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Gripes with RSS after one week

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Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#61

Post by mawise »

gumby wrote: post #27

You can see if there's a feed referenced in the page you're on by simply doing `curl |egrep rss\|xml` or just show source.

I confess I got in the habit of doing this... view source, crtl+f for 'rel=alte'... It made me feel embarrassed for the state of RSS support in the world.

The best experience I've had is using a browser extension that detects the tag, shows an icon, and lets me use it to subscribe with a custom /subscribe?url= link; but the extension I was using kept crashing on presumably non-spec feeds.

Bonus would be if someone came up with a protocol for your feed reader to advertise to the extension that it can handle subscribing to feeds to simplify configuring a custom reader.

Can anyone recommend an extension for FF?

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#63

Post by SanjayMehta »

Two uses for RSS feeds in conjunction with invidious and nitter:

1. You can subscribe to YouTube channels via an invidious instance without ever logging into google.

2. You can subscribe to anyone's twitter feed via a nitter instance without ever logging into twitter.

https://invidious.io/

https://nitter.net/

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#64

Post by wahnfrieden »

ianzakalwe wrote: post #58

I remember the moment when I added huggingface blog feed to my reader and realized that this feed has no content in it and links are specified with guid tag. Outside of tech blogs its very common nowadays to stumble upon malformed atom/rss feeds in the wild, some feel unmaintained or abandoned.

it's a very basic feature for modern RSS readers to detect this and fetch the full article. it's a shame that so many RSS programs treat their inputs as good enough for users.

i'll generalize my japanese reading assistant software for general RSS use soon as a result of pervasive quality problems like this. not to mention abhorrent disrespect for user privacy in most cloud software.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#65

Post by kjs3 »

trowawee wrote: post #32

The firehose issue is definitely a problem with RSS, especially if all you've ever experienced is algorithmic social media feeds. It's solveable, but it does require either a very specific approach (I quickly scan my unreads in Feedbin/Reeder, save whatever I want to read in depth, and then browse saved items later), or a reasonably large suite of rules applied to your feed (takes a long time to build, takes even lon…

Isn't that a client issue, not an RSS issue per se? Accept a lot and have some rules to filter it? That's kinda what I like about RSS...I have the power to decide what ends up in my feeds, not what some algorithm decides I should see.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#66

Post by groundcoffee »

rawling wrote: post #6

> A page can declare an RSS feed using a tag in the something like this: > ... > But browsers won’t surface that to you. Do they not? I thought FF put an icon in the address bar.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...

Firefox removed support for RSS back in 2018. It would've been great to get first class support from the browser but I understand their motivations for deprecating support.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#67

Post by Havoc »

_eht wrote: post #37
Havoc wrote: post #36

My main complaint is that feeds then to just be the first sentence or two. So you still end up opening a browser and getting bombarded with popups and cookie banners and what not. Very tempted to try & combine this with something like FF reader mode and build a scraping & filtering layer inbetween that sends the full text to the reader.

cloudflare anti-scraping intensifies...

Should be ok from a residential IP, no?

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#68

Post by jesushax »

>Funnily enough, the old.reddit.com view does have a to the RSS feed.

Maybe that's not a coincidence! Aaron Swartz, one of the co-founders of Reddit, was also one of the developers of RSS. Most people already know his story, but for those who don't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#69

Post by masenf »

europeanguy wrote: post #40
masenf wrote: post #29

As a recent returnee to the world of RSS feeds, I’ve been enjoying the miniflux client [1] self hosted with docker-compose. Fast, cross-platform, not fancy. [1] https://miniflux.app/

Why do you need to host something in order to consume RSS?

1. Synced feeds, read/unread status, and consistent UI across all devices

2. Hosted feed reader for friends and family.

The author mentions the friction they imagine their friends or family would have using RSS feeds, so hosting the reader for them can reduce that friction and bootstrap cost (everyone already has a browser). Then they could always export their feeds and move to a different solution later.

Re: Gripes with RSS after one week

#70

Post by zwayhowder »

If you run your own NextCloud instance I highly recommend the News app as an RSS aggregator and the accompanying mobile app which I use regularly.

With regards content I have a few feeds I read everything in, and a lot I just browse through. The read everything list varies but always includes ArsTechnica.

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