I’ve seen a lot of people praising RSS feeds over standard news. What benefits does RSS have over normal news sites? Are they more privacy-focused?

What feeds would you recommend for a fellow Lemmy user?

  • TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    8·
    5 days ago

    I love RSS because of why everyone on this thread already stated but also because it removes me from commercial social media and I can avoid legacy media propaganda. Some sites don’t have RSS enabled but you can always pay for scraping services or build your own scraper as well. FreshRSS has a built in scraper that is useful. I am running a few scrapers on top of the hundreds of feeds I have.

  • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
    101·
    6 days ago

    I have a couple of hundred RSS feeds. It has worked well past 15+ years.

    The internet comes to me rather than the other way around.

    Some RSS feeds that are fun:

    https://questionablecontent.net/ - very long running comic.

    https://hackaday.com/

    https://www.kevinandkell.com/ - one of the most consistent oldest webcomic.

    Royal road also has RSS feed support.

    What I use: https://freshrss.org/ it’s kinda like Google reader back in the day.

  • tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    6 days ago

    I don’t do it for privacy, although that is a benefit.

    I use RSS for convenience (all sources like news, YT, link aggregators, etc. are in the same place) and also to escape “the algorithm“. With RSS, I am in more control over what I see rather than what the Apple/Google news algorithm wants me to see.

    Also it helps to prevent doom scrolling. When you’re at the end of your feed, that’s it. There’s no more. You find something else to do.

    Just generally, a more efficient use of my time.

  • TheTimeKnife@lemmy.world
    7·
    6 days ago

    My rss app combines 44 different news sites into one long feed. It replaced multiple apps and makes checking an assload of news very easy.

  • Mora@pawb.social
    4·
    6 days ago

    What benefits does RSS have over normal news sites?

    Main benefit is that you don’t have to visit websites to get the news. And once the news are on your client it is up to you to decide how to work with it. Filter ads from articles, or remove all articles with the word “orange” from your feed, let an AI add a summary at the top, automatically fetch the full version of the text (if it isn’t already). RSS means you are in control of what and how you consume.

    Are they more privacy-focused?

    That depends on your client and configuration. Do you block/filter ads? Do you proxy images? Do you proxy the requests to the rss file?

    What feeds would you recommend for a fellow Lemmy user?

    This very drastically depends on the user. I have web comics, releases from GitHub, news, porn, tech/cooking/gaming blogs, general News, shopping alerts, my selfhosted change detection, YouTube feeds and more in there.

  • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    I’ve seen a lot of people praising RSS feeds over standard news.

    RSS (and Atom) syndication feeds are not a different news. It’s the same content packaged and delivered differently. It’s just different packaging & delivery system from HTML. A lot of news sites also have syndication feeds.

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
    2·
    6 days ago

    If you’re into watching YouTube: You can add channels as RSS into your reader. The latest 15 videos are offered via the feeds. All you need is the channel ID of the channel whose feed you want to access.

    The channel ID is not visible anywhere on the page, but if you look at the DOM in the web browser via the developer console, you will find a meta entry <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID"> in the <head>, where CHANNEL_ID is the required ID. There are also websites that can be found quickly and easily using the appropriate keywords, which read out and return the ID associated with the provided handle.

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

    If you have a lot of subscriptions, you can use Google Takeout at takeout.google.com and export the YouTube subscriptions as a CSV file. The CSV file contains the subscribed channels with their ID and title for you to parse into whatever format you need for your reader.

    For Newsboat you can use this script on the Abos.csv from my Google Takeout archive:

    while IFS="," read id url name; do
  feedURL="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=%24%7Bid%7D"
  [ ! -z "${id}" ] && echo "$feedURL youtube videos \"~${name}\""
done < <(tail -n +2 Abos.csv) >> urls

    Edit: Seems like, Lemmy messes up the code formatting, but you get the gist …

  • nighty@lemmy.ml
    1·
    5 days ago

    I know this is kinda tangential, but what apps do you guys use to read RSS feeds?