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.
It stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, but you don’t need to know or care about that part.
The part that matters is that you get news from places you trust without the algorithm BS. RSS lets you subscribe to any website you want, and you see all of their new posts, in reverse chronological order, no algorithm. You can (if you have a good reader) filter out subjects you’re not interested in, and just see the stuff you care about.
I recommend trying out Feedly (feedly.com) with a few sites you already follow, and going from there.
In addition to blogs, RSS is used by podcasts. If you use an app like Spotify, you’re not using RSS, but rather their internal API, which tracks how much of the show you listened to, etc. If you use an RSS based app (overcast is my favorite), you’re often going to be subscribing via an RSS feed.
For podcasting, RSS has advantages and disadvantages. The upside is that it’s about as private as possible. You do show up on someone’s radar when you download episodes, but your podcast player isn’t sending detailed information that can identify you or your listening habits. The disadvantage is mainly for podcasters publishing on RSS: it’s very hard to tell how many listeners you have, and how active they are.
I’ve been loving RSS for awhile now not only because it’s private but because it seems to be unpaywalled as well? Maybe someone can answer this, but how is it I can subscribe to the NYT RSS feed and can get completely free articles to my reader?
PS shoutout to NetNewsWire on iOS which is open source and the developer seems like a great guy. It’s not great for discovery as you have to paste in the web url manually, but if you already know what you want to read it’s a great RSS reader app.
Which NYT rss feed are you using? Mine seems to have paywalled articles + is it maybe the app you are using? It’s surprisingly easy to crawl the full text to display it
This is the feed xml I use for NYT Breaking News. I get the usual text preview but if I choose to expand the full article it’s always there. This is true on NetNewsWire and Inoreader which I previously used.
@wrath-sedan wow, this one is really great!
I love to have not only the headers, also the full article is possible to crawl. 😍
