Hey all,

So I’ve been wanting to start using RSS recently. I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for using it to help curate what I’m interested in instead of what algorithms want me to engage with. But maybe I’m thinking of it wrong.

My understanding of RSS was that I find one of the many different RSS readers that I like, currently I’m using Akregator on Linux, then start subscribing to individual sites and sources. The idea being that I can go to one place and read everything I’m interested in.

But I can count on one hand, out of the 165 feeds I’ve subscribed to so far, the number that actually load the full article contents and images. Nearly every single one of them gives me a paragraph and a “Complete this story” or a “View full story here” or some other phrase.

If I load the full page inside the RSS app, I get all the nagware about signing up, give me cookies, just general obtrusive ads, blah blah blah. Obviously it’s using an internal web engine and not my actual browser with my ad blockers and VPN extension and stuff. So instead I just double-click the RSS link and it opens in my normal browser and I read it there.

So, that gets down to the crux of my question…at this point, what’s the difference between me just bookmarking the sites that I want and then just going there? If RSS only loads a paragraph anyways, what’s the point in using it?

Now I do understand that this isn’t RSS’s fault as a protocol, it’s how these sites are choosing to use it. I imagine they are just trying to get people to click to their site for views and whatnot but still…at least how I want to use it, it kinda defeats the purpose of RSS.

Am I missing something or is this something the community has been dealing with for a while now?

  • impolitecarry@lemmy.wtf
    12·
    5 days ago

    I think you are using RSS the way it was meant to be used, or, at least, the way I have been using it for years.

    I my opinion, RSS isn’t meant to be your primary source of consumption, but your primary source of notification. For learning about new content being available. Instead of signing up for 165 newsletters, email subscriptions, or, in the worst form, downloading an app -> register an account -> subscribe to feed, you put the feed in your RSS client (which doesn’t require identifying yourself to the content provider in any form, registering interest, etc), and are notified when something new pops up.

    • ChocolateFrostedSugarBombs@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      5 days ago

      Yeah that’s the feeling I’m getting too…just kinda get notified that something’s changed and to go look at it. Unfortunately not what I had in mind when I thought RSS might be the solution I was looking for.

  • vort3@lemmy.ml
    3·
    4 days ago

    what’s the difference between me just bookmarking the sites that I want and then just going there?

    I have 98 feeds. Is it easier to open an aggregator that checks 98 sites for me and lets me see what’s new, than to open 98 bookmarks and look for what’s new myself?

  • kevincox@lemmy.ml
    5·
    5 days ago

    Yes, a lot of feeds, especially the more commercial ones, only have a teaser in the feed. Most people don’t like this. But lots of feeds want to try and estimate how many readers they have. Since RSS has better privacy by design they can’t really tell if you read it or not. So they force you to visit the site.

    However IMHO RSS is still valuable here. Because now I get my notifications in the same place. For example I subscribe to YouTube via RSS even though YouTube tries as hard as it can to force you to watch the video on-site or in-app. This is because RSS lets me reliably get notified about all of the channels and playlists that I am interested in. I can also mix in feeds from elsewhere (Nebula, PeerTube, …) into the same feed so that I just look at one place and have all of my video history.

    In some cases you can combat this. Many feed readers will attempt to scrape the full article from the site. This means that you may not have to leave your reader to enjoy the whole article. However this isn’t very reliable and can be pretty difficult depending on how antagonistic the site is. There are also tools that will consume the original feel and produce a new feed with (hopefully) full text articles.

    But at the end of the day this is the choice the site is offering you. If you don’t find their feeds useful just don’t use them. You can either visit manually to check, use whatever other notification systems they provide or try to build your own feed (see “feed builder” tools that scrape sites to produce feeds).

  • WarrenVZ@lemmy.ml
    4·
    5 days ago

    These websites you found are definitely using RSS incorrectly. My website’s RSS feed displays the full article, upload date, and author. I think their website’s HTML is either scuffed, or they want you to visit their website, which doesn’t make any sense?? I think their HTML semantics are just messed up. When coding a website (Which almost nobody wants to do these days), you are supposed to wrap your blog post content in an “article” tag, something that a lot of website builders don’t do at all. This tag’s contents is supposed to be able to make sense on its own - in this case, a standalone blog post without having to load the rest of the website.

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    RSS is a nice was to get a centralized list of things you want to know about, it’s not a full content delivery platform. I think one of the best examples of using RSS was way back when FireFox allowed you to have RSS bookmarks (seriously, fuck whoever made the decision to kill that feature). You could have a “folder” which was the current RSS feed from the site and if anything looked worth reading, you could click on it and go to the full article. It is also pull based, meaning that you get to decide what ends up in your list and what doesn’t. No algorithms,no intrusive client side scripts/programs, just you pulling data from the source. Granted, an RSS feed might have an algorithm behind it, but it’s up to you to decide to subscribe to such.

    From the perspective of the sites providing the RSS feed, it’s a way to drive traffic to their site without that content being scraped and presented somewhere that doesn’t give them the ad impressions and user engagement statistics which they get if you visit their site (and don’t have a plethora of ad-blocking in place). If they simply delivered the whole article in the RSS feed, they would lose that revenue source and any incentive to use it. So ya, you’re going to have to actually go to the site to read/see the full thing.

    It’s helpful to treat RSS as a way to know about stuff you are interested in. Actually viewing that stuff should happen in the appropriate app, be that a browser or dedicated app.

  • librekitty@lemmy.today
    2·
    5 days ago

    yeah there was a blog post about this on openrss, i was going to share the link but it looks like the site is down right now