The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful. What the hell is RSS? RSS is just a format that defines how websites can publish updates (articles, posts, episodes, and so on) in a standard feed that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader (or aggregator). Don’t worry if this sounds extremely uninteresting to you; there aren’t many people that get excited about format specifications; the beauty of RSS is in its simplicity. Any content management system or blog platform supports RSS out of the box, and often enables it by default. As a result, a large portion of the content on the internet is available to you in feeds that you can tap into. But this time, you’re in full control of what you’re receiving, and the feeds are purely reverse chronological bliss. Coincidentally, you might already be using RSS without even knowing, because the whole podcasting world runs on RSS.
  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    19·
    16 days ago

    This is your casual reminder that Lemmy was built to support RSS. Just look for the RSS logo on the top of any community’s list of posts:

    And for those pining for the old days of Google Reader, I have been a huge fan of Newsblur.

  • (des)mosthenes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    15 days ago

    I ended up building my own ingestor and discovery (finds RSS feeds across the web, adds it to a queue for me to review) application with over 15k sources and always growing. I serve the content through a public front end if anyone is interested: https://startyparty.dev/ - all articles link out to their sources. all media plays in the app. no tracking, no analytics, no gimmicks. free to use. videos use youtube embed player unfortunately. lemmy, mastodon, blue sky, youtube, podcasts, youtube music, general articles, browser based games and more.

  • FauxPseudo @lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    15 days ago

    I stopped using RSS a long long time ago. And then when I left Reddit and found Lemmy, I also restarted my RSS feeds and cleaned up the links. I don’t go there everyday but I do enjoy when I get there.

    But I have asked in numerous places for people’s best RSS links and always come up with zero feedback.

    So let’s try it here. What are your best RSS links?

  • Rooty@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    15 days ago

    Sadly, a lot of sites have started shuttering their RSS feeds and hiding content behind paywalls. I have to periodically clean my feed and remove dead links.Luckily, there are a lot of sites that basically copy AP and Reuters news verbatim.