the catch is that lots of the stuff on the internet is now centralised on big platforms that try as hard as they can to steer you into their apps, so that you consume the content the way they want you to rather than the way you personally find convenient. what used to be blogs and small hobby websites has become Facebook fan pages or Instagram accounts, and while both Facebook and Instagram used to offer RSS feeds for public accounts at some point, it hasn’t been the case anymore for a decade or so. there are workarounds that let you get RSS for some pages that don’t offer it, but not for all of them and they vary in difficulty from “put the name of the account you want to follow and generate a special feed address with one click” through “pay a small monthy subscription for a company to generate a feed for you”, to “self-host some software that manages the feed”, and all of those can break at some point. still, for me personally there’s enough stuff that offers the feeds that are ready easy enough to access to make it worth my time.
You can also organise them into groups. You can view all the new content on a particular blog in order, or you can look at all your webcomic strips like opening up the newspaper to the funny page.
I tried RSS a couple times but I don’t get it. There are so many different channels from one of my favorite news site alone. If I fetch them all, my RSS inbox is bursting from that one site. How do I sort through all of it? I can’t manage hundreds of new articles per day.
you don’t read every article when visiting the website either, do you? so you’re already doing the sorting.
no one’s forcing you to read all of them, either set a short expiry time for the feed so the unread ones get deleted after a day or week or whatever, or mark them as read so that they disappear and move on. some readers allow you to set filters to e.g. ignore articles with certain keywords in the headlines, if you’re feeling a bit extra.
well that just sounds like a far better way to experience the internet
what’s the catch?
the catch is that lots of the stuff on the internet is now centralised on big platforms that try as hard as they can to steer you into their apps, so that you consume the content the way they want you to rather than the way you personally find convenient. what used to be blogs and small hobby websites has become Facebook fan pages or Instagram accounts, and while both Facebook and Instagram used to offer RSS feeds for public accounts at some point, it hasn’t been the case anymore for a decade or so. there are workarounds that let you get RSS for some pages that don’t offer it, but not for all of them and they vary in difficulty from “put the name of the account you want to follow and generate a special feed address with one click” through “pay a small monthy subscription for a company to generate a feed for you”, to “self-host some software that manages the feed”, and all of those can break at some point. still, for me personally there’s enough stuff that offers the feeds that are ready easy enough to access to make it worth my time.
You can also organise them into groups. You can view all the new content on a particular blog in order, or you can look at all your webcomic strips like opening up the newspaper to the funny page.
No catch, its an extremely simple, old and reliable system. The apps also look great, and have options for different lists, etc.
The only “catch” is that many sites no longer offer a feed, in the past almost all did. Blame Google.
I tried RSS a couple times but I don’t get it. There are so many different channels from one of my favorite news site alone. If I fetch them all, my RSS inbox is bursting from that one site. How do I sort through all of it? I can’t manage hundreds of new articles per day.
you don’t read every article when visiting the website either, do you? so you’re already doing the sorting.
no one’s forcing you to read all of them, either set a short expiry time for the feed so the unread ones get deleted after a day or week or whatever, or mark them as read so that they disappear and move on. some readers allow you to set filters to e.g. ignore articles with certain keywords in the headlines, if you’re feeling a bit extra.