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Do you use an RSS reader?
A year or two ago when the decay of social media became a popular topic of discussion, there was a lot of talk about a resurgence in the use of RSS readers. My impression recently was that the RSS renaissance hadn't really materialised in the end, but I realised that if it had it would be pretty hard to tell.
So, Tildes users: do you use an RSS reader currently? If so, is that a recent decision? Tell me about your experience.
Yep, I use Reeder on iOS and no complaints, it does everything I need in a feed reader.
I started off using it to keep track of some long-running webcomics, but I've slowly added a few more sites to it as I find interesting blogs randomly on the internet. I have a blogroll (exported from Reeder) if you're curious what I'm currently reading (and definitely open to recommendations if people have cool blogs or comics they follow!)
Fun fact: Everyone still calls it an rss feed, but the recommended choice in 2024 for the fast-moving technical domain of metadata syndication is Atom, defined in rfc 4287.
Yes I have fully committed to it, so basically most of my non-work web usage is originating from my RSS feeds. I self host FreshRSS and use Fiery Reader on my phone. It is a great way to be mostly free algorithm recommendations. Check out this thread for some great feed recommendations.
I also use FreshRSS self hosted alongside fivefilters-full-text-rss. On iOS I use NetNewsWire connected to my FreshRSS. I then use Wallabag to save articles I find interesting to read later.
I also self-host FreshRSS but use Reeder (Mac) and Read You (Android) for consumption.
For all the FreshRSS users out there, what extensions (if any) are you using?
Same here. I use Fresh RSS and, combined with https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ I was able to migrate a crapload of email garbage over to RSS where it belongs. It's really been a great reading experience.
Self-hosted FreshRSS here as well. I use the web app for mobile to keep things simple. It works great!
Hi, fellow FreshRSS user!
How do you organize your feeds? Any FreshRSS specific wisdom you have to share?
Oh I think I use it fairly standard with just a bunch of categories. I do like the various filtering options, where posts can be marked as read automatically if they contain certain keywords or the like. Very helpful for feeds with lot of content that I am not interested in.
I use Feedly occasionally. More so when I wanna go deep into something with lots of alternative sources - - academic websites, personal blogs, personal websites, project blogs, etc. I have curated lists for several themes.
Add one Feedly user. Migrated from Google Reader shortly after its death was announced, bought a lifetime license. Longest time I've gone without checking it is one week.
Webcomics, tech and news, feeds from work, travel deals, and because they drop news so rarely, (Hyper Light Drifter developer) Heart Machine's Tumblr.
I have filters set up to get rid of posts with topics I don't care about. I don't use any other Feedly feature like the AI stuff or save/read later after a third party Windows 8 app (shiver) wiped out 200 saves. Its greatest feature is RSS search. 99.9% of the time I don't need to go digging for the RSS URL, Feedly usually finds it just by site name, and provides multiple options where appropriate.
I audit feeds once a year and clean up any that are dead. I average 2-3 new feeds and one deleted feed annually.
Personal bias: I don't follow individuals on the internet – I follow topics and publishers. I understand Twxtter/Bsky/Mastodon, but it's never been for me.
Yes. Decided to about a year ago or less?
Using Inoreader so I can keep my stuff sync'd across multiple devices and accounts, probably not needed and probably not needed for most people.
Personally, it's just about everything I wanted, and I'm aware of a ton of optimizations i'd like to make.
It's so much easier to consolidate and track, at the bare minimum, video content from platforms like youtube/nebula and bring it up quickly.
Once you set up some rules to auto tag your content it basically filters wherever you want. I just need to get better at tagging content from other sites like tildes/reddit. I was also looking into using it for twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever as I really don't use any of those, but there's a few tags i'll sometimes want to follow (mostly because fighting game tech winds up on socials now...). That said around the time I did this is when twitter nuked their API soooooo that one's probably not happening.
In short, my only real concern about it is eventually all the major content sites blocking it out because they want people on their pages to click on ad's or whatever. Everyone really should learn the basics, and it would probably help if there was easier onboarding for it.
I've been using feed readers since about 2010 or so? Not exactly sure, but I remember using Google Reader for a few years before it was shut down.
Initially I was using it mostly for various webcomics, before that I would check each webcomic for updates each day.
Once I started reading my comics through Google Reader I started noticing the RSS/Atom icon on blogs and stuff and started adding more and more blogs.
After Google Reader was killed I tried a number of different readers, but nothing really stuck for long.
The reader I used the longest was newsbeuter / newsboat, a command line based reader.
I was overall satisfied by newsboat, but I wanted to use the same feed and everything on my PC, phone and tablet.
But none of the commerical or self-hostable readers ticked all my boxes, so three years ago I wrote my own feed reader and have been using that since.
It is very barebones, but it does exactly what I need, nothing more and nothing less. (though a rewrite is probably happening soon)
Although it is more of a link aggregator rather than a reader I suppose.
I much prefer visiting websites for their content rather than consuming everything through the reader itself.
Other than that I use it for:
I don't use it for any news outlets or anything that updates daily, if something does update that frequently and I care enough then I'll just check the website itself. Not that there's many website I do that for.
The youtube feeds have been a pain the ass by the way.
A few times now with no changes on my side youtube will start timing out my request.
The only solution has been to increase the time waited between refreshing the youtube feeds.
But other than some minor hiccups, it's been good and I'd probably just not read a lot of the websites I follow if RSS/Atom feeds did not exist.
Yes, but I’d been using one before too. My reader of choice is NetNewsWire which is open source, extremely lightweight, and generally well-built. It doesn’t try to have a brand or personality, it’s just another utility that feels like it could’ve shipped with my Mac/iPhone which is great.
Yes. I was using Thunderbird for a while, but I regularly use more than the one computer and got tired of keeping track of state in my head when doing so, and so I actually wrote my own feed reader server. (Existing self-hosted solutions were pretty much all not packaged in Debian and/or built on platforms I don't want to deal with—i.e., PHP—and so nixed because of operational burden. Writing my own lets me easily implement weird features I want, too.)
I mostly follow webcomic feeds, and a handful of blogs. For a while I was following a handful of Mastodon users via RSS, but it's not a great model for that (it's rarely desirable to go through a big backlog of Mastodon posts if you stop checking it for a while), so I registered an actual Mastodon account and dropped the feeds.
I always found this weird. RSS and social media are so fundamentally different. RSS is a broadcast technology in the end; it's a common format so many different entities broadcasts can be aggregated together into a single inbox. But that's inherently one-directional.
Social media is about bi-directional communication. If you treated Twitter as an RSS feed, I think you're in the minority of users.
Personally I have not gone back to RSS readers. Honestly, journalism is too consolidated, blogs are still pretty dead, and many have transitioned to paywalled substack or patreon formats which have poor and sometimes non-existent RSS support.
I find my RSS reader (Newsblur) and Substack to be a pretty good combination. I can click through to the website to read and reply to comments. Some blogs have very active comment sections.
Substack does push email subscriptions, but you don't have to use it that way.
The problem is that social media takes a huge slice of the RSS world just due to how much of a larger market it is.
If you put out a new comic/video, ideally you'd throw it up, everyone's feed would update, and they'd come view it.
Of course most people aren't using RSS feeds, which do ONLY that, but instead social media, which handles both advertising it due to discover mechanics and allows people to discuss the content as well.
Yup. As Reddit collapsed on me, I made a pretty big change back to rss feeds, with the exception of a few sites (such as tildes).
Right now, I follow some GitHub pages for new releases, some blogs, webcomics, specific gaming news, and local news (plus one international news update). That's on Feeder, for Android. Separate from that, in my podcast app (AntennaPod), I'm subbed to the rss feed for my YouTube channels and some playlists, which are set to open on Tubular (a YouTube frontend). The logic there is, I don't need it want recommendations, ads, related videos or anything like that. I just want the video.
Essentially, I've used it to cut away advertisements, algorithms and parasocial connections, and to end the addiction to refreshing sites.
Yep. Been using one since ~2007 (Google Reader), transitioned seamlessly to Feedly when Google killed Reader in 2013. Get enough mileage out of it that I snapped up both versions of lifetime pro they've offered and it's still a great deal.
I keep things real simple and use Thunderbird's built-in RSS reader. I have everything categorized by type of news (or website post) and some things only get post summaries while others pull the full article and I never deal with the website's formatting, ads, etc.. Before Thunderbird I was using SeaMonkey and ... old Opera for a bit. I keep things sync'd the old fashioned way ... importing the RSS files wherever I need them. I've been doing this for around 10 years now.
At peak activity, I get between 3k and 4k incoming per day, so this makes it easy to scroll headlines and look for the content that I'm looking for and to stay on top of developing situations abroad. Despite the number, since the majority is just text and not full pages/articles (though I have that setting enabled), it stays pretty manageable with respect to bandwidth and reading.
More recently I've been utilizing Discord's webhook integrations to create actions/zaps/whatever that post to specific channels so that incoming news is categorized and accessible. It's much more graphical that way and I can also get Twitter/BlueSky/etc notifications all in one place without having to be logged in myself. The downside is it's much more graphical and the backscroll is horrendous. One day I'll get another hook that translates foreign language news headlines so I can cross-reference which articles are exclusively non-English.
Despite paying Discord nothing while (gently) flogging their servers, I don't know why they haven't nuked my IP from orbit. Fingers crossed if they ever take issue with my Web 2.0 RSS reader they at least ask me to cough up some money instead of nuking it.
Kind of, I guess? I mostly read things on my e-book reader, and it has a built-in RSS reader feature, though I will say I use it for very personally-specific RSS feeds, rather than as a news outlet or whatever
When you say e-book reader, are we talking a physical device like a nook/kindle? Somehow that possibility never occurred to me until now.
Indeed, I use a physical device (but not a kindle). I will refrain from mentioning the actual brand or model, but the e-ink screen definitely makes a big difference both in putting me the mood for reading and with encouraging me to read more.
Yes.
I self-host FreshRSS and use it to subscribe to blogs I enjoy (mostly programming related), release notes for software and programming languages I like, small subreddits I follow and a few other small things.
I've never used Twitter much, as I've never really "got it". I think I'd have liked old Twitter if I'd made a fresh account and only followed creators I wanted to hear updates and thoughts from.
I use Feeder, for a no nonsense, fully local (no account funny business) rss reader.
It's really streamlined and lowered my web use. Sometime a blog mentions another blog, I'll check it out and add it if i like it. Otherwise i can quickly check if anything new was posted without having always something more shoved in my face (which I usually won't have the discipline to ignore).
Yes. I use newsboat, a terminal-based RSS reader. It's excellent.
I use a free plan on inoreader for storing and cross-platform/device syncing and all that.
I mostly read on mobile, and I found a great free iOS app called Unread that works with Inoreader, Feedly, and others. The UI is clean, minimal, and a really nice experience while still letting you use your primary rss service of choice.
I have used RSS feeds since the early 2000s. They are practically my window to the internet, Tildes included. I currently run FreshRSS on my home NAS, accessing it from a browser on my computers and through the NetNewsWire app on my iPhone.
For those self hosting, I can recommend rss-bridge and reddit-top-rss, if you want to generate feeds from websites that either don't support them, or don't offer you the options that you would like to have. I've additionally dabbled with RSSHub but have less experience with it, and also run some of my own scraper scripts.
Interestingly enough, I just started using it for work. We need to source information on a monthly basis on various topics and using RSS to feed that information into a Teams channel works great.
Yeah, I've been using NewsBlur since Google Reader died. Sometimes more sometimes less. For a while I was relying more on algorithms and following interesting people, but then Twitter became unbearable and I decided to use RSS more. I think a lot of people have done the same, I feel that RSS is growing in popularity over the past 2 years or so.
Yes, since ever. Nowadays, a self-hosted Miniflux instance with NetNewsWire as front-end everywhere (laptop and iPad).
Yes but only occasionally. I used Google Reader, then, when Google killed it, find Inoreader as good replacement, but unfortunately most sites now do not support RSS, so now I do not have a good reasons to use it often.
I still use it for some web comicses that I read but do not want to download, and for steam games updates, and thats all.
I use Newsblur daily. I always read the comics first. I have a lot of subscriptions, but there is a "0-Front" folder with the ones I read most often and the others I often don't read for a while.
There are a fair number of blogs where I don't remember why I subscribed. I should clean up.
I wrote a small app that sends me a daily email with all of the items from the feeds I follow. I'm pretty happy with it; it's nice to not have to go out of my way to check a reader, and I don't subscribe to any high-volume feeds that makes it overwhelming.
I set up FreshRSS awhile back (possibly last time a question like this was asked) and have been using it pretty religiously since.
Historically I'm terrible about signing up for way too many newsletters and then falling behind, so I've been trying super hard to limit what feeds I subscribe to. So far The Atlantic is the only one that I regularly skip articles from.
Newsraft
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/newsraft
I've been using it for several months now. Before that I used canto-curses for years.
Sort of, but not so much for articles and such. Mostly to follow up on webcomics and web serials.
Edit: forgot to mention what I use. I used to use feedly but recently installed the reader app on my nextcloud instance. It is a bit barebones but serviceable enough for my needs.
No