Hey all,

So I’ve been wanting to start using RSS recently. I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for using it to help curate what I’m interested in instead of what algorithms want me to engage with. But maybe I’m thinking of it wrong.

My understanding of RSS was that I find one of the many different RSS readers that I like, currently I’m using Akregator on Linux, then start subscribing to individual sites and sources. The idea being that I can go to one place and read everything I’m interested in.

But I can count on one hand, out of the 165 feeds I’ve subscribed to so far, the number that actually load the full article contents and images. Nearly every single one of them gives me a paragraph and a “Complete this story” or a “View full story here” or some other phrase.

If I load the full page inside the RSS app, I get all the nagware about signing up, give me cookies, just general obtrusive ads, blah blah blah. Obviously it’s using an internal web engine and not my actual browser with my ad blockers and VPN extension and stuff. So instead I just double-click the RSS link and it opens in my normal browser and I read it there.

So, that gets down to the crux of my question…at this point, what’s the difference between me just bookmarking the sites that I want and then just going there? If RSS only loads a paragraph anyways, what’s the point in using it?

Now I do understand that this isn’t RSS’s fault as a protocol, it’s how these sites are choosing to use it. I imagine they are just trying to get people to click to their site for views and whatnot but still…at least how I want to use it, it kinda defeats the purpose of RSS.

Am I missing something or is this something the community has been dealing with for a while now?

  • kevincox@lemmy.ml
    5·
    5 days ago

    Yes, a lot of feeds, especially the more commercial ones, only have a teaser in the feed. Most people don’t like this. But lots of feeds want to try and estimate how many readers they have. Since RSS has better privacy by design they can’t really tell if you read it or not. So they force you to visit the site.

    However IMHO RSS is still valuable here. Because now I get my notifications in the same place. For example I subscribe to YouTube via RSS even though YouTube tries as hard as it can to force you to watch the video on-site or in-app. This is because RSS lets me reliably get notified about all of the channels and playlists that I am interested in. I can also mix in feeds from elsewhere (Nebula, PeerTube, …) into the same feed so that I just look at one place and have all of my video history.

    In some cases you can combat this. Many feed readers will attempt to scrape the full article from the site. This means that you may not have to leave your reader to enjoy the whole article. However this isn’t very reliable and can be pretty difficult depending on how antagonistic the site is. There are also tools that will consume the original feel and produce a new feed with (hopefully) full text articles.

    But at the end of the day this is the choice the site is offering you. If you don’t find their feeds useful just don’t use them. You can either visit manually to check, use whatever other notification systems they provide or try to build your own feed (see “feed builder” tools that scrape sites to produce feeds).