I could not be happier with my self hosted FreshRSS.
It's a major way i stay in touch without having to doom scroll
RSS is still pretty great
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#12The main problem with RSS is there might be a large quantity of (useless) traffic produced by subscribers to a personal website which is update with a low frequency.
There were some services to fix this problem, but most of them have all been (deliberately) closed now.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#13For anyone not using rss and wondering whether to get into it and how, this is what worked for me over the past year.
I used to have 4-6 sites I would check regularly. A couple occasionally had a news update article I liked reading. A couple were “firehose” sites for a hobby which produced 4-20 articles per day. Hard to keep up with on web without feeling overwhelmed.
I got NetNewsWire which has a good sync system across machines. Then I put the occasional news articles in one folder and the firehose feeds in another.
(If a site has no obvious rss, paste in the homepage. NetNewsWire seems to figure it out)
It now takes 2-3 min per day to look over the firehouses. Can scan, read the ones I want, mark the rest as done.
For the news/essay sites, no longer any need to check a site periodically to see “is there an update?” It all just comes in when published.
In a world where habit transformation is hard, this one stuck. Consistently has led me to read more of the stuff I wanted to keep up with, while spending less time and energy around actually finding it.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#14I love RSS. I take a bit of an unconventional approach and use Discord as my RSS reader. I run a self hosted instance of MonitoRSS (https://github.com/synzen/MonitoRSS). I have a server with just me and my bot instance and I tend to group my feeds into categories and channels (effectively creating a tab system per subscription or group of subscriptions). I have Discord installed on my laptop, phone, and desktop so this means that I can easily look at all my subscribed feeds wherever it's convenient for me. When I'm not set to "do not disturb", I even get push notifications on my devices when content is posted to feeds that go to channels I haven't muted. I think the only real downside of the setup is some days I am very busy and don't check the server that often, so I'll come back to a large backlog of things to read and I'll end up missing or under-appreciating some gems.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#15The main problem with RSS is there might be a large quantity of (useless) traffic produced by subscribers to a personal website which is update with a low frequency. There were some services to fix this problem, but most of them have all been (deliberately) closed now.
> there might be a large quantity of (useless) traffic
RSS has update hints in the form of skipHours, skipDays and TTL to let clients know if you expect to be publishing regularly or not. Also most RSS feeds are just links with a tiny amount of text. A large youtube channel produces a feed file in the 30KB range for example. Unlikely you'll ever exhaust your transfer quota at any provider with that size of data.
Quite easy to CDN that file as well.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#16> Finally, and one of the biggest issues with RSS, is that it's not very intuitive to non-tech savvy individuals.
Back when Google reader was a thing this wasn't true. Your browser auto-themed and provided subscribing options for your configured reader. It's a true shame that Firefox gave up supporting RSS out of the box to match Chrome's stance on the subject
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#17I use rss for youtube and it's been great but lately a lot of "shorts" stuff has been junking up the feeds.
Does this still work? This post from a couple weeks ago was saying they were down. Was this a temporary outage, not a removal?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179446
I like the idea of moving some of the channels I actually like to RSS.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#18Waiting for a selfhost options with feedly pro features.
Web scraping (limited) for sites that doesn't have RSS.
Filters through dupes.
AI priority filters to for specific topics/subjects.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#19No matter how much people want to proclaim RSS is "dead" there is actually no way to kill it. It is decentralized. No one owns it. If we keep publishing RSS feeds, it still lives.
Its death can be from sites deciding it’s no longer worth supporting, when they do a redesign. I can see this happening if a bunch of young front end devs are put in change of the full redesign.
I’m currently on a project where the front end has all the control and none of them seem to know anything about computers or tech in general. It seems like they all went to an 8 week boot camp and got a job. It has been very frustrating.
Re: RSS is still pretty great
#20No matter how much people want to proclaim RSS is "dead" there is actually no way to kill it. It is decentralized. No one owns it. If we keep publishing RSS feeds, it still lives.
Its death can be from sites deciding it’s no longer worth supporting, when they do a redesign. I can see this happening if a bunch of young front end devs are put in change of the full redesign. I’m currently on a project where the front end has all the control and none of them seem to know anything about computers or tech in general. It seems like they all went to an 8 week boot camp and got a job. It has been very…
On behalf of front-end devs, I'm sorry. I'm not an amazing FE dev, cut my teeth on Rails projects and weird PHP, but the lack of simple thinking in the frontend world hurts my soul. I need to switch...