tal , (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

RSS is fine for what it is, but it addresses a use case that only rarely applies to me -- wanting to see all or nearly all of the content put out from some feed.

There are a few sources for which I'll do that -- I look at The War Zone, for example. But for the great majority of sources, any feed has a mix of content that I want to see mixed with content that I don't want to see. I think that link aggregators like Reddit or the Fediverse do a better job of picking up interesting content and filtering out the uninteresting.

I'll use RSS to obtain podcast feeds. But for webpages, I just usually don't want to see all the content that a given source is putting out.

Tarte ,

I‘m using a RSS reader with rule based filters to remove uninteresting articles (to me) and upvote or downvote articles with certain keywords (for me). That way I can aggregate lots of media and have my own personal feed.

It takes some time to set up and fine-tune, though.

princessnorah ,
@princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

What RSS reader is this? I’ve been wanting to get back into it for a while but I too need to be able to filter things down to a digestible form.

Tarte ,

Feedbro, it's a browser extension.

awmire ,

do you recommend any fediverse instances (or even subreddits) that might share informative/fun/interesting articles or websites of any kind? i feel the quality on reddit has really tanked in the last couple years.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I mean, that kind of heavily depends on the area of your interests; I don't think that it's really possible to say "forum X is interesting" in a vacuum. I'd add that I still think that there are interesting subreddits on Reddit, though I agree that the front page isn't very appealing these days, at least to me.

On the Threadiverse, though, I would say that as things stand, lemmy is not really good at helping one find existing communities. There's the newcommunities announcement community at !newcommunities, but those, by definition, don't have a userbase when announced, and some of the creators don't do the work of regularly posting content until they catch on. Kbin reccomends random posts in the sidebar, but that's a pretty shotgun way to find things.

What I'd probably do is use the Lemmy Explorer's community search, which as things stand is the only way I'm aware of to search all of the communities across all of the Threadiverse.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

awmire ,

thanks a bunch that helps! in terms of reddit, i've been using it for almost 15 years and the subreddits i liked seem to have changed recently, or maybe gotten "too big". i think the API changes last year really shook things up too. hence why i'm on beehaw now! anyway, i'll take a look at the lemmy verse communities, thanks!

petrescatraian ,
@petrescatraian@libranet.de avatar

@tal

Lemmy Explorer's community search

That is a good way indeed, although I'm yet to find a way to filter after new or active communities.

I like the fact that I can filter the instances that I don't like or that my server has blocked, so I can see actual relevant content for me. 😁

@awmire

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

That is a good way indeed, although I’m yet to find a way to filter after new or active communities.

Look at the drop-down menu next to the search field, which lets you sort via different criteria.

I think "newest publish time" is the date of community creation; new communities at the top.

For activity, it has number of active users in various given periods of time.

petrescatraian ,
@petrescatraian@libranet.de avatar

@tal thank you!

petrescatraian ,
@petrescatraian@libranet.de avatar

@awmire Friendica supports RSS if you're into that. You might already know it is mostly a Facebook alternative (although it has many more features than Facebook). You can paste the website link into the search bar and it gets the RSS feed for you if it has one.

I do like RSS feed readers that have a magazine view though, so I couldn't really move all my feeds here.

@tal

kreynen ,

@ginerel a few people in this thread have mentioned using Kbin or Mbin as something of an RSS curration tool. I'd like to learn more about that.

The Drupal community maintains an aggregate of feeds from 200+ sources with posts about the CMS. In the last year or so, the quality of the content is noticeably worse. Some community members are blaming Ai generated content...

Chat GPT, write a 1000 word blog post about Agile that mentions Drupal

I think the problem has more to do with how Google rewards "fresh" content that repeats keywords with higher page rank than a better written article posted 2 years earlier.

Regardless of the cause, a small group already running drupal.community for Mastodon has been discussing using up voting as a way to let the community curate the feed.

Would love any advice or examples on using Kbin or Mbin to empower a small community to curate RSS content.

SpectralPineapple ,

Although I still have Feedly on my phone, and open it occasionally, RSS readers are not as useful as they used to be. That is not due to the way RSS inherently works, but in the past 15 years, websites no longer make their entire articles available on the feed. What you usually get is a small excerpt with a link to the website. They do that because RSS does not allow for the same level of engagement and advertising they would have on their website. As it is, RSS readers are, technically, link aggregators. Which makes them much less convenient.

agressivelyPassive ,

Even as a link aggregator that would be perfectly fine for me personally.

What really bugs me is that many news sites don't keep their feeds clean, so you often have duplicates and most importantly: if you have multiple sources, you'll get multiple copies of the same information packaged slightly differently - often I'm not even interested in one copy.

For example, all news outlets had some Grammy/Taylor Swift crap in their feeds. Each outlet had like three different articles, all regurgitating the same information. I would love to have something like topic clusters, so that I could discard all articles I'm not interested in in bulk.

I even tried building it myself, but wasn't very successful.

SpectralPineapple ,

I don't see how RSS could identify, prioritize, and remove duplicates between different sources in the same category. If I understand correctly, those are not really duplicates, but rather different articles on the same subject. Unless you are talking about a more complicated system or manual curation, I don't think that is possible. I don't believe I had much trouble with duplicates within the same feed, maybe I never subscribed to many feeds that do that.

agressivelyPassive ,

It's possible by analyzing the title and subtext (and the article snippet, if it exists). I tried to have an AI model estimate the likeness of articles. Worked relatively well, but I lack the motivation to build it out into a usable app.

CanadaPlus ,

I'm kind of sad I've entirely missed the RSS golden era, then.

monkeyflower ,
@monkeyflower@infosec.exchange avatar

@CanadaPlus @SpectralPineapple Ive been using Plenary on Android which does a pretty good job of pulling full articles when available. Don't think its FOSS but its seems to be focused on privacy to a certain extent. I love that it can create a custom widget that can replace the google surveillance oriented click bait feed.

I've been experimenting with a few different options on desktop. @thunderbird has been the go to for me for a long time. Since playing with Google Reader lifetimes ago.

SpectralPineapple ,

It was pretty great to receive dozens of full articles everyday without any bloat or ads. Just text and maybe a few images. I suppose it is possible to subscribe to apps that aggregate several sources in a practical manner, but then you'll be restricted to their selection.

davehtaylor ,
@davehtaylor@beehaw.org avatar

This right here.

The heyday of RSS is long, long gone. Everything has become a walled garden where platforms want you ON their platform, not reading a feed, or using third-party clients, etc. They want your eyeballs there on their site/service. So many sites don't even offer RSS feeds anymore, and when you get full text, you get piles of ads.

It's the same issue with so many sites/services either shutting down API access or severely restricting it.

I tried really, really hard recently to put together a good list in an RSS reader and tried to make it work. but it just doesn't. It's a miserable experience and you have to fight for every feed you get. It's not worth it. It's sad and extremely frustrating, but unless we can push sites to do a 180 on their strategies, RSS is essentially dead.

some_guy ,

Even if I only get the first few paragraphs, it's still the best way to aggregate articles and determine what I want to read. I'd rather find out that a headline wasn't as engaging as the story without loading the actual site. And for those that I wish to read, I'll click through.

kib48 ,
@kib48@lemm.ee avatar

I just wish RSS readers could properly parse the webpages instead of only having the first paragraph and getting cut off

N0x0n ,

That's actually not the RSS reader's fault. It's the rss feed you import that behaves like that. It's on purpose, to make you go to their website and ingage in their traffic.

drwho ,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

This is exactly the case.

In a lot of CMSes that offer RSS feed generation, there's a setting you can frob - either put the entire article in each RSS entry, or just the first X words in the <summary></summary> block. A lot of them default to the latter and folks never turn on the former.

Shamot ,
@Shamot@jlai.lu avatar

This is an important criteria for me. If I can't read the full article without leaving the reader and without a WebView, I won't keep the RSS feed.

tracteurblinde ,

Not a solution for everyone, but I am selfhosting and using FreshRSS. One of the extensions is Readable which will fetch the entry's URL and parse it using either Readability or Postlight Parser to replace the content of the entry and make all of it available in the reader.

Cwilliams ,

morss.it

thegreekgeek ,
@thegreekgeek@midwest.social avatar

Best way around that I've found is with feedme on android. It's got a mobilizer with a customizable css selector. Just set the app to load the feed in web view and to use the mobilizer and you're good to go.

phlaym ,

There are some that do. Inoreader as host and Reeder as client both support that. Not perfect, but working well enough

i_ben_fine ,

I'm currently trying to retrieve my local gym's Facebook feed as RSS so I don't have to be on Facebook. It bites.

_thisdot ,
@_thisdot@infosec.pub avatar

One amazing RSS app I recommend to all Apple users is NetNewsWire. It’s Open Source and works very well. If Apple ever built an RSS reader, it’d be like this. It uses iCloud to sync between devices.

Lets you use a reader mode where it fetches readable content from the URL instead of just reading from the xml file.

And is very simple. If you use something like Feedly, it also works very well as a client for such services. I started using it like that, later just started using iCloud instead of Feedly

crank ,
@crank@beehaw.org avatar

It’s Open Source

If Apple ever built an RSS reader, it’d be like this.

nope

_thisdot ,
@_thisdot@infosec.pub avatar

You joke. That’s not what I meant and if Apple did make an app it wouldn’t be Open Source.

But Apple does contribute to Open Source. They collaborated with KDE back when Microsoft was making fun of Linux

jlow ,
@jlow@beehaw.org avatar

For those who wanna I hear

https://www.freshrss.org/

is pretty good. I kinda gave up on RSS when all artists moved from Tumblr and websites with RSS to the disgusting social networks ...

tesseract ,

One question. Why do we need a web app for something that was designed to work locally?

DrinkMonkey ,

To sync across different devices maybe?

tesseract ,

Do you need that? You only need to sync the feed. There are formats like OPML for that. At worst you need a file sync tool like syncthing. The feed contents seen by the readers are all the same.

I'm yet to see a good reason why feed readers need to be web apps. This is worse than the case of git - a decentralized tool is taken and made centralized.

DrinkMonkey ,

Agreed. The syncing can be managed other ways. The only thing I’m left with is using on a work computer for some reason, where one’s own devices aren’t available/permitted? But that’s probably not a common usage case.

kfet ,
@kfet@lemmy.ca avatar

When you have 100+ feeds you really want to avoid reading twice the same entry. It's the single most important feature in an RSS reader for me.

ginerel OP ,
@ginerel@kbin.social avatar

So the OPML file does handle the read status as well? isn't it just a format to export and import feeds inside a reader?

jlow ,
@jlow@beehaw.org avatar

Depends on your use-case obviously, for me it's very nice to have all feeds and read status on all devices (laptop, phone, tablet) and don't need to add a new feed to all devices or set it up again when I change phone, reinstall Linux etc. It also has user-management, so you could have accounts for friends and family and even expose it to the internet (which I wouldn't at this point) or but it on a private mesh / vpn like Tail-/Headscale.

Edit: Whoops, I was talking about self-hosting. Having it as a web service has the same benefits if you don't wanna tinker with tech, obviously, (with the caveat that people from that service know what you read ...)

crank ,
@crank@beehaw.org avatar

Anyone interested can find (usually free) externally hosted freshRss and TinyRss hosts on the chatons website. Select one of those in the "based on" drop down menu.

I've tried both and like neither. As far as I can tell, they only have a small number of apps. And none of them work offline. With a regular RSS reader you can refresh it when you have internet access, then everything is available when you do not. Like an email client or any other such software.

But it might be suitable to you. So check out the chatons.

some_guy ,

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