RSS is still the best way to track the news on the web, and these RSS readers can keep you right up to date.

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.

  • RememberTheApollo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    9 months ago

    I loved RSS feeds. But I’ve given up on them. And it would seem so have many of the sites I used to frequent. I read RSS offline, so right there I have a problem as the vast majority of RSS apps expect an internet connection. Sites used to write content in such a manner that it was easily readable in RSS, now they don’t. The decline in popularity of RSS has meant that after I get comfortable with an app it stops being updated and no longer works as the developer decides it’s not worth keeping up. Sites make RSS feeds harder to find, if they even have one.

    I

    • Evkob@lemmy.caEnglish
      16·
      9 months ago

      Assuming you read RSS offline on mobile, Feeder has an option to fetch full articles and stores them for offline reading. It’s FOSS and actively-maintained, having received an update just last week.

      I’ve never encountered a site I wanted to follow that didn’t have RSS, but I wholly agree it’s often needlessly complicated to find the feed links.

        • Evkob@lemmy.caEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          Ah, my bad! I should have guessed by your username, which I assume is in reference to the now-defunct reddit app.

          I can’t personally vouch for it, but NetNewsWire might be a good option for iOS if you haven’t tried it. It’s also FOSS, updated as recently as June 2023, can read RSS feeds locally and has a reader view to fetch full articles. You’d have to test if it caches fetched articles though, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t.

          • RememberTheApollo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            9 months ago

            Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.

            (Yep, it’s the former Reddit app)

            Edit: it is offline, but it only pulls in the first paragraph or whatever. You can read a snippet, but it’s not really an offline reader that pulls in the full article to be read.

          • panicnow@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            9 months ago

            I will vouch for it. I use it on my iPad constantly and have few complaints. I don’t think it syncs well between iPad and Mac or Phone when using iCloud sync, but I think they have other methods and I don’t really need sync since I do my media consumption on the iPad.

    • bazmatazable@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      This is my experience too. The sites hosting the articles that I want to read only provide the first parapraph and then a link back to the webpage. News is just headlines. I love that RSS doesn’t allow much formating so you end up with an experience focused on the content itself (and no ads). It feels like a long time ago since I really enjoyed my RSS feeds.