Whatever the linguistic details, one of the main roles of RSS is to supply directly to you a steady stream of updates from a website. Every new article published on that site is served up in a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.
Unfortunately, RSS is no longer how most of us consume “content.” (Google famously killed its beloved Google Reader more than a decade ago.) It’s now the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what’s new. But I think RSS still has a place in your life: Especially for those who don’t want to miss anything or have algorithms choosing what they read, it remains one of the best ways to navigate the internet. Here’s a primer on what RSS can (still!) do for you, and how to get started with it, even in this late era of online existence.
I’ve never left RSS. Went to Feedly like a lot of people. These days I’m using a self-hosted instance of miniflux because I got sick of Feedly making “enhanced” feeds and then not letting me get to the real RSS feed anymore.
I went with a self-hosted FreshRSS instance, it has its issues but it works well with the client apps I use.
Which client apps do you use?
NetNewsWire on iOS and the Mac. Pretty great, and it’s FOSS to boot. Still working on a decent front end on other OSes, the web client is okay-fine but could be better.
I’ve got Readrops (android) which has freshrss support for when I get my instance up.
What is this enhanced feed feature of Feedly that I have never heard of? Is it a premium feature of something?
I ran into a couple of them but the most notable was reddit (before the APIpocolypse). If you try to subscribe to the RSS feed of a sub it will ignore your request and ask you to sign in to Reddit instead. It then uses the API instead of the RSS feed and reports your reading habits back to Reddit.
Oh lol. I wonder how that’s going - especially when they had to drop their enhanced feeds for Twitter.
I need this miniflux in my life. I’ve been just putting up with Feedly. I understand they have to make money, but I don’t want to pay for RSS. Especially if I can DIY.