Blogger discovers this cool thing called “RSS”.
Google Reader was my goto and when they killed that I tried a bunch of others and none quite hit the same. Gutted that one hit the Google graveyard.
Classic Embrace-Extend-Extinguish move.
I’ve recently rediscovered RSS and I’m in love with it. I just wish Meta wasn’t a piece of fuck and let you add Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. there are some workarounds for the latter, but they’re really finicky.
Not an RSS solution, but in IG if you tap the “Instagram” logo at the top/right, a menu will pop up. You can select “following” to (mostly) see the accounts you’re following (and in reverse chronological order.)
that requires having an account.
With bibliogram you can follow instagram pages in rss: https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
Facebook pages used to work with rss bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
With bibliogram you can follow instagram pages in rss
good luck finding an instance that works.
Facebook pages used to work with rss bridge
I’m well aware of the RSS Bridge and I use several of them hosted on the main instance, but how does “used to work” help? Facebook used to actually provide RSS feeds for their pages and they used to work, too.
You have to selfhost bibliogram, working for me, I usually get rate limited but get all updates once or twice a week.
There is a facebook bridge in rss bridge, for a long time it worked, I don’t follow its development nowadays, maybe someone with some php knowledge can resurrect it.
I use RSS but as far as I’m concerned, Lemmy is better, because it is categorized and ranked.
I use RSS for sites where I want to read every update. That typically means serial comics; dev-blogs of indie games; other infrequent blogs; and some infrequent youTube channels (I don’t visit youTube other than via my RSS feeds);
Whereas I use Lemmy and other sites for skimming and browsing, and discovering new things.
lemmy also supports rss! your inbox can generate a rss feed. Also communities have feeds that update whenever someone posts on them. For example for c/technology sorted after active: https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/technology.xml?sort=Active
I am using RSS and I love it
To OP and the few other comments sarcastically dunking on the blogger for just discovering RSS: why? It’s not exactly drowning in advocates today, and there’s basically a whole generation that wasn’t around when Google killed off Reader. What if we treated advocacy like this like the good thing it is?
Why is it people flock to server based rss? Wtf? There are native clients galore for all platforms ever created.
Having your stuff accessible and synced, including read/unread status, across devices is a real benefit.
Fair.
I don’t think “dunking” is the right word. It’s just funny that people are still discovering RSS 30 years later. Myself included.
You make my heart hurt, you’re so right. It’s getting harder and harder to find RSS or Atom links on sites. The more people rediscover these technologies, the more chance there is that site developers will continue to provide them.
It would be fantastic if more people would rediscover Usenet, and IRC, and ditch the shitty knock-offs like Discord. There’s a pretty big contingent advocating for Jabber, which I’m ambivalent about, having been there when it started and when it (effectively) died and being very conscious of its flaws and limitations… but, still, these are all open standards and old-school internet - sometimes pre-web! - and they’re often still better than the commoditized successors.
Embrace and encourage the new infusion of youth! Gate keeping is a very post-eternal-September behavior.
What might motivate someone to move away from using Discord?
https://archive.today/1Lfct “Spyware Level: EXTREMELY HIGH”
I’d be interested in ditching Discord, anything you recommend?
Element (over the Matrix protocol). As someone who grew up on IRC, it is in no shape or form a replacement for Discord.
(IIRC) Element has stopped development.
Element X should be the app to install.
Matrix is probably the closest; it’s federated, there are a dozen more-or-less actively developed clients, for just about every platform. You can self-host your own server. It has a lot of features.
It’s not perfect; it has a lot of flaws, but there’s slow progress. Things to be aware of:
- Despite it being “open”, there’s really only one server that supports everything, and that’s Synapse. It’s where all of the new features are tested and land first. All other (half-dozen) servers lag Synapse. And - IMHO - Synapse is an awful piece of software. It’s a giant mess of Python, and it lumbers along like a bloated, arthritic hippopotamus.
- The way federation is done makes it very expensive to self-host. Everything’s fine until one of your users joins - even briefly - a popular room, and suddenly your server’s downloading 9GB of history and binary blobs. This can be managed, but you may as well quit your job and become a full-time admin, because
- moderation tools suck. Aside from the most basic banning, all mod tools are external servers you have to set up and configure and run in parallel. And the most essential tool - mjolnir, a “this account is a troll spam bot, so ban it site-wide” is still very beta-ish and it’s nearly impossible to get any help with setting up or using it.
- It’s really a rather heavy protocol. Lots of network traffic.
- bridging is better in theory than practice. Most bridging requires you to run your own server, and few major hosts provide anything more than IRC bridging, and even then you can’t actually bridge to most of the biggest IRC networks because it’s blocked by the IRC providers, because Matrix bridges are a major source of spam grief for the IRC rooms. And setting up a bridge between a Matrix and an (e.g.) Discord room is a fairly significant PITA, requiring a Discord mod to perform several steps.
- It does hand e2e encryption for DMs, but it’s honestly pretty bad at it. It’s a better Discord than a, say, Signal. Key management is a minor nightmare and it is both prone to breakage, and complex, with a lot of fairly obscure terminology needed to understand any but the most basic operations. Like, when it’s working, it’s fine, but as soon as anything goes wrong, you’re in a world of pain. I came count the number of times I’ve lost entire chat histories with people.
And to throw up a challenge before anyone disagrees about that last point: try changing clients several times, across devices, and on the same client. Delete your client and reconnect (as if you lost your phone). See how long you can go before you hit a point where you can’t get to your chat history.
It’s a good alternative to Discord; it’s categorically better than Discord. If you’re not hosting the server, it’s better than IRC; the user experience is simply undebatably better. It’s a crappy IM platform. It needs far better mod tools, and some competitor to Synapse has to get out of Beta.
But if all you’re looking for is an alternative to Discord and you ate fine with using a public service, it’s a good choice.
Wow I had a whole message written to ask for information and here you lay it out so perfectly. Now I’m in paralysis mode though and can’t decide if I want to self host…
If you have any tips, resources, or a simple breakdown of what I should focus on, I’d really appreciate it! Thanks!
It really depends on your needs, like most things.
What are you trying to achieve? Just set up a place for folks to chat about a topic?
I’m inclined to suggest that if you’re moving from Discord, then I suggest you pick a public server and create your room there. You already aren’t self-hosting or getting bridging, so no loss. A public Mjolnir used to be on matrix.org but isn’t anymore, so you have to be alert to spammers; if you have enough people you’re willing to make mods, this is manageable. Matrix spammers tend to pop in, drop some fishing or advertisement; if you have someone watching 24/7 they can ban-and-remove the spam pretty quickly. Otherwise, you clean things up whenever you’re in there; it’s annoying, but not arduous. If you’re a small room, you won’t attract the spammers as much; if you’re larger, I’d hope you have enough folks who can help mod.
I would not try to self-host out of the gate. If you do, start with a beefy server; you’ll need a bunch of disk space - maybe not immediately, but as soon as one of your users joins a big room on a different server. I’ve only tried Synapse; you might try one of the other servers, but they’ll all have the same disk space issue: it’s a result is the design of the protocol.
Thanks for the information. I just signed up using a public matrix but will look into bridge as well and possibly use Oracle free tier to set something up instead of on my homelab. Thanks again!!
Good luck!
IRC
AFAIK it can’t reach feature parity with Discord, it only does text FFS! No video, no voice, not even simple text formatting and emojis! Not to mention plenty of clients are ugly, which can’t be said about Discord.
Agree about features (pplus the fact that you’d need a bouncer or an always-on client to receive all messages), but the clients are just better than Discord. Discord just feels bloated.
Pretty much everyone who has an RSS feed has it accidentally.
Usenet and IRC have bad usability and lack features compared to Discord.
IM applications like Jabber and such have been replaced by messenger apps like Telegram.
Unfortunately a lot of sites have ditched support for RSS over the past 10 years requiring tedious work arounds if you can get it to work at all.
I hope it can make a comeback but I’m dubious.
I use it, as both a reader and a publisher, but rss (in particular) could do with an update.
How do you all discover new RSS feeds to subscribe to?
I use an extension that searches the code on the page to find them. It puts a little number up, then when you click it you can copy the link.
You can set Google alerts for search terms. You’ll get articles when they pop up. Apparently I have the same name as a politician in Canada, so I get to keep up with what’s going on with that.
Wordpress sites publish an rss feed by default at site.com/rss or site.com/feed, so there’s a good chance a site you want an rss feed for has one even if they didn’t intend to.
My way is simple and stupid. I hit F12, then search for “rss” in the html and copy the link
I use Feedly for discovery, they have a crap load of websites you can subscribe to even if the websites don’t explicitly advertise RSS.
And then use the Feedly desktop website to get the actual RSS URL and put it in the client of your choice 🙃
I recently rediscovered RSS with Read You on F-Droid (I enjoy it’s UI and bionic reading). I also found something on Github called Follow that I use on my desktop running CachyOS.
People should be rediscovering RSS. It’s news that you tailor to yourself and doesn’t come bundled with the “social” part of social media.
I never stopped using it. It’s a shame some sites don’t have an rss feed anymore though…
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I frankly hate those posts in which people tells me what I should do. Just write “Hey, look, this is cool!” and let me judge it.
Same. I’m guessing the clickbait algorithm favors the “should” phrasing, which is annoying.
I was trying to find a solution to have all the news sources I care about in a single app. Then I remembered RSS and was able to do that very easily. I use self-hosted Miniflux and just use that as pwa when on my phone. Ridoculously lightweight and very awesome. I also setup Readeck (a Pocket alternative) where I push longer articles for when I’m up for reading more instead of just checking the latest news. I love it
I did this too recently. Highly recommend.
For iOS, this one doesn’t collect any data. It’s pretty barebones, but also free. It nags you a bunch at first but eventually stopped
NetNewsWire is the iOS and macOS app for RSS. It has been around since RSS started out and is now open source.
It doesn’t have keyword filters or at least I can’t find them.
We gotta bring back usenet servers and dare I say IRC and Telnet
