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?

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    RSS is a nice was to get a centralized list of things you want to know about, it’s not a full content delivery platform. I think one of the best examples of using RSS was way back when FireFox allowed you to have RSS bookmarks (seriously, fuck whoever made the decision to kill that feature). You could have a “folder” which was the current RSS feed from the site and if anything looked worth reading, you could click on it and go to the full article. It is also pull based, meaning that you get to decide what ends up in your list and what doesn’t. No algorithms,no intrusive client side scripts/programs, just you pulling data from the source. Granted, an RSS feed might have an algorithm behind it, but it’s up to you to decide to subscribe to such.

    From the perspective of the sites providing the RSS feed, it’s a way to drive traffic to their site without that content being scraped and presented somewhere that doesn’t give them the ad impressions and user engagement statistics which they get if you visit their site (and don’t have a plethora of ad-blocking in place). If they simply delivered the whole article in the RSS feed, they would lose that revenue source and any incentive to use it. So ya, you’re going to have to actually go to the site to read/see the full thing.

    It’s helpful to treat RSS as a way to know about stuff you are interested in. Actually viewing that stuff should happen in the appropriate app, be that a browser or dedicated app.