After trying an RSS reader for a few days, a contributor on Reddit has declared that RSS is "kind of dog----" and not worth the hype. They don't like that many feeds contain the partial text of posts to get you to finish reading at the link:
So over the last 2 days I installed a local FreshRSS instance.
Oh boy is it bad.
Most sites want you to read articles on their website to generate traffic, so they only provide headlines and small summaries in their feeds. So I'm forced to read the article on their website. This defeats the entire purpose of RSS. I'm sorry, if you are fine with this, you should configure Google News for 5 minutes (lets you subscribe to topics and websites) and you will have a better and more beginner friendly experience than RSS. I didn't set this up for hours just to read it on the original website.
But I didn't want to give up, so I really tried everything to fix this. I installed Full-Text RSS 3.8, which shows you the full text of the article inside RSS. This actually does work, but now the entire layout is fucked. Suddenly all images appear twice above each other, so you have to disable images. But there are also other slightly annoying layout bugs. Luckily, its possible to configure the displayed text by changing the URL. I actually spent a lot of time to learn this, and it kind of worked, but you need to do this on each site all over again, if they use different layouts its not working properly. I didn't set this up for hours just to read with an ugly layout.
I was still unhappy with everything, so I tried out RSS-Bridge. It didn't work for me so I stopped trying that.
What about all the websites that don't even offer RSS? What is the point of one central hub of information if it can't access most sites? ... Definitely unusable for normies, might be useful for people who are into software engineering with high patience and low standards.
Someone trying RSS for the first time is not going to find all the feeds they might want to follow in two days. RSS isn't a total replacement for using the web. There aren't full feeds of everything. There are a lot of partial feeds and sites that don't offer feeds at all, especially now that syndication is a normal part of the web and not the next big thing.
In my experience RSS readers that try to extract full text from web pages are always hit or miss, so I settle for what's in the feeds or unsubscribe if they are too limited in what they make available in feed items.
The person on Reddit went from overselling the premise of RSS ("one central hub") to underselling it ("kind of dog----"). I've used an RSS reader since the format was created by Ramanathan Guha and Dan Libby at Netscape in 1999. It is useful, convenient and free from algorithmic manipulation and constant advertising. These traits are still vital on a web that has become increasingly terrible.
Categories: RSS, FreshRSS, Full-Text RSS, RSS-Bridge, Netscape, Reddit
Echo is a Node script to post new items from an RSS feed to microblogging services and social media sites. It requires Node.js version 19, though some earlier versions might work, and installation instructions can be found on the GitHub repository for the project.
The script currently supports Micro.blog, Mastodon, Omnivote, GitHub and Webhooks.
Categories: RSS, Mastodon, Micro.blog
