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Newsboat! It works great (make sure to turn on the multi-threading option to update faster).
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I really like this, well done! I was actually thinking of getting something like it the other day. Can I suggest keyboard navigation (basically "go to next unread") and "only show unread items"? It would be great to be able to press a key and go to the next unread feed.
Oh, of course. That makes a ton of sense, I'll think about how to do that shortly. If you're on Github adding an issue would help me remember, if not I'll try to keep it top of mind until I put the kids to bed.
Is RSS really so obscure as the site suggests? Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed. Apparently YouTube content creators receive more money if they have more subscribers, but I don't subscribe and simply use the RSS feed; it's easier. Perhaps YouTube also factors in the number of RSS requæsts they receive.
I suspect that it's only there because WordPress includes it.
I built my personal blog on a static site generator (Gridsome) and had to add RSS to my site intentionally. Luckily there is a plugin that provides this functionality easily now, but you still have to know about RSS, decide to offer it, and then install the plugin and configure it to compile your RSS feed with each site build. So it is something the developer or maintainer of the site has to think about (at least initially, now that it is configured it updates automatically).
I am not a huge fan of Wordpress, but I am grateful that they continue to offer it "automatically" for all Wordpress sites. This means that I am able to subscribe in my feed reader for small sites that might not even think about RSS.
This quote is exactly right: "Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I want to see it with the freedom to jump between readers as I please, all with no ads? For me, no other service comes close to the flexibility, robustness, and overall ease-of-use that RSS offers." I always wonder why they aren't as popular now. It takes more work to add site to a reader, and more effort to even use one I suppose.…
IMO it's a lot of reasons.
A big one, that was the case even before social media, is the inherent geekiness of it. "RSS" is an acronym after a geek's heart, most people don't like it.
The subscription process is complicated. Go to the site, find the feed (which one? There might be a bunch! eg, main feed, topic feed, comments-per-post feed, etc), take that URL and paste it into your feed reader, then look at that and... you got linked back to the site you were on? Yay... There have been various attempts to streamline this via in-page "add to reader" widgets back in the day, browser plugins, etc. But it was never as frictionless as the Facebook/Twitter/Reddit "follow" button.
Responding to things is harder. There's no comment/like/whatever button right there, you have to go to the site, figure out what's going on there, maybe sign up for yet another damn account if you want to comment. Some sites don't even have comment sections! Or maybe they point you to FB or Twitter anyway. Again there were partial solutions back in the day, but nothing as easy as modern social media.
Last for today, it's not nearly as addictive. Some people (including the author and myself) like that about it... but it doesn't drive adoption nearly as well.
>I assume they'll be popular again some day like vinyl and static web sites.
I think they'll always be niche-popular with geeks, long-form content creators, open web advocates (the "EFF crowd" I guess) and so forth. But I don't think it'll ever be mainstream. At best it could serve as the substrate for something else that becomes mainstream.
Anyway, just my 2 cents from hanging around this space for a decade+.
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I'm perfectly happy just getting headlines with links, which seems most common these days, at least for what I subscribe to. It requires I go to their site to get the content where they can (try to) shove anything they want in my face and run whatever trackers they normally do.
This why I personally gave up RSS. I used to enjoy reading things in my RSS reader where I could set things up to be clear to me. Once they started providing only links back to the WWW browser where everything was hard to read I gave up and now I just suffer reading in the WWW browser and frankly don't read nearly half as much online content as a result.
The value of the RSS feed reader is still there because it allows you to monitor potentially hundreds or thousands of sites for content and then skim through to see if any new content was created today that interests you.
This makes it particularly useful for monitoring personal blogs or sites that only publish a few times per month or year. I personally LOVE reading people's personal blogs, but since most people only publish a post a few times a month (or less), I am unlikely to check their website every day. I also don't want to give them my email address and have them clutter my inbox with new posts. So the feed reader is nice because I can go once a day and see what new content exists. I skim through the posts and click through on a handful of content that interests me. If the content is long, I add it to my "Pocket" (getpocket.com) to read later.
In the feed reader I usually get a preview of their content (the first few paragraphs). I can read the content and click through if desired. So the feed reader still provides value for monitoring all these sites that have sporadic posting schedules.
I understand the value of reading the content entirely in the feed reader, but I don't mind clicking through the content once I know it is something that interests me. The feed reader allows me to skim, filter, and screen content so that I am only clicking through on interesting content (similar to how HN works, we still have to click through content). If content is interesting, there is value in supporting creators by visiting them on their site to get the experience that they designed and potentially supporting them with an ad or two. If ad use is egregious then I might retaliate by blocking ads for their site or simply removing them from my feeds.
I've not found a free "RSS viewer" with great UI and a decent feature-set. Albeit I've not search a long time but everything I've seen has been off putting. I'd love to use RSS more. I guess all the decent ones are behind paywalls, I may have to consider them after all. Any suggestions is appreciated.
RSS lets me see the content I care about without black box algorithms getting in the way. This is so important to me that I wrote a feed reader as a browser plugin so I don't need to worry about a service disappearing some day. If you're curious it's Brook[1], and if you like hacking on things, it's open source[2]. There's a branch that works on Chrome, but I really like Firefox's support for showing content in a sid…
Does it utilize firefox sync at all for multiple devices? I see an import/export option at least so I can get the same feeds on my laptop and desktop.
I think my digital life would be a mess without an RSS feed reader. Because of its existence I do not need to touch Twitter, Reddit, YouTube[1], or any Mastodon instance, for example, as I can just have the updates that interest me from these networks in the comfort of my Feedbin[2] feed. While Hacker News does not provide an interface that notifies you when someone replies to you, hnrss.org provides an RSS feed for…