has a lot of flaws, but there’s slow progress. Things to be aware of:
- Despite it being “open”, there’s really only one server that supports everything, and that’s Synapse. It’s where all of the new features are tested and land first. All other (half-dozen) servers lag Synapse. And - IMHO - Synapse is an awful piece of software. It’s a giant mess of Python, and it lumbers along like a bloated, arthritic hippopotamus.
- The way federation is done makes it very expensive to self-host. Everything’s fine until one of your users joins - even briefly - a popular room, and suddenly your server’s downloading 9GB of history and binary blobs. This can be managed, but you may as well quit your job and become a full-time admin, because
- moderation tools suck. Aside from the most basic banning, all mod tools are external servers you have to set up and configure and run in parallel. And the most essential tool - mjolnir, a “this account is a troll spam bot, so ban it site-wide” is still very beta-ish and it’s nearly impossible to get any help with setting up or using it.
- It’s really a rather heavy protocol. Lots of network traffic.
- bridging is better in theory than practice. Most bridging requires you to run your own server, and few major hosts provide anything more than IRC bridging, and even then you can’t actually bridge to most of the biggest IRC networks because it’s blocked by the IRC providers, because Matrix bridges are a major source of spam grief for the IRC rooms. And setting up a bridge between a Matrix and an (e.g.) Discord room is a fairly significant PITA, requiring a Discord mod to perform several steps.
- It does hand e2e encryption for DMs, but it’s honestly pretty bad at it. It’s a better Discord than a, say, Signal. Key management is a minor nightmare and it is both prone to breakage, and complex, with a lot of fairly obscure terminology needed to understand any but the most basic operations. Like, when it’s working, it’s fine, but as soon as anything goes wrong, you’re in a world of pain. I came count the number of times I’ve lost entire chat histories with people.
And to throw up a challenge before anyone disagrees about that last point: try changing clients several times, across devices, and on the same client. Delete your client and reconnect (as if you lost your phone). See how long you can go before you hit a point where you can’t get to your chat history.
It’s a good alternative to Discord; it’s categorically better than Discord. If you’re not hosting the server, it’s better than IRC; the user experience is simply undebatably better. It’s a crappy IM platform. It needs far better mod tools, and some competitor to Synapse has to get out of Beta.
But if all you’re looking for is an alternative to Discord and you ate fine with using a public service, it’s a good choice.
Wow I had a whole message written to ask for information and here you lay it out so perfectly. Now I’m in paralysis mode though and can’t decide if I want to self host…
If you have any tips, resources, or a simple breakdown of what I should focus on, I’d really appreciate it! Thanks!
Element (over the Matrix protocol). As someone who grew up on IRC, it is in no shape or form a replacement for Discord.
(IIRC) Element has stopped development.
Element X should be the app to install.
IRC
AFAIK it can’t reach feature parity with Discord, it only does text FFS! No video, no voice, not even simple text formatting and emojis! Not to mention plenty of clients are ugly, which can’t be said about Discord.
So many great things listed as negatives :(
There is a single feature I kinda wish it had, view message history. Doesn’t have to be permanent history, like last 30 minutes/messages would be fine. But using IRC on an intermittent connection isn’t great in my experience. Otherwise I would love to go back to IRC.
Agree about features (pplus the fact that you’d need a bouncer or an always-on client to receive all messages), but the clients are just better than Discord. Discord just feels bloated.
It makes the most sense to get off discord by being platform agnostic in my opinion, just going to wherever you can find clusters of the types of connections you want in whatever format works for you as long as the format meets your requirements like privacy or whatever else, if you can find the bulk of it in a single place that’s great but not necessary.
Revolt Chat. Only problem is they limit you to 25mb unless you’re self hosted.
there’s basically a whole generation that wasn’t around when Google killed off Reader.
🥺 😭
I don’t think “dunking” is the right word. It’s just funny that people are still discovering RSS 30 years later. Myself included.
For iOS, this one doesn’t collect any data. It’s pretty barebones, but also free. It nags you a bunch at first but eventually stopped
NetNewsWire is the iOS and macOS app for RSS. It has been around since RSS started out and is now open source.
It doesn’t have keyword filters or at least I can’t find them.
It’s 2004 again lol The good ol days.
RSS is back. Forums are back. It’s brilliant. Now I just need Musk and Zuck and Bezos to be no longer relevant to anybody’s lives.
I frankly hate those posts in which people tells me what I should do. Just write “Hey, look, this is cool!” and let me judge it and decide.
Same. I’m guessing the clickbait algorithm favors the “should” phrasing, which is annoying.
I was trying to find a solution to have all the news sources I care about in a single app. Then I remembered RSS and was able to do that very easily. I use self-hosted Miniflux and just use that as pwa when on my phone. Ridoculously lightweight and very awesome. I also setup Readeck (a Pocket alternative) where I push longer articles for when I’m up for reading more instead of just checking the latest news. I love it
Cool tip.
If you want news for a specific game and they release news on steam… all steam pages have an RSS feed.
Wow that’s really neat, thanks!
Genuinely did not know that, thanks
I’ve recently rediscovered RSS and I’m in love with it. I just wish Meta wasn’t a piece of fuck and let you add Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. there are some workarounds for the latter, but they’re really finicky.
member when all the big cool web 2.0 companies had public facing APIs?
That was just for the growth and acquisition phase, using the network effect to capture consumers and businesses, get them addicted and dependent on the product, and then build a wall around them to lock them into your platform.
It’s a classic bait and switch, and if we didn’t live in corporate dictatorships masquerading as “democracy” it’d be illegal.
Yep, remember when XMPP was a thing so you could chat with anyone no matter the platform?
It is very much still a thing, and my preferred chat protocol - because it is easy to host and unlikely to enshittify.
Yeah, I meant in the sense that Facebook and Google had also implemented it so you could just talk to anyone with any client.
I member when there was no official reddit mobile app, only third party clients, and they were so good.
Not an RSS solution, but in IG if you tap the “Instagram” logo at the top/right, a menu will pop up. You can select “following” to (mostly) see the accounts you’re following (and in reverse chronological order.)
that requires having an account.
With bibliogram you can follow instagram pages in rss: https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
Facebook pages used to work with rss bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
With bibliogram you can follow instagram pages in rss
good luck finding an instance that works.
Facebook pages used to work with rss bridge
I’m well aware of the RSS Bridge and I use several of them hosted on the main instance, but how does “used to work” help? Facebook used to actually provide RSS feeds for their pages and they used to work, too.
You have to selfhost bibliogram, working for me, I usually get rate limited but get all updates once or twice a week.
There is a facebook bridge in rss bridge, for a long time it worked, I don’t follow its development nowadays, maybe someone with some php knowledge can resurrect it.
