I'm rusty, though. What's the best Mac desktop RSS client these days?

Youtube wants people to subscribe, which I don't do, I simply add the RSS feed of channels I want to be updated about which is probably not what either Youtube or those channels want given how much they are begging me to subscribe all the time.

[1]: https://havenweb.org

Is there a way to update my own blog to play nicely with Haven? I like my own styling and hosting setup, and I already have my own RSS reader, so ideally I would like to continue using those, while also making them available to friends and family on Haven.

I have to add that caveat because support isn't universal. NetNewsWire supports it, Thunderbird supports it, and Inoreader supports it on their paid tier, but Feedly doesn't. (for some examples)

Happy to chat directly, drop me a note on the Haven contact page! https://havenweb.org/contact.html

For users who don't know how to self host, and can't stomach the (very reasonable for ad-free social media) $5/mo... have you considered a cloud-hosted option with a sidebar of KTLO ads? Or maybe a "family plan" cloud instance where multiple friends could share a single cloud instance (sharded per person) to save money on the hosted option?

The beauty of RSS is it's interoperability. So I was wondering, can your built-in newsreader also read my RSS feed, for example? Or only other Haven feeds?

And the other way around, can I add private feeds from Haven users to my built-in newsreader? Or any other separate newsreader software, for that matter? As long as Haven users would share that link with me, of course.

And Haven's feed reader can read every RSS and Atom feed I've been able to find. The feed reading and publishing are both part of the live demo, so you can do some testing over there! https://havenweb.org/demo.html

If you run into any incompatibilities, let me know and I'll get them fixed!

Back in the day, more people used to include a list of blogs they follow on their own blogs, I thought this was a great practice. A few still do, like this very interesting blog on statistics: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/blogs-i-read/

Filter them. For example I have Tested youtube channel on feed but put a filter on titles that gets most of the content Adam Savage makes (as I kinda don't care about anything else they do).

Also, splitting into groups helps a lot, just putting "low volume but I want to see everything" stuff away from "just basically a news feed of on average mildly interesting stuff" hels

I thought the same, and so I built a sort of webring/blogroll functionality in my website project, together with an accompanying OPML file so these lists are easily shareable. I did the same with a microblog/timeline, that had an RSS counterpart. The web is already 'social media', if you ask me.

Drew wrote the OG version: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring

I also made a little rust version here: https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsense...

HN nerds might remember that NNW is very fast, even by native macOS standards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23286362

If you're feeling fatigued by algorithmic nonsense these days, you should seriously give RSS a try.

Let's not participate in the corruption of the word "algorithm" here on HN, too. We can afford to abstain from loose use of language as shorthand for generic memetic outrage.

https://miniflux.app/

I ended up setting up a FreshRSS[0] instance which I've been quite happy with so far. It provides the Google Reader API, which is still supported by a lot of FOSS mobile RSS readers (I picked Readrops[1]).

[0] https://www.freshrss.org/

[1] https://github.com/readrops/Readrops

To be fair, this is a big problem everywhere, not just with RSS. Especially on Twitter, and even here with dupes on HN.

It's more of a problem though if you're following a bunch of "news" feeds, as opposed to, say, technical blogs with original content.

Like if HN and lobste.rs (or other link aggregators) both point to a recent news story, then the fact that you've read the url they link to, should be a seperate concept from whether you've 'read' the discussion that points to the link.

And if you seperately have a feed of the originating news site, reading it there would mark it in both places.

This just seems like reverse voyeurism, and while that’s fine, it’s odd to assume anyone else shares that fetish with you.

Why make it easier for this to happen? :

  >    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a socialist.

  >    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a trade unionist.

  >    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
  >         Because I was not a Jew.

  >    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

[0] Most of them wouldn't want to kill me personally. Just the nameless other that happens to match a lot about me.

The data being collected is valuable, evidenced by the fact that an entire industry exists for it. It is collected without the users' consent (beyond the sham of "by using this website you agree to our terms" - by the way, legally speaking individuals cannot agree to give up their rights). The users are not compensated for the valuable information that is harvested from them.

Lastly, many online service providers are cavalier with the security of this data. It is freely shared with hostile state actors (not necessarily western ones), predatory commercial third parties (spammers), and actual criminals. Due to lax security, criminals often gain access to this data and use it for identity theft, phishing and other fraud. People compile it in "social media background check" databases which exposes individuals, without their consent, to stalkers.

There's not enough space in a comment to go over every single instance of privacy violations leading to serious consequences for users, such as those you claim do not exist, so to anyone interested I would recommend doing a web search on privacy related topics.

Aren’t you exhausted by all of this? Why continue to participate in the flywheel when you can otherwise simply reap the myriad benefits that come with a more connected society?

It just seems like some folks prefer constantly being upset…

Metrics-driven OKRs processes are at odds with privacy-first protocols. The sad reality at most companies is "if we can't measure it, we ain't gonna do it" - even if everybody is asking for it. This is why OKRs suck.

So, I blame OKRs for getting rid of RSS and open protocols in general.

[1] https://updates.postcard.page/posts/new-on-postcard-rss-easi...

PSA #2: set things up so the author field of your feed includes your email address (e.g. "Alice <[email protected]>") and not just your bare name, so people can more easily get in touch with you without having to click through to the original post and then hunt around for your contact page; otherwise, you might never find out it's broken[2].

1. <https://enable-cors.org>

2. <https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel...>

I should really add my email address to my news feed though.

In theory, it should be trivial to make simple, truly "serverless", web-based feed readers like AirSS[1][2]. In practice, many people are prevented from doing this, because the feeds they're interested in are hosted on servers that don't support CORS, which leads to really annoying workarounds (like needing to use a proxy or a separate browser extension, etc.)

1. <https://github.com/derek-zhou/airss>

2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28730630>

I'd love to find a "web2rss" for laggards that don't provide their own feeds :)

[1]: https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/

https://createfeed.fivefilters.org/

https://feed43.com/

https://politepol.com/en/

https://github.com/breck7/scroll/commit/0ca22e118e1cc9a79eb9...

I'd also like to shout out

https://www.jsonfeed.org/

https://jsonresume.org/

https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/

It'd be pretty cool to have an ecosystem where you could

```

$ packagemanger init my-site password

$ hostOfChoice deploy

```

Go to the url, auth yourself, then have a list of "plugins" that act as a ~cms for formats like the ones above

Edit: Could you at least tell me why you're downvoting

1. I find it easier to work with JSON using javascript

2. The stupid reason, I find it more aesthetically pleasing

I'd like to bookmark interesting long reads for later to Pocket from newsboat, but also resurface them as an RSS feed, but it seems a little awkward.

https://gitlab.com/news-flash/news_flash_gtk

Most of my experience with RSS is just for podcasts.

RSS is a bunch of different "standards" and good practices, its way more difficult to parse and play with.

They both have the same goal, but one is just cleaner and stricter :)

That being said the reader I wrote supports it because why not.

[1] https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email

1. configure your feeds (RSS/Atom, but also Twitter/Reddit) in a simple dashboard 2. connect Google Drive (Dropbox/OneDrive to be supported eventually) 3. on a daily schedule, a pdf file with your feeds' content will be sent to your GDrive account, which can be synced on your tablet device.

If interested, I've got a survey you can fill out to get alpha access: https://forms.gle/qmy6WMgHLxWiEgx4A

Though I'm running into a stubborn issue where FreshRSS doesn't parse the date correctly... so your mileage may vary.

It basically reads a list of feed URLs, with categories, loads and parses them and writes out a simple HTML page with the headlines. Saves me a lot of trouble - just run it on a web server and publish the created HTML files in a directory.

However, I cannot find proper open-source RSS reader for Windows that fits in 2022. Any recommendations? I especially need customization for appearance of text/feed.

Feeder for Android is great.

Is an attempt to move these to json.

You can add an `xml-stylesheet` processing instruction at the top of your XML-based feed format to transform it via XSLT into HTML. When viewed in a Web browser, it will look like an ordinary Web page, but in reality it's actually RSS/Atom consumable by anyone's feed reader. Nobody has to hunt for the URL to the RSS/Atom feed, because the URL of the top-level post index for your blog is the URL to the RSS/Atom feed. You also don't have to set up your static site generator to generate a separate feed file. Neat!

Can't do that with JSON.

Same. I even wrote a program that allows me to follow people on Twitch without being logged in there. I made a bash alias so I just need to type "f" in the terminal when I want to see who is live. Otherwise I use newsboat for things that have RSS feeds and w3m bookmarks for everything else. W3m has a really nice bookmarks page that is just a list of links that you can access with alt+b; very convenient when you want to quickly go to a page.

I loved Google for the way that promoted it so heavily. I thought that it was conceivable that a corporation need not be evil..... How naive!

But then Google dropped rss! Just when they had everyone there!! Why?

It was by design. It was an attempt to kill a protocol that supported disintermediated information, where the user could get information directly from source.

I've never stopped using rss - it is hands down the best way to get information.

QuiteRSS is an excellent native reader that handles my thousands of feeds well. It is so multi-platform it even has an OS/2 version. https://quiterss.org/

If you like bicycles and simple tech stuff, you might enjoy.

Most HN sourced feeds are in the "Computing but not spammy" category.

The first load of the big opml into QuiteRSS (if you try it) might take a while. After that it will be faster. I suggest enabling the "load database to ram" option in QuiteRSS configuration.

It is a very small microcosm of how we say we want social media feeds to work (chronological) but why algorithms are everywhere.

Personally I do more of the latter and probably get less than 10 new items a day (and 3 of those tend to be comics which are quick to read over breakfast).

Often the higher-volume feeds that I subscribe to are filtered by author or category to focus on what I am really interested in.

FreshRSS looked to be a more up to date solution compared to ttrss that I self hosted in the past with a BIG plus of going beyond what is available in the rss stream, retrieve full articles AND even just parse normal web pages to retrieve articles when rss is not available. For sure I've spent 2-3 hours to setup all these things, but now I have a curated list of rss feeds + parsed normal sites in a page, rarely needing to go outside of that view directly on the relevant sites and accessible from everywhere with proper user/pass support behind a reverse proxy. AND I spend less time just browsing without reason ;)

I wish more feeds had this kind of focus- sharing the meat of something in the item body rather than a bland summary or a plain click through to an article.

The feed item should give me a reason to go through to the article/link/comment, not just be a spammy list of things that might be interesting but probably won't be (but I won't know until I click through and find out for myself).

My only hesitation about Nextcloud is that I don't like to put too many eggs in one basket. It is best in class for cloud services and now my most critical installation. Their innovation and drive as a company is impressive probably because they have real values that align with their people.

I don't know what happened, but when I tried to find something earlier this year, it looked like there was nothing that was a simple RSS without extra bloat that wasn't abandonware and that actually literally worked.

Every time I ask this, 90% of the answers just say use X Android app. Or I have to compile it myself from scratch with broken directions (and then find out it has been broken for years). Or it's like a docker image (thus requiring docker) or otherwise requires installing multiple gigabytes of random new languages.

Flym for Android.

- Being able to dismiss articles where the headline is the story is really valuable. For example, I just dismissed "Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun (techcrunch.com)"- it's not worth my attention.

- It's possible to accrue a large backlog of unread "semi-interesting" items that may or may not be valuable. In this sense, there's still a FOMO aspect to RSS, and you have to be aggressive in dismissing articles. For exmaple, a few 2-week-old backlog titles in my feed include "SHA-3 Buffer Overflow", "Show HN: Restfox - Open source lightweight alternative to Postman", and "Five origami books by Shuzo Fujimoto are now public domain". These are semi-interesting, but really I should just dismiss them.

So from a Kantian ethical point of view, it doesn't really work. There ought to be a better solution. But on a personal level, I wholeheartedly agree

Using wsb as an example, you used to see quality posts with 20 upvotes then the 2020s roll around, bots and scrawlers started inflating the needed numbers and even with thousand of upvotes, some posts were blatant ads after wsb proved it had alot of wealthy eyes.

The main pages of reddit have the same problems full of bots that flood into selected posts almost immediately after it gets posted, this is especially obvious during election years, where billions are burned to "let us discover what the popular concensus is".

I saw the link to this article in my RSS feed, and I took the time to open a browser, find the link, and comment because RSS adoption is something that I genuinely want to have a conversation about.

Which means that with RSS, you can still be a part of the community, you just won't reflexively upvote or spend time in the comments section.

Sometimes an uninteresting website has a very interesting article. This is specially great for supper niche stuff. An empty feed should not draw much attention in a reader. The single comment posted years later could be really useful.

There is also <comment> https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html#ltcommentsgtSub...

The author discusses the design here: https://george.mand.is/2019/11/introducing-bubo-rss-an-absur...

RSS is good to read, it does not solve the problem of how to respond.

This is more of a philosophical grouching so stop if you don't want to hear a rant.

Organizations, (I do mean organization as not only corporations do this) ingest or take over a well functioning solution, a FOSS, or standard with the intention to make it better (i give them the benefit of doubt). Often this manifests in merging with their tangential product, or similar solution into the victim. Ultimately, each and every one of these solutions die an agonizing death - death of complete abandonment, or complete destruction of the original spirit (e.g., ICQ, usenet, feedburner, CU-SeeMe, sageTV, silk labs, drop.io, gowalla).

    <a href="mailto:[email protected]?subject=my article">comment on this article</a>

I’ve given up. The result is that I simply don’t get to see what my friends and family post there anymore.

That being said I'm not sure if there is a great website to recommend for private sharing. Mastodon is maybe the best but I'm not sure I am a huge fan of the "only short messages" medium.

I use elfeed as my rss and even though I sit at my system for quite long, some days I just would like to go through my feeds on my phone. I would also love to have an archived portable copy of all my sites as well (FOMO) which currently elfeed doesn't seem to support exporting the feeds right now.