I feel like I missed this part of internet school.
An RSS feed is a publication that you can subscribe to without needing to give any personal information, such as your email address.
Website would publish their blog entries to an RSS feed so you didn’t need to keep going to their website, or give your email address to get it sent to you that way.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.
Is there a big difference between paid and free readers? It seems weird for them to only list readers with monthly cost (+a browser).
Thought I’d drop my Reader recommendations (all free of cost and FOSS):
- iOS/iPadOS and MacOS: NetNewsWire - App Store, GitHub
- Android: ReadYou - F-Droid, GitHub
- Linux: NewsFlash - Flathub, GitLab
- Windows (cross-platform): GitHub I’m not listing links for all 6-ish platforms of just this one individually just go here.
The aforementioned are readers which can either read feeds saved in them locally, or on a supported service. If you wish to self-host a feed aggregator (so you can sync your read articles etc across platforms), I recommend FreshRSS. NetNewsWire can sync this stuff over iCloud.
Lots of websites (news, blogs, etc) have an “RSS” page which is automatically updated every time they make a new post. People have RSS apps, which scan all the RSS pages they’re subscribed to, and can quickly in one place see all the new posts they’re interested in.
Me personally, I have an RSS app that tells me anytime Winehq, This Week in KDE, and Frame.work make a new post
Feeder it’s on f droid. Really simple and nice.
You can also use it as a YouTube aggregator and open all YouTube links in Newpipe for an anonymous private portable YouTube subscription feed.
It’s maybe a bit of a niche use case, but I predominantly use RSS links in my torrent client. (uTorrent 2.2.1, specifically, but I’m sure other more modern ones support it as well.) It’s very useful if you want to say download all the new Linux isos that happen to share the name of a popular currently airing TV series, and contain s01 and 1080p in their name. You can just put the search terms in whatever site you get your Linux ISOs from, copy the link on the RSS button, and put it in your torrent client, and your ISOs just magically show up as they’re released.
I use Reeder on iOS and have for yonks. I was using it with Feed Wrangler (for synchronisation) until it folded and then I just imported my feeds into Reeder directly so it syncs across all of my devices.
The loss of Google Reader was a blow to RSS but it’s never gone away and a great way of getting your news and information.
(Disclaimer, I now run an RSS-to-Email service, but that is an effect of my liking the approach)
My preferred approach has been to subscribe using an RSS-to-Email service. I then filter the items into dedicated folders in my mailbox. For most of these folders I turn off notifications and turn on syncing so that whenever I have downtime I can browse through them.
I like it because I already have email set up on all of my devices an my email clients are nice and configurable. I also like that I can direct a few feeds towards my inbox for things that I want to act on quickly.
As mentioned, RSS is used by RSS readers to keep tabs on constantly updating content.
Typically this would be something like: today’s sports/business stories, every single weather watch issued by the National Weather Service, or the last 10 blog posts on Daring Fireball.
Like most XML-based formats from the early 2000’s, it’s complex, excessively verbose, and hard to read as a human (hello CDATA) but it’s good enough for computers.
What killed it was Google killing off the most popular reader (Google Reader). They did this mostly because people wouldn’t go to the destination websites… which is bad for their pagview metrics.
Ultimately Facebook came along and put everything behind their wall, where no RSS feeds are available.
I’ll add the important bit, that it’s this icon:
If you see this icon, click it. If you have a program/app that can read the feed, it will open and you’ll see what it does.
Even Lemmy communities have their own RSS feeds, tho it’s limited to last 10 or 50? Idk, posts.
I can’t seem to read this icon in Jerboa. Not sure if it’s a Jerboa thing or Lemmy thing or what.
RSS, is a fantastic thing, which makes it very easy to keep track of updates, news, blog posts, etc… for hundreds of things at the same time… in an easily consumable method.
IMO-
Feedly, is one of the better PAID apps.
FreshRSS is a great self-hosted alternative. This is what I use.
Going to plug inoreader. Feedly has IMO lost its way, they’re way too focused on selling thousand dollar annual “AI” powered monitoring solutions.
