FYI FreshRSS is fairly trivial to self-host, and is a really nice option for an RSS reader app.
FreshRSS hit the sweet spot for me, combined with NetNewsWire as a mobile UI
I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work?
Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological.
More readers should have this
not in my world it aint.
Even so it's no longer a de facto standard the way it used to be.
- Three local independent theaters
- Every local venue I checked in my city (admittedly only checked a few I was specifically interested in)
- The local dvd rental place (we still have one and it's neat. The announce their newer niche additions via an updating page)
- My local folk school that hosts events and has an updated news page with no feed
There were a few things I can't remember now that I was shocked to see regularly update pages with lists of updates that there is no way to subscribe to. I would have expected most of these sites to be built using some kind of automated tool that would just include rss or atom. I guess most of the offer email lists, which is a crappy way to get updates comparatively imo.
I'm probably going to use a combination of changedetection.io and rss-bridge to get updates from these sites, but like, seriously?
[0] https://blogs.hn
Other good directories:
Tip: use a service to stream quality content to your RSS feed reader. For Hacker News, http://hnapp.com/ does the trick for me.
I subscribe to a couple dozen authors on Hacker News.
Example: in hnapp, search for `author:bob1029`, there's an RSS link, paste that into your RSS feed reader to see that person's Hacker News comments.
I have an entire "Hacker News" section in Feedly, just with author's comments. Very useful!
(BTW all serious static site generators know how to produce an RSS/Atom feed.)
Also that blog has some other good related articles:
- What is RSS: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-rss
- What is Atom: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-atom
- What is JSON feed: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-json-feed
- What are feed readers: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-are-feed-readers
- What is OPML: https://lighthouseapp.io/blog/what-is-opml
https://web.archive.org/web/20070910131413/http://news.com.c...
Sadly, filtering features seem to be only available for paid subscriptions of online services, or for self-hosted solutions. Or are there solutions I am not aware of?
Flym (Android)
I actually built a simple and free RSS reader because my needs are simple and I'm a sucker for punishment. You'd think websites would want bots to read their RSS feeds since that's the whole point of RSS, but apparently not! ツ
I use it also for:
- bookmarks
- web crawling
- simple search engine
I also created simple RSS reader/parser, and web crawling system [1].
Links:
Using this curbed my Reddit usage quite a lot.
[1] https://rssrdr.com [2] https://github.com/Roald87/HackernewsClassics
I wonder how long that will last until Substack closes it, I have never seen an RSS feed where the author is able to make it sustainable for them to make money from it.
As someone who's subscribed to a lot of substacks the thing that brought me there was the availability of asynchronous reading (mail, rss newsletters.) I'm sure I'm not alone in disliking the actual site itself.
I host freshrss on a linode vps so my read/unread feeds are synced across devices.
Hacker news, various subreddits, YouTube channels, webcomics, blogs, forum posts, and even a newsgroup (comp.lang.ada is still active) are all in there, letting me catch up on feeds that I choose to read at my own pace.
1. Create a feed on https://kill-the-newsletter.com/. This will also give you a custom email address to send your newsletter to.
2. Subscribe to the newsletter with the custom email address and add the feed you created to your reader.
This setup works very well for me with NetNewsWire though there is friction in the multiple steps. No affiliation with either, just a satisfied user.
Feed entries then become emails which sit in your inbox/folders alongside your existing [emailed] newsletters.
(I prefer this approach myself, I can filter and search via my mail client, and manage state easily.)
- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_Fever_A...
- https://freshrss.github.io/FreshRSS/en/developers/06_GoogleR...
FreshRSS implements two APIs
A lot of people get put off because they don't like the dev, he's not a "let me hold your hand while you understand the basics of how to install my app" kinda guy, he's a "Oh you didn't read the docs and are now spamming forums with help requests? Here's a ban" kinda guy which I gotta say, I actually really respect. Why everyone thinks open source ALSO means you get your hand held through every little rough patch I don't know, probably because a lot of open source is backed by companies who can't say the things the probably want to say in public, like "Go away, idiot"
Anyway sorry, I digress. TinyTinyRSS is excellent, the filtering just makes it head and shoulders above anything else I've tried like Miniflux (also nice) and FreshRSS.
I hope X/Twitter back to this functionality, but that's a low probability.
Which killed all the legitimate fun and useful bots and just left the astroturfing and discord sowing kind state sponsored bots.
As was the plan.
(As for SSE, it’s entirely unsuitable as it would require a persistent connection.)
- There are million different formats.
- guids are not required, they are not monotonically rising integers, and there is no length limits on them (I've seen 50kb guid in the wild)
- date is not required
- you cannot fetch articles "since guid 123". If you go on vacation and return, if the feed had too much traffic they are gone, you'll never see the articles you missed except last 20 or so.
- whether article will be in full or just a teaser is fully in the hands of the server
My pet conspiracy is that big tech has wanted RSS dead ever since Google Reader briefly took off, because they can't suck you into a walled garden of infinite ads when it exists. Obviously they can't kill it entirely, but they can pressure browsers to drop support, acquire and softly kill off the readers, paywall them so they suck to use, discontinue others, make scraping to RSS against the TOS of their site, etc, etc.
What they optimise for is time spent on the platform "engagement". And usually rage-baiting content gives better engagement metrics than things that make you happy.
