this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.

The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.

I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

For RSS I honestly don't see a point, at least for me. What's the use for having update feeds in a unified format when I still have to go to each fucking site to view the full text? I completely see the point of RSS when all I need is in the feed. But I hate going from different UI to different UI to get the full content. I want something like inoreader.com for self-hosting.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

RSS works great for me though.

I have an app on my not-so-smart phone to read news when commuting. It is not a long journey so I just want to have a quick glance at the headlines and read the actual articles that I want to. There are only 6 sites that I am interested, but still will take quite some work to crawl from the proper websites. RSS in turn is unified so I don't need to worry about their website layouts, formats, etc. It also gives me an URL to the actual content which I can use readability/reader mode library to parse and further reduce unnecessary contents.

Quite the opposite, I hope more informational sites offer/keep RSS! (Some removed RSS typically after a revamp, design change)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Mastodon offers rss for both keywords and users

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The content of the feed depends on the content creator, not on RSS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I know that. But RSS is like 95% used for news feeds and that's what I'm talking about. The way RSS is overwhelmingly used is making the whole thing useless (to me).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

well, then just consider those giving shitty support for it as if they wouldn't be supporting it at all

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

What's the use for having update feeds in a unified format when I still have to go to each fucking site to view the full text

This has nothing to do with RSS, it is the author's choice. It's like someone who posts links to their articles on Twitter / Facebook / Reddit, same thing. The platform doesn't prevent you from putting the entire content there, and in fact, many do, especially with RSS.

One benefit of RSS though is that because it is an open protocol, the problem you mention already has solutions, which auto fetch the articles for you. That wouldn't be possible without an open protocol like RSS

Moreover, I'd argue even with that, RSS is still a huge plus. To have all your content's headlines in one UI, and potentially you can filter or sort them however you want, that's pretty awesome.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Miniflux is likely to tick most of your boxes. It's self hostable and can download the full article without extra clicks / having to visit the source.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks, I'll take a look. These days Inoreader also shows only the summary, making it useless for me.