[HN Gopher] Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)
        
       Author : editbutton
       Score  : 304 points
       Date   : 2022-11-04 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (rsapkf.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (rsapkf.org)
        
       | andrewshadura wrote:
       | This mentions Bibliogram, but in fact it's been discontinued
       | since Instagram has been actively breaking it for quite some
       | time. Another app, Barinsta, died after its author was served a
       | C&D letter.
        
         | kornhole wrote:
         | I have been using RSS-Bridge to generate those feeds, but today
         | it looks like Mark changed the API again. Hopefully next update
         | will fix that. I wish I could get my family and friends to
         | start posting on the Pixelfed instance I setup for them to
         | avoid this cat and mouse game with Meta. ;/
        
       | paulgb wrote:
       | The current situation at Twitter has made me want to go back to
       | the good-old-days of RSS, I'm glad to see I'm not alone.
       | 
       | I'm rusty, though. What's the best Mac desktop RSS client these
       | days?
        
         | addajones wrote:
         | I highly recommend Reeder. Been using it for years. Solid.
        
           | stepri wrote:
           | Reeder has also support for Twitter, Youtube and Reddit.
           | Great app indeed
        
         | jakewalker wrote:
         | Strongly prefer NetNewsWire, which is free and open source.
         | www.netnewswire.com. Available on Mac and iOS.
        
           | addajones wrote:
           | Also a great choice and has been around for a while!
        
           | themadturk wrote:
           | Yes, NetNewsWire is great. It works well as a client for
           | Feedbin, too.
        
           | jonwinstanley wrote:
           | Yes the iOS app was rewritten relatively recently and is
           | excellent
        
         | ghostpepper wrote:
         | For people who willingly live in (or visit) Apple's walled
         | garden, I like News Explorer because it syncs (subscribed feeds
         | and read/unread state of each article) via icloud between
         | iphone, ipad and macOS.
        
       | gbil wrote:
       | Just earlier this week I went back to rss with my selfhosted
       | aggregator based on FreshRSS docker. What made me go back to rss
       | was partially fueled by the twitter situation since I primarily
       | use twitter for updates from news and tech sites. Moreover, I
       | realized that on twitter I get the "list" of news but then I also
       | spend a lot of time browsing the various sites even if there are
       | no new articles and rss would be ideal to get at the same time a
       | list of new articles, go back to read/old ones and expand only
       | what I wanted in the same interface - with some compromises.
       | 
       | FreshRSS looked to be a more up to date solution compared to
       | ttrss that I self hosted in the past with a BIG plus of going
       | beyond what is available in the rss stream, retrieve full
       | articles AND even just parse normal web pages to retrieve
       | articles when rss is not available. For sure I've spent 2-3 hours
       | to setup all these things, but now I have a curated list of rss
       | feeds + parsed normal sites in a page, rarely needing to go
       | outside of that view directly on the relevant sites and
       | accessible from everywhere with proper user/pass support behind a
       | reverse proxy. AND I spend less time just browsing without reason
       | ;)
        
       | ZeroGravitas wrote:
       | Has anyone got Mozilla Pocket and newsboat working together?
       | 
       | I'd like to bookmark interesting long reads for later to Pocket
       | from newsboat, but also resurface them as an RSS feed, but it
       | seems a little awkward.
        
       | Vixel wrote:
       | I was a huge fan of RSS for a long time but stopped using it. I
       | found that when I added in multiple feeds of my interests, My
       | feed was littered with the same stories and sometimes even the
       | same content. Also, much of the content had the same ads that
       | were on the sites. So at that point, it was easier to just visit
       | the sites with an ad blocker on.
        
         | ozarker wrote:
         | Some clients let you dedup a bit
        
         | ZeroGravitas wrote:
         | Some way of grouping things by canonical links would be neat.
         | 
         | Like if HN and lobste.rs (or other link aggregators) both point
         | to a recent news story, then the fact that you've read the url
         | they link to, should be a seperate concept from whether you've
         | 'read' the discussion that points to the link.
         | 
         | And if you seperately have a feed of the originating news site,
         | reading it there would mark it in both places.
        
           | ghostpepper wrote:
           | This doesn't help if you follow, eg. five different news
           | sites and they all report on the same event with largely the
           | same facts (or even the exact same article copy syndicated)
        
         | lapcat wrote:
         | > My feed was littered with the same stories and sometimes even
         | the same content.
         | 
         | To be fair, this is a big problem everywhere, not just with
         | RSS. Especially on Twitter, and even here with dupes on HN.
         | 
         | It's more of a problem though if you're following a bunch of
         | "news" feeds, as opposed to, say, technical blogs with original
         | content.
        
       | frumiousirc wrote:
       | A useful reminder is to configure your RSS reader to poll at a
       | reasonable frequency. I know of at least one popular blog that
       | blocks RSS polls from liferea due to a too-fast default.
        
       | firefoxkekw wrote:
       | Highly recommend the newsflash rss reader for linux, wroted in
       | rust and official flatpak so it should work on any distro.
       | 
       | https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk
        
       | robalni wrote:
       | > I have stopped subscribing/following anything/anyone online.
       | 
       | Same. I even wrote a program that allows me to follow people on
       | Twitch without being logged in there. I made a bash alias so I
       | just need to type "f" in the terminal when I want to see who is
       | live. Otherwise I use newsboat for things that have RSS feeds and
       | w3m bookmarks for everything else. W3m has a really nice
       | bookmarks page that is just a list of links that you can access
       | with alt+b; very convenient when you want to quickly go to a
       | page.
        
         | satrday wrote:
         | Would love to see the Twitch program!
        
           | robalni wrote:
           | https://github.com/robalni/twitch-shell
        
             | djbusby wrote:
             | All in bash!, well done, neat usage of `nc` in there too.
        
               | googlryas wrote:
               | Not only bash but some of the more readable shell script
               | I've seen. OP, if you're reading this, is that an
               | idiomatic style or did you learn the style from some well
               | known source?
        
               | robalni wrote:
               | I don't know what you refer to when you talk about the
               | style but it's just how I write code; I try to keep it
               | simple. Some of the simplicity of the code is possible
               | because it's bash, which both means that I can skip
               | parsing the input (since bash already is made for doing
               | that) and use existing programs like curl and nc.
        
       | t0bia_s wrote:
       | Agree, RSS is great tool for decentralization.
       | 
       | However, I cannot find proper open-source RSS reader for Windows
       | that fits in 2022. Any recommendations? I especially need
       | customization for appearance of text/feed.
       | 
       | Feeder for Android is great.
        
         | timbit42 wrote:
         | Perhaps QuiteRSS.
        
       | Semaphor wrote:
       | I've been self hosting TT-RSS since Newsblut raised prices some
       | years ago (which was what I switched to when Google Reader
       | closed). My list simply grew over time. Whenever I see an
       | interesting article (doesn't matter where, here, Reddit, Twitter,
       | Facebook) I check if the others are interesting, and if so, I
       | subscribe. Almost everything worth reading has a feed.
        
         | rinze wrote:
         | Another happy TT-RSS user here. I moved after the Google Reader
         | debacle.
        
         | remram wrote:
         | Switched from TT-RSS to FreshRSS recently, mostly because I
         | don't want to hack on PHP code. It's a good alternative, also
         | light weight.
        
           | Semaphor wrote:
           | I tried it and some things didn't work, can't remember what
           | was my issue, though.
        
       | FortiDude wrote:
       | lobste.rs/s is a missed oppurtunity
        
       | pfoof wrote:
       | Acshually it's not RSS, it's Atom /j
        
       | matai_kolila wrote:
       | I just don't understand the obsession with privacy at all cost.
       | What has anyone actually had happen to them as a result of their
       | Reddit or YouTube browsing history?
       | 
       | This just seems like reverse voyeurism, and while that's fine,
       | it's odd to assume anyone else shares that fetish with you.
        
         | Shared404 wrote:
         | There are aspects of my life obvious from my Reddit/YouTube
         | history that people I have heard people they say they think
         | should be worthy of death [0]. Is it so unreasonable to be
         | worried about that?
         | 
         | Why make it easier for this to happen? :                 >
         | First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
         | >         Because I was not a socialist.            >    Then
         | they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
         | >         Because I was not a trade unionist.            >
         | Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--       >
         | Because I was not a Jew.            >    Then they came for me
         | --and there was no one left to speak for me.
         | 
         | - Martin Niemoller
         | 
         | [0] Most of them wouldn't want to kill me personally. Just the
         | nameless other that happens to match a lot about me.
        
         | imoreno wrote:
         | Privacy is a self-evident and basic human right, like freedom
         | of expression. The principle of this is already acknowledged in
         | law. For example, reading snail mail is very illegal, and
         | nobody questions what harm would come from someone reading
         | Grandmas "merry christmas" letter to you. It is only on the
         | internet that violations of this right are turned a blind eye
         | to, because of regulatory capture and government inertia.
         | Regulators are slowly catching up (see GDPR) but in the
         | meanwhile users are forced to take matters into their own
         | hands.
         | 
         | The data being collected is valuable, evidenced by the fact
         | that an entire industry exists for it. It is collected without
         | the users' consent (beyond the sham of "by using this website
         | you agree to our terms" - by the way, legally speaking
         | individuals cannot agree to give up their rights). The users
         | are not compensated for the valuable information that is
         | harvested from them.
         | 
         | Lastly, many online service providers are cavalier with the
         | security of this data. It is freely shared with hostile state
         | actors (not necessarily western ones), predatory commercial
         | third parties (spammers), and actual criminals. Due to lax
         | security, criminals often gain access to this data and use it
         | for identity theft, phishing and other fraud. People compile it
         | in "social media background check" databases which exposes
         | individuals, without their consent, to stalkers.
         | 
         | There's not enough space in a comment to go over every single
         | instance of privacy violations leading to serious consequences
         | for users, such as those you claim do not exist, so to anyone
         | interested I would recommend doing a web search on privacy
         | related topics.
        
           | matai_kolila wrote:
           | So nothing; nothing actually happened, and so now we must
           | invent moral outrage to sustain the hate cycle.
           | 
           | Aren't you exhausted by all of this? Why continue to
           | participate in the flywheel when you can otherwise simply
           | reap the myriad benefits that come with a more connected
           | society?
           | 
           | It just seems like some folks prefer constantly being
           | upset...
        
         | zoul wrote:
         | For me, the turning point was when I understood that my fairly
         | inoccuous data like browsing history or post likes can be used
         | to infer information that I would not share publicly.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | ajvs wrote:
         | It's a human right to have privacy. If you want to opt in to
         | sharing everything about yourself to Big Tech and everyone else
         | they sell data to then be my guest, but don't try to make it
         | out to be a "fetish" to avoid this totally unnecessary data
         | collection.
        
         | pessimizer wrote:
         | Is reverse voyeurism when you don't want everybody to look at
         | you naked? Because I'm pretty sure most people suffer from
         | that. It's similar to reverse murder and reverse fraud, when
         | you don't kill people, and you tell them the truth.
        
         | jmbwell wrote:
         | I think the point of privacy is, it isn't anyone else's
         | business why someone would care about it.
        
         | emsign wrote:
         | What happened to me? All the big social media sites send me to
         | an information prison. It makes using the internet not fun
         | anymore if you can't break out of your information bubble to
         | get a different perspective! There's no "common knowledge"
         | anymore and that development is fueled by people giving away
         | their valuable data willy nilly. I just don't want that, I hate
         | it actually and I think it's very dangerous tribalism and it's
         | not has reached its peak yet, though more and more people get
         | annoyed after noticing all these information prisons.
        
           | matai_kolila wrote:
           | I really don't think this take survives first contact with
           | incognito mode...
        
         | ozarker wrote:
         | It's a matter of principle. If everybody were more concerned
         | about their privacy there'd be less dark patterns from the
         | these giant ad companies. Social media, Google, etc...
        
       | tripple6 wrote:
       | For Android I prefer Press (com.twentyfivesquares.press), a
       | discontinued app I asked the creators to open the source code for
       | a few years ago. Got ignored. Probably the only app known to me
       | to categorize starred/read-later entries. Well, a couple of bugs
       | (rare caching issues) and supporting already-dead services are
       | not a big issue even after many years, however kind of reversing
       | and modding it to make it support Inoreader or ttRSS would make
       | me finally get rid of Feedly (seems still to support the original
       | Google Reader API?) whose both web version and the app are you-
       | know-what.
        
       | mmplxx wrote:
       | I've mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I like the
       | uniformity and simplicity of RSS, its vibe of good old times and
       | the ability to avoid ad-driven ranking algorithms. On the other
       | hand, many media/content sources offer legitimately sophisticated
       | recommendation systems that are more effective than having dozens
       | of unranked high-frequency inputs a day in your RSS inbox. For
       | sources with more curated and low-frequency output there is no
       | trade-off, though.
        
         | pessimizer wrote:
         | There's no reason "legitimately sophisticated recommendation
         | systems" can't offer RSS feeds.
        
       | philip1209 wrote:
       | I'm a fan of RSS and interoperability in general. That's why I
       | added full-text RSS on Postcard [1] sites.
       | 
       | Metrics-driven OKRs processes are at odds with privacy-first
       | protocols. The sad reality at most companies is "if we can't
       | measure it, we ain't gonna do it" - even if everybody is asking
       | for it. This is why OKRs suck.
       | 
       | So, I blame OKRs for getting rid of RSS and open protocols in
       | general.
       | 
       | [1] https://updates.postcard.page/posts/new-on-postcard-rss-
       | easi...
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | cxr wrote:
       | PSA: enable CORS[1] so people can make cross-origin requests
       | without having to run a proxy.
       | 
       | PSA #2: set things up so the author field of your feed includes
       | your email address (e.g. "Alice <alice@example.org>") and not
       | just your bare name, so people can more easily get in touch with
       | you without having to click through to the original post and then
       | hunt around for your contact page; otherwise, you might never
       | find out it's broken[2].
       | 
       | 1. <https://enable-cors.org>
       | 
       | 2. <https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-
       | tel...>
        
         | dont__panic wrote:
         | Curious why you recommend 1). Personally, I just don't use
         | Javascript in my blog posts. But maybe I'm missing a use-case
         | here?
         | 
         | I should really add my email address to my news feed though.
        
           | djbusby wrote:
           | It's so my domain can request from your domain using client
           | side JS on my page, loading your RSS with a cross origin
           | request.
        
           | cxr wrote:
           | I don't understand your remark about "Javascript in my blog
           | posts" or how it relates to CORS.
           | 
           | In theory, it should be trivial to make simple, truly
           | "serverless", web-based feed readers like AirSS[1][2]. In
           | practice, many people are prevented from doing this, because
           | the feeds they're interested in are hosted on servers that
           | don't support CORS, which leads to really annoying
           | workarounds (like needing to use a proxy or a separate
           | browser extension, etc.)
           | 
           | 1. <https://github.com/derek-zhou/airss>
           | 
           | 2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28730630>
        
             | dont__panic wrote:
             | Makes sense. I should disable CORS on my blog, then! I
             | normally use a dedicated feed reader, rather than a
             | browser, but it makes sense to accommodate both use cases.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | vanilla_nut wrote:
         | For those of you wondering if your GitHub Pages site enables
         | CORS: it does by default!
        
       | bgro wrote:
       | Can anybody recommend a RSS program that works on Windows that
       | isn't terrible? Or that literally does the minimum requirement of
       | works?
       | 
       | I don't know what happened, but when I tried to find something
       | earlier this year, it looked like there was nothing that was a
       | simple RSS without extra bloat that wasn't abandonware and that
       | actually literally worked.
       | 
       | Every time I ask this, 90% of the answers just say use X Android
       | app. Or I have to compile it myself from scratch with broken
       | directions (and then find out it has been broken for years). Or
       | it's like a docker image (thus requiring docker) or otherwise
       | requires installing multiple gigabytes of random new languages.
        
         | 5bolts wrote:
         | haven't used a dedicated installed program in ages - as i
         | browse on different machines at different times of day...
         | Newsblur ticked a ton of boxes for me, moved from inoreader.
        
         | ylk wrote:
         | Thunderbird includes an RSS client
        
         | timbit42 wrote:
         | QuiteRSS for Windows, MacOS, Linux and OS/2.
         | 
         | Flym for Android.
        
       | jesuslop wrote:
       | Nice to know that YouTube does RSS.
        
         | bretbernhoft wrote:
         | I did not know that YouTube offers RSS feeds for their
         | channels. I can see a lot of good use cases for that
         | information.
        
         | kornhole wrote:
         | You can also use https://api.invidious.io/ to get the feeds. I
         | keep the Youtube feed since I just share button to Newpipe.
         | From Newpipe I can send to Kodi for the big screen experience.
        
         | emsign wrote:
         | Yeah, I've cancelled all my subscriptions on YouTube and use a
         | browser extension that hides recommendations and ads. I follow
         | a lot of channels and there comes a point where I had to do
         | something since I was missing videos constantly. When I want to
         | watch YouTube I don't go to Youtube.com but open my RSS reader
         | that links me directly to the videos.
        
         | david2ndaccount wrote:
         | It's one of those features that feels like someone forgot they
         | support it and I fear the day when they remove it.
        
           | Blikkentrekker wrote:
           | Indeed; it doesn't feel as though it be in the interest of
           | the website which is why support is dropping.
           | 
           | Youtube wants people to subscribe, which I don't do, I simply
           | add the RSS feed of channels I want to be updated about which
           | is probably not what either Youtube or those channels want
           | given how much they are begging me to subscribe all the time.
        
         | sys_64738 wrote:
         | Yeah this is great once you know about it. It changes how you
         | use YouTube.
        
       | edhelas wrote:
       | If we have a RSS revival, please be Atom 1.0 :) !
        
         | doublepg23 wrote:
         | What are the differences between RSS and Atom?
         | 
         | Most of my experience with RSS is just for podcasts.
        
           | edhelas wrote:
           | Atom 1.0 is strictly and well defined in https://www.rfc-
           | editor.org/rfc/rfc5023
           | 
           | RSS is a bunch of different "standards" and good practices,
           | its way more difficult to parse and play with.
           | 
           | They both have the same goal, but one is just cleaner and
           | stricter :)
        
         | jonwinstanley wrote:
         | Didn't someone try to start a JSON based RSS standard a while
         | back?
        
           | johnsbrayton wrote:
           | JSON Feed - https://www.jsonfeed.org/
        
       | jeffgreco wrote:
       | I make heavy use of https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to convert
       | e-mail newsletters into RSS feeds -- IMO the RSS reader context
       | is way better than an email inbox for consuming newslettery
       | content.
        
         | john-tells-all wrote:
         | that's amazing! Subscribing now.
         | 
         | I'd love to find a "web2rss" for laggards that don't provide
         | their own feeds :)
        
           | yepguy wrote:
           | Maybe try Feed me up, Scotty!
           | 
           | [1]: https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/
        
         | locofocos wrote:
         | I find it hilarious that a bit lower down, someone is
         | discussing https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email to do the
         | opposite of this.
        
           | klysm wrote:
           | I think people should be able to consume however they want.
           | It seems easier to go RSS to email though.
        
         | buzzy_hacker wrote:
         | +1 I support this on Patreon. A nifty open source tool that you
         | can self host if you like, but I've run into no issues with the
         | hosted one
        
         | diordiderot wrote:
         | Wow! Very cool. Thank you for sharing
        
         | teg4n_ wrote:
         | feedbin gives you an email address to use for newsletters that
         | will show up in your rss feed. it's also nice.
        
       | superkuh wrote:
       | HN is a great place to gather RSS feeds. Any time there's an
       | interesting site I always look for them. These days I usually see
       | articles that appear on the HN front page a day or so before they
       | hit HN. But HN isn't the only place I practice this. Back in the
       | 2010s it was obvious reddit was going under so I did the same
       | there till 2015. I have 1000+ RSS feeds now and very little need
       | for news aggregators on the day to day (except finding new
       | feeds).
       | 
       | QuiteRSS is an excellent native reader that handles my thousands
       | of feeds well. It is so multi-platform it even has an OS/2
       | version. https://quiterss.org/
        
         | RadiozRadioz wrote:
         | I do this too, but only started a few days ago. That's a lot of
         | feeds you've collected, would you be open to sharing a list of
         | them?
        
           | vanilla_nut wrote:
           | I post my list of subscriptions to my blog in OPML format:
           | https://github.com/nathan-contino/nathan-
           | contino.github.io/b... (github link, so you can preview it).
           | 
           | If you like bicycles and simple tech stuff, you might enjoy.
        
           | superkuh wrote:
           | Sure. Here is the opml file and an HTML listing of the feed
           | URLs and their website URL/name organized by categories:
           | http://a.superkuh.com/feeds9.html and
           | http://a.superkuh.com/2022-11-04-feedlist.opml This is my
           | script to convert .opml to html unordered list,
           | http://superkuh.com/regexopmltohtml.pl.txt
           | 
           | Most HN sourced feeds are in the "Computing but not spammy"
           | category.
           | 
           | The first load of the big opml into QuiteRSS (if you try it)
           | might take a while. After that it will be faster. I suggest
           | enabling the "load database to ram" option in QuiteRSS
           | configuration.
        
         | noveltyaccount wrote:
         | Good grief I struggle to keep up with _eight_ feeds in my RSS
         | reader!
        
           | moehm wrote:
           | I see two use cases of an RSS reader. You can use them as a
           | stream of news and just dive in when you want, or trying to
           | read every article. I personally do a bit of both, mixing
           | feeds, but with good tagging and filtering.
        
       | MattyRad wrote:
       | I've used RSS to follow all media for the past 2 years
       | (FreshRSS+FeedMe, I have a guide here
       | https://soapstone.mradford.com/hn-rss-guide/). It's been the
       | single best thing I've done to reclaim my attention. Here's a
       | couple of other random thoughts:
       | 
       | - Being able to dismiss articles where the headline is the story
       | is really valuable. For example, I just dismissed "Twitter's mass
       | layoffs have begun (techcrunch.com)"- it's not worth my
       | attention.
       | 
       | - It's possible to accrue a large backlog of unread "semi-
       | interesting" items that may or may not be valuable. In this
       | sense, there's still a FOMO aspect to RSS, and you have to be
       | aggressive in dismissing articles. For exmaple, a few 2-week-old
       | backlog titles in my feed include "SHA-3 Buffer Overflow", "Show
       | HN: Restfox - Open source lightweight alternative to Postman",
       | and "Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain".
       | These are semi-interesting, but really I should just dismiss
       | them.
        
         | bibanez wrote:
         | I really like your reasoning. The only problem I see is that if
         | everyone did what you propose, we wouldn't have Hacker News at
         | all (upvotes, in the end, must come from somewhere).
         | 
         | So from a Kantian ethical point of view, it doesn't really
         | work. There ought to be a better solution. But on a personal
         | level, I wholeheartedly agree
        
       | jayant_kaushik wrote:
       | I use Inoreader. Terrific app. With RSS I am able to add feeds of
       | websites which normally have a paywall.
        
         | sys_64738 wrote:
         | I've been using INO Reader since Google Reader Death Day and
         | totally agree. Didn't know about the paywall. What does that
         | mean?
        
         | emsign wrote:
         | Unfortunately it's a website and not a standalone app, so the
         | privacy benefit of using RSS is gone.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | mawise wrote:
       | +1 for RSS, I leaned on RSS as my protocol-of-choice for
       | Haven[1], and even added a built-in RSS feed-reader. It provides
       | a single chronologically-ordered stream of content from all your
       | feeds which I've found makes it much more pleasant to read
       | through.
       | 
       | [1]: https://havenweb.org
        
         | vanilla_nut wrote:
         | Brilliant! If you ever need help with this, I would love to
         | pitch in. It reminds me of the olden days of social media.
         | 
         | For users who don't know how to self host, and can't stomach
         | the (very reasonable for ad-free social media) $5/mo... have
         | you considered a cloud-hosted option with a sidebar of KTLO
         | ads? Or maybe a "family plan" cloud instance where multiple
         | friends could share a single cloud instance (sharded per
         | person) to save money on the hosted option?
        
         | rambambram wrote:
         | Hi Matt, we've recently emailed about Haven and HeyHomepage
         | because we both are RSS-based, so to speak. Your software is
         | oriented towards private (group) communication and makes a
         | strong case as an alternative for Facebook. I've a lot of
         | respect for your product! With HeyHomepage I'm more publicly
         | oriented, more Twitter-like if you will. On top of a publicly
         | accessible website.
         | 
         | The beauty of RSS is it's interoperability. So I was wondering,
         | can your built-in newsreader also read my RSS feed, for
         | example? Or only other Haven feeds?
         | 
         | And the other way around, can I follow private feeds from Haven
         | users with my built-in newsreader? Or any other separate
         | newsreader software, for that matter? As long as Haven users
         | would share that link with me, of course.
        
         | dont__panic wrote:
         | Thank you so much for sharing! I have considered this _exact_
         | same idea to break my friends and family free from the chains
         | of Facebook and Instagram, but you 've packaged this up so
         | nicely, I should really give this a shot.
         | 
         | Is there a way to update my own blog to play nicely with Haven?
         | I like my own styling and hosting setup, and I already have my
         | own RSS reader, so ideally I would like to continue using
         | those, while also making them available to friends and family
         | on Haven.
        
       | breck wrote:
       | https://scroll.pub/ has made RSS irrelevant.
       | 
       | https://github.com/breck7/scroll/commit/0ca22e118e1cc9a79eb9...
        
         | lloydatkinson wrote:
         | Laughable
        
           | breck wrote:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlta-dP9Tq4
        
       | mYTtapS0 wrote:
       | I recently started using RSS again (self-hosted with miniflux).
       | One difficulty I have is that these kinds of RSS feeds in OP are
       | way too high-volume for me. But it can be hard to find good blogs
       | or RSS feeds without relying on Twitter to find them.
       | 
       | Back in the day, more people used to include a list of blogs they
       | follow on their own blogs, I thought this was a great practice. A
       | few still do, like this very interesting blog on statistics:
       | https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/blogs-i-read/
        
         | ilyt wrote:
         | > I recently started using RSS again (self-hosted with
         | miniflux). One difficulty I have is that these kinds of RSS
         | feeds in OP are way too high-volume for me. But it can be hard
         | to find good blogs or RSS feeds without relying on Twitter to
         | find them
         | 
         | Filter them. For example I have Tested youtube channel on feed
         | but put a filter on titles that gets most of the content Adam
         | Savage makes (as I kinda don't care about anything else they
         | do).
         | 
         | Also, splitting into groups helps a lot, just putting "low
         | volume but I want to see everything" stuff away from "just
         | basically a news feed of on average mildly interesting stuff"
         | hels
        
         | rambambram wrote:
         | > Back in the day, more people used to include a list of blogs
         | they follow on their own blogs, I thought this was a great
         | practice.
         | 
         | I thought the same, and so I built a sort of webring/blogroll
         | functionality in my website project, together with an
         | accompanying OPML file so these lists are easily shareable. I
         | did the same with a microblog/timeline, that had an RSS
         | counterpart. The web is already 'social media', if you ask me.
        
         | croutonwagon wrote:
         | I keep HN in its own category and not a part of my normal
         | unreads. So i have to go and see out HN threads and not have
         | them clutter up the main feed. But still able to go through
         | them.
        
         | lwhsiao wrote:
         | If you use a static site generator, there is a nice cli for
         | doing that called openring. It's what is used by people like
         | https://www.jefftk.com/ and https://drewdevault.com/.
         | 
         | Drew wrote the OG version: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
         | 
         | I also made a little rust version here:
         | https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs
        
         | pletnes wrote:
         | +1 for miniflux! It's great for low-volume, high-quality blogs.
         | It's got features to keep track of more frequent updates too,
         | if you can be bothered to categorize them.
        
           | kixiQu wrote:
           | I set my page length to something long (n>1000) and have a
           | userscript that round-robin sorts the unread posts by feed,
           | and it works pretty nicely for all but the _most_ high-volume
           | (e.g. Boing Boing)
           | https://maya.land/userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/
        
         | jollyllama wrote:
         | You can follow twitter feeds in RSS via Nitter instances. Just
         | place /rss after a profile URL.
        
           | themadturk wrote:
           | Feedbin lets you read Twitter as RSS feeds as well. US$5 a
           | month, but well worth it to me.
        
         | quickcheck wrote:
         | If you go the self-hosted route you can also put RSS-Bridge on
         | the same host to locally generate RSS feeds for a lot of
         | sources that don't have RSS like Twitter
         | https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
        
       | nazgulsenpai wrote:
       | Feeder is a great GPL RSS reader for Android. Save you some time
       | fumbling through the Google Play cess pool. Not affiliated just a
       | happy user.
       | 
       | https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
       | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...
        
         | account-5 wrote:
         | Me too, one of the first things I install on a new phone,after
         | fdroid of course.
        
         | lallysingh wrote:
         | I pay for Feedly. The big feature I love is that it will
         | generate anonymous email addresses for newsletters that show up
         | as just another feed.
        
         | ozarker wrote:
         | For iOS I really like Reeder
        
         | dont__panic wrote:
         | For iOS folks, I can't recommend NetNewsWire more. I pair NNW
         | on my phone and laptop with Fresh.RSS running on my raspberry
         | pi for most of my news and blog feeds these days.
         | 
         | HN nerds might remember that NNW is very fast, even by native
         | macOS standards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23286362
         | 
         | If you're feeling fatigued by algorithmic nonsense these days,
         | you should seriously give RSS a try.
        
           | cxr wrote:
           | > fatigued by algorithmic nonsense
           | 
           | Let's not participate in the corruption of the word
           | "algorithm" here on HN, too. We wouldn't tolerate people
           | saying "integral" when they mean "derivative", so we
           | shouldn't tolerate this, either. We can afford to abstain
           | from this sort of quick-and-easy but sloppy use of language
           | as a shorthand for generic memetic outrage.
        
           | ascagnel_ wrote:
           | And if you're looking to move off of the Twitter app, NNW has
           | a built-in tool to ingest Twitter timelines and searches (you
           | still need to sign in to use Twitter's API).
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | +1 for this: the NetNewsWire Mac and iPhone combo, which
           | syncs state using iCloud, is exactly the right feed reader
           | solution for me. Just works.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | pkulak wrote:
         | If you're inclined to self-host (or can just run a Docker-
         | compose anywhere on your network), MiniFlux is amazing.
        
           | croutonwagon wrote:
           | Agree. Been using it for a while now after.
        
         | lolinder wrote:
         | I tried using a local-only RSS reader after ditching Feedly,
         | but I found myself missing the ability to easily switch between
         | devices.
         | 
         | I ended up setting up a FreshRSS[0] instance which I've been
         | quite happy with so far. It provides the Google Reader API,
         | which is still supported by a lot of FOSS mobile RSS readers (I
         | picked Readrops[1]).
         | 
         | [0] https://www.freshrss.org/
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/readrops/Readrops
        
         | croutonwagon wrote:
         | Personally I use miniflux. Not app needed for iOS or otherwise.
         | Its pretty nice. You can also host it wherever.
         | 
         | https://miniflux.app/
        
       | account-5 wrote:
       | I love RSS/atom feeds. One thing I'm wondering though, RSS is is
       | XML based. Most things are/have moved to JSON (RPC really more
       | than REST). My question is why is XML still good for this use
       | case? Genuinely interested.
        
         | ZeroGravitas wrote:
         | https://www.jsonfeed.org/
         | 
         | Is an attempt to move these to json.
        
         | dinosaurdynasty wrote:
         | JSON Feed is a thing, not many websites that support RSS
         | support it however.
        
         | cxr wrote:
         | Little-known trick:
         | 
         | You can add an `xml-stylesheet` processing instruction at the
         | top of your XML-based feed format to transform it via XSLT into
         | HTML. When viewed in a Web browser, it will look like an
         | ordinary Web page, but in reality it's actually RSS/Atom
         | consumable by anyone's feed reader. Nobody has to hunt for the
         | URL to the RSS/Atom feed, because the URL of the top-level post
         | index for your blog _is_ the URL to the RSS /Atom feed. You
         | also don't have to set up your static site generator to
         | generate a separate feed file. Neat!
         | 
         | Can't do that with JSON.
        
         | ilyt wrote:
         | It's not better or worse, it was just first. I guess having
         | schemas in standard rather than some kind of addon like for
         | JSON is a benefit but not really that relevant, schema doesn't
         | help all that much if you make bad RSS stream anyway.
        
       | bsnnkv wrote:
       | I'm a big fan of RSS and curate a number of topic-specific feeds
       | of highlights available for people to subscribe to (in my profile
       | for anyone who is interested).
       | 
       | I wish more feeds had this kind of focus- sharing the meat of
       | something in the item body rather than a bland summary or a plain
       | click through to an article.
       | 
       | The feed item should give me a reason to go through to the
       | article/link/comment, not just be a spammy list of things that
       | might be interesting but probably won't be (but I won't know
       | until I click through and find out for myself).
        
       | CodeWriter23 wrote:
       | Didn't podcasting start out with self-publishing links via your
       | own website and end up a "platform" owned by various aggregators,
       | and the links are tracked and redirected with maybe a little CDN
       | baked in?
        
       | axiolite wrote:
       | A good RSS reader is like a DVR for everything else (text,
       | images, audio).
        
       | kornhole wrote:
       | I moved all my feeds to Nextcloud News which is just one of a
       | dozen or so add-ons I setup on my Nextcloud server. The official
       | free mobile app is awesome, and Nextcloud syncs with just about
       | any feed reader.
       | 
       | My only hesitation about Nextcloud is that I don't like to put
       | too many eggs in one basket. It is best in class for cloud
       | services and now my most critical installation. Their innovation
       | and drive as a company is impressive probably because they have
       | real values that align with their people.
        
       | NoboruWataya wrote:
       | Does anyone use (or know of) software that follows RSS feeds and
       | sends you a single daily/weekly/whatever digest with links to all
       | new posts? TinyTinyRSS has this functionality which I am
       | currently using but it's not very pretty or configurable - I'm
       | wondering if there is anything else that I could look into.
        
         | variant wrote:
         | Doesn't do a digest (at least not that I'm aware of), but
         | rss2email[1] does a good job of aggregating feed updates into
         | your email inbox.
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email
        
         | zacharytalis wrote:
         | I'm also working on a tool to do this:
         | https://github.com/ZacharyTalis/rss-digest-flask/
         | 
         | Though I'm running into a stubborn issue where FreshRSS doesn't
         | parse the date correctly... so your mileage may vary.
        
         | asdfqwertzxcv wrote:
         | Been using https://feedmail.org/ to do exactly this.
        
         | charlieegan3 wrote:
         | You might be able to get what you need with IFTTT or Zapier.
         | They have email digests and support RSS triggers.
        
         | aliceryhl wrote:
         | I wrote my own program that submits new RSS entries to my
         | todoist account once each night.
        
         | funksta wrote:
         | I am building something like this! It's oriented specifically
         | towards reading the feeds via a pdf digest on eReaders like the
         | reMarkable/Supernote/etc though.
         | 
         | 1. configure your feeds (RSS/Atom, but also Twitter/Reddit) in
         | a simple dashboard 2. connect Google Drive (Dropbox/OneDrive to
         | be supported eventually) 3. on a daily schedule, a pdf file
         | with your feeds' content will be sent to your GDrive account,
         | which can be synced on your tablet device.
         | 
         | If interested, I've got a survey you can fill out to get alpha
         | access: https://forms.gle/qmy6WMgHLxWiEgx4A
        
       | mab122 wrote:
       | Project mentioned in the article is being discontinued
       | unfortunately: https://bibliogram.art/ - Discontinuing Bibliogram
       | (2022-09-01)
        
       | alexmorenobaeza wrote:
       | aaa
        
       | verisimi wrote:
       | The story of RSS is so telling.
       | 
       | I loved Google for the way that promoted it so heavily. I thought
       | that it was conceivable that a corporation need not be evil.....
       | How naive!
       | 
       | But then Google dropped rss! Just when they had everyone there!!
       | Why?
       | 
       | It was by design. It was an attempt to kill a protocol that
       | supported disintermediated information, where the user could get
       | information directly from source.
       | 
       | I've never stopped using rss - it is hands down the best way to
       | get information.
        
       | diordiderot wrote:
       | I'm kind of a JSON maximalist because I find it really simple and
       | haven't put too much thought into it.
       | 
       | I'd also like to shout out
       | 
       | https://www.jsonfeed.org/
       | 
       | https://jsonresume.org/
       | 
       | https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/
       | 
       | https://geojson.org/
       | 
       | It'd be pretty cool to have an ecosystem where you could
       | 
       | ```
       | 
       | $ packagemanger init my-site password
       | 
       | $ hostOfChoice deploy
       | 
       | ```
       | 
       | Go to the url, auth yourself, then have a list of "plugins" that
       | act as a ~cms for formats like the ones above
       | 
       | Edit: Could you at least tell me why you're downvoting
        
         | quintussss wrote:
         | I don't get why anybody would want a json feed. RSS/Atom are
         | already simple to the point of being trivial, so why introduce
         | more standards?
        
           | jonwinstanley wrote:
           | JSON is more readable to humans, while still being great for
           | machines
        
           | SahAssar wrote:
           | XML is a far more complex format to parse.
        
           | diordiderot wrote:
           | For me personally, two reasons
           | 
           | 1. I find it easier to work with JSON using javascript
           | 
           | 2. The stupid reason, I find it more aesthetically pleasing
        
           | kixiQu wrote:
           | You're not exactly wrong - I don't serve out a json feed
           | myself, even - but RSS/Atom are terribly underused for cases
           | other than "personal organization of feed reading" when they
           | _could_ handle a lot of weirder poll-for-updates automation,
           | and the json format seems like an attempt to encourage that
           | direction. You don 't need a bespoke API if what you have
           | makes sense in a feed like this, but people would really
           | rather work with a json than XML.
        
         | jordemort wrote:
         | I'm a structured data maximalist so in addition to RSS and
         | Atom, I implemented Schema.org metadata on my blog for
         | GoogleBot, and I implemented JSON Feed and h-feed/h-entry
         | markup, even though I've never seen anything that actually uses
         | JSON Feed out in the wild. I'd be interested if there's anyone
         | out there that's actually using these sorts of feeds.
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-04 23:00 UTC)