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?
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.
I know this is kinda tangential, but what apps do you guys use to read RSS feeds?
RSS feeds are a way to aggregate articles from many websites all in one feed. There’s no inherite privacy advantages. The main advantage is you can group many RSS feeds into your preferred categories and see a list of all the articles of your interests, without having to visit each website separately.
You can start here, a currated list of many feeds. I use Feeder on android and FreshRSS as a self-hosted curration tool but also to connect RSS feeds to services of mine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
