What do you think of web feeds?

[Xavier]

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?

i use RSS for investing. i can not yet afford a billion dllr bloomberg terminal. i have multiple feeds set up and use"rss bandit" is this sexy? i mean- nvm.

[ABlueRose]

I LOVE RSS FEEDS!!! I've only started using them in the past couple months, but they're amazing. I love finding new websites that I can add to my reader. I've been interested in them for a while before that, but didn't really know any websites to get me started with it. Once I had a few lined up, it made it much easier to use it more and more! I will admit I follow several tumblr blogs through RSS, and a couple Bluesky accounts, but it helps keep me from using the social media less, but still get updates on some things I really like!

It's really useful for letting me keep up with fandom news. Now I don't have to check each series official social media to see if there's been any updates, I just get them through RSS! Part of why I didn't want to fully leave social media was because of this, so I'm just really happy to have a handy alternative.

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?

The reader I use, FeedBro, has this! It's a browser extension, and it'll have a little number on the icon for it showing how many new things you have!

[varve]

I never stopped using RSS...

Currently using a little app called baRSS (mac only) that sits in the toolbar and provides a menu of all the RSS feeds I'm subscribed to, with a little number showing how many unreads (optional). I have them grouped into folders. When I click on one, it opens the item in my default browser.

This means that technically it's not a feed *reader* but it is a feed tracker.

If I have more than one device that I want to read my feeds on in the future, I may look into freshRSS or similar. But for now, baRSS works well for me.