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Ask HN: Do you still use RSS?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still use RSS?

#71
Yes. I'm subscribed to 170 feeds using the Newsblur app. I started using feeds with Google Reader. When it was shutdown, I self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS for a while, hosted using a cloud provider's free plan. After some time and a server out of disk space disaster, I didn't want to bother with hosting it myself anymore. So I tried other services like Digg Reader, The Old Reader and Feedly. I finally settled on using Newsblur and I have been a subscriber for many years now.

The primary reason for selecting Newsblur is the excellent offline support in the Android app. When commuting to work with metro, cellular reception is spotty. So before I go in the train, I refresh my feeds in the app, then I turn off the WIFI and read the content offline. When I get off the metro, I re-enable the WiFi for the read status to sync up.

Anyone reading, please, please provide a feed for your blog, newsletter, etc. for us to follow your content. And no, posting updates to Twitter is not an alternative.

I wish web browsers had better support for feeds to make them more convenient for everyone to use. Instead they seem to have given up on RSS and removed any support or made it optional through difficult to find and setup add-ons :(

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use RSS?

#73
I don't. For me the death of RSS was a gift in disguise. I think it encouraged me to spend too much time obliging myself to read articles and keep up with sources, too much time trying to "curate" my media sources, and so on. I'm very sour on that way of using time now.

Instead I use Twitter, I don't use lists or curate, and I try to liberally follow enough people so that I always see some people that are way outside my bubble, people with very different views from my own. I learn from them, interact with them, try to sympathize with them and get a feel for them. I make friends this way, too. I never made friends reading "the news" however you define it.

I definitely don't want to go back to a "media diet" of stuff that I don't (or can't) interact with. I think this is a poor way of being. We lived in dialogue for thousands of years, all information we got was two-way communication, and then between the printing press and radio we switched to one-way communication, and I'm really happy that Twitter allows us to, at least a little bit, bring back the old way. Use it!

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use RSS?

#74

Yes, I consume: 1. Twitter via Twitter lists using Feedbin: https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/01/11/feedbin-is-the-best-way-... 2. Email newsletters via RSS (also thanks to Feedbin): https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl... 3. HN via hnrss.org[†] 4. Reddit via subreddit RSS. (Just add .rss after the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/golang.rss ) 5. A small selection of hand-curated blogs and frie…

I do the same thing. I subscribed to one private Twitter list in Feedbin and add/remove the relatively few people I want to read reliably.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use RSS?

#77
I love RSS, I used to have an OPML file of hundreds of feeds (mainly blogs/ppl I follow but also various company news feeds and other news content). Don’t know when it happened but for a few years I didn’t have a RSS reader because the sw just got too unmaintained and bad (on macOS / iOS).

But a few months back I finally took the time and set up a reader. Now I again get annoyed by sites that don’t offer feeds of their content. But RSS is still hands down the best eay to be notified and on top of vast amount of new content of various sites all over the Web.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use RSS?

#78

Yes, I consume: 1. Twitter via Twitter lists using Feedbin: https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/01/11/feedbin-is-the-best-way-... 2. Email newsletters via RSS (also thanks to Feedbin): https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl... 3. HN via hnrss.org[†] 4. Reddit via subreddit RSS. (Just add .rss after the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/golang.rss ) 5. A small selection of hand-curated blogs and frie…

re: subscribing to the HN firehose on Feedbin. Has anyone else noticed that Feedbin does not seem to handle that well? Right now it says 526 unread items, whereas it in fact should rather be a few thousand items. Is there some lossy aspect to subscriptions on Feedbin, like upper limit of number of items?

I've just started using Feedbin about a month ago, and although my HN firehose feed is at like 1100 something, it definitely limits the rest of the HN feeds. The show and ask feeds are both stuck around 400 something.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use RSS?

#80

I use RSS daily for all things. Those webpages without an RSS feed are ones I never visit as I don't want to change my habit of 15 years.

I just use a service to create one. Also if they don't have RSS they probably have Twitter. I use queryfeed.net to get an RSS feed of their tweets.
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