RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.

Whatever the linguistic details, one of the main roles of RSS is to supply directly to you a steady stream of updates from a website. Every new article published on that site is served up in a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.

Unfortunately, RSS is no longer how most of us consume “content.” (Google famously killed its beloved Google Reader more than a decade ago.) It’s now the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what’s new. But I think RSS still has a place in your life: Especially for those who don’t want to miss anything or have algorithms choosing what they read, it remains one of the best ways to navigate the internet. Here’s a primer on what RSS can (still!) do for you, and how to get started with it, even in this late era of online existence.

  • nutsack@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    people don’t do RSS anymore because websites don’t do posts. everything is on some shitty proprietary social media shithole

  • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I mean, I’m all for it, but I thought the problem was that so many sites stopped offering RSS output options.

    • nadir@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Or if they do, it’s not the full article. Which I get, them being in the business of selling ads and all.

      • harsh3466@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        1 year ago

        This is why I stopped using rss. I fucking hate seeing an headline I’m interested in, clicking to expand and then having to click through to the site to read the article, dismiss the goddam email list overlay, fight with the stupid paywall, and then close the tab out of frustration.

        I miss the days of actually reading articles in my rss feed reader.

  • toofpic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Google Reader shutdown has completely changed the way I was ingesting information. It was so convenient, I always had 2-3 days worth of articles, web comics and news for reading.
    Another problem was that many sites shifted to providing only parts of articles instead of full versions, and it was still the time when I wasn’t always online to finish reading.

  • bushparty@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    RSS has always been great! Thankfully I never relied on Google Reader and have been using Newsify for 5+ years. Great app with a great newspaper view as well as an identical web version. Keept me off of Google and don’t have to rely on Feedly either.

    Newsify also supports Feedly accounts though I’ve never needed to consider migrating. I think I’ve had a couple full text issues with certain items but it’s been amazing great and I’ve really enjoyed their product and price point for subscription ($50CAD/yr, I believe)

  • RememberTheApollo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I loved RSS feeds. But I’ve given up on them. And it would seem so have many of the sites I used to frequent. I read RSS offline, so right there I have a problem as the vast majority of RSS apps expect an internet connection. Sites used to write content in such a manner that it was easily readable in RSS, now they don’t. The decline in popularity of RSS has meant that after I get comfortable with an app it stops being updated and no longer works as the developer decides it’s not worth keeping up. Sites make RSS feeds harder to find, if they even have one.

    I

    • Evkob (they/them)@lemmy.ca
      English
      0·
      1 year ago

      Assuming you read RSS offline on mobile, Feeder has an option to fetch full articles and stores them for offline reading. It’s FOSS and actively-maintained, having received an update just last week.

      I’ve never encountered a site I wanted to follow that didn’t have RSS, but I wholly agree it’s often needlessly complicated to find the feed links.

        • Evkob (they/them)@lemmy.ca
          English
          1·
          1 year ago

          Ah, my bad! I should have guessed by your username, which I assume is in reference to the now-defunct reddit app.

          I can’t personally vouch for it, but NetNewsWire might be a good option for iOS if you haven’t tried it. It’s also FOSS, updated as recently as June 2023, can read RSS feeds locally and has a reader view to fetch full articles. You’d have to test if it caches fetched articles though, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t.

  • Evkob (they/them)@lemmy.ca
    English
    0·
    1 year ago

    I started using RSS during the summer. It filled a hole after I quit reddit, since I used to get a lot of my news from the subreddits for my city and my province. There’s also the on-going bickering between Meta and Canadian lawmakers/news media groups which means I see way less articles on social media than I used to. Honestly, after adding a couple local news outlets to my RSS apps, I feel better informed than ever before, and I spend a lot less time arguing with people on reddit. Win-win if you ask me.

    Anyone looking for good RSS readers, I use Feeder on my phone (Android-only), Fluent Reader on desktop (cross-platform), and I also use the RSS widget of the Renewed Tab addon for Firefox. Both apps I use work locally, and have the ability to fetch full articles in-app (the addon just opens the articles in Firefox).

    Something also worth mentioning: you can often find RSS feeds by checking the page’s source (on Firefox: right-click and “View Page Source”) and using Ctrl+F to search, there’s usually a URL somewhere. Keywords to search for: “feed”, “RSS”, “xml”, “atom”. For example, if I go to this community’s page on lemmy.world, I can Ctrl+F “feed” on the page source to find https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/technology.xml