RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google
108 points by repl
108 points by repl
Out of curiosity, how many people actually use an RSS Feed Reader?
I don't use one, and from this it sounds like I may be in a minority of techies no using one. Should I use one instead of relying on link aggregators to feed my procrastination?
I use it because there are many interesting blogs that publish infrequently with months or years between posts and most of those posts never hit the front page of any link aggregrator. And even back when Twitter still was somewhat useful, it was a terrible way to catch these posts as they quickly passed by in the feed.
Yes, this is exactly why I still use one.
I have found that it's important to keep those infrequently-updating blogs separate from more noisy feeds, or they similarly get lost in the noise. Most of the noisy ones are news outlets, so I have a news tag on those feeds so I can filter them out easily.
I use one daily and have since Google Reader (R.I.P.) Now I use Feedly.
I find it excellent for feeding procrastination.
Followup, I have a lot of feeds from back when RSS was "hip". A lot of them haven't seen new entries in years.
I do prune sometimes. Unfortunately old WP instances can get hijacked or the domain name expires and I get slop instead of good content. I also had to wean myself off an addiction to US political reporting as it was impacting my mental wellbeing.
I have a lot of feeds about photo gear I no longer really care about, but I just mark as read when it becomes too much.
A recent pleasant discovery was that local traffic alerts are published as RSS here, so I can get a quick overview before commuting without relying on the alerts on the radio.
I use one. I have a freshrss server self-hosted, and use various freshrss-compatible clients on devices to read the entries themselves.
I started using Thunderbird for it relatively recently. This was ironically motivated by most link aggregators and tech related social media I follow devolving (or being forcibly devolved) into slop. Just trawling through my old bookmarks and history for unique domains, I gathered a couple dozen of niche blogs, but there's plenty of ways to find more: marginalia search, bearblog's discover, googling for personal gitea/forgejo instances and checking for blog subdomains, googling for random stuff and coming across them, or googling for random lists of sites someone already put together in a github repo. And some blogs link to other blogs, who in turn link to other blogs, who link to even more blogs. Those are a gold mine. At this point I think I have hundreds of feeds and am losing track of how I'm discovering them lol.
Niche blogs aside, quite a few vendors and CERTs maintain their own feeds, which is really handy for keeping up with infosec related news. Did you know you can add seclists.org to your feed reader and get the oss-sec mailing list as an RSS feed? Every once in a while a security advisory will credit a specific org or person for a report, if you're lucky they have a high quality blog, and if you're even luckier it'll have a feed. Add it to your reader and carry on.
Anyhow, it's particularly nice breaking out a bit from the US/Western Europe bubble sites like this one tend to be in. It's not like you have to ditch link aggregators entirely (or maybe do, and boost your productivity); they're complementary to feed readers.
I do - NetNewsWire, on macOS and iPhone (it neatly syncs state between the two).
I'm not subscribed to much - less than 100 feeds total - but I get some good stuff in there. People who can be bothered to implement RSS/Atom turns out to be a good filter for people who publish good content!
I also use it for quite a few personal hacks. I have my own custom feed of photographs of California Brown Pelicans from iNaturalist, for example.
I started using feed readers again just in the last couple of months. There were a couple of Lobsters stories on the topic, and in the "cozy web" frame of mind I thought, "Gee, I should pick this up again!" I went with Capy Reader because it's minimalist and open source.
To answer your question, whether feed readers are "better" than link aggregators (for some definition of the term): eh, sometimes! Most of my procrastination still comes from link aggregators, but occasionally I'll get something extra from my feed reader, usually via the following pathway:
I use one, and have been trying very hard to get any of my friends to use one, and have failed at that. I was under the impression that RSS is still a fairly niche technology among tech workers at large, though more represented among people who post to lobste.rs b/c it's a really good way to stay up-to-date with many blogs.
I self host a minflux instance in my homelab. Great way to keep up with niche blogs that only post occasionally.
Same setup for me. I use rss for many years, starting with Google Reader, multiple apps and services since (including Inoreader, Feedbin, standalone Reeder app, probably more I don’t remember), until finally landing on self-hosted Miniflux, with changing apps to consume it (currently Unread, I also like Lire and Current).
I also consume email only newsletters as rss, via https://kill-the-newsletter.com/, as I don’t like reading in my mail client.
I love RSS and use it for YouTube and email newsletters as well as websites.
It's a niche thing perhaps but most sites still have feeds
I've had elfeed going in emacs for several years now. I don't use tags, and it just shows me a flat list of posts. I can filter them by date, source, read/unread, etc.
Lately I've been making more of an effort to grow the list of things in there so I don't have the same three or four high-volume bloggers filling the whole screen. Finding things you actually want to read and have in your feed is a really difficult part of using RSS. Personally, I only want authors in my feed if I know that whatever they are posting I will want to see (most of the time, at least).
Reflecting on my elfeed time: I the most important thing about enjoying RSS is that you don't have to read everything. It is okay if you don't get to everything. I like the elfeed interface because I can tell it to only show me things that are less than a month old and I don't feel overwhelmed by volume. I don't want to know how many unread things there are - I can look at my email inbox if I want that experience.
Link aggregators are a good jumping off point to find folks you might want to read. I've used https://blogroll.org a lot for discovering sites. If an author you really like has their own blogroll, then congratulations you've found some real treasure.
good luck!
I've tried many readers but the one I've ended up sticking with is the very simple https://vore.website by ~j3s.
I have a categories of feeds that no single aggregator would pull together. NetNewsWire keeps me up to date on them. Reviving my feeds was what enabled me to finally kick Reddit.
I use FreshRSS. I used to use Feedly and then Inoreader, but self-hosting works better for me. RSS is the main way I get tech news these days.
It's hard to see how many people use it by asking it that way, since communities like Lobster are echo chambers that attract like-minded people. I think the more important thing is whether you find using it brings you value. I certainly do.
I just set one up today and honestly, I'm loving it. It's a good replacement for Google News and I've followed a couple of talented devs who have rss feeds on their blogs and have a separate folder for them.
I use one. I built it myself. It polls sites I like and then updates a static HTML file on a server I control. Live site here and source code here.
I found myself hitting the same 2-3 sites when wanting to consume internet content (HN, Lobste.rs, HaD) and instead of switching between those sites hoping to see the latest new item or article, I just created an RSS feed to do it. I find the experience much more pleasurable.
As a side note, I have little icon for which site the article comes from which, if clicked on instead of the link line goes directly to the comments section. I find myself often going directly to the comments section, bypassing the original article, because the discussion on HN and Lobste.rs is often more interesting and can inform whether I want to invest actually reading the article.
I read a metric ton of blogs over RSS. Also a handful of podcasts distributed over RSS. And, technically, my "youtube homepage is an absolute mess, let's use the RSS feeds to create a sensible set of links"[0] thing is an RSS reader.
[0] not exactly what it does but you get the idea.
I do! Like others here, I run a Miniflux server and mostly read on NetNewsWire on an iPad. I not only use it for blogs, it's pretty useful to me to track releases and security advisories for software that I use or I'm interested in (most software forges have an RSS feeds for releases).
Also use it to filter firehose feeds (Lobste.rs, HN) for particular subjects that I'm interested in.
I 95% use the lobsters feed as an entry point, very rarely do I visit the homepage.
And yes, that's a general: I use a feed reader.
I use them a lot. Use them so much that when the one I was using didn’t had the features I wanted, I made my own.
RSS is great. It is the web we deserve.
I use it, but only to receive updates from the blogs I follow (with titles and summaries of articles). Then I click on the original link to read the full content. I know some people read articles directly in the reader.
I use Miniflux and I follow hundreds of great blogs/websites on it. Everyday I have 20–30 new posts to read. It is much better than doomscrolling on Reddit I suppose. Lobsters is not bad though.
Kindof, I use rss-parrot to follow feeds on the fediverse https://rss-parrot.net/ . While the feedreaders I used to use are defunct, I kept around the opml in case I could pick them up again, and when the parrot appeared I re-subbed to sites I used to read.
I have been using feed readers daily for the past couple of decades and currently subscribe to 322 feeds.
As for aggregators vs feed readers, they do different things. For me aggregators are discovery tools whereas feed readers, much like subscriptions to publications, deliver reading material I want to receive regularly.
For quite a while building an RSS reader was my goto project for learning a new language.
I still use the latest one.
I do, every day. I, like many others here, use Miniflux to aggregate. For a while I waffled between using the web ui and NetNewsWire. I think now that my configuration has calmed down a bit, NNW is nice and stable, and a great native interface.
I wrote my own, Temboz, over 22 years ago (currently rewriting it from Python to Rust to learn the latter). Emphasizes filtering capabilities, e.g. I never want to hear about sports or the Kardashians again. Probably the app I spend the most time in every day. I read Lobste.rs in it, incidentally.
The unique thing about RSS is it allows you to follow sites with very infrequent updates. I have over 600.
Indeed, infrequent updates and RSS are made for each other.
I remember being shocked when Google Reader was axed by people saying "who cares, I get all that info via Twitter anyway". That might have worked then with frequently updated sources but it really didn't work with infrequent ones.
Miniflux self-hosted. Been very happy with it.
It does what I want, shows me the new stuff from (most) sites. The socials are terrible for this - either they prioritise 3rd party crap and wildly out of order (FB is terrible for this) or sites don't post them. Staying away from the ex-bird for sanity reasons.
I a very happy user of a self hosted Miniflux instance since years. It's running in a VPS as a container into a Docker Compose stack, almost zero maintenance.
Curious if folks here use RSS to consume Lobste.rs, as it does have RSS.
I subscribe to the Top Stories of the Past Week feed. It’s a nice way to catch good stories that I may have missed during my irregular manual browsing.
I do. I have a 'fire hose' category called 'Discovery' on FreshRSS with several fast moving feeds like lobste.rs
I used to have the new stories feed on the RSS reader app on my phone before. Was nice.
But I prefer using the mobile web interface here to be honest.
My google traffic has dropped dramatically since the introduced AI mode at the top of the results page
I just had at my own logs, out of curiosity, and it's interesting. I'm trying my best to stay off of Google and search engines, so I didn't expect much traffic my way from there. Looking at my logs for a single day, May the 4th, not counting various crawlers I drive into a maze of garbage:
/atom.xml.Not surprising that google drives basically nothing my way (as hoped, because I tried to tell it not to index me). But my RSS traffic is considerably larger on this particular site (my blog) than direct visits. At least on that day.
Looking at the entire log collection (~7 days): 19k regular hits, 27k RSS/Atom. Feeds still win!