Out of curiosity, how many people actually use an RSS Feed Reader?
I don't use one, and from this it sounds like I may be in a minority of techies no using one. Should I use one instead of relying on link aggregators to feed my procrastination?
I use it because there are many interesting blogs that publish infrequently with months or years between posts and most of those posts never hit the front page of any link aggregrator. And even back when Twitter still was somewhat useful, it was a terrible way to catch these posts as they quickly passed by in the feed.
I use one, and have been trying very hard to get any of my friends to use one, and have failed at that. I was under the impression that RSS is still a fairly niche technology among tech workers at large, though more represented among people who post to lobste.rs b/c it's a really good way to stay up-to-date with many blogs.
I started using feed readers again just in the last couple of months. There were a couple of Lobsters stories on the topic, and in the "cozy web" frame of mind I thought, "Gee, I should pick this up again!" I went with Capy Reader because it's minimalist and open source.
To answer your question, whether feed readers are "better" than link aggregators (for some definition of the term): eh, sometimes! Most of my procrastination still comes from link aggregators, but occasionally I'll get something extra from my feed reader, usually via the following pathway:
Alice's blog hits the front page of Lobsters, etc.
I like her writing, so I subscribe!
Weeks pass.
Alice publishes another article, but for whatever reason it doesn't rank as highly on Lobsters.
I started using Thunderbird for it relatively recently. This was ironically motivated by most link aggregators and tech related social media I follow devolving (or being forcibly devolved) into slop. Just trawling through my old bookmarks and history for unique domains, I gathered a couple dozen of niche blogs, but there's plenty of ways to find more: marginalia search, bearblog's discover, googling for personal gitea/forgejo instances and checking for blog subdomains, googling for random stuff and coming across them, or googling for random lists of sites someone already put together in a github repo. And some blogs link to other blogs, who in turn link to other blogs, who link to even more blogs. Those are a gold mine. At this point I think I have hundreds of feeds and am losing track of how I'm discovering them lol.
Niche blogs aside, quite a few vendors and CERTs maintain their own feeds, which is really handy for keeping up with infosec related news. Did you know you can add seclists.org to your feed reader and get the oss-sec mailing list as an RSS feed? Every once in a while a security advisory will credit a specific org or person for a report, if you're lucky they have a high quality blog, and if you're even luckier it'll have a feed. Add it to your reader and carry on.
Anyhow, it's particularly nice breaking out a bit from the US/Western Europe bubble sites like this one tend to be in. It's not like you have to ditch link aggregators entirely (or maybe do, and boost your productivity); they're complementary to feed readers.
I do - NetNewsWire, on macOS and iPhone (it neatly syncs state between the two).
I'm not subscribed to much - less than 100 feeds total - but I get some good stuff in there. People who can be bothered to implement RSS/Atom turns out to be a good filter for people who publish good content!
I also use it for quite a few personal hacks. I have my own custom feed of photographs of California Brown Pelicans from iNaturalist, for example.
Same setup for me. I use rss for many years, starting with Google Reader, multiple apps and services since (including Inoreader, Feedbin, standalone Reeder app, probably more I don’t remember), until finally landing on self-hosted Miniflux, with changing apps to consume it (currently Unread, I also like Lire and Current).
I also consume email only newsletters as rss, via https://kill-the-newsletter.com/, as I don’t like reading in my mail client.
I have a categories of feeds that no single aggregator would pull together. NetNewsWire keeps me up to date on them. Reviving my feeds was what enabled me to finally kick Reddit.
I use FreshRSS. I used to use Feedly and then Inoreader, but self-hosting works better for me. RSS is the main way I get tech news these days.
It's hard to see how many people use it by asking it that way, since communities like Lobster are echo chambers that attract like-minded people. I think the more important thing is whether you find using it brings you value. I certainly do.
I read a metric ton of blogs over RSS. Also a handful of podcasts distributed over RSS. And, technically, my "youtube homepage is an absolute mess, let's use the RSS feeds to create a sensible set of links"[0] thing is an RSS reader.
[0] not exactly what it does but you get the idea.
I use yarr. Feeds have been my main content discovery tool for ~20 years. Yes, I am that guy that pesters you if you create a blog without a means to subscribe to it :)
I use it, but only to receive updates from the blogs I follow (with titles and summaries of articles). Then I click on the original link to read the full content. I know some people read articles directly in the reader.
I use Miniflux and I follow hundreds of great blogs/websites on it. Everyday I have 20–30 new posts to read. It is much better than doomscrolling on Reddit I suppose. Lobsters is not bad though.
Kindof, I use rss-parrot to follow feeds on the fediverse https://rss-parrot.net/ . While the feedreaders I used to use are defunct, I kept around the opml in case I could pick them up again, and when the parrot appeared I re-subbed to sites I used to read.
I just had at my own logs, out of curiosity, and it's interesting. I'm trying my best to stay off of Google and search engines, so I didn't expect much traffic my way from there. Looking at my logs for a single day, May the 4th, not counting various crawlers I drive into a maze of garbage:
I had 32 referers mentioning google.com. All 32 hit /atom.xml.
I had 5231 requests total
Of those, 3329 hit an RSS feed
1902 hit something else
Not surprising that google drives basically nothing my way (as hoped, because I tried to tell it not to index me). But my RSS traffic is considerably larger on this particular site (my blog) than direct visits. At least on that day.
Looking at the entire log collection (~7 days): 19k regular hits, 27k RSS/Atom. Feeds still win!
I subscribe to the Top Stories of the Past Week feed. It’s a nice way to catch good stories that I may have missed during my irregular manual browsing.
aleyan | 13 hours ago
Out of curiosity, how many people actually use an RSS Feed Reader?
I don't use one, and from this it sounds like I may be in a minority of techies no using one. Should I use one instead of relying on link aggregators to feed my procrastination?
kryptiskt | 13 hours ago
I use it because there are many interesting blogs that publish infrequently with months or years between posts and most of those posts never hit the front page of any link aggregrator. And even back when Twitter still was somewhat useful, it was a terrible way to catch these posts as they quickly passed by in the feed.
gerikson | 13 hours ago
I use one daily and have since Google Reader (R.I.P.) Now I use Feedly.
I find it excellent for feeding procrastination.
polywolf | 13 hours ago
I use one, and have been trying very hard to get any of my friends to use one, and have failed at that. I was under the impression that RSS is still a fairly niche technology among tech workers at large, though more represented among people who post to lobste.rs b/c it's a really good way to stay up-to-date with many blogs.
slondr | 12 hours ago
I use one. I have a freshrss server self-hosted, and use various freshrss-compatible clients on devices to read the entries themselves.
bitshift | 6 hours ago
I started using feed readers again just in the last couple of months. There were a couple of Lobsters stories on the topic, and in the "cozy web" frame of mind I thought, "Gee, I should pick this up again!" I went with Capy Reader because it's minimalist and open source.
To answer your question, whether feed readers are "better" than link aggregators (for some definition of the term): eh, sometimes! Most of my procrastination still comes from link aggregators, but occasionally I'll get something extra from my feed reader, usually via the following pathway:
7tehdt3cnw6kir6o | 11 hours ago
I started using Thunderbird for it relatively recently. This was ironically motivated by most link aggregators and tech related social media I follow devolving (or being forcibly devolved) into slop. Just trawling through my old bookmarks and history for unique domains, I gathered a couple dozen of niche blogs, but there's plenty of ways to find more: marginalia search, bearblog's discover, googling for personal gitea/forgejo instances and checking for blog subdomains, googling for random stuff and coming across them, or googling for random lists of sites someone already put together in a github repo. And some blogs link to other blogs, who in turn link to other blogs, who link to even more blogs. Those are a gold mine. At this point I think I have hundreds of feeds and am losing track of how I'm discovering them lol.
Niche blogs aside, quite a few vendors and CERTs maintain their own feeds, which is really handy for keeping up with infosec related news. Did you know you can add seclists.org to your feed reader and get the oss-sec mailing list as an RSS feed? Every once in a while a security advisory will credit a specific org or person for a report, if you're lucky they have a high quality blog, and if you're even luckier it'll have a feed. Add it to your reader and carry on.
Anyhow, it's particularly nice breaking out a bit from the US/Western Europe bubble sites like this one tend to be in. It's not like you have to ditch link aggregators entirely (or maybe do, and boost your productivity); they're complementary to feed readers.
simonw | 11 hours ago
I do - NetNewsWire, on macOS and iPhone (it neatly syncs state between the two).
I'm not subscribed to much - less than 100 feeds total - but I get some good stuff in there. People who can be bothered to implement RSS/Atom turns out to be a good filter for people who publish good content!
I also use it for quite a few personal hacks. I have my own custom feed of photographs of California Brown Pelicans from iNaturalist, for example.
yashgarg | 8 hours ago
I have Miniflux self-hosted which I connect with Unread for the iOS and macOS app.
diktomat | 3 hours ago
Same setup for me. I use rss for many years, starting with Google Reader, multiple apps and services since (including Inoreader, Feedbin, standalone Reeder app, probably more I don’t remember), until finally landing on self-hosted Miniflux, with changing apps to consume it (currently Unread, I also like Lire and Current).
I also consume email only newsletters as rss, via https://kill-the-newsletter.com/, as I don’t like reading in my mail client.
benoliver999 | 6 hours ago
I love RSS and use it for YouTube and email newsletters as well as websites.
It's a niche thing perhaps but most sites still have feeds
alper | 2 hours ago
I've gone back to using Netnewswire which is amazingly clean and light weight.
kaimac | 13 hours ago
I've tried many readers but the one I've ended up sticking with is the very simple https://vore.website by ~j3s.
oceanhaiyang | 12 hours ago
Vore is a very odd choice in naming given the meaning of the term.
mtset | 10 hours ago
I assume it's an intentional pun, because it ingests RSS feeds.
blakesmith | 12 hours ago
I self host a minflux instance in my homelab. Great way to keep up with niche blogs that only post occasionally.
oceanhaiyang | 12 hours ago
I used FreshRss then my DB died and idk if I want to set it up again.
jcd | 10 hours ago
I have a categories of feeds that no single aggregator would pull together. NetNewsWire keeps me up to date on them. Reviving my feeds was what enabled me to finally kick Reddit.
LesleyLai | 6 hours ago
I use FreshRSS. I used to use Feedly and then Inoreader, but self-hosting works better for me. RSS is the main way I get tech news these days.
It's hard to see how many people use it by asking it that way, since communities like Lobster are echo chambers that attract like-minded people. I think the more important thing is whether you find using it brings you value. I certainly do.
zimpenfish | 4 hours ago
I read a metric ton of blogs over RSS. Also a handful of podcasts distributed over RSS. And, technically, my "youtube homepage is an absolute mess, let's use the RSS feeds to create a sensible set of links"[0] thing is an RSS reader.
[0] not exactly what it does but you get the idea.
catwell | 3 hours ago
I use yarr. Feeds have been my main content discovery tool for ~20 years. Yes, I am that guy that pesters you if you create a blog without a means to subscribe to it :)
miguno | 2 hours ago
+1 I use one.
Hecate | 2 hours ago
I do use feedbin, it's a good product.
wink | 2 hours ago
I 95% use the lobsters feed as an entry point, very rarely do I visit the homepage.
And yes, that's a general: I use a feed reader.
SoapDog | 2 hours ago
I use them a lot. Use them so much that when the one I was using didn’t had the features I wanted, I made my own.
RSS is great. It is the web we deserve.
ema-pe | an hour ago
I use it, but only to receive updates from the blogs I follow (with titles and summaries of articles). Then I click on the original link to read the full content. I know some people read articles directly in the reader.
abhin4v | an hour ago
I use Miniflux and I follow hundreds of great blogs/websites on it. Everyday I have 20–30 new posts to read. It is much better than doomscrolling on Reddit I suppose. Lobsters is not bad though.
bazzargh | an hour ago
Kindof, I use rss-parrot to follow feeds on the fediverse https://rss-parrot.net/ . While the feedreaders I used to use are defunct, I kept around the opml in case I could pick them up again, and when the parrot appeared I re-subbed to sites I used to read.
algernon | 12 hours ago
I just had at my own logs, out of curiosity, and it's interesting. I'm trying my best to stay off of Google and search engines, so I didn't expect much traffic my way from there. Looking at my logs for a single day, May the 4th, not counting various crawlers I drive into a maze of garbage:
/atom.xml.Not surprising that google drives basically nothing my way (as hoped, because I tried to tell it not to index me). But my RSS traffic is considerably larger on this particular site (my blog) than direct visits. At least on that day.
Looking at the entire log collection (~7 days): 19k regular hits, 27k RSS/Atom. Feeds still win!
vbernat | 3 hours ago
From my understanding, the author uses an invisible lazy-pixel to account for a "real" users on their RSS feed.
sauropod | 10 hours ago
Curious if folks here use RSS to consume Lobste.rs, as it does have RSS.
jparise | 9 hours ago
I subscribe to the Top Stories of the Past Week feed. It’s a nice way to catch good stories that I may have missed during my irregular manual browsing.
zk | 10 hours ago
I used to have the new stories feed on the RSS reader app on my phone before. Was nice.
But I prefer using the mobile web interface here to be honest.
bugsmith | 2 hours ago
I do. I have a 'fire hose' category called 'Discovery' on FreshRSS with several fast moving feeds like lobste.rs
abhin4v | an hour ago
I use it to follow posts in particular tags that I do not want to miss.
mtset | 10 hours ago
Not lobste.rs, but I consume RSS feeds from the lobsters software running on tilde.news.
labria | 9 hours ago
Some do
rnb37 | 50 minutes ago
My google traffic has dropped dramatically since the introduced AI mode at the top of the results page