Benefits of RSS? Where should I look for trustworthy feeds?
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QC was such a fun ride…
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=“canonical” href=“https://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.
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I'd add that Social Media kind of took over this role for most regular users
I agree, and that fact scares me tbh. But that's more of a privacy concern with social media and less an adventage of RSS. Some RSS feeds do require you to click through for the full article, having another opportunity for tracking.
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Yeah, but this has been 15 years in the making... So many people say that they 'don't use Facebook, it's just where I get my news...'. Which is how we got into this mess in the first place.
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I'm not judging anyone for not knowing the risks of algorithmic news, and I get how we got there. Journalism as a whole changed by it, so many news articles are engagement bait now. It's becoming so hard to find uplifting news, that's why I liked reddit and now lemmy too. People make a genuine effort to find uplifting news.
Diversification has always been the answer, proven by a second uprising of RSS.
