Ask HN: Do You Use RSS?

[falafelite]

I know there's discussion around RSS readers every here or there on HN. I'm curious about how many of you (especially those of you who write code) interact with publishing to or subscribing from RSS feeds as part of your work or side projects, and if you have any common pain points or favorite tools/libraries (and if it's something you can share here, please do!).

[supersparrow]

Absolutely! It's the only way I get my news. I have FreshRSS self-hosted on a Pi with an nginx reverse proxy front end. I either access it from the FreshRSS web UI or from Reeder on my phone.

It's also the main way I use HN - I probably click into more HN threads than news articles these days.

[heywoodlh]

I also use FreshRSS + Reeder on my phone (and that is my primary

I also self-host Nitter (Twitter front-end), Bibliogram (Instagram front-end), and Teddit (Reddit front-end). Each of these server applications allow me to subscribe to social media feeds without having accounts.

Additionally, I self-host RSSHub for a ton of other integrations, but mostly Youtube subscriptions. Using RSSHub for Youtube subscriptions is nice because I can watch ad-free Youtube videos in Reeder when content creators drop new videos.

EDIT: on desktop (Linux, MacOS) I use Newsboat with FreshRSS.

[danaris]

> It's also the main way I use HN - I probably click into more HN threads than news articles these days.

Seconded.

My personal setup is a tt-rss instance set up on my personal server, with a Fever plugin, which allows me to use it with other readers—currently ReadKit on my Mac, and Reeder on iOS. I very rarely access my tt-rss webpage directly; it's just there to provide centralized-under-my-control syncing of the feeds and their read status.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I pretty much exclusively use RSS, I saw this post from my RSS reader.

I use NewsBlur. It has a free setting, but I like it so much I pay for the subscription.

https://www.newsblur.com/

[softwarerero]

Found this post thanks to https://github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss. There are two kinds of web sites. Those I read through RSS or those I don't read.

[aurora72]

I've just tried this app on my Mojave MacBook and it's amazing. So pleased with it. My biggest requirement was an app as simple as an RSS reader must be open source and that it's got a macOS binary. This one fulfills both and it 's got a quite nice UI too. So far I've been using NewsFire, not knowing the alternatives.

[dj_mc_merlin]

This is like when people go on a game X's subreddit and ask "Should I buy X?".. You're on HN my friend, it's like asking if they like life extension medicine or pg's essays.

[CuHawk]

Firefox Addon - Feedbro https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...

(available on chrome too)

[ecef9-8c0f-4374]

I use Feedbro even for youtube.

[themodelplumber]

Publishing it, yes. Mostly on my blogs these days, though I used to use RSS to help sales people manage content across a number of websites owned by a wine distributor.

Interacting with it, sure--at a paid service level it's been easy to monitor service updates this way, but not so much at a personal reading level currently. Though you got me thinking...

Last time I was using a reader, I remember struggling to find a Linux desktop RSS reader with discovery features. I have my own OPML that I like & cart around, but it requires a lot of maintenance over time, and using feeds for their current value seems to subvert the fact that a lot of really great blogs are past their heyday (the good stuff is found by going back in time, not so much now & later).

I also thought it'd be cool if there could be a P2P effect with sharing OPML or RSS feeds, like a general catalog. Or let's say a Gutenberg.org mixed with Github for RSS. Find, explore, & remix others' shared feeds. Not sure if such a thing exists.

Almost some random thoughts here, not sure if any of this helps...

[baal80spam]

I use RSS daily. Years ago I used Google Reader, then Feedly for a short time and finally settled on Inoreader (free tier) and very happy with it.

I really hope RSS will be kept alive in the future. Feeds are my daily curated source of news, updates to youtube channels etc.

RSS is the only way I subscribe to any news source and I don't think I'm missing on anything.

[timbit42]

I have 80 feeds in QuiteRSS with 659 unread posts right now. These feeds bring in over 1,000 posts per day.

Some are news and blogs but also sub-Reddits, Google News searches, and Kijiji searches. Until a couple of months ago I had some eBay searches but eBay killed their RSS feeds. I don't use it for YouTube but they do support RSS.

[anotherevan]

Similarly use RSS for Reddits and a few Twitter users and Youtube channels. 477 feeds using Newsblur. Including Hnapp for my Hackernews RSS feed.

The bulk of them are feeds with infrequent posts - software release updates and that sort of thing. I try and be pretty ruthless with culling anything with a high noise to signal ratio of posts that interest me.

[kgwxd]

It's the only way. Even a feed that's just links and no content saves tons of time because you never have to re-skim over headlines you've already chosen to read or skip.

[Apreche]

Yes. When Google Reader died I just moved to other apps. I’ve tried a few over the years. Feedly, Inoreader, etc. Also, podcasting still uses RSS. Every podcast app uses it directly, or more often these days, indirectly. iTunes and Spotify podcasts databases are still originally populated from RSS feeds.

As a developer, I mostly use Django, so I use the included syndication framework. The major pain point in that library is that adding additional tags that it doesn’t already support, especially if they are complex, is a pain in the ass. of course, you only have to do it once and then you can re-use your subclass in other projects. It’s still not great. Ideally it would support a very wide range of popular tags out of the box, i.e.: the podcast ones.

[AlphaGeekZulu]

RSS is actually the only mechanism that I use to subscribe to any news source, including YouTube channels.

If a news source does not support RSS itself and there is no workaround to get it otherwise as RSS, I will not subscribe to it.

For reading, I use Feedbro in Firefox and Flym on Android.

[kevincox]

Exactly the same for me. I get most of my news via RSS. And when I "run out" then I go browse sites like HN or Reddit as a form of extra discovery. (I also get top HN posts and some searches/topics from HN and Reddit as RSS feeds). I'm constantly adding new subscriptions and unsubscribing from old ones that aren't valuable to me.

[D13Fd]

I use RSS quite a lot at this point.

I use it to read HN and various blogs & Ars Technica, and to sync my read/unread status between my phone, ipad, and computer (I use NetNewsWire and Feedbin).

I publish a blog that has an RSS feed, although very few RSS subscribers.

I use a service to convert my blog's RSS feed to a daily newsletter for subscribers (who have no idea there is RSS involved). I have around 100x as many newsletter subscribers as RSS subscribers.

I use a different service to automatically link new blog posts on Twitter & LinkedIn whenever they appear on my blog's RSS feed.

[njkleiner]

I found this post because it showed up in a TUI Microsub[0] client that talks to a Microsub server[1] which is subscribed to one of the HN-to-RSS service's front page feed.

I use my RSS/feed reader pretty extensively as a central hub to collect "news" from a variety of sources, including from closed platforms such as YouTube via their semi-hidden RSS feed support. I like having a central place where things that may be of interest to me show up without me having to discover them actively or having to rely e.g. on the YouTube subscription interface.

I personally really like the concept of Microsub, because it allows you to have a single designated server takes care of fetching the feeds, normalizing the content and synchronizing state (e.g. read status, subscriptions, channel/folder organization) and you can then access that data from any client that supports the protocol. I specifically like Microsub, as opposed to some of the other "synchronization protocols" that are more or less supported by some services because it is an open protocol independent from any specific platform/implementation.

[0]: https://indieweb.org/Microsub-spec [1]: https://github.com/aaronpk/aperture

[KronisLV]

A while ago I tried finding a nice RSS reader that would be detached from the browser, but didn't find too many nice options out there.

But as it turns out, Thunderbird actually has a built in feed reader, which now nicely aggregates both my e-mails, spam e-mails and both news that I might care about as well as the ones I don't. So the experience is very similar to dealing with e-mails - occasional items that I care about amongst others that I don't, even if some of the others are useful as well, and having all of that in the same application makes a lot of sense!

Here's an example: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/05/thunderbird-rss-feeds-g...

I even added an RSS feed to my own blog which can now tell anyone who cares about that stuff about new articles.

In addition, I'm subscribed to some feeds that pull data from HN so I don't miss like 90% of my comment responses, as well as a "Jobs" feed for the "Who's Hiring?" posts.

I currently use this for HN: https://hnrss.github.io/

It feels like RSS is a nice solution for releases of articles and such, I wonder why we don't see too much of it anymore nowadays, though someone would probably claim that it has something to do with ads.

[kevincox]

I also read news via Thunderbird but instead of using its built-in reader I use a rss-to-email service. This way my feeds are synced across devices via IMAP. On mobile I use K9 (which is apparently rebranding to Thunderbird now, go figure).

[yakubin]

I use NetNewsWire to subscribe to blogs, YT channels, subreddits, newspapers, podcasts... basically anything I follow that has an RSS channel (if it doesn't, I'm almost surely not going to follow it).

I really like the Ars Technica model, where they have short snippets available in the public RSS feeds, but also provide feeds with full articles for paying subscribers. I don't like to leave the comfort of my reader for the discomfort of a web browser (they're all terrible).

[kazinator]

I use it only when (very rarely) looking for something on Craigslist.

Oh, wait; doh! I forgot the twits got rid of it some years ago, impairing the hell out of the usability of that site.

RSS is useful in the following way: the reader is vaguely structured like an e-mail box, where you have folders representing various feeds. You can dismiss items you've already seen, just like marking e-mail read.

New items are similar to new e-mails. You get some status visuals on the folders like new items unread with a count.

Almost a decade ago, also, I used a certain RSS feed program on an android phone to automatically download news podcasts, and listen to them while cycling. How that works is that the RSS items contain URLs of media files like mp3. Those get downloaded and played. Instead of going into some streaming site or app to get the latest news, the thing is fetching them for you, making them available locally in its UI. The items expire automatically. It made sense with poor mobile networks and data plans; it would sync while you're on Wi-Fi and then you have the programs there when you're on the road without using mobile data.

[pteetor]

I've worked for corporations that need to generate reports and distribute them internally. I created an RSS feed on the report generation machine, then asked users to subscribe to the feed within Microsoft Outlook. That worked well because users are often in Outlook. They would see the RSS notification and think, "Hey! Look! A new report!". (Well, maybe not that enthusiastically.)

[hammyhavoc]

WordPress instances include RSS by default. I'd say that RSS is stronger than ever in terms of content, but quite poor in terms of ways to parse that information as there's evidently not much money to be made from RSS. I'll take RSS any day over algorithmic echo chambers and non-promoted posts only being seen by a fraction of an account's followers/subscribers.

[perelin]

As far as side projects go:

I was a 100%-RSS-news guy a few years ago, but found myself more and more looking at twitter for a certain kind of news content (mostly rants about how bad agile has become). But I kind of hated needing to use two apps to get my daily content fix. Strangely Twitter didnt provide an RSS feed for the raw timeline feed. So I build myself an Twitter2RSS thingie.

https://twissr.herokuapp.com/

Go / Postgress / Heroku For RSS generation: https://github.com/gorilla/feeds (looks stale now)

Was a great learning experience as I was teaching myself Go back then. Dont use it much these days anymore, but its still working, which I find incredible, since I basically havent touched the thing for over 6 years!

[ajolly]

Any way to get Twissr to subscribe to a users twitter list?

[JasonFruit]

I've been using RSS more lately, with Liferea. It's nice, because I can a) remember the sources of information of which I'm interested in keeping track; b) read it in a readable format without a lot of the tracking and Javascript running; and c) not rely on social media to carry news to me with all the imposed biases and tracking that implies.

[antisol]

I use RSS extensively and in multiple ways. I rely on it a lot. I love it and need it in my life. The number of websites that no longer support RSS (or try not to coughyoutubecough) is a crime against the internet IMO.

* I near-exclusively access my text-based news via RSS, mostly via thunderbird, using many many RSS feeds gathered over years. I got here from an RSS feed.

* I run scripts which monitor a few web pages and give me RSS output, so that I can see new posts on these pages mixed in with my news.

* I use an RSS reader on my phone to notify me of certain events, and I have an RSS monitor widget for those events in my task bar on my desktop.

* For work, I scrape something on the order of ~200K RSS feeds and ~20mil feed items every ~couple of days.

[gmoore]

Daily - it's how I got this article.....

[kkfx]

I use them alot, in the past I've used RSS2email where emails are managed via Emacs/notmuch-emacs/org-mode and behind the scene autorefiled via MailDrop, I quit this method simply because to many feeds to make click only publish a title not the entire article so I need anyway something webbic...

I've tried elfeed but it's a bit slow and sometimes it's DB go TFU so I end up with Miniflux, just because it's simple and quick enough to be setup and on my homeserver I can see the same feeds on desktop, laptop etc.

I do not use them much more than news, for software I only use them for security advisors and new releases of some projects I track, I've planned an RSS-centric personal website but it's a skeleton essentially empty so far and it's veeeery low priority so...

My most important pain point is publishers who not put full posts inside RSS.

[thirdplace_]

I wrote a tool that finds rss feeds for you:

https://discovery.thirdplace.no/?q=https://www.youtube.com/w...

It was a personal pain point for me.

[glmeece]

Absolutely! I found this post via my RSS feed for Hacker News.

I really like the https://feeder.co/ extension, and even pay for the Pro license. There are a few minor bugs, but overall it works extremely well for me. I don't often use the account Reader feature, but the extension has a nice way to organize various feeds into categories/folders. You can stay on the free tier forever if you'd like, but to sync across multiple machines you'll need to pay.

FWIW, the Chrome extension is named 'RSS Feed Reader' if you want to search for it. For Firefox, Edge, and iOS, it's just named 'Feeder'; Android - "Feeder.co"

[docdeek]

Yes, it’s where I get news, follow blogs, and read Hacker News among many other things. I’m a big fan of Reeder on my Mac and iOS, too.

https://reederapp.com

[saltymimir]

It's my go-to way of subscribing to blogs / news feed. For every subscription, with some automations, I fetch the newest item(s) once every day and put the content of each item in a markdown file within a cloud storage that syncs to my devices. I can then read those feeds from any markdown editor. If I feel like I'm done with a post, I can just delete it from the folder.

The only pain point I can think of has more to do with feeds getting completely re-built from scratch. Haven't quite figured out a way to de-duplicate repeat feeds when that happens.

[kennethko]

RSS is how I filter and consume the majority of my news, blogs, HN, newsletters, and monitor Google Alerts for domain specific questions or topics that I'm interested in.

For the client, I've landed on FreshRSS for the web/desktop experience as it allows me sufficient control to group and tag articles for my own needs. Deployment is simple: docker-compose on a small Droplet that hosts a few other apps. It's helpful that there are a few RSS reader apps on iOS that support syncing with self-hosted FreshRSS instances, as well.

[anelson]

Another NewsBlur user here, ever since Google killed off Google Reader. All of my news and regular content consumption, including HN, is via RSS. If a site doesn’t have a well behaved RSS feed then I won’t be able to follow it.

I’ve used a number of blog engines over the years and don’t recall ever having a problem with RSS. It seems like a solved problem on the publishing side.

I do find it annoying when the RSS feed publishes only partial content without making it clear that it’s doing so.

[manicdee]

Main issue I have is systems that don’t keep RSS feeds in sync with actual content, and remembering that editing existing content shouldn’t result in a new RSS entry for that edited content.

As an example one group I am involved in tried sharing a calendar via RSS but every time they created a new appointment they would copy an old one, update the description, update the headline, then change the invite list and meeting time. Each action resulted in a new record being added to the RSS feed.

Cache invalidation is hard, apparently.

[sto_hristo]

I use RSS and get all my HN digest (among others) from it, including your post.

I like it because it gives a very clean, simple interface to multiple sources and keeps track of what i've seen.

[jayknight]

I use inoreader, but don't use rss as heavily as I did with Google Reader.

https://www.inoreader.com/

[tinalumfoil]

I second inoreader. Even though RSS is dying they have native Twitter support, email feeds and they also have the ability to turn an html page into a feed which all work great, so I'm able to turn most public streams of data into a news feed.

[simmons]

Sure, I've been using RSS (or Atom) for... probably around 18 years or so. In that time, I've moved from Thunderbird to Liferea to Google Reader to Newsblur. I subscribe to many feeds related to my work, but also various Google Alerts and general news sources. I don't do much publishing to RSS, except for making sure that my (currently very neglected) blog has RSS and Atom feeds available.

I can't think of any burning pain points, off hand.

[Dracophoenix]

Definitely. RSSGuard. It's one of the few offline and independent (read: not a web application) RSS Readers on Windows. My only problem with it is how RAM-heavy an application it is, and that it can get pretty bogged down when downloading feeds. But beggars can't be choosers.

https://github.com/martinrotter/rssguard

[BoppreH]

I have a script that cURL's each line from "feeds.txt" every 3 minutes, and dumps the new links in "new.txt".

Then there's a button on my dashboard that opens all of those items in new tabs at once (sometimes a dozen or more!), and also moves them to "seen.txt", which is ignored when fetching new items.

It's as simple as it sounds. I created it when Google Reader died, and has served my needs perfectly so far.

[troyforster]

I would not have found this post otherwise!

I have https://inoreader.com bookmarked on all my devices allowing me to keep abreast of several hundred feeds throughout the day. It's great that it supports the same keyboard shortcuts as Google Reader (RIP).

I always add RSS feeds to websites and most web applications (for non-proprietary and public info only).

[bertman]

Yes. Dockerized Miniflux instance, >100 feeds. Wouldn't miss it for the world. I use it as PWA on both desktop and mobile. No complaints.

[jhot]

Dockerized Miniflux as well. Light on resources, quick, plenty of features without being bloated, and the fetching of article content works with the default selectors for most sites.

I use Miniflutt on Android instead of the PWA mainly for the mark-as-read on scroll functionality (which I contributed because it's a must-have feature for me). About the only feature I find missing is a global regex blocklist which I may put in a PR for as well.

[brycewray]

Yep, am both a consumer (via the NetNewsWire app[0]) and publisher thereof. It's how I keep up during the day with not only HN but also updates to a number of GitHub-based projects I watch, not to mention YouTube video feeds by a variety of devs (or dev-friendly creators), tech blogs, etc.

[0]: https://netnewswire.com/

[bla3]

I used to use it long ago. It worked too well for me: every morning I had a very long list of very interesting posts I could read. For a while I tried to read them all. That was very interesting, but it also needed a lot of time. Eventually it felt like yet another inbox to keep track of, and i stopped using it. I don't really miss it.

[rmrfchik]

Daily via Inoreader.com (great site and app!).

[headbee]

That's how I got to this question. I went through the usual guantlet of finding a self-hosted RSS app I liked as well as exploring freemium options and eventually settled on Inoreader. The "plus" tier is ~2USD/mo and is cheaper than what it would cost to host my own, and is overall one of the better readers.

[gerikson]

Yes. I pay for Feedly.

I use RSS (well, Atom) in my blogs.

[trelane]

I do also. RSS is a Free and open standard, something this world is dearly in need of more of.

I use Liferea on non mobile.

[robbie-c]

Yes, we subscribe to a few CS/eng blogs with our company Slack and use the threads for discussions. Sadly https://blog.acolyer.org/ doesn't update any more but that was one of the favourites.

[superduperuser]

I keep up with a few Patreon podcasts through Feedly. I don't have much good say about it. Sometimes the audio cuts off after about 15 minutes of play while inside my pocket. It keeps the timestamp, though! Id love a recommendation of an android app that does not do that

[TrianguloY]

I use it daily. The think I like most is that I'm in control of the contents. All the elements are sorted by date, and I can choose which feeds to follow (or unfollow). There are no 'featured', no 'things you may like' and there is no algorithm.

[yipeedipee]

I have been using https://www.ustart.org/ as my homepage ever since Google killed iGoogle to gather my feeds and other things like Twitter searches. I love RSS.

[fallinghawks]

I use NewsBlur and subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds, as well as using Google Apps scripts to modify some. Right now, however, there's a problem with setMimeType (it's in the issue tracker) and that broke two of my scripts.

[pjz]

Daily since Google Reader shut down, via self-hosted commafeed (https://github.com/Athou/commafeed).

[naravara]

Yes. It really is the only way to keep up with blogs that update intermittently. Stuff like Twitter and Facebook leave you at the mercy of an algorithmic sort or just happenings to stumble upon it in a river of other content.

[Thristle]

Yeah.

Other than for news and stuff i have a google apps script that uses my RSS feeds to add new youtube videos to specific playlists I have.

Since youtube's "subscriptions" page became so bad in the past years that script is a must

[riley_dog]

Yup! I use Miniflux (https://miniflux.app/) and run it into Reeder 5 on my Apple devices.

[cagey]

Yes, I do. I opened this link right from my RSS reader.

[flobosg]

Yes, every day. I started with Google Reader and now use NewsBlur as well as some scripts that aggregate RSS feeds and send me daily email updates.

[CoolCold]

Yes, I do. Opened this link right from my rss reader.

[jumperabg]

I didn't use RSS for a year but started again aroudn 1-2 months since someone posted an article about the Fluent Reader RSS reader.

[SmileyKeith]

Daily. I find it a great way to follow many low frequency blogs without having to fill my twitter feed or email with them.

[alexobenauer]

I do maintain an RSS feed on my site that matches my newsletter. I code it by hand, since it's simple enough.

[LaSombra]

Every day, thanks to https://newsblur.com

[bestouff]

I do, via my Nextcloud install. But I wanna say HN is a real pain to read via RSS, mainly because of dupes.

[timbit42]

I don't see any dupes but QuiteRSS has an 'ignore dupes' setting.

[triptych]

I use Inoreader and it's a delight.

[aurora72]

I use RSS daily. Yes I write code. Rule of thumb: Don't reinvent the wheel. If you see what I mean.

[ksec]

Been using RSS for close to if not over 20 years. Now on Feedly, before that it was Google Reader.

[ericfrazier]

RSS + scrapers have been and always will be the backbone of information exchange online.

[jonsagara]

Yes, with Feedly. It's how I keep track of my favorite blogs and YouTube channels.

[thefz]

Yes, I self host a Tiny Tiny RSS instance. Used it every day for years.

[andyjohnson0]

Yes, with Feedly. Before that Google Reader, and before that NewsBlur.

[ckluis]

100% - I use Reeder (mac app) with native/local vs a service.

[imartin2k]

Yes. I couldn’t live without RSS (not writing code though).

[gbqwKHmfe06JJH]

RSS feeds to automate movies/series downloading.

[sashk]

Yes, daily for many years. Feedbin plus NetNewsWire.

[parweb]

Yes and yes 1000yes I seen this post thank to rss

[mynameismon]

Yup. Vivaldi's inbuilt feed reader here.

[ThrowawayTestr]

I use RSS to follow HN and a few web comics.

[ta988]

Yes with ttrss (self-hosted).

[agentultra]

I use RSS still.

[menotyou]

Yes.

I use netvibes for reading.

[mstdokumaci]

yes via netnewswire on osx

[trentthethief]

I use a terminal app called newsboat to subscribe to blogs and youtube channels.