I use it for news aggregation with Nextcloud news. Also for podcasts and PeerTube channels. Anyone using RSS for other things?
I use RSS to watch YouTube videos. I collect the ULRs of the videos I want to watch in a text file using my feed reader (Newsboat). In the evening a script transfers the file to my TV computer and fetches the videos with yt-dlp.
To play the videos I use another script, which plays and then trashes the video files in a loop.
Pros: no ads, no buffering videos during playback, plays videos without interaction (like TV), can collect video URLs over day, don’t have to bother with YouTube’s user interface, cookies etc.
I like that idea! Any chance you would be able to share the script or the general workflow?
I just wrote down simplified versions of my scripts. Then I clicked the wrong button to exit the markdown preview and now it’s all gone. I’ll have to drink a beer now, sorry. If you have any specific questions, I’ll answer them gladly.
Parent’s is more complicated, but this simple script may be a good place to start. In this case, I follow a channel that posts new music videos for discovery. This automatically downloads (just the audio) using yt-dlp to a local directory. It could easily be modified to download the video (just change the -f flag). I run this with cron once a day.
https://gist.github.com/line72/ceef5402881d6d3ae732e7b7c9cbf01b
I use this lightweight reader by the same dev who makes Bookstack. Just for news though. I use Audiobookshelf for podcasts.
What news do you add to it?
Nothing special, just WaPo, NPR, NYT, etc. I just prefer aggregating all those sites instead of going to them individually when I some that kind of news.
Thanks for explaining!
I use freshrss. It is my primary source of information. Here are some of the things I follow:
- Various Local News Sources
- Local City Council Blog
- Various National/International News Sources
- Various Blogs
- Comics (SMBC, xkcd, …)
- Music Review Sites/Blogs
- Various Record Label feeds (I run a small distributor)
- YouTube Channels :: This is so much better than going to youtube
- New Releases/ChangeLogs of various OSS projects I follow and host
- Various Planet (Gnome/Gnu/Debian/…) Aggregators
- Google Alerts
- Lemmy Communities
- Reddit Communities (We’ll see where these go)
- HomeLab/Cron :: Instead of dealing with emails, I generate RSS feeds from my cron scripts/home lab notifications
- Email Subscriptions :: I take some email notification (like new releases on bandcamp) and convert them to RSS
I subscribe to:
- Blogs I find interesting
- Blogs of personal friends
- Projects’ blogs and announcements
- Changes to codebase I need to closely monitor (e.g. things I host)
- Videos, mostly on YouTube, but also my PeerTube feed
- Web comics
I self-host FreshRSS and use it for:
- Blogs
- News-Sites
- Piped (YouTube) channels
- GitHub releases
+1 for FreshRSS. It’s excellent and has been very easy to host for years.
FreshRSS here, too. Tech, State and local news all nicely sorted where I can firehose it or just see small sections.
I don’t. Google reader died, and all of the blogs put themselves on social media.
The walled garden is almost complete.
My use is not foss because I didn’t find something that fits my needs better than Inoreader. There is the android app which works fine and also a very nice web interface that I can use at work because without thumbnails it looks like a ‘boring’ list of stuff.
Never used Inoreader, but recently switched to Newsblur which is open source (app installable via F-Droid) and selfhostable. If you don’t want to self host they have a freemium model to use their hosted service, couldn’t tell you what free vs paid gets you but I haven’t bumped into any limits yet. You can also log in to their site to browse via web browser.
So far the app looks better than other open source readers I’ve tried and thumbnails generally load so the lists are a bit livelier.
Yes, I already tested newsblur. The only thing I remember is that, for my needs, Inoreader is superior. I forgot the details why tbh.
Any RSS clients with 2 way syncs?
For qbittorrent for sites I know I will want their stuff.
I use newsboat for all my RSS needs, which is pretty much my main entry point for a lot of things:
- News sites
- Various blogs
- Youtube channels (I unsubscribed from everything on my YouTube account, hardly ever login, and only use RSS to follow the channels I want)
- Podcasts
- I used to have some subreddits in there too, but those were ritually deleted after June 12th of course
Youtube channels (I unsubscribed from everything on my YouTube account, hardly ever login, and only use RSS to follow the channels I want)
This is the way to do it. I can’t stand youtube’s interface and its recommendations, auto play, and other anti-features frustrate me. I find that on youtube, when I go look at a channel, I often can’t figure out which video is the most recent, and really struggle to see figure out what I’ve watched and what I haven’t.
Using RSS let’s me see when there is a new video posted just from the channels I am interested in. I don’t have to go hunting. FreshRSS will watch it through youtube-nocookie.com, but I often find using yt-dlp is better experience, especially for anything longer than 5 minutes.
Yes. I use it on my phone. I use AntennaPod for pod casts, and Flym for textual news feeds. Antenna pod in particular is really nice. I finding having this sort of content on a mobile device best.
I use it for recipes! I use the iOS app Mela for recipe storage and it has a built-in RSS feed system to follow recipe blogs so you can easily add new recipes to your collection without having to visit all the sites separately.
Would you mind sharing some of your favorite blogs and webcomics?
Nothing unusual with my feed - news, tech, science, environment. What I may do differently is I set up a filter on Mastodon so any of my feeds are only seen in rss. I really don’t need to see a Wired article 6 times.
I use RSS through Readwise Reader though I’ve used Newsblur in the past. I really wish Newsblur was redesign to get a more modern interface…
