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!