2d ago

Does anyone here use RSS, and do you have any recommendations for feeds to follow?

In an effort to further curate my online experience and try to bring stuff I'm interested in directly to me without all the "noise" and effort that goes with scrolling random sites, I'm late to the party and finally trying out RSS.

I installed a reader, and so far have added some local news, local weather, alerts (e.g. FDA warnings), a few niche blogs, NASA's APOD and news feeds, a couple of comics, and a youtube channel (only got it to work once - it seems buggy for others), a podcast, and now I'm out of ideas.

Do y'all have any favorite feeds that you follow? Or any tips about where to look / types of feeds that might be interesting?

27 comments

https://lemmy.world/post/21293912
https://lemmy.world/post/2183033
https://lemmy.world/post/24614038
https://lemmy.world/post/26802401
- Wow, I should have scrolled back some for these. Thanks.
- Nice, thank you!

Cory Doctorow's blog pluralistic.net is required reading as far as I'm concerned.
You should also look into Escape Pod if you like sci-fi (just a hunch).

Back before algorithms and social media ruined the Internet, there was an RSS feed one click away on every website. Now many of them are removed or just hidden.
- Close, it's the need to drive traffic that killed it. Gotta get those clicks for advertisers.

Youtube channels have RSS feeds, I also subscribe to Slashdot and a few webcomics and Neatorama.

OpenRSS is a cool site that aims to produce RSS feeds for sites without them at no cost (some conditions apply, e.g. no account-walled/paywalled sites may be requested).
There's also the Feedbro add-on for Firefox (and other browsers) that can be used to check if a website has a RSS feed buried somewhere to add to your reader.
If you'd like to keep up with some non-commercial music, you could check out the Editor's Picks from ccMixter. Here's the direct feed link.
In case of follow-up questions:
Mobile Apps: personally I'm mostly using Feeder on Android these days. I like to be able to see a lot of feed entries at once and this works best for me. I've tried apps like Read You and Nunti, but they weren't showing as much as I wanted.
Worth noting though, Nunti may be worth trying for its unique feature that tries to adjust your feeds to surface articles/entries that may be of more interest to you with offline systems.
Desktop/laptop: I'm still sort of searching on this one. For the moment I use Thunderbird, but it's not RSS-focused so it's more than I want from a reader.
- This is promising! Thanks.
  I'm using Feeder too. I haven't tried any others, but I remember someone on lemmy recommended it once before, and it seems perfectly good to me.

If you follow any open source projects on GitHub, it's useful to know that you can get an Atom feed of most pages (e.g. the commit log or releases tab), by adding .atom to the end of the URL.
Atom feeds are not the same thing as RSS feeds but any halfway modern RSS reader should be able to handle both. Feeder for Android, mentioned by ElectroVagrant (twinsies!) elsewhere in this thread is an example of an "RSS reader" which also supports Atom.
Here's an example Atom link for Interstellar (a cross-platform Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed app) releases: https://github.com/jwr1/interstellar/releases.atom
This is a handy way to get notifications when things update, especially useful if they have no internal update mechanism. If you can navigate your way to the Releases tab, then you can turn it into an Atom feed and you're done.
- Oh, I have just the page to test this out on now. Thank you!

Someone linked to a couple other threads, but that instance is taking forever to load (site issues?) so I can't find out if they are the two to which I recently commented. So, just to be sure, here's the list I exported from my preferred RSS client (there are some that are inactive, I've just never removed them because they don't interfere with those that are still active). Mostly pro-audio, tech stuff, blogs, some political stuff that I mostly keep hidden from view unless I wanna see it.

    
www.kvraudio.com/index.php?s=top
www.macosaudio.com
www.404media.co/
leancrew.com/all-this/
www.appleoutsider.com
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
bitsplitting.org
brettterpstra.com
veertu.com/
daringfireball.net/
krebsonsecurity.com
marco.org/
onethingwell.org/
sheriffs.substack.com
twitterisgoinggreat.com/
veertu.com/
distrowatch.com/
distrowatch.com/
liliputing.com/
www.macstories.net
www.servethehome.com/category/networking/
www.cyberciti.biz/atom/
www.servethehome.com/
sixcolors.com
www.techdirt.com
tidbits.com/
www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
www.wired.com
www.afp548.com
www.airpair.com
www.airpair.com
www.airpair.com
annoying.technology/
birchtree.me/
blog.codinghorror.com/
command-tab.com
ericasadun.com
boehs.org
arstechnica.com
lapcatsoftware.com/FeedbackAssistantBoycott/index.html
flickerfusion.com/index.xml
www.friendlyatheist.com
furbo.org
hypercritical.co/feeds/main
inessential.com/
www.kooslooijesteijn.net
www.kooslooijesteijn.net
krypted.com
blog.lastinfirstout.net/
learn-networking.com
linuxblog.io/
linuxblog.io/
mjtsai.com/blog
mrmacintosh.com/
mtlynch.io/
www.multicore.blog
nfarina.com/
www.cyberciti.biz/
notes.ghed.in/
pxlnv.com/
planet.centos.org
mtlynch.io/posts/
inessential.com/
redsweater.com/blog
rentzsch.tumblr.com/
retina.studio
morrick.me
www.peoplefor.org/
www.schneier.com/
docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/msdn/sfu/feed.xml
shawnblanc.net
tante.cc/
stevenf.com/wiki/
take.surf/feed.atom
macromates.com
lapcatsoftware.com/articles/index.html
eclecticlight.co
www.alexlaird.com/
lonesysadmin.net/
robservatory.com
shapeof.com/
theunderground.blog/
everythingsysadmin.com/
tyler.io
underpassapp.com/news/index.html
waxy.org
waxy.org/
web3isgoinggreat.com
williamlam.com
stevenf.com/wiki/
firewallengineer.wordpress.com
abnml.com/
www.astralcodexten.com
hackerboards.com
changelog.com/
davidwalsh.name
www.wheresyoured.at/
blog.equinux.com/
telruptive.com
news.ycombinator.com/ask
news.ycombinator.com/newest
hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com
howtonode.org
macwright.com
meh.com
crys.site/bsd/
mikeindustries.com/blog
www.cyberciti.biz/atom/
www.raywenderlich.com
feeds.feedblitz.com/scotch_io
sunilkumarn.wordpress.com
simonwillison.net/atom/everything
taoofmac.com
www.tenable.com/
thehungrycoder.com
www.theverge.com
crys.site/unix-history/
blog.codeship.com
codecondo.com
webapplog.com
www.andrewhay.ca
www.cio.com
www.computerworld.com
www.computerworld.com
www.extremetech.com/feed
hazenet.dk
www.infoworld.com
itcblogs.currentanalysis.com
itcblogs.currentanalysis.com
www.techradar.com/rss
www.linuxjournal.com/
www.linuxtoday.com/
www.linux.com
lxer.com/
oswalt.dev/
meilleurabonnementiptvavis.wordpress.com
mondaynote.com?source=rss----c537d80ed0a---4
netcraftsmen.com
www.networkcomputing.com
www.networkcomputing.com
www.networkworld.com
www.networkworld.com
www.networkingfiles.com
www.phoronix.com/
www.sdxcentral.com
www.securitypronews.com
techbuddha.wordpress.com
www.storagereview.com
www.sysadminnews.com
www.tecmint.com
nucblog.net/
www.unixmen.com/
www.virten.net
www.citationneeded.news/
www.dropsitenews.com

Whoa, so much to browse through. Thanks!

I've been self-hosting an RSS feed reader and have been tying to build up a list of feeds to follow as well. It's been a messy experience so far. Some feeds push WAY to much (like some newspapers, which will push dozens of articles a day). That drowns out some others who post only occasionally (like webcomics). Organizing the feeds seems necessary, and I've done poorly doing that so far.
I've added feeds for technical groups I'm interested in (e.g. https://blog.system76.com/rss.xml)
I find that subscribing to political commentators, bloggers, and local newspapers works best, and trying to find news feeds that allow you to filter by topic (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/rss or https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/rss)

I have a few hundred feeds across topics that I’ve collected over the years, but I’m gonna guess you don’t want to see my entire OPML. Want to share some topics you’re into? That should help recommendations a lot
Also, a general tip: Most decent feed readers can sniff out a feed if you paste a website into their search box. Next time you’re surfing the regular web and find a site you like, try tossing it into your reader to follow it from then on
- I've been having decent luck adding topics that I like (e.g. Star Trek), but I guess what I'm most curious to find are types of feeds that translate well to RSS. Like, weather alerts, podcasts, webcomics, etc.

I also recently asked this question to a programming community and a self-hosting community, so if either of those interest you (or any related computing topics):
Programming: https://programming.dev/post/26356680
Self-hosting: https://programming.dev/post/26356684

I’m late to the party
26 years and 5 days late, to be precise!
But really more like 20 years, which was when it took off as the plumbing of the blogosphere (AKA the last form of social media that was arguably healthy for all concerned).
Or in fact you're not late at all given that you probably listen to podcasts.
PS: to add a useful tool recommendation to this otherwise ruminative contribution: RSSBox

I follow my own Lemmy feed via RSS.
This is where I find the RSS link on my page. The RSS link it generates is based on which buttons you have chosen. My current RSS feed shows posts, hiding hidden posts, to everything I've subscribed to, using the Hot algorithm.
Clicking the link will download an XML file for RSS, or you can just right click and "Copy Link" and that works, too.
- Ah, very nice! I've heard you can follow any Mastodon account via RSS too, but I haven't tried that out yet. I'm glad to see RSS is alive and well in the fediverse.
  
  Also for other feeds Metafilter always has good links and discussion.
  They have a "subscribe to the RSS feed" button near the bottom of their main page.

I do. Used to use Google Reader, since its demise, Feedly, but exploring other possibilities like free-gratis hosting of FreshRSS (signed up tp Cheredeprince.net found via this page on free-libre online hosts: Chatons.)
Great all-round feed: Metafilter, an old school content aggregator, collating "the best of the web" since 1999. Interesting content on all kinds of topics.
Website: https://www.metafilter.com/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaFilter
RSS: https://rss.metafilter.com/metafilter.rss
If you want, you can even subscribe to posts with specific tags, .e.g. startrek :D
Website: https://www.metafilter.com/tags/startrek
RSS: http://www.metafilter.com/tags/startrek/rss
Other feeds really depend on your interests.
- Oh, very cool idea! I'm adding the star trek tag now to try it out and may expand from there if I like it. Thanks!
  
  You're welcome!

Mostly subscribed to GitHub repo release feeds. To know which software has updates.
Also some blogs from companies I am interested in.

I don't have any specific feeds, and of course it depends on your interests, but I just wanted to recommend to keep an eye out for feeds during your everyday browsing
When I see an interesting link on Lemmy to a news article or a blog, I just look at a couple of more articles on that site, and if it seems interesting I subscribe to it! 😅😉 (I can always unsubscribe later if it turns out that I don't like it). I started using RSS a few days ago, and I've collected quite a few blogs and news sites this way
(Btw also keep in mind, that some news sites provide feeds for specific tags, you don't have to subscribe to everything that gets posted)
- The tags for specific feeds seem to be really important for news sites. I tried adding one without it, and it completely overwhelmed my feed with a billion posts per day. I removed it in less than 24 hrs, lol

27 comments