Benefits of RSS? Where should I look for trustworthy feeds?
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I used to read RSS feeds from Thunderbird a long time ago, but that required me to set them up again on every reinstallation and every device, so I eventually stopped doing that.
Nowadays I read RSS feeds on Mastodon. There's a service https://rss-parrot.net/ that converts any RSS feed into a fediverse account, so you get RSS feed updates into your feed along with everything else you follow there. Of course it would be even better if blogs and news sites just posted directly on the fediverse, but not all of them do.
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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.
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I'd like to throw a bunch of web comics into my RSS reader so that I could get a steady drip of new comics every day or whatever. But I'd rather start from the beginning for most of them. Especially ones that follow some kind of story. Anyone know of any tools that would convert a long history of comics to an updating RSS feed but start at the beginning?
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As 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.
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QC was such a fun ride... I encountered it pretty late in the story, then I got on par and I unfortunately dropped it, now it's hard to go back
I think it's the Star Trek of web comics: incredibly progressive, ethical dilemmas everywhere, starting it now is hard for many because of the early graphics!
The most amazing thing is how real its characters feel
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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.
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This is what stops me from subscribing to a lot of web comics
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Why not sort from oldest? Wouldn't that work well enough?
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QC was such a fun rideā¦
It clearly had it's moments. There were some weirdly questionable strips. I'm not following it anymore since a few years but I'm happy to see it's still running.
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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=ācanonicalā href=āhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID%E2%80%9D>in the<head>, whereCHANNEL_IDis 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_IDIf 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 -
That would work.. if the RSS feed had every post since the beginning.
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Oh i totally understand that. Thats alright
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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.
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I know this is kinda tangential, but what apps do you guys use to read RSS feeds?
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Feedly isn't bad.
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Ooh I'd be interested in that too. Then again, never a bad time to start some comic series.
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That's a good point. I forgot about that part.
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qBitTorrent
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NetNewsWire is open-source, IIRC.
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I'd add that Social Media kind of took over this role for most regular users, but that having your own RSS feed gives you control of what you follow, instead of ceceeding control to the algorithms most social media uses to put whatever it is they want to put in front of you. So in that aspect, I do think there are also some privacy advantages in not having a central algorithm studying up what news stories and links work for you and how they can manipulate you.
