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Ask Slashdot: Who's Still Using an RSS Reader? 181

Posted by BeauHD from the show-and-tell dept.
alternative_right writes: I use RSS to cover all of my news-reading needs because I like a variety of sources spanning several fields -- politics, philosophy, science, and heavy metal. However, it seems Google wanted to kill off RSS a few years back, and it has since fallen out of favor. Some of us are holding on, but how many? And what software do you use (or did you write your own XML parsers)?
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Ask Slashdot: Who's Still Using an RSS Reader? More

Ask Slashdot: Who's Still Using an RSS Reader?

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  • Every day. Main source of information (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gisborne ( 199113 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @07:25PM (#65571242)

    I dip into my RSS feeds several times a day. It is my main immediate source of information.

    Still seems to be widely supported, and it’s the basis of podcasting (I believe), so I don’t see it going anywhere.

  • RSS is Main source of news (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SoonerSkeene ( 1257702 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @07:34PM (#65571262)
    I currently use Feedly but have been considering a self-hosted solution. I already run my own url shortener for example. It's the only way I see slashdot posts and also all my other news and feeds and blogs. Big and small. RSS forever.

    • I have been using Feedly since Google retired Reader. I have run into a limit on tags and I am still terrified of Feedly going away. What self hosted solutions have you been looking at? Anything to recommend?

      • Only barley started to dable so no recommendations so far. Saw a few projects on GitHub but so far still going along with Feedly. I'm probably weird with my habits because I use Feedly constantly to browse headlines of what's new, but I always push things to Pocket or now Instapaper to actually go read later (rarely I'll read something direct on Feedly). That's a lot of pushing links around and gathering them up in another place but it's what I've got so far.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by acroyear ( 5882 )

      Been on Feedly since Google killed Reader as well. I do own a domain for an intended app (would have been php/mysql) called "feedmixer", but Feedly came along and addressed all my needs before I could get around to actually building it. So hey, my first true vaporware project.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Same experience here. Feedly has issues, but not enough that I can be bothered to replace it. I have an exit strategy if they ever enshittify it too much.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Vylen ( 800165 )

      Ditto.

      Thankfully found Feedly after Google Reader was shelved - and super fortunate that they offered a cheap life time subscription soon after.

      It's been pretty good and can probably count on one hand the number of times Feedly has gone unexpectedly down in the years since.

    • Same. I found this article from my Feedly feed.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rod.Dorman ( 458034 )

      I've been using the FeedBro extension in FireFox.
      Several times a day.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        I'm still using the Suite, SeaMonkey, handles RSS fine, along with Usenet, email and with an add-on, even gopher

      • I got here via Feedbro, and I also use an RSS reader on my mobile device for listening to podcasts while I'm in the car.

    • Self-hosted option:
      CommaFeed - Works rather well for my day-to-day use.

      OS application:
      QuiteRSS - Worked rather well, but it requires a lot of resources when you have a lot of subscriptions.
      RSSowl - Worked rather well, but doesn't deal all that well with quite a lot of subscriptions.

      First I was using RSSowl, but as I started mixing normal RSS feeds with Youtube (their "bell"-thingy is just RSS) it started to crash quite often. If the amount of both types are low, RSSowl can deal with it. But my list kept gro

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jmke ( 776334 )
      > ?utm_source=rss0.9mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

      RSS is also my main reader, that how I clicked through to this headline & article. It just such an convenient way to stay on top of things for subjects you are interested in. After google reader offline, swapped around a few services, ended up on inoreader which in free mode even, has all the features I was looking for.
    • Another feedly user here. I also started using it when Google retired their RSS reader.

      Most of my updates are from RSS feeds, but feedly also has the option to "scrape" websites, that is, check websites for new content and post that as if it was from an RSS stream. I also read a lot of scraped material.

      • Didn't know about that. Also I wish more sites would post their feed link. Many have an xml feed but don't post the link so you have to guess to find it

        • Didn't know about that. Also I wish more sites would post their feed link. Many have an xml feed but don't post the link so you have to guess to find it

          It's often in the headers of the html source.

    • As I posted here [slashdot.org] on the same topic 7 years ago, Firefox + Livemarks is my method for reading the news. A quick scan of headlines, 60+ including /. , allows me to read various angles on several topics across many sites, with readerships both large and small. RSS is the way.
      • It's so much better than the algorithmic feeds Google tries to steer us to like with the Google Discover feed baked into their launcher home screen on Android, or the Widgets board with the MSN "Start Feed" Microsoft pushes on Windows 11. Obviously both with sponsored clicks all over them. Plus neither ever surfaces much I hadn't already seen from the RSS feed of the sources I follow already. Like you said, RSS is the way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by acroyear ( 5882 )

      FreeRSS (php based) is starting to get my attention currently.

    • I found this story from Feedly.

  • I need to go through multiple news sources everyday. RSS is still king.

  • TT-RSS (Score:5, Informative)

    by gbooker ( 60148 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @07:36PM (#65571274) Homepage Journal

    TT-RSS [tt-rss.org] is my reader of choice and has been since Google Reader shutdown. These days I use the docker container on one of my servers.

    There has been a site here and there that I had to remove due to their rss feed no longer updating over the years but the vast majority have maintained their feed. Sometimes I have to hunt for the feed or even look at the source of a website to find the URL but nearly all sites in my interests have feeds.

    • Google Reader was great. I tried a bunch of RSS reader applications but stick with The Old Reader (https://theoldreader.com) which is mostly a copy of Google Reader. I like something simple and web based.

    • I also use this, it's pretty good.

      I prefer RSS over email notifications or something similar, with RSS I can go check the reader when I want to instead of having the notifications fill up my inbox.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mousit ( 646085 )

      TT-RSS [tt-rss.org] is my reader of choice and has been since Google Reader shutdown.

      There has been a site here and there that I had to remove due to their rss feed no longer updating over the years but the vast majority have maintained their feed. Sometimes I have to hunt for the feed or even look at the source of a website to find the URL but nearly all sites in my interests have feeds.

      Same. Self-hosted, and in fact still using it from standalone git pulls because I do not like nor want to use Docker. Still works fine even if standalone is "unsupported", pfft.

      Sad every time a site removes their feed, which I've had several disappear. Even more frustrating when they still have one but yeah, you've got to really go out of your way to hunt for it, a sign that it likely will go away before long. Shockingly one of the things Google can actually be useful for, since a Google search will o

  • All the time, self-hosted FreshRSS.

  • Could have fooled me.

  • The Old Reader (Score:3)

    by kalieaire ( 586092 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @07:42PM (#65571290)
    Literally reading this article from my RSS Reader.

    https://theoldreader.com/

    Cybersecurity news is often available via RSS. I can't imagine any good reason not to use RSS Feeds when you can focus on only the headlines.

    Why would I want to waste time navigating to an actual site to read individual articles?  I don't need to read comments to form an opinion.

  • Still works great (Score:3)

    by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @07:43PM (#65571294)
    My Newsblur install is my morning newspaper.

    It is also a great filing cabinet - since most of my sources of new info flow through it, I use it all the time to find that thing I vaguely remember but can't place.

  • RSS was great. Snippets of news from all your chosen sources in one place. You could quickly delete the ones which were not interesting and just follow up on the ones which looked like had some value without going to the actual website.

    Unfortunately, this kind of news delivery model is not good for busines i.e serving ads so the big tech effectively killed it by discouraging publishers from supporting RSS at all.

  • I have Slashdot, the BBC World News feed, and a few other things subscribed in the classic version of Flym.

    Of course Google wanted to get rid of RSS, can't put rich advertising experiences in a text list and everyone's entries are given equal billing together ordered by time, so you can't sell "promoted" top-of-feed entries.

  • I've been using https://newsblur.com/ [newsblur.com] for years now, and it's been rock solid. It has a web-based interface, as well as iPhone and iPad apps (and everything is synced). They also have Mac and Android apps (although I've never used them).

  • Inoreader (Score:5, Informative)

    by WimBo ( 124634 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @07:56PM (#65571348) Homepage

    I spend more time reading rss feeds than skimming any other social media. Itâ(TM)s what caused me to notice this article.

  • Since Google Reader was killed several years ago, I ended up trying Feedly on my mobile. It works just fine for RSS, although you can see some early extra features you did not ask for, like AI summaries. I understand Feedly owners need to get some income somehow.

    Finding RSS feeds has been made difficult. So let me give you some comments on the evolution of some feeds. Slashdot readers may be interested to know that XKCD renders correctly in the app. The alt text of the comic appears through a Hover button

  • I wish the app was still available.. But the developer stopped since google was making it difficult to have the RSS app on the google store. I still use it and love it for my custom non also curated news feeds

  • Google (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @08:05PM (#65571382)

    Google wanted to kill off RSS a few years back, and it has since fallen out of favor

    Yeah. I don't know many people who still use Google.

  • https://jangernert.gitlab.io/b... [gitlab.io]

    NewsFlash is excellent if you're a GNOME user, or probably even if you aren't.

    Use it every day.

  • Atom (Score:3)

    by Grady Martin ( 4197307 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @08:07PM (#65571402)

    Input-wise, I use a terminal-based reader called newsboat [newsboat.org] on a daily basis.

    Output-wise, I choose not to burden the world with RSS's shortcomings (“guid” not being—oh, I don't know—a globally unique ID, only permitting locale information at the feed and not article level, etc). Instead, I output Atom using a beautiful code module called python-feedgen [kiesow.be].

    Aaron Swartz died for our sins. The least we could do is stop saying “RSS” when we actually mean “Atom”.

  • Inoreader (Score:5, Interesting)

    by definate ( 876684 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @08:15PM (#65571432)

    Yeah, I use it multiple times a day. I use Inoreader and I pay for it. I use rules and folders and tags to filter things for me and cut down the bullshit.

    I use it to parse my Reddit subs, most news websites, YouTube channels, etc, etc. To be honest it's pretty rare that sites don't support RSS if they're delivering content.

    However it apparently also has a scraper to force some sites which don't have that into a feed, but I haven't used that.

  • I use ighome.com daily. Sometimes it's hard to find the actual RSS feed for a site, though, and some feeds are broken. A lamentable loss of a great idea, 'hey, tell me what your content is!'
  • When my.yahoo.com went away recently, I switched to protopage.com - I found this very post on the slashdot RSS feed.
  • Via SeaMonkey (which is also my email, and what I'm typing this on, and irc clent, and calendar, and...)

  • I run my own script in a cron job. It parses feeds, adds tags, filters out a lot of the sponsored posts and stuff I don't care about, then sends the rest to me in email.

    Thanks to the tags, it's easy to move the resulting emails to sub-folders as they arrive.

    Because email syncs across my devices, so do my feeds.

    And it also serves as a canary for whether my server is up and connected. No new articles arriving? I'd better check on the server...

  • RSS is how I saw this article, too. After Google killed their own RSS reader I poked around at a few options and settled on NewsBlur [newsblur.com] back in 2016. It has a free version, but after giving that a spin I elected to go for the paid version. $36/yr has been a pretty good investment IMO, save myself a lot of time checking between multiple sites manually. I could probably survive with the free account as I don't have that many RSS feeds but, eh, at this point I'm happy to keep paying until I need to really pinch m

    • I'm surprised many others mentioned Newsblur, that's what I use as well. But I don't use the Newsblur app or website, but rather the Reeder Classic app (the newer Reeder version is subscription-based, which I avoid at his point).

      Reeder Classic is nothing really special, except maybe for its 'bionic reading' support. Despite the pompous name, I actually love 'bionic reading', which essentially is method to add bolding to some letters in words, which greatly helps and speeds reading (especially those long Sla

  • There has never been a less consequential "innovation" in the online era.

  • Migrated to a self-hosted docker container on my home NAS, and it's my main source of information since I'm off all forms of social media now. I still use my phone's Chrome discovery feed but I usually add sites to the RSS reader since it's good at blocking paywalls or article limits on places like The Atlantic.

  • InoReader. Use it every day. (Score:3)

    by saccade.com ( 771661 ) on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @09:00PM (#65571514) Homepage Journal
    Their web application is great. I also use it for bookmarking / read later as well (since Mozilla killed Pocket).
  • Try Inoreader [inoreader.com] Press h to see the shortcuts. It's very efficient and well organized. I go through 500 or so articles a day in about an hour (easily skipping 90% of them)
  • I'm reading Slashdot through RSS, with the RSS-Bridge and FreshRSS. I only drop here to write comments.

  • Oh very much, yes. I use Feedly, which is... fine.

  • Have used it for years, running on one of my VMs, works fantastically...Slashdot is a big reason I check it everyday (along with ESPN, space news stuffs, etc.)

  • > ... what software do you use?

    Just my regular email client (Thunderbird). It's all I need.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DERoss ( 1919496 )

      I too use Thunderbird for RSS feeds. My list of 10 feeds, however, does not include news sources. My list includes a Web site hosting stories by amateur authors (some quite good), blogs, podcasts, and announcements of software updates,

  • TT-RSS install on my cloud server, web browser and android clients. Use it for everything I can. It vastly simplifies keeping up with news/ events/authors/sites I want to follow without having to visit dozens of sites daily. I've over 100 feeds I track, not counting the YouTube channels. On some I find articles to read daily, some weekly, some rarely. For example, I followed a link in my Slashdot feed to this story. I'd not have seen it if it wasn't in my feed.

  • The Slashdot Sidebar uses RSS but it doesn't seem to be configurable anymore.

    Slashdot is just waiting for RSS to die, I guess.

  • I'm much older and use links (similar to lynx but with tables) in text-mode as my main browser. Occasionally I'll have to load something graphic for java[script]/... which is otherwise detestable and to be avoided.

    So I have a simple script that dumps a list of URLs into a text file (~100kB). Then `diff` on an earlier version give a few pages of interesting changes. Done and not dependant only YAP (yet another protocol, RSS).

  • Yes, I'm definitively a graybeard, so everyone under 40 is a kid. Ironically though, as a senior IT leader, I sat through my org's interns' post-internship (end of internship?) presentations just last week. One recounted her learnings as she leveraged various RSS feeds of cyber-threat intelligence news to... of course, feed an AI summarization engine that would spam said summarizations to the SecOps team. I almost asked her whether this Frankensteinian monster also plugged-into FidoNet or Usenet before I th

  • I tried RSS for news multiple times, with different readers. The problem is, most RSS feeds contain WAY too many articles each day. I don't want to sift through dozens of trash articles to find one or two that are useful. Curation is critical (for me).

  • I actually like FireFox's New Tab page. It's not RSS, but it serves a similar purpose. The curation is decent, and covers many sites across the web.

  • The mail client in Opera 7-12 (known as M2) included an RSS reader. When the founder decided he didn't like where the current owners were taking Opera, ne decided to reimplement as much of it as he could in a Chromium-based browser under the name Vivaldi. So yes, Vivaldi has a mail and RSS client built in as well as showing an icon in the address bar if a page lists that it has RSS feeds available.

  • I use the Feedbro Firefox plugin to track podcasts - an amazing number of worthwhile podcasts still advertise new contend by RSS. So I don't need to use any privacy-invading audio services or apps.

    A sampling of podcasts of interest to me with RSS: No Such Thing As A Fish, Cory Doctorow, Gastropod, Hackaday, Science With Sabine, Guardian Science Weekly

    Vik :v)

  • First, it wasn't a few years ago. It was a decade ago.

    Second, I use Feedly. In fact, I navigated to this article from reading it on my RSS feed.

  • I have been using RSS feeds for many years and I'm not going to change that without a good reason. The enshittification of Twitter and similar services has proven me right.

    When Netvibes shut down recently I even vibe coded my own feed reader in JavaScript for the browser (which works surprisingly well).

  • Having used Google Reader for some years before the shutdown, I migrated to hosting my own Tiny Tiny RSS instance on my home server. It works. The developer can be ... a little hostile ... to people not thinking before they report issues, but otherwise it works well.

    Now, if only sites that offer RSS feeds would always think to exclude them from any bot detection rate limits.... Even YouTube was guilty of not thinking about this, at least a couple of years ago when I had to reduce the poll rate of some

  • Youtube (Score:3)

    by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Thursday August 07, 2025 @04:11AM (#65572108)
    I use RSS more for Youtube than anything else, though I get a lot of entertainment content through it. I don't want to make it easier for Google to track me, and they don't let you make an account anymore without giving them a phone number, so I just have all the Youtube channels that I like in an RSS reader. And then I download the videos to watch them.

    • I don't want to make it easier for Google to track me, and they don't let you make an account anymore without giving them a phone number,

      The phone number thing has nothing to do with tracking, it's about account recovery. IMO, they should offer an option to skip it that makes you promise repeatedly that if you ever forget your password, or if your account is ever taken over, that you'll give up and make a new account instead of demanding some other way to prove your identity and recover your account. "I promise to take responsibility for maintaining access to this account and will never ask Google to reset my forgotten/stolen password".

      Pro

  • Thunderbird has a built in RSS client and it's fine.

  • I never stopped. I have a private ttrss instance running somewhere. I already had it when google reader became a thing and died, so I just never changed that.
    A surprising number of recent websites still provides RSS feed, too.
  • I've been using RSS Guard [github.com] for a couple of years now. I like to have a variety of news sources and viewpoints, so I read through a couple hundred article summaries each day and zero in on the 20-30 that interest me.

  • Been using it for over 2 decades and I have no plans to stop doing it.

    Sadly, it's the absolute best RSS/Atom reader out there and it's dead. Its developer has long given up on it.

  • I wrote and open-sourced an RSS feed parser plugin for Zoom Player in order to support RSS Audio/Video stream lists:
    https://github.com/bLightZP/De... [github.com]

  • I use Firefox's Live Bookmarks. I don't see a reason to change that, unless the feeds start disappearing.

  • I access my Feedly account in Safari occasionally and use the Unread app on my iPad.

    But I found that most of the people and organisations I follow post the same articles on Bluesky, so I took the time to set them all up in a list on a separate tab from my other follows.

  • I use Nextcloud's News app and leverage https://rss-bridge.org/ [rss-bridge.org] when sites don't have RSS capabilities.

  • But when Reader dies, I went to Netvibes, which wasn't intended to be an RSS reader, but it had one. It died.

    Now I've gone back to an old option, Inoreader. It's tolerable.

  • I'm starting to get back into RSS for a couple reasons. First, Vivaldi recently integrated RSS into their browser, a la Opera Classic. Second, I've blacklisted so many sites from Google's Android feed that I mostly only get AP and weird esoteric niche stuff like research publications or local news stories from places I've never been.

  • What else would you use?

    Browse to each site one by one like its 1997? ;)

  • I got this very article in RSS

    I'm using Inoreader, but there are other online and installed apps for this.

  • I was pissed when Netvibes shut down recently. I've just migrated to them because Google killed Reader!
    But it let me refresh my setup and move to self-hosted Miniflux. Works like a charm, no one will pull the rug from under me and new integrations are possible. One-click sending to Kindle? I'm bought!

  • Feed reader for /., for local news, for Reddit subs, for blogs, for all sorts of stuff, it's my main way of surfacing info that I'd not know to go seeking.

  • I've been using an RSS reader every day for many years. I'm currently using Newsboat [newsboat.org], a terminal-based RSS reader, and I'm very happy with it.

    It's a good way of keeping out of the "algorithm bubble". It's also nice to to be able to follow Youtube channels without needing a login, and play the videos with mpv [mpv.io].

  • Check out the article on RSS by Molly White. [citationneeded.news]

  • I'm not overly big on news, so I don't generally go out looking for what's out there. I've been using an RSS reader for years, to aggregate it all together so I can look through the headlines to determine what I want to read further. For the longest time I used newsbeuter, but then switched to newsboat a few years ago, and I don't see any need to change that.

  • Net News Wire on the Mac, Fiery Feeds on iOS.

    I also use Tapestry on iOS. It can pull in RSS feeds, but critically, it can also be configured to pull in things that refuse to have RSS feeds, like GoComics. It can also do things like Tumblr or Bluesky social feeds if you want to read the posts from one person but don't actually want to participate (good for things like news/announcement accounts).

  • If Evil Google take RSS news sources away, I hope someone recreates them by scraping paid sites and sharing.

    RSS is grossly underutilized.
  • Web comics and podcasts still use it heavily. The Podcasting 2.0 stuff is great since Apple has let it languish since they were handed over the main index.

  • (open source Android reader)

  • I'm using Linux. I use liferea (LinuxFeedReader). I have about 500 feeds and all my main browsing is sources from RSS. Youtube has RSS with no need to sign in. Download with sponsorblock. All reddit addresses take .rss at the end to give you the feed, for example https://old.reddit.com/r/Histo... [reddit.com]. Combine with a userscript to redirect all reddit links to old.reddit. All the main journals have RSS. Elelvier, PNAS, Nature, Science, PLOS one ... ask you favorite AI to compile a list of peer-reviewed and or hig

  • Yes. (Score:2)

    by antdude ( 79039 )

    I use them in both SeaMonkey & IRC. :)

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