I love RSS. I literally just bought an app on itch.io, and to my surprise the devlog page for it, which lists all the new updates, supports RSS. I love when it happens. [1]
RSS didn't stick for me until:
1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would miss stuff I actually care about.
2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing. Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles, OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50 unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio.
3. https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs.
I pay for Feedbin, and it's great.
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1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.
> https://hnrss.github.io/ lets you subscribe only to posts above a certain number of points, or other metrics.
Yes, that's the one I used, but I feel it's still too much noise. You don't want a firehose in your RSS feeds.
Just open https://news.ycombinator.com when you want to doomscroll through an almost endless stream of information. RSS doesn't work well with social media, and that's a feature.
I think #2 is a great tip. I’ve tried to use my feed reader to segregate by 'frequency' before, but I haven't really given it a full trial—it still feels a bit awkward.
> the top HN frontpage articles
I don't even really understand what the HN feed is. I looked in the FAQ, etc. the other day and couldn't find an explanation. The description ("Links for the intellectually curious, ranked by readers.") is nice PR, but it doesn't tell me what I'm seeing. Is it every post submitted? Every post that made it to the front page? Same, but stayed on the front page for a certain amount of time? Received at least X upvotes? I have no idea...
> I’ve tried to use my feed reader to segregate by 'frequency' before, but I haven't really given it a full trial—it still feels a bit awkward.
I'm in the middle of that myself. I have folders labelled rarely, weekly, frequent and social. Rarely and weekly I tend to read most of it, as they are the folders I open first. I only open frequent once I'm done with the others and I usually scroll through the titles and only read very few articles. Social is for mastodon and bluesky accounts, which I open when I only have 5 minutes to kill and I know I won't have time to finish reading long posts/articles.
I liked Newsblur's approach to this when I was using a firehose (I dropped most of my firehose-like feeds a couple years ago for various reasons including I didn't actually like most of them all that much). Newsblur has Focused versus Disliked and you can "train" all sorts of things to Like or Unlike about an article. You can Like an entire feed, but you can also Like things like specific authors or tags in a feed or words in a headline. Similarly you can use all the same tools to Unlike an article. If an article has more Likes than Unlikes it shows up in a Focused view and if an article has more Unlikes than Likes it shows up only in an "All" view, meaning it disappears from the default Unread view. When you have a limited amount of time you read Focused, when you have more time you read Unread, and if you want to check on spam or topics you dislike you can zoom out to "All" and spot-check feeds for Unliked articles.
Additionally, Newsblur added an automated "Infrequent Site Stories" for things it knows come from feeds that don't update all that frequently. (Which you can use in tandem with Focused view for even less time.)
The point 2 is an important one, I used RSS for years but had to stop using it as I was way too anxious trying to read everything.
I started using again, but I have a few rules: all the feeds only refresh once week; and any news feed (like hackers news) that generates too much content is purged also once a week, so I only have the latest one week articles.
In my mind, my RSS feed for me is like an old school weekly magazine. This solve the FOMO feeling of missing something interesting, but I don’t feel like I need to read something as soon as is published.
I'd suggest giving a go to lenns.io (shameless plug). It gives you source prioritisation control + number of items per source control + category prioritisation. In the end, you get exactly what you want without being overwhelmed.
This is an app/service that I've built for myself, but it's up for anyone go give it a go and use it.
My biggest gripe with RSS is that it is a page that is changing continuously. If I want to read what was on that page 6 months ago, I cant seem to find a way to do so. Do you have any ideas how to go about doing this? or find what I can RSS historical data
RSS didn't stick for me until:
1. I decided to quit most social media, so without RSS I would miss stuff I actually care about.
2. I unsubscribed to all news sites. RSS fatigue is a thing. Don't subscribe to sites that make money the more they post. I used to subscribe to Phoronix, the top HN frontpage articles, OSNews, LWN, etc.: bad idea, you don't want to wake up to 50 unread posts per day and get overwhelmed. Now I mostly follow personal blogs, and I have one new post per day to read. Much more manageable and higher signal-to-noise ratio.
3. https://fetchrss.com/ is genius for everything else that doesn't support RSS. It allows to turn any website into an RSS feed, and the free plan is generous enough for my needs.
I pay for Feedbin, and it's great.
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1: I wish Firefox still showed an RSS feed icon when a page has one. These days I have to "view-source" and search for feed or atom or rss to tell.