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AstroLightz @lemmy.world

Benefits of RSS? Where should I look for trustworthy feeds?

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?

34 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • My rss app combines 44 different news sites into one long feed. It replaced multiple apps and makes checking an assload of news very easy.

  • 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"> in the <head>, where CHANNEL_ID is 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_ID

    If 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:

     bash
        
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

    Edit: Seems like, Lemmy messes up the code formatting, but you get the gist ...

  • I’ve seen a lot of people praising RSS feeds over standard news.

    RSS (and Atom) syndication feeds are not a different news. It’s the same content packaged and delivered differently. It’s just different packaging & delivery system from HTML. A lot of news sites also have syndication feeds.

34 comments