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In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information (blog.burkert.me)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 57 points 1 year ago* (12 children)

I love the idea of the internet coming to us rather than us going out to the internet. And RSS is an excellent example.

I want a system that will cache articles, comics, essentially websites and stay on a system until I am ready to read it. Then it will transform into a queue (RSS clients), email, ebook/pdf format, etc...etc... and ill read it. Its easy for server admins (people are not bombarding their systems), its easy for users (get content how they want it to work) and its better for the internet as a whole. Its one of my favorite tech that has not gone away.

Ive went from google reader, to thunderbird rss, to freshrss on my own system. My phone queues it all up in the morning and in the afternoon at work, where internet is spotty, ill read my pre-downloaded articles. Its a great system.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    email is pretty close to the system you mention.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Id rather subscribe to certain entities instead of having ALL entities being able to send me messages. Every time I have my own mailserver, it gets overwhelmed with spam.

    But yes email as a technology is really close to perfect.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Yep, instead of a single address you should be able to issue keys that let people message you, and when you receive a message you should be able to see what key was used to send it.

    And of course you should be able to revoke keys (tell your mail server to no longer accept messages signed with it).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (7 children)

    freshrss doesn't cache images. how do you do it offline?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    Couple different ways.

    It came with my setup script back a year or so ago but https://github.com/FreshRSS/Extensions/tree/master/xExtension-ImageProxy works. Also the caching occurs when it gets transfered over to my phone or client. The client does the heavy lifting. I dont really care after that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    I remember that extension but I didn't user it because it didn't cleanup after it self (old not needed images stayed in cache).

    what is "your phone"? you mean an app? I know about text caching (I don't know if frehsrss has an option to get original page for RSSs that has just a simple text that redirects to full page), but even inoreader that had that (if i remember correctly) didn't have image caching.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    TTRSS reader. It has a "cache image" button on it. I assume it works.

    Ive never had any issues even outside of internet. comics come in from what I see.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    it works with freshrss self hosted?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yep doing it now! :)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    tt-rss and frehsrss are two different self-hosted apps. are you sure using that app doesnt mess with freshrss?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    ...Im not sure what to tell you. freshrss has an API that TTRSS-Reader works on the backend with. And its working. Fresh ALSO has its own frontend that can work.

    In preferences theres an "connection" area. Otehr than showing you a lot of screenshots im not sure what else to say. GL!

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    • [–] 44 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This is your casual reminder that Lemmy was built to support RSS. Just look for the RSS logo on the top of any community's list of posts:

    And for those pining for the old days of Google Reader, I have been a huge fan of Newsblur.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    This is not technical, but I hope the subscriptions are getting Lyric the dog some meat along with “Home cooked meals of green beans, sweet potatoes, carrots, and brown rice”. Dogs require meat, it’s not their fault.

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    • [–] 29 points 1 year ago*

    I ended up building my own ingestor and discovery (finds RSS feeds across the web, adds it to a queue for me to review) application with over 15k sources and always growing. I serve the content through a public front end if anyone is interested: https://startyparty.dev/ - all articles link out to their sources. all media plays in the app. no tracking, no analytics, no gimmicks. free to use. videos use youtube embed player unfortunately. lemmy, mastodon, blue sky, youtube, podcasts, youtube music, general articles, browser based games and more.

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    [–] 26 points 1 year ago

    Kill the Newsletter

    Turns newsletter subscriptions into RSS feeds. Helps keep my inbox clean and is helpful on sites that don't advertise a feed.

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    [–] 26 points 1 year ago* (19 children)

    Come on everyone. Share your best RSS setup. No wrong answers

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.

    I've been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who's interested in RSS but thinks it's a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn't have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That's all it takes to get started.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    FreshRSS self hosted. Just navigate to the website in your browser, install it to android via a browser 'app'. Assign the app to a gesture.

    Now i swipe from the left and my RSS opens. Fully self hosted with no tracking beyond the websites you visit.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Capy reader on my phone. Lightweight and filters blacklist out.

    Since i've found no readers for shell that just dump the important bits, without ncurses background shenanigans and whatnot, i've made my own in 100 lines POSIX shell. It's kinda slow (500 ms), since it calls multiple times awk per line. Maybe i'll redo it in python sometime.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Mines very basic I just replaced the Google feed using Octopi launcher so a swipe left opens capyreader instead. It's recent so haven't put all that much on there just UK headlines some basic tech stuff and the onion of course.

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    [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    It's simple and elegant, no matter if RSS or Atom. Easy to parse too.Yet somehow, finding a good rss reader app is like finding a needle in a haystack.

    Edit: i'm satisfied with Capy Reader, but thanks for the recommendation.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    After more than a decade of Feedly, I've been using Newsblur for the last couple years. I love its filtering feature where I can set some tags or title keywords and just hide all matching posts from that feed - it's the only thing that made some feeds usable.

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    • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I love RSS! For the longest time I used Miniflux, and I still have an instance running, but lately I've just been using the Unread app on iOS. That's one of the many great things about RSS: you're not tied down to any specific app or platform, you can pack up and take your feeds wherever you want if you wanna try something different.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Seconding Miniflux! It's my main RSS reader. I pay for the hosted version, it's super cheap and works great. And since it's simple HTML I can write Greasemonkey scripts to customize it a bit.

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    • [–] 10 points 1 year ago*

    I switched back to RSS sometime ago. Been using Inoreader

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    [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Sadly, a lot of sites have started shuttering their RSS feeds and hiding content behind paywalls. I have to periodically clean my feed and remove dead links.Luckily, there are a lot of sites that basically copy AP and Reuters news verbatim.

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    [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    I set up RSS a few months ago and do enjoy it.

    RSS Guard on PC, Feeder on mobile.

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    [–] 13 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    I stopped using RSS a long long time ago. And then when I left Reddit and found Lemmy, I also restarted my RSS feeds and cleaned up the links. I don't go there everyday but I do enjoy when I get there.

    But I have asked in numerous places for people's best RSS links and always come up with zero feedback.

    So let's try it here. What are your best RSS links?

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    its been a while since i checked out mine, but the ones i do still sometimes read are

    hackernews frontpage: https://hnrss.org/frontpage low-tech magazine: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/feeds/all-en.atom.xml xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/rss.xml oglaf (often nsfw): https://www.oglaf.com/feeds/rss/ and k6bd (a long comic, highly recommend starting at the beginning): https://killsixbilliondemons.com/feed/

    they might not be the best for you, though, you should try looking for if the websites you read still have an rss page

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I tend to go for the fire hose approach with news agencies AP, democracy now, CCN, RT Al Jazeera, BBC, France 24, Fox, common dreams, NPR, pew research, open source post, and a few geographically local sources. Entertainment pbs has a few, tvline, xkcd. Using capy reader.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    If I understand correctly he’s asking for links to sites that have an RSS feed available, to fill up some app like NetNewsWire with good content. I found this hard myself, just getting news sources or whatever, since I think a lot of these sites have disabled any old RSS feeds they used to have to funnel users through their algorithms

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    If I asked just for the topics I care about then I'm not helping anyone else reading. I'm looking for the quality sources. The ones that aren't filled with filler. The ones that have the key news stories and the oddball stuff.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I follow some of theguardian.com's topical feeds - each tag and author has their own feed. It's a UK-based site, but it has international editions and mostly does good quality centre-left journalism.

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