Hopefully this is a fit for this community (for getting value out of a self-hosted RSS aggregator/reader).
I’m looking for a list of high-value feeds to subscribe to or some alternative ideas to use RSS for in $current_year such as subscribing to a youtube channel without being logged in/directly using the frontend.
It is a mix of use cases, from Podcasts to news, blogs, webcomics and Github releases.
To not see ads in articles and still see at least headlines of what is going in the world. I’ll sub to many news outlets for stuff I don’t even read just because much of my online presence is fairly absent of algorithms and that has resulted in me not knowing what people are talking about too many times, even if it is stupid. Sometimes a single YouTube title and thumb nail is all I need to see to know something happened in the world. So this way the things I want to see, and things I don’t want to see are separated, so I have to actively to go out of my way to look at it. Its not blasting my mind palace 24/7 will bullshit every time I want to look at a picture of a cat or whatever.
I also use it to add YouTube channels I don’t watch, but again want to keep up with trends so I have a large list of popular channels, and ones that I know will make a video about clickbait nonsense. So they are the canarie in the coal mine for me on certain issues/topics.
That way none of it gets loaded on my phone my RSS server handles it, I can view it from there. Also I don’t need to load up 700+ channels every time I refresh my newpipe subscription on my phone. I also have sit down and view channels separated to my pipepipe profile on my PC. The channels on my phone are more listening/podcast like experiences.
I also subscribed to a bunch of small things, gaming projects to get updates, or comics, etc but they get buried because I don’t seperate my feed and its been less useful. Its just not in my habit of checking my RSS feed for that kind of stuff. It used to be more useful for fun stuff when reddit let you use it with RSS but I think they stopped that? Its feels like you can turn less random news pages into RSS feeds these days too. So yeah now its mostly kind of a boring place that aggregates all of my news and world info.
Lots of good responses so far. I’ll add my favorite: https://github.com/johnwarne/upvote-rss which is the only sane way for me to discover posts on popular forum boards like reddit and Lemmy. I can set the number of posts I’m shown a day, and it adds friction to the process of interacting with the post, which means if I comment, I really wanted to :)
I’ve used Protopage as my start page for years. I put each news source in in a small window which includes the five most recent post. I see the title and hover for for the intro.
The reason I’ve used Protopage so long is because it will parse many websites without proper RSS feeds.
I was going to send a screenshot of my start page but I don’t know how to it in linux.
I use it for pretty much everything I care about that’s posted online. I selfhost RSSHub to get updates from sites that don’t provide RSS. It’s much more convenient to have a universal inbox that’s under my control than have to remind myself to manually check dozens of browser tabs, all with their own algorithmic “for you” feeds. barf.
commit history of some software i use
Kind of obvious but: Podcasts
I love the classic “Subscribe to an RSS feed and get all of your podcasts downloaded automatically” mechanic. Using AntennaPod as feed catcher and podcast player. To me this is the absolute best way to listen to my regular podcasts.
Automatically downloading new Anime episodes on my home server. I use qBittorrent, which allows you to add RSS feeds and add any new item on the feed to your downloads: I feed it RSS links from Nyaa, setup the auto downloader and done! As soon as I turn the server on, it is downloaded in a few minutes.
And also the usual fetching articles from news sites with NewsBlur (though trying to move away from that app, it’s starting to feel bloated and the dev uses way too much LLMs for my liking)
in $current_year
Is that a joke or a bot?
Regardless I use Newsflash RSS for this stuff and more:
- Lemmy
- News - Tech, Global, Local
- Podcasts
- Youtube Channels
- Recipes
- Friends’ Blogs
- Niche Topics
I’m surprised to see so much response to that bit. I feel like I’ve seen that on forums or newsboards for a long time for any question relating to something that can be repurposed after some amount of time. Really just a stand-in forsomething that’s likely been asked before.
yeah it’s normal. llm slop has made people so distrusting lol
For good reason. For years bots have been making Reddit posts just to farm for content for YouTube videos or market research
Is that a thing that happens from small instances in the fediverse? I’d assume those instances would be defederated pretty quickly if they weren’t actually using the bot flag on accounts.
Oh yes it’s a thing, to a lesser extent than Reddit though obviously. In order for anything to be done about it though, the bot accounts usually have to do something that betrays the fact that they’re bot accounts though. Such as accidentally passing through a variable instead of the value, such as with your post. Hence why you will see people question you
What a brave new world we’re living in.
The one non-obvious thing that I use RSS for is to monitor releases on GitHub, so that when I’m waiting for some project to release some bugfix it gets conveniently listed in my RSS reader.
I wish GitHub also supported rss feeds for issue and pull request discussions, it recently got added to Forgejo.
There is at least one workaround, if you don’t mind being a bit flexible.
GitHub lets users add multiple email addresses to their accounts and assign them as notification recipients. I’ve added a Kill-the-Newsletter (not affiliated) email to my account, and then use custom routing to route all emails for orgs I’m a part of to my email address - and everything else to Kill-the-Newsletter.
With this setup, all notifications related to orgs I specify come to my primary email address, anything else by default hits the RSS feed from Kill-the-Newsletter and keeps my inbox from getting slammed when a particular issue/etc. has a ton of activity.
Thanks, it’s good to know of other workarounds but I’ll probably stick to RSSHub since I find it easier use/manage. I believe RSS Bridge has a route too.
I quickly wiped up a little tool to automate this on my RSS feed it could maybe be useful to you if you use docker 😘 https://github.com/P6g9YHK6/DockFeed
I have been selfhosting miniflux, and using Capy Reader on Android. Been using this for almost two years now. It’s been great.
Mostly use it for news and blogs. But I follow some lemmy community and mastodon feeds with this as well. Anything with an RSS feed can be followed.
i love capy reader
I’ve run my own since Google Reader shutdown. I add any site I come across that it interesting. I look at their content and then add them. If they get spamy or suck, I remove them.
I miss greader so much. Even my non teachy friends used it, we shared and commented there a lot.
My best strategy has been to use Lemmy, and then if I liked a post shared here, I would check if that post came from a site with an RSS feed.
I’ve also been reading posts on bubbles.town and finding lots of fun niche little blogs to subscribe to. Bubbles has its own RSS feeds, too, sharing the highest-voted posts.
Also, more relevant to this community, I’m watching feeds for releases for most of the software I’m running.
youtube channels, blogs, news, software releases, etc
i use freshrss. allows me to sub to websites that don’t have rss/atom by parsing html.
i use reeder classic on ios and easyrss on android
