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.

  • @Salix
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    4 months ago

    Feeder on my phone (Android-only)

    If you host an RSS aggregator yourself such as FreshRSS, I’d recommend using ReadYou or FeedMe (not Open Source) instead so that you can sync. I use FeedMe on Android and Fluent Reader on Linux. It’s nice to have everything synced.

    I also recommend rss-bridge if you’re self hosting. Helps gets you more RSS feeds from websites that don’t have them.

    • @[email protected]
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      44 months ago

      I don’t self-host (…yet. I do have a couple of things I’d like to play around with eventually) but honestly, for my use case I don’t feel any need to sync RSS. I mostly read articles on my phone, and if I’m on my PC I just remember which articles I’ve read. I can see how fetching RSS locally on each device might fall apart if one follows a large number of feeds, though.

    • kratoz29
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      24 months ago

      It seems like a new project/rabbit hole for me.

      With FreshRSS would I be able to sync Feeder and Feedly?