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A comment on RSS as a Facebook alternative.

Re:RSS as a Facebook alternative by EccentricBunny on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @06:01PM (#26405646)
It's a shame he didn't recommend cli programs like sfeed or newsboat.

I recently also stopped using youtube to be notified about new videos from the channels I follow, and now I use exclusively RSS with some scripts to made my life easier. Because youtube doesn't provide a RSS with all your subscriptions anymore, I had to extract all of them using the browser console[0] and convert all the links to the (hidden) RSS feed. This issue also happens with LBRY but this time I had to use an external service (I don't blame them because by design, you can't have something like a linear RSS feed in a blockchain).

I also used twitter for a while but at one point I felt tired of letting them tell me what I want to read. I was usually distracted by other tweets and feelt like I was wasting my time and didn't find any important or interesting stuff. Because there are still good twitter users in this platform and they don't support RSS feeds anymore, I managed to follow them using nitter[1].

I can tell you that, now, I see those two platforms like they were 10 years ago and I'm enjoying them like never before.

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/85275454?hl=en&msg...

[1] https://nitter.net/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:RSS as a Facebook alternative by HDMI_Cable on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @06:18PM (#26405785)
You can still get an RSS feed for individual channels (not subscriptions though) with the following URL:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[Channel ID here]

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:RSS as a Facebook alternative by drdeca on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @08:29PM (#26406726)
You can even subscribe to a particular playlist! (So, say someone produces many videos, but you only want the ones that they add to a particular playlist, you can do that.)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:RSS as a Facebook alternative by EccentricBunny on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @03:55AM (#26409266)
Yes, I wanted to use sfeed and they show how to get the good url in their config example [0].

With a simple for loop in bash, I added them to the list of my rss feeds. I had 50+ youtube channels and didn't want to make something complicated.

[0] https://git.codemadness.org/sfeed/file/sfeedrc.example.html#...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:RSS as a Facebook alternative by opan on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @09:11PM (#26406962)
Nitpick, but newsboat is TUI rather than CLI, a sort of terminal GUI. (same for others ncurses stuff) CLI stuff is more of a REPL.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:RSS as a Facebook alternative by asdff on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @11:32PM (#26407787)
Off topic: would a man page be considered a TUI?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:RSS as a Facebook alternative by pwrplus1 on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @10:26PM (#26407416)
sfeed is the greatest! [1]

The reason I couldn't stick with other feed aggregators in the past is because of the perpetual accumulation of the unread count. The output of sfeed_html is just links [2]. No unread counts. I can remember whether I've read something or not.

Just stick it on a server, run as a cronjob, and you have your new browser homepage. And if you want to move your "database" it's just a directory of tsv files. Brilliant.

[1] https://codemadness.org/sfeed-simple-feed-parser.html

[2] https://codemadness.org/downloads/sfeed/html/feeds.html

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:RSS as a Facebook alternative by asdff on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @11:30PM (#26407781)
>perpetual accumulation of the unread count

In practice, is that an issue? you could just ignore that number, or mark all as read when you are done reading. It looks like the example you gave in link 2 has some unread counts perpetually accumulating, in fact, unless I misunderstand.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:RSS as a Facebook alternative by pwrplus1 on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @10:05AM (#26411926)
sfeed_html just outputs a flat html file, I know it looks like unread counts, but it's just showing a count of entries with a published date within the last 24 hours of when the page was generated. It's just an easy way to draw attention to "new" entries.

An unread count feels to me like another todo list. I like not having it.

[ Parent | on HN ]