I’ve gotten to a point in my privacy journey where it’s less about moving towards private options, and more about relaxing and having some fun with what I can do.
I put off messing around with RSS for a while. I simply didn’t have a significant need for it. However, after finding no good options to monitor various Lemmy communities without logging in, I decided to try out an RSS reader.
I settled on Feeder as my RSS reader, despite a few missing features I would like. I added my first Lemmy community as a feed, to try it out. I was immediately surprised how well it worked.
I also added other feeds, such as Tails News, and I was happy with that. I could monitor all the communities I needed to.
Then, I noticed one day, there was an RSS button for my Lemmy inbox. This is where I was really pleased: I can view my notifications without the need to log in, all in the same place.
Lemmy and RSS are both incredible, and I truly believe RSS is the hidden backbone of the internet. I love it, and maybe you should give it a try too!
(Ahem P.S. if anyone has an RSS reader as good as Feeder for Android that fixes this issue, please let me know)
It’s cool.
I currently catch up on news with it.
Firefox has RSS radar extensions that can help find rss feeds in websites(that don’t really show/mention it on every page)
Really? Why’d Firefox remove such a useful feature?
Security concerns? Or no one maintaining it?
Mozilla claimed that it was rarely used
I wish more blogs, websites and services would offer RSS feeds. I personally use Thunderbird as my feed reader on PC. Not sure if the Android client has this functionality too.
I’ve found that a lot of blogs do have RSS feeds even if there is no visible link or mention of RSS anywhere on the website. I often just throw the blog URL into the ‘add feed’ box on The Old Reader, and it turns out there is feed info hidden in there somewhere.
I’ve noticed that too and try that also. Sometimes the reader does not find anything, but adding /rss.xml or /feed/ or something manually to the link does work at times. The inconsistency is also a problem. But some blogs just do not have such a functionality at all, or is not tested (wrong dates, therefore unusable). Its often sometimes an afterthought and inconsistent.
RSS is awesome. My favorite fun fact is that podcasts are RSS-based, which is why you can listen to any of them from any podcast app.
I personally hate newsletters because
- my email inbox is already cluttered enough as it is
- I need to share my email to subscribe, which puts the balance of power into the hands of the sender at the expense of my privacy
I’d rather have newsletters made available through RSS feeds, where I can subscribe and unsubscribe anonymously.
You can turn newsletters into RSS feeds anonymously through Kill the Newsletter.
I’ve been using it for over a year and it works flawlessly. Highly recommend!
I second that excitement! When I first found RSS, it felt like rediscovering the original intent of the internet. It gives you full flexibility of your sources of information all in one place, without giving your data away to a corporate entity, or signing up for any platform for that matter.
Tbh it is such a breath of fresh air compared to the feeds and platforms we’ve become accustomed to–and RSS has been around longer than them, which is crazy to me.
I just hope websites on the internet continue to support it–as many older, not as common technologies often get phased out.
