- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.
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Although I still have Feedly on my phone, and open it occasionally, RSS readers are not as useful as they used to be. That is not due to the way RSS inherently works, but in the past 15 years, websites no longer make their entire articles available on the feed. What you usually get is a small excerpt with a link to the website. They do that because RSS does not allow for the same level of engagement and advertising they would have on their website. As it is, RSS readers are, technically, link aggregators. Which makes them much less convenient.
Even if I only get the first few paragraphs, it’s still the best way to aggregate articles and determine what I want to read. I’d rather find out that a headline wasn’t as engaging as the story without loading the actual site. And for those that I wish to read, I’ll click through.
Even as a link aggregator that would be perfectly fine for me personally.
What really bugs me is that many news sites don’t keep their feeds clean, so you often have duplicates and most importantly: if you have multiple sources, you’ll get multiple copies of the same information packaged slightly differently - often I’m not even interested in one copy.
For example, all news outlets had some Grammy/Taylor Swift crap in their feeds. Each outlet had like three different articles, all regurgitating the same information. I would love to have something like topic clusters, so that I could discard all articles I’m not interested in in bulk.
I even tried building it myself, but wasn’t very successful.
I don’t see how RSS could identify, prioritize, and remove duplicates between different sources in the same category. If I understand correctly, those are not really duplicates, but rather different articles on the same subject. Unless you are talking about a more complicated system or manual curation, I don’t think that is possible. I don’t believe I had much trouble with duplicates within the same feed, maybe I never subscribed to many feeds that do that.
I’m kind of sad I’ve entirely missed the RSS golden era, then.
Does anybody have any recommendations for FOSS RSS readers with actual content surfacing features? So many RSS feeds are full of junk (this is particularly a problem with feeds with wildly disparate posting frequencies) and I’ve always felt they’d be a lot more useful if people were putting more effort into a modern way to sort through extremely dense feeds.
Don’t know what you mean by “actual content surfacing features”, but I’m quite happy with Feeder, it’s pretty basic but it’s FOSS and the notifications work!
Posted elsewhere: Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters and grouped feeds. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS
One amazing RSS app I recommend to all Apple users is NetNewsWire. It’s Open Source and works very well. If Apple ever built an RSS reader, it’d be like this. It uses iCloud to sync between devices.
Lets you use a reader mode where it fetches readable content from the URL instead of just reading from the xml file.
And is very simple. If you use something like Feedly, it also works very well as a client for such services. I started using it like that, later just started using iCloud instead of Feedly
It’s Open Source
If Apple ever built an RSS reader, it’d be like this.
nope
You joke. That’s not what I meant and if Apple did make an app it wouldn’t be Open Source.
But Apple does contribute to Open Source. They collaborated with KDE back when Microsoft was making fun of Linux
I dunno what you guys are on. RSS is crap. If the outlet actually offers it at all, all you get is a title and a thumbnail most of the time.
Blame the website, not rss
Why does it matter whose to blame?
The site configures what shows up in the RSS or ATOM feed. It’s not a feature or a flaw in RSS or ATOM inherently.
In other words, complain to whomever runs the site in question.
@drwho yep, that is correct. I also have feeds in all my readers that are displayed completely, while others are just back links to the article in question.
Lemmy communities are glorified RSS feeds, you can even subscribe to them through RSS and not care whether your instance is down for maintenance to read the posts.
Cool. What practical value does that provide me?
Catered feeds, for example.
You can create a feed that only includes Lemmy communities dedicated to a specific topic - like only those related to video games in some broad sense. Or a news-only feed.
It’s much more convenient that just subscribing to everything you’re interested in and then trying to filter out on our own (good luck not forgetting stuff), as you’re basically on the algorithm’s mercy as well.
Never stopped.
