What do you think of web feeds?

[m15o]

RSS used to be very popular in the early 2000 as a way to keep up with updates from any place of the internet. The idea is incredibly simple: want to keep up with a website's updates? Subscribe to its RSS feed.

Things changed with social media. Since social media allows you to subscribe to other people, they almost made RSS obsolete. RSS itself became hard to follow with multiple forks and versions, and a newcomer called Atom.

Yet, feeds are still used. I feel they're even becoming more popular now that the web is slowly moving away (at least, I hope!) from centralized platforms.

I would love to hear how you use feeds today! Do you maintain one for your homepage? What feed reader do you use?

[Obspogon]

I use Inoreader and QuiteRSS

[cinni]

im fairly new to rss, so my feeds are a little bare (i dont have much to follow!).. but i really like feedDemon for desktop, it's nifty n supports images which some readers i've tried don't :-p i also use feeder on my phone, AND an rss plugin for retroshare :-)

below are my two feeds, i don't update them super often so i wont spam u :-)
https://cinni.net/rss.xml
https://entranceorexit.net/rss.xml

what feeds do people follow/recommend? i follow one called the history of the web: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/feed/

[Melooon]

Feeds are way cool, that's my official stance on the matter!

I use a notification feed app for this forum and my guestbook: RSS Bot - It gives me desktop notifications whenever there is a new post.

For more typical feeds I use NetNewsWire - It syncs feeds between my computers and iPad. I mostly use that for keeping up with other peoples blogs and a few company blogs I like. This one is pretty good: https://panic.com/blog/

For my own site, I have a script that reads the news section on my homepage and automatically generates an RSS feed out of it, you can see that script HERE: https://github.com/Melonking906/Melonland-Ozway/blob/main/server/rss.js AND here is the url if you wish to subscribe

[m15o]

I read a fascinating article about the history of feeds. It's called The Rise and Demise of RSS. I highly recommend it.

I just found Liferea, a feed reader that I really enjoy using these days. I've been working recently quite a lot on extending the Atom support of status.cafe. I love the idea of the syndicated web!

By the way, thanks Melon for adding a feed to the forum, it makes it super convenient to check for updates.

[Cobra!]

I use Fraidycat for my feeds. It's designed to not be addictive, and it also supports things like Twitter and Twitch. It's good for occasionally checking to see if there any updates to sites/people you're subscribed to.

[Nightdrift]

I admit I never got into web feeds; always (and kind of still) preferred to visit sites on my own time without being notified or aware of updates or changes. But I am definitely a bit more curious now, reading through a lot of the positive responses here, and it sounds like there are a great variety of options for getting started without it becoming overwhelming : o

[cinni]

question: how would i go about setting up an automatic rss feed? i want to set one up for my oekaki board so it updates every time there's a new post. any help appreciated!

[m15o]

question: how would i go about setting up an automatic rss feed? i want to set one up for my oekaki board so it updates every time there's a new post. any help appreciated!

Good idea to have a feed for that! I see two potential ways:

- Using an external service that will periodically (e.g. once per hour, day, etc...) scan the oekaki board and generate a feed
- Supporting it directly within the oekaki board's code.

The first approach is probably the simplest. I found a bunch of services that allow to generate a feed from a page:
https://politepol.com
https://fetchrss.com/
https://feedfry.com

However, even though they all have a free tier, it seems like without the paid plan they are all quite limited. Perhaps someone knows of a better one?

The other approach is probably the cleanest, but also the most complex one. I see the board is based on https://github.com/satopian/poti-kaini-EN. Since the code is available in PHP, the idea would be to add a `/feed` route that serves an RSS feed.

Maybe others have better ideas! Good luck

[Cy83rPr1mm13]

I've been vaguely aware of RSS the entire time I've been online but I didn't actually start using it until about a week ago! I switched from firefox to Vivaldi and it's got a built in feed reader when you use the fully featured version. It's not the cleanest but it's really nice for keeping up with this forum

My feed is pretty bare too, so chances are if I do end up adding many more sites I'll switch to something like fraidycat.

[di]

I switched from firefox to Vivaldi and it's got a built in feed reader when you use the fully featured version

Ooh! that sounds awesome.

I've started using Thunderbird and it has a feed reader built in too, & i'm happy with it! Long live RSS

However, I need to use something like feedbro or fraidycat to follow any Instagram feeds I still want to follow..

[m15o]

Great to see other feed lovers.

I've never tried vivaldi but I'm more and more tempted. Good to see they include an RSS reader directly. Thunderbird is awesome too!

[Dan Q]

Resurrecting this thread to chip in that I love feeds... a lot.

I love RSS

I currently use FreshRSS as my feed reader; I switched from TinyTinyRSS a a long while back because I didn't like the technical direction the project was going in. It's probably still a fine reader for folks who want it. Before that I used Google Reader, though I managed to jump off that ship many years before it sadly sank.

I love RSS so much. I start and end my day in my feed reader: I get my news via it, subscribe to blogs via it, read comics via it, listen to podcasts with it, follow forum threads with it, subscribe to YouTube channels with it; everything! I love that I get to see the content I want, the way I want, all in one place, and it'll keep track of what I've read/not read, favourited, etc.

I love it so much that I add feeds to sites that don't have them!

I love RSS so much that... where a website doesn't have an RSS feed (or I don't like it)... I'll hack one in using screen-scraping! For example: I didn't like it when BBC News's RSS feeds started getting polluted by repeat articles and plugs for their apps and TV shows... so I made a site that filters out that content (and optionally the sports news, which I don't care about either). All it's doing is subscribing to the RSS feeds and the publishing its own RSS feeds which have the unwanted content removed.

And like... when I discovered a webcomic called LABS, I wanted to read it all, but I didn't want to have to remember where I got up to (especially if I was switching devices) nor read it all in a single sitting. So I wrote some code to build an RSS feed of the entire comic archive and subscribed to that. It was an easy, one-off operation because it's a "finished" webcomic, so I was able to publish an RSS file that is just a list of all the episodes, dump it into my reader, and pick through it a few episodes every day until I'd read it all... and my RSS reader kept track of where I was up to.

Nowadays, FreshRSS has a "killer feature" called XPath Scraping which can be used to help do this kind of thing. When my friend Bev started their blog they didn't have an RSS feed, so I used XPath Scraping instead. The idea is that instead of connecting to a feed FreshRSS connects to a web page, and you tell it "what to look for" using XPath: e.g. you might say 'find every <div class="post">; the <h2> inside it is the post title; everything else is the content' and FreshRSS will treat that as if it's an RSS feed and present it to me in the same way. When Bev makes a new post, I get to hear about it. Magic!

I love it so much but not because of the notifications

As I've hinted in other threads, I don't like notifications that aren't "a human is trying to reach you". So I don't have my RSS reader "ping" or anything. It's purpose is not to notify me that there's new content.

Instead, my RSS reader's purpose is to collate content for me. It doesn't stop my flow to say "Ruth posted something new!", but it remembers that Ruth has posted things that I haven't read yet, so it doesn't matter whether I check on her daily or yearly: I'll have an archive of everything I missed. And if I read four posts but save one for later, it'll wait there until later.

Its secondary purpose is to collate feeds together. So I can, if I like, say "I want to be inspired: I'd like to read blogs of people I know from Melonland right now", and it'll show me a feed of just that, or "I'd like to know what's going on in the world: show me the feeds from news organisations I follow" and I get those.

So yeah, the tl;dr is that I absolutely adore my feed reader and it's the absolute centre of how I consume Internet content.

[rolypolyphonic]

Really nice to see people still using RSS feeds nowadays. I definitely used it more in the 2010s when personal blogs on Blogspot, Wordpress (back when it was still a blogging platform), etc. were more common, but these days I haven't subscribed to a lot of feeds. My interests are niche enough that I don't stumble on the kinds of blogs that talk about them anymore (or when I do, they don't use RSS).

A liiiiitle off-topic, but it's the sort of thing specific enough that it's hard to search online: does anybody know any RSS readers (or if there's a specific function in case this is actually common) that can notify when an existing item has its publishing date updated?

I have a flat file BBS on my own personal website and just recently added an actual threads function. Whenever someone makes a thread, it adds an item to the RSS feed, and when someone replies to the thread, it updates the publishing date of the corresponding item (Each thread also has an individual RSS feed, but the BBS is small enough that it's more convenient to use the overall feed).

Nowadays, FreshRSS has a "killer feature" called XPath Scraping

This sounds really useful! I'm not nearly as tech-savvy to do the other things you've done to add things to RSS, but it really is a handy tool that not enough people appreciate these days. I definitely agree with using it as a consolidator that keeps track of where I am in a website, so much cleaner than having a hundred open tabs or bookmarks.

[mittens]

i only learned about web feeds recently (early this year? late last year? one or the other), but i love them!

i also use freshrss, it's running on my homeserver so i can access it anywhere without having to export and import everything to every device i use ad infinitum + so i can sync it with newsboat (command line feed reader) on my laptop (partly because i like cli apps and partly because i couldn't open a web browser for a month or two without my laptop crashing immediately). i also used feedbro (firefox extension) for a bit, it's neat!

my website doesn't have a feed, but i don't update it very much so i keep putting off making one