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?
For me, I saw very little benefit to RSS until I hosted fulltextrss. Most of the feeds I subscribed to, the RSS feed just gave you the headline, and made you load up the full website and all the ads to read the article. They don’t really want you just skimming the good stuff and skipping the ads.
Fulltextrss basically loads in the full articles, pictures and all (if you so choose). It means I can read stories from all the sources I want, without really leaving my RSS reader.
∞🏳️⚧️Edie [it/its, she/her, fae/faer, love/loves, null/void, des/pair, none/use name]@lemmy.ml8·3 months agoAs all the others have said, its about convenience, being able to check just one place for news is nice.
As for feeds. If you feel like your day is too nice, too happy, try https://reliefweb.int/ it itself is an aggregate of news from many humanitarian organizations, which means the stuff that comes in can be a bit grim and miserable.
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://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.
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.
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>
, whereCHANNEL_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 …
I know this is kinda tangential, but what apps do you guys use to read RSS feeds?
Feeder, downloaded via F-Droid.
qBitTorrent
NetNewsWire is open-source, IIRC.