How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won’t be getting any valuable information? For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users. It won’t be long before your news feed is worthless.
Ben Wolf of Old Reader fame wrote this back in November 2013. (And I found it in this Wired article, credit where credit is due.) It was true then in 2013, it was true in 2018 when I started writing this blog post (LOL), and it is true now. More amazingly, that 2013 slug still works! Anyhow, today I want to write a bit about RSS so time to dust off this draft!
RSS is one of those old holdouts of open technologies that kind of went away, but akshully never really went away. We kind of left it, but actually we (some of us) never did. Contrary to common belief it did exist before Google Reader (if I’m not wrong, I used Liferea before migrating my feeds to Reader), and contrary to common belief, it’s not dead. Like IRC. Or Usenet. Or punks.
Meanwhile, with AI rising the internet by and large became unusable on the “traditional” channels of the past 10-15 years — your “for you” feeds, and the like. Algorithmically curated sources are inevitably polluted by algorithmically generated crap making human content very difficult to find and follow.
But I digress.
When I started writing this post in 2018, I was a happy Inoreader user — Pro, for no other reason than to support them. But now, 3 (+1) things happened:
- First, they raised prices / reshuffled tiers, so my “supporter” type of subscription suddenly got very expensive, with 9 EUR per month for the first year, even more after.
- Second, I realised that I need more than what I do now with my RSS, around my Youtube use.
- I basically ran out of the 150 feed limit of the free tier.
- (Three, in the making for some time: Youtube has become impossible to use. But this will be a separate post. Eventually.)
So I finally made the move from Inoreader to (selfhosted) FreeRSS.
FreeRSS is a PHP application so install is trivial. Subscribed feeds can be simple exported to OPML from Inoreader and then imported to my FreshRSS instance, so that’s also trivial. I encountered 2 gimmicks:
- Using NGinx there are some rewrite rules that I needed to add to properly use the Google Reader API (which I didn’t spot during the install, causing my some minor headache.)
- Auto refreshing the feeds on server side required a cron job, otherwise force refreshing the feeds is not possible in the Android apps. (Because it will always just refresh the current list of articles from the server, and not the feeds.)
On my phone (and tablet), I installed FeedMe for those cozy cross platform vibes, connecting to my instance through the (anachronistically named) Google Reader API. The app works much like Inoreader’s, swipe to refresh, scroll to mark as read, etc.
I also installed the RSSHub Radar addon in my Firefox to help discovery: it will discover feeds in pages I visit, so if I decide I want to add a site’s feed to my reader, it’s 1 click.
And now with no limits on number of feeds, I do it much more often too: when I stumble upon an interesting/valuable post in a “human” ghetto of the internet (like Reddit, or Lemmy, or Mastodon), I can immediately subscribe to the whole feed if I want to, making for a very simple, but (for now) effective discovery method.
Next up: consolidating my Youtube feeds in a similar way!