RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google
63 points by repl
63 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.
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 use one daily and have since Google Reader (R.I.P.) Now I use Feedly.
I find it excellent for feeding procrastination.
I've tried many readers but the one I've ended up sticking with is the very simple https://vore.website by ~j3s.
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 self host a minflux instance in my homelab. Great way to keep up with niche blogs that only post occasionally.
I use one. I have a freshrss server self-hosted, and use various freshrss-compatible clients on devices to read the entries themselves.
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 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!