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Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

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51–60 of 205 posts

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#51

I make heavy use of https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to convert e-mail newsletters into RSS feeds -- IMO the RSS reader context is way better than an email inbox for consuming newslettery content.

feedbin gives you an email address to use for newsletters that will show up in your rss feed. it’s also nice.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#52
Does anyone use (or know of) software that follows RSS feeds and sends you a single daily/weekly/whatever digest with links to all new posts? TinyTinyRSS has this functionality which I am currently using but it's not very pretty or configurable - I'm wondering if there is anything else that I could look into.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#53

I just don’t understand the obsession with privacy at all cost. What has anyone actually had happen to them as a result of their Reddit or YouTube browsing history? This just seems like reverse voyeurism, and while that’s fine, it’s odd to assume anyone else shares that fetish with you.

It’s a matter of principle. If everybody were more concerned about their privacy there’d be less dark patterns from the these giant ad companies. Social media, Google, etc…

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#54
post #7

+1 for RSS, I leaned on RSS as my protocol-of-choice for Haven[1], and even added a built-in RSS feed-reader. It provides a single chronologically-ordered stream of content from all your feeds which I've found makes it much more pleasant to read through. [1]: https://havenweb.org

Thank you so much for sharing! I have considered this exact same idea to break my friends and family free from the chains of Facebook and Instagram, but you've packaged this up so nicely, I should really give this a shot.

Is there a way to update my own blog to play nicely with Haven? I like my own styling and hosting setup, and I already have my own RSS reader, so ideally I would like to continue using those, while also making them available to friends and family on Haven.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#55
post #11

I was a huge fan of RSS for a long time but stopped using it. I found that when I added in multiple feeds of my interests, My feed was littered with the same stories and sometimes even the same content. Also, much of the content had the same ads that were on the sites. So at that point, it was easier to just visit the sites with an ad blocker on.

Some clients let you dedup a bit

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#56
Agree, RSS is great tool for decentralization.

However, I cannot find proper open-source RSS reader for Windows that fits in 2022. Any recommendations? I especially need customization for appearance of text/feed.

Feeder for Android is great.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#57
post #13
post #8

I recently started using RSS again (self-hosted with miniflux). One difficulty I have is that these kinds of RSS feeds in OP are way too high-volume for me. But it can be hard to find good blogs or RSS feeds without relying on Twitter to find them. Back in the day, more people used to include a list of blogs they follow on their own blogs, I thought this was a great practice. A few still do, like this very interestin…

+1 for miniflux! It’s great for low-volume, high-quality blogs. It’s got features to keep track of more frequent updates too, if you can be bothered to categorize them.

I set my page length to something long (n>1000) and have a userscript that round-robin sorts the unread posts by feed, and it works pretty nicely for all but the most high-volume (e.g. Boing Boing) https://maya.land/userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#58

I just don’t understand the obsession with privacy at all cost. What has anyone actually had happen to them as a result of their Reddit or YouTube browsing history? This just seems like reverse voyeurism, and while that’s fine, it’s odd to assume anyone else shares that fetish with you.

There are aspects of my life obvious from my Reddit/YouTube history that people I have heard people they say they think should be worthy of death [0]. Is it so unreasonable to be worried about that?

Why make it easier for this to happen? :

  >    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a socialist.

  >    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a trade unionist.

  >    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a Jew.

  >    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Martin Niemöller

[0] Most of them wouldn't want to kill me personally. Just the nameless other that happens to match a lot about me.

Re: Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

#59

I'm kind of a JSON maximalist because I find it really simple and haven't put too much thought into it. I'd also like to shout out https://www.jsonfeed.org/ https://jsonresume.org/ https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/ https://geojson.org/ It'd be pretty cool to have an ecosystem where you could ``` $ packagemanger init my-site password $ hostOfChoice deploy ``` Go to the url, auth yourself, then have a l…

I don't get why anybody would want a json feed. RSS/Atom are already simple to the point of being trivial, so why introduce more standards?

You're not exactly wrong – I don't serve out a json feed myself, even – but RSS/Atom are terribly underused for cases other than "personal organization of feed reading" when they could handle a lot of weirder poll-for-updates automation, and the json format seems like an attempt to encourage that direction. You don't need a bespoke API if what you have makes sense in a feed like this, but people would really rather work with a json than XML.
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